rows threadbare, and here and
there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through. We owe
it to all these dear youths--"_

His pen stopped again.

"I must work on a rough draft," said Mr. Britling.

Section 5

Three hours later Mr. Britling was working by daylight, though his study
lamp was still burning, and his letter to old Heinrich was still no
better than a collection of material for a letter. But the material was
falling roughly into shape, and Mr. Britling's intentions were finding
themselves. It was clear to him now that he was no longer writing as his
limited personal self to those two personal selves grieving, in the old,
large, high-walled, steep-roofed household amidst pine woods, of which
Heinrich had once shown him a picture. He knew them too little for any
such personal address. He was writing, he perceived, not as Mr. Britling
but as an Englishman--that was all he could be to them--and he was
writing to them as Germans; he could apprehend them as nothing more. He
was just England bereaved to Germany bereaved....

He was no longer writing to the particular parents of one particular
boy, but to all that mass of suffering, regret, bitterness and fatigue
that lay behind the veil of the "front." Slowly, steadily, the manhood
of Germany was being wiped out. As he sat there in the stillness he
could think that at least two million men of the Central Powers were
dead, and an equal number maimed and disabled. Compared with that our
British losses, immense and universal as they were by the standard of
any previous experience, were still slight; our larger armies had still
to suffer, and we had lost irrevocably not very much more than a quarter
of a million. But the tragedy gathered against us. We knew enough
already to know what must be the reality of the German homes to which
those dead men would nevermore return....

If England had still the longer account to pay, the French had paid
already nearly to the limits of endurance. They must have lost well over
a million of their mankind, and still they bled and bled. Russia too in
the East had paid far more than man for man in this vast swapping off of
lives. In a little while no Censorship would hold the voice of the
peoples. There would be no more talk of honour and annexations,
hegemonies and trade routes, but only Europe lamenting for her dead....

The Germany to which he wrote would be a nation of widows and children,
rather pinched bo