Americans -- England -- Fiction; Diary fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- England -- Fiction
Each has something to contribute that the other lacks. I really think
that we, in our sense of the dignity of the individual man, in
willingness to forego shades and differences of taste for the sake of
something greater, have outgrown you. You, with your keen insight, had
divined the need of democracy, had accepted it in theory, but found the
inevitable consequences hard to accept. Nothing is more agreeable than
good taste; perhaps there are things more profoundly important. Dare I
say that I think we have out-stripped you in generosity of act and of
thought?
But you are greater than we, and your life runs in deeper channels than
our own, in that you keep faith with the past, refusing to let the
hard-won spiritual achievement of the race be swept away by the
externalism of the present. To you, as to no other people, we look to
save the world from the terrible material forces, without conscience,
without insight, which threaten to dominate the whole of life. You who
refuse to give up fine standards of an elder day are the influence that
we of America greatly need, for in matters intellectual, we are all too
prone to be led, and have been too much cowed by this later
Germany--who forgets.
February 1. We are living on, as best we may, through cold and thaw and
cold again. The horror of that January night, when human beings and
birds wakened, with fear dropping from the sky, when innocent women and
children were killed by bombs from German Zeppelins, lingers and grows
deeper. The tension was greatest for those who could not hear what the
birds heard, but listened to the great outcry of blackbirds, pheasants,
and other winged things, to the loud cawing of the rooks, and wondered
and waited in nameless anguish. There seems to be no refuge in earth or
sky or sea. Can this world of shot and shell and conquering chemicals
be that world that was so beautiful, and that suddenly seemed so
strangely _safe_ when you came into my life?
March 10. Such days of excitement and of strain! My little house has
performed its supreme service,--has sheltered a body, while the soul
was going out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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