But these things are getting home, Cornelia, they are telling on us all.
Little portents show the weakening of the fibre here and there. I am
feeling it myself, while all the time fighting against it.
Of course the chief object of these diabolical visitations is just that,
so to weaken the moral stamina that we people will cry for peace at any
price. That cry will never be heard in this country, Cornelia, not if
he sends his aerial torpedoes hurtling through the sky, world without
end.
There is no grumbling, surprisingly little protest anywhere. Our people
accept these things as part of the horrible business in which we are
presently engaged. They don’t even know how to hate properly. We have
a German prison camp nearby, the men being employed in the woods,
cutting and preparing the timber of which so many of our finest
properties are now being denuded. These men are scared to death in the
raids, but though you may hear an occasional hope expressed that a bomb
might fall on the prison camp, I question whether, if you drove it home,
you would find they really desired such a thing to happen. We are not
successful haters; we are only clean fighters, and desperate lovers of
peace.
Can you accept that paradoxical presentment which is an actual
description of our mental attitude?
The children in the war zone here are beginning to exercise us; some of
them are really subnormal now, like their poor little brothers and
sisters in the other countries. Those who can, remove them to safer
places, sending them often to relations in remote parts of the country.
Children quickly droop when their sleeping hours are shortened or much
disturbed.
The school teachers find them either restless or extremely languid after
an air raid; and cannot urge them to concentrate on their lessons. One
wee chap in our cellar, in his pajamas the other night, said
pathetically to his mother, with eyes heavy with sleep: "Mummy, you
won’t get me up next night, will you, till they are really here?"
No, I am not hearing regularly from Himself. There has been no letter
for weeks and weeks. Whether they are being torpedoed when written, or
not written at all, I don’t know. There is only the blank wall of
silence. How much can the human heart stand, I wonder? We are amazing
creatures, bound by "cords which come from out eternity."
*XVI*
Yes, I have read Sir Oliver Lodge’s book and had some correspondence
with him about it. Somehow he got it into his head that I had written a
rather brutal, unsigned article on it in the _Daily Mail_. Writing to
refute this, I set forth my views on spiritualism and the intervention
of mediums between us and those who have passed on. We say "gone away"
in Scotland, and I think I like it better. He sent me a long letter in
reply. I will enclose you a copy.
I don’t think there is any road that way. The only key to the grave was
left on the stone of the sepulchre on the Resurrection morning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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