Page:The Book of the Homeless (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916).djvu/153

 was wonderfully exact in the spirit, same roar of guns, same protestations of superiority, same words in the air: race, liberation, justice, and the same mood of trivial demonstration. You could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg, however roundabout the route. “You mean Petrograd,” would say the booking-clerk. Shortly after the fall of Adrianople a friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some “café turc” at the end of his lunch.

—“Monsieur veut dire café balkanique,” the patriotic waiter corrected him austerely.

I will not say that I had not seen something of that instructive aspect in the war of the Balkans, both in its first and even in its second phase. But those with whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to see in it the evidence of an alarmist cynicism. As to alarm I pointed out that fear is natural to man and even salutary. It has done as much as courage for the preservation of races and institutions. But from a charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively. It is like a charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of disgraceful calamity that must be carried off by a jaunty bearing—a sort of thing I am not capable of. Rather than be thought to be a mere jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness of the usual arguments. It had been pointed out to me that those were nations not far removed from a savage state. Their economics were yet at the stage of scratching the earth and feeding pigs. The complex material civilization of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by war. The industry and the finance could not allow themselves to be disorganised by the ambitions of the idle class or even the aspirations, whatever they might be, of the masses.

Very plausible all this sounded. War does not pay. There had been even a book written on that theme—an attempt to put pacifism on a material basis. Nothing more solid could have been imagined on this trading and manufacturing globe. War was bad business! This was final.

But truth to say on this fateful July I reflected but little on the