"The tragedy of the Great War--a tragedy which enhances the desolation of Rheims--is that it should have killed almost everything which the best of our soldiers died to preserve, and that it should have raised more problems than it has solved. "We would sacrifice a dozen cathedrals to preserve what the war has destroyed in England.... We would readily surrender our ten best cathedrals to be battered by the artillery of Hindenburg as a ransom. Surely it would be better to lose Westminster Abbey than never again to have anybody worthy to be buried there."[116] Europe is, indeed, passing through the most critical spiritual phase of the war's aftermath--what I may term the zero hour of the spirit. When the trenches used to fill with infantry waiting in the first cold flicker of the dawn for the signal to go "over the top," they called it the "zero hour." Well, Europe now faces the zero hour of peace. It is neither a pleasant nor a stimulating moment. The "tumult and the shouting" have died. The captains, kings--and presidents--have departed. War's hectic urge wanes, losses are counted, the heroic pose is dropped. Such is the moment when the peoples are bidden to go "over the top" once more, this time toward peace objectives no less difficult than those of the battle-field. Weakened, tired Europe knows this, feels this--and dreads the plunge into the unknown. Hence the _malaise_ of the zero hour. The extraordinary turmoil of the European soul is strikingly set forth by the French thinker Paul Valéry. "We civilizations," he writes, "now know that we are mortal. We had heard tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires gone to the bottom with all their engines; sunk to the inexplorable bottom of the centuries with their gods and their laws, their academies, their science, pure and applied; their grammars, their dictionaries, their classics, their romantics and their symbolists, their critics and their critics' critics. We knew well that all the apparent earth is made of ashes, and that ashes have a meaning. We perceived, through the mists of history, phantoms and huge ships laden with riches and spiritual things. We could not count them. But these wrecks, after all, were no concern of ours. "Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were vague and lovely names, and the total ruin of these worlds meant as little to us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia--these would also be lovely names. Lusitania also is a lovely name. And now we see that the abyss of history is large enough for every one. We feel that a civilization is as fragile as a life. Circumstances which would send the works of Baudelaire and Keats to rejoin the works of Menander are no longer in the least inconceivable; they are in all the newspapers.... "Thus the spiritual Persepolis is ravaged equally with the material Susa. All is not lost, but everything has felt itself perish.