World War, 1914-1918; World War, 1914-1918 -- France; World War, 1914-1918 -- Italy; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
These wounds are still bleeding. They cannot be ignored. They, as
well as the death, suffering, and agony of the long trench combat,
make the faces of the French tense, silent. "To think that they are
still here after a whole year since this happened!" a young Frenchman
exclaimed in bitterness of soul as we looked out over the thickly
scattered graves in the fields around Bercy. To him it was as if a
crazed and drunken marauder had taken possession of his house, burned
a part of it, and still caroused in another wing. The unforgettable,
unforgivable wounds of France!
The French, so clear-seeing, so reasonable even about their own
tragedies, are bitter to the soul when they think of the brutality
done to their _"douce France."_ To the French, quite as much as to
the Bryanited American, war is a senseless, inhuman thing; but it
becomes direfully necessary when the home has been burned and laid
waste. The Gallic spirit cannot understand that spirit of malevolent
destruction which vengefully wreaks its spite against defenseless and
inanimate works of age to be reverenced, of art to be loved. There are
certain scrupulosities of soul in the Latin that divide him from his
enemy, more effectually than a thousand years of life and an entire
world of space.
III
_The Barbarian_
The barbarian, as the Greeks used the word, was not necessarily a
person or a people without civilization. Indeed, certain ancient
peoples known as barbarians had a high degree of luxury, civilization.
The Persians under the barbarian Xerxes were probably quite the equals
in the mechanics of civilization of the Greeks, and the Egyptians could
lay claim to a large amount of what even the Greeks considered culture.
The barbarian was a person or a nation without a spiritual sense in his
values. The barbarian was often strong, able, intelligent, "organized"
as we say, but he was incapable of self-government: the barbarian nations
were ruled despotically. Their position in the world depended upon the
force and the ability of the particular despot who got control of their
destinies. The barbarian peoples were often crude in what is called
fine art. They neither believed in nor practiced those amenities of daily
life which express themselves superficially in manners, more deeply in
sensitive inhibitions, nor those amenities of the soul which are known
as honor, justice, mercy. The barbarian despised as soft and degenerate
such persons as permitted themselves to be trammeled in their conduct by
non-utilitarian considerations. In his primitive state the barbarian's
instinct was to destroy what he could not understand; as he became more
sophisticated, his instinct was to imitate what he could not create.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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