Beneath the mask of cheeriness England agonised. Fathers grew old and white and withered because of their sons’ sacrifice, but kept a stiff upper lip when the telegraph boy was the messenger of death. The mothers of boys out there suffered martyrdom in wakeful nights, in dreadful dreams, though they kept smiling when the boys came home between the battles and—worst of all—went back again. They hid their tears, steeled their hearts to courage. Even the pretty ladies—the most frivolous, the most light-hearted—gave their love so easily because it was all they had to give, and they would grudge nothing to the boys. Apart from a vicious little set, the women were beyond words wonderful in service and self-sacrifice. In spite of all the weakness of human nature and the low passions stirred up by the war, the British people as a whole during these years of great ordeal were sublime in resignation and spiritual courage. In millions of little houses in mean streets, and in all the houses of the rich, to which a double knock came with news of a dead or wounded boy, the awful meaning of the war burnt its way into the soul of the people. But they would not yield to weakness and had a stubborn obstinacy of faith in final victory—somehow, in a way they could not see. Anyhow, they wouldn’t “let down” their men or show the white feather. They did not know that many of the men were sullen because of this unreasonable optimism, this “bloody cheerfulness.” They did not know that in the trenches, under an awful gunfire, many men looked back to England as to another world, which they no longer knew, from which they were cut off by spiritual distances no longer to be bridged, and for whose safety, frivolity, profiteers and prostitutes they were asked to die, to be shell-shocked, gassed or mutilated, under incompetent generalship and for inadequate reasons.