too much.

TUMULTY. You mean that talk about fuse caps being on board might have been
true? Would it matter now?

EX-PRES. Yes. It was a horrible thing in any case--disproportionate, like
most other acts of war--and it did immeasurable harm to those who thought
to benefit. But this--I still only guess--might do too much good--bring
things a little nearer to proportion again, which the Treaty did not try
to do.... What I've been realising these last two years is a terrible
thing. You go to war, you get up to it from your knees--God driving you to
it--unable, yes, unable to do else. Your will is to do right, your cause
is just, you are a united nation, a people convinced, glad, selfless, with
hearts heroic and clean. And then war takes hold of it, and it all changes
under your eyes; you see the heart of your people becoming fouled, getting
hard, self-righteous, revengeful. Your cause remains, in theory, what it
was at the beginning; but it all goes to the Devil. And the Devil makes on
it a pile that he can make no otherwise--because of the virtue that is in
it, the love, the beauty, the heroism, the giving-up of so much that man's
heart desires. That's where he scores! Look at all that valiance, that
beauty of life gone out to perish for a cause it knows to be right; think
of the generosity of that giving by the young men; think of the faithful
courage of the women who steel themselves to let them go; think of the
increase of spirit and selflessness which everywhere rises to meet the
claim. All over the land which goes to war that is happening (and in the
enemy's land it is the same), making war a sacred and a holy thing. And
having got it so sanctified, then the Devil can do with it almost what he
likes. That's what he has done, Tumulty. If angels led horses by the
bridle at the Marne (as a pious legend tells), at Versailles the Devil had
his muzzled oxen treading out the corn. And of those--I was one! Yes; war
muzzles you. You cannot tell the truth; if you did, it wouldn't be
believed. And so, finally, comes peace; and over that, too, the Devil runs
up his flag--cross-bones and a skull.

TUMULTY (_struggling in the narrow path between wrong and right_).
But what else, Governor, is your remedy? We had to go to war; we were left
with no choice in the matter.

EX-PRES. No, we _had_ no choice. And what others had any choice?--
what people, I mean? But that is what everyone--once we were at war--
refused to remember. And