Page:The world set free.djvu/129

 a mark on me. I kept thinking of the dead Prussian down among the corn, and of the bitter outcries of my own man. Damned foolery! It was Damned foolery. But who was to blame? How had we got to this?

"Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with dynamite bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and suddenly dived down over beyond the trees.

From Holland to the Alps this day,' I thought, 'there must be crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to inflict irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic to the pitch of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall wake up'

"Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. 'Presently mankind will wake up.'

"I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were among these hundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in rebellion against all these ancient traditions of flag and empire. Weren't we, perhaps, already in the throes of the last crisis, in that darkest moment of a nightmare's horror before the sleeper will endure no more of it—and wakes?

"I don't know how my speculations ended. I think they were not so much ended as distracted