are not about. The Sphinx has a
secret only for those who do not see her wink.

V. Signs of Spring

FEBRUARY 16, 1918. A catalogue of second-hand books was sent to me
yesterday. A raid warning, news of the destruction of Parliament House,
or a whisper of the authentic ascent of Mr. Lloyd George in a fiery
chariot and of the flight of God, would do no more to us than another
kick does to the dead. But that catalogue had to be handled to be
believed. It was an incredible survival from the days before the light
went out. Those minor gratifications have gone. I had even forgotten they
were ever ours. Sometimes now one wakes to a morning when the window is a
golden square, a fine greeting to a good earth, and the whistle of a
starling in the apple tree just outside is as tenuous as a thread of
silver; the smell of coffee brings one up blithe as a boy about to begin
play again. Yet something we feel to be wrong--a foggy memory of an ugly
dream--ah, yes; the War, the War. The damned remembrance of things as
they are drops its pall. The morning paper, too, I see, has the
information that our men are again cheerfully waiting for the spring
offensive.

Cheerfully! But, of course, the editor knows. And the _spring_ offensive!
I have seen that kind of vernal gladness. What an advent! When you find
the first blue egg in the shrubbery behind your billet in Artois; when
the G. S. O. 2 comes into the mess with a violet in his fingers, and
shows it to every doubter, then you know the time has come for the
testing of the gas cylinders, and you wonder whether this is the last
time you will be noteworthy because you had the earliest news of the
chiffchaff. The spring offensive! Guns are now converging by leagues of
roads to a new part of the Front, to try to do there what they failed to
do elsewhere. The men, as all important editors know, are happily waiting
for the great brutes to begin bellowing again in infernal concert. So
there accumulates at breakfast in these spring days all that evidence
which makes one proud to share with one's fellows the divine gift of
reason, instead of a blind and miserable animal instinct. No wonder the
cuckoo has a merry note!

That is the way we idle and hapless civilians now begin our day. I look
up to the sky, and wonder whether this inopportune spell of fine weather
means that some London children will be killed in bed to-night. As I pass
the queues of women who have been waiting for hours