They had to him no connection with anything outside
normal peaceful life, stirred his thoughts to war no more than seeing a
gasbracket would wake him to imaginings of a coalmine or a pit
explosion. His slight conceptions of war, then, were a mere matter of
print and books and pictures, and the first months of this present war
were exactly the same, no more and no less--newspaper paragraphs and
photos and drawings in the weeklies hanging on the bookstalls. He read
about the Retreat and the Advance, skimmed the prophets' forecasts,
gulped the communiques with interest a good deal fainter than he read
the accounts of the football matches or a boxing bout. He expected "our
side" to win of course, and was quite patriotic; was in fact a
"supporter" of the British Army in exactly the sense of being a
"supporter" or "follower" of Tottenham Hotspurs or Kent County. Any
thoughts that he might shoulder a rifle and fight Germans would at that
time, if it had entered his head, have seemed just as ridiculous as a
thought that he should play in the Final at the Crystal Palace or step
into the ring to fight Carpentier. It took a long time to move him from
this attitude of aloofness. Recruiting posters failed utterly to touch
him. He looked at them, criticized them, even discussed their
"goodness" or drawing power on recruits with complete detachment and
without the vaguest idea that they were addressed to him.
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