He started up from his meditation and found that the old man was speaking to him.
“Listen! Wasn’t that firing ... a long way off?”
He listened intently, then shook his head. “No, I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“Jeremy, how much longer is it going to be?”
He was seized with surprise at the pitifulness of the Speaker’s tone. “God knows, sir,” he answered slowly, and added in an exhausted voice. “We haven’t enough men to go on adventures and force the business.”
“No ... no, I suppose not.” And then, losing some of this unusual docility, the Speaker burst out: “I am sick of this hole!”
“Campaigning quarters!” Jeremy replied as humorously and soothingly as he could. He was sick of it himself. The Speaker had desired that they should establish themselves in Windsor Castle; but much of the old building had been burnt down in the Troubles, and what was left had been used as a quarry. It was not possible to go anywhere in the neighborhood without seeing the great calcined stones built into the walls of house or barn. Hardly anything of the Castle was left standing; and the poor remains, in fact, were used as a common cart-shed by the inhabitants of the village of Windsor. In all this countryside, which was held and cultivated by small men, there was no great house; and they had been obliged to content themselves with a poor hovel of a farm, which had only one living-room and was dirty and uncomfortable. Jeremy grew to hate it and the wide dusty flats in which it stood. It seemed to him a detestable landscape, and daily the scene he loathed grew intertwined in his thoughts with his dread of the future. His feverish brain began to deal, against his will, in foolish omens and premonitions. He caught himself wondering, “Will this be the last I shall see of England?” He remembered, shuddering, that when he had first joined the Army in 1914 and had complained of early morning parades, a companion had said, “I suppose we shall have to get up at this time every morning for the rest of our lives!”
While he was trying to drive some such thoughts as these out of his mind, he was conscious of a stir outside the farmhouse, and presently an orderly entered and announced, “A scout with news, sir.”
“Bring him in,” said Jeremy wearily. He hardly glanced up at the trooper who entered, until the man began to speak. Then the tones of the voice caught his attention and he saw with surprise that it was Roger Vaile who stood there, his head roughly bandaged; his face smeared with blood and dust, his uniform torn and stained.
“Roger!” he cried, starting up.