Waiting for Daylight

Set up, electrotyped and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y. Paper furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y. Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA To MY WIFE CONTENTS I. In Ypres 3 II. A Raid Night 12 III. Islands 24 IV. Travel Books 28 V. Signs of Spring 31 VI. Prose Writing 36 VII. The Modern Mind 40 VIII. Magazines 44 IX. The Marne 49 X. Carlyle 56 XI. Holiday Reading 58 XII. An Autumn Morning 65 XIII. News from the Front 74 XIV. Authors and Soldiers 80 XV. Waiting for Daylight 88 XVI. The Nobodies 96 XVII. Bookworms 112 XVIII. Sailor Language 115 XIX. Illusions 120 XX. Figure-heads 127 XXI. Economics 133 XXII. Old Sunlight 135 XXIII. Ruskin 140 XXIV. The Reward of Virtue 147 XXV. Great Statesmen 149 XXVI. Joy 152 XXVII. The Real Thing 162 XXVIII. Literary Critics 170 XXIX. The South Downs 175 XXX. Kipling 182 XXXI. A Devon Estuary 188 XXXII. Barbellion 194 XXXIII. Breaking the Spell 200 WAITING FOR DAYLIGHT I. In Ypres JULY, 1915. My mouth does not get so dry as once it did, I notice, when walking in from Suicide Corner to the Cloth Hall. There I was this summer day, in Ypres again, in a silence like a threat, amid ruins which might have been in Central Asia, and I, the last man on earth, contemplating them. There was something bumping somewhere, but it was not in Ypres, and no notice is taken in Flanders of what does not bump near you. So I sat on the disrupted pedestal of a forgotten building and smoked, and wondered why I was in the city of Ypres, and why there was a war, and why I was a fool. It was a lovely day, and looking up at the sky over what used to be a school dedicated to the gentle Jesus, which is just by the place where one of the seventeen-inchers has blown a forty-foot hole, I saw a little round cloud shape in the blue, and then another, and then a cluster of them; the kind of soft little cloudlets on which Renaissance cherubs rest their chubby elbows and with fat faces inclined on their hands consider mortals from cemetery monuments. Then dull concussions arrived from heaven, and right overhead I made out…