the curious idea that you may be invisible in this old world.
In a sense you know you are unseen. These people will never know what
you know. There they gossip in the hall, and leisurely survey the
bookstall, and they would never guess it, but you have just returned
from hell. What could they say if you told them? They would be
embarrassed, polite, forbearing, kindly, and smiling, and they would
mention the matter afterwards as a queer adventure with a poor devil
who was evidently a little over-wrought; shell shock, of course.
Beastly thing, shell shock. Seems to affect the nerves.

They would not understand. They will never understand. What is the use
of standing in veritable daylight, and telling the living, who have
never been dead, of the other place?

I know now how Rip Van Winkle felt about it. But his was a minor
trouble. All he lost was some years. He had not changed, except that
his beard was longer. But the man who comes back from the line has lost
more than years. He has lost his original self. People failed to
recognize Rip because they did not know his beard. Our friends do
recognize us when they greet us on our return from the front, but they
do not know us because we are not the men they remember. They are the
same as ever; but when they address us, they talk to a mind which is
not there, though the eyes betray nothing of the difference. They talk
to those who have come back to life to see them again, but who cannot
tell them what has happened, and dare not try.

Between that old self and the man they see, there is an abyss of dread.
He has passed through it. To them the war is official _communiques_,
the amplifying dispatches of war correspondents, the silence of absent
friends in danger, the shock of a telegram, and rather interesting
food-rationing. They think it is the same war which the leave-man
knows. He will tell them all about it, and they will learn the truth at
last.

All about it! If an apparition of the battle-line in eruption were to
form over London, over Paris, over Berlin, a sinister mirage, near,
unfading, and admonitory, with spectral figures moving in its reflected
fires and its gloom, and the echoes of their cries were heard, and
murmurs of convulsive shocks, and the wind over the roofs brought
ghostly and abominable smells into our streets; and if that were to
haunt us by day and night, a phantom from which there was no escape, to
remain till the sins of Europe were expiated, we