He bought
Allies' flag-buttons, and subscribed with his fellow-employees to a Red
Cross Fund, and joined them again in sending some sixpences to a
newspaper Smokes Gift Fund; he always most scrupulously stood up and
uncovered to "God Save the King," and clapped and encored vociferously
any patriotic songs or sentiments from the stage. He thought he was
doing his full duty as a loyal Briton, and even--this was when he
promised a regular sixpence a week to the Smokes Fund--going perhaps a
little beyond it. First hints and suggestions that he should enlist he
treated as an excellent jest, and when at last they became too frequent
and pointed for that, and began to come from complete strangers, he
became justly indignant at such "impudence" and "interference," and
began long explainings to people he knew, that he wasn't the one to be
bullied into anything, that fighting wasn't "his line," that he "had no
liking for soldiering," that he would have gone like a shot, but had
his own good and adequate reasons for not doing so.
There is no need to tell of the stages by which he arrived at the
conclusion that he must enlist: from the first dawning wonder at such a
possibility, through qualms of doubt and fear and spasms of hope
and--almost--courage, to a dull apathy of resignation.
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