ng against tyranny for freedom?

There came drifting to Mr. Britling's ears a confusion of voices, voices
that told of reaction, of the schemes of employers to best the trade
unions, of greedy shippers and greedy house landlords reaping their
harvest, of waste and treason in the very households of the Ministry, of
religious cant and intolerance at large, of self-advertisement written
in letters of blood, of forestalling and jobbery, of irrational and
exasperating oppressions in India and Egypt.... It came with a shock to
him, too, that Hugh should see so little else than madness in the war,
and have so pitiless a realisation of its essential futility. The boy
forced his father to see--what indeed all along he had been seeing more
and more clearly. The war, even by the standards of adventure and
conquest, had long since become a monstrous absurdity. Some way there
must be out of this bloody entanglement that was yielding victory to
neither side, that was yielding nothing but waste and death beyond all
precedent. The vast majority of people everywhere must be desiring
peace, willing to buy peace at any reasonable price, and in all the
world it seemed there was insufficient capacity to end the daily
butchery and achieve the peace that was so universally desired, the
peace that would be anything better than a breathing space for further
warfare.... Every day came the papers with the balanced story of
battles, losses, destructions, ships sunk, towns smashed. And never a
decision, never a sign of decision.

One Saturday afternoon Mr. Britling found himself with Mrs. Britling at
Claverings. Lady Homartyn was in mourning for her two nephews, the
Glassington boys, who had both been killed, one in Flanders, the other
in Gallipoli. Raeburn was there too, despondent and tired-looking.
There were three young men in khaki, one with the red of a staff
officer; there were two or three women whom Mr. Britling had not met
before, and Miss Sharsper the novelist, fresh from nursing experience
among the convalescents in the south of France. But he was disgusted to
find that the gathering was dominated by his old antagonist, Lady
Frensham, unsubdued, unaltered, rampant over them all, arrogant,
impudent, insulting. She was in mourning, she had the most splendid
black furs Mr. Britling had ever seen; her large triumphant profile came
out of them like the head of a vulture out of its ruff; her elder
brother was a wounded prisoner in Germany, h