“What is a man of my sort to do?” asked a clean-shaven barrister.

“Exactly what I have been asking,” said Mr. Britling.  “They are fixing the upward age for recruits at thirty; it’s absurdly low.  A man well over forty like myself is quite fit to line a trench or guard a bridge.  I’m not so bad a shot....”

“We’ve been discussing home defence volunteers,” said the barrister.  “Anyhow we ought to be drilling.  But the War Office sets its face as sternly against our doing anything of the sort as though we were going to join the Germans.  It’s absurd.  Even if we older men aren’t fit to go abroad, we could at least release troops who could.”

“If you had the rifles,” said a sharp-featured man in grey to the right of Mr. Britling.

“I suppose they are to be got,” said Mr. Britling.

The sharp-featured man indicated by appropriate facial action and head-shaking that this was by no means the case.

“Every dead man, many wounded men, most prisoners,” he said, “mean each one a rifle lost.  We have lost five-and-twenty thousand rifles alone since the war began.  Quite apart from arming new troops we have to replace those rifles with the drafts we send out.  Do you know what is the maximum weekly output of rifles at the present time in this country?”

Mr. Britling did not know.

“Nine thousand.”

Mr. Britling suddenly understood the significance of Wilkins and his dummy gun.

The sharp-featured man added with an air of concluding the matter:  “It’s the barrels are the trouble.  Complicated machinery.  We haven’t got it and we can’t make it in a hurry.  And there you are!”

The sharp-featured man had a way of speaking almost as if he was throwing bombs.  He threw one now.  “Zinc,” he said.

“We’re not short of zinc?” said the lawyer.

The sharp-featured man nodded, and then became explicit.

Zinc was necessary for cartridges; it had to be refined zinc and very pure, or the shooting went wrong.  Well, we had let the refining business drift away from England to Belgium and Germany.  There were just one or two British firms still left....  Unless we bucked up tremendously we should get caught short of cartridges....  At any rate of cartridges so made as to ensure good shooting.  “And there you are!” said the sharp-featured man.

But the sharp-featured man did not at that time represent any considerable section of public thought.  “I suppose after all we can get rifles from America,” said the lawyer.  “And as for zinc, if the shortage is known the shortage will be provided for....”