Napoleonic time another sort of war-doctrine has been inculcated in a nation,
and held out to the world.
IV.
On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a progress, but a
retracing of footsteps on the road of life, I had no beacons to look for in
Germany. I had never lingered in that land which, on the whole, is so singularly
barren of memorable manifestations of generous sympathies and magnanimous
impulses. An ineradicable, invincible, provincialism of envy and vanity clings
to the forms of its thought like a frowsy garment. Even while yet very young I
turned my eyes away from it instinctively as from a threatening phantom. I
believe that children and dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of
perception as far as spectral apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned.
I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space, without sights,
without sounds. No whispers of the war reached my voluntary abstraction. And
perhaps not so very voluntary after all! Each of us is a fascinating spectacle to
himself, and I had to watch my own personality returning from another world, as
it were, to revisit the glimpses of old moons. Considering the condition of
humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much to blame for giving myself up to that
occupation. We prize the sensation of our continuity, and we can only capture it
in that way. By watching.
We arrived in Cracow late at night. After a scrambly supper, I said to my eldest
boy, “I can’t go to bed. I am going out for a look round. Coming?”
He was ready enough. For him, all this was part of the interesting adventure of
the whole journey. We stepped out of the portal of the hotel into an empty
street, very silent and bright with moonlight. I was, indeed, revisiting the
glimpses of the moon. I felt so much like a ghost that the discovery that I could
remember such material things as the right turn to take and the general direction
of the street gave me a moment of wistful surprise.
The street, straight and narrow, ran into the great Market Square of the town, the
centre of its affairs and of the lighter side of its life. We could see at the far end
of the street a promising widening of space. At the corner an unassuming (but
armed) policeman, wearing ceremoniously at midnight a pair of white gloves
which made his big hands extremely noticeable, turned his head to look at the
grizzled foreigner holding forth in a strange tongue to a youth on whose arm he