‘I don’t know what your private feelings are, Forsyth,’ he plunged boldly; and Mark started as if he had been waked from a dream. ‘But the more I look at this business of enlisting and going out to slaughter Germans—not to mention the chance of their returning the compliment—the more heartily I hate the whole thing. It’s nothing so simple as mere funk. And it’s not that I’m shirking—you understand.’ ‘Oh, yes. I understand,’ Mark rejoined, setting his teeth on the stem of his pipe. But he did not seem disposed to enlarge on his understanding of his private feelings; and Maurice, whose mixed emotions were clamouring for expression, went on: ‘Mere funk would at least give one something to tackle and overcome. It’s this cursed inferno going on inside one’s head that does the damage. And the beastly thing seems quite independent of one’s thoughts or attention. Just keeps on automatically at the back of my brain. Even when I’m reading or talking, I can hear those infernal guns and shells. I can see the mangled fragments that once were men—the wounds—the blood—the slopes of the Liége forts—’ ‘Damn you! Shut _up_!’ Mark leaned forward suddenly, a spark of anger in his eyes. ‘D’you suppose you’re the only one that’s plagued with an imagination?’ Maurice sighed. ‘Sorry, old chap,’ he said, disappointed, but contrite. ‘It’s a relief all the same. And I thought—you understood—’ ‘Of course I do: a long sight too well.’ Mark’s tone was gentler now. ‘If it’s relief you’re after, you’ll get that most effectively by going out yourself; seeing things with your actual eyes: doing things with your actual hands that’ll give you no time for cinematographs in your head. You can thank your stars you’re a _man_. It’s the women given that way who’ll have the devil’s own time of it. My mother’s one, worse luck; and it’ll come hard on her—when I’m gone.’ Maurice ventured no comment on a subject so poignantly intimate as Lady Forsyth’s anxiety for her one remaining son; nor did Mark seem to expect any. He took a few pulls at his pipe, then reverted to generalities.