All
of humanity we have acquired in the slow way of evolution sloughs off
us.
We are savages once more. For science is dead. All the laboratories are
shut, save those where poison is brewed and destruction is put up in
packages. Education has ceased, save that fierce Nietzschean education
which declares: "The weak and helpless must go to the wall; and we shall
help them go." All that made life humanly fair is hidden in the fetid
clouds of war where savages (in terror and hysteria) grope for each
other's throats.
The glory of war--rot! The heroism of war--rot! The scarlet and
beneficent energies of war--rot! When you look at it close what you see
are hulking masses of brutes with fear behind them prodding them on, or
wild and splendid savages, hysterical with hate, battling to save their
hearth fires and women from the oncoming horde. Reversal to barbarism.
Think it over. Upon whom falls the stress of war? Not upon the soldier.
He is killed and fattens the soil where he falls; or he is maimed and
hobbles off toward a pension or beggary--both tolerable things; anyway
he has drunk deep of cruelty and terror and may go his way. By rare good
grace he may have been a hero. In other words, he may have been a
Belgian--which is a word like a decoration, a name to make one strut
like a Greek of Thermopylae--and become thus a permanent part of the
world's finest history.
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