theatre-fronts the innumerable faces stood out vividly, grave, intent, slightly bewildered. Except when the soldiers passed no cries or songs came from the crowd, but only the deep inarticulate rumour which any vast body of people gives forth. 78 “Queer——! How silent they are: how do you think they’re taking it?” Campton questioned. But Dastrey had grown belligerent again. He saw the throngs before him bounding toward the frontier like the unchained furies of Rude’s “Marseillaise”; whereas to Campton they seemed full of the dumb wrath of an orderly and laborious people upon whom an unrighteous quarrel has been forced. He knew that the thought of Alsace-Lorraine still stirred in French hearts; but all Dastrey’s eloquence could not convince him 79that these people wanted war, or would have sought it had it not been thrust on them. The whole monstrous injustice seemed to take shape before him, and to brood like a huge sky-filling dragon of the northern darknesses over his light-loving, pleasure-loving, labour-loving France. 79 George came home late. It was two in the morning of his last day with his boy when Campton heard the door open, and saw a flash of turned on light. All night he had lain staring into the darkness, and thinking, thinking: thinking of George’s future, George’s friends, George and women, of that unknown side of his boy’s life which, in this great upheaval of things, had suddenly lifted its face to the surface. If war came, if George were not discharged, if George were sent to the front, if George were killed, how strange to think that things the father did not know of might turn out to have been the central things of his son’s life! The young man came in, and Campton looked at him as though he were a stranger. “Hullo, Dad—any news from the Ministry?” George, tossing aside his hat and stick, sat down on the bed. He had a crumpled rose in his button-hole, and looked gay and fresh, with the indestructible freshness of youth. 80“What do I really know of him?” the father asked himself. 80 Yes: Dastrey had had news. Germany had already committed acts of overt hostility on the frontier: telegraph and telephone communications had been cut, French locomotives seized, troops
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