This, I thought yesterday, may be my last walk . . . the war - 
our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation - has 
taken away the outer wall of security. No echo comes back. I 
have no surroundings . . . Those familiar circumlocutions - 
those standards - which have for so many years given back an 
echo and so thickened my identity are all wide and wild as 
the desert now. I mean, there is no "autumn," no winter. 
We pour to the edge of a precipice . . . and then? I can't 
conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.