‘I was thinking before you came in of the Germans who will be killed; of the German scholars. They are doing work which no one else has ever done. If German scholarship is stamped out, scholarship throughout Europe will die. My work is useless, if the Germans are killed.’
I said:
‘But the Germans are conscripts⸺’
It answered my own thought, not his, and I knew that, as soon as I had said it.
‘We may all be conscripts too, before we are done,’ he answered. ‘It will not matter much by then.’
I asked:
‘Do you think Guy and Hugo were quite right to go?’
And he nodded.
The next day I heard from Mollie that George had got a Commission in the Lancashire Fusiliers, and about a week later Freddy Furze joined a Welsh Regiment.