It was my
favourite church in Petrograd, rising at the English Prospect end of the
Quay, with its white rounded towers pure and quiet and modest.
I had been depressed all day. I had not been well, and the weather was
harsh, a bitterly cold driving wind beating down the streets and
stroking the ice of the canal into a dull grey colour. Christmas seemed
to lift into sharper, bitterer irony the ghastly horrors of this end
endless war. Last Christmas I had been too ill to care, and the
Christmas before I had been at the Front when the war had been young and
full of hope, and I had seen enough nobility and self-sacrifice to be
reassured about the true stuff of the human soul. Now all that seemed to
be utterly gone. On the one side my mind was filled with my friends,
John Trenchard and Marie Ivanovna. The sacrifice that they had made
seemed to be wicked and useless. I had lost altogether that conviction
of the continuance and persistence of their souls that I had, for so
long, carried with me. They were dead, dead... simply dead. There at
the Front one had believed in many things. Here in this frozen and
starving town, with every ghost working against every human, there was
assurance of nothing--only deep foreboding and an ominous silence.
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