It made him thoughtful. Ought he to crime the chap? Why should he? Had the Armistice come just in time? If it hadn’t come, would he have been faced with the spectacle of two armies making peace by themselves, without orders, against orders, sections and platoons and companies simply not reloading their rifles, machine gunners and Trench Mortars not unpacking their gear, finally even the artillery keeping teams by the guns, and the inertia gradually spreading upwards, until the few at the top who really wanted to go on, would have found the dead weight of unwillingness impossible to drag? The prospect, though curious, was not alarming. In a country so denuded and starved, one could keep discipline by the simple expedient of withholding rations. He had already seen, a year before at Étaples, the leaderless plight of all those millions of armed men, once they were unofficered. He was not stampeded by panic, and his inherited, inbred honesty bade him ask himself: “Why shouldn’t they make Peace themselves?” The object that had drawn all these men together was achieved. The invasion of France was at an end, that of Belgium a matter of evacuation only. “Cease fire.” It almost began to look like an attempt to save face. Was it the same on the German side too? In the afternoon he proposed to walk over to Battalion H.Q. and have a word with the Colonel. He knew quite well he should find the other company commanders there. Naturally every one would want to get some idea of what was to be expected under these totally unprecedented circumstances. He was met at the door of his billet by a message from the youngster he had left in charge. He had got a hundred and forty prisoners. Dormer went at once. He could see it all before he got there. All along the opposite side of the street, faultlessly aligned and properly “at ease” were men in field grey. At either end of the line stood a guard of his own company, and not all Dormer’s pride in the men he had led with very fair success, with whose training and appearance he had taken great pains, could prevent his admitting to himself that the only point at which his lot could claim superiority was in a sort of grumpy humour. The machinery of War had conquered them less entirely than it had conquered the Germans.