A FOREWORD
“... thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.”
Rupert Brooke.
A little chronicle of a great time may have an interest of its own quite incommensurate from its intrinsic worth. These pages do not pretend to any merit beyond faithfulness; but they are the true record of the everyday life of an average family during the first year of the war of wars; what we have felt, what we have seen; the great anxieties; the trivial incidents and emotions which have been shared by thousands of our fellow-countrymen. This home has been so far exceptional that it has had few hostages to give to fortune, and that it has mercifully been spared the supreme sacrifice demanded with such tragic universality, and given with such a glorious resignation: but, infinitesimal pulse, it has beaten with the great arteries, the whole mighty heart of the British Empire.
Annals enough there are, and will be, of the soul-stirring events of 1914: the proud rise of the nation, its struggles, its failures, its appalling blunders, and the super-heroism that has saved the consequences. If Armageddon be not the end of the world; if there be generations coming after to carry the sheaves of that seed sown with blood and tears to-day, there will be no dearth of evidence to enable our children’s children to feed upon the story of England’s glory. They will be able to read and learn and look back, out of the peace won for them, to examples almost beyond the conception of idealism. Should, by some freak of chance, this humble book survive, it may not then be without an interest of its own.
This was how the quiet stay-at-home family felt and thought in the days of the titanic conflict; these were the little things that happened in a little country house. No great moral lesson certainly, no revelation of out-of-the-way philosophy; just the way we hoped and feared; the way we still laughed and talked, gardened and worked, the way we were led on from day to day and made to find, after all, what seemed unbearable, bearable, brought to see light where there was apparently no issue.