should soon forget
politics and arguments, and be in sackcloth and ashes, positive no
longer, but down on our knees before Heaven in awe at this revelation
of social guilt, asking simply what we must do to be saved.

Your revival at home, when on leave, is full of wonderful commonplaces,
especially now, with summer ripening. The yellow-hammer is heard on the
telegraph wire, and the voices of children in the wood, and the dust of
white English country roads is smelled at evening. All that is a
delight which is miraculous in its intensity. But it is very lonesome
and far. It is curious to feel that you are really there, delighting in
the vividness of this recollection of the past, and yet balked by the
knowledge that you are, nevertheless, outside this world of home,
though it looks and smells and sounds so close; and that you may never
enter it again. It is like the landscape in a mirror, the luminous
projection of what is behind you. But you are not there. It is
recognized, but viewed now apart and aloof, a chance glimpse at the
secure and enduring place from which you came, vouchsafed to one who
must soon return to the secret darkness in his mind.

The home folk do not know this, and may not be told--I mean they may
not be told why it is so. The youngster who is home on leave, though he
may not have reasoned it out, knows that what he wants to say, often
prompted by indignation, cannot be said. He feels intuitively that this
is beyond his power to express. Besides, if he were to begin, where
would he end? He cannot trust himself. What would happen if he
uncovered, in a sunny and innocent breakfast-room, the horror he knows?
If he spoke out? His people would not understand him. They would think
he was mad. They would be sorry, dammit. Sorry for him! Why, he is not
sorry for himself. He can stand it now he knows what it is like. He can
stand it--if they can. And he realizes they can stand it, and are
merely anxious about his welfare, the welfare which does not trouble
him in the least, for he has looked into the depth of evil, and for him
the earth has changed; and he rather despises it. He has seen all he
wants to see of it. Let it go, dammit. If they don't mind the change,
and don't kick, why should he? What a hell of a world to be born into;
and once it did look so jolly good, too! He is shy, cheery, but
inexorably silent on what he knows. Some old fool said to him once, "It
must be pretty bad out there?" Pretty bad!