Points of Friction
men and women with a natural gift of indecision, a natural taste for compromise and awaiting developments. In the absence of newspapers and pamphlets, these peaceful pagans were compelled to express their sense of fatigue to their neighbours at the games or in the market-place; and their neighbours—if well chosen—sighed with them over the intensity of life, the formidable happenings of history.
Since August, 1914, the turmoil and anguish incidental to the world's greatest war have accentuated every human type,—heroic, base, keen, and evasive. The strain of five years' fighting was borne with astounding fortitude, and Allied statesmen and publicists saw to it that the clear outline of events should not be blurred by ignorance or misrepresentation. If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes. Men, "living between two eternities, and warring against oblivion," make their
2
