Fools exulted in
"German losses." They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting
in the death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death
blow!
Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel
But most people could not comprehend these sorrows. There was a
frivolous exultation in death for its own sake, which was at
bottom an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths
and not stage ones. Again and again, when an air raider dropped a
bomb which tore a child and its mother limb from limb, the people
who saw it, though they had been reading with great cheerfulness
of thousands of such happenings day after day in their
newspapers, suddenly burst into furious imprecations on "the
Huns" as murderers, and shrieked for savage and satisfying
vengeance. At such moments it became clear that the deaths they
had not seen meant no more to them than the mimic death of the
cinema screen. Sometimes it was not necessary that death should
be actually witnessed: it had only to take place under
circumstances of sufficient novelty and proximity to bring it
home almost as sensationally and effectively as if it had been
actually visible.
For example, in the spring of 1915 there was an appalling
slaughter of our young soldiers at Neuve Chapelle and at the
Gallipoli landing.
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