He left the village and went up to Renton Moor and walked along the top for miles, without knowing or caring where he went, and seeing nothing before him but his own act and what must come afterwards.  By to-morrow, or the next day at the latest, he would have enlisted; by six months, at the latest, three months if he had what they called “luck,” he would be in the trenches, fighting and killing, not because he chose, but because he would be told to fight and kill.  By the simple act of sending that letter to his mother he was committed to the whole ghastly business.

And he funked it.  There was no use lying to himself and saying that he didn’t funk it.

Even more than the actual fighting and killing, he funked looking on at fighting and killing; as for being killed, he didn’t think he would really mind that so much.  It would come—­it must come—­as a relief from the horrors he would have to see before it came.  Nicky had said that they were unbelievable; he had seemed to think you couldn’t imagine them if you hadn’t seen them.  But Michael could.  He had only to think of them to see them now.  He could make war-pictures for himself, in five minutes, every bit as terrifying as the things they said happened under fire.  Any fool, if he chose to think about it, could see what must happen.  Only people didn’t think.  They rushed into it without seeing anything; and then, if they were honest, they owned that they funked it, before and during and afterwards and all the time.

Nicky didn’t.  But that was only because Nicky had something that the others hadn’t got; that he, Michael, hadn’t.  It was all very well to say, as he had said last night:  “This ends it”; or, as their phrase was, “Everything goes in now.”  It was indeed, as far as he was concerned, the end of beauty and of the making of beauty, and of everything worth caring for; but it was also the beginning of a life that Michael dreaded more than fighting and killing and being killed:  a life of boredom, of obscene ugliness, of revolting contacts, of intolerable subjection.  For of course he was going into the ranks as Nicky had gone.  And already he could feel the heat and pressure and vibration of male bodies packed beside and around him on the floor; he could hear their breathing; he could smell their fetid bedding, their dried sweat.

Of course he was going through with it; only—­this was the thought his mind turned round and round on in horror at itself—­he funked it.  He funked it so badly that he would really rather die than go through with it.  When he was actually killed that would be his second death; months before it could happen he would have known all about it; he would have been dead and buried and alive again in hell.