1st May
In May 1917 he was thinking about war and human nature. In a letter sent to Cambridge don Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, he proposed that 'the obverse of love is not hatred but fear. Hatred is only one of the forms fear takes, cowardice being another and efficiency a third’. He thought also about what made men want to fight: 'To merge myself. To test myself. To do my bit. To suffer what other soldiers suffer, that I may understand them’. He recognised, though, that in many cases 'compulsion’ is the real reason. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 5 May 1917)
