es to acute personal grief; but they only
embittered those who knew that the young men were having their teeth
set on edge because their parents had eaten sour political grapes. Then
think of the young men themselves! Many of them had no illusions about
the policy that led to the war: they went clear-sighted to a horribly
repugnant duty. Men essentially gentle and essentially wise, with really
valuable work in hand, laid it down voluntarily and spent months forming
fours in the barrack yard, and stabbing sacks of straw in the public
eye, so that they might go out to kill and maim men as gentle as
themselves. These men, who were perhaps, as a class, our most efficient
soldiers (Frederick Keeling, for example), were not duped for a moment
by the hypocritical melodrama that consoled and stimulated the others.
They left their creative work to drudge at destruction, exactly as they
would have left it to take their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship.
They did not, like some of the conscientious objectors, hold back
because the ship had been neglected by its officers and scuttled by
its wreckers. The ship had to be saved, even if Newton had to leave his
fluxions and Michael Angelo his marbles to save it; so they threw away
the tools of their beneficent and ennobling trades, and took up the
blood-stained bayonet and the murderous bomb, forcing themselves to
pervert their divine instinct for perfect artistic execution to the
effective handling of these diabolical things, and their economic
faculty for organization to the contriving of ruin and slaughter. For
it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy that the very talents they were
forced to prostitute made the prostitution not only effective, but
even interesting; so that some of them were rapidly promoted, and found
themselves actually becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for
it, like Napoleon and all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of
themselves. For many of them there was not even this consolation. They
"stuck it," and hated it, to the end.

Evil in the Throne of Good

This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it
in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own hands, or
witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to obtrude their
own woes. Nevertheless, even when sitting at home in safety, it was not
easy for those who had to write and speak about the war to throw
away their highest conscience, and deliberately wo