penetrated to the common man in Germany must remain something of a question. Personally, I do not think that the peasant who knelt by the wayside crucifix in the Tyrol, or the comfortable, stout farmer in Bavaria or Würtemberg, or the miner in Westphalia, or any typical Rhinelander wanted to dip his hands in blood. He bore with rulers who did so want. In the rest of Europe the atmosphere was one of profound peace. That it was so in France even German witnesses testify.
It will be said that all such considerations are now empty, that we have experienced war and realise all that it means, and that it is the part of wisdom to banish such memories from the human imagination. This sort of plea is, indeed, likely to be popular; it has all the qualities of popularity—that is to say, it is feeble, edifying, and free from all the roughness of truth. But it is precisely the truth in all its roughness of which we stand in need. Our duty is not to banish the memories of war as we have experienced it, but to burn them in beyond effacement, every line and trait, every dot and detail. Civilised men, in the mass, have not yet begun to understand the baseness and the magnitude of this adventure in de-civilisation. There is no calculus of suffering that can sum up the agonies endured since the sentence of blood was daubed on the lintel of every cottage in Europe. The story of war is not yet realised because it has not yet been told; there has not been time for the
