We entered Victoria Station.  I opened the door of the compartment with hasty, trembling hands.  I did not wait to change my French money, but hurried out into a street and got on to a ’bus.

London, with its subdued lights, lay all around me.  It had not changed since I saw it last, and yet I felt it ought to have changed.  The reason was that I had changed.  And then I began to fear that I had changed beyond the power of recovery.  The oppressive sensation that I was in a dream forced itself upon me.  I felt that there was only one reality in the whole world—­the war.  Would I ever escape from the war?  It would come to an end some day, and I would leave the army, but would not the war obsess me until the end of my life?  Would I ever be myself again?

But this was not the way to enjoy my leave!  I began to feel disappointed at not being so happy as I had expected to be.  Why was I not full of rapture?  Why did not every object fill me with delight?  But I ought to have known that habitual discontent and bitterness and revolt are not shaken off in a few hours or a few days, and that they persist even after their immediate cause has been removed.

I looked round at the other people sitting on the ’bus.  I had visited foreign countries in former years, but never before had I felt that I was amongst complete strangers.  There are moments when a dog, a horse, or a bird fills us with a sense of the uncanny—­its mind is an insoluble mystery, with depths so dark and inscrutable that one feels something that approaches fear and horror.  And so it was as I sat on the ’bus.  The civilians around me seemed like animals of a different species.  They were not human at all—­or was it I who was not human?

I went to another seat in order to listen to a man and woman who were talking together.  I felt that if they were to talk about the war, the uncanny spell would be broken, the dream would dissolve and I would be restored to my own fellow creatures.  But they spoke about trivial domestic matters and about a flower show.  If they had only mentioned the word “war” I would have felt relieved by its familiarity, but they did not mention it once.

And then, in great mental agony, I said to myself:  “I will be happy, I will enjoy my leave.”  But a number of invisible cobwebs hung between myself and the world around me.  I tried to brush them away, but they were so impalpable that the movement of my hand did not disturb them at all.

I gave up the attempt.  I would wait until I got home.  Then I would talk and forget myself—­only by forgetting myself would I enjoy the present.  Only those who forget themselves are happy.  The obsession of self is the most oppressive of all burdens.

I descended from a ’bus and took a train.  A girl sitting opposite me stared at my blue chevrons and whispered to her fellow passenger:  “He’s just come from the front.”  So I too was regarded as a strange kind of animal.  I got out at my home-station.  I showed my leave-warrant to the ticket collector.  He was a benevolent looking old man.  He smiled and wished me good luck.  Things began to seem a little less foreign.  And then the thought of being home in a few minutes absorbed me entirely.