On reaching the Head-quarters of the Division, he found the War in full progress. That is to say, every one was standing about, waiting to do something. Dormer had long discovered that this was war. Enlisting as he had done at the outbreak of hostilities, with no actual experience of what such a set of conditions could possibly be like, he had then assumed that he was in for a brief and bitter period of physical discomfort and danger, culminating quite possibly in death, but quite certainly in a decisive victory for the Allies within a few months. He had graduated in long pedestrian progress of Home Training, always expecting it to cease one fine morning. It did. He and others were ordered to France. With incredible slowness and difficulty they found the battalion to which they were posted. Now for it, he had thought, and soon found himself involved in a routine, dirtier and more dangerous, but as unmistakably a routine as that in which he had been involved at home. He actually distinguished himself at it, by his thoroughness and care, and came to be the person to whom jobs were given! Thus had he eventually, after a twelvemonth, found another false end to the endless waiting. He was sent to help the Q. office of Divisional Staff. He had felt himself to be of considerable importance, a person who really was winning the War. But in a few weeks he was as disabused as ever. It was only the same thing. Clerking in uniform, with no definite hours, a few privileges of food and housing, but no nearer sight of the end of it. The Somme had found him bitterly disillusioned. And yet even now, after being two days away from the Head-quarters where his lot was cast, he was dumbfounded afresh to find everything going on just as he had left it. They were all waiting now for orders to go into a back area and be trained. For, as sure as the snowdrop appeared, there sprang up in the hearts of men a pathetic eternal hopefulness. Perhaps nothing more than a vernal effusion, yet there it was, and as Dormer reported to Colonel Birchin, in came the messenger they had all been expecting, ordering them, not forward into the line, but backward to Authun, for training. It was some time before he could get attention, and when he did, it seemed both to him and to the Colonel that the affair had lessened in importance. “You’ve asked 3rd Eccleton to give you the posting of this Chirnside?” “Yessir!” “Very well. That’s all you can do for the moment. Now I want you to see that everything is cleared up in the three Infantry Brigade camps, and don’t let us have the sort of chits afterwards that we got at Lumbres, etc.” So the Vanderlynden affair receded into the background, and Dormer found before his eyes once more that everlasting mud-coloured procession, men, men, limbers, cookers, men, lorries, guns, limbers, men.