Disenchantment

character fed by the gentle and timely rains of plague and famine, tempest and fire; simple lessons of patience and courage conned in the schools of typhus, gout, and stone; not oratorios, perhaps, but homely anthems and rude hymns played on knife and gun, in the long winter nights. Far from me to ‘sin our mercies’ or to call mere twilight dark. Yet dark it may become. For remember that even these poor makeshift schools of character, these second-bests, these halting substitutes for war⁠—remember that the efficiency of every one of them, be it hunger, accident, ignorance, sickness or pain, is menaced by the intolerable strain of its struggle with secular doctors, plumbers, inventors, schoolmasters, and policemen. Every year thousands who would in nobler days have been braced and steeled by manly tussles with smallpox or diphtheria are robbed of that blessing by the great changes made in our drains. Every year thousands of women and children must go their way bereft of the rich spiritual experience of the widow and the orphan. I try not to despond, but when I think of all that Latimer owed to the fire, Regulus to a spiked barrel, Socrates to prison, and Job to destitution and disease⁠—when I think of these things and then think of how many of my poor fellow creatures in our modern world are robbed daily of the priceless discipline of danger, want, and torture, then I ask myself⁠—I cannot help asking myself⁠—whether we are not walking into a very slough of moral and spiritual squalor.

“Once more, I am no alarmist. As long as we have wars to stay our souls upon, the moral evil will not be grave; and, to do the Ministry justice, I see no risk of their drifting into any long or serious peace. But weak or vicious men may come after them, and it is now, in the time of our strength, of quickened insight and deepened devotion, that we must take thought for the leaner years when there may be no killing of multitudes of Englishmen, no breaking up of English homes, no chastening blows to English trade, no making, by thousands, of English widows, orphans, and cripples⁠—when the school may be shut and the rain a drought and the oratorio dumb.”

But what did a few unfashionable curmudgeons count for, against so many gifted divines?

V

And yet all mortal things are subject to decay, even reactions, even decay itself, and there comes a time when the dead Ophelia may justly be said to be not decomposing, but recomposing successfully as violets and so forth. Heirs-apparent grow up into kings and have little heirs of their own who, hearkening to nature’s benevolent law, become stout counter-reactionists in their turn. So now the prewar virilists, the literary braves who felt that they had supped too full of peace, have died in their beds, or lost voice, like the cuckoos in June, and a different breed find voice and pipe up. These are the kind, the numerous kind, whose youth has supped quite full enough of war. For them Bellona has not the mystical charm, as of grapes out of reach, that she had for the Henleys and Stevensons. All the veiled-mistress business is off. Battles have no aureoles now in the sight of young men as they had for the British prelate who wrote that old poem about the “red rain.” The men of the counter-reaction have gone to the school and sat the oratorio out and taken a course of the waters, after the worthy prelate’s prescription. They have seen trenches full of gassed men, and the queue of their friends at the brothel-door in Bethune. At the heart of the magical rose was seated an earwig.

Presently all the complaisant part of our Press may jump to the fact that the game of idealizing war is now, in its turn, a back number. Then we may hear such a thudding or patter of feet as Carlyle describes when Louis XV was seen to be dead and the Court bolted off, ventre à terre, along the corridors of Versailles, to kiss the hand of Louis XVI. And then will come the season of danger. Woe unto Peace, or anyone else, when all men speak well of her, even the base. When Lord Robert Cecil and Mr. Clynes and Sir Hubert Gough stand up for the peace which ex-soldiers desire, it is all right. But what if Tadpoe and Taper stood up for it? What if all the vendors of supposedly popular stuff, all the timid gregarious repeaters of current banalities, all the largest circulations in the solar system were on the side of peace, as well as her old bodyguard of game disregarders of fashion and whimsical stickers-up for Christianity, chivalry, or sportsmanship?

We must remember that, in the course of nature, the proportion of former combatants among us must steadily decline. And war hath no fury like a noncombatant. Can you not already forehear, in the far distance, beyond the peace period now likely to come, the still, small voice of some Henley or Lang of later days beginning to pipe up again with Ancient Pistol’s ancient suggestion: “What? Shall we have incision? Shall we imbrue?” And then a sudden furore, a war-dance, a beating of tom-toms. And so the whole cycle revolving again. “Seest thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is? How giddily a’ turns about all the hot bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty? Sometimes fashioning them like Pharaoh’s soldiers in the reechy painting, sometimes like god Bel’s priests in the old church window; sometimes like the shaven Hercules in the smirched worm-eaten tapestry?” Anything to be in the fashion.

There is only one thing for it. There must still be five or six million ex-soldiers. They are the most determined peace party that ever existed in Britain. Let them clap the only darbies they have⁠—the Covenant of the League of Nations⁠—on to the wrists of