been made, there remains a vast amount of jerry-built and ready-made
borrowed stuff in most of people's philosophies of the war. The systems
of authentic opinion in this world of thought about the war are like
comparatively rare thin veins of living mentality in a vast world of
dead repetitions and echoed suggestions. And that being the case, it is
quite possible that history after the war, like history before the war,
will not be so much a display of human will and purpose as a resultant
of human vacillations, obstructions, and inadvertences. We shall still
be in a drama of blind forces following the line of least resistance.

One of the people who is often spoken of as if he were doing an enormous
amount of concentrated thinking is "the man in the trenches." We are
told--by gentlemen writing for the most part at home--of the most
extraordinary things that are going on in those devoted brains, how they
are getting new views about the duties of labour, religion, morality,
monarchy, and any other notions that the gentleman at home happens to
fancy and wished to push. Now that is not at all the impression of the
khaki mentality I have reluctantly accepted as correct. For the most
part the man in khaki is up against a round of tedious immediate duties
that forbid consecutive thought; he is usually rather crowded and not
very comfortable. He is bored.

The real horror of modern war, when all is said and done, is the
boredom. To get killed our wounded may be unpleasant, but it is at
any rate interesting; the real tragedy is in the desolated fields, the
desolated houses, the desolated hours and days, the bored and desolated
minds that hang behind the melee and just outside the melee. The
peculiar beastliness of the German crime is the way the German war cant
and its consequences have seized upon and paralysed the mental movement
of Western Europe. Before 1914 war was theoretically unpopular in every
European country; we thought of it as something tragic and dreadful.
Now everyone knows by experience that it is something utterly dirty and
detestable. We thought it was the Nemean lion, and we have found it
is the Augean stable. But being bored by war and hating war is quite
unproductive _unless you are thinking about its nature and causes
so thoroughly that you will presently be able to take hold of it and
control it and end it._ It is no good for everyone to say unanimously,
"We will have no more war," unless you have thought