Yet underneath all the wild recriminations prompted by fear and hate, there is brotherhood. For at the worst what do all these charges mean? That a few foolish men without vision have slipped into power and direct the great beast-machine that kills. That Frankenstein is apt at all times to wild, primitive cruelty. What may it be when foolish, hard theorists are its masters? Yet, for all that, the people out of whom Frankensteins are made are of one flesh, are all brothers, all parts of the great Life which some call God. Now and then, amidst their fiercest fighting, this becomes plain. It sometimes seems as if the main concern of rulers were to prevent any permanent realisation of this truth; for if the peoples should realise their oneness, war would cease, and there is nothing that stops awkward questions as war does. Yet some day these awkward questions will be asked again, I hope, and Hans and Jack and François and Ivan may come to realise their brotherhood. Let us remind ourselves how now and then they can realise this even in war. “Who will not recall in this connection,” writes Prince Eugéne Troubetzky in the _Hibbert_ (July, 1915), “the touching description of the Christmas festival in the trenches, when the Germans, hearing the English singing their hymns, went out to meet them and heartily shook their enemies by the hand? Similar scenes have occurred more than once between the Russians and the Germans. At the present moment there lies before me the letter of a Russian soldier which refers to them: ‘What I am going to tell you,’ he says, ‘is a true miracle.’ The ‘miracle’ which had so appealed to his imagination was that, during an armistice, there were ‘handshakes and hearty acclamations on both sides, to which no description could do justice.’ ... From the very heart of war there issues this mighty protest of life against the destructive force of death. But whenever life asserts itself, its object is always to re-establish a living unity. The more violently unity is threatened by war, or by the mutual hate which would tear it asunder, the more powerful becomes the answer of this spiritual force in its effort to re-establish the integrity of mankind. In this we have the explanation of a fact, which at first sight seems incredible, that in time of war the perception of the universal solidarity of mankind reaches a degree of elevation which would hardly be possible in time of peace.”