Tom Smallways: You can say what you like… It didn't ought ever to 'ave begun.
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Context: Old Tom Smallways gives a small boy his verdict on the war.
Source: The Epilogue
They complacently assumed a necessary progress towards which they had no moral responsibility. They did not realise that this security of progress was a thing still to be won — or lost, and that the…
The development of Science had altered the scale of human affairs. By means of rapid mechanical traction, it had brought men nearer together, so much nearer socially, economically, physically, that…
Kurt: Think of it, Smallways: there's war everywhere! They're smashing up their civilisation before they have made it. … The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in…
Tom Smallways: This here Progress… it keeps on. Tom Smallways: You'd hardly think it could keep on.
It was the dissolution of an age; it was the collapse of the civilisation that had trusted to machinery, and the instruments of its destruction were machines. But while the collapse of the previous…