Were we to get more of the kind of civilization we knew, conquer more ground, or have less of it? It depended on the battle. And that hung, I was sure, on the morale of the fighter. I wondered if it wasn't cracking badly-- But at this point I considered how late it was, and whether it was not time for bed, that I might not have bad morale myself, with a headache added to it, at 6.00 A.M. The roar again--I began breaking it up once more into the fragments of grind and rattle that composed it. In imagination I jumped on the step of the charging-machine as it moved on its rails past Seven. It shook and jarred grumpily about its business, I thought. Near Five I got off, and started to make front-wall. I remembered how I felt on a front-wall a few weeks ago. I had tried to throw my mind into the unsleeping numbness that protects a little against the load of monotony. Other men I had seen do it, drawing a curtain over nine tenths of their brain; not thinking, but only day-dreaming faintly behind the curtain, leaving enough attention to the fore for plunging the shovel into dolomite, and keeping the arms out of heat. Other passages from open-hearth shifts came into my mind in violent contrast. Shorty, who was always clearly to be distinguished anywhere on the floor because he wore his khaki shirt outside his pants, quarreled with me one day, and showed his temper, as one shows temper in Italy. He stood by the drinking fountain back of Number 4, hair on end, chest bare, his eyes a little bloodshot, and his mouth sullen and drawn at the corners, as it always was. The argument was about a shovel. Shorty took out a long knife from his pocket and explained its use in argument. I remembered how the mill stayed in your mind when you left it. In the hour or so in which you washed up, walked home, ate, and went to bed, it loomed as a black sheet-iron foreman, demanding that you get to bed and prepare for the noise and jar it had in store for you at 5.00 o'clock. That sense of imminence was a thing to bear, especially if you wondered whether sleep would come at all. Then there were long strings of neutral days when you did not think well of life, or ill of it. And there were the occasional satisfactions. The keen pleasure of acquiring a knack, as when I learned to "get it across" in back-wall. And the pleasures of rough-house. Jock, the first-helper on Seven, had once told me in a burst of enthusiasm for furnace work that he "liked the game because there was so much hell-raisin' in it."