Replies

I must confess the stress and danger of the time have left
an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind. I sit
in my study writing by lamplight, and suddenly I see again
the healing valley below set with writhing flames, and feel
the house behind and about me empty and desolate. I go
out into the Byfleet Road, and vehicles pass me, a butcher
boy in a cart, a cabful of visitors, a workman on a bicycle,
children going to school, and suddenly they become vague
and unreal, and I hurry again with the artilleryman through
the hot, brooding silence. Of a night I see the black powder
darkening the silent streets, and the contorted bodies
shrouded in that layer; they rise upon me tattered and
dog-bitten. They gibber and grow fiercer, paler, uglier, mad
distortions of humanity at last, and I wake, cold and wretched,
in the darkness of the night.

I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet
Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that
they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that
I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phan-
tasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised
body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as
I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the
great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze
of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague
lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the
flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Mar-
tian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of
playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all
bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of
that last great day. . . .