"Here, in this war, there was no conflict between one faith
and another, but a murderous death-struggle between many nations holding
the same faith, preaching the same gospel, and claiming the same God as
their protector. Let us seek some better truth than that hypocrisy! Let
us, if need be, in honesty, get back to the savage worship of national
gods, the Ju-ju of the tribe."

My own belief is that the war was no proof against the Christian faith,
but rather is a revelation that we are as desperately in need of the
spirit of Christ as at any time in the history of mankind. But I
think the clergy of all nations, apart from a heroic and saintly few,
subordinated their faith, which is a gospel of charity, to national
limitations. They were patriots before they were priests, and their
patriotism was sometimes as limited, as narrow, as fierce, and as
bloodthirsty as that of the people who looked to them for truth and
light. They were often fiercer, narrower, and more desirous of vengeance
than the soldiers who fought, because it is now a known truth that the
soldiers, German and Austrian, French and Italian and British, were sick
of the unending slaughter long before the ending of the war, and would
have made a peace more fair than that which now prevails if it had
been put to the common vote in the trenches; whereas the Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Archbishop of Cologne, and the clergy who spoke from
many pulpits in many nations, under the Cross of Christ, still stoked up
the fires of hate and urged the armies to go on fighting "in the
cause of justice," "for the defense of the Fatherland," "for Christian
righteousness," to the bitter end. Those words are painful to write,
but as I am writing this book for truth's sake, at all cost, I let them
stand....

VI

The entire aspect of the war was changed by the Russian Revolution,
followed by the collapse of the Russian armies and the Peace of
Brest-Litovsk, when for the first time the world heard the strange word
"Bolshevism," and knew not what it meant.

The Russian armies had fought bravely in the first years of the war,
with an Oriental disregard of death. Under generals in German pay,
betrayed by a widespread net of anarchy and corruption so villainous
that arms and armaments sent out from England had to be bribed on their
way from one official to another, and never reached the front, so
foul in callousness of human life that soldiers were put into the
fightin