Faith's Reviews > Despised And Rejected

Wept in public. 4.5 stars (more to come when I recover)
Ok I am back and ready to quote my favourite passages. This will be spoilery because my favourite bits came at the end, so watch out!
"The spectacled, highly strung young man had appeared on socialistic grounds. His speech was both virile and vehement, and he quoted Tolstoy and Wells and Karl Marx and Phillip Gibbs in a breathless Cockney voice that told of self-education and night-school. When he had finished, he still stood tense and rigid, although he had the Board's permission to be seated. And when the blow fell- 'Appeal dismissed. Applicant passed for foreign service'- he crumpled up quite suddenly into his chair in a way that made Antoinette's throat feel tight."
"'Right or wrong, my country'- that's the line for every true Briton to take up." "I am a humanitarian before I am a 'true Briton', then, if either the 'right' or 'wrong' of my country involves the deliberate slaughter of human beings."
"Almost independent of his own volition, they began to build themselves into a great symphonic poem: 'War.' A chaos of conflicting motives bewildered him; he could hear each instrument clamouring at cross-purposes with all the others in the orchestra; clashing rhythms and counter-rhythms battled for supremacy. It seemed at first a labour for giants to bring order into this chaos, to select and reject wisely among the dissonant themes. Then he began to perceive that he must eliminate none, reject none; each must have its place in the scheme, for each stood for one of the innumerable beliefs and reasons, ideals and madnesses that had led the peoples into war...all must be woven in until, in the final solution and climax, he had succeeded in showing their fundamental unity, converting strife and turmoil and the sorrows of all the nations into the transcendent harmony of peace."
"The impersonator of many cardinals had been killed during his first month at the front. Antoinette could not but help wondering in what manner he had died. She was haunted by memory of a languid voice, saying: "This is all- so stupid-..." Haunted by memory of other voices, too; Alan's vigorous speech; the youthful bombast with which Oswald used to mask his terror; the heavy lilt of Pegeen's and Conn's tones. And Conn had been shot down in the streets of Dublin during Easter week, proclaiming with his last breath that Ireland would never bend the knee 'to England's bloody red'"
"But it doesn't seem to strike people that shutting up some of these C.Os in prison is deliberate, wilful murder of brains that were fine, sensitive instruments which might have brought some lasting beauty, some lasting wonder into the world. These men might be rendering far greater service to their country by following their natural bent than by doing navvies' work or performing silly brutalising tasks in prison."
"The tearoom was empty, save for the ghosts that sat grouped at the tables; almost she could have expected them to take place in the conversation... Dennis; Alan; Everard, with his languid drawl; Crispin's stammer; O'Farrell's Irish phrasing; the whole chorus of familiar voices. But the chorus was silent now."
"Benny was radiant and breathless, but he spoke to an audience of ghosts; ghost of Everard, long dead on the field in Flanders; ghost of Harry Hope, drilling drearily on Salisbury Plain; ghosts of the many professionals of all grades who had once frequented Miss Mowbray's, and had been gradually sucked into the army, and who would have overwhelmed him with a flood of questions."
Dulce et Decorum Est and Suicide in the Trenches are fantastic accompaniments to this book.