The solace of indifference …

… Philosophy, lit, etc.: Blunden: No time for the present.

Blunden's focus is repeatedly expelled from its refuge, cast away from an ancient, other existence of geological calm and back into the violence of the present. As his unit marches back to the front after some R & R, Blunden observes that 'the failing ancient sun shone on the wide and shallow Ancre by Aveluy, and the green fancy-woodwork of the mill belonged to another century, indeed another existence, as we crossed the long causeway leading from the pleasures of rest, and turned along the opposite hillside with its chalky excavations, old trenches and spaces of surviving meadow-like green, towards the new arena.' His trajectory from the rest site towards the front is in parallel with the temporal references: from the ancient age of the sun to the more recent century in the mill's past to the still more recent signs ('old trenches') of earlier stages in the War to their next arena.