All day long you hear things 'placed' as having happened since the waw; or du'in' the waw; or befo' the waw; or right aftah the waw; or 'bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo' the waw or aftah the waw.

It shows how intimately every individual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode.

It gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea of what a vast and comprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get by reading books at the fireside.
At a club one evening, a gentleman turned to me and said, in an aside-- 'You notice, of course, that we are nearly always talking about the war.
It isn't because we haven't anything else to talk about, but because nothing else has so strong an interest for us.

And there is another reason: In the war, each of us, in his own person, seems to have sampled all the different varieties of human experience; as a consequence, you can't mention an outside matter of any sort but it will certainly remind some listener of something that happened during the war--and out he comes with it.

Of course that brings the talk back to the war.