I'm glad I didn't. Especially after
what I've seen."
He had lost interest in politics.
"There's something bigger coming," he said. "Here everything seems to be
going on much the same, but over there you feel it. Something growing
silently out of all this blood and mud. I find myself wondering what the
men are staring at, but when I look there's nothing as far as my field-
glasses will reach but waste and desolation. And it isn't only on the
faces of our own men. It's in the eyes of the prisoners too. As if they
saw something. A funny ending to the war, if the people began to think."
Mrs. Phillips was running a Convalescent Home in Folkestone, he told her;
and had even made a speech. Hilda was doing relief work among the ruined
villages of France.
"It's a new world we shall be called upon to build," he said. "We must
pay more heed to the foundation this time."
She seldom discussed the war with her father. At the beginning, he had
dreamed with Greyson of a short and glorious campaign that should weld
all classes together, and after which we should forgive our enemies and
shape with them a better world.
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