He was no longer writing to the particular parents of one particular boy, but to all that mass of suffering, regret, bitterness and fatigue that lay behind the veil of the “front.”  Slowly, steadily, the manhood of Germany was being wiped out.  As he sat there in the stillness he could think that at least two million men of the Central Powers were dead, and an equal number maimed and disabled.  Compared with that our British losses, immense and universal as they were by the standard of any previous experience, were still slight; our larger armies had still to suffer, and we had lost irrevocably not very much more than a quarter of a million.  But the tragedy gathered against us.  We knew enough already to know what must be the reality of the German homes to which those dead men would nevermore return....

If England had still the longer account to pay, the French had paid already nearly to the limits of endurance.  They must have lost well over a million of their mankind, and still they bled and bled.  Russia too in the East had paid far more than man for man in this vast swapping off of lives.  In a little while no Censorship would hold the voice of the peoples.  There would be no more talk of honour and annexations, hegemonies and trade routes, but only Europe lamenting for her dead....

The Germany to which he wrote would be a nation of widows and children, rather pinched boys and girls, crippled men, old men, deprived men, men who had lost brothers and cousins and friends and ambitions.  No triumph now on land or sea could save Germany from becoming that.  France too would be that, Russia, and lastly Britain, each in their degree.  Before the war there had been no Germany to which an Englishman could appeal; Germany had been a threat, a menace, a terrible trampling of armed men.  It was as little possible then to think of talking to Germany as it would have been to have stopped the Kaiser in mid career in his hooting car down the Unter den Linden and demand a quiet talk with him.  But the Germany that had watched those rushes with a slightly doubting pride had her eyes now full of tears and blood.  She had believed, she had obeyed, and no real victory had come.  Still she fought on, bleeding, agonising, wasting her substance and the substance of the whole world, to no conceivable end but exhaustion, so capable she was, so devoted, so proud and utterly foolish.  And the mind of Germany, whatever it was before the war, would now be something residual, something left over and sitting beside a reading-lamp as he was sitting beside a reading-lamp, thinking, sorrowing, counting the cost, looking into the dark future....

And to that he wrote, to that dimly apprehended figure outside a circle of the light like his own circle of light—­which was the father of Heinrich, which was great Germany, Germany which lived before and which will yet outlive the flapping of the eagles....