What a lark!

But for his senior, who also knows, though the feeling is the same, the
nature of the combative adult male is less shy, and not merely
negatively contemptuous, but aggressive. It is difficult for him to
endure hearing the home folk speak with the confidence of special
revelation of the war they have not seen, when he, who has been in it,
has contradictory minds about it. They are so assured that they think
there can be no other view; and they bear out their mathematical
arguments with maps and figures. It might be a chess tournament. He
feels at last his anger beginning to smoulder. He feels a bleak and
impalpable alienation from those who are all the world to him. He
understands at last that they also are in the mirror, projected from
his world that was, and that now he cannot come near them. Yet though
he knows it, they do not. The greatest evil of war--this is what
staggers you when you come home, feeling you know the worst of it--is
the unconscious indifference to war's obscene blasphemy against life of
the men and women who have the assurance that they will never be called
on to experience it. Out there, comrades in a common and unlightened
affliction shake a fist humorously at the disregarding stars, and mock
them. Let the Fates do their worst. The sooner it is over, the better;
and, while waiting, they will take it out of Old Jerry. He is the only
one out of whom they can take it. They are to throw away their world
and die, so they must take it out of somebody. Therefore Jerry "gets it
in the neck." Men under the irrefragable compulsion of a common spell,
who are selected for sacrifice in the fervour of a general obsession,
but who are cooly awake to the unreason which locks the minds of their
fellows, will burst into fury at the bond they feel. The obvious
obstruction is the obstinate "blighter" with a machine-gun in front of
them. At least, they are free to "strafe" him.

But what is the matter with London? The men on leave, when they meet
each other, always ask that question without hope, in the seclusion of
their confidence and special knowledge. They feel perversely they would
sooner be amid the hated filth and smells of the battle-ground than at
home. Out there, though possibly mischance may suddenly extinguish the
day for them, they will be with those who understand, with comrades who
rarely discuss the war except obliquely and with quiet and bitter
jesting. Seeing the world has gone wrong,