Richard had said that, the last time Edward had seen him alive. He was sitting on the edge of an overturned wheelbarrow, a derelict, minus its wheel. He puffed his pipe. It was a blue, mild day. High above Armentières an aeroplane caught the sun on its turning wing. There were heavy grumblings of artillery from the north. Behind them, some men were playing football near the farm with the hole in the roof—Richard’s billet. They sat at the edge of the muddy road, watching an enormous procession of lorries slowly bumping forward over the pot-holes.

They had been talking of that unimaginable time, the end of the War. Unimaginable, at least, for Edward. He’d never for a moment, he now felt, expected to come through, to see it. And there was Richard sitting on the wheelbarrow, puffing his pipe, speaking with such calm certainty, as though he meant to live for ever. It had done Edward good. He came away from this last meeting, as from their first, reassured and soothed.

Their last meeting wasn’t, after all, unlike their first. Then, also, the future had seemed obscure and uncertain. Then, also, had Edward been oppressed by a fatalistic sense of helplessness, of being a tiny part of a machine. Not such a big machine. Only a school of four hundred boys. Yet now Edward remembered more clearly than this later afternoon in France that dreary Midland evening. How they’d all crowded together—the “new youths”—mutely wretched, wishing to efface themselves, unhappily trying to avoid the questions, the sarcasms of their seniors. And Edward Blake had trembled, loathing it passionately, more than any of the others, loathing and resenting it. Hating his parents for having sent him to such a place. He’d run away, he told himself, at once. He’d drown himself. Starve himself to death. He’d never submit, not if they tortured him. He almost hoped they’d try.

From the very first, he’d been defensively on the lookout for marks of injustice and tyranny. He hadn’t long to wait. His fag-master gave him three strokes because the sausages weren’t properly cooked. How could you be expected to cook sausages if you’d never learnt and if the study fire had to be fed with coal-dust? How could you be expected, after a single week, to remember all the idiotic nicknames of the various masters? And fancy having to clean boots. What an indignity. You might as well be a slave. How did people endure it? Why didn’t they rebel?

Why didn’t they rebel? he’d asked Vernon; and Vernon had answered vaguely that he didn’t know. He supposed that everyone had to put up with it, at first.