ould have backed out, because he had not given
any pledge. Now he would have to go through with it. And he saw clearly
for the first time what it was that he would have to go through.

He left the village and went up to Renton Moor and walked along the top
for miles, without knowing or caring where he went, and seeing nothing
before him but his own act and what must come afterwards. By to-morrow,
or the next day at the latest, he would have enlisted; by six months, at
the latest, three months if he had what they called "luck," he would be
in the trenches, fighting and killing, not because he chose, but because
he would be told to fight and kill. By the simple act of sending that
letter to his mother he was committed to the whole ghastly business.

And he funked it. There was no use lying to himself and saying that he
didn't funk it.

Even more than the actual fighting and killing, he funked looking on at
fighting and killing; as for being killed, he didn't think he would
really mind that so much. It would come--it must come--as a relief from
the horrors he would have to see before it came. Nicky had said that
they were unbelievable; he had seemed to think you couldn't imagine them
if you hadn't seen them. But Michael could. He had only to think of them
to see them now. He could make war-pictures for himself, in five
minutes, every bit as terrifying as the things they said happened under
fire. Any fool, if he chose to think about it, could see what must
happen. Only people didn't think. They rushed into it without seeing
anything; and then, if they were honest, they owned that they funked it,
before and during and afterwards and all the time.

Nicky didn't. But that was only because Nicky had something that the
others hadn't got; that he, Michael, hadn't. It was all very well to
say, as he had said last night: "This ends it"; or, as their phrase was,
"Everything goes in now." It was indeed, as far as he was concerned,
the end of beauty and of the making of beauty, and of everything worth
caring for; but it was also the beginning of a life that Michael dreaded
more than fighting and killing and being killed: a life of boredom, of
obscene ugliness, of revolting contacts, of intolerable subjection. For
of course he was going into the ranks as Nicky had gone. And already he
could feel the heat and pressure and vibration of male bodies packed
beside and around him on the floor; he could hear their breathing; he
could smell