Now he discovered that the one thing he dreaded more than that England should go to war, was that she should not.

The consciousness of national honour, the thing which, with religion, Englishmen are most shy of speaking about, suddenly asserted itself, and he found on the moment that it was bigger than anything else in the world.
"I think we shall go to war," he said.

"I don't see personally how we can exist any more as a nation if we don't.

We--we shall be damned if we don't, damned for ever and ever.

It's moral extinction not to." She kindled at that.
"Yes, I know," she said, "that's what I have been telling myself; but, oh, Mike, there's some dreadful cowardly part of me that won't listen when I think of Hermann, and.