* * * * *
I would like to write here the name of a friend, Charles Flamache of
Brussels. He was 21 years old. He was an artist who had already tasted
fame. He had known the love of woman. That his destiny might be
fulfilled he died, the blithe, brave boy, in front of Liege. It was the
right death at the right time--ere yet the massed Prussians had rolled
in fire and blood over his fair small land. Wherefore, hail and
farewell, young hero!
* * * * *
But upon whom falls the stress of war?
In a time of barbarism those who suffer are always the weak. War is in
its essence (as said Nietzsche, the German philosopher of "world power")
an attack upon weakness. The weakest suffer most.
I saw children born on cinder heaps, and I saw them die; and the mothers
die gasping like she dogs in a smother of flies.
Some day the story of what was done in Alsace will be written and the
stories of Vise and Aerschot and Onsmael and Louvain will seem pale and
negligible; but not now--five generations to come will whisper them in
the Vosges.
What I would emphasize is that in the natural state of barbarism induced
by the war the woman falls back to her antique state of she animal. In
thousands of years she has been made into a thing of exquisite and
mysterious femininity; in a day she is thrown back to kinship with the
she dog.
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