My own manner of testifying must be to tell what I have seen and what I have thought during this extraordinary experience.  It has been my natural disposition to see this war as something purposeful and epic, as it is great, as an epoch, as “the War that will end War”—­but of that last, more anon.  I do not think I am alone in this inclination to a dramatic and logical interpretation.  The caricatures in the French shops show civilisation (and particularly Marianne) in conflict with a huge and hugely wicked Hindenburg Ogre.  Well, I come back from this tour with something not so simple as that.  If I were to be tied down to one word for my impression of this war, I should say that this war is Queer. It is not like anything in a really waking world, but like something in a dream.  It hasn’t exactly that clearness of light against darkness or of good against ill.  But it has the quality of wholesome instinct struggling under a nightmare.  The world is not really awake.  This vague appeal for explanations to all sorts of people, this desire to exhibit the business, to get something in the way of elucidation at present missing, is extraordinarily suggestive of the efforts of the mind to wake up that will sometimes occur at a deep crisis.  My memory of this tour I have just made is full of puzzled-looking men.  I have seen thousands of poilus sitting about in cafes, by the roadside, in tents, in trenches, thoughtful.  I have seen Alpini sitting restfully and staring with speculative eyes across the mountain gulfs towards unseen and unaccountable enemies.  I have seen trainloads of wounded staring out of the ambulance train windows as we passed.  I have seen these dim intimations of questioning reflection in the strangest juxtapositions; in Malagasy soldiers resting for a spell among the big shells they were hoisting into trucks for the front, in a couple of khaki-clad Maoris sitting upon the step of a horse-van in Amiens station.  It is always the same expression one catches, rather weary, rather sullen, inturned.  The shoulders droop.  The very outline is a note of interrogation.  They look up as the privileged tourist of the front, in the big automobile or the reserved compartment, with his officer or so in charge, passes—­importantly.  One meets a pair of eyes that seems to say:  “Perhaps you understand....

“In which case—–...?”

It is a part, I think, of this disposition to investigate what makes everyone collect “specimens” of the war.  Everywhere the souvenir forces itself upon the attention.  The homecoming permissionaire brings with him invariably a considerable weight of broken objects, bits of shell, cartridge clips, helmets; it is a peripatetic museum.  It is as if he hoped for a clue.  It is almost impossible, I have found, to escape these pieces in evidence.  I am the least collecting of men, but I have brought home Italian cartridges, Austrian cartridges, the fuse of an Austrian shell, a broken Italian bayonet, and a note that is