The Great War from FMF

You may say that everyone who had taken physical part in the war was then mad. In those days you saw objects that the earlier mind had labelled as houses. They had been used to seem cubic and solid permanences. But we had seen Ploegsteert where it had been revealed that men's dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. Man and even Beast . . . all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields. . .. Even omnibuses had picked their lumbering ways, crowded with obfusc humanity, dulled steel and bronze, between pits and hillocks of the tortured earth until they found the final pit into which they wearily subsided. It would be long before you regarded an omnibus as something which should carry you smoothly along the streets of an ordered life. Nay, it had been revealed to you that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos. One had come from the frail shelters of the Line to a world that was more frail than any canvas hut. And, more formidable than the frailness of the habitations was . .. the attitude of the natives. We who re-turned—and more particularly those of us who had gone voluntarily and with enthusiasms—were like wanderers coming back to our own shores to find our settlements occupied by a vindictive and savage tribe. We had no chance. We were like poor Regan after his four years in hospital. The world of men was changed and our places were taken by strangers. As to my own fate I was relatively unmoved. Very early in life I had arrived at the settled conviction: Homo homini lupus—man is a wolf to his fellow men.
And I have always believed that, given a digging fork and a few seeds and tubers, with a quarter's start, I could at any time wrest from the earth enough to keep body and soul together. I thought so when I was twenty; I thought the same when I stood on that Campden Hill kerb and I am again preparing to set out on that adventure at this moment of writing with the world seeming to crumble around us. I wrote then, in the columns of that lunatic journal, that England had suffered more, at least in her mentality, than any other of the nations that had shared in the war. . . . We fought in the beginning and for more than half of the duration of the fighting with volunteer soldiers. Thus in 1919 England found herself in the position of Bulgaria at the end of the Balkan War of 1913. . . . Bulgaria had formed a battalion of elite troops out of all the educated men in that relatively illiterate country. This battalion she hurled against the barbed wire of the impregnable Turkish entanglements round Tchatalja. It was entirely wiped out and Bul-garia found herself deprived of intelligentsia and almost of men who could read and write. In 1919 England was in an almost parallel position. It was not her intelligentsia that she had lost. They had embusqued themselves in government offices, in muni-tion works, in prisons or in the posts vacated by fight-ing men. . . . But the most vigorous and alert of the young men had been killed or mangled—physically and mentally. It had been impossible for a young man sound physically and of healthy imagination not to volunteer in the years between 1914 and 1917. Those who remained and filled all the posts in 1919 were the physicaly unfit and the mentally frigid. So those poor boys came back- maimed and bewildered to a world administered by those born to detest them.