Thank goodness that fellow wasn’t back. He, Dormer, would be asleep, and would not hear him. He counted the khaki shoulders and dusty wheels that went round and round beneath his eyelids, until he went off.
Unfortunately for that particular malaise which the War occasioned to his precise and town-bred spirit, that was not his last sleep that he slept that night. Many a one never woke again to hear the earth-shaking clamour of the barrage, to see that eternal procession of men, men, mules, limbers, men, guns, ambulances, men, lorries, going on and on like some gigantic frieze. But Dormer did. He was one of those who, had he been born in the Middle Ages, would have been described as under a curse, or pictured as working out an atonement for his own or some one else’s misdeeds. He had to go on doing his very best, and the more he disliked the whole business the harder he worked. The harder he worked the longer it seemed to that desired day when he might return to the quiet niceties of a branch bank in a provincial town. And all the time Kavanagh kept up that ceaseless argument as to one’s mental attitude. Dormer didn’t really believe in having such a thing, for he felt bound to join issue with the absurd ramblings of the other, and he could not escape, because their jobs naturally threw them together and because he secretly admired the way that Kavanagh did his work.
So the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, the casualty lists grew longer and longer, the visible fruits of the immense effort grew smaller and smaller, and as the year wore on, the weather broke, and the only conditions that make life in the open tolerable, light and drought, disappeared, and they dwelt in the sodden twilight of tent or hut, while what had been the white powdery dust, became the cement-like mud that no scraping could remove. Sitting dejectedly over some returns he heard
“Still, be still, my soul, the arms you bear are brittle!”
“It’s all very well to sit there and sing. This offensive is a failure, we shall never get through.”
“I’m afraid you’re right, Dormer. I told you how it would be. I hope we shall learn the lesson.”
“It means another winter in the trenches.”
“Evidently.”
“It’s very bad for the men. They’ve nothing to show for all that’s been done.”
“That’s nothing new.