n the villages of Morfe
and Renton there was peace; for as yet only a few men had gone from
them. The rest were tied to the land, and they were more absorbed in the
hay-harvest than in the War. Even the old Belgians in Veronica's cottage
were at peace. They had forgotten.

For three days Michael himself had peace.

He went up to Veronica's hill and sat on it; and thought how for
hundreds of miles, north, south, east and west of him, there was not a
soul whom he knew. In all his life he had never been more by himself.

This solitude of his had a singular effect on Michael's mind. So far
from having got away from the War he had never been more conscious of it
than he was now. What he had got away from was other people's
consciousness. From the beginning the thing that threatened him had
been, not the War but this collective war-spirit, clamouring for his
private soul.

For the first time since August, nineteen-fourteen, he found himself
thinking, in perfect freedom and with perfect lucidity, about the War.
He had really known, half the time, that it was the greatest War of
Independence that had ever been. As for his old hatred of the British
Empire, he had seen long ago that there was no such thing, in the
continental sense of Empire; there was a unique thing, the rule, more
good than bad, of an imperial people. He had seen that the strength of
the Allies was in exact proportion to the strength and the enlightenment
of their democracies. Reckoning by decades, there could be no deadlock
in the struggle; the deadlock meant a ten years' armistice and another
war. He could not help seeing these things. His objection to occupying
his mind with them had been that they were too easy.

Now that he could look at it by himself he saw how the War might take
hold of you like a religion. It was the Great War of Redemption. And
redemption meant simply thousands and millions of men in troop-ships and
troop-trains coming from the ends of the world to buy the freedom of the
world with their bodies. It meant that the very fields he was looking
over, and this beauty of the hills, those unused ramparts where no
batteries were hid, and the small, silent villages, Morfe and Renton,
were bought now with their bodies.

He wondered how at this moment any sane man could be a Pacifist. And,
wondering, he felt a reminiscent sting of grief and yearning. But he
refused, resolutely, to feel any shame.

His religion also was good; and, anyhow, y