The sea was blue and smooth and a cool breeze was blowing. We saw the cliffs of England grow larger and larger. Soon we were able to distinguish the town of Dover, the houses clustered round the harbour, and the Castle up on the cliff. It was there that I had begun my career as a soldier more than two years before. How much had happened since then! I felt that I had become a different being altogether. The boat entered the harbour and ran alongside the quay. A train was waiting for us. We poured out of the ship in two streams that spread out fan-wise and flowed into the carriages. It was good to sit by the window in a comfortable compartment and lean back against soft cushions. Glad anticipation and barely suppressed excitement were visible on everybody's face. The train sped through familiar country: meadows, pastures, cornfields, orchards and woodlands. People waved their handkerchiefs at us from cottage windows. It was growing dark as the first rows of drab suburban houses began to glide past. So this was London. I stared out of the window and tried to grasp the tremendous, wonderful fact with all the power of my mind. Somehow or other it did not seem real, but I felt I could make it real by an effort of the will. Streets and houses and moving people soon crowded the whole view. The people filled me with intense curiosity. I longed to talk to them and find out what they felt and thought about the war. We entered Victoria Station. I opened the door of the compartment with hasty, trembling hands. I did not wait to change my French money, but hurried out into a street and got on to a 'bus. London, with its subdued lights, lay all around me. It had not changed since I saw it last, and yet I felt it ought to have changed. The reason was that I had changed. And then I began to fear that I had changed beyond the power of recovery. The oppressive sensation that I was in a dream forced itself upon me. I felt that there was only one reality in the whole world--the war. Would I ever escape from the war? It would come to an end some day, and I would leave the army, but would not the war obsess me until the end of my life? Would I ever be myself again? But this was not the way to enjoy my leave! I began to feel disappointed at not being so happy as I had expected to be. Why was I not full of rapture? Why did not every object fill me with delight? But I ought to have known that habitual discontent and bitterness and revolt are not shaken off in a few hours or a few days, and that they persist even after their immediate cause has been removed.