“‘Nobody knows how bored we are,
Bored we are,
Bored we are,
Nobody knows how bored we are,
And nobody seems to care.’
Meanwhile you sit at home and feel vicariously ennobled.”
He laid his hand on a daily newspaper beside him.
“Oh, you’re not the only one. I will make you ashamed of yourself, Wilkins. Here’s the superlative to your positive. Here’s the sort of man I should like to hold for five minutes head downwards in the bilge of a trench, writing on the Heroic Spirit in the Morning Post. He’s one of your gentlemen who sit in a room full of books and promise themselves much moral benefit from the bloodshed in France. Coleridge, he says, Coleridge—the heroic, self-controlled Spartan Coleridge was of his opinion and very hard on Pacificism—Coleridge complained of peace-time in such words as these: ‘All individual dignity and power, engulfed in courts, committees, institutions…. One benefit-club for mutual flattery.’… And then, I suppose, the old loafer went off to sponge on somebody…. And here’s the stuff the heroic, spirited Osborn, the Morning Post gentleman—unhappily not a German, and unhappily too old for trench work—quotes with delight now—now!—after Belgium!—
“‘My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield!
With these I till, with these I sow,