tself upon the attention. The homecoming permissionaire brings with
him invariably a considerable weight of broken objects, bits of shell,
cartridge clips, helmets; it is a peripatetic museum. It is as if he
hoped for a clue. It is almost impossible, I have found, to escape these
pieces in evidence. I am the least collecting of men, but I have brought
home Italian cartridges, Austrian cartridges, the fuse of an Austrian
shell, a broken Italian bayonet, and a note that is worth half a franc
within the confines of Amiens. But a large heavy piece of exploded shell
that had been thrust very urgently upon my attention upon the Carso I
contrived to lose during the temporary confusion of our party by the
arrival and explosion of another prospective souvenir in our close
proximity. And two really very large and almost complete specimens of
some species of _Ammonites_ unknown to me, from the hills to the east
of the Adige, partially wrapped in a back number of the _Corriere
della Sera_, that were pressed upon me by a friendly officer, were
unfortunately lost on the line between Verona and Milan through the
gross negligence of a railway porter. But I doubt if they would have
thrown any very conclusive light upon the war.

2

I avow myself an extreme Pacifist. I am against the man who first takes
up the weapon. I carry my pacifism far beyond the ambiguous little group
of British and foreign sentimentalists who pretend so amusingly to be
socialists in the _Labour Leader_, whose conception of foreign policy is
to give Germany now a peace that would be no more than a breathing time
for a fresh outrage upon civilisation, and who would even make heroes of
the crazy young assassins of the Dublin crime. I do not understand those
people. I do not merely want to stop this war. I want to nail down war
in its coffin. Modern war is an intolerable thing. It is not a thing
to trifle with in this Urban District Council way, it is a thing to
end forever. I have always hated it, so far that is as my imagination
enabled me to realise it; and now that I have been seeing it, sometimes
quite closely for a full month, I hate it more than ever. I never
imagined a quarter of its waste, its boredom, its futility, its
desolation. It is merely a destructive and dispersive instead of a
constructive and accumulative industrialism. It is a gigantic, dusty,
muddy, weedy, bloodstained silliness. It is the plain duty of every man
to give his life and all that