Is this brutal? Is it hard-hearted? Is it callous, indifferent, cruel? _No_! For it bears no relation to our feelings for other people, _it only relates to our own sensations about ourselves_. When a group of wounded Belgians comes limping along, you look into their hollow, blackened faces, you feel your heart break, and all your soul seems to dissolve in one mighty longing to die for these people who have sacrificed their all for _you_; and you run to them, you help them all you can, you experience a passionate desire to give them everything you have, you turn out your pockets for them, you search for something, anything, that will help them. No! You are not callous because you are curious! Quite the reverse, in fact. You are curious because you are alive, because you dwell in this one earth, and because you are created with the "sense" that you have a right to see and hear all the strange and wonderful things, all the terrors as well as all the glories that go to make up human existence. Not to care, not to want to see, not to want to know, that is the callousness beyond redemption! CHAPTER XXXII THURSDAY Thursday is a queer day, a day of no beginning and no ending. It is haunted by such immense noise that it loses all likeness to what we know in ordinary life as "a day"--the thing that comes in between two nights. It is, in fact, nothing but one cataclysmal bang and shriek of shells and shrapnel. The earth seems to break open from its centre every five minutes or so, and my brain begins to formulate to itself a tremendous sense of height and space, as well as of noise, until I feel as though I am in touch with the highest skies as well as with the lowest earth, because things that seem to belong essentially to earth are now happening in the skies. The roof of the world is now enacting a rôle that is just as strange and just as surprising as if the roof of a theatre had suddenly begun to take part in a drama. One looks above as often as one looks below or around one. Flinging themselves forward with thin whinging cries like millions of mosquitoes on the attack, the shrapnel rushes perpetually overhead, and the high-explosive shells pour down upon the city, deafening, stupefying, until at last, by the very immensity of their noise, they gradually lose their power to affect one, even though they break all round. Instead of listening to the bombardment I find myself listening crossly to the creaking of our lift, which makes noises exactly like those of the shrapnel outside. In fact, when I am in my bedroom, and the lift is going up and down, I really don't know which is lift and which is shrapnel. * * * * * Seven o'clock on Thursday morning. The bombardment goes on fiercely, but I forget about it here in the big, bare, smoky café, because I cannot hear the lift. A waiter brings me some coffee and I stand and drink it and look about me.