Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/81

 of future wisdom. But they are not our immediate business. Enough for the present to remember that we were playing with unrealities while this crime of all history was being prepared.

All our civilisation of that time, however disturbed, had in it a principle of growth and reconciliation. The temper of these countries might have permitted inflammatory verbiage, and even scattered anarchical outbursts, but it would have revolted to sanity at the first actual shedding of blood.

And now every landmark has been submerged in an Atlantic of blood. There has been forced upon us a dispensation in which our very souls are steeped in blood. The horizon of the future, such horizon as is discernible, is visible only through a mist of blood. Now this was not a war demanded by the peoples of the world. It was not, like the Great Revolution, created by the universal uprising of oppressed men, to be marred and to pass over into murder, lust and tyranny. It was not like the old wars of religion. The sort of religion that tortures its enemies and puts them to death no longer flourishes under the standard of the Cross. It does flourish under that of the Crescent, as the corpses of eight hundred thousand slain Armenians terribly testify. There was indeed before the war one people in Europe, but only one, whose leaders preached war as a national duty and function. How far the militarism of his rulers had