“Riding out with the Old Surrey and Burstow Hunt, White recorded the first time he saw a kill with distanced fascination. The fox was dug out of a drain where it had taken refuge and thrown to the hounds. They tore it to pieces while a circle of human onlookers 'screeched them on'. The humans, White thought, were disgusting, their cries 'tense, self-conscious, and histerically animal'. But the hounds were not. 'The savagery of the hounds', he wrote, 'was deep-rooted and terrible, but rang true, so that it was not horrible like that of the human.” CrueltyAnimalsHuntingHoundsNatural OrderHuman Cruelty Book:H is for Hawk Source: H is for Hawk
“Lancelot was a sadist who refrained from hurting people through his sense of honour - his Word. His Word was his promise to be gentle, and it was one of the things that made him the Best Knight in the World. 'All through his life,' [T.H.] White wrote of Lancelot, 'even when he was a great man with the world at his feet - he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand.' White always took great pains to be gentle precisely because he wanted to be cruel. It was why he never beat his pupils at Stowe.” CrueltyGentlenessSadismInner ConflictInner Torment Book:H is for Hawk Source: H is for Hawk