I barely glanced at those books. What could they tell me? What did they know about it? Just as they were, open on the floor, tumbled on the stairs, they were telling me all they could. Was there more to be said? Sitting on a bracket in the shadow of a corner, a little bust of Rousseau overlooked the scene with me. In such a place, at such a time, you must make your own interpretation of the change, receiving out of the silence, which is not altered in nature by occasional abominable noises, just whatever your mind wishes to take. There the books are, and the dust on them is of an era which abruptly fell; is still falling. XVI. The Nobodies NOVEMBER 11, 1918. The newspapers tell us that to-day the signal to "cease fire" will be given. This news is called "Official," to give us assurance in the fog of myth. Maroons will explode above the City. Then we shall know it is the end of the War. We ought to believe it, because They tell us this; They who do everything for us--who order us what to think and how to act, arrange for our potatoes, settle the coming up and the going down of the sun, and who for years have been taking away our friends to make heroes of them, and worse. They have kept the War going, but now They are going to stop it. We shall know it is stopped when the rockets burst. Yet "The War" has become a lethargic state of mind for us. We accepted it from the beginning with green-fly, influenza, margarine, calling-up notices, and death. It is as much outside our control as the precession of the equinoxes. We believed confidently in the tumultuous first weeks of the affair that mankind could not stand that strain for more than a few months; but we have learned it is possible to habituate humanity to the long elaboration of any folly, and for men to endure uncomplainingly racking by any cruelty that is devised by society, and for women to support any grief, however senselessly caused. Folly and cruelty become accepted as normal conditions of human existence. They continue superior to criticism, which is frequent enough though seldom overheard. The bitter mockery of the satirists, and even the groans of the victims, are unnoticed by genuine patriots. There seems no reason why those signal rockets should ever burst, no reason why the mornings which waken us to face an old dread, and the nights which contract about us like the strangle of despair, should ever end. We remember the friends we have lost, and cannot see why we should not share with them, in our turn, the punishment imposed by solemn and approved dementia. Why should not the War go on till the earth in final victory turns to the moon the pock-scarred and pallid mask which the moon turns to us?