Lightly they threw away all the
baubles and gewgaws civilization had fashioned for adorning and
disguising their raw humanity, and the habits of civilization as well.
They had touched but the outermost edge of war, and their very clothes
fell off them.
III.
BARBARISM AND WOMEN.
War; and it takes eighty-four hours to make a twelve-hour journey from
the Alps to Paris; the cable is dead; the telegraph is dumb; letters go
only when smuggled over the frontiers by couriers; you look about you
and find you are in a mediaeval and mysterious world. You stand amid the
melancholy ruins of canceled cycles. The mailed fist of war has smashed
your world to pieces. You do not know it.
The man you thought of as a brother looks at you with eyes of passionate
hatred; you have eaten bread and salt together; you have drunk together;
you have been uplifted by the same books; you have been sublimed by the
same music; but he is a German, and your blood was made in another land,
and he looks at you with suspicion and hate--perhaps you are a spy. (The
spy mania! Dear Lord, what absurd, bloody, and abominable stories I
could write of this madness which has Europe by the throat, this madness
which is only another form of war hysteria.) A reversal to barbarism;
you and the man who was your friend have gone back to the fear and
hatred of primitive savages, meeting at the corner of a dark wood.
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