Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/136

Counter-Currents home destroyed; it nerved the arm of the French soldier who knew his home in peril. The killing of the first women and children at Scarborough sent a host of tardy volunteers into the British army. Such indiscriminate slaughter, though it represents a negligible loss to a nation, is about the only thing on earth which the least valiant men cannot stomach.

The Lusitania children, lying in pitiful rows to await identification in Queenstown, little meek and sodden corpses buffeted out of comeliness by the waves, awoke in the hearts of the men who looked at them a passion of anger and hate which life is too short to appease. The brutal shooting of an English nurse was followed by an illogical rush of young Englishmen to the colours. And the mere 120