We are within measurable, or imaginable distance of real Armageddon. Happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.

—HERBERT ASQUITH,

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR, JULY 24 1914

 

I was sleepwalking through a field of poppies,

somewhere in France.

CARRILLO MEAN, ‘The Life and Times of a Brass Emperor’

 

It seems that no flowering summer lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of unimaginable darkness.

PETER FLEMING, ‘Has the new dark age begun yet?

 

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping

Than you can understand.

—W.B. YEATS, ‘The Stolen Child’