The Way We Were...

After the huge loss of men on the Somme during World War I, and before the USA entered the war, some women visited the American Ambassador in London to ask him for help in finding their menfolk. Walter Hines Page, the US Ambassador, recorded:

"I suppose a thousand English women have been to see me - as a last hope - to ask me to have enquiries made in Germany about their 'missing' sons or husbands, generally sons. They are of every class and rank, from Marchioness to scrub-woman. Every one tells her story with the same dignity of grief, the same marvellous self-restraint, the same courtesy and deference and sorrowful pride. Not one has whimpered...It's the breed....They never weep; their voices do not falter. Not a tear have I seen yet. They take it as part of the price of greatness and empire. You guess at their grief only by their reticence. They use as few words as possible and then courteously take themselves away. It isn't an accident that these people own a fifth of the world. Utterly unwarlike, they outlast anybody else when war comes...."

(quoted in 'A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900' by Andrew Roberts)