But in his heart, he knew that he was afraid to go. Almost he deceived himself into believing that he was behaving well in refusing to join the Army so that he might devote himself more assiduously to Ireland and his work ... but not completely did he persuade himself. The fear of death was in him and he could not allay it. The fear of mutilation, of madness, of blindness, of shattered nerves sent him shuddering from the thought of offering himself as a soldier ... and mixed up with this devastating fear was a queer vanity that almost conquered the fear.

"If I were to go in, I might do something ... something distinguished!"

There were times when he gave himself up to dreams of glory, saw himself decorated with high awards for bravery. He would imagine himself performing some impossible act of courage ... saving an Army Corps from destruction ... showing resource in a period of crisis, and so bringing salvation where utter loss had seemed inevitable. But these times of glory were few and brief: he saw himself most often, killed ingloriously, inconspicuously, one of a crowd, blown, perhaps, to pieces or buried in bombarded earthworks; and through his dreams of glory and his plans for work in Ireland, there stubbornly thrust itself this accusation: I'm a coward! I'm a coward! I'm a coward!

In England, men were charging the queer people who called themselves Conscientious Objectors with cowardice, but the charge seemed a baseless one to Henry. He did not believe that he could endure the odium and obloquy which some of the Conscientious Objectors had borne. There was courage in the man who said, "I will fight for my country!" but that courage might be less than that of the man who said, "I will not fight for my country!" Henry was not a Conscientious Objector, nor could he understand the state of mind of the man who was. He was a coward. Inside him, he knew that he was a coward. Inside him, he accused himself of cowardice. Everything in his life showed that he was a coward, that he shrank from physical combats, from tests of courage, that sometimes he shrank from spiritual contests....

"I ought to tell Mary," he said to himself. "I can't marry her without telling her that I'm ... a funk!"

But he temporised even in this. "I'll wait a little while longer," he said. "Perhaps later on!..."

Always he wanted to thrust the unpleasant thing a little further off; It was as if he had said to himself, "I won't deal with it just yet ... and perhaps it won't need to be dealt with!"

"I'll finish my book first," he said, "and then I'll tell Mary. Perhaps the war will be over!..."