Once more I saw life plain....'
Very characteristic is that of the 'rather too corpulent' young
officer, who was afterwards to set it all down in the Wander Jahre. Very
characteristic, too, it is of the change in men's hearts that was even
then preparing a new phase of human history.
He goes on to write of the escape from individuality in science and
service, and of his discovery of this 'salvation.' All that was then,
no doubt, very moving and original; now it seems only the most obvious
commonplace of human life.
The glow of the sunset faded, the twilight deepened into night. The
fires burnt the brighter, and some Irishmen away across the meer started
singing. But Barnet's men were too weary for that sort of thing, and
soon the bank and the barge were heaped with sleeping forms.
'I alone seemed unable to sleep. I suppose I was over-weary, and after
a little feverish slumber by the tiller of the barge I sat up, awake and
uneasy....
'That night Holland seemed all sky. There was just a little black lower
rim to things, a steeple, perhaps, or a line of poplars, and then the
great hemisphere swept over us. As at first the sky was empty. Yet my
uneasiness referred itself in some vague way to the sky.
'And now I was melancholy. I found something strangely sorrowful and
submissive in the sleepers all about me, those men who had marched so
far, who had left all the established texture of their lives behind them
to come upon this mad campaign, this campaign that signified nothing and
consumed everything, this mere fever of fighting.
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