SECOND THOUGHTS ON THIS WAR (From _Scribner’s Magazine_, 1915.) § 1. I went out into the wind—the first south-west wind after many days of easterly drought. All the morning it had rained, but now the gray sky was torn; the sun shone, and long white clouds were driven over pools of blue, or piled up into heavenly mountains. The land of moor and valley, the hills and fields and woods gleamed in the sunlight, or were shadowed dark by the drifting clouds. Moss on the top of the old gray walls was wet, but warm to the touch; the birds—daws, pigeons, hawks—flung themselves at the wind. And the scent! Every frond of the bracken, each sprig of the gorse and the heather, all the soughing boughs of young pine-tree and oak, and the grass, gray-powdered with rain, were exhaling their fragrance so that each breath drawn was a draught of wild perfume. And in one’s heart rose an ecstasy of love for this wind-sweetened earth, for the sun, and the clouds, the rain, and the wind, the trees and the flowering plants, for the streams and the rocks—for this earth which breeds us all, and into which we reabsorb, a passion as untutored, wild, and natural as the love of life in the merest dumb thing that knows nothing of ideals, of country, realms and policies, nothing of war. Germany calls the war “this English war;” we English as fervently believe it a Prussian war, having deep root in Prussian will, and history. One thing is certain: At the last moment the world, desperately balancing, was thrust over the edge of the abyss by a sudden swoop of the Prussian war party. “Pourtales (German Ambassador to Russia) called Sazonoff’s attention in the most serious manner to the fact that nowadays measures of mobilization would be a highly dangerous form of diplomatic pressure; for in that event the purely military consideration of the question by the General Staffs would find expression, and that _if that button were once touched in Germany_ the situation would get out of control.” (Count Szapary, Austrian Ambassador to Russia. Austrian Book, No. 28.)[8] In a Europe teeming with mutual fears a few men, perhaps not a score in all, have had the power to strip from millions their meed of life on this wind-sweetened earth! For myths conceived in a few ambitious brains, and the “strike-first” theory of a knot of strategists, the whole world must pay with grief and agony! What can we do, when this war is over, to insure that we shall not again be stampeded by professional soldiers, and those—in whatever country—who dream paper dreams of territory, trade, and glory, caring nothing for the lives of the simple, knowing nothing of the beauty of the earth which is their heritage. -----