At lunch-time the A.P.M. sent in for me. I found him outside in the sun, with the D.A.A. and Q.M.G., I think it was--both of them very grave and business-like in their shrapnel helmets, their gas-masks hooked up under their chins. They, too, wanted to know what we proposed to do; they, too, explained exactly why the town would presently become no place for any of us. But it was not for me to speak for the other workers, who by this time were most of them on the spot; we were all as sheep in the absence of our Public School shepherd, who had gone off in the Ford to seek instructions at Area Headquarters. Some of them, indeed, took the opportunity of speaking for themselves; and who had a better right? It may be only my impression that we all had a good deal to say at the same time: I know I voiced my dream about the Rest Cave. The official faces were not encouraging; indeed, they put their discouragement in words open to an ominous construction. They did not say Janiculum was lost, but they left us perhaps deservedly uneasy on the point.
And it was all idiotically, if not shamefully, exasperating! Those heavy shells still raining into the town; untold pain and damage ensuing every minute; the town-crier with his bell even then upon his rounds, warning civilians to evacuate; little parties of them already under way, here a toothless old lady in her Sunday weeds, a dignified old gentleman pushing a superannuated perambulator full of household gods, a prancing terrier loving the sad excitement of it all; and a man old enough to know better thinking only of his makeshift hut, hardly at all about their lifelong homes compulsorily abandoned in their poor old age, yet with a step so proud and so unfaltering! The perambulator, perhaps, was now a nobler and a sadder treasure than any it contained. But just then the hut was home and treasure-house to me; filled day by day with hearts of gold and souls of iron; and now what would become of it and them!
For the first time since the first day of all, nobody was there when we opened; but presently a handful drifted in, as unconcerned as the terrier in the road, but without a symptom of the dog's ingenuous excitement. What was it to them if the day was big with all our fates! It would not be their first big day; but it was not their day at all just yet, whatever it might be to us. To them it was still a May day come in March, the air was still charged with the fulness of life, and the hut with all that they had found in it hitherto. It was only to us, in our narrow, keen experience, that everything was spoilt, or spoiling before our eyes.