Anthony Powell: The war blew the whole bloody thing up

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

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Anthony Powell
A Dance to the Music of Time

“…People talk of rearming….There is far too much disregard, as it is, of the equilibrium to be maintained between the rate of production and consumption in the aggregate, without the additional interference of a crushing armaments programme. We do not want an obstacle like that in the way of the organised movement toward progressive planning in the economic world of today….No, no, none of that, please. What is much more likely to be productive is to settle things around a table….”

***

The possibility that I might have been “in the war” seemed perfectly conceivable to him.

“Some of it wasn’t so bad,” he said.

“No?”

“Most of it perfect hell, of course. Absolute bloody hell on earth. Gives me the willies even to think of it sometimes.”

“Where were you?”

“Joined up at Thirsk. Started off in the Green Howards. Got a commission after a bit in one of the battalions of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. I’d exchanged from the Duke’s into the Machine-Gun Corps when I caught it in the tummy at Le Bassé.”

“Pretty unpleasant?”

“Not too good. Couldn’t digest anything for ages. Can’t always now, to tell the truth….”

***

“People don’t think the same way any longer,” he bawled across the table. “The war blew the whole bloody thing up, like tossing a Mills bomb into a dug-out. Everything’s changed about all that. Always feel rather sorry for your generation as a matter of fact, not but what we haven’t all lost our – what do you call ’em – you know, somebody used the word in our house the other night – saying much what I’m saying now? Struck me very forcibly. You know – when you’re soft enough to think things are going to be a damned sight better than they turn out to be. What’s the word?”

“Illusions?”

“Illusions! That’s the one. We’ve lost all our bloody illusions….”