econd-rate sentimentalism and cheap short-cuts and mediocrity; they
stand for brain and clear thinking against muddle and cant; but they're
fighting it with Potterite weapons--self-interest, following things for
what they bring them rather than for the things in themselves. John would
never write the particular kind of stuff he does for the love of writing
it; he'll only do it because it's the stunt of the moment. That's why
he'll never be more than cleverish and mediocre, never the real thing. In
his calm, unexcited way, he worships success, and he'll get it, like old
Pinkerton. Though of course he's met plenty of the bloodthirsty
non-combatants he writes about, he takes most of what he says about them
second-hand from other people. It's not first-hand observation. If it
was, he would have to include among his jingoes and Hun-haters some
fighting men too. I know it's entirely against popular convention to say
so, but some of the most bloodthirsty fire-eaters I met during the war
were among the fighting men. Of course there were plenty of them at home
too, and plenty of peaceable and civilised people at the front, but it's
the most absurd perversion of facts to make out that all our combatants
were full of sweet reasonableness (any one who knows anything about the
psychological effects of fighting will know that this is improbable), and
all our non-combatants bloody-minded savages. Though I don't say there's
nothing in the theory one heard that the natural war rage of
non-combatants, not having the physical outlet the fighters had for
theirs, became in some few of them a suppressed Freudian complex and
made them a little insane. I don't know. Anyhow to say this became the
stunt among a certain section, so it was probably as inaccurate as
popular sayings usually are; as inaccurate as the picture drawn by
another section--the Potter press section--of an army going rejoicing
into the fight for right.

What one specially resented was the way the men who had been killed, poor
devils, were exploited by the makers of speeches and the writers of
articles. First, they'd perhaps be called 'the fallen,' instead of 'the
killed' (it's a queer thing how 'fallen,' in the masculine means killed
in the war, and the feminine given over to a particular kind of vice),
and then the audience, or the readers, would be told that they died for
democracy, or a cleaner world, when very likely many of them hated the
first and never gave an hour's t