But there are two very noble traits in men, or in the best of them: a fundamental love of truth and a refusal to accept defeat. So presently such men began to shake off despair and to look about them clear-sightedly, like Noah and his companions after they had emerged from the Ark. And their love of truth, burning more clearly now that the lamp was less encrusted with illusions, showed them some very heartening facts: that the thirty centuries of recorded human life were not as barren a waste as all that; that always, as far back as eye could see, even in the midst of war, pestilence and external chaos, some men had laboured patiently, and for no other reward than the satisfaction of their love of truth, to guard and, bee-like, add a few drops to the small store of knowledge transmitted to them; that explorers had charted the earth and its seas, and astronomers mapped the movements of the stars; that to have worked up from nothing more than a few primitive sounds to the indescribable beauty of a Mozart symphony was an achievement beyond all praise. True, men were also beasts. Nothing could justify this war or ever excuse it. It was unmitigatedly evil, a crime without a reason, for which not one or two or a dozen, but all men, were responsible. But there, too, was that other side of men, that grazed divinity. All was not lost, though ten million human lives were. Civilization, many said gravely, might come to an end. Sad, if true, but, at bottom, what of it? It would only be one civilization. Another would follow. For what goes on indestructibly is the steady soul of man, loving truth and never defeated. So I conceive such men as meditating for a little while before going back to their patient work. These, whether they knew it or not, were themselves among the lonely guarders of the flame. But others besides them, many others among the rest of us, have profited by our disillusionment. Indeed, we have profited more than they, since their lives had always a noble directive never entirely obscured, ours none. One thing that we have gained is the spirit of wholesome mockery for grandiloquent twaddle. This bubbled up to us perhaps from that great mass beneath, which has moments when it is not inarticulate. In Italy, some time about the weary middle of the war, when, as always, generals, politicians, journalists, and diplomats at banquets never opened their mouths or lifted their pens save to speak or write of ‘the Cause of Liberty, Justice and Civilization’ and all the rest of it, a ribald soldiers’ song suddenly swept the country and set it rocking with tonic mirth, though how the song got about so universally is a mystery, since it could not be sung in public. It had many verses, all equally scurrilous, but it will suffice to quote one, the best known: _Il General Cadorna_ _Scrisse a la Regina:_ _‘Se vuol veder Trieste_ _Si compri una cartolina.’_ _Ah! Ah! Ah!_ _Ah! Ah! Ah!_