n and barely suppressed excitement were visible on
everybody's face.

The train sped through familiar country: meadows, pastures, cornfields,
orchards and woodlands. People waved their handkerchiefs at us from
cottage windows.

It was growing dark as the first rows of drab suburban houses began to
glide past.

So this was London. I stared out of the window and tried to grasp the
tremendous, wonderful fact with all the power of my mind. Somehow or
other it did not seem real, but I felt I could make it real by an effort
of the will.

Streets and houses and moving people soon crowded the whole view. The
people filled me with intense curiosity. I longed to talk to them and
find out what they felt and thought about the war.

We entered Victoria Station. I opened the door of the compartment with
hasty, trembling hands. I did not wait to change my French money, but
hurried out into a street and got on to a 'bus.

London, with its subdued lights, lay all around me. It had not changed
since I saw it last, and yet I felt it ought to have changed. The reason
was that I had changed. And then I began to fear that I had changed
beyond the power of recovery. The oppressive sensation that I was in a
dream forced itself upon me. I felt that there was only one reality in
the whole world--the war. Would I ever escape from the war? It would
come to an end some day, and I would leave the army, but would not the
war obsess me until the end of my life? Would I ever be myself again?

But this was not the way to enjoy my leave! I began to feel
disappointed at not being so happy as I had expected to be. Why was I
not full of rapture? Why did not every object fill me with delight? But
I ought to have known that habitual discontent and bitterness and revolt
are not shaken off in a few hours or a few days, and that they persist
even after their immediate cause has been removed.

I looked round at the other people sitting on the 'bus. I had visited
foreign countries in former years, but never before had I felt that I
was amongst complete strangers. There are moments when a dog, a horse,
or a bird fills us with a sense of the uncanny--its mind is an insoluble
mystery, with depths so dark and inscrutable that one feels something
that approaches fear and horror. And so it was as I sat on the 'bus. The
civilians around me seemed like animals of a different species. They
were not human at all--or was it I who was not human?

I went to another