uld stop at rare relics, holding them up to the sun, and dimly
recall ancient tales of woe.

_Spring 1917._

XXI. Lent, 1918

It was Meredith's country, and Atlantic weather in Lent. The downs were
dilated and clear as though seen through crystal. A far company of
pines on the high skyline were magnified into delicate inky figures.
The vacant sward below them was as lucent as the slope of a vast
approaching wave. A blackbird was fluting after a shower, for the sky
was transient blue with the dark rags of the squall flying fast over
the hill towards London. The thatched roof of a cottage in the valley
suddenly flamed with a light of no earthly fire, as though a god had
arrived, and that was the sign. Miss Muffet, whose profile, having the
breeze and the surprise of the sun in her hair, was dedicated with a
quivering and aureate nimbus, pulled aside the brush of a small yew,
and exclaimed; for there, neatly set in the angle of the bough, was a
brown cup with three blue eggs in it. I saw all this, and tried my best
to get back to it; but I was not there. I saw it clearly--the late
shower glittered on my coat and on the yew with the nest in it--but it
was a scene remote as a memorable hour of a Surrey April of years ago.
I could not approach; so I went back into the house.

But there was no escape. For I freely own that I am one of those who
refused to believe there would be "a great offensive." (Curse such
trite and sounding words, which put measureless misery through the mind
as unconsciously as a boy repeats something of Euclid.) I believe that
no man would now dare to order it. The soldiers, I knew, with all the
signs before them, still could not credit that it would be done. The
futile wickedness of these slaughters had been proved too often. They
get nowhere. They settle nothing. This last, if it came, would be worse
than all the rest in its magnitude and horror; it would deprive Europe
of a multitude more of our diminishing youth, and end, in the
exhaustion of its impetus, with peace no nearer than before. The old
and indurated Importances in authority, safe far behind the lines,
would shrink from squandering humanity's remaining gold of its life,
even though their ignoble ends were yet unachieved. But it had been
ordered. Age, its blind jealousy for control now stark mad, impotent in
all but the will and the power to command and punish, ignoring every
obvious lesson of the past, the appeal of the torture