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To most of our elders--and they were considerably our elders--this was a passing phase, a temporary lack of faith in humanity, a time of exhaustion after great trial; but to those of us who were green and rather frightened, as all people are at that age, there was nothing but broken planks wherever we trod. Nobody knew anything at all for certain. The most elementary morals were in considerable doubt. Every formula for behaviour whose use was not instantly apparent had been thrown overboard. Our parents, school teachers and clergy, sickened by a catastrophe which everybody said was the direct outcome of a world in which most of them had lived happily and innocently, turned from any thought of instructing us with weary self-disgust. Having lost their younger brothers and their elder sons, apparently through some unspecified fault of their own or their fathers', they had nothing they dared tell us. We were given doorkeys and the freedom of a shambles. The pseudo-scientists and the demolition merchants became the prophets of our more sophisticated contemporaries and their doctrines filtered through to us, showing us at least how we could get to work for the time being, if it was only shovelling away more of the debris.