II. AN AUTUMN MORNING 65

XIII. NEWS FROM THE FRONT 74

XIV. AUTHORS AND SOLDIERS 80

XV. WAITING FOR DAYLIGHT 88

XVI. THE NOBODIES 96

XVII. BOOKWORMS 112

XVIII. SAILOR LANGUAGE 115

XIX. ILLUSIONS 120

XX. FIGURE-HEADS 127

XXI. ECONOMICS 133

XXII. OLD SUNLIGHT 135

XXIII. RUSKIN 140

XXIV. THE REWARD OF VIRTUE 147

XXV. GREAT STATESMEN 149

XXVI. JOY 152

XXVII. THE REAL THING 162

XXVIII. LITERARY CRITICS 170

XXIX. THE SOUTH DOWNS 175

XXX. KIPLING 182

XXXI. A DEVON ESTUARY 188

XXXII. BARBELLION 194

XXXIII. BREAKING THE SPELL 200

WAITING FOR
DAYLIGHT

I. In Ypres

JULY, 1915. My mouth does not get so dry as once it did, I notice, when
walking in from Suicide Corner to the Cloth Hall. There I was this summer
day, in Ypres again, in a silence like a threat, amid ruins which might
have been in Central Asia, and I, the last man on earth, contemplating
them. There was something bumping somewhere, but it was not in Ypres, and
no notice is taken in Flanders of what does not bump near you. So I sat
on the disrupted pedestal of a forgotten building and smoked, and
wondered why I was in the city of Ypres, and why there was a war, and why
I was a fool.

It was a lovely day, and looking up at the sky over what used to be a
school dedicated to the gentle Jesus, which is just by the place where
one of the seventeen-inchers has blown a forty-foot hole, I saw a little
round cloud shape in the blue, and then another, and then a cluster of
them; the kind of soft little cloudlets on which Renaissance cherubs
rest their chubby e