Yet the professor's declaration may be not only outrageous, but right. It is a terrible thought, except to those who are merely bibliophiles just as some little boys are lovers of old postage stamps. I think he may be right, for I have a catalogue of all the books and documents prompted by the War and published before June, 1916. It runs to 180 pages of small type. It contains the names of about 3500 books and pamphlets. Now, let us suppose a student wished to know the truth about the War, for perhaps a very youthful student could imagine it was possible to get the truth about it. The truth may be somewhere in that catalogue; but I know, for I have tried, that it has no significant name to betray its pure gold, no strange brilliance to make the type dance on that page as one turns the leaves with a hopeless eye. There are, however, two certainties about the catalogue. One is that it would require a long life, a buoyant disposition, and a freedom from domestic cares, to read every book in it. And the other is that there are no more books in it--which we ought to count as books--than one evening would see us through, interruptions and all. The books in that mass are as dead as the leaves of their June of the War. I must confess, though, that I am a bibliophile with War books. Any book about the Great War is good enough for me. I am to that class of literature what little boys are to stamps. Yes; I know well the dread implication. I am aware of the worm in the mind; that I probe a wound; that I surrender to an impulse to peer into the darkness of the pit; that I encourage a thought which steals in with the quiet of midnight, and that it keeps me awake while the household sleeps. I know I consort with ghosts in a region of evil. I get the horrors, and I do not repel them. For some reason I like those ghosts. Most of them have no names for me, but I count them as old friends of mine; and where should I meet them again, at night, but amid the scenes we knew? And what do I look for in these War books? It is not easy to say. It is a private matter. Songs the soldiers used to sing on French roads are often in my head. I am like the man who was once bewitched, and saw and heard things in another place which nobody will believe, and who goes aside, therefore, unsociable and morose, to brood on what is not of this world. I am confessing this but to those who themselves have been lost in the dark, and are now awake again. The others will not know. They will only answer something about "Cheering up," or--and this is the strangest thing to hear--"to forget it." I don't want to forget it. So if in a book I see names like Chateau Thierry, Crepy-en-Valois, Dickebusch, Hooge, Vermelles, Hulluch, Festubert, Notre Dame de Lorette, Ligny-Tilloy, Sailly-Saillisel, Croiselles, Thiepval, Contalmaison, Dompierre, then I am caught. I do not try to escape.