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a life that was like a splendid tune in her ears, with ordered sound and movement, a definite form, even though on a scale beyond her human powers to grasp, she was surrounded by a mocking terrifying jumble of discords, in which she could find no sense at all. It was that loss of contact that was so terrifying, as if she had lost the key and could no longer read the signs of life around her.
    In A World of Love (),* a later novel which describes the sabotage wrought by one soldier’s death on two generations of living women, Elizabeth Bowen wrote even more eloquently of the dislocation the First
    World War introduced into the lives of the living:
    [Guy] had had it in him to make a good end, but not soon; he would have been ready to disengage himself when the hour came, but rightfully speaking it had not . . . It was simply that these years she went on living belonged to him, his lease upon them not having run out yet. The living were living in his lifetime; and of this his contemporaries . . . never were unaware. They were incomplete.
    For many of the bereaved the established Church fell short in answering
    the questions posed by the deaths of such a multitude. How could a
    beneficent God have permitted them to suffer and die? Were they now
    before God’s throne? Large numbers of those who could not bear it at that
    time turned in their grief-stricken denial to psychics and clairvoyants, who in turn conjured up bogus visions of the returned dead. In those dark * An extraordinary metaphysical ghost story, in which Guy, killed in , haunts the former home now inhabited by his cousin, his ex-fianceé and her daughter. Inescapably, all three women are drawn into the vortex of his non-presence. ‘By striking when it did, before he had tried to see, even, whether he could consolidate, death made him seem a defaulter, a runner-out upon his unconsummated loves . . . His immortality was in their longings . . .’ (Chapter ).
    Where Have All the Young Men Gone?
    
    days spiritualism flourished; by  the Spiritualists’ National Union had
    doubled the number of its pre-war affiliated societies – an estimated quarter of a million bereaved members conducting seances to reach out to their lost loved ones. ‘Poor human beings . . .’ mourned Beatrice Webb, when
    she heard that her sister Maggie was seeking to communicate with her son,
    killed at Ypres. And Maggie conceded that she was powerless in the face
    of her terrible need for him: ‘How deep is the craving for extended
    personality beyond the limits of a mere lifetime on earth!’
    A world without men
    After Roland Leighton’s death, Vera Brittain went back to her job as a VAD
    in a hard-working London hospital. Gertrude Caton-Thompson put her
    hopes behind her and got a lowly job working as a filing clerk in the Ministry of Shipping. The war was a fact of life, and with the men away, Britain’s women stiffened their upper lips and set to work to run the country:
    War Girls () by Jessie Pope
    There’s the girl who clips your ticket for the train,
    And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,
    There’s the girl who does a milk-round in the rain,
    And the girl who calls for orders at your door.
    Strong, sensible, and fit,
    They’re out to show their grit,
    And tackle jobs with energy and knack.
    No longer caged and penned up,
    They’re going to keep their end up
    Till the khaki boys come marching back.
    There’s the motor girl who drives a heavy van,
    There’s the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,
    There’s the girl who cries ‘All fares, please!’ like a man,
    And the girl who whistles taxis up the street.

Beneath each uniform
    Beats a heart that’s soft and warm,
    Though of canny mother-wit they show no lack;
    But a solemn statement this is,
    They’ve no time for love and kisses
    Till the khaki soldier boys come marching home.
    
    Singled Out
    But too many of the khaki boys were dead.