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They dressed for dinner that night because Oswald came back tired and vexed from London and wanted a bath before dining. “They seemed to be sending everybody to East Africa on the principle that any one who’s been there 453before ought not to go again,” he grumbled. “I can’t see any other principle in it.” He talked at first of the coming East African campaign because he hesitated to ask Peter what he intended to do. Then he went on to the war news. The Germans had got Liége. That was certain now. They had smashed the forts to pieces with enormous cannon. There had been a massacre of civilians at Dinant. Joan did not talk very much, but sat and watched Peter closely with an air of complete indifference.

There was a change in him, and she could not say exactly what this change was. The sunshine and snow glare and wind of the high mountains had tanned his face to a hard bronze and he was perceptibly leaner; that made him look older perhaps; but the difference was more than that. She knew her Peter so well that she could divine a new thought in him.

“And what are you going to do, Peter?” said Oswald, coming to it abruptly.

“I’m going to enlist.”

“In the ranks, you mean?” Oswald had expected that.

“Yes.”

“You ought not to do that.”

“Why not?”

“You have your cadet corps work behind you. You ought to take a commission. We shan’t have too many officers.”

Peter considered that.

“I want to begin in the ranks.... I want discipline.”

(Had some moral miracle happened to Peter? This was quite a new note from our supercilious foster brother.)

“You’ll get discipline enough in the cadet corps.”

“I want to begin right down at the bottom of the ladder.”

“Well, if you get a rotten drill sergeant, I’m told, it’s disagreeable.”

“All the better.”

“They’ll find you out and push you into a commission,” said Oswald. “If not, it’s sheer waste.”

“Well, I want to feel what discipline is like—before I give orders,” said Peter. “I want to be told to do things and asked why the devil I haven’t done ’em smartly. I’ve been going too easy. The ranks will brace me up.”

(Yes, this was a new note. Had that delay of four or five 454days anything to do with this?... Joan, with a start, discovered that she was holding up the dinner, and touched the electric bell at her side for the course to be changed.)

“I suppose we shall all have to brace up,” said Oswald. “It still seems a little unreal. The French have lost Mulhausen again, they say, but they are going strong for Metz. There’s not a word about our army. It’s just crossed over and vanished....”

(Queer to sit here, dining in the soft candlelight, and to think of the crowded roads and deploying troops, the thudding guns and bursting shells away there behind that veil of secrecy—millions of men in France and Belgium fighting for the world. And Peter would go off tomorrow. Presently he would be in uniform; presently he would be part of a marching column. He would go over—into the turmoil. Beyond that her imagination would not pass.)

“I wish I could enlist,” said Joan.

“They’re getting thousands of men more than they can handle as it is,” said Oswald. “They don’t want you.”

“You’d have thought they’d have had things planned and ready for this,” said Peter.

“Nothing is ready,” said Oswald. “Nothing is planned. This war has caught our war office fast asleep. It isn’t half awake even now.”

“There ought to be something for women to do,” said Joan.

“There ought to be something for every one to do,” said Oswald bitterly, “but there isn’t. This country isn’t a State; it’s a crowd adrift. Did you notice, Peter, as you came through London, the endless multitudes of people just standing about? I’ve never seen London like that before. People not walking about their business, but just standing.”...

Peter told of things he had seen on his way home. “The French are in a scowling state. All France scowls at you, and Havre is packed with bargains in touring cars—just left about—by rich people coming home....”

So the talk drifted. And all the time Joan watched Peter as acutely and as unsuspectedly as a mother might watch a grown-up son. Tomorrow morning he would go off and join 455up. But it wasn’t that which made him grave. New experiences always elated Peter. And he wouldn’t be afraid; not he.... She had been let into the views of three other young men who had gone to war already; Troop had written, correctly and consciously heroic, “Some of the chaps seem to be getting a lot of emotion into it,” said Troop. “It’s nothing out of the way that I can see. One just falls into the line of one’s uncles and cousins.”

Wilmington had said: “I just wanted to see you, Joan. I’m told I’ll be most useful as a gunner because of my mathematics. When it comes to going over, you won’t forget to think of me, Joan?”

Joan answered truthfully. “I’ll think of you a lot, Billy.”

“There’s nothing in life ............