At this point Anthony’s attention was diverted to his business by a sudden Government demand for timber.  As he believed that the War would be over in four months he did not, at first, realize the personal significance of this.  Still, there could be no doubt that its immediate message for him was that business must be attended to.  He had not attended to it many days before he saw that his work for his country lay there under his hand, in his offices and his stackyards and factories.  He sighed and sat down to it, and turned his back resolutely on the glamour of the Front.  The particular business in hand had great issues and a fascination of its own.

And his son John sat down to it beside him, with a devoted body and a brain alive to the great issues, but with an ungovernable and abstracted soul.

And Nicky, a recruit in Kitchener’s Army, went rapidly through the first courses of his training; sleeping under canvas; marching in sun and wind and rain; digging trenches, ankle-deep, waist high, breast high in earth, till his clear skin grew clearer, and his young, hard body harder every day.

And every day the empty spiritual space between him and Michael widened.

With the exception of Michael and old Mrs. Fleming, Anthony’s entire family had offered itself to its country; it was mobilized from Frances and Anthony down to the very Aunties.  In those days there were few Red Cross volunteers who were not sure that sooner or later they would be sent to the Front.  Their only fear was that they might not be trained and ready when the moment of the summons came.  Strong young girls hustled for the best places at the ambulance classes.  Fragile, elderly women, twitching with nervous anxiety, contended with these remorseless ones and were pushed to the rear.  Yet they went on contending, sustained by their extraordinary illusion.

Aunt Louie, displaying an unexpected and premature dexterity with bandages, was convinced that she would be sent to the Front if nobody else was.  Aunt Emmeline and Aunt Edith, in states of cerebral excitement, while still struggling to find each other’s arteries, declared that they were going to the Front.  They saw no earthly reason why they should not go there.  Uncle Maurice haunted the Emergency class-rooms at the Polytechnic, wearing an Esmarch triangular bandage round his neck, and volunteered as an instructor.  He got mixed up with his bandages, and finally consented to the use of his person as a lay-figure for practical demonstrations while he waited for his orders to go to the Front.

They forebore to comment on the palpable absurdity of each other’s hopes.

For, with the first outbreak of the War, the three Miss Flemings had ceased from mutual recrimination.  They were shocked into a curious gentleness to each other.  Every evening the old schoolroom (Michael’s study) was turned into a Red Cross demonstration hall, and there the queer sight was to be seen of Louie, placable and tender, showing Edith over and over again how to adjust a scalp bandage on Emmeline’s head, and of Emmeline motionless for hours under Edie’s little, clumsy, pinching fingers.  It was thus, with small vibrations of tenderness and charity, that they responded to the vast rhythm of the War.