out
them, it seemed to their perplexed and startled minds must be full
of dead men!

Theirs I think must have been one of the strangest of all experiences;
they were never insensible; at once, and, I am told, with a sudden
catch of laughter, they began to breathe the new air. None of
them has proved a writer; we have no picture of their wonder, no
description of what was said. But we know these men were active and
awake for an hour and a half at least before the general awakening
came, and when at last the Germans stirred and sat up they found
these strangers in possession of their battleship, the submarine
carelessly adrift, and the Englishmen, begrimed and weary, but
with a sort of furious exultation, still busy, in the bright dawn,
rescuing insensible enemies from the sinking conflagration. . . .

But the thought of certain stokers the sailors of the submarine
failed altogether to save brings me back to the thread of grotesque
horror that runs through all this event, the thread I cannot overlook
for all the splendors of human well-being that have come from it.
I cannot forget the unguided ships that drove ashore, that went
down in disaster with all their sleeping hands, nor how, inland,
motor-cars rushed to destruction upon the roads, and trains upon
the railways kept on in spite of signals, to be found at last by
their amazed, reviving drivers standing on unfamiliar lines, their
fires exhausted, or, less lucky, to be discovered by astonished
peasants or awakening porters smashed and crumpled up into heaps
of smoking, crackling ruin. The foundry fires of the Four Towns
still blazed, the smoke of our burning still denied the sky.
Fires burnt indeed the brighter for the Change--and spread. . . .

Section 3

Picture to yourself what happened between the printing and composing
of the copy of the New Paper that lies before me now. It was the
first newspaper that was printed upon earth after the Great Change.
It was pocket-worn and browned, made of a paper no man ever intended
for preservation. I found it on the arbor table in the inn garden
while I was waiting for Nettie and Verrall, before that last
conversation of which I have presently to tell. As I look at it all
that scene comes back to me, and Nettie stands in her white raiment
against a blue-green background of sunlit garden, scrutinizing
my face as I read. . . .

It is so frayed that the sheet cracks along the folds and comes to
pieces in my hands. It