The city was very silent; but at eleven o’clock, I imagined, there would be such a silence as would make men think that the earth was halting in her course. Out there, over the water, some would adventure amicably into the enemy’s lines; some would drift back to their base; most would wait dumbly for orders; and one man would be the last to die in the Great War. At the top of Waterloo Place I found a policeman flashing his lantern on the doors and shutters of the shops. “I think you’d like to know that the Germans have accepted the armistice,” I said. “Thank you, sir,” he answered with a salute. A taxi crawled westward across Piccadilly Circus; and I told the driver. “They ’ave, ’ave they?,” he muttered in perplexity. “Oh, they _’ave_. . . . Well . . .” I hesitated long before reckoning the number of those for whom peace came too late. In ’14 my generation was of an age to be called for the hottest and the longest of the fighting. Sam Dainton had escaped with a flesh wound, Jack Waring with a split head and a broken nerve, David O’Rane with the loss of his sight; these, with the five or six who had failed to pass the doctors or had been tied to a mission abroad, were all that remained of the friends who had said good-bye to their schools in the last years of the nineteenth century. A lifetime had passed since we all talked of what we would do “on the day peace is signed”; and yet, when we spoke of “last summer”, we always meant “the summer before the war”. It was, at the same time, an eternity and an episode. “So,” I reflected at the door of my house in Seymour Street, “one school of political thought in France looked upon the Revolution and the Empire.” From force of habit, I headed for the hot milk in my dressing-room and rang to have my bath prepared. Then I recollected that I need never again work by night and sleep by day. “I’ll breakfast first,” I told Barbara’s maid. “And I shan’t go to bed this morning. The armistice has been signed.” The girl tried to speak, but could only turn away with a sob that sounded like “dad”. “Has her ladyship been called?,” I asked. Still unable to speak, the girl shook her head and nodded in the direction of a breakfast-tray. 3 Barbara was asleep, with a light burning by her side and an open book face-downwards on the bed. At last, I told myself, I could see something of my wife. I should be able to read the new poets and novelists who overflowed her cases. At last we could entertain our friends again. At last, after eight months, we could have our honeymoon. Barbara looked dangerously fragile. As I watched her, one hand was drawn slowly up the sheet; and the fingers were almost transparent. Her head turned restlessly from side to side; and I knew that she was dreaming. There was a whispered sigh; and I felt that her dreams were unhappy.