The battle of the Marne passed into the battle of the Aisne, and then the long lines of the struggle streamed north-westward until the British were back in Belgium failing to clutch Menin and then defending Ypres.  The elation of September followed the bedazzlement and dismay of August into the chapter of forgotten moods; and Mr. Britling’s sense of the magnitude, the weight and duration of this war beyond all wars, increased steadily.  The feel of it was less and less a feeling of crisis and more and more a feeling of new conditions.  It wasn’t as it had seemed at first, the end of one human phase and the beginning of another; it was in itself a phase.  It was a new way of living.  And still he could find no real point of contact for himself with it all except the point of his pen.  Only at his writing-desk, and more particularly at night, were the great presences of the conflict his.  Yet he was always desiring some more personal and physical participation.

Hugh came along one day in October in an ill-fitting uniform, looking already coarser in fibre and with a nose scorched red by the autumnal sun.  He said the life was rough, but it made him feel extraordinarily well; perhaps man was made to toil until he dropped asleep from exhaustion, to fast for ten or twelve hours and then eat like a wolf.  He was acquiring a taste for Woodbine cigarettes, and a heady variety of mineral waters called Monsters.  He feared promotion; he felt he could never take the high line with other human beings demanded of a corporal.  He was still trying to read a little chemistry and crystallography, but it didn’t “go with the life.”  In the scanty leisure of a recruit in training it was more agreeable to lie about and write doggerel verses and draw caricatures of the men in one’s platoon.  Invited to choose what he liked by his family, he demanded a large tuckbox such as he used to have at school, only “much larger,” and a big tin of insect powder.  It must be able to kill ticks....

When he had gone, the craving for a personal share in the nation’s physical exertions became overpowering in Mr. Britling.  He wanted, he felt, to “get his skin into it.”  He had decided that the volunteer movement was a hopeless one.  The War Office, after a stout resistance to any volunteer movement at all, decided to recognise it in such a manner as to make it ridiculous.  The volunteers were to have no officers and no uniforms that could be remotely mistaken for those of the regulars, so that in the event of an invasion the Germans would be able to tell what they had to deal with miles away.  Wilkins found his conception of a whole nation, all enrolled, all listed and badged according to capacity, his dream of every one falling into place in one great voluntary national effort, treated as the childish dreaming of that most ignorant of all human types, a “novelist.” Punch was delicately funny about him; he was represented as wearing a preposterous