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After a month of rest and refitment the Colonel called together the senior officers. He and our Company Commander were both men I liked and respected – regular soldiers, efficient, quiet, unspectacular. I think we must have become veterans; Cambrai had finished off the enthusiastic amateurs.
The air was more wholesome for the disappearance of Aitches and Homfray. Of Aitches it could be said that the misfortune was a tragedy personal to him and to those under him who were expected by force of circumstances to invest him with an importance he did not have. The tragedy was repeated in the next war on a far larger scale when not only Chamberlain but the nation itself was called upon to bear an importance, loaded by history and the conditions of a present and a future, which it could not carry. Churchill himself added to the tragedy by seeming to embody the qualities which were required by the past, envied and outdated by the present, and insupportable and unsupported by the future.
In the insignificant physical and moral space occupied by myself in the First War even such trivial responsibilities as I had to carry were far beyond my capacity, my training and upbringing. To that extent I too shared the tragedy which was Aitches'. He, in so far as he can be distinguished from his environment, probably had not the personality required; the environment of great wealth, ruthless amorality, third-rate admiration, probably played its part in producing the feeble personality and would finally have destroyed it. Wealth, admiration, honour may mark already existing achievements but are poison when used as a substitute for the qualities which they are supposed to mark. They are similarly harmful when they are withheld until they mark nothing that is not already known. The individual
who will not accept such marks of recognition, the society that will not extend them, is already in a bad way and becoming worse.
Homfray with his affectation of worthlessness was striving to disguise