ountry. I've never been able to understand
those women one reads about who offer their sons gladly. I don't offer
Ninian gladly. I offer him ... that's all. I know that men have to
defend their country, and I love England and I'm proud to be English ...
but when I've said all that, it's very little when I remember that I
love Ninian. I suppose that that's a selfish thing to say ... but I
don't care whether it is or not!..." She stopped for a moment or two,
and then, with a change of voice, she said, "Do you think the war will
last long, Henry?"

"I don't know," he replied. "Nobody seems able to form any estimate.
When it began I thought it couldn't possibly last for longer than two
months, but it looks like going on for a very long time yet. We move
forward and we move back ... and more men are killed. That's the only
result of anything at present!"

"It's strange," she murmured, "how indifferent one becomes to the death
lists. I thought my heart would break when I saw the first Devon
casualties, but now one simply doesn't feel anything ... just a vague
regret. Sometimes I think I'm growing callous. I can't feel anything
when I read that thousands of men have been killed and wounded. It's
almost as if I were saying to myself, 'Is that all? Weren't there
more?...' I'm not the only one like that. People don't like to admit it,
but I've heard people confessing ... I confess myself ... that I get a
... kind of shocked pleasure out of a big casualty list! ... Oh, isn't
it disgusting, Henry? One gets more and more coarse every day, less
sensitive!..."

"Yes," he said, nodding his head and staring into the fire which was now
burning down.

And everywhere, it seemed to him, that coarsening process was going on,
a persistent blunting of the feelings, an itching desire for more and
grimmer and bloodier details. One saw it operating in kindly women who
visited soldiers in hospital or took them for drives ... an
uncontrollable wish to hear the ghastlier things, a greedy anxiety for
"experiences." ... And the soldiers loathed these prying women in whom
lust had taken a new turn: the love lust had turned to blood lust, and
those who had formerly itched for men (and even those who had not)
itched now for horrors, more and more horrors.... "Tell me, now," they
would say, "did you kill any Germans? I suppose you saw some awful
things...."

One saw this coarsening process operating on men with incredible
swiftness. Their tastes be