our planet was being acknowledged.
The street is as the milkman and the postman have always known it on a
quiet morning.

A cock crowed. It was then I knew that, though the morning was like all
good sunrises, which are the same for the unjust and the righteous, I,
somehow, was different. Chanticleer was quite near, but his confident and
defiant voice, I recognized with a start, was a call from some other
morning. It was the remembered voice of life at sunrise, as old as the
jungle, alert, glad, and brave. Then why did it not sound as if it were
meant for me? Why did it not accord, as once it did, with the coming of a
new day, when the renewed and waiting earth was veritably waiting for us?
Yet the morning seemed the same, its sounds the familiar confidences, its
light the virgin innocence of a right beginning. Was this new light ours?
While looking at it I thought that perhaps there is another light, an
aura of something early and rare, which, once it is doused, cannot be
re-kindled, even by the sun which rises to shine on a great victory.

I began to feel that this early confusion of thought, over even so plain
a cause for joy as morning, might be a private hint that it would be as
hard to tell the truth about peace as it used to be about battle. And how
difficult it is to tell the truth about war, and even how improper, some
of us know. For what a base traitor even truth may be to good patriots,
when she insists that her mirror cannot help reflecting what is there!
Why should the best instincts of loyal folk be thus embarrassed? If they
do not wish to know what is there, when that is what it is like, is it
right, is it gentlemanly, to show them?

How easy it would be to write of peace in the Capital, where the old
highways have been decorated for many kings, marshals, and admirals, and
the flags have been hung for victories since England first bore arms. So
why should one be dubious of a few unimportant suburban byways, where the
truth is plain, and is not charged with many emotions through the
presence of an emperor and his statesmen and soldiers, all of them great,
all of them ready for our superlatives to add to their splendour?

But perhaps the more you know of a place, the greater is your perplexity.
That old vicarage wall, lower down my street, is merely attractive in the
sun of Peace Day. A stranger, if he noticed it, might at the most admire
its warm tones, and the tufts of hawkweed and snapdragon which are