Riding across the gap between the cottages was a string of horsemen, and then a grey cart, and then a team drawing a heavy object—­a gun, and then more horsemen, and then a second gun.  It was all a dim brown procession in the moonlight.  A mounted officer came up beside him and looked at him and then went back to the cross-roads, but as yet England was not troubling about spies.  Four more guns passed, and then a string of carts and more mounted men, sitting stiffly.  Nobody was singing or shouting; scarcely a word was audible, and through all the column there was an effect of quiet efficient haste.  And so they passed, and rumbled and jingled and clattered out of the scene, leaving Mr. Britling in his car in the dreaming village.  He restarted his engine once more, and went his way thoughtfully.

He went so thoughtfully that presently he missed the road to Pyecrafts—­if ever he had been on the road to Pyecrafts at all—­altogether.  He found himself upon a highway running across a flattish plain, and presently discovered by the sight of the Great Bear, faint but traceable in the blue overhead, that he was going due north.  Well, presently he would turn south and west; that in good time; now he wanted to feel; he wanted to think.  How could he best help England in the vast struggle for which the empty silence and beauty of this night seemed to be waiting?  But indeed he was not thinking at all, but feeling, feeling wonder, as he had never felt it since his youth had passed from him.  This war might end nearly everything in the world as he had known the world; that idea struggled slowly through the moonlight into consciousness, and won its way to dominance in his mind.

The character of the road changed; the hedges fell away, the pine trees and pine woods took the place of the black squat shapes of the hawthorn and oak and apple.  The houses grew rarer and the world emptier and emptier, until he could have believed that he was the only man awake and out-of-doors in all the slumbering land....

For a time a little thing caught hold of his dreaming mind.  Continually as he ran on, black, silent birds rose startled out of the dust of the road before him, and fluttered noiselessly beyond his double wedge of light.  What sort of bird could they be?  Were they night-jars?  Were they different kinds of birds snatching at the quiet of the night for a dust bath in the sand?  This little independent thread of inquiry ran through the texture of his mind and died away....

And at one place there was a great bolting of rabbits across the road, almost under his wheels....