rds British and French chemistry and so forth
in the relation of heaven to hell, it was clear that the utterers of
such barbarous ravings had never really understood or cared for the
arts and sciences they professed and were profaning, and were only the
appallingly degenerate descendants of the men of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries who, recognizing no national frontiers in the great
realm of the human mind, kept the European comity of that realm loftily
and even ostentatiously above the rancors of the battle-field. Tearing
the Garter from the Kaiser's leg, striking the German dukes from the
roll of our peerage, changing the King's illustrious and historically
appropriate surname (for the war was the old war of Guelph against
Ghibelline, with the Kaiser as Arch-Ghibelline) to that of a
traditionless locality. One felt that the figure of St. George and the
Dragon on our coinage should be replaced by that of the soldier driving
his spear through Archimedes. But by that time there was no coinage:
only paper money in which ten shillings called itself a pound as
confidently as the people who were disgracing their country called
themselves patriots.

The Sufferings of the Sane

The mental distress of living amid the obscene din of all these
carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on sane
people during the war. There was also the emotional strain, complicated
by the offended economic sense, produced by the casualty lists. The
stupid, the selfish, the narrow-minded, the callous and unimaginative
were spared a great deal. "Blood and destruction shall be so in use that
mothers shall but smile when they behold their infantes quartered by the
hands of war," was a Shakespearean prophecy that very nearly came true;
for when nearly every house had a slaughtered son to mourn, we should
all have gone quite out of our senses if we had taken our own and our
friend's bereavements at their peace value. It became necessary to give
them a false value; to proclaim the young life worthily and gloriously
sacrificed to redeem the liberty of mankind, instead of to expiate the
heedlessness and folly of their fathers, and expiate it in vain. We
had even to assume that the parents and not the children had made the
sacrifice, until at last the comic papers were driven to satirize fat
old men, sitting comfortably in club chairs, and boasting of the sons
they had "given" to their country.

No one grudged these anodyn