But perhaps you think that though these things might have happened to you, you would not have deserved them--not in the sense that Central Europe deserves them. Had you been an Austrian your moral fineness would have revolted against your countrymen's war of opportunism and aggression. Perhaps! But men act in crowds and the probabilities are against you. All the enemy peoples with whom I have conversed, have claimed as the ideals which urged them to fight precisely the same ideals for which we sacrificed and ultimately triumphed--liberty, justice, righteousness. Had their Governments not convinced them that their inheritance of freedom was in danger, they would not have risked their happiness in carnage. This at least is certain, whatever else is in doubt: the ordinary, home-loving citizen, whatever his nationality, only becomes a soldier and makes himself a target for shell-fire under the compulsion of a lofty motive. It was the bad fortune of the citizens of the Central Powers that their lofty motives were the offspring of lies--lies retailed to them as truth by the criminals and casuists who were their leaders. Had we been of their citizenship, should we have been more alert to discern the falsehood?
That I should write in this spirit, pleading for our late enemies, may cause a slight amazement in a public who have read my war-books. My reason--I will not say my excuse:--is that I have visited our late enemies' need and in the presence of human agony animosity dies. One ceases to question how far their suffering is the outcome of their folly; his sole desperation is to bind up their wounds--especially the wounds of their children. When witnessing death and starvation on the wholesale scale now prevailing in Europe, he forgets his austere self-righteousness and substitutes mercy for justice. "It might have happened to me," he says; "these women might have been my wife, my mother, my sisters, and these children, save for the grace of God, might have been my children."
One never believes that his own calamities are possible until they have happened. He thinks of himself proudly, as an individual immune from the contagion of adversity. It was so that the Russian aristocrats thought of themselves. If in the summer of 1914 the stranger of _The Third Floor Back_ had mysteriously appeared at the Imperial Court in Petrograd and had announced, "Unless you have compassion and share with the outcast, the day will come when there will not be a peasant in Russia as forlorn as you," he would have been laughed ta scorn and sent into exile. Yet that day has come. In Warsaw you may see the princesses, the generals, the fops, the plutocrats, the law-givers of that resplendent Court, clothed in rags, their feet in sodden boots, waiting their turn in the breadline. After such a sight, no reversal of fortunes, however far-fetched, seems impossible. It might happen to anybody. It might happen to me or you. There is even a likelihood that it will happen unless we learn to have compassion. Central Europe will not die patiently of starvation indefinitely. Nations which civilisation has condemned to starve to death have nothing to lose by giving way to violence; they may have something to gain by it The more desperate their need becomes, the more likely they are to risk the gamble. They would at least get the satisfaction before they perished of making other nations, which had been heedless of their misery, as outcast as themselves. There lies the danger.