Bourne appreciated Sergeant Tozer’s point of view, because he understood the implications his words were intended to convey, even when he seemed to wander from the point. Life was a hazard enveloped in mystery, and war quickened the sense of both in men: the soldier also, as well as the saint, might write his tractate de contemptu mundi, and differ from him only in the angle and spirit from which he surveyed the same bleak reality.

He could not stay any longer, but went back to the orderly-room until within a few minutes of commanding-officer’s orders, when as usual he went out, and finding a cool place sat by himself and smoked. He spoke scarcely a word to anyone except the signaller, who would whisper occasionally, or scribble something on a piece of paper, and push it along the table for him to read. The only person in whom he took any interest was the adjutant. When he had come in for the first time that day, Bourne had been going out with forms for one of the company-officers, and they had met in the doorway. Bourne stood to attention on one side of the door, as he passed in, and he noticed the look of weariness and anxiety on the officer’s face. He felt a great deal of sympathy for him. Now and again through the day he glanced in his direction, to find him sitting there in his place, doing nothing, his chin in his left hand, his eyes fixed, and his young, rather handsome face filled with the trouble and perplexity of his thoughts. They all knew what his thoughts were. The colour-sergeant would interrupt him occasionally, on some matter of routine; and he would turn to it with a look of wearied resignation, and having settled it, fall to fidgetting with his papers for a few moments, and then relapse again into his melancholy brooding. It is so easy to settle these questions of routine. He was even oblivious of the fact that the colour-sergeant had made a separate peace with the enemy, and when reminded with modest delicacy of the fact, he had only looked at him with some embarrassment and said:

‘Oh, yes, Sergeant-Major’ – for that was Tomlinson’s present rank, the old ‘colour-sergeant’ being merely reminiscent of the rank, abolished earlier, with which he had retired from the prewar army – ‘what time do you leave?’

‘I relinquish my duties at six o’clock tonight, sir.’

‘Well,’ said the adjutant desperately, ‘you will be glad to have a rest, won’t you?’

Bourne, typing orders, was just ticking off on the typewriter the statement ‘18075 Cpl. T. S. Reynolds to be sergeant’, and the date; and then a little later the notice of Sergeant Reynolds’ appointment as orderly-room sergeant. He felt the hurt which the adjutant’s preoccupation had given to the old man’s vanity. Presently the chaplain came in, and immediately Captain Havelock got up and went out with him. Bourne remembered he wanted to ask the Padre to cash a cheque. And then quite suddenly he heard that curiously tinny old voice, which always reminded him of an emasculated tom-cat, behind him.