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When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.
a family’s estimate of its intrinsic importance is not always associated with qualifications which immediately convert the outsider to the same point of view.
the most benevolent and aspiring headmistresses are, after all, singularly helpless in the hands of misguided but resolute parents.
teaching in the real sense of the word - the creation in immature minds of the power to think, to visualise, to perceive analogies
Some of the masters, perhaps, were more prescient, but I do not believe that any of the gaily clad visitors who watched the corps carrying out its manœuvres and afterwards marching so impressively into the Chapel for the Speech Day service, in the least realised how close at hand was the fate for which it had prepared itself, or how many of those deep and strangely thrilling boys’ voices were to be silent in death before another Speech Day. Looking back upon those three radiant days of July 1914, it seems to me that an ominous stillness, an atmosphere of brooding expectation, must surely have
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So much, I thought, for ‘Hun atrocities’ - for I was already beginning to suspect, as all my generation now knows, that neither side in wartime has a monopoly of butchers and traitors.
What is to come we know not. But we know That what has been was good - was good to show, Better to hide, and best of all to bear. We are the masters of the days that were: We have lived, we have loved, we have suffered . . . even so. Shall we not take the ebb who had the flow? Life was our friend. Now, if it be our foe— Dear, though it spoil and break us! - need we care What is to come?
Together Edward and I looked at The Times History of the War, picked out a newspaper paragraph stating that the total estimate of European war casualties was already five million dead and seven million wounded, and studied with care the first official account of Neuve Chapelle. ‘It is quite impossible to understand,’ I commented afterwards, ‘how we can be such strong individualists, so insistent on the rights and claims of every human soul, and yet at the same time countenance (and if we are English, even take quite calmly) this wholesale murder, which if it were applied to animals or birds or
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That last line. Actual shivers.
There is sunshine on the trees in the garden and a bird is singing behind the hedge. I feel as if someone had uprooted my heart to see how it was growing.’
‘I could have done so well without love - before it came - I with my ambitions and life work . . .’ I wrote in my diary. ‘I shall never again now be able to work towards worldly triumphs with the same disinterested concentration. It was so pleasant when I had only myself to care for most instead of someone else. My peace of mind is gone for ever - it will never completely return again.’
I am less blindly confident than I once was, for I have been learning a truer estimate of myself, my failings and limitations, in these dark days. I have learnt to hope that if there be a Judgment Day of some kind, God will not see us with our own eyes, nor judge us as we judge ourselves.
the Big Four were making a desert and calling it peace.
The fact that, within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide. There may not be - I believe that there is not - resurrection after death, but nothing could prove more conclusively than my own brief but eventful history the fact that resurrection is possible within our limited span of earthly time.
Quite soon, we all got used to it and didn’t read it, but the men - no doubt hopefully supposing that we did - still continued to write it.
Savage
