n steely blue by
great clouds. Above, in a weakly luminous silvering, it is crossed by
enormous sweepings of wet mist. The weather is worsening, and more rain
on the way. The end of the tempest and the long trouble is not yet.

"We shall say to ourselves," says one, "'After all, why do we make
war?' We don't know at all why, but we can say who we make it for. We
shall be forced to see that if every nation every day brings the fresh
bodies of fifteen hundred young men to the God of War to be lacerated,
it's for the pleasure of a few ringleaders that we could easily count;
that if whole nations go to slaughter marshaled in armies in order that
the gold-striped caste may write their princely names in history, so
that other gilded people of the same rank can contrive more business,
and expand in the way of employees and shops--and we shall see, as soon
as we open our eyes, that the divisions between mankind are not what we
thought, and those one did believe in are not divisions."

"Listen!" some one broke in suddenly.

We hold our peace, and hear afar the sound of guns. Yonder, the
growling is agitating the gray strata of the sky, and the distant
violence breaks feebly on our buried ears. All around us, the waters
continue to sap the earth and by degrees to ensnare its heights.

"It's beginning again."

Then one of us says, "Ah, look what we've got against us!"

Already there is uneasy hesitation in these castaways' discussion of
their tragedy, in the huge masterpiece of destiny that they are roughly
sketching. It is not only the peril and pain, the misery of the moment,
whose endless beginning they see again. It is the enmity of
circumstances and people against the truth, the accumulation of
privilege and ignorance, of deafness and unwillingness, the taken
sides, the savage conditions accepted, the immovable masses, the
tangled lines.

And the dream of fumbling thought is continued in another vision, in
which everlasting enemies emerge from the shadows of the past and stand
forth in the stormy darkness of to-day.

* * * * *

Here they are. We seem to see them silhouetted against the sky, above
the crests of the storm that beglooms the world--a cavalcade of
warriors, prancing and flashing, the charges that carry armor and
plumes and gold ornament, crowns and swords. They are burdened with
weapons; they send forth gleams of light; magnificent they roll. The
antiquated movements of the war