If you count dead and wounds this is the most dreadful war in history; for you as for me, it has been almost the extremity of personal tragedy....  Black sorrow....  But is it the most dreadful war?

I do not think it is.  I can write to you and tell you that I do indeed believe that our two sons have died not altogether in vain.  Our pain and anguish may not be wasted—­may be necessary.  Indeed they may be necessary.  Here am I bereaved and wretched—­and I hope.  Never was the fabric of war so black; that I admit.  But never was the black fabric of war so threadbare.  At a thousand points the light is shining through.

Mr. Britling’s pen stopped.

There was perfect stillness in the study bedroom.

“The tinpot style,” said Mr. Britling at last in a voice of extreme bitterness.

He fell into an extraordinary quarrel with his style.  He forgot about those Pomeranian parents altogether in his exasperation at his own inexpressiveness, at his incomplete control of these rebel words and phrases that came trailing each its own associations and suggestions to hamper his purpose with it.  He read over the offending sentence.

“The point is that it is true,” he whispered.  “It is exactly what I want to say."...

Exactly?...

His mind stuck on that “exactly."...  When one has much to say style is troublesome.  It is as if one fussed with one’s uniform before a battle....  But that is just what one ought to do before a battle....  One ought to have everything in order....

He took a fresh sheet and made three trial beginnings.

    "War is like a black fabric."...

    "War is a curtain of black fabric across the pathway."

"War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind.  Yet always it has let through some gleams of light, and now—­I am not dreaming—­it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through.  We owe it to all these dear youths—­“

His pen stopped again.

“I must work on a rough draft,” said Mr. Britling.

Section 5

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 material was falling roughly into shape, and Mr. Britling’s intentions were finding themselves.  It was clear to him now that he was no longer writing as his limited personal self to those two personal selves grieving, in the old, large, high-walled, steep-roofed household amidst pine woods, of which Heinrich had once shown him a picture.  He knew them too little for any such personal address.  He was writing, he perceived, not as Mr. Britling but as an Englishman—­that was all he could be to them—­and he was writing to them as Germans; he could apprehend them as nothing more.  He was just England bereaved to Germany bereaved....