work-a-day self was occupied with
the immediate prospect of the stewpot. It was some sort of a ragout, he
knew, and he lusted for it. Red wine of the country would be there,
and cheese and new brown bread. . . . It surprised him to find how
completely his bodily needs and the pleasure of their gratification had
possession of him.

They were under orders to go back to the trenches shortly after sunset,
and when their meal was over there remained but an hour or two before
they had to start. The warmth and glory of the day was already gone,
and streamers of cloud were beginning to form over the open sky.
All afternoon these thickened till a dull layer of grey had thickly
overspread the heavens and below that arch of vapour that cut off
the sun the wind was blowing chilly. With that change in the weather,
Michael's mood changed also, and the horror of the return to the
trenches began to come to the surface. He was not as yet aware of any
physical fear of death or of wound, rather, the feeling was one of some
mental and spiritual shrinking from the whole of this vast business of
murder, where hundreds and thousands of men along the battle front that
stretched half-way across Europe, were employed, day and night, without
having any quarrel with each other, in the unsleeping vigilant work of
killing. Most of them in all probability, were quite decent fellows,
like those four who had whistled "Tipperary" together, and yet they were
spending months of young, sweet life up to the knees in water, in foul
and ill-smelling trenches in order to kill others whom they had never
seen except as specks on the sights of their rifles. Somewhere behind
that gruesome business, as he knew, there stood the Cause, calm and
serene, like some great statue, which made this insensate murdering
necessary; but just for an hour to-day, as he waited till they had to be
on the move again, he found himself unable to make real to his own mind
the existence of that cause, and could not see beyond the bloody and
hideous things that resulted from it.

Then, in this inaction of waiting, an attack of mere physical cowardice
seized him, and he found himself imagining the mutilation and torture
that perhaps awaited him personally in those deathly ditches. He tried
to busy himself with the preparation of the few things that he would
take with him, he tried to encourage himself by remembering that in his
previous experiences there he had not been conscious of any