But in Thompson these calmly recounted horrors worked profound distress.
His imagination became immediately shot with sinister pictures. All
these things which he had read and doubted, which had left him unmoved,
now took on a terrible reality. He could see these things about which
the returned soldier spoke, and seeing them believed. Believing, there
rose within him a protest that choked him with its force as he sat in
the cockpit beside this veteran of Flanders.
The man had fallen silent, staring into the green depths overside.
Thompson sat silent beside him. But there was in Thompson none of the
other's passivity. Unlike the returned soldier, who had seen blood and
death until he was surfeited with it, until he wanted nothing but peace
and quietness, and a chance to rest his shrapnel-torn body and
shell-shocked nerves, Thompson quivered with a swift, hot desire to kill
and destroy, to inflict vengeance. He burned for reprisal. For a
passionate moment he felt as if he could rend with his bare hands a man
or men who could wantonly mutilate women and children. He could find no
fit name for such deeds.
And, responding so surely to that unexpected stimulus, he had no
stomach for crossing the Inlet as Tommy's guest, to view the scene of
Tommy's industrial triumph-to-be.
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