rth. Some day they would return,
and with honor--not all, but some. The old order of things
would have irrevocably vanished. There would be a new companionship
whose bond would be the common danger run, the common sufferings borne,
the common glory shared. "And where have you been all the time,
and what have you been doing?" The very question would be a reproach,
though none were intended. How could they endure it?
Face to face with a situation like that, a man becomes reconciled,
justifies easily the part he is playing, and comes to understand,
in a universe where logic counts for so little and sentiment and the impulse
of the heart for so much, the inevitableness and naturalness of war.
Suddenly the world is up in arms. All mankind takes sides. The same faith
that made him surrender himself to the impulses of normal living and of love,
forces him now to make himself the instrument through which a greater force
works out its inscrutable ends through the impulses of terror and repulsion.
And with no less a sense of moving in harmony with a universe
where masses are in continual conflict and new combinations are engendered
out of eternal collisions, he shoulders arms and marches forth with haste.
==
Already in this passage we can discern the fatalistic acceptance of war
which runs through many of his utterances on the subject,
and may be read especially in the noble conclusion of his poem, "The Hosts":
There was a stately drama writ
By the hand that peopled the earth & air
And set the stars in the infinite
And made night gorgeous & morning fair;
And all that had sense to reason knew
That bloody drama must be gone through.
Some sat & watched how the action veered --
Waited, profited, trembled, cheered --
We saw not clearly nor understood,
But, yielding ourselves to the master hand,
Each in his part, as best he could,
We played it through as the author planned.
It was not, in his own conception, a "war against war" that he was waging;
it was simply a fight for freedom and for France. Some of us may hope
and believe that, in after years, when he was at leisure
to view history in perspective and carry his psychology a little deeper,
he would have allowed, if not more potency, at any rate more adaptability,
to the human will. In order to do so, it would not have been necessary
to abandon his fatalistic creed. He would have seen, perhaps,
that even if we
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