And I am weak and weary enough at this moment to wish _les Anglais_ would give it up, let the forts be rendered, and let the cannons cease.
Anything for peace, for an end of slaughter, an end of terror, an end of this cruel soul-racking thunder.
Do they come to the soldiers, thoughts like these? Heaven help the poor fellows if they do!
They are more deadly than Death, for they attack only the immortal part of one, leaving the mortal to save itself while they blight and corrode the spirit.
I am weary. I have not slept for five nights, and I feel as if I shall never sleep again.
I daresay that's partly why I have been weak enough to wish for an end of noise.
It's five o'clock and darkness has set in.
Nobody has been near me, I'm still here, locked up in this little room.
I roam about like a caged animal. I look from the window. The blank back wall of the Antwerp Theatre meets my eye, but a corner of the hotel looks in also, and I can see three tiers of windows, so I hastily move away. In all those rooms there are Germans quartered now. What if they glanced down here and discovered _me_? I pull the curtains over the window, and move back into the room.
This is Saturday afternoon, October 10th, and all of a sudden a queer thought comes over me.
I lie down on the mattress again, and my thoughts begin dreamily to revolve round an extraordinary psychic mystery that I became conscious of when I was little more than a baby in far-away Australia.
I became conscious at the age of four that I heard in my imagination the sounds of cannon, and I became certain too that those cannon were going to be real cannon some day.
Yes! All my life, ever since I could think, I have heard heavy firing in my ears, and have known I was going to be very close to battle, some far-off day or other.
Have other people been born with the same belief, I wonder?
Gradually a vast area of speculative psychology opens out before me, and, like one walking in a world of dreams, I lose myself in its dim distances, seeking for some light, clear opening, wherein I can discover the secret of this extraordinary psychic or physiological mystery, that has hidden itself for a lifetime in my being. I say hidden itself; yet, though it has kept itself dark and concealed, it has always been teasing my sub-consciousness with vague queer hints of its presence, until at last I have grown used to it, and have even arranged a fairly comfortable explanation of its existence between my soul and myself.