Doomsday by Warwick Deeping

Furze had a load of logs to deliver at "Simla." Oak, and ash, and chestnut, he sawed them at night during the long winter evenings; it gave him something to do; it helped him to sleep; it earned him a little money. If Rose had been alive he would not have been sawing wood at ten o'clock after a day's work, but he seemed to have no heart in him to grow tired. It went on beating with the same dogged, deliberate, sombre rhythm; it had nothing to quicken it, or to bid it pause. He was made of iron. His head and face were the colour of old plough chains. He felt stronger than he had ever been, fatally and tragically strong with the dull strength of a man who is lonely, and who hopes for nothing. His day was like the day of a slow and plodding beast.

He had one of the grey horses between the shafts. Even before starting the wheels of the cart had been caked with dry and yellow mud, and in the farm lane they gathered more mud, for the ground was rotten after sudden thaw. Furze's boots were all mud, wet below, dry and hard above. He walked beside the grey horse, lacking a collar, wearing an old army jerkin over his coat, his worn breeches spotted with clay and grease, his leggings much the same colour as his boots. He walked heavily, but with a suggestion of power. When he came to the turning into the main road he checked the grey horse to let a car go by.