He sat down without saying anything. He too was pleased to see me, but retained that air of anxious concern with which his eyes had first encountered mine. As usual he looked as if he’d slept in his uniform. Something had snapped inside me and I felt rather silly and hysterical. “David, you’ve got an enormous black smudge on your forehead,” I remarked. Obediently he moistened his handkerchief with his tongue and proceeded to rub the smudge off, tentatively following my instructions as to its whereabouts. During this operation his face was vacant and childish, suggesting an earlier time when his nurse had performed a similar service for him. “How on earth did you manage to roll up from the Isle of Wight like this?” I enquired. He smiled in a knowing way. Already he was beginning to look less as though he were visiting an invalid; but I’d been so much locked up with my own thoughts lately that for the next few minutes I talked nineteen to the dozen, telling him what a hellish time I’d had, how terribly kind the depot officers had been to me, and so on. “When I started this anti-war stunt I never dreamt it would be such a long job, getting myself run in for a court martial,” I concluded, laughing with somewhat hollow gaiety.
In the meantime David sat moody and silent, his face twitching nervously and his fingers twiddling one of his tunic buttons. “Look here, George,” he said, abruptly, scrutinizing the button as though he’d never seen such a thing before, “I’ve come to tell you that you’ve got to drop this anti-war business.” This was a new idea, for I wasn’t yet beyond my sense of relief at seeing him. “But I can’t drop it,” I exclaimed. “Don’t you realize that I’m a man with a message? I thought you’d come to see me through the court martial as ‘prisoner’s friend.’ ” We then settled down to an earnest discussion about the “political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men were being sacrificed.” He did most of the talking, while I disagreed defensively. But even if our conversation could