That is what he says, clearly, in many passionate paragraphs; and I can bear witness that his point of view is shared by many other soldiers who fought in France. These men were thinking hard when day by day they were close to death. In their dug-outs and ditches they asked of their own souls enormous questions. They asked whether the war was being fought really for Liberty, really to crush Militarism, really on behalf of Democracy, or whether to bolster up the same system on our side of the lines which had produced the evils of the German menace. Was it not a conflict between rival Powers imbued with exactly the same philosophy of Imperialism and Force? Was it not the product of commercial greed, diplomatic fears and treacheries and intrigues (conducted secretly over the heads of the peoples) and had not the German people been led on to their villainy by the same spell-words and “dope” which had been put over our peoples, so that the watch-words of “patriotism,” “defensive warfare” and “Justice” had been used to justify this massacre in the fields of Europe by the Old Men of all nations, who used the Boys as pawns in their Devil’s game? The whole structure of Europe had been wrong. The ministers of the Christian churches had failed Christ by supporting the philosophy of Force, and diplomatic wickedness and old traditions of hatred. All nations were involved in this hark-back to the jungle-world, and Germany was only most guilty because first to throw off the mask, most efficient in the mechanism of Brute-government, most logical in the damnable laws of that philosophy which poisoned the spirit of the modern world.
That was the conclusion to which, rightly or wrongly--I think rightly--many men arrived in their secret conferences with their own souls when death stood near the door of their dug-outs.
That sense of having fought for ideals which were not real in the purpose of the war embittered them; and they were most bitter on their home-coming, after Armistice, or after Peace, when in England they found that the victory they had won was being used not to inaugurate a new era of liberty, but to strengthen the old laws of “Might and Right,” the old tyrannies of government without the consent of peoples, the old Fetish worship of hatred masking under the divine name of Patriotism. Disillusionment, despair, a tragic rage, filled the hearts of fighting men who after all their sacrifices found themselves unrewarded, unemployed, and unsatisfied in their souls. Out of this psychological distress have come civil strife and much of the unrest which is now at work.