Ah! when the awakening came at last, and the diplomats, old vultures, were collected round the council-board to talk, they might congratulate themselves as they audited the balance sheet. Broken up, ground and crushed, these two, three, four generations of men who might have been great, and collaborated in the common cause. So many wounded who would soon succumb, wan wrecks, and so many others who, like myself, would only drag out the shadow of an existence. And all the rest! The ravaged homes, the wives abandoned to the terrors of their widowhood, the old parents dying with curses on their lips, the children delivered over without guidance to life's buffetings, the surplus girls especially, deprived of their natural associates, devoted to the sorrows of debauchery. With many of those who came back safely, the mind at least would be affected, their faith in work sapped, their brutal instincts let loose, and their desire for immediate enjoyment aroused. The public wealth destroyed, want bringing revolt in its train, the emasculated nations incapable of recovering, or even of governing themselves. The snare of revolutions, of frightful social convulsions. What could one depend upon henceforth? There would be no law or rule of any sort. The religions, Art, Science, all these would be humiliated before Force. The Ideal broken and trampled underfoot. An infected breath tainting the sacred legacies of the past. The genius of destruction hovering over a civilisation in ruins. That was what War meant! A monstrous survival of primitive errors. How I abhorred them all of a sudden, the politics and morals which revere this scourge of God. As to war raising the hearts of individuals and nations, alas, who could answer for it? For one soul purified, how many others would be vilified! And, above all, how terrible was the remedy, a thousand times worse than the complaint. War might be necessary, and it was in this case, for the defence of our native land. Then it might give birth to the most noble effervescence. Then in its radiance virtues might thrive like plants beneath a tropical sun. But it remained no less the supreme calamity; the triumph of the powers of Death. Care must be taken not to magnify it, not to flatter the fluctuating mind of the nations with bellicose dreams. We must needs greet a like catastrophe with a fiercely hostile heart, abhor it, blaspheme against it, we miserable creatures, who had but one life to live, one brief chance of being happy. CHAPTER V A GIRL OF 1915