Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
1921
She never lived, maybe, but it is truer to say that she never dies. Norshall she ever die. One may believe in God, though He is hard to find,and in Women, though such as Julie are far to seek.
The glamour of no other evil thing is stronger than the glamour of war.It would seem as if the cup of the world's sorrow as a result of war hadbeen filled to the brim again and again, but still a new generation hasalways been found to forget. A new generation has always been found totalk of the heroisms that the divine in us can manifest in the mouth ofhell and to forget that so great a miracle does not justify our creationof the circumstance.
Yet if ever war came near to its final condemnation it was in 1914-1918.Our comrades died bravely, and we had been willing to die, to put an endto it once and for all. Indeed war-weary men heard the noise of conflictdie away on November 11, 1918, thinking that that end had been attained.It is not yet three years ago; a little time, but long enough forbetrayal.
Long enough, too, for the making of many books about it all, wherein hasbeen recorded such heroisms as might make God proud and such horror asmight make the Devil weep. Yet has the truth been told, after all? Hasthe world realized that in a modern war a nation but moves in uniform toperform its ordinary tasks in a new intoxicating atmosphere? Now andagain a small percentage of the whole is flung into the pit, and, forthem, where one in ten was heavy slaughter, now one in ten is reasonableescape. The rest, for the greater part of the time, live an unnaturallife, death near enough to make them reckless and far enough to make themgay. Commonly men and women more or less restrain themselves because ofto-morrow; but what if there be no to-morrow? What if the dice are heavilyweighted against it? And what of their already jeoparded restraint whenthe crisis has thrown the conventions to the winds and there is littleto lighten the end of the day?
Thus to lift the veil on life behind the lines in time of war is athankless task. The stay-at-homes will not believe, and particularlythey whose smug respectability and conventional religion has been putto no such fiery trial. Moreover they will do more than disbelieve; theywill say that the story is not fit to be told. Nor is it. But then itshould never have been lived. That very respectability, that veryconventionality, that very contented backboneless religion made itpossible—all but made it necessary. For it was those things whichallowed the world to drift into the war, and what the war was nine daysout of ten ought to be thrust under the eyes of those who will notbelieve. It is a small thing that men die in battle, for a man has butone life to live and it is good to give it for one's friends; but it issuch an evil that it has no like, this drifting of a world into a hell towhich men's souls are driven like red maple leaves before the autumnwind.
The old-fashioned pious books made hell stink of brimstone and paintedthe Devil hideous. But Satan is not such a fool. Champagne and Martinisdo not taste like Gregory powder, nor was St. Anthony tempted bysh