and that some broadening change was needed immediately if the swift
exemplary victory over Germany that his soul demanded was to be ensured.
Suppose he were to write some noisy articles at once, an article, for
instance, to be called "The War of the Mechanics" or "The War of Gear,"
and another on "Without Civil Strength there is no Victory." If he wrote
such things would they be noted or would they just vanish
indistinguishably into the general mental tumult? Would they be audible
and helpful shouts, or just waste of shouting?... That at least was what
he supposed himself to be thinking; it was, at any rate, the main
current of his thinking; but all the same, just outside the circle of
his attention a number of other things were dimly apprehended, bobbing
up and down in the flood and ready at the slightest chance to swirl into
the centre of his thoughts. There was, for instance, Captain Carmine in
the moonlight lugging up a railway embankment something horrible,
something loose and wet and warm that had very recently been a man.
There was Teddy, serious and patriotic--filling a futile penman with
incredulous respect. There was the thin-faced man at the club, and a
curious satisfaction he had betrayed in the public disarrangement. And
there was Hugh. Particularly there was Hugh, silent but watchful. The
boy never babbled. He had his mother's gift of deep dark silences. Out
of which she was wont to flash, a Black Princess waving a sword. He
wandered for a little while among memories.... But Hugh didn't come out
like that, though it always seemed possible he might--perhaps he didn't
come out because he was a son. Revelation to his father wasn't his
business.... What was he thinking of it all? What was he going to do?
Mr. Britling was acutely anxious that his son should volunteer; he was
almost certain that he would volunteer, but there was just a little
shadow of doubt whether some extraordinary subtlety of mind mightn't
have carried the boy into a pacifist attitude. No! that was impossible.
In the face of Belgium.... But as greatly--and far more deeply in the