GR translation: English men came to love one another decently

[Mark Kohut]

I think the 'decently' implies deep bonding---homosociality, that ugly
word---rather than homosexulaity.

Homosexuality was not 'decent' yet at all in England, not even close just
those few years after what they did to Oscar Wilde (and probably worse to
the unfamous)


On Tue, Sep 2, 2025 at 1:58 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> V616.23-36, P627.23-36   It wasn’t always so. In the trenches of the First
> World War, English men came to love one another decently, without shame or
> make-believe, under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths, and to
> find in the faces of other young men evidence of otherworldly visits, some
> poor hope that may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the decaying pieces
> of human meat. . . . It was the end of the world, it was total revolution
> (though not quite in the way Walter Rathenau had announced): every day
> thousands of the aristocracy new and old, still haloed in their ideas of
> right and wrong, went to the loud guillotine of Flanders, run day in and
> out, on and on, by no visible hands, certainly not those of the people—an
> English class was being decimated, the ones who’d volunteered were dying
> for those who’d known something and hadn’t, and despite it all, despite
> knowing, some of them, of the betrayal, while Europe died meanly in its own
> wastes, men loved.
>
> Is this part referring to homosexuality specifically or is it more general?
> The published translation doesn't consider homosexuality a part of it at
> all, which seems wrong to me.
> --
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>