There is no particular need of our trying to recreate the picture of it as it was before the war began. Before the war it was one of a vast number of suchlike drowsy, cosy little towns lying, each one of them, in the midst of tilled fat acres on the breasts of a pleasant land; a town with the grey highroad running through it to form its main street, and with farms and orchards and vineyards and garden patches round about it; so that in the springtime, when the orchard trees bloomed and the grapevines put forth their young leaves and the wind blew, it became a little island, set in the centre of a little, billowy green-and-white sea; a town of snug small houses of red brick and grey brick, with a priest and a mayor, a schoolhouse and a beet-sugar factory, a town well for the gossips and a town shrine for the devout. Nor is there any especial necessity for us to try to describe it as it was after the war had rolled forward and back and forward again over it; for then it was transformed as most of those small towns that lay in the tracks of the hostile armies were transformed. It became a ruin, a most utter and complete and squalid ruin, filled with sights that were affronts to the eye and smells that were abominations to the nose. In this place there abode, at the time of which I aim to write, a few living creatures. They were human beings, but they had ceased to exist after the ordinary fashion of human beings in this twentieth century of ours. So often, in the first months and the first years of the war, had their simple but ample standards been forcibly upset that by now almost they had forgotten such standards had ever been. To them yesterday was a dimming memory, and to-morrow a dismal prospect without hope in it of anything better. To-day was all and everything to them; each day was destiny itself. Just to get through it with breath of life in one's body and rags over one's hide and a shelter above one's head--that was the first and the last of their aim. They lived not because life was worth while any more, but because to keep on living is an instinct, and because most human beings are so blessed--or, maybe, so cursed--with a certain adaptability of temperament, a certain inherent knack of adjustability that they may endure anything--even the unendurable--if only they have ceased to think about the past and to fret about the future. And these people in this town had ceased to think. They were out of habit with thinking. A long time before, their sensibilities had been rocked to sleep by the everlasting lullaby of the cannon; their imaginations were wrapped in a smoky coma. They lived on without conscious effort, without conscious ambition, almost without conscious desire: just as blind worms live under a bank, or slugs in a marsh, or protoplasms in a pond.