ested on his oars, and drifted with the tide.
"I'll give you a job," he said. "Write a book that will make people hate
the idea that the State is God as Moloch was at last hated. Turn the
young against it. The latest priest is the politician. No ritual in any
religion was worse than this new worship of the State. If men don't wake
up to that then they are doomed." He began then to pull me towards
humanity again.

XXXII. Barbellion

DECEMBER 18, 1920. When posterity feels curious to discover what may have
caused the disaster to our community it will get a little light from the
merry confessions of our contemporary great folk. Let it read Colonel
Repington's _Diary_, Mrs. Asquith's book, and the memoirs of General
French. The general, of course, implies that he was so puzzled by the
neutrality of time and space, and by the fact that the treacherous enemy
was in trenches and used big guns. Our descendants may learn from these
innocent revelations what quality of knowledge and temper, to be found
only in a superior caste, guided the poor and lowly, and shaped our fate
for us. They will know why wars and famines were inevitable for us, and
why nothing could avert doom from the youth of our Europe. There is no
disputing the importance of these confessions. But their relationship to
literature? For that matter they might be linoleum. Yet there has been a
book of confessions published recently which may be read as literature
when the important gossip with the vast sales is merely curious evidence
for historians equipped for psychological analysis. I mean Barbellion's
_Journal of a Disappointed Man_.

It will interest our descendants to learn that outside the circle which
Colonel Repington reports at its dinner-tables where the ladies were so
diverting, the fare usually excellent, and the gentlemen discussed the
"combing out" of mere men for places like Ypres, there was genuine
knowledge and warm understanding. Beyond those cheerful dinner-tables,
and in that outer darkness of which the best people knew nothing except
that it was possible to rake it fruitfully with a comb, there was a host
of young men from which could be manifested the courageous intellectual
curiosity, the ardour for truth, the gusto for life, and the love of
earth, which we see in Keeling's letters and Barbellion's diary. All is
shown in these two books in an exceptional degree, and, in Barbellion's
diary, is expressed with a remarkable wit and acut