“Yes! Let us. Only, to do that in time for the present situation we should have begun five hundred years ago. You can’t put out the fire the ages have kindled as you’d blow out a candle. When you’ve spent centuries in preparing your mine, and fixed a time fuse to make it explode, you’ve nothing to do but to let it go off. This war wasn’t made overnight. The world has been getting ready for it as long as there have been human beings to look askance at one another. Now we’ve got it—with all its horrors, but also with all its compensations.” “Compensations for the lives it has ruined?” “In the lives it has saved—yes. You’ll never get its meaning unless you see it as a great regenerative process.” “Do you mean to tell me that we can only be regenerated by fire and sword and rapine?” “Not at all! We’re regenerated by courage and honor and sacrifice and the sense that every man gets—every Tommy, every poilu, every bluejacket—that he personally is essential to man’s big fight in his struggle upward. It’s one of the queer things of the whole business that out of the greatest wrong human beings can inflict on one another—to go to war with them—there can come the highest benefits to every individual who gets himself ready to receive them. It makes one believe in an intelligence compelling the race toward good, however much we may be determined to go the other way.” He tuned his voice to a new key. “Oh, I’ve never doubted that; and now, old chap, now I—I see it.” I knew what was coming. It was the great subject that could eclipse even that of the war. I had just force to pull the bedclothes up about my mouth and mutter a suffocated, “How?” “What I hinted this morning. It’s all—it’s all come right. I used to think it never would, sometimes. And then—don’t laugh, old boy!—but then I’d say to myself that God would never have made me feel as I did unless He meant something to come of it. Religion keeps telling you to trust; and I did trust—on and off.” Again I had an opportunity; but again such words as rose in me choked themselves back in my throat. I could have told him that she was ready to come to me if I lifted a finger. I knew I should have to tell him sometime, and it occurred to me that it might as well be now. It was the words that failed me, not the intention; or if it was the intention, it was the intention in any degree that made it compulsory. I don’t think he noticed that I said nothing, for he went falteringly on: