almost national significance in the fact of a few Butley men doing target practice on summer evenings.
Meanwhile my meditations had dispelled my heavy-heartedness, and as I went home I recovered something of the exultation I’d felt when first forming my resolution. I knew that no right-minded Butley man could take it upon himself to affirm that a European war was being needlessly prolonged by those who had the power to end it. They would tap their foreheads and sympathetically assume that I’d seen more of the fighting than was good for me. But I felt the desire to suffer, and once again I had a glimpse of something beyond and above my present troubles—as though I could, by cutting myself off from my previous existence, gain some new spiritual freedom and live as I had never lived before.
“They can all go to blazes,” I thought, as I went home by the field path. “I know I’m right and I’m going to do it,” was the rhythm of my mental monologue. If all that senseless slaughter had got to go on, it shouldn’t be through any fault of mine. “It won’t be any fault of mine,” I muttered.