Let's be
consistent."

"The other fellows asked for it. They attacked first."

"Yes, but we are all involved. Our diplomacy, our secret treaties, our
philosophical dope over the masses, our imperial egotism, our trade
rivalries--all that was a direct challenge of Might against Right. The
Germans are more efficient and more logical--that's all. They prepared
for the inevitable and struck first. We knew the inevitable was coming,
but didn't prepare, being too damned inefficient... I have a leaning
toward religion. Instinctively I'm for Christ. But it doesn't work in
with efficiency and machine-guns."

"It belongs to another department, that's all. We're spiritual and
animal at the same time. In one part of my brain I'm a gentleman. In
another, a beast. It's conflict. We can't eliminate the beast, but we
can control it now and then when it gets too obstreperous, and that's
where religion helps. It's the high ideal--otherworldliness."

"The Germans pray to the same God. Praise Christ and ask for victory."

"Let them. It may do them a bit of good. It seems to me God is above
all the squabbles of humanity--doesn't care a damn about them!--but
the human soul can get into touch with the infinite and the ideal, even
while he is doing butcher's work, and beastliness. That doesn't matter
very much. It's part of the routine of life."

"But it does matter. It makes agony and damnation in the world. It
creates cruelty and tyranny, and all bloody things. Surely if we believe
in God--anyhow in Christian ethics--this war is a monstrous crime in
which all humanity is involved."

"The Hun started it... Let's go and give the glad eye to Marguerite."

At night, in moonlight, Amiens cathedral was touched with a new
spirituality, a white magic beyond all words of beauty. On many nights
of war I walked round the cathedral square, looking up at that grand
mass of masonry with all its pinnacles and buttresses gleaming like
silver and its sculptured tracery like lacework, and a flood of milky
light glamorous on walls in which every stone was clear-cut beyond a
vast shadow-world. How old it was! How many human eyes through many
centuries had come in the white light of the moon to look at this dream
in stone enshrining the faith of men! The Revolution had surged round
these walls, and the screams of wild women, and their shrill laughter,
and their cries for the blood of aristocrats, had risen from this
square. Pageants of kingship and ro