"All I ever thought about if I'd forgotten anything was what would be a good excuse to put up to the adjutant . . . When I was a regimental officer . . ." Suddenly Tietjens said insistently: "How did you know that? . . . About the door handle? Sylvia could not have seen it. . . ." He added: "And she could not have known what I was thinking. . . . She had her back to the door. . . . And to me. . . . Looking at me in the glass. . . . She was not even aware of what had happened. . . . So she could not have seen the handle move!" Levin hesitated: "I . . ." he said. "Perhaps I ought not to have said that. . . . You've told us. . . . That is to say, you've told . . ." He was pale in the sunlight. He said: "Old man . . . Perhaps you don't know. . . . Didn't you perhaps ever, in your childhood? . . ." Tietjens said: "Well . . . what is it?" "That you talk . . . when you're sleeping!" Levin said. Astonishingly, Tietjens said: "What of that? . . . It's nothing to write home about! With the overwork I've had and the sleeplessness. . . ." Levin said, with a pathetic appeal to Tietjens' omniscience: "But doesn't it mean . . . We used to say when we were boys . . . that if you talk in your sleep . . . you're . . . in fact a bit dotty?" Tietjens said without passion: "Not necessarily. It means that one has been under mental pressure, but all mental pressure does not drive you over the edge. Not by any means. . . . Besides, what does it matter?" Levin said: "You mean you don't care. . . . Good God!" He remained looking at the view, drooping, in intense dejection. He said: "This _beastly_ war! This _beastly_ war! . . . Look at all that view. . . ." Tietjens said: "It's an encouraging spectacle, really. The beastliness of human nature is always pretty normal. We lie and betray and are wanting in imagination and deceive ourselves, always, at about the same rate. In peace and in war! But, somewhere in that view there are enormous bodies of men. . . . If you got a still more extended range of view over this whole front you'd have still more enormous bodies of men. . . . Seven to ten million. . . . All moving towards places towards which they desperately don't want to go. Desperately! Every one of them is desperately afraid. But they go on. An immense blind will forces them in the effort to consummate the one decent action that humanity has to its credit in the whole of recorded history. The one we are engaged in. That effort is the one certain creditable fact in all their lives. . . . But the _other_ lives of all those men are dirty, potty and discreditable little affairs. . . . Like yours. . . . Like mine. . . ." Levin exclaimed: "Just heavens! _What_ a pessimist you are!" Tietjens said: "Can't you see that is optimism?" "But," Levin said, "we're being beaten out of the field. . . . You don't know how desperate things are." Tietjens said: "Oh, I know pretty well. As soon as this weather really breaks we're probably done."