Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/133

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When viewed in its whole immensity, the present War is an enormous, never-ending drama, with its action never ceasing, yet always changing with almost kaleidoscopic rapidity. Its great sea of dramatic power, of horrifying, maddening tragedy, of comedy that can evoke but a slight response from hearts already sick with the incongruity of the whole thing, is constantly fed by millions of tiny, individual streams of suffering, short-running and becoming lost in the great ocean of the world sorrow.

There is, indeed, a strong element of incongruity about war. War is a reversion to "man's primal state;" it evokes the basest instincts that in times not martial lie slumbering within the heart of man. But it cannot kill entirely his instincts for good. It can stun them temporarily, it can rob man of his ideas of the beautiful and the noble, substitute for them the bare instinct of self-preservation, now distorted and swelled to unbecoming proportions, drown his humanizing traits in the sight of blood and of torn flesh, in the incessant hell of battle.

And yet, even under these conditions, the drama of war often presents peculiar, tiny twists and turns of its action, unfolds before our eyes little pictures that we cannot help admiring, despite all their grimness, despite what now appears to be the habitual cruelty that seems to have become man's very element. Perhaps these little pictures of individual valor, of individual attainment, strike us so, because they speak to us of the impossibility of converting immense masses of men into regulated fighting machines, because they remind us of the individual units whose willingness to undergo suffering for whatever they think is right or necessary, is so often abused and wantonly squandered. There is unfathomable pathos in these simple, little, individual dramas that run their course within the implacable shadow of the awful War.

Turning, at random, the leaves of the War's grim annals,