It is a world calamity, indeed, but a calamity, since it has
come, to be spiritualized and utilized for the benefit of the future
society of mankind. It must be made to serve a purpose in helping to
liberate the world from sentimentalism, ignorance, close-mindedness, and
cant.

II

One night we entered the danger zone. There had been an entertainment in
the little salon which, packed with passengers, had gradually achieved
the temperature and humidity of a Turkish bath. For the ports had been
closed as tight as gaskets could make them, the electric fans, as usual,
obstinately "refused to march." After the amateur speechmaking and
concert pieces an Italian violinist, who had thrown over a lucrative
contract to become a soldier, played exquisitely; and one of the French
sisters we had seen walking the deck with the mincing steps of the
cloister sang; somewhat precariously and pathetically, the Ave Maria.
Its pathos was of the past, and after she had finished, as we fled into
the open air, we were conscious of having turned our backs irrevocably
yet determinedly upon an era whose life and convictions the music of the
composer so beautifully expressed. And the sister's sweet withered face
was reminiscent of a missal, one bright with colour, and still shining
faintly. A missal in a library of modern books!

On deck a fine rain was blowing through a gap in our burlap shroud, a
phosphorescent fringe of foam hissed along the sides of the ship, giving
the illusory appearance of our deadlights open and ablaze, exaggerating
the sinister blackness of the night. We were, apparently, a beacon in
that sepia waste where modern undersea monsters were lurking.

There were on board other elements which in the normal times gone by
would have seemed disquieting enough. The evening after we had left New
York, while we were still off the coast of Long Island, I saw on the poop
a crowd of steerage passengers listening intently to harangues by
speakers addressing them from the top of a pile of life rafts.
Armenians, I was told, on their way to fight the Turks, all recruited in
America by one frenzied woman who had seen her child cut in two by a
German officer. Twilight was gathering as I joined the group, the sea
was silvered by the light of an August moon floating serenely between
swaying stays. The orator's passionate words and gestures evoked wild
responses from his hearers, whom the drag of an ancient hatred had
snatched f