voyager was sundered from insistent trifles. He was with simple,
elemental things that have been since time began, and he had to meet
them with what skill he had, the wind for his friend and adversary, the
sun his clock, the stars for counsel, and the varying wilderness his
hope and his doubt. But the cruel misery of man did not intrude. He was
free from that. All men at sea were his fellows, whatever their
language, an ancient fraternity whose bond was a common but unspoken
knowledge of a hidden but imminent fate. They could be strangers
ashore, but not at sea.

But that is gone now. The sea is poisoned with a deadly sorrow not its
own, which man has put there. The spaciousness of the great vault above
the round of waters is soiled by the gibbering anxieties of a thousand
gossipers of evil, which the ship catches in its wires, to darken the
night of its little company with surmises of distant malignity and woe.
It is something to retain a little of the light of the days at sea
which have passed. They too had their glooms, but they came of the
dignity of advancing storms, and the fear which great seas put in men
who held a resolute course nevertheless, knowing that their weird was
one which good seamen have faced since first the unknown beyond the
land was dared; faith, courage, and the loyalty of comrades, which all
the waters of the world cannot drown. But the heart of man, which will
face the worst the elements can do, sickens at the thought of the
perverse and inexplicable cruelty of his fellows.

_October 1917._

XV. On Leave

Coming out of Victoria Station into the stir of London again, on leave
from Flanders, must give as near the sensation of being thrust suddenly
into life from the beyond and the dead as mortal man may expect to
know. It is a surprising and providential wakening into a world which
long ago went dark. That world is strangely loud, bright, and alive.
Plainly it did not stop when, somehow, it vanished once upon a time.
There its vivid circulation moves, and the buses are so usual, the
people so brisk and intent on their own concerns, the signs so
startlingly familiar, that the man who is home again begins to doubt
that he has been absent, that he has been dead. But his uniform must
surely mean something, and its stains something more!

And there can be no doubt about it, as you stand there a trifle dizzy
in London once more. You really have come back from another world; and
you have