Nevertheless, even when sitting at home
in safety, it was not easy for those who had to write and speak
about the war to throw away their highest conscience, and
deliberately work to a standard of inevitable evil instead of to
the ideal of life more abundant. I can answer for at least one
person who found the change from the wisdom of Jesus and St.
Francis to the morals of Richard III and the madness of Don
Quixote extremely irksome. But that change had to be made; and we
are all the worse for it, except those for whom it was not really
a change at all, but only a relief from hypocrisy.
Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to
fight, and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the
inestimable loss to the world of four years of the life of a
generation wasted on destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making
works of the human mind might not have been aborted or destroyed
by taking their authors away from their natural work for four
critical years. Not only were Shakespeares and Platos being
killed outright; but many of the best harvests of the survivors
had to be sown in the barren soil of the trenches. And this was
no mere British consideration. To the truly civilized man, to the
good European, the slaughter of the German youth was as
disastrous as the slaughter of the English.
Pages:
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45