were the firstborn of Heartbreak House smitten; and the young,
the innocent, the hopeful, expiated the folly and worthlessness
of their elders.


War Delirium

Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the
field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand
the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through
this experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when
the lunatics, exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions
of a dawning millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame
in comparison. I do not know whether anyone really kept his head
completely except those who had to keep it because they had to
conduct the war at first hand. I should not have kept my own (as
far as I did keep it) if I had not at once understood that as a
scribe and speaker I too was under the most serious public
obligation to keep my grip on realities; but this did not save me
from a considerable degree of hyperaesthesia. There were of
course some happy people to whom the war meant nothing: all
political and general matters lying outside their little circle
of interest. But the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad,
the main symptom being a conviction that the whole order of
nature had been reversed. All foods, he felt, must now be
adulterated. All schools must be closed. No advertisements must
be sent to the newspapers, of which new editions must appear and
be bought up every ten minutes. Travelling must be stopped, or,
that being impossible, greatly hindered. All pretences about fine
art and culture and the like must be flung off as an intolerable