There were elements of hesitation, he noticed, in all the Allies. The French felt they had done much too much, and wanted to be back at their farms and little shops. The Belgians wanted to march into their country without the tragic necessity of knocking flat all its solidly built, hard-working little towns. All three nations shared the inevitable sense that grew upon men with the passage of years, of the mechanical nature of the War. Thus the cavalry, where the greatest proportion of regular soldiers lingered, were still keen on exploiting their one chance. The artillery, buoyed up by the facilities that their command of transport gave them, fired away their now all abundant ammunition. The machine gunners, containing some proportion of picked men, and able to feel that they could easily produce some noticeable effect with their weapon, were still game. But the mass of infantry, tired enough of the bomb and the rifle, and probably unfitted by generations of peace, for any effective use of the bayonet, were rapidly adopting the attitude, unexpressed as always with the humbler Englishman, of “Let the gunners go on if they like. We don’t mind!” On a grey November morning, Dormer went to his billet in the suburb of a manufacturing town. It was the most English place he had set eyes on in all his three years. It was not really suburban, very nearly, not quite. There was no garden before the door, it was close to the factories and workshops where the wealth that had built it was made, instead of being removed a decent mile or so. In fact, it just lacked the proper pretentiousness. Its owner had made money and was not in the least ashamed of admitting it, was rather prone to display the fact and his house looked like it. It was a villa, not a château. It was the home of a successful manufacturer who did not want in the least to be taken for a country gentleman. He, poor fellow, had been called up and promptly killed, and his home, with its stained-glass windows, expensive draping and papering, clumsy if efficient sanitation, was inhabited only by his widow.