Dedication

To Lieutenant R.O. Hobhouse, R.A.F.

My Dear Oliver

If you can carry your memory across the abyss which separates us all

from July 1914, you will remember some hours which we spent reading

Kant together in a cool Highgate garden in those summer days of peace.

I think by way of relaxation we sometimes laid aside Kant, took up

Herodotus, and felt ourselves for a moment in the morning of the world.

But it is of Kant that I remind you, because three years later I was

reading his great successor in the same garden in the same summer

weather, but not with you. One morning as I sat there annotating Hegel’s

theory of freedom, jarring sounds broke in upon the summer stillness.

We were well accustomed to the noises of our strange new world that

summer. Daily if the air was still we heard, as some one said, the thud of

guns across the northern sea, and murmur of innumerable ‘planes. But

this morning it was soon clear that something more was on foot. Gunfire,

at first distant, grew rapidly nearer, and soon broke out from the

northern heights hard by. The familiar drone of the British aeroplanes

was pierced by the whining of the Gothas. High above, machine guns

barked in sharp staccato and distant thuds announced the fall of bombs.

Presently three white specks could be seen dimly through the light haze

overhead, and we watched their course from the field. The raid was

soon over. The three specks drifted away towards the east, the gunfire

died down, the whining faded away, and below the hill the great city

picked up its dead. The familiar sounds resumed their sway, the small

birds chirruped from the shrubs, and the distant murmur of the traffic

told of a world going steadily on its accustomed course.