passant la main sur son visage, il sentit sa laideur." A is
white and finds it necessary to whitewash B, who is black: after several
years of hopeless grey, A finds that he has indeed put some very
satisfactory daubs of whitewash all over B, but that his own coat has
been blackened in the course of the struggle. It is as if a gardener,
having heard of the cannibalistic habit of earwigs, proposed to
exterminate the earwig in his rose-garden by importing a special army of
five million earwigs collected at great expense from the surrounding
country.

Other belligerent governments will raise the plea of checking the spread
of a hostile and dangerous culture; a plausible because apparently
philosophical justification of war as the only means of extirpating a
heresy that might pervert the whole future of European civilisation.
Unfortunately such a moral effect, such a "conversion by shock," could
only be accomplished by a very sudden, complete and shattering victory;
and it is now beginning to be recognised that spectacular triumphs are
not to be expected in modern warfare. But even if it were as possible by
violence as it might conceivably be desirable to extirpate or even to
limit the propagation of a particular form of mental culture, the
achievement would certainly not be worth the cost to the unhappy
survivors and their posterity. It would indeed be a crime against
humanity to eliminate the better part of the younger generation, the
flower of human brains, in the monstrous pedantry of attempting to
correct an intellectual error. For the risks of modern warfare are not
ordinary. It is not sufficiently realised that in six months of
offensive tactics under modern conditions no man in the front line has
more than one chance in a million of escaping death or mutilation.

There may remain the plea that a prolonged campaign is necessary in
order by exhaustion to compel the enemy to evacuate some territory that
he may have wrongfully occupied. The inevitable answer to such a plea
would be that if a war had arrived at a stage in which there was a clear
possibility of coercing the enemy by a process of exhaustion, that
possibility, if it were well-founded, would certainly not have escaped
the intelligence of the enemy, who would consequently be prepared to
save his face by coming to terms. The evacuation of the occupied
territory, or whatever it is that was to be achieved by the coercive
exhaustion of another year or two of bat