"Hooper
had no illusions about the army – or rather no special illusions
distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the
universe. He had come to it reluctantly, under compulsion, after he had made
every feeble effort in his power to obtain deferment. He accepted it, he said,
“like the measles.” Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with
Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my
eyes were dry to all save poetry- that stoic, red-skin interlude which our
schools introduce between the fast flowing tears of the child and the
man-Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St. Crispin’s Day,
nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had had few
battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and
recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn,
Roncevales, and Marathon-these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell,
and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless
state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the
clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper."
~Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
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