must make a Merit of Dying

Heartbreak House was far too lazy and shallow to extricate itself from
this palace of evil enchantment. It rhapsodized about love; but it
believed in cruelty. It was afraid of the cruel people; and it saw that
cruelty was at least effective. Cruelty did things that made money,
whereas Love did nothing but prove the soundness of Larochefoucauld's
saying that very few people would fall in love if they had never read
about it. Heartbreak House, in short, did not know how to live, at which
point all that was left to it was the boast that at least it knew how
to die: a melancholy accomplishment which the outbreak of war presently
gave it practically unlimited opportunities of displaying. Thus were the
firstborn of Heartbreak House smitten; and the young, the innocent, the
hopeful, expiated the folly and worthlessness of their elders.

War Delirium

Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the
field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand
the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through this
experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when the lunatics,
exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions of a dawning
millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame in comparison. I do
not know whether anyone really kept his head completely except those
who had to keep it because they had to conduct the war at first hand.
I should not have kept my own (as far as I did keep it) if I had not at
once understood that as a scribe and speaker I too was under the most
serious public obligation to keep my grip on realities; but this did
not save me from a considerable degree of hyperaesthesia. There were of
course some happy people to whom the war meant nothing: all political
and general matters lying outside their little circle of interest. But
the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad, the main symptom being a
conviction that the whole order of nature had been reversed. All
foods, he felt, must now be adulterated. All schools must be closed.
No advertisements must be sent to the newspapers, of which new editions
must appear and be bought up every ten minutes. Travelling must be
stopped, or, that being impossible, greatly hindered. All pretences
about fine art and culture and the like must be flung off as an
intolerable affectation; and the picture galleries and museums and
schools at once occupied by war workers. The British Museum itse