d the bluebell gatherers
had run together. They were in the same day. My book had made of that May
morning in Surrey an apparition without time and place. We hear ourselves
laughing now, intent, for instance, on confirming the almond and cucumber
in bruised bracken, or catch the sound of our serious voices raised in a
dispute over literature or politics. But these things are not really in
our minds. We would not betray our secret thoughts to bluebell gatherers
and boys snuffing the bracken. This book I was reading, and a fancied
resemblance in that hill and its prospect, moved the shadows again--they
are so readily moved--and I saw two of us in France on such a hill,
gazing intently and innocently over just such a prospect, in the summer
of 1915, without in the least guessing what, in that landscape before us,
was latent for us both. Those downs across the way would be Beaumont
Hamel and Thiepval. Bluebells! The publishers may send out what advice
they choose to authors concerning the unpopularity of books about the
War--always excepting, of course, the important reminiscences, the soft
and heavy masses of words of the great leaders of the nations in the War,
which merely reveal that they never knew what they were doing. Certainly
we could spare that kind of war book, though it continues to arrive in
abundance; a volume by a famous soldier explaining why affairs went
strangely wrong is about the last place where we should look for anything
but folly solemnly pondering unrealities. But whatever the publishers may
say, we do want books about the War by men who were in it. Some of us
have learned by now that France is a memory of such a nature that, though
it is not often we dare stop to look directly at it, for the day's work
must be done, yet it looms through the importance of each of these latter
days as though the event of our lives were past, and we were at present
merely watching the clock. The shadow of what once was in France is an
abiding presence for us. We know nothing can happen again which will
release us from it. And yet how much has been written of it? That is the
measure of its vastness and its mystery--it possesses the minds of many
men, but they are silent on what they know. They rarely speak of it,
except to one of the fraternity. But where are their thoughts? Wandering,
viewless and uneasy wraiths, over Flanders, in Artois and Picardy. Those
thoughts will never come home again to stay.

It is strange to