ers that has
now been let loose in a devastating flood over Europe was steadily
accumulating; but we paid little attention to it. People sometimes speak
of the negotiations of the twelve days before the war as if the whole
secret and cause of the war could be found there; but it is not so.
Statesmen, it is true, are the keepers of the lock-gates, but those
keepers can only delay, they cannot prevent an inundation that has great
natural causes. The world has in it evil enough, and darkness enough.
But it is not so bad and so dark that a slip in diplomacy, a careless
word, or an impolite gesture, can instantaneously, as if by magic,
involve twenty million men in a struggle to the death. It is only
clever, conceited men, proud of their neat little minds, who think that
because they cannot fathom the causes of the war, it might easily have
been prevented. I confess I find it difficult to conceive of the war in
terms of simple right and wrong. We must respect the tides, and their
huge unintelligible force teaches us to respect them.

It is not a war of race. For all our differences with the Germans, any
cool and impartial mind must admit that we have many points of kinship
with them. During the years before the war our naval officers in the
Mediterranean found, I believe, that it was easier to associate on terms
of social friendship with the Austrians than with the officers of any
other foreign navy. We have a passionate admiration for France, and a
real devotion to her, but that is a love affair, not a family tie. We
begin to be experienced in love affairs, for Ireland steadily refuses to
be treated on any other footing. In any case, we are much closer to the
Germans than they are to the Bulgarians or the Turks. Of these three we
like the Turks the best, because they are chivalrous and generous
enemies, which the Germans are not.

It is a war of ideas. We are fighting an armed doctrine. Yet Burke's use
of those words to describe the military power of Revolutionary France
should warn us against fallacious attempts to simplify the issue. When
ideas become motives and are filtered into practice, they lose their
clearness of outline and are often hard to recognize. They leaven the
lump, but the lump is still human clay, with its passions and
prejudices, its pride and its hate. I remember seeing in a provincial
paper, in the early days of the war, two adjacent columns, both dealing
with the war. The first was headed 'A Holy War