It is murderous not to be able to fight back. It is also appropriate for the Army to denude the ground of its grass, the beach grass that holds it down above the cliffs. It is appropriate for the sea to roam on with a blind eye, and for the cliffs to fall and the sands to shift and blow. It is inevitable, at one time or another, that each of us should stand on these barren grounds. The gloom of the sea puts all other darkness and gloom in jeopardy. Its brilliance is impenetrable. It carries light over the earth’s surface like a turning crystal. It is overbearing and restless and at the same time as strict and balanced as its tides. Perhaps it is best approached in misery of soul, because then it stands out in all its cryptic mastery as the raw room that owns us, the desert without illusion. Camp Wellfleet had eight towers, spaced along the top of the cliff for several miles. Watchers could look out from their transversing positions over the coastline and the sea and signal the accuracy of the antiaircraft gunners who fired at mobile targets over the water. I climbed two of the towers that still had ladders. They were in fair condition, but clearly not too long for this world of wind and spray, of ice, rain, and snow, and the fierce summer sun. Most of the windows were broken, the wires ripped off the control boards, and the floors, with boards splintered or gone entirely, were littered with wire and broken glass. A cold wet wind whined through. I wondered how many young men had felt cast off, lonely, and bored on this lookout over the dark sea. Some of those on duty had left their names behind, probably after the war was over, judging by the dates: Sweeny, Morton, Yarborough, and they also left the names, portraits, or disfigurements of their girls, or would-be girls, the signs of need in wastes of order. Concrete gun emplacements and bunkers were still intact, with empty cartridges and ammunition boxes on the ground outside. A strand of barbed wire made a little clanging sound of unused warning as I brushed by it. Toward the far end of the reservation, on the Eastham side, I passed another off-limits sign and sat down on a ring of sandbags located in a little hollow on the very edge of the cliff; they were beginning to slide down the face of it like Marconi’s bricks. Looking down on the beach where blackbacks and herring gulls were the only sentinels, facing in to the wind, I thought of how many worlds, how many inventions, how much devising we had run through, at a faster rate even than the sea cut down the cliffs. The maniacal weight of one war had gone, but the knowledge and power it let loose had sent us on, committing us to our human ends in the most inclusive and at the same time isolated sense, universally vulnerable. [Illustration]