. . . The
vow is to the man what the song is to the bird, or the bark to the
dog; his voice whereby he is known."* There were two chief marks
whereby it seemed to Chesterton that the Prussian invasion of Belgium
was fundamentally an attack on civilization. Contempt for a promise
was the first. He called it the war on the word.

[* Ibid., 32-33.]

The other mark of barbarism he called the refusal of reciprocity.
"The Prussians," he wrote, "had been told by their literary men that
everything depends upon Mood: and by their politicians that all
arrangements dissolve before 'necessity.'"* This was not merely a
contempt for the word but also an assumption that German necessity
was like no other necessity because the German "cannot get outside
the idea that he, because he is he and not you, is free to break the
law; and also to appeal to the law." Thus the Kaiser at once violated
the Hague Convention openly himself and wrote to the President of the
United States to complain that the Allies were violating it. "For
this principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and
worst of the refusals of reciprocity."**

[* Ibid., 37.]

[* Ibid., p. 60.]

If these two ideas were allowed to prevail they must destroy
civilization and so to Chesterton the war was a crusade and, to his
profound joy, was understood as such by the people of England. The
democratic spirit of our country "is rather unusually sluggish and
far below the surface. And the most genuine and purely popular
movement that we have had since the Chartists has been the enlistment
for this war." Chesterton loved the heroic humour of the trenches:
the cry of "Early Doors" from the boys rushing on death; the term
Blighty for England and congratulations on a severe wound as a "good
Blighty one"; the song under showers of bullets, "When It's Raining
Keep Your Umbrella Up." The English, he once said, had no religion
left except their sense of humour but I think he meant that they hung
out humour somewhat defiantly as a smoke-screen for other things.

Anyhow he doubted neither that the war was worth winning nor that it
could be won by our soldiers and sailors. And with the soldiers and
sailors stood the munition workers and the Trades Unions which had
sacrificed their cherished rights for the war period. If the only
danger to England was on the Home Front it was not, in his eyes, to
be found in the mass of the nation. Nor was he at first too
apprehensive of th