“THE following letter, from “B.E.F., April 10,” bears the initials of a distinguished scholar of Bootham, Fellow of All Souls, Oxford :—
‘I have come to the wars—what I think, in my more dramatic moments, is getting about the only experience my life hadn’t included before. But although I promised myself to write an offensive article in Bootham when I got here, something about this business (I can’t guess what, though it’s certainly not its horribleness) dries me up. I find one doesn’t think here much, because there’s rather a lot of work, but I did for one moment have a strong impression of a theoretical kind. It was when I first saw the corpses of about a hundred unhappy fellows in turbans who were so bewildered when they got here (in the cold and mud at Christmas) that they lost a trench. They lie between our lines and the Germans, and no one can go out to bury them. My impression was that nothing could be important enough for great empires to go to war about it ; but whether that remarkable reversal of my normal views will be what I seriously conclude from it all, I’ll tell you after the war.’
Readers of Bootham are requested not to weary themselves unduly with the consideration of what that all-important word “nothing” does or does not involve.”
From ‘Bootham’ magazine, June 1915.