He didn’t complain. Whatever his job, he would have taken off his coat and set to. He was no subscriber to the military fetish, nothing would ever make him one, but in August, 1914, he had given his services unconditionally to his country and he was not the man to shirk the obligation into which he had entered. To one of subtle perceptions and fastidious culture, the teaching of a lot of “bandy-legged coal-shovelers” to form fours, and to hurl an imaginary bomb at an imaginary Hun should have been a wearisome, soul-destroying affair. Yet somehow it was not. There was a time when in spite of his honest, democratic liberalism, he would have been tried beyond endurance by the fantastic boredom of it all. But that time had passed. Never again could the human factor, however primitive, be without its meaning. He had been wrought upon by a miracle, and it abided with him during every hour of the new life. His thoughts were often with John Smith. Enshrined in Brandon’s heart as a divine symbol, he was the key to a Mystery which had the power to cleanse even the thing called war of its bestial obscenity. Many a night when he came back dog-tired and heart-sore, to a dirty, comfortless room and an ill-cooked meal in a rude, miserable colliery township whose like he had never seen, he was sustained by the sublime faith of one who, for the sake of the love he bore his kind, had dared to transcend reason in order to affirm it. Many a night in the fetid air of a bedroom whose window could not be persuaded to open, he lay on a broken-backed mattress trying to relate this divine friend with the humanity through whose travail he had found expression. Who and what was this portent? Was he akin to the August Founder of Christianity? Was he a madman hugging a crazy but pathetic and terrible delusion? Or was he the superman of which the World Spirit had long been dreaming, a great clairvoyant able to summon representative souls from the astral plane? It must be left to the future to decide. At the best these were fantastic speculations, but they were now the _clou_ of a forward-looking soul. Only these could sustain it in the path of duty. Week by week, it was being borne in upon Brandon that the sword could never hope to achieve anything worth achieving. Humanity was too complex and it was poisoned at the roots. Prussia after all was only a question of degree. Unless a change took place in the heart of man, these splendid, simple chaps with their debased forms of speech, their crudeness and their ignorance, would hurl their bombs in vain. How he loved these bandy-legged warriors who never opened their mouths without defiling his ears. Deeper even than the spirit of race was the sense of human brotherhood. It resolved every difficulty, it unlocked every door. And the key had come to him by means of the inmate of Wellwood who had received it in turn from the divine mystic of the hills of Galilee.