So we had failed--had won the fight and lost the prize; the garland of the war was withered before it was gained. The lost years, the broken youth, the dead friends, the women's overshadowed lives at home, the agony, and bloody sweat--all had gone to darken the stains which most of us had thought to scour out of the world that our children would live in. Many men felt, and said to each other, that they had been fooled. They had believed that their country was backing them. They had thought, as they marched into Germany, "Now we shall show old Fritz how you treat a man when you've thrashed him." They would let him into the English secret, the tip that the power and glory are not to the bully. As some of them looked at the melancholy performance which followed, our Press and our politicians parading at Paris in moral _pickelhauben_ and doing the Prussianist goose-step by way of _pas de triomphe_, they could not but say in dismay to themselves: "This is our doing. We cannot wish the war unwon; and yet--if we had shirked, poor old England, for all we know, might not have come to this pass. So we come home draggle-tailed, sick of the mess that we were unwittingly helping to make when we tried to do well." CHAPTER XIV OUR MODERATE SATANISTS I Satanism is one of the words that most of us simple people have heard others use; we guiltily feel that we ought to know what it means, but do not quite like to ask, lest we expose the nakedness of the land. Then comes Professor Gilbert Murray, one of the few learned men who are able to make a thing clear to people not quite like themselves, and tells us all about it in a cheap, small book, easy to read. It seems that the Satanists, or the pick of the sect, were Bohemian Protestants at the start, and quite plain, poor men from the country. "Every person in authority met them with rack and sword, cursed their religious leaders as emissaries of the Devil, and punished them for all the things which they considered holy. The earth was the Lord's, and the Pope and Emperor were the vicegerents of God upon the earth. So they were told; and in time they accepted the statement. That was the division of the world. On the one side God, Pope and Emperor, and the army of persecutors; on the other themselves, downtrodden and poor...."