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In 1914 there was the war. He was wounded in 1916, and again in the spring of 1918—tiresome wounds involving pain of the wearying, irritating kind that seems to teach you nothing but exasperation. He used to think about himself during his long hours in hospital, and it surprised him to perceive that if it had not been for his love for England he would have been, long ago, a conscientious objector. He loathed war, but he loathed the thought of a foreign-ridden England still more deeply. There was, he supposed, an intellectual flaw in this somewhere. Had he been of the intellectual calibre of, say, Bertrand Russell, he would have perceived that this love of country was exactly the thing that held back the world's progress—this selfish clinging to one small fragment of earth. But he could not help it. When he thought of Boyton Church or Figheldean Village, or the stretch of the Plain, or the old stones of St. Anne's Gate in Salisbury, or the grey stretches of Longleat, or the lawns of his own adored Wintersmoon, he simply knew that he would fight to the last trouser-button to prevent this domination by German, Frenchman, or Spaniard.