Читать книгу The Oaken Heart онлайн

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Unfortunately that incident was only a flicker of an eyelid, only a turning over in our sleep. I seem to think there was some sort of fuss about that talk. Anyhow, there certainly was a general piping down on the subject of war altogether after that.

Meanwhile we in Auburn had our school to think about. I do not want to convey that the entire village became absorbed in the school to the exclusion of everything else. It did not. But the thing I can only call its public mind did become rather preoccupied with the subject for the best part of two years before the war.

In a very small village the public mind is apparent. What the village thinks is clear, definite, and usually highly important. In the ordinary way most of us do not think a great deal about national affairs, except as they concern us directly, but I have noticed over and over again that when a national question does at last begin to worry us to the point of provoking open speech about it, then Parliament settles the matter in double-quick time and in our way, as if it realised its job depended on it. This puzzled me for a long time, until it occurred to me that the explanation was obvious and was simply that we were not the unique group of individuals that we see ourselves but merely an echo, a reflection, of thousands of other little rural communities, all thinking and feeling the same thing, sometimes the wrong thing, with an instinctive unity which must be pretty impressive when seen from the middle.