_Albuquerque, N. M._

The long trip home is done. The wars are far distant, and over the desert there hangs an infinity of space and time that seems put here to prohibit any contemplation of giant struggles far away.

It is so quiet out here just at dawn. I don’t know what, but something awakens us--the silence or the gentleness--something awakens us just at daybreak. And we get up, and watch the light come softly over the bare Sandias to the east, and it is a perfect hour. The little birds hop from the sage-filled mesa at daylight, and they come over into our yard and they peck in the fresh earth, and waddle around and sing and have a wonderful time.

The friendly hot sun makes its arc across the peaceful sky, and evening is here. We have a window which looks to the west, and every evening I sit there and watch. Just as the sun touches the horizon its gold radiates upward onto the hanging clouds above, and the unearthly long line of the mesa rim turns into a silhouette and the old volcano peaks stand silently black in their filament of fire, and all out and on beyond, everywhere, is the gentle rolling vastness of the desert. What you see then from our west window is something completely enthralling, something that is big, and finer than any words.

All this is here for us to relish, so lovely and beautiful and serene. But when we sit in our west window at sundown it is past midnight in London, and the guns are going and the bombers are raising hell and my friends of yesterday are tense and full of a distracting excitement--peering, listening, alert to death and the sounds of death.

Out here, so remote from turmoil, the ghostly rustle of a falling bomb can surely be only something you dreamed once in a nightmare. There can be no truth in it. And yet you know. Day and night, always in your heart, you are still in London. You have never really left. For when you have shared even a little in the mighty experience of a compassionless destruction, you have taken your partnership in something that is eternal. And amidst it or far away, it is never out of your mind.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.