His dream of God, as a detached and aloof personage, had taken a very strong hold upon his imagination. Or, perhaps, it would be truer to say that his fevered mind in the hospital had given a caricature personality to ideas that had grown up in his mind as a natural consequence of his training. He had gone on with that argument; he went on with it now, with a feeling that really he was just as much sitting and talking in that queer, untidy, out-of-the-way office as swaying in a kite balloon, six thousand feet above Flanders, waiting to be shot at.
“It is all very well to say ’exert yourself,’” said Peter. “But there is that chap over there exerting himself. And what he is doing with all his brains is just trying to wipe my brains out of existence. Just that. He hasn’t an idea else of what he is doing. He has no notion of what he is up to or what I am up to. And he hasn’t the sense or ability to come over here and talk about it to me. He’s there—at that—and he can’t help himself. And I’m here—and I can’t help myself. But if I could only catch him within counter battery range——!
“There’s no sense in it at all,” summarized Peter, after some moments of grim reflection. “Sense hasn’t got into it.”
“Is sense ever going to get into it?
“The curious thing about you,” said Peter, addressing himself quite directly to his Deity at the desk, “is that somehow, without ever positively promising it or saying anything plain and definite about it, you yet manage to convey in an almost irresistible manner, that there is going to be sense in it. You seem to suggest that my poor brain up here and the brains of those chaps over there, are, in spite of all appearance to the contrary, up to something jointly that is going to come together and make good some day. You hint it. And yet I don’t get a scrap of sound, trustworthy reasoning to help me to accept that; not a scrap. Why should it be so? I ask, and you just keep on not saying anything. I suppose it’s a necessary thing, biologically, that one should have a kind of optimism to keep one alive, so I’m not even justified in my half conviction that I’m not being absolutely fooled by life....
“I admit that taking for example Joan, there is something about Joan that almost persuades me there must be something absolutely right about things—for Joan to happen at all. Yet isn’t that again just another biologically necessary delusion?... There you sit silent. You seem to say nothing, and yet you soak me with a kind of answer, a sort of shapeless courage....”
Peter’s mind rested on that for a time, and then began again at another point.
“I wonder,” said Peter, “if that chap gets me tonight, what I shall think—in the moment—after he has got me....”
§ 24
But the German gunner never got Peter, because something else got him first.