He will be coming home now very soon, said the major.

Saint Odile predicted much further away that is what any one can say, does it make it more interesting, yes it does and no it does not and yes it does.

If you try to kill five hundred years or a thousand years is it more interesting than just killing one hundred years is it. And is there any hope that the hundred years or the thousand years which have been killed to make room for another thousand years or five hundred years will make that difference. Saint Odile thought so and thinking so she was a comfort to all of us. That is what makes predictions. Knowing what is going to happen to-day or to-morrow, or next week, that is some people’s predictions, and other people’s predictions is what some one person or kind of person will do at any time, and other people’s predictions is what some country will do and what will happen when any one or any body of them do do it. I have always loved to read Shakespeare’s Henry VI in three parts and now just now August 1943, I find it more so than ever much more even so much more so than ever which I always did find it fun when I was eight years old until now. Saint Odile.

Saint Odile said that the world would go on and there would come the worst war of all and the fire would be thrown down from the heavens and there would be freezing and heating and rivers running and at last there would be winning by the enemy and everybody would say and how can they be so strong, and everybody would say and give us peace and then little by little there would come the battle of the mountain and that was certainly Moscow, because even in the time of Saint Odile Moscow because of its many religious houses was called the Holy Mountain, and indeed it was there that the enemy received its first check, and then she said much later there would be fighting in the streets of the eternal city and indeed there it is, we did sometimes think it might be Constantinople or even possibly Jerusalem but no it certainly was Rome and now they are fighting in the streets of Rome, now in 1943 in August in the evening and that would not yet be the end but would be the beginning of the end, which it is, and then there would for the first time in the history of the world there would be peace, east and west, west and east and all together.

And this was a comfort so often a comfort and it is a comfort again, like a road you find on the map and then see in real life or a road you see in real life and then see on a map. So that is the difference between the nineteenth and the twentieth century just that.

This is my scientific history. Not Saint Odile, but this, that I am about to tell.

August 1943. Here we can see every night when the moon is bright and even when it is not, we cannot see them but we hear them, they hum and then from time to time they drop a light and they give us all a very great deal of delight. And why. Because they are going to drop bombs on the Italians. Anybody can like an Italian but just the same we can have a great deal of pleasure in hearing all these airplanes hum and see them drop lights on their way to bomb Italians. Why we all say do they not give in. Not so exciting perhaps but more useful, useful that is if you want to go on living in a country that has not been overwhelmed by destruction. Last night just before the airplanes came there was a complete eclipse of the moon, the shadow of the earth fell on the moon, none too soon and then slowly it passed away, it was very nice, but none of the newspapers and none of the radios mentioned it. Eclipses are an amusement for peace time and yet all the same said my neighbor, she is a country-woman, it makes one think of all those worlds turning around and around. Yes I said it is more terrifying even than war. Yes she said. And it was twelve o’clock at night and the moon was shining bright again and we went to bed and a little after we heard the airplanes humming and we saw the lights dropping and then we shut out the moonlight and then we were sleeping. All this is an introduction to the nineteenth century feeling about science.

To believe in progress and in science you had to know what science was and what progress might be. Having been born in the nineteenth century it was natural enough to know what science was. Darwin was still alive and Huxley and Agassiz and after all they all made the difference of before and after. And now in 1943 none of it means more than it did. Not so much more as not more. Not more at all.

And I began with evolution. Most pleasant and exciting and decisive. It justified peace and justified war. It also justified life and it also justified death and it also justified life. Evolution did all that.