Then instead of breaking under that pressure, he was released by the trick of the sanguine temperament.  His mind turned over, abruptly, to the four chances out of five.  It was like a dislocated joint slipping back into place.  It was as sudden as that.  He found he had adapted himself to the prospect of Hugh in mortal danger.  It had become a fact established, a usual thing.  He could bear with it and go about his affairs.

He went up to London, and met other men at the club in the same emotional predicament.  He realised that it was neither very wonderful nor exceptionally tragic now to have a son at the front.

“My boy is in Gallipoli,” said one.  “It’s tough work there.”

“My lad’s in Flanders,” said Mr. Britling.  “Nothing would satisfy him but the front.  He’s three months short of eighteen.  He misstated his age.”

And they went on to talk newspaper just as if the world was where it had always been.

But until a post card came from Hugh Mr. Britling watched the postman like a lovesick girl.

Hugh wrote more frequently than his father had dared to hope, pencilled letters for the most part.  It was as if he was beginning to feel an inherited need for talk, and was a little at a loss for a sympathetic ear.  Park, his schoolmate, who had enlisted with him, wasn’t, it seemed, a theoriser.  “Park becomes a martinet,” Hugh wrote.  “Also he is a sergeant now, and this makes rather a gulf between us.”  Mr. Britling had the greatest difficulty in writing back.  There were many grave deep things he wanted to say, and never did.  Instead he gave elaborate details of the small affairs of the Dower House.  Once or twice, with a half-unconscious imitation of his boy’s style, he took a shot at the theological and philosophical hares that Hugh had started.  But the exemplary letters that he composed of nights from a Father to a Son at War were never written down.  It was just as well, for there are many things of that sort that are good to think and bad to say....

Hugh was not very explicit about his position or daily duties.  What he wrote now had to pass through the hands of a Censor, and any sort of definite information might cause the suppression of his letter.  Mr. Britling conceived him for the most part as quartered some way behind the front, but in a flat, desolated country and within hearing of great guns.  He assisted his imagination with the illustrated papers.  Sometimes he put him farther back into pleasant old towns after the fashion of Beauvais, and imagined loitering groups in the front of cafes; sometimes he filled in the obvious suggestions of the phrase that all the Pas de Calais was now one vast British camp.  Then he crowded the picture with tethered horses and tents and grey-painted wagons, and Hugh in the foreground—­bare-armed, with a bucket....