A battle certainly, to make an ingot—trench work in a quiet sector, perhaps, but a year-after-year affair. The multiform steel prop which civilization hung upon came to me for a moment—rails, skyscrapers, the locomotive just passed, machinery that was making the ornament and substance of the environment of men. It rested on muscle and the will to push through "long turns," I thought. It could slip so easily. A huge mistaken calculation: not enough coal or cars to carry it. Or what if the habitual movements of the muscles were broken, or the will fallen into distemper? Suppose men thought it not worth the candle, and stopped to look on?
Were we to get more of the kind of civilization we knew, conquer more ground, or have less of it? It depended on the battle. And that hung, I was sure, on the morale of the fighter. I wondered if it wasn't cracking badly—
But at this point I considered how late it was, and whether it was not time for bed, that I might not have bad morale myself, with a headache added to it, at 6.00 A.M.
The roar again—I began breaking it up once more into the fragments of grind and rattle that composed it. In imagination I jumped on the step of the charging-machine as it moved on its rails past Seven. It shook and jarred grumpily about its business, I thought.
Near Five I got off, and started to make front-wall. I remembered how I felt on a front-wall a few weeks ago. I had tried to throw my mind into the unsleeping numbness that protects a little against the load of monotony. Other men I had seen do it, drawing a curtain over nine tenths of their brain; not thinking, but only day-dreaming faintly behind the curtain, leaving enough attention to the fore for plunging the shovel into dolomite, and keeping the arms out of heat.
Other passages from open-hearth shifts came into my mind in violent contrast. Shorty, who was always clearly to be distinguished anywhere on the floor because he wore his khaki shirt outside his pants, quarreled with me one day, and showed his temper, as one shows temper in Italy. He stood by the drinking fountain back of Number 4, hair on end, chest bare, his eyes a little bloodshot, and his mouth sullen and drawn at the corners, as it always was. The argument was about a shovel. Shorty took out a long knife from his pocket and explained its use in argument.
I remembered how the mill stayed in your mind when you left it. In the hour or so in which you washed up, walked home, ate, and went to bed, it loomed as a black sheet-iron foreman, demanding that you get to bed and prepare for the noise and jar it had in store for you at 5.00 o'clock. That sense of imminence was a thing to bear, especially if you wondered whether sleep would come at all.
Then there were long strings of neutral days when you did not think well of life, or ill of it. And there were the occasional satisfactions. The keen pleasure of acquiring a knack, as when I learned to "get it across" in back-wall. And the pleasures of rough-house. Jock, the first-helper on Seven, had once told me in a burst of enthusiasm for furnace work that he "liked the game because there was so much hell-raisin' in it."
In the midst of listening to the roar, and thinking of shifts, good and bad, it occurred to me abruptly that men would make front-walls in front of hot furnaces for several hundred years, in all likelihood. I wondered. Perhaps Mr. Wells's army of inventors would alter that. For several hundred years, thousands of men had labored without imagination or hope in Egypt, and built the Pyramids. There were similarities. Civilization rested on the uninspired, unimaginative drudgery of nine tenths of mankind. "There have always been hewers of wood, and drawers of water," I heard some elderly person say at me, in a voice of finality.
I did not stop to reply to the implications of that sentence in my own mind, but thought more closely of the Pyramid-builders I had known in the pit.