These expulsions and disappearances work nicely as culminations of the rootlessness, impotence, and somatoparaphrenia reported by the foregoing characters, sensations that inevitably attend to a terror about providence and time that intensified throughout the twentieth century. Especially after the senseless blood rituals of the World Wars, statesmen, veterans, and civilians had come to suspect that the functions of history were discontinuous and orthogonal to human concern. The proud captains of history were realizing they were, in Lernet-Holenia’s terms, “merely the instruments of fate.”