those men were!  How ready to accept leadership and forget themselves in collective ends!  I thought how manfully they had gone through all the strains and toil of the last two weeks, how they had toughened and shaken down to comradeship together, and how much sweetness there is after all in our foolish human blood.  For they were just one casual sample of the species—­their patience and readiness lay, as the energy of the atom had lain, still waiting to be properly utilised.  Again it came to me with overpowering force that the supreme need of our race is leading, that the supreme task is to discover leading, to forget oneself in realising the collective purpose of the race.  Once more I saw life plain....’

Very characteristic is that of the ‘rather too corpulent’ young officer, who was afterwards to set it all down in the Wander Jahre.  Very characteristic, too, it is of the change in men’s hearts that was even then preparing a new phase of human history.

He goes on to write of the escape from individuality in science and service, and of his discovery of this ‘salvation.’  All that was then, no doubt, very moving and original; now it seems only the most obvious commonplace of human life.

The glow of the sunset faded, the twilight deepened into night.  The fires burnt the brighter, and some Irishmen away across the meer started singing.  But Barnet’s men were too weary for that sort of thing, and soon the bank and the barge were heaped with sleeping forms.

’I alone seemed unable to sleep.  I suppose I was over-weary, and after a little feverish slumber by the tiller of the barge I sat up, awake and uneasy....

’That night Holland seemed all sky.  There was just a little black lower rim to things, a steeple, perhaps, or a line of poplars, and then the great hemisphere swept over us.  As at first the sky was empty.  Yet my uneasiness referred itself in some vague way to the sky.

’And now I was melancholy.  I found something strangely sorrowful and submissive in the sleepers all about me, those men who had marched so far, who had left all the established texture of their lives behind them to come upon this mad campaign, this campaign that signified nothing and consumed everything, this mere fever of fighting.  I saw how little and feeble is the life of man, a thing of chances, preposterously unable to find the will to realise even the most timid of its dreams.  And I wondered if always it would be so, if man was a doomed animal who would never to the last days of his time take hold of fate and change it to his will.  Always, it may be, he will remain kindly but jealous, desirous but discursive, able and unwisely impulsive, until Saturn who begot him shall devour him in his turn....

’I was roused from these thoughts by the sudden realisation of the presence of a squadron of aeroplanes far away to the north-east and very high.  They looked like little black dashes against the midnight blue.  I remember that I looked up at them at first rather idly—­as one might notice a flight of birds.  Then I perceived that they were only the extreme wing of a great fleet that was advancing in a long line very swiftly from the direction of the frontier and my attention tightened.