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. We shall find ourselves living as we vaguely thought only foreigners and very poor people lived: “keeping themselves to themselves,” as the saying is. “We lost sight of them during the war,” we shall say of a hundred friendly acquaintances, and probably of a good many real friends, for the friendships which can go on without intercourse are few. It is a pity, like so much else, but it seems inevitable.
All this is by the way. What we wanted to emphasize was that the new outlets for energy which the present crisis has given us have not altogether made up for the loss of friendly intercourse. It was imperative to sacrifice the one to the other, but it has been a sacrifice. It has produced an excitement which nearly resembles happiness while it Mats, but which when it dies down will leave a terrible blank. Some effort at a renewal of normal social conditions —which for ordinary folk have nothing to do with horse. racing, sport, or display—moat soon take place. If not, we shall experience later on a depression incongruous with the conventional idea of victory.
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