A city of
ghosts....
The old hotel had put on a new face; freshly decorated, it wears none
the less a poverty-stricken air. My dinner was bad and insufficient. One
grows sick of those vile maccheroni made with war-time flour. The place
is full of rigid officers taking themselves seriously. Odd, how a
uniform can fill a simpleton with self-importance. What does Bacon say?
I forget. Something apposite--something about the connection between
military costumes and vanity. For the worst of this career is that it is
liable to transform even a sensible man into a fool. I never see these
sinister-clanking marionettes without feelings of distrust. They are the
outward symbol of an atavistic striving: the modern infame. We have been
dying for sometime past from over-legislation. Now we are caught in the
noose. A bureaucracy is bad enough. A bureaucracy can at least be
bribed. Militarism dries up even that little fount of the imagination.
Another twenty years of this, and we may be living in caves again; they
came near it, at the end of the Thirty Years' War. Such a cataclysm as
ours may account for the extinction of the great Cro-Magnon
civilization--as fine a race, physically, as has yet appeared on earth;
they too may have been afflicted with the plague of nationalism, unless,
as is quite likely, that horrid work was accomplished by a microbe of
some kind....
In the hour of evening, under a wintry sky amid whose darkly massed
vapours a young moon is peering down upon this maddened world, I wander
alone through deserted roadways towards that old solitary brick-tower.
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