Alone by Norman Douglas — Read

After a glacial journey -- those English! They will not even give us coal for steam-heating -- I arrived here. It is warmer, appreciably warmer. Yet I leave to-morrow or next day. The streets of the town, the distant beach of San Rossore and its pine trees -- they are fraught with sad memories; memories of an autumn month in the early nineties. A city of ghosts.

The old hotel had put on a new face; freshly decorated, it wears none the less a poverty-stricken air. My dinner was bad and insufficient. One grows sick of those vile maccheroni made with war-time flour. The place is full of rigid officers taking themselves seriously. Odd, how a uniform can fill a simpleton with self-importance. What does Bacon say? I forget. Something apposite -- something about the connection between military costumes and vanity. For the worst of this career is that it is liable to transform even a sensible man into a fool. I never see these sinister-clanking marionettes without feelings of distrust. They are the outward symbol of an atavistic striving: the modern infame. We have been dying for sometime past from over-legislation. Now we are caught in the noose. A bureaucracy is bad enough. A bureaucracy can at least be bribed. Militarism dries up even that little fount of the imagination.