me letters,
all smothered with fragments of glass and new dust. A few drawers of the
desk were open, and the contents had been spilled. Round the walls of the
room were bookcases with leaded diamond panes. Whoever was last in the
room had left sections of the bookcases open, and there were gaps in the
rows of books. Volumes had been taken out, had been dropped on the floor,
put on the mantelpiece, or, as I had noticed when coming up to the room,
left on the stairs. One volume, still open face upwards, was on the
bureau.

I barely glanced at those books. What could they tell me? What did they
know about it? Just as they were, open on the floor, tumbled on the
stairs, they were telling me all they could. Was there more to be said?
Sitting on a bracket in the shadow of a corner, a little bust of Rousseau
overlooked the scene with me. In such a place, at such a time, you must
make your own interpretation of the change, receiving out of the silence,
which is not altered in nature by occasional abominable noises, just
whatever your mind wishes to take. There the books are, and the dust on
them is of an era which abruptly fell; is still falling.

XVI. The Nobodies

NOVEMBER 11, 1918. The newspapers tell us that to-day the signal to
"cease fire" will be given. This news is called "Official," to give us
assurance in the fog of myth. Maroons will explode above the City. Then
we shall know it is the end of the War. We ought to believe it, because
They tell us this; They who do everything for us--who order us what to
think and how to act, arrange for our potatoes, settle the coming up and
the going down of the sun, and who for years have been taking away our
friends to make heroes of them, and worse. They have kept the War going,
but now They are going to stop it. We shall know it is stopped when the
rockets burst.

Yet "The War" has become a lethargic state of mind for us. We accepted it
from the beginning with green-fly, influenza, margarine, calling-up
notices, and death. It is as much outside our control as the precession
of the equinoxes. We believed confidently in the tumultuous first weeks
of the affair that mankind could not stand that strain for more than a
few months; but we have learned it is possible to habituate humanity to
the long elaboration of any folly, and for men to endure uncomplainingly
racking by any cruelty that is devised by society, and for women to
support any grief, however senselessly caused