is but the formulated utterance of the still, the unwhispered prayer in
the heart of each man on the tented field--"Through death to life, even
through death to life, as my country fares on its great path through
the thickening shadows to the greater light, to the higher
freedom!"--is this a mockery? Yet such is the prayer of armies. War
so considered ceases to be an action continually to be deplored,
regretted, or forgiven, ceases to be the offspring of human weakness or
human crime, and the sentence of the Greek orator recovers its living
and consoling power--"Of the dead who have fallen in battle the wide
earth itself is the sepulchre; their tomb is not the grave in which
they are laid, but the undying memory of the generations that come
after them. They perish, snatched in a moment, in the height of
achievement, not from their fear, but from their renown. Fortunate!
And you who have lost them, you, who as mortal have been born subject
unto disaster, how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so
glorious a shape!"

Thus the great part which war has played in human history, in art, in
poetry, is not, as Rousseau maintains, an arraignment of the human
heart, not necessarily the blazon of human depravity, but a testimony
to man's limitless capacity for devotion to other ends than existence
for existence' sake--his pursuit of an ideal, perpetually.

Sec. 3. COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR

Those critics of the relations of State to State, of nation to nation,
to whom I have more than once referred, have recently found in their
condemnation of diplomacy and war a remarkable and powerful ally.
Amongst the rulers of thought, the sceptred sovereigns of the modern
mind, Count Tolstoi occupies, in the beginning of the twentieth
century, a unique position, not without exterior resemblance to that of
Goethe in the beginning of the nineteenth, or to that of Voltaire in
the great days of Louis XV. In the gray and neutral region where the
spheres of religion and ethics meet and blend, his words, almost as
soon as spoken, rivet the attention, quicken the energies, or provoke
the hostility of one-half the world--when he speaks, he speaks not to
Russia merely, but to Europe, to America, and to the wide but undefined
limits of Greater Britain. Of no other living writer can this be said.
Carlyle had no such extended sway in his lifetime, nor had Hugo so
instantly a universal hearing.

How then does Tolstoi regard W