Page:The War and the Future (Masefield, 1918).djvu/62

50 on this earth, and that we are here truly linked man to man, and not divided up nation by nation. We are one body of humanity.

There is a fifth lie, that we are a greedy people, who ask you Americans to starve, while we feast on white bread and other delicacies. The answer to that is, that no white bread has been made in England for at least eighteen months, and that there is no feasting there. There is no home in all that land that is not the sadder for this war.

There is no need to lie about a nation any more than there is any need to lie about a man. The truth emerges above any lie.

I know my nation's faults as well as I know my own. They are the faults of a set and of a system. They are faults of head, they are not faults of heart. When I think of those faults I think of a long graveyard in France, a hundred miles long, where simple, good, kind, ignorant Englishmen by the thousand and the hundred thousand lie in every attitude of rest and agony, for ever and for ever and for ever. They did not know where Belgium is, nor what Germany is, nor even what England is. They were told that a great country had taken a little country by the throat, and that it was up to