‘Hundreds of them will be killed,’ I thought, ‘perhaps thousands, and yet I don’t really mind; it doesn’t really affect me, just because I don’t know them, and they live in countries that I don’t know’; and it seemed to me dreadful that one’s sympathy should be so limited.
And then another time, I did realize it for a bit; that was after the German mobilization, when the French reservists were called up; we had read the paper when it came that day, in the evening after dinner, and somehow by that time, it had begun to seem terrible; we had begun, I think, though very dimly, to feel the trouble closing in all round.
We lay a long time awake that night, Walter and I, not speaking to each other. The night was hot and oppressive, the darkness seemed to press upon us like a weight.
I thought of the French and German homes where people were lying in bed, awake too, and thinking about the next day, when the men must go out to the army; and it became suddenly real to me; perhaps because I had been in France and Germany, and knew some French and German people, and understood that they were just people like us.
And that made the others seem more real too, and I felt the immensity of what was happening; I realized, dimly, the masses of people in Austria and in Russia too.
And then a sense of unreality came over me. I felt myself a long way off; looking on, as though I were disembodied; I seemed to hear a great throbbing, very far away, a strange pulsating sound, as though it were the heart of all the world; I suppose it was really my own heart. I thought of birds in a storm, of clouds gathering, of the lines in ‘In Memoriam’ about the rooks, of the Dynasts and the Pities and Powers; and an acute, quite impersonal sense of loss and desolation came over me.
Walter said suddenly:
‘This may be the end of Europe, of European civilization.’
I said:
‘I was thinking about the people saying Good-bye; sleeping together like us, only for the last time, people just like us, and I thought, “Supposing it was you and me?” ’