Like as if it might have been the British Museum where they had Pharaohs and others in glass cases…There were threshing machines droning away all over the night. He always said they were like threshing machines…Crikey, if only they were!…But they might be our own planes, of course. A good welsh rarebit he had had for tea.

In the hut, the light from the brazier having fewer limbs on which to fall, a sort of intimacy seemed to descend, and Tietjens felt himself gain in ability to deal with his mad friend. Captain Mackenzie—Tietjens was not sure that the name was Mackenzie: it had looked something like it in the general’s hand—Captain Mackenzie was going on about the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of some fabulous uncle. Apparently at some important juncture the uncle had refused to acknowledge acquaintanceship with the nephew. From that all the misfortunes of the nephew had arisen…Suddenly Tietjens said:

‘Look here, pull yourself together. Are you mad? Stark, staring?…Or only just play-acting?’

The man suddenly sank down on to the bully-beef case that served for a chair. He stammered a question as to what—what—what Tietjens meant.

‘If you let yourself go,’ Tietjens said, ‘you may let yourself go a tidy sight farther than you want to.’

‘You’re not a mad doctor,’ the other said. ‘It’s no good your trying to come it over me. I know all about you. I’ve got an uncle who’s done the dirty on me—the dirtiest dirty ever was done on a man. If it hadn’t been for him I shouldn’t be here now.’

‘You talk as if the fellow had sold you into slavery,’ Tietjens said.

‘He’s your closest friend,’ Mackenzie seemed to advance as a motive for revenge on Tietjens. ‘He’s a friend of the general’s, too. Of your wife’s as well. He’s in with every one.’

A few desultory, pleasurable ‘pop-op-ops’ sounded from far overhead to the left.

‘They imagine they’ve found the Hun again,’ Tietjens said. ‘That’s all right; you concentrate on your uncle. Only don’t exaggerate his importance to the world. I assure you you are mistaken if you call him a friend of mine. I have not got a friend in the world.’ He added: ‘Are you going to mind the noise? If it is going to get on your nerves you can walk in a dignified manner to a dugout, now, before it gets bad…’ He called out to Cowley to go and tell the Canadian sergeant-major to get his men back into their shelters if they had come out. Until the ‘All Clear’ went.

Captain Mackenzie sat himself gloomily down at table.

‘Damn it all,’ he said, ‘don’t think I’m afraid of a little shrapnel. I’ve had two periods solid of fourteen and nine months in the line. I could have got out on to the rotten staff…It’s damn it: it’s the beastly row…Why isn’t one a beastly girl and privileged to shriek? By God, I’ll get even with some of them one of these days…’

‘Why not shriek?’ Tietjens asked. ‘You can, for me. No one’s going to doubt your courage here.’

Loud drops of rain spattered down all round the hut; there was a familiar thud on the ground a yard or so away, a sharp tearing sound above, a sharper knock on the table between them. Mackenzie took the shrapnel bullet that had fallen and turned it round and round between finger and thumb.

‘You think you caught me on the hop just now,’ he said injuriously. ‘You’re damn clever.’

Two stories down below someone let two hundred-pound dumb-bells drop on the drawing-room carpet; all the windows of the house slammed in a race to get it over; the ‘pop-op-ops’ of the shrapnel went in wafts all over the air. There was again sudden silence that was painful, after you had braced yourself up to bear noise. The runner from the Rhondda came in with a light step bearing two fat candles. He took the hooded lamps from Tietjens and began to press the candles up against the inner springs, snorting sedulously through his nostrils…

‘Nearly got me, one of those candlesticks did,’ he said. ‘Touched my foot as it fell, it did.