Saturday, January 30, 2021
A Typical Englishman
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring:
The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), p. 184, with note on p. 353:
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A sensitive friend of Vera Brittain's who was worried that he might not pass the test of courage in the front lines in an emergency wrote: "I tell you it is a positive curse to have a temperament out here. The ideal thing to be is a typical Englishman."26 And to be a typical Englishman meant, of course, that one repressed inner feelings, stiffened one's upper lip, and functioned according to form. What was vital was what the British used to call "bottom," stability of character, staying power, integrity.
26. In Brittain, Testament of Youth, 316.
