The extent to which a man can suffer is the precise measure of his merit, and thus it was that our patriots and war-enthusiasts being incapable, by reason of their grossness and vulgarity, of suffering in a spiritual sense, were immune from the misery caused by the war and yet it was they above all others upon whose support the continuance of the war depended.
This was the terrible fatality. The more a man suffered from the war the smaller was his control over it.
Everywhere, those who deserved to suffer did not suffer and those who did not deserve to suffer suffered. And that was why the war went on. Most people were so indifferent that it was impossible to talk to them without anger. I could think of nothing else but the war. I could not escape from its invisible presence. The streets and houses seemed the immaterial creations of some dream, and somewhere behind them the slaughter was going on, and amid the noise of the traffic the throbbing of the bombardment was plainly audible.
Sometimes I felt an impulse to shout from the house-tops like a Hebrew prophet and denounce this most wicked of generations. But the very futility of the idea filled me with mortification.
Our enlightened twentieth century has no use for prophets. Christ Himself would have been arrested as a pacifist or a lunatic if He had spoken His mind in the streets of London. And the clergy would have applauded the imprisonment of a dangerous "pro-German." The scribes and Pharisees were more numerous and more powerful than ever before.
There never was in all the world an infamy as great as the infamy of our war-time Press. A horde of unscrupulous liars and hirelings spat hatred and malice from safe and comfortable positions. They played the hero when no danger threatened. They defied an enemy who could not reach them. They boasted of the deeds they had not done. They gloried in the victories they did not win. They mouthed frantic protestations of injured innocence when they should have felt the burden of guilty shame. They were mawkishly sentimental when they should have felt keen grief and horror. They denounced murder and they urged others to commit murder. They spewed their venomous slime into every spring of healing water. At a time when clear thinking and balanced judgments were needed more desperately than ever before, they squirted into the air thick clouds of lies, and half-truths, and misleading phrases, and judgments distorted by hatred and warped by malice. And as for those who were either lured on to perpetrate the great iniquity by grandiose and seductive falsehoods or were dragged from their homes and families and sent unwilling to the slaughter, these miserable slaves the Press of all countries urged on, one against the other, brutally deaf to their misery, representing them as glad and cheerful when they had reached the extreme of human suffering, magnifying them into heroes of epic proportions (before they donned their dingy garb of war they were "lice" that had to be "combed out"), endowing them with absurdly impossible virtues--when they were just ordinary human beings in misfortune with no ambition except to live in peace and comfort--and at the same time bestowing lofty patronage upon them and calling them "Tommies" and sending them cigarettes, chocolates and advice, as though they were children to be petted, with no will or intelligence of their own.