Dormer was not unkind enough to interrupt. He did not blame those instructors. Having, by desperately hard work, obtained their positions, they were naturally anxious to keep them. But his new insight and preoccupation, born of the Vanderlynden affair, made him study the faces of the listening squads intently. No psychologist, he could make nothing of them. Blank, utterly bored in the main, here and there he caught sight of one horrified, or one peculiarly vindictive. The main impression he received was of the sheer number of those passive listening faces, compared with the fewness of the N.C.O.’s and instructors. So long as they were quiescent, all very well. But if that dormant mass came to life, some day, if that immense immobility once moved, got under way, where would it stop? It was the same with the full-dress manœuvres. Dormer had never been taken up with the honour and glory of war. He was going through with this soldiering, which had been rather thrust upon him, for the plain reason that he wanted to get to the end of it. He considered that he had contracted to defeat the Germans just as, if he had been an iron firm, he might have contracted to make girders, or if he had been the Post Office, he would have contracted to deliver letters. And now that he watched the final processes of the job, he became more than ever aware that the goods would not be up to sample. How could they be? Here were men being taught to attack, with the principal condition of attack wanting. The principal condition of an attack was that the other fellow hit you back as hard as he could. Here there was no one hitting you back. He wondered if all these silent and extraordinarily docile human beings in the ranks would see that some day. He looked keenly at their faces. Mask, mask; mule-like stupidity, too simple to need a mask; mask and mask again; one with blank horror written on it, one with a devilish lurking cunning, as if there might be something to be made out of all this some day; then more masks. He wondered, but he did not wonder too unhappily. He was beginning to feel very well. Away from the line, the hours were more regular, the food somewhat better, the horse exercise did him good. There was another reason which Dormer, no reader of poetry, failed altogether to appreciate. Spring had come. Furtive and slow, the Spring of the shores of the grey North Sea came stealing across those hard-featured downs and rich valleys. Tree and bush, blackened and wind-bitten, were suddenly visited with a slender effusion of green, almost transparent, looking stiff and ill-assorted, as though Nature were experimenting.