The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Morning After
THE MORNING AFTER
If Mr. Maeterlinck's theory is sound, that this
war is the visible reflection of a vast, invisible
conflict, what a gigantic battle of the unseen
forces of good and evil must have been raging
throughout the universe when Europe rose on
the morning of August 5, 1914! Think what had
happened. While the light was dawning, the
sun was rising, and the birds were singing over
Europe, the greater nations were preparing to
turn a thousand square miles of it into a gigantic
slaughter-house. After forty years of unbroken
peace, in which civilization, as represented by
law, science, surgery, medicine, art, music, literature,
and above all religion, in their ancient and
central home, had been striving to lift up man
to the place he is entitled to in the scheme of
creation, war had suddenly stepped in to drag
him back to the condition of the barbarian. From
this day onward he was to live in holes in the
ground, to be necessarily unclean, inevitably
verminous, and liable to loathsome diseases.
Although hitherto law-abiding, and perhaps even
pious, with an ever-developing sense of the value
and sanctity of human life, he was henceforward
to take joy in the destruction of thousands of his
fellow-creatures by devilish machines of death,
and not to shrink from an opportunity of thrusting
his bayonet down the throat of his enemy. He was to set fire to churches, to throw images of
Christ into the road, and, showing no mercy to
old men and women and children, to destroy all
and spare none. And why? Ostensibly because
one quite commonplace Austrian gentleman had.
been foully murdered, but really because a vain
and ambitious and rapidly increasing nation,
living on an arid and insufficient soil, had come
to consider themselves the master-spirits of
humanity, and therefore entitled to possess the
earth, or at least give law to all other nations.
"We are doing wrong, but it is necessary to do wrong, and we shall make amends as soon as our military necessities have been served."