A man of generous instincts, artistic tastes, and
unsteady nerves too thinly coated with that God-given assurance which
alone fits a man for knowing what is good for the world, he had become
gradually haunted by the thought that he was not laying down his own
life, but only the lives of his own and other peoples' sons. And the
consideration that he was laying them down for the benefit of their own
future had lost its grip on him. At moments he was still able to see
that the war he had so long supported had not yet attained sufficient
defeat of the Prussian military machine to guarantee that future; but
his pity and distress for all these young lives, cut down without a
chance to flower, had grown till he had become, as it were, a gambler.
What good--he would think--to secure the future of the young in a Europe
which would soon have no young! Every country was suffering
hideously--the criminal country not least, thank God! Suppose the war
were to go on for another year, two, three years, and then stop from
sheer exhaustion of both sides, while all the time these boys were being
killed and maimed, for nothing more, perhaps, than could be obtained
to-day. What then? True, the Government promised victory, but they never
promised it within a year. Governments did not die; what if they were to
go on promising it a year hence, till everybody else was dead! Did
history ever show that victory in the present could guarantee the
future? And even if not so openly defeated as was desirable, this
damnable Prussianism had got such a knock that it could never again do
what it had in the past. These last, however, were but side reflections,
toning down for him the fact that his nerves could no longer stand this
vicarious butchery of youth. And so he had gradually become that
"traitor to his country, a weak-kneed Peace by Negotiation man."
Physically his knees really were weak, and he used to smile a wry smile
when he read the expression.

John Rudstock, of vigorous physique, had opposed the war, on principle,
from the start, not because, any more than Wilderton, he approved of
Prussianism, but because, as an essentially combative personality, he
opposed everything that was supported by a majority; the greater the
majority, the more bitterly he opposed it; and no one would have been
more astonished than he at hearing that this was his principle. He
preferred to put it that he did not believe in opposing Force by Force.
In peace-time he