. Folly and cruelty become
accepted as normal conditions of human existence. They continue superior
to criticism, which is frequent enough though seldom overheard. The
bitter mockery of the satirists, and even the groans of the victims, are
unnoticed by genuine patriots. There seems no reason why those signal
rockets should ever burst, no reason why the mornings which waken us to
face an old dread, and the nights which contract about us like the
strangle of despair, should ever end. We remember the friends we have
lost, and cannot see why we should not share with them, in our turn, the
punishment imposed by solemn and approved dementia. Why should not the
War go on till the earth in final victory turns to the moon the
pock-scarred and pallid mask which the moon turns to us?

I was looking, later this morning, at Charing Cross Bridge. It was, as
usual, going south to the War. More than four years ago I crossed it on a
memorable journey to France. It seemed no different to-day. It was still
a Via Dolorosa projecting straight and black over a chasm. While I gazed
at it, my mind in the past, a rocket exploded above it. Yes, I saw a
burst of black smoke. The guns had ceased?

A tug passing under the bridge began a continuous hooting. Locomotives
began to answer the tug deliriously. I could hear a low muttering, the
beginning of a tempest, the distant but increasing shouting of a great
storm. Two men met in the thoroughfare below my outlook, waved their
hats, and each cheered into the face of the other.

Out in the street a stream of men and women poured from every door, and
went to swell the main cataract which had risen suddenly in full flood in
the Strand. The donkey-barrow of a costermonger passed me, loaded with a
bluejacket, a flower-girl, several soldiers, and a Staff captain whose
spurred boots wagged joyously over the stern of the barrow. A motor cab
followed, two Australian troopers on the roof of that, with a hospital
nurse, her cap awry, sitting across the knees of one of them. A girl on
the kerb, continuously springing a rattle in a sort of trance, shrieked
with laughter at the nurse. Lines of people with linked arms chanted and
surged along, bare-headed, or with hats turned into jokes. A private car,
a beautiful little saloon in which a lady was solitary, stopped near me,
and the lady beckoned with a smile to a Canadian soldier who was close.
He first stared in surprise at this fashionable stranger, and then go