But if one thing should be apparent by now to any one who lived through those four trying years, it is that the war had no villain or villains responsible for it. There were, indeed, fierce economic and other rivalries between the groups of men called nations, but no one, literally no one, intended or devised that catastrophe. The peoples blundered into war. It was a vast, senseless, chaotic mêlée. History may, and doubtless will, write it down as something clear and logical; in truth it was neither one nor the other. People rather fortuitously but none the less rigidly assembled in groups were at odds with people assembled in other similar groups, about trade, world markets, the congestion of population, and the like; but they were far less clearly so than history is going to give them credit for being, and their being so was only half the story. The other half was emotion. Neither, given the bewilderment over the war, when it came, of positively every one save the regular army officer (whose mind, if you can call it that, is not subject to bewilderment), can I believe that within each comprehensive national group smaller groups of people pulled strings and, callously exploiting the majority, deliberately brought on the war for their own advantage. The result may prove to be the same as though they had done that, but they simply did not. They were as bewildered and upset and emotional as the others. History, I begin to perceive, cares really only for results--with, perhaps, neat, post-factum causes; and that is why I grow sceptical of it, since a result without its causes--all of them--is not truth and lacks significance. Presumably, then (still judging by the past), what we are going to have a couple of centuries hence is a cold, neat, logical, definitive history of the World War, with, running along beside it, a body of literature patriotically chronicling, exalting and deforming its episodes of heroism. And never the twain shall meet, any more than East and West, Highbrow and Lowbrow, mind and matter. And which of the two will be the falser it is hard to say. The former will not explain truly why people made the war, and the latter will _not_ tell what they truly felt. Each will fail even in its own chosen province. A novel like _War and Peace_ may be written that will come amazingly close to the real truth, but the historians will sniff at it because some of its facts are inaccurate and because it is a novel, and the addicts of the patriotic literature will detest and condemn it because it does not picture their ancestors as heroes, but as bewildered mediocre individuals like themselves.