I shall be nothing....
To shoulder Christ from out the topmost niche
In human fame, as once I fondly felt,
Was not for me. I came too late in time
To assume the prophet or the demi-god,
A part past playing now.
Possibly his pinchbeck German imitator has by this arrived at the same self-knowledge. The war-monger has become an anachronism in the modern world which has, from hard experience, got sense enough to know that if stealing a man's purse be a vice, stealing his country can scarcely count as a virtue; that it is a hypocritical mockery to build a gallows for the man who slays one of his fellows, and a throne for the man who slaughters millions. That was the great argument in the latest that was to have been the last of wars, and you cannot read the literature, especially the poetical literature, that the war inspired without realising that the free peoples of the world rose to the height of that argument.
The Napoleonic wars were not so immeasurably vaster than the siege of Troy
