w In the course of a week-end devoted to the study
of atomic ,Ettriare ,I met—rather inconsequently—two bishops. They 'ended a dinner given by the Territorial Division which was undergoing its theoretical baptism of atomic fire, and one of them told me that he had spent that morning exorcising a ghost from a farmhouse. During the Civil War prisoners (I am not sure which side they belonged to) had been con- fined in the out-buildings of two farms and some had been summarily executed; the ghost was reputed to be that of the man who ordered this deed to be done. The farmer who lives in the place—he was indeed born there—is neither super- stitious nor imaginative; but as time went on the ghost, which manifested itself chiefly by producing a sharp lowering of the temperature and a sense of depression and fear, became impossible to live with and he sent for the bishop. After a day spent learning about the effect of Gamma rays on the marrow of the bones and the relation of the 100% Killed Line' to the ' 100% Casualty Line,' I felt, as I listened to the bishop, that there was something peculiarly but indefinably appropriate in the fact that, while we had been striving duti- fully to evoke an image of the next war, he had been quietly tidying up a battlefield of long ago.
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