From ‘Friendship and the War’, The Spectator, 10 April 1915:
WE are all losing our friends. This is true in a tragic sense, because our friends are dying in battle. But there is a lighter sense in which it is true also, and which is also connected with the war. There is so much work to be done that there seems to be no time for keeping up with old friends, let alone for making new ones. Besides being busy, everybody is obsessed by new emotions, and cannot pay attention; and besides that, the mental strain of eight months’ war is beginning to tell, and we are all rather on edge. Anyhow, there is everywhere a cessation of ordinary social life. We do not meet our neighbours unless we come across them in the way of business. When it is all over we shall find it difficult in the great calm once more to take up social threads, and life to most of us will seem to be very much impoverished.
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