It was the sixth day of Mr. Direck’s first visit to England, and he was at his acutest perception of differences. He found England in every way gratifying and satisfactory, and more of a contrast with...

It was the sixth day of Mr. Direck’s first visit to England, and he was at his acutest perception of differences. He found England in every way gratifying and satisfactory, and more of a contrast with...

It was the sixth day of Mr. Direck’s first visit to England, and he was at his acutest perception of differences. He found England in every way gratifying and satisfactory, and more of a contrast with...

And now here he was on the branch line of the little old Great Eastern Railway, on his way to Matching’s Easy in Essex, and he was suddenly in the heart of Washington Irving’s England. Washington Irvi...

Except in the doubtful instance of Miss Mamie Nelson, Mr. Direck’s habit was good fortune. Pleasant things came to him. Such was his position as the salaried secretary of this society of thoughtful Ma...

And now it seemed was the time for Mr. Direck to make his meditated speeches. But an unexpected complication was to defeat this intention. Mr. Direck perceived almost at once that Mr. Britling was pro...

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Britling without assurance, and after a little peaceful pause, “I can reverse out of this.” He seemed to feel some explanation was due to Mr. Direck. “You see, at first⁠—it’s perfe...

The two gentlemen smiled at each other to dispel any suspicion of discontent. “My driving leaves something to be desired,” said Mr. Britling with an air of frank impartiality. “But I have only just go...

This rally of Mr. Direck’s mind was suddenly interrupted. Mr. Britling stood up, and putting both hands to the sides of his mouth, shouted “Yi-ah! Aye-ya! Thea!” at unseen hearers. After shouting agai...

Mr. Direck, though he was a little incommoded by the suppression of his story about Robinson⁠—for when he had begun a thing he liked to finish it⁠—found Mr. Britling’s household at once thoroughly Bri...

The long narrow table under the big sycamores between the house and the adapted barn that Mr. Direck learnt was used for “dancing and all that sort of thing,” was covered with a blue linen diaper clot...

The bright interest of this consulship helped Mr. Direck more than anything to get the better of his Robinson-anecdote crave, and when presently he found his dialogue with Mr. Britling resumed, he tur...

It detracted a little from Mr. Direck’s appreciation of this flow of information that it was taking them away from the rest of the company. He wanted to see more of his newfound cousin, and what the b...

Mr. Direck’s eye had come to rest upon the barn, and its expression changed slowly from lazy appreciation to a brightening intelligence. Suddenly he resolved to say something. He resolved to say it so...

Mr. Direck found little reason to revise his dictum in the subsequent experiences of the afternoon. Indeed the afternoon and the next day were steadily consistent in confirming what a very good dictum...

Mr. Direck found little reason to revise his dictum in the subsequent experiences of the afternoon. Indeed the afternoon and the next day were steadily consistent in confirming what a very good dictum...

He left it at that for the time, but throughout the afternoon Mr. Direck had the gratification of seeing his thought floating round and round in the backwaters of Mr. Britling’s mental current. If it ...

The park had a trim wildness like nature in an old Italian picture; dappled fallow deer grouped close at hand and looked at the two men fearlessly; the path dropped through oak trees and some stunted ...

He was still only in the fragmentary stage of conversation when everything was thrown into commotion by the important arrival of Lady Frensham, and there was a general reshuffling of places. Lady Fren...

Mr. Britling was still flushed and ruffled as he and his guest returned towards the Dower House. He criticised England himself unmercifully, but he hated to think that in any respect she fell short of...

And indeed at the very moment when Mr. Britling was saying these words, in Sarajevo in Bosnia, where the hour was somewhat later, men whispered together, and one held nervously to a black parcel that ...

When Mr. Direck and Mr. Britling returned to the Dower House the guest was handed over to Mrs. Britling and Mr. Britling vanished, to reappear at supper time, for the Britlings had a supper in the eve...

Then Mr. Direck fell into the hands of Hugh, the eldest son, and anticipating the inevitable, said that he liked to walk in the rose garden. So they walked in the rose garden. “Do you read Utopias?” s...

Mr. Direck gave his very best attention to this business of draping himself, for he had not the slightest intention of appearing ridiculous in the eyes of Miss Corner. Teddy came with an armful of stu...

Mr. Direck found he had taken leave of the rest of the company, and drifted into a little parlour with Mr. Britling and certain glasses and siphons and a whisky decanter on a tray.⁠ ⁠… “It is a very c...

For a time Mr. Direck could not sleep. His mind had been too excited by this incessant day with all its novelties and all its provocations to comparison. The whole complicated spectacle grouped itself...

Breakfast was in the open air, and a sunny, easygoing feast. Then the small boys laid hands on Mr. Direck and showed him the pond and the boats, while Mr. Britling strolled about the lawn with Hugh, t...

Breakfast was in the open air, and a sunny, easygoing feast. Then the small boys laid hands on Mr. Direck and showed him the pond and the boats, while Mr. Britling strolled about the lawn with Hugh, t...

Now just at that moment there was a loud report.⁠ ⁠… But neither Mr. Britling nor Mr. Manning nor Mr. Direck was interrupted or incommoded in the slightest degree by that report. Because it was too fa...

Lunch was an open-air feast again. Three visitors had dropped in; they had motored down from London piled up on a motorcycle and a sidecar; a brother and two sisters they seemed to be, and they had ap...

Hockey as it was played at the Dower House at Matching’s Easy before the war, was a game combining danger, physical exercise and kindliness in a very high degree. Except for the infant in the perambul...

“We’ll play some more after tea,” said Cecily. “It will be cooler then.” “My word, I’m beginning to like it,” said Mr. Direck. “You’re going to play very well,” she said. And such is the magic of a ga...

The newspapers came next morning at nine, and were full of the Sarajevo Murders. Mr. Direck got the Daily Chronicle and found quite animated headlines for a British paper. “Who’s this Archduke,” he as...

“There is only one way to master such a thing as driving an automobile,” said Mr. Britling outside his front door, as he took his place in the driver’s seat, “and that is to resolve that from the firs...

In the course of the next twelve hours Mr. Direck was to make a discovery that was less common in the days before the war than it has been since. He discovered that even pain and injury may be vividly...

Very different from the painful contentment of the bruised and broken Mr. Direck was the state of mind of his unwounded host. He too was sleepless, but sleepless without exaltation. The day had been t...

Very different from the painful contentment of the bruised and broken Mr. Direck was the state of mind of his unwounded host. He too was sleepless, but sleepless without exaltation. The day had been t...

If he had not crushed a child other people had. Such things happened. Vicariously at any rate he had crushed many children.⁠ ⁠… Why are children ever crushed? And suddenly all the pain and destruction...

After this much of explanation it is possible to go on to the task which originally brought Mr. Direck to Matching’s Easy, the task that Massachusetts society had sent him upon, the task of organising...

The mysterious processes of nature that had produced Mr. Britling had implanted in him an obstinate persuasion that somewhere in the world, from some human being, it was still possible to find the utm...

Throughout the weekend Mr. Britling had kept this trouble well battened down. He had written to Mrs. Harrowdean a brief ambiguous note saying, “I am thinking over all that you have said,” and after th...

It was in the doubly refracting nature of Mr. Britling’s mind that while he was deploring his inefficiency in regard to his son, he was also deploring the ineffectiveness of all his generation of pare...

On these black nights, when the personal Mr. Britling would lie awake thinking how unsatisfactorily Mr. Britling was going on, and when the impersonal Mr. Britling would be thinking how unsatisfactori...

The next morning Mr. Britling came into Mr. Direck’s room. He was pink from his morning bath, he was wearing a cheerful green-and-blue silk dressing gown, he had shaved already, he showed no trace of ...

It was quite characteristic of the state of mind of England in the summer of 1914 that Mr. Britling should be mightily concerned about the conflict in Ireland, and almost deliberately negligent of the...

It was quite characteristic of the state of mind of England in the summer of 1914 that Mr. Britling should be mightily concerned about the conflict in Ireland, and almost deliberately negligent of the...

After lunch Mr. Britling had a brilliant idea for the ease and comfort of Mr. Direck. It seemed as though Mr. Direck would be unable to write any letters until his wrist had mended. Teddy tried him wi...

A day was to come when Mr. Britling was to go over the history of that sunny July with incredulous minuteness, trying to trace the real succession of events that led from the startling crime at Saraje...

Thus⁠—a vivid fact as yet only in a few hundred skulls or so⁠—the vast catastrophe of the Great War gathered behind the idle, dispersed and confused spectacle of an indifferent world, very much as the...

After Hugh had cleared things up and gone back to London Mr. Britling was inclined to think that such a thing as apprehension was a sin against the general fairness and integrity of life. Of all thing...

Though Mr. Britling’s anxiety about his son was dispelled, his mind remained curiously apprehensive throughout July. He had a feeling that things were not going well with the world, a feeling he tried...

Mr. Direck’s broken wrist healed sooner than he desired. From the first he had protested that it was the sort of thing that one can carry about in a sling, that he was quite capable of travelling abou...

Soon Mr. Direck could measure the time that was left to him at the Dower House no longer by days but by hours. His luggage was mostly packed, his tickets to Rotterdam, Cologne, Munich, Dresden, Vienna...

After the departure of Mr. Direck things international began to move forward with great rapidity. It was exactly as if his American deliberation had hitherto kept things waiting. Before his postcard f...

For days the broader side of Mr. Britling’s mind, as distinguished from its egotistical edge, had been reflecting more and more vividly and coherently the spectacle of civilisation casting aside the t...

Monday was a public holiday, the First Monday in August, and the day consecrated by long-established custom to the Matching’s Easy Flower Show in Claverings Park. The day was to live in Mr. Britling’s...

The Claverings gardens, and particularly the great rockery, the lily pond, and the herbaceous borders, were unusually populous with unaccustomed visitors and shy young couples. Mr. Britling had to go ...

Mr. Britling had been a little surprised by the speech he had made. He hadn’t realised before he began to talk how angry and scornful he was at this final coming into action of the Teutonic militarism...

Mr. Britling started for his moonlight ride about half-past nine that night. He announced that he could neither rest nor work, the war had thrown him into a fever; the driving of the automobile was ju...

In this fashion it was that the great war began in Europe and came to one man in Matching’s Easy, as it came to countless intelligent men in countless pleasant homes that had scarcely heeded its comin...

On that eventful night of the first shots and the first deaths Mr. Britling did not sleep until daylight had come. He sat writing at this pamphlet of his, which was to hail the last explosion and the ...

On that eventful night of the first shots and the first deaths Mr. Britling did not sleep until daylight had come. He sat writing at this pamphlet of his, which was to hail the last explosion and the ...

On that eventful night of the first shots and the first deaths Mr. Britling did not sleep until daylight had come. He sat writing at this pamphlet of his, which was to hail the last explosion and the ...

“I won’t come in,” cried Mrs. Faber, “but I thought I’d tell you. I’ve been getting food.” “Food?” “Provisions. There’s going to be a run on provisions. Look at my flitch of bacon!” “But⁠—” “Faber say...

England was not yet at war, but all the stars were marching to that end. It was as if an event so vast must needs take its time to happen. No doubt was left upon Mr. Britling’s mind, though a whole-pa...

“There’s bound to be a tremendous change in values.” On that text Mr. Britling’s mind enlarged very rapidly. It produced a wonderful crop of possibilities before he got back to his study. He sat down ...

The conflict of interests at Mr. Britling’s desk became unendurable. He felt he must settle the personal question first. He wandered out upon the lawn and smoked cigarettes. His first conception of a ...

When Mr. Britling, after a strenuous morning among high ideals, descended for lunch, he found Mr. Lawrence Carmine had come over to join him at that meal. Mr. Carmine was standing in the hall with his...

Mr. Britling was in a phase of imaginative release. Such a release was one of the first effects of the war upon many educated minds. Things that had seemed solid forever were visibly in flux; things t...

That day of vast anticipations drew out into the afternoon. It was a day⁠—obsessed. It was the precursor of a relentless series of doomed and fettered days. There was a sense of enormous occurrences g...

The imminence of war produced a peculiar exaltation in Aunt Wilshire. She developed a point of view that was entirely her own. It was Mr. Britling’s habit, a habit he had set himself to acquire after ...

One remarkable aspect of the English attitude towards the war was the disposition to treat it as a monstrous joke. It is a disposition traceable in a vast proportion of the British literature of the t...

That night brought the British declaration of war against Germany. To nearly every Englishman that came as a matter of course, and it is one of the most wonderful facts in history that the Germans wer...

This story is essentially the history of the opening and of the realisation of the Great War as it happened to one small group of people in Essex, and more particularly as it happened to one human bra...

After the jolt of the food panic and a brief, financial scare, the vast inertia of everyday life in England asserted itself. When the public went to the banks for the new paper money, the banks tender...

For a time it was believed in Matching’s Easy that the German armies had been defeated and very largely destroyed at Liège. It was a mistake not confined to Matching’s Easy. The first raiding attack w...

Cissie did not come up to the Dower House that afternoon, and so Mr. Direck, after some vague and transparent excuses, made his way to the cottage. Here his report become even more impressive. Teddy s...

Mr. Britling found Mr. Direck’s talk very indigestible. He was parting very reluctantly from his dream of a disastrous collapse of German imperialism, of a tremendous, decisive demonstration of the in...

And then it was that Mr. Britling accepted the truth. “One talks,” he said, “and then weeks and months later one learns the meaning of the things one has been saying. I was saying a month ago that thi...

“It interrupts everything,” said Hugh suddenly. “These Prussians are the biggest nuisance the world has ever seen.” He considered. “It’s like everyone having to run out because the house catches fire....

There were now two chief things in the mind of Mr. Britling. One was a large and valiant thing, a thing of heroic and processional quality, the idea of taking up one’s share in the great conflict, of ...

There were now two chief things in the mind of Mr. Britling. One was a large and valiant thing, a thing of heroic and processional quality, the idea of taking up one’s share in the great conflict, of ...

By night there was a new strangeness about London. The authorities were trying to suppress the more brilliant illumination of the chief thoroughfares, on account of the possibility of an air raid. Sho...

On Wednesday morning Mr. Britling returned to the Dower House, and he was still a civilian unassigned. In the hall he found a tall figure in khaki standing and reading The Times that usually lay upon ...

It was only when they sat together in the barn court out of the way of Mrs. Britling and the children that Captain Carmine was able to explain his listless bearing and jaded appearance. He was sufferi...

The smear was still bright red in Mr. Britling’s thoughts when Teddy came to him. “I must go,” said Teddy, “I can’t stop here any longer.” “Go where?” “Into khaki. I’ve been thinking of it ever since ...

“Hugh’s going to be in khaki too,” the elder junior told Teddy. “He’s too young to go out in Kitchener’s army, but he’s joined the Territorials. He went off on Thursday.⁠ ⁠… I wish Gilbert and me was ...

The battle of the Marne passed into the battle of the Aisne, and then the long lines of the struggle streamed northwestward until the British were back in Belgium failing to clutch Menin and then defe...

While Mr. Britling was trying to find his duty in the routine of a special constable, Mrs. Britling set to work with great energy to attend various classes and qualify herself for Red Cross work. And ...

But the conflict of manners and customs that followed the invasion of the English villages by French and Belgian refugees did not always present the immigrants as Catholics and the hosts as “Neo-Europ...

October passed into November, and day by day Mr. Britling was forced to apprehend new aspects of the war, to think and rethink the war, to have his first conclusions checked and tested, twisted askew,...

The Christmas of 1914 found England, whose landscape had hitherto been almost as peaceful and soldierless as Massachusetts, already far gone along the path of transformation into a country full of sol...

And while the countryside of England changed steadily from its lax pacific amenity to the likeness of a rather slovenly armed camp, while long-fixed boundaries shifted and dissolved and a great irrepa...

And while the countryside of England changed steadily from its lax pacific amenity to the likeness of a rather slovenly armed camp, while long-fixed boundaries shifted and dissolved and a great irrepa...

Certain things had to be forced upon Mr. Britling because they jarred so greatly with his habits of mind that he would never have accepted them if he could have avoided doing so. Notably he would not ...

“You see,” said Mr. Britling, trying to get it into focus, “I have known quite decent Germans. There must be some sort of misunderstanding.⁠ ⁠… I wonder what makes them hate us. There seems to me no r...

Mr. Britling was only one of a multitude who wanted to feel the bumps of Germany at that time. The effort to understand a people who had suddenly become incredible was indeed one of the most remarkabl...

Mr. Britling would sit in his armchair and stare at his fire, and recall conflicting memories of Germany⁠—of a pleasant land, of friendly people. He had spent many a jolly holiday there. So recently a...

It will be an incredible thing to the happier reader of a coming age⁠—if ever this poor record of experience reaches a reader in the days to come⁠—to learn how much of the mental life of Mr. Britling ...

Tormenting the thought of Mr. Britling almost more acutely than this growing tale of stupidly inflicted suffering and waste and sheer destruction was the collapse of the British mind from its first fi...

“Life had a wrangling birth. On the head of every one of us rests the ancestral curse of fifty million murders.” So Mr. Britling’s thoughts shaped themselves in words as he prowled one night in March,...

Abruptly and shockingly, this malignity of warfare, which had been so far only a festering cluster of reports and stories and rumours and suspicions, stretched out its arm into Essex and struck a barb...

The next day Aunt Wilshire was unconscious of her visitor. They had altered her position so that she lay now horizontally, staring inflexibly at the ceiling and muttering queer old disconnected things...

Mr. Britling, after he had looked at his dead cousin for the last time, wandered for an hour or so about the silent little watering-place before he returned to his hotel. There was no one to talk to a...

All the while that Mr. Britling had been indulging in these imaginative slaughterings and spending the tears and hate that had gathered in his heart, his reason had been sitting apart and above the st...

Hugh’s letters were becoming a very important influence upon Mr. Britling’s thought. Hugh had always been something of a letter-writer, and now what was perhaps an inherited desire to set things down ...

Hugh’s letters were becoming a very important influence upon Mr. Britling’s thought. Hugh had always been something of a letter-writer, and now what was perhaps an inherited desire to set things down ...

But presently Hugh began to be bored. “Route marching again,” he wrote. “For no earthly reason than that they can do nothing else with us. We are getting no decent musketry training because there are ...

Then came a letter which plunged abruptly into criticism. “My dear Parent, this is a swearing letter. I must let go to somebody. And somehow none of the other chaps are convenient. I don’t know if I o...

A subsequent letter threw fresh light on the career of the young man with the “oto.” Before the rifle and the “oto,” and in spite of his fights with some person or persons unknown, Ortheris found trou...

Mr. Britling, with an understanding much quickened by Hugh’s letters, went about Essex in his automobile, and on one or two journeys into Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, and marked the steady conversio...

In that computation he reckoned without Hugh. Within a month Hugh was also saying “Goodbye.” “But how’s this?” protested Mr. Britling, who had already guessed the answer. “You’re not nineteen.” “I’m n...

Hugh was to stop the night. He spent what seemed to him and everyone a long, shy, inexpressive evening. Only the small boys were really natural and animated. They were much impressed and excited by hi...

When Mr. Britling was alone in his own room all the thoughts and feelings that had been held up downstairs began to run more and more rapidly and abundantly through his mind. He had a feeling⁠—every n...

In the morning Mr. Britling’s face was white from his overnight brain storm, and Hugh’s was fresh from wholesome sleep. They walked about the lawn, and Mr. Britling talked hopefully of the general out...

For some days Mr. Britling could think of nothing but Hugh, and always with a dull pain at his heart. He felt as he had felt long ago while he had waited downstairs and Hugh upstairs had been under th...

Not all Hugh’s letters were concerned with these grim technicalities. It was not always that news and gossip came along; it was rare that a young man with a commission would condescend to talk shop to...

Teddy’s misadventure happened while figs were still ripening on Mr. Britling’s big tree. It was Cissie brought the news to Mr. Britling. She came up to the Dower House with a white, scared face. “I’ve...

Mr. Britling returned to the Dower House perplexed and profoundly disturbed. He had a distressful sense that things were far more serious with Teddy than he had tried to persuade Letty they were; that...

Mr. Britling read this through, and then his thoughts went back to Teddy’s disappearance and then returned to Hugh. The youngster was right in the front now, and one had to steel oneself to the possib...

These letters weighed heavily upon Mr. Britling’s mind. He perceived that this precociously wise, subtle youngster of his was now close up to the line of injury and death, going to and fro from it, in...

Mr. Britling sat one September afternoon with Captain Lawrence Carmine in the sunshine of the barn court, and smoked with him and sometimes talked and sometimes sat still. “When it began I did not bel...

In these days also Mr. Direck was very unhappy. For Cissie, at any rate, had not lost touch with the essential issues of the war. She was as clear as ever that German militarism and the German attack ...

It was not until Teddy had been missing for three weeks that Hugh wrote about him. The two Essex battalions on the Flanders front were apparently wide apart, and it was only from home that Hugh learnt...

It was just a day or so over three weeks after this last letter from Hugh that Mr. Direck reappeared at Matching’s Easy. He had had a trip to Holland⁠—a trip that was as much a flight from Cissie’s re...

Mr. Direck took his leave of Mrs. Britling, and went very slowly towards the little cottage. But he did not go to the cottage. He felt he would only find another soul in torment there. “What’s the goo...

And then as if it were something that everyone in the Dower House had been waiting for, came the message that Hugh had been killed. The telegram was brought up by a girl in a pinafore instead of the b...

He had been thinking of this possibility for the last few weeks almost continuously, and yet now that it had come to him he felt that he had never thought about it before, that he must go off alone by...

Mrs. Britling did not learn of the blow that had struck them until after dinner that night. She was so accustomed to ignore his incomprehensible moods that she did not perceive that there was anything...

That night Mrs. Britling made the supreme effort of her life to burst the prison of self-consciousness and inhibition in which she was confined. Never before in all her life had she so desired to be s...

He closed the door softly behind her. The door had hardly shut upon her before he forgot her. Instantly he was alone again, utterly alone. He was alone in an empty world.⁠ ⁠… Loneliness struck him lik...

He went into the far corner of the hockey paddock, and there he moved about for a while and then stood for a long time holding the fence with both hands and staring blankly into the darkness. At last ...

All over England now, where the livery of mourning had been a rare thing to see, women and children went about in the October sunshine in new black clothes. Everywhere one met these fresh griefs, moth...

All over England now, where the livery of mourning had been a rare thing to see, women and children went about in the October sunshine in new black clothes. Everywhere one met these fresh griefs, moth...

All over England now, where the livery of mourning had been a rare thing to see, women and children went about in the October sunshine in new black clothes. Everywhere one met these fresh griefs, moth...

Cissie lay awake that night thinking about her sister as if she had never thought about her before. She began to weigh the concentrated impressions of a thousand memories. She and her sister were near...

Cissie could think more clearly of Letty’s mind than of her own. She herself was in a tangle. She had grown to be very fond of Mr. Direck, and to have a profound trust and confidence in him, and her f...

And Cissie, with eyes full of distress for her sister, had still to grasp the fact that Direck was wearing a Canadian uniform.⁠ ⁠… He stood behind her, ashamed that in such a moment this fact and its ...

Cissie’s estimate of her sister’s psychology had been just. The reverie of revenge had not yet taken a grip upon Letty’s mind sufficiently strong to meet the challenge of this conclusive evidence of T...

There comes an end to weeping at last, and Letty lay still, in the red light of the sinking sun. She lay so still that presently a little foraging robin came dirting down to the grass not ten yards aw...

Presently she became aware of footsteps rustling through the grass towards her. She looked over her shoulder and discovered Mr. Britling approaching by the field path. He looked white and tired and li...

“Somehow I can’t talk about this to Edith. It is ridiculous, I know. But in some way I can’t.⁠ ⁠… It isn’t fair to her. If I could, I would.⁠ ⁠… Quite soon after we were married I ceased to talk to he...

It was Mr. Britling who broke silence. And when he drew his hands down from his face and spoke, he said one of the most amazing and unexpected things she had ever heard in her life. “The only possible...

Letty regarded him, frowning, and with her chin between her fists.⁠ ⁠… “But do you really believe,” said Letty, “that things can be better than they are?” “But⁠—Yes!” said Mr. Britling. “I don’t,” sai...

Letty walked back slowly through the fields of stubble to her cottage. She had been talking to Mr. Britling for an hour, and her mind was full of the thought of this changed and simplified man, who ta...

Letty was in the cottage struggling to hear and understand things too complicated for her emotion-crowded mind. There was something that Mr. Direck was trying to explain about a delayed telegram that ...

Letty stood by the window as close as she could to Teddy in a world that seemed wholly made up of unexpected things. She could not heed the others, it was only when Teddy spoke to the others, or when ...

“Good God! how old the Master looks!” cried Teddy suddenly. He was standing at the window, and as Mr. Direck came forward inquiringly he pointed to the figure of Mr. Britling passing along the road to...

It was some weeks later. It was now the middle of November, and Mr. Britling, very warmly wrapped in his thick dressing-gown and his thick llama wool pyjamas, was sitting at his night desk, and workin...

It was some weeks later. It was now the middle of November, and Mr. Britling, very warmly wrapped in his thick dressing-gown and his thick llama wool pyjamas, was sitting at his night desk, and workin...

But this night even this circle of lamplight would not hold his mind. Doubt had crept into this last fastness. He pulled the papers towards him, and turned over the portion he had planned. His purpose...

On the top of Mr. Britling’s desk, beside the clock, lay a letter, written in clumsy English and with its envelope resealed by a label which testified that it had been “opened by censor.” The friendly...

He pushed aside the manuscript of “The Better Government of the World,” and began to write rather slowly, shaping his letters roundly and distinctly: Dear Sir, I am writing this letter to you to tell ...

Three hours later Mr. Britling was working by daylight, though his study lamp was still burning, and his letter to old Heinrich was still no better than a collection of material for a letter. But the ...

From this point onward Mr. Britling’s notes became more fragmentary. They had a consecutiveness, but they were discontinuous. His thought had leapt across gaps that his pen had had no time to fill. An...

I do not think you Germans realise how steadily you were conquering the world before this war began. Had you given half the energy and intelligence you have spent upon this war to the peaceful conques...

Your boy, as no doubt you know, dreamt constantly of such a world peace as this that I foreshadow; he was more generous than his country. He could envisage war and hostility only as misunderstanding. ...

“Dissertations,” said Mr. Britling. Never had it been so plain to Mr. Britling that he was a weak, silly, ill-informed and hasty-minded writer, and never had he felt so invincible a conviction that th...

He turned over the rest of the night’s writing presently, and read it now as though it was the work of another man. These later notes were fragmentary, and written in a sprawling hand. “Let us make ou...

He sighed. He looked at the scattered papers, and thought of the letter they were to have made. His fatigue spoke first. “Perhaps after all I’d better just send the fiddle.⁠ ⁠…” He rested his cheeks b...

He rubbed his open hands over his eyes and forehead. The night of effort had tired his brain, and he was no longer thinking actively. He had a little interval of blankness, sitting at his desk with hi...