possible. So he tucked his first letter into its envelope and
began to write again, with no date and no direct address, but from a
sense that it was going to be an enormously comforting thing to do.

V

"I think I'll tell you the real reason why I'm going to Wake Hill. I've
told you I'm going, but just as my nerves move the muscles that move my
legs to go, so my will moves my nerves and the me that is inside
somewhere and is a perfect stranger to you--and also to the me I am used
to myself--moves my will. You see, the me inside me knows there's
something wrong. Something mighty bad--or it may be merely
inevitable--has happened to me. I went through the War all right, on a
pretty even keel, because I thought I saw a bright light at the end. I
thought we all saw the light. And the light wasn't any electric
signboard out to say there never would be any more wars, but it was a
light you could see to read by. You could see the stars and see them
differently from the old way we'd been seeing them. We could see the
moon and the Milky Way--but I suppose that comes under stars--and the
upshot of it was that we thought we saw God. And after you'd seen God,
you knew saying there shouldn't be any more war was only beginning at
the wrong end of the puzzle. Of course war is a damnable business,
perhaps the most damnable we go into because it's so wholesale. But if
you begin at the right end of the puzzle and not the wrong, the thing we
learn is that the only reality in this universe for which it's worth
going through the obscene hells of which war is one, is God. To be aware
of Him, not to explain Him. You can't explain Him. You can't explain
what He's done to you or means to do. All you can do is to keep your eye
on Him and fall in.

"I came home. I was rather cracked, when I got here, I was so pleased
with my little plaything. I'd seen God. I was only one of a good many
millions that saw Him. And it was exactly as if you went into an
enchanter's cave and expected to find some dream you'd dreamed made
real, and all you found was the Forty Thieves sitting there counting
over their spoils. No! no! it isn't an allegory. I don't mean America
and profiteers. I don't mean anybody particularly. But it began to come
over me more and more every day that we and everybody else on the round
world, if they had seen God, had forgotten all about it. Just as the
old-fashioned men at Wake Hill used to read their Bible Sunday and put
it a