and shaken down to comradeship together, and how much
sweetness there is after all in our foolish human blood. For they were
just one casual sample of the species--their patience and readiness
lay, as the energy of the atom had lain, still waiting to be properly
utilised. Again it came to me with overpowering force that the supreme
need of our race is leading, that the supreme task is to discover
leading, to forget oneself in realising the collective purpose of the
race. Once more I saw life plain....'

Very characteristic is that of the 'rather too corpulent' young
officer, who was afterwards to set it all down in the Wander Jahre. Very
characteristic, too, it is of the change in men's hearts that was even
then preparing a new phase of human history.

He goes on to write of the escape from individuality in science and
service, and of his discovery of this 'salvation.' All that was then,
no doubt, very moving and original; now it seems only the most obvious
commonplace of human life.

The glow of the sunset faded, the twilight deepened into night. The
fires burnt the brighter, and some Irishmen away across the meer started
singing. But Barnet's men were too weary for that sort of thing, and
soon the bank and the barge were heaped with sleeping forms.

'I alone seemed unable to sleep. I suppose I was over-weary, and after
a little feverish slumber by the tiller of the barge I sat up, awake and
uneasy....

'That night Holland seemed all sky. There was just a little black lower
rim to things, a steeple, perhaps, or a line of poplars, and then the
great hemisphere swept over us. As at first the sky was empty. Yet my
uneasiness referred itself in some vague way to the sky.

'And now I was melancholy. I found something strangely sorrowful and
submissive in the sleepers all about me, those men who had marched so
far, who had left all the established texture of their lives behind them
to come upon this mad campaign, this campaign that signified nothing and
consumed everything, this mere fever of fighting. I saw how little and
feeble is the life of man, a thing of chances, preposterously unable
to find the will to realise even the most timid of its dreams. And I
wondered if always it would be so, if man was a doomed animal who would
never to the last days of his time take hold of fate and change it to
his will. Always, it may be, he will remain kindly but jealous, desirous
but discursive, able and unwisely impulsive, until