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The young green of the year shivered.

Alex St. George had been walking hard for half an hour as though trying to overtake a sense of warmth, but the spring day had no heart in it. The thorn hedges were powdered with young leaves, but, overhead, elms groped blackly at a grey sky. It was a land of elms, towering and melancholy, with the grass looking like a shabby coat, and the young wheat tinged yellow. Young St. George walked as though he had an east wind blowing in his face, but no east wind blew. It was one of those raw, dead days.

And he was afraid. He carried with him a horrible sense of emptiness, in spite of a good lunch at the battalion “mess” at the “King’s Head” in Letchford, and a tot of rum in his coffee. He had come out to get warm, and because he felt too restless and miserable to do anything but walk. It seemed to him that he could go on walking interminably along any muddy road in this raw, grey England; for it was England, though the young green of it had for him a kind of anguish.

At the top of a hill where a flint cottage stood between two converging lanes, he turned aside to lean upon a field gate, and to stare at a brown and cloddy piece of ploughland. In the garden of the cottage a very old pear-tree had smothered itself in blossom, and its whiteness was like the glare of snow against the blue-grey gloom of the landscape. Young St. George could see Letchford town streaking the valley with a thin redness, and over it hung a mist of smoke. It looked very still and silent. A robin sang plaintively in the cottage garden.

O, this England, this sodden, grey, beautiful, secure, mist-smudged England! And the spring was coming!

Young St. George’s chin came to rest upon his crossed arms. His eyes stared. He had very expressive eyes set rather wide in a broadish, sensitive face. He was a boy who flushed easily. At school they had called him “Alice”.

But on this April day his face had a greyness. His eyes stared; his nostrils looked pinched.

For the crisis had been so sudden. It had found him so unprepared, so flabbily and comfortably secure, so sure that he would not have to face the bloody business out yonder. It had shocked him. He had felt as though some one had pulled him out of a warm bed at three o’clock on an icy morning. He was a little, whimpering boy. He wanted to cry out—“Mother,—I’m afraid.”

For—somehow—he felt that they had not treated him fairly, these doctor men who had allowed him to play in khaki for three years, and then had started to hustle him out into all that horror. Had he but known—! He would have felt more resigned to it, more ready. He had been very ready to go in the beginning, but for three years or more they had allowed him to assume the conviction of a comfortable unfitness.

He looked up at the white pear-tree. It seemed to mock him like a girl wearing a white garland.