well acquainted personally with the three best-known victims, and
understood, better perhaps than most people, the misfortune of
the death of Lane. I even found a grim satisfaction, very
intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the civilians who
found the war such splendid British sport should get a sharp
taste of what it was to the actual combatants. I expressed my
impatience very freely, and found that my very straightforward
and natural feeling in the matter was received as a monstrous and
heartless paradox. When I asked those who gaped at me whether
they had anything to say about the holocaust of Festubert, they
gaped wider than before, having totally forgotten it, or rather,
having never realized it. They were not heartless anymore than I
was; but the big catastrophe was too big for them to grasp, and
the little one had been just the right size for them. I was not
surprised. Have I not seen a public body for just the same reason
pass a vote for ú30,000 without a word, and then spend three
special meetings, prolonged into the night, over an item of seven
shillings for refreshments?



Little Minds and Big Battles

Nobody will be able to understand the vagaries of public feeling
during the war unless they bear constantly in mind that the war
in its entire magnitude did not exist for the average civilian.
He could not conceive even a battle, much less a campaign. To the
suburbs the war was nothing but a suburban squabble. To the miner
and navvy it was only a series of bayonet fights between German
champions and English ones. The enormity of it was quite beyond