William-An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton — Read

The war was well past its third anniversary when William again met Edith Haynes. The silence once broken between them they had corresponded with a fair regularity, and, leave being due to him, he wrote to ask if he should be likely to meet her in London; receiving in answer a hearty invitation to pass as much of his leave as he could spare -- the whole of it if he would -- with her mother and herself in Somerset. The reply was an eager acceptance; hitherto his leave, if a respite from the office, had been dreary enough in comparison with the homecomings of other men -- it was a suspicion of the loneliness in which it was usually passed that had prompted Edith's invitation. She met him at the station and drove him home, and they picked up their odd friendship at the point where they had left it off.

The only other member of the family with whom he made acquaintance was a delicate, pale mother, given, since her firstborn was killed at Thiepval, to long silences and lonely brooding; a younger son had been a prisoner since the surrender at Kut, and Edith ran her mother as well as the house and the estate. She looked older, and by more than the passing of three years; the iron of war had entered into her soul, for the brother killed in France had been her darling as well as her mother's; but in other ways she was just what William remembered her, a kindly and capable good comrade. The delicate, pale mother kept much to her room, and the pair, in consequence, were left often to each other's company -- sometimes tramping the home farm with Edith bent on bailiff's duties, sometimes sitting by the evening fire. For the first day or two he was not communicative -- engrossed, perhaps, in mere pleasure in his new surroundings; but even through the stiffness and restraint of his letters she had guessed at something of the change that had come over him, and when he showed signs of emerging from his shell she took pains, on her side, to draw him out and discover his attitude of mind. By degrees, from his silences as much as from his speech, she learned of the weariness that had settled like a mist on his soul, the aimlessness with which he plodded the pathway of his disciplined life. She knew him for a man disillusioned, in whom the imaginings of his pre-soldier days had died as completely as his faith in his prewar creed. Had the lot fallen to him he would not have shrunk from his turn in the trenches, and at the bottom of his heart, for Griselda's sake, there was always a smoulder of hatred; but he had seen much of the war machine, had realized keenly his own unimportance therein, and he blushed when he remembered that he had once imagined that his one small arm and his private vengeance might be factors, and important factors, in the downfall of the German Empire. And the first mad impulse of agony, the impulse which would have sent him into battle single-handed, had passed as it was bound to pass.