Page:No More Parades (Albert & Charles Boni).djvu/15

Rh as, by reaction, causes the horrors to become matters of indifference. If you overstate heroisms you induce indifference to heroisms—of which the late war produced, Heaven knows, plenty enough, so that to be indifferent to them is villainy. Casting about, then, for a medium through which to view this spectacle, I thought of a man—by then dead—with whom I had been very intimate and with whom—as with yourself—I had at one time discussed most things under the sun. He was the English Tory.

Even then—it must have been in September, 1916, when I was in a region called the Salient, and I remember the very spot where the idea came to me—I said to myself: How would all this look in the eyes of X—already dead, along with all English Tories? For, as a medium through which to view struggles that are after all in the end mostly emotional struggles—since as a rule for every twenty minutes of actual fighting you were alone with your emotions, which, being English, you did not express, for at least a month!—as a medium, what could be better than the sceptical, not ungenerous, not cold, not unconvincible eyes of an extinct frame of mind? For by the time of my relative youth when I knew X so intimately, Toryism had gone beyond the region of any practising political party. It said for a year or two: A plague on all your houses, and so expired.

To this determination—to use my friend's eyes as a medium—I am adhering in this series of books. Some Do Not—of which this one is not so much a continuation as a reinforcement—showed you the Tory at home during war-time; this shows you the Tory going up the line. If I am vouchsafed health and intelligence for long enough I propose to show you the same