Stranger things have been happening, even on that sunken road of ours. It was lost to us in those very days of the Army Rest Camp; it had not been recovered when I was busy expatiating on its Christmas charms; its recovery was one of the first loose stones in the avalanche of vast events which has caught me up.... And now they say the war is over! To have seen something of it all in the last dark hour--and nothing since--is to find even more than the old war-time difficulty in believing half one hears. One has too many fixed ideas and violent impressions, not only of those four months, but of these four years: a man has to clear his own entanglements before he can begin to advance with such times. In the meantime the patter about Indemnities and Demobilisation leaves him cold. Demobilisation will have to begin nearer home than charity, in the armies of our thoughts; and some are not as highly disciplined as others, some hearts too sore to enter as they would into this Peace. For them there is still the Y.M.C.A. That little force of camp-followers still holds the field, has nothing to say to any Armistice, may well have started its most strenuous campaign. With the Armies of Occupation its work will hardly be the romantic enterprise it was; with all the danger, most of the glamour will have departed; but the deeper attractions are the less adventitious, while the Rhine at any rate should provide some piquant novelties in place of old excitements. The grand fleet of huts will soon be anchored there--including, as I hope, the new Rest Hut that was to have been tucked up close behind the Line. Once more before each counter there will be the old press of matchless manhood and humanity; neater and sprucer, I make no doubt, but otherwise neither more nor less like conquering heroes than their old unconquerable selves; and just once more, behind the counter, the chance of a lifetime, but the last chance, for 'sinful laymen' of the milder sort!