Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/269

failure there, the menace of disaster elsewhere—Russia retreating to the San, Italy; declaring war on Austria and preparing to cross the Isonzo, the British advance at Anzac, and from the near East news of the new landing at Suvla. Through all this alternating of tragedy and triumph ran the million and million individual threads of hope, fear, fortitude, resolve, with which the fortune of the war was obscurely but fatally interwoven. Campton remembered his sneer at Dastrey's phrase: "One can at least contribute an attitude." He had begun to feel the force of that, to understand the need of every human being's "pulling his weight" in the struggle, had begun to scan every face in the street in the passionate effort to distinguish between the stones in the wall of resistance and the cracks through which discouragement might filter.

The shabby office of the Palais Royal again became his only haven. His portrait of Mrs. Talkett had brought him many new orders; but he refused them all, and declined even to finish the pictures interrupted by the war. One of his abrupt revulsions of feeling had flung him back, heart and brain, into the horror he had tried to escape from. "If thou ascend up into heaven I am there; if thou make thy bed in hell, behold I am there," the war said to him; and as the daily head-lines shrieked out the names of new battle-fields, from the Arctic shore to the Pacific, he groaned back like the Psalmist: "Whither shall I go from thee?"