ort she makes of County Line[81]--the
country, the place, the house, and its inhabitants. Maybe, praise
God, I'll see it myself some day--it and them.

But--but--I don't know when and can't guess out of this vast fog of
war and doom. The worst of it is nobody knows just what is
happening. I have, for an example, known for a week of the blowing
up of a British dreadnaught[82]--thousands of people know it
privately--and yet it isn't published! Such secrecy makes you fear
there may be other and even worse secrets. But I don't really
believe there are. What I am trying to say is, so far as news (and
many other things) go, we are under a military rule.

It's beginning to wear on us badly. It presses down, presses down,
presses down in an indescribable way. All the people you see have
lost sons or brothers; mourning becomes visible over a wider area
all the time; people talk of nothing else; all the books are about
the war; ordinary social life is suspended--people are visibly
growing older. And there are some aspects of it that are
incomprehensible. For instance, a group of American and English
military men and correspondents were talking with me yesterday--men
who have been on both sides--in Germany and Belgium and in
France--and they say that the Germans in France alone have had
750,000 men killed. The Allies have lost 400,000 to 500,000. This
in France only. Take the other fighting lines and there must
already be a total of 2,000,000 killed. Nothing like that has ever
happened before in the history of the world. A flood or a fire or a
wreck which has killed 500 has often shocked all mankind. Yet we
know of this enormous slaughter and (in a way) are not greatly
moved. I don't know of a better measure of the brutalizing effect
of war--it's bringing us to take a new and more inhuman standard to
measure events by.

As for any political or economic reckoning--that's beyond any man's
ability yet. I see strings of incomprehensible figures that some
economist or other now and then puts in the papers, summing up the
loss in pounds sterling. But that means nothing because we have no
proper measure of it. If a man lose $10 or $10,000 we can grasp
that. But when nations shoot away so many million pounds sterling
every day--that means nothing to me. I do k