The effect of the revolution on me and my contemporaries was exactly the reverse of that of the war. The war had left our actual everyday lives unaltered, often to the point of boredom, while it supplied an inexhaustible fund of raw material for our imaginations. The revolution brought many changes to our daily lives, and the novelty was vivid and exciting enough – I shall soon be going into that – yet it failed to engage our imaginations. Unlike the war, it did not provide a simple, plausible narrative to explain events.
