After this, Harry always read the food-supply news, and pondered it. Was it indeed true that the war which was being waged with such gallantry and fortitude abroad might be lost at home? For the first time he had a personal interest in the struggle, apart from the interest he felt through Tom. Hitherto the war had meant nothing to him, because he had thought he meant nothing to the war—he was too young to be a soldier, probably always would be, since everyone said that peace would come next year. All he had had of warfare was the distant throb and grumble of guns a hundred miles away—not even a prowling Taube or lost Zeppelin had visited the country within the Four Roads. First the lighting order, then the liquor control, then the Conscription Act—only thus and indirectly had the war touched him, requiring of him merely a passive part. But now he saw that he also might take his active share, and the realisation set fire to his clay. The winter was a bad one—bitterly cold, with thick green ice on the ponds, and a skimming of hard snow on the fields, where the soil was like iron. The marshes of Horse Eye were sheeted with a frozen overflow, and the wind that rasped and whiffled from the east, stung the skin like wire, and piercing the cracks of barns, made the stalled cattle shiver and stamp. There was little work on the farm, though Harry had done his best to fulfil Tom’s injunctions, and had carted his manure and turned a strong furrow to the frost. The lambing had been got through somehow—but two ewes and three or four lambs had died, as they would never have done if Tom had been there. At every turn Harry was faced by his own inexperience, and learned only at the price of many disappointments and much humiliation. But he was the type which failure only makes dogged, and his unsuccessful winter helped his new sense of the country’s need in making him plan daringly for the spring. He resolved that his apprenticeship should not last beyond the winter—it was his own fault that it had lasted so long—and in March he would get to business, and start his scheming for doubling the grain acreage of the farm.