in fidgeting, bit upon
an artery and bled to death. Never again would the survivor enter that
sleeping place. Dogs have learned from us that things may stand for
thoughts.

Anything that persuades the British people to spend two minutes a
year in thought is a good thing; for thinking is not congenial to us.
Feeling is; and feeling may perhaps be described as thinking about
thinking. We feel still, as we felt at the time, the wholesale,
hapless, heroic and entirely monstrous sacrifice of our young men; but
it is out of the question to suppose that we thought about them--or,
for that matter, that any nation in the world did; for if we had
thought as we felt the scythe would have stopt in mid-swathe and Death
been robbed of a crowning victory! But we did not think; and we
were not thinking just now when we stood still in the midst of our
interrupted affairs. The act sufficed us. It was a sacrament. An act,
that is, a thing, stood for a thought about a thing--namely heroic,
hapless death. Of such sacraments, maybe, is the kingdom of this
world, but not, I am persuaded, the Kingdom of Heaven; and assuredly
not of such, nor of any amount of it, will be a League of Nations
which is anything more than a name.

The thought, or the feeling, of those two minutes here in the village,
or in the city eight miles away, where in full market the same
opportunity was taken, was concerned in all human probability, with
the hapless dead rather than with means to preserve the living from
hapless and unnecessary death; and yet, so curiously are we wrought
out of emotion, sensibility and habit, some good besides piety may
come out of a memorial Eleventh of November. Pitying, recording,
respecting the dead or perhaps the bereaved, it may presently become
a fixed idea with us that avoidable death is taboo. It may be borne
in upon us on the next occasion when stung pride, outraged feeling or
panic fear is sweeping like a plague over our land, that nothing
but sorrow and loss was gained by the Four Years War. That is just
possible, but no more than that, we being what we are. Yet, unless we
learn to think rather of life than of death, there is no other way. As
in religion, faith comes before works, and you must fall in love with
God if you are to believe in Him, so it is in politics. Emotional
conviction must precede action. And the conviction to be established
is that war is a crime and in some nations, a vice.

In the Middle Ages a great an