f their June of
the War.

I must confess, though, that I am a bibliophile with War books. Any book
about the Great War is good enough for me. I am to that class of
literature what little boys are to stamps. Yes; I know well the dread
implication. I am aware of the worm in the mind; that I probe a wound;
that I surrender to an impulse to peer into the darkness of the pit; that
I encourage a thought which steals in with the quiet of midnight, and
that it keeps me awake while the household sleeps. I know I consort with
ghosts in a region of evil. I get the horrors, and I do not repel them.
For some reason I like those ghosts. Most of them have no names for me,
but I count them as old friends of mine; and where should I meet them
again, at night, but amid the scenes we knew?

And what do I look for in these War books? It is not easy to say. It is a
private matter. Songs the soldiers used to sing on French roads are often
in my head. I am like the man who was once bewitched, and saw and heard
things in another place which nobody will believe, and who goes aside,
therefore, unsociable and morose, to brood on what is not of this world.
I am confessing this but to those who themselves have been lost in the
dark, and are now awake again. The others will not know. They will only
answer something about "Cheering up," or--and this is the strangest thing
to hear--"to forget it." I don't want to forget it. So if in a book I see
names like Chateau Thierry, Crepy-en-Valois, Dickebusch, Hooge,
Vermelles, Hulluch, Festubert, Notre Dame de Lorette, Ligny-Tilloy,
Sailly-Saillisel, Croiselles, Thiepval, Contalmaison, Dompierre, then I
am caught. I do not try to escape.

Yet these books rarely satisfy me. Is it not remarkable that soldiers who
could face the shells with an excellent imitation of indifference should
falter in their books, intimidated by the opinions of those who stayed at
home? They rarely summon the courage to attack those heroic dummies which
are not soldiers but idols set up in a glorious battlefield that never
existed except as a romance among the unimaginative; the fine figures and
the splendid war that were air-built of a rapture. These authors who were
soldiers faced the real War, but they dare not deride the noble and
popular figments which lived but in the transports of the exalted. They
write in whispers, as it were, embarrassed by a knowledge which they
would communicate, but fear they may not. To shatter a cheri