“Diner, m’sieu,” she said, and Michael, without another thought of ambulance or aeroplane, scrambled to his feet. Somewhere in the middle distance of his mind he was sorry that this tranquil morning was over, just as below in the darkness of it there ran those streams of yearning and of horror, but all his ordinary work-a-day self was occupied with the immediate prospect of the stewpot. It was some sort of a ragout, he knew, and he lusted for it. Red wine of the country would be there, and cheese and new brown bread. . . . It surprised him to find how completely his bodily needs and the pleasure of their gratification had possession of him.
They were under orders to go back to the trenches shortly after sunset, and when their meal was over there remained but an hour or two before they had to start. The warmth and glory of the day was already gone, and streamers of cloud were beginning to form over the open sky. All afternoon these thickened till a dull layer of grey had thickly overspread the heavens and below that arch of vapour that cut off the sun the wind was blowing chilly. With that change in the weather, Michael’s mood changed also, and the horror of the return to the trenches began to come to the surface. He was not as yet aware of any physical fear of death or of wound, rather, the feeling was one of some mental and spiritual shrinking from the whole of this vast business of murder, where hundreds and thousands of men along the battle front that stretched half-way across Europe, were employed, day and night, without having any quarrel with each other, in the unsleeping vigilant work of killing. Most of them in all probability, were quite decent fellows, like those four who had whistled “Tipperary” together, and yet they were spending months of young, sweet life up to the knees in water, in foul and ill-smelling trenches in order to kill others whom they had never seen except as specks on the sights of their rifles. Somewhere behind that gruesome business, as he knew, there stood the Cause, calm and serene, like some great statue, which made this insensate murdering necessary; but just for an hour to-day, as he waited till they had to be on the move again, he found himself unable to make real to his own mind the existence of that cause, and could not see beyond the bloody and hideous things that resulted from it.