er?

Suddenly, while speaking, she fell into a passionate fit of weeping. She
went on through her tears:

"It will be terrible," she said. "It will last longer than you say.
Every nation will be drawn into it. There will be no voice left to speak
for reason. Every day we shall grow more brutalized, more pitiless. It
will degrade us, crush the soul out of us. Blood and iron! It will
become our God too: the God of all the world. You say we are going into
it with clean hands, this time. How long will they keep clean? The
people who only live for making money: how long do you think they will
remain silent? What has been all the talk of the last ten years but of
capturing German trade. We shall be told that we owe it to our dead to
make a profit out of them; that otherwise they will have died in vain.
Who will care for the people but to use them for killing one another--to
hound them on like dogs. In every country nothing but greed and hatred
will be preached. Horrible men and women will write to the papers crying
out for more blood, more cruelty. Everything that can make for anger and
revenge will be screamed from every newspaper. Every plea for humanity
will be jeered at as 'sickly sentimentality.' Every man and woman who
remembers the ideals with which we started will be shrieked at as a
traitor. The people who are doing well out of it, they will get hold of
the Press, appeal to the passions of the mob. Nobody else will be
allowed to speak. It always has been so in war. It always will be. This
will be no exception merely because it's bigger. Every country will be
given over to savagery. There will be no appeal against it. The whole
world will sink back into the beast."

She ended by rising abruptly and wishing them good-night. Her outburst
had silenced Joan's impish drummer, for the time. He appeared to be
nervous and depressed, but bucked up again on the way to the bus. Greyson
walked with her as usual. They took the long way round by the outer
circle.

"Poor Mary!" he said. "I should not have talked before her if I had
thought. Her horror of war is almost physical. She will not even read
about them. It has the same effect upon her as stories of cruelty."

"But there's truth in a good deal that she says," he added. "War can
bring out all that is best in a people; but also it brings out the worst.
We shall have to take care that the ideals are not lost sight of."

"I wish this wretc