And I repeat, at the risk of wearisome insistence, that our sheltered homeland shares the calm, awful fatalism of the battlefield; we have to share it because every rood of our country is, spiritually, as much a battlefield as the narrow, blood-sodden wastes of Flanders and France.
Willie Connor, fine brave gentleman, was dead.

My beloved Betty was a widow.

No Victoria Cross for Betty.

Even if there had been one, no children to be bred from birth on its glorious legend.

The German shell left Betty stripped and maimed.