Then the vision of that morning when the newspaper brought its disturbing news vanished with the memory of his mother standing by his side, her arm round his waist, as they gazed together across a field of nodding corn....
Troubled visions, then, of Giles returning post-haste from Oxford, of himself in the village talking to every one he met about “the dreadful business,” speaking to the people on the farm, and to old Joe Walters, the wheelwright, whose voice he could remember saying:
“Ay, tha’ woan’t tak’ thee, Master Robin.”
He remembered talking to Mr. Meads at the general shop, and to the Reverend Quirk, whose precious voice he could almost hear declaiming:
“I presume your brother will apply for a commission.”
He had wandered then up on to the downs and tried to think about “the dreadful business” in a detached way, but it made him tremble. He listened to the bees droning on the heather, and saw the smoke from the hamlet over by Wodehurst trailing peacefully to the sky. “The dreadful business” seemed incredible.
It was some days later that he met his friend Jerry Lawson wandering up there, with a terrier at his heels. Lawson was a sculptor, a queer chap, whom most people thought a fanatic. Jerry blazed down on him:
“This is hell, Robin. Hell let loose. It could have been avoided. It’s a trade war. At the back of it all is business, business, business. And millions of boys will be sacrificed for commercial purposes. Our policy is just as much at fault as—theirs. Look what we did at—”
For an hour he listened to the diatribe of Lawson, tremulously silent. He had nothing to reply. He detested politics and the subtleties of diplomacy. He had left school early owing to an illness which had affected his heart. He had spent his life upon these downs and among his books. He could not adjust the gentle impulses of his being to the violent demands of that foreboding hour. When Lawson had departed, he had sat there a long time. Was Lawson right?
He wandered home, determining that he would read more history, more political economy; he would get to the root of “this dreadful business.”