metimes a man will stab the girl
he loves, if he cannot get at her any other way. Sex itself is a
positive battle. Lust connects itself only too frequently with violence
and the spilling of blood.

Is it possible that something the same happens with whole nations and
peoples--an actual lust and passion of conflict, a mad intercourse and
ravishment, a kind of generation in each other, and exchange of
life-essences, leaving the two peoples thereafter never more the same,
but each strangely fertilized towards the future? Is it this that
explains the extraordinary ecstasy which men experience on the
battlefield, even amid all the horrors--an ecstasy so great that it
calls them again and again to return? "Have you noticed," says one of
our War correspondents,[25] "how many of our colonels fall? Do you know
why? It is for five minutes of _life_. It is for the joy of riding, when
the charge sounds, at the crest of a wave of men."

Is it this that explains the curious fact that Wars--notwithstanding all
their bitterness and brutishness--do not infrequently lead to strange
amalgamations and generations? The spreading of the seeds of Greek
culture over the then known world by Alexander's conquests, or the
fertilizing of Europe with the germs of republican and revolutionary
ideas by the armies of Napoleon, or the immense reaction on the
mediaeval Christian nations caused by the Crusades, are commonplaces of
history; and who--to come to quite modern times--could have foreseen
that the Boer War would end in the present positive alliance between the
Dutch and English in South Africa, or that the Russo-Japanese conflict
would so profoundly modify the ideas and outlook of the two peoples
concerned?

In making these remarks I do not for a moment say that the gains
resulting from War are worth the suffering caused by it, or that the
gains are _not_ worth the suffering. The whole subject is too vast and
obscure for one to venture to dogmatize on it. I only say that if we are
to find any order and law (as we must inevitably _try_ to do) in these
convulsions of peoples, these tempests of human history, it is probably
in the direction that I have indicated.

Of course we need not leave out of sight the ordinary theory and
explanation, that wars are simply a part of the general struggle for
existence--culminating explosions of hatred and mutual destruction
between peoples who are competing with each other for the means of
subsistence. Th