It has taken place in an hour; but yesterday these were sweet patrician
ladies, who prattled of humanity and love and the fair graces of life;
and now they would fain wet their mouths with blood--laughingly as
harlots wet their mouths with wine.
The unclean and vampirish spirit of war has swept them back to the
habits of the cave-dwelling ages of the race. In an hour the culture so
painfully acquired in slow generations has been swept away. Royalty, in
the tearoom of the "Four Seasons," is one with the blonde nude female
who romped and fought in the dark Teutonic forests ere Caesar came
through Gaul.
Reversal to barbarism.
War is declared; and in Berlin the Emperor of Germany rides in an open
motor car down Unter den Linden; he is in full uniform, sworded, erect,
hieratic; and at his side sits the Empress--she the good mother, the
housewife, the fond grandmother--garmented from head to foot in cloth
the color of blood.
Theatricalism? No. The symbolism is more significant. The symbol bears a
savage significance. It marks, as a red sunset, the going down of
civilization and the coming of the dark barbarism of war.
II.
BREAKING POINT OF CIVILIZATION.
There was war; and the whole machinery of civilization stopped.
Modern civilization is the most complex machine imaginable; its infinite
cogged wheels turn endlessly upon each other; and perfectly it
accomplishes its multifarious purposes; but smash one wheel and it all
falls apart into muddle and ruin.
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