Some critics find in the diary of Barbellion's last days evidence that he remembered he was writing for an audience. It may be there, but it is not plain to me. It is likely that if we were writing a paragraph while doubtful whether the hair which held the sword over us would last till we had finished, we might find we were not so joyously abandoned to pure art as we used to be. The interest of the book is that it is some more of Bruce Cummings when we could not have expected another line from him. Apart even from their literary value, it seems to me that some day his three volumes may prove to bear historic witness as important as that of Colonel Repington's diary. It was just such minds as Barbellion's, not uncommon in the youth of our war time--though in his case the unusual intuitions and adventurous aspirations were defined by genius--it was such minds that the war-mongers condemned and destroyed. Those men were selected for sacrifice because they had the very qualities which, when lost to the community, then it dies in its soul. They were candid with themselves, and questioned our warranty with the same candour, but were modest and reticent; they were kindly to us when they knew we were wooden and wrong, and did our bidding, judging it was evil. In France they subdued their insurgent thoughts--and what that sacrifice meant to them in the lonely night watches I have been privileged to learn--and surrendered, often in terrible derision, to our will; and then in cool and calculated audacity devised the very tasks in which the bravest and most intelligent would be the first to die. XXXIII. Breaking the Spell APRIL 8, 1921. My seat by the Serpentine was under a small and almost impalpable cloud of almond petals. The babbling of ducks somewhere in the place where the water seemed a pale and wavering fire was like the sound of the upwelling of the hidden spring of life. This was the spot where I could sit and there quietly match the darker shades of trouble in the afternoon papers, the time being April in England, and the sky ineffable. There was not a trace of mourning in the sky; not a black-edged cloud. But human life, being an urgent and serious affair, and not a bright blue emptiness like Heaven; human life being a state of trial in which, as favoured beings, we are "heated hot with burning fears and dipped in baths of hissing tears" for our own good, could not be expected to look as pleasant, during so severe a necessary process, as almond trees in blossom. So I sat down and prepared to measure, from the news in the papers, the depth of the present border on our daily memorial card.