It was not the physical fatigue Winterbourne minded, though he hated the inevitable physical degradation—the coarse, heavy clothes, too thick for summer; the hob-nailed boots; the plank bed; horribly cooked food. But he accepted and got used to them. He suffered mentally, suffered from the shock of the abrupt change from surroundings where the things of the mind chiefly were valued to surroundings where they were ignorantly despised. He had nobody to talk to. He suffered from the communal life of thirty men in one large hut, which meant that there was never a moment’s solitude. He suffered because he brooded over Elizabeth and Fanny, over the widening gulf he knew was dividing him from them, and suffered abominably as month after month of the war dragged on with its interminable holocausts and immeasurable degradation of mankind. The world of men seemed dropping to pieces, madly cast down by men in a delirium of homicide and destructiveness. The very apparatus of killing revolted him, took on a sort of sinister deadness. There was something in the very look of his rifle and equipment which filled him with depression. And then, in the imagination, he was already facing the existence for which this was but a preparation, already confronting the agony of his own death. Horrific tales—alas, only too true—were told of companies and battalions wiped out in a few instances. N.C.O. after N.C.O., as Winterbourne got to know them better, assured him that they were the only men—or almost the only men—left alive from their platoons or companies. And it was the truth. The proportion of casualties was undoubtedly high in infantry units. It was, perhaps, selfish of Winterbourne to worry about his own extinction when so many better men had already been obliterated. He felt rather ashamed and apologetic about it himself. But it is human to recoil from a violent death, even at twenty-two or -three.... The train began to slow down at a large junction, and he returned to his present surroundings with a start. The other men were asleep. Well, all the training and presenting arms and saluting by numbers were over and in the past. They were on Active Service. It was an immense relief. Now, henceforth, he would be facing dread realities, not Regular Army pedants and bullies. As Winterbourne once remarked, one of the horrors of the war was not fighting the Germans but living under the British. * * * * *