They were unfair, those fellows who sat in wet trenches cursing the levity of England, writing sonnets, some of them about the murderous old men and the laughing ladies. It was true that some old men were making money—piles of it—out of all this business of war. It was true that some of the pretty ladies seemed callous of the death of the boys they “vamped.” It was true that large numbers of men in factories and workshops were making fantastic wages in safe jobs while poor old Tommy was dodging death in the mud for fourteen pence a day. It was true that war and casualties had become so familiar to the mind that many folk at home were beginning to accept it all as a normal thing. It was true that cheerfulness, gaiety, high spirits, were adopted as the only code of life, and that melancholy, fear, pessimism, prophets of woe, were barred as people of bad form. It was true that the imagination of the average man and woman at home was incapable of visualising a front line trench or a battlefield under a German barrage fire. It was true that the newspapers were full of false optimism and false victories. It was true that in a war against militarism England had been militarised, and that officers on seven days’ leave from Hell-on-Earth were insulted by little squirts called A.P.M.’s because they didn’t carry gloves or because their collars were too light in colour, with a thousand other tyrannies. It was true that the hatred of women against “the Huns” was not shared by men who had come to have a fellow-feeling in their hearts for German peasants caught in the trap of war against their will, with no less courage than the men who killed them or whom they killed. It was true that parsons professing Christianity were more bloodthirsty than soldiers who cried out to God in hours of agony and blasphemed in hours of rage. It was true that in England in war time there was a noisy cheerfulness that seemed like callousness to those condemned to death. But it was _not_ true that England was indifferent to the sufferings of the men, or that all that optimism was due to carelessness, or that all the laughing ladies were having the time of their lives because of war’s delightful thrill and the chance of three husbands, or more lovers, in rapid sequence as battle followed battle and wiped out young life. THE AGONY OF ENGLAND