At least in one particular I will take his advice, and will not dwell further upon those years. We know now that, interminable as they seemed at the time, they passed, and in a golden autumn peace came to the earth like sleep returning after night upon night of insomnia. Malory wrote to me on that occasion also, a letter more full of sarcasm, bitterness, and sorrow than any I had yet received. “... So here we are at last at the end of this long, long road, more like straight railway-lines than like a road, which is a poetical thing. I look back, and I see iron everywhere: iron hurtling through the air and smashing against the soft flesh of men and the softer hearts of women; iron thundering in the sea; masonry toppling; careful labour destroyed; skies full of black smoke; giant machines. Impressionism is the only medium to express the war. In this chaos little men have laboured, trying to put their brains round the war like putting a string round the globe; and pitting their little bodies against the moving tons of iron, like a new-born baby trying to push against a Titan. What has emerged? a new, a great tradition, greater than the Trojan or the Elizabethan; a new legend for the ornament of art. For it all comes down to art in the end; the legend is greater than the fact; the mind survives the perishing matter. We are the heirs of the past. The man of action is the progenitor of the dreamer. What am I saying? The progenitor? he is the manure, merely the manure dug into the soil on which the dreamer will presently grow. Poor, inarticulate, uncomprehending men have died in their anonymous millions to furnish a song for the future singer, a vicious, invertebrate effete, no doubt; a moral hermaphrodite of a worthless generation. “How many before me have asked, What is Truth? is it indeed a flower which blooms only on a dung-heap? “... I have seen so many men here die in their prime, who were precious to mankind or all in all to their individual loves, yet they have been taken, and I, the valueless, the solitary, am left. Is there a purpose behind these things? or am I to believe that fate is, after all, the haphazard of chance?” We held no peace rejoicings at Pennistans’, for Nancy’s sake; peace was to her an additional sorrow. During the war she had had the feverish interest of having given her greatest sacrifice to the ideal of the moment, but as the horror faded away so the memory of those who had died faded also. Nancy and her kindred ceased to shine as the heroic, and became merely the unfortunate, a sad and scattered population to whom the war would last, not a few years, but all their lives. Shattered women and shattered men; but to us the war appeared already as a nightmare interlude from which we had wakened.