In December 1917 Hilaire Belloc (who had lost a son in the world war then raging) wrote to Wilfred Blunt on hearing of the death of an old friend:

“You agree with me on the impossibility of dealing, not adequately indeed, but at all, with the circumstances that the affections & memories and aims of the human spirit are utterly out of scale with its habitations & limits here. The inequality of lives is the chief mark of that tragic circumstance”.