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Of all of us there just then only Norry had been adult during the last war. He had been a vet's smith in the army, and his martial reminiscences mainly concern food and mules. But we others were all in the early or mid-thirties, and our generation remembers the time when war was life, when there seemed to have been no beginning and to be no end to an intolerable condition of strain in which our elders struggled irritably and which we appeared to be on the point of inheriting.

Out in the yard that evening my own immediate reaction to the sudden thought of war was much the same, I suppose, as most of the others'. I was ten years old in 1914, and very vivid impressions received at that age never alter but come on one unexpectedly afterwards, bright and bald as they were at the time: War simply meant death to me; a soldier galloping up on a fat grey horse to kiss my tearful nurse goodbye over the wall under the chestnut trees, and then death.

It was not ordinary dying, either, nor even death in its more horrible forms, but death final, empty and away somewhere. I had a sudden recollection of women and old people all in black, as country people were in those days on a Sunday, standing about in the village street reading enormous casualty lists in a very small type which seemed to fill whole pages of the paper; a boy on a bike with not one telegram spelling tragedy but sometimes two or even three at a time; and long sad services in the small church which had been a barn and still smelt of hay.