m, and was met, at
Penny Green. It might have been reached precisely as it was reached
without agency of the war, certainly without participation in it. Of the
interval only those few events ultimately mattered which had connection
with his life at home. They seemed in the night of the war transient as
falling stars; they proved themselves lodestars of his destiny. They
seemed nothing, yet even as they flashed and passed he occupied himself
with them as the falling star catches the attention from all the fixed
and constant. They were of his own life: the war life was life in exile.

And, caught up at last in the enormous machinery of the war, his
feelings towards the war underwent a great change. First in the training
camp in Dorsetshire, afterwards, and much more so, in the trenches in
Flanders, it was only by a deliberate effort that he would recapture,
now and then, the old tremendous emotions in the thought of England
challenged and beset. He turned to it as stimulant in moments of
depression and of dismay, in hours of intense and miserable loathing of
some conditions of his early life in the ranks, and later in hours when
fatigue and bodily discomfort reached degrees he had not believed it
possible to endure--and go on with. He turned to it as stimulant and it
never failed of its stimulation. "I'm in it. What _does_ this matter?
This is the war. It's the war. Those infernal devils.... If these
frightful things were being done in England! Imagine if this was in
England! Thank God I'm in it. There you are! I'm absolutely all right
when I remember why I'm here." And enormous exaltation of spirit would
lift away the loneliness, remove the loathing, banish the exhaustion,
dissipate the fear. The fear--"And thy right hand shall show thee
terrible things"--He was more often than once in situations in which he
knew he was afraid and held fear away only because, with his old habit
of introspection, he knew it for fear,--a horrible thing that sought
mastery of him and by sheer force of mental detachment must be held away
where it could be looked at and known for the vile thing it was. In such
ordeals, in Flanders, he got the habit of saying to himself between his
teeth, "Six minutes, six hours, six days, six months, six years. Where
the hell will I be?" It somehow helped. The six minutes would go, and
one could believe that all the periods would go,--and wonder where they
would find one.

But more than that: now, caught up