The children and nurse were still at breakfast.  Nothing had changed in the house during his absence.  But the whole house was changed.  It was a house unconvincing, incredible, which might vanish at any moment.  He himself was incredible.  What had happened was incredible.  The screeching voices of the children were not real voices, and the children were apparitions.  The newspaper was illegible.  Its messages for the most part had no meaning, and such as bore a meaning seemed to be utterly unimportant.  The first reality, for George was food.  He discovered that he could not eat the food—­could not swallow; the nausea was acute.  He drank a little coffee, and then went upstairs to see his wife.  Outside the bedroom door he stood hesitant.  A desolating sadness of disappointment suddenly surged over him.  He had destroyed his ambitions, he had transformed all his life, by a single unreflecting and irretrievable impulse.  What he had done was terrific, and yet he had done it as though it were naught ...  The mood passed as suddenly as it had come, and left him matter-of-fact, grim, as it were swimming strongly on and with the mighty current which had caught him.  He went into the bedroom on the current.  Lois was awake.

“I’ve seen Colonel Rannion.”

“You haven’t, George!”

“Yes, I have.  I’ve just come back.”

“Well?”

He replied with his damnable affected casualness:  “I’m in the Army. 
Royal Field Artillery.  And so that’s that.”

“But where’s your uniform?”

“I knew you’d say that.  I’m in mufti, you see.”

II

He promptly received his papers and returned them.  His medical examination was quite satisfactory.  Then there was no further sign from the Army.  The Army might have completely forgotten him; his enrolment in the Army might have been an illusion.  Every day and every hour he expected a telegram of command.  It was in anticipation of the telegram, curt and inexorable, that he kept harrying his tradesmen.  To be caught unprepared by the telegram would be a disaster.  But the tradesmen had lessons to teach him, and by the time the kit was approximately completed he had learnt the lessons.  Whether the transaction concerned his tunic, breeches, spurs, leggings, cane, sword, socks, shirts, cap, camp field-kit, or any of the numerous other articles without which an officer might not respectably enter the British Army, the chief lesson was the same, namely, that the tradesmen were bearing the brunt of the war.  Those who had enrolled and made spectacular sacrifices of homes and careers and limbs and lives were enjoying a glorious game amid the laudations of an ecstatic populace, but the real work was being done in the shops and in the workrooms.  The mere aspect of tradesmen was enough to restore the lost modesty of officers.  Useless to argue with the tradesmen, to expostulate, to vituperate.