Lunacy

Wednesday, December 26th., Comarques, Thorpe-le-Soken.

Only seven sat down to dinner last night owing to difficulties of transport and engagements of officers for mess dinners. This is the smallest Xmas dinner we have had in this house. Soldiers were noisy outside during the day. Mason came for lunch and stayed 'til after nightfall. He rode off in falling snow, having made Richard a present of all the chemical reagents which he had ordered for him. Much bad music after dinner. I think Marguerite was disappointed not to have a good crowd. She enjoys the attention she gets from the young (and not so young) officers. I felt rather guilty to think that we were here enjoying a more or less traditional Christmas whilst millions of young men (German and Allied) are squatting in squalid conditions, not so far away, pursuing a lunatic war not of their making.


I have read a lot, all I shall read, of Saintbury's "History of the French Novel". Very prolix and bursting with subordinate sentences and clauses, but containing plenty of useful information. He understands something of the craft of novel writing. The amount of this old man's reading is staggering.

Some bookish men of my acquaintance have a morbid appetite which demands to be titillated by an everlasting diet of new books. I regard them as cases for brain specialists. Their malady is akin to alcoholism, which is the worst malady of the mind known to medical science. Then there are other bookish men who day in day out protest that too many new books are published. They gloomily assert that the majority of new books are worthles and can do no good to anyone. They weep, in a manner of speaking, because this is a decadent age and things are not what they were. I have a primitive desire to assassinate these liunatic men. But I refrain, for the reason that they are misguided rather than vicious.