Amiens, so near
the high-water mark of the high tide of barbarism, in that night
of terror just before the turning of the tide. For the truth which
thus grew clearer with travel is rightly represented by the metaphor
of the artillery, as the thunder and surf of a sea beyond the world.
Whatever else the war was, it was like the resistance of something
as solid as land, and sometimes as patient and inert as land,
against something as unstable as water, as weak as water; but also as
_strong_ as water, as strong as water is in a cataract or a flood.
It was the resistance of form to formlessness; that version or
vision of it seemed to clarify itself more and more as I went on.
It was the defence of that same ancient enclosure in which stood
the broken columns of the Roman forum and the column in the
Paris square, and of all other such enclosures down to the domestic
enclosures of my own dog and donkey. All had the same design,
the marking out of a square for the experiment of liberty;
of the old civic liberty or the later universal liberty.
I knew, to take the domestic metaphor, that the watchdog of the West
had again proved too strong for the wild dogs of the Orient.
For the foes of such creative limits are chaos and old night, whether they
are the Northern barbarism that pitted tribal pride and brutal drill
against the civic ideal of Paris, or the Eastern barbarism that brought
brigands out of the wilds of Asia to sit on the throne of Byzantium.
And as in the other case, what I saw was something simpler and
larger than all the disputed details about the war and the peace.
A man may think it extraordinary, as I do, that the natural dissolution
of the artificial German Empire into smaller states should have
actually been prevented by its enemies, when it was already accepted
in despair by its friends. For we are now trying hard to hold
the Prussian system together, having hammered hard for four mortal
years to burst it asunder. Or he may think exactly the opposite;
it makes no difference to the larger fact I have in mind.
A man may think it simply topsy-turvy, as I do, that we should
clear the Turks out of Turkey, but leave them in Constantinople.
For that is driving the barbarians from their own rude tillage
and pasturage, and giving up to them our own European and Christian city;
it is as if the Romans annexed Parthia but surrendered Rome.
But he may think exactly the opposite; and the larger and simpler
truth will st