That night in Venice, George and his death became a symbol to me—and still remain a symbol. Somehow or other we have to make these dead acceptable, we have to atone for them, we have to appease them. How, I don’t quite know. I know there’s the Two Minutes Silence. But after all a Two Minutes Silence once a year isn’t doing much—in fact, it’s doing nothing. Atonement, how can we atone? How can we atone for the lost millions and millions of years of life, how atone for those lakes and seas of blood? Something is unfulfilled, and that is poisoning us. It is poisoning me, at any rate, though I have agonized over it, as I now agonize over poor George, for whose death no other human being has agonized. What can we do? Headstones and wreaths and memorials and speeches and the cenotaph—no, no, it has got to be something _in_ us. Somehow, we must atone to the dead, the dead, murdered, violently-dead soldiers. The reproach is not from them, but in ourselves. Most of us don’t know it, but it is there, and poisons us. It is the poison that makes us heartless and hopeless and lifeless—us the war generation and the new generation, too. The whole world is blood-guilty, cursed like Orestes, and mad, and destroying itself, as if pursued by an infinite legion of Eumenides. Somehow we must atone, somehow we must free ourselves from the curse—the blood-guiltiness. We must find—where? how?—the greater Pallas who will absolve us on some Acropolis of Justice. But meanwhile the dead poison us and those who come after us. * * * * * That is why I am writing the life of George Winterbourne, a unit, one human body murdered, but to me a symbol. It is an atonement, a desperate effort to wipe off the blood-guiltiness. Perhaps it is the wrong way. Perhaps the poison will still be in me. If so, I shall search for some other way. But I shall search. I know what is poisoning me. I do not know what is poisoning you, but you are poisoned. Perhaps you too must atone. PART ONE _VIVACE_ _VIVACE_ [ I ]