Death of a Hero

Look after your cock, and your life will look after itself.

All of which they talked out very fully before they ever lay together. You may say, of course, that this is very wicked and “unnatural”, that if every one acted in this way the human race would soon come to a full stop. I shall not make the obvious retort of “a good job, too,” but merely say that I observe no danger of under-population in Europe. Since the population of England is about three times the amount w

He was a wrecked man, swept along in the swirling cataracts of the War.

He brooded incessantly and saw all things in terms of the bleakest despair – the collapse of his own life, his present situation, the continued retirement of the Allied Armies which seemed to promise an indefinite continuation of the War, his feeling that even if he came out alive he would never be able to rebuild his life.

situation happened to be one which most disastrously fed his “worry” neurosis. A bitterly humorous destiny seemed intentionally to involve him in circumstances which rent his mind to pieces and exhausted his body – unnecessarily.

Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.

He felt very uncomfortable, like a death’s-head at a feast. He caught a glimpse of himself in one of the restaurant mirrors, and thought he looked ludicrously solemn and distressed.

An immense effort of imagination was needed to link himself now with himself then. He looked almost with curiosity at his familiar khaki and rifle – so strange that ten years later that boy should be a soldier.

He shuddered, thinking of the showers of bursting metal, flogging and churning the ground, shearing and rending human flesh; the immense concourse of detonations hammering on human nerves.

he had been told there and then that he was discharged from the Army and could go, he wouldn’t have known what to do except to stay there and stare at the poppies and daisies.