they will not get it. Whatever
else this betrayal means it does not mean peace. The Poles have
raised revolution after revolution, when three colossal Empires
prevented them from being a nation at all. It is not in the realm of
sanity to suppose that, if we make them half a nation, they will not
some day attempt to be a whole nation. But we shall come back to the
place where we started, after another cycle of terror and torment and
abominable butchery--and to a place where we might, in peace and
perfect safety, stand firm today.

"Not by any act of English public opinion" would Poland be weakened,
not by any act of English opinion Prussia strengthened or Ireland
oppressed. It was the horror of the situation that no act of English
public opinion seemed possible, for the organs of action were
stultified. When they _could_ act by fighting and by dying Englishmen
had done it grandly. Not all that they had done had, Chesterton
believed, been lost. Because of them the Cross once more had replaced
the crescent over the Holy City of Jerusalem, because of them Alsace
and Lorraine were French once more and Poland lived again. But their
sufferings and their death had not availed yet to save England.

And what is theirs, though banners blow on Warsaw risen again, Or
ancient laughter walks in gold through the vineyards of Lorraine,
Their dead are marked on English stones, their loves on English
trees, How little is the prize they win, how mean a coin for these--
How small a shrivelled laurel-leaf lies crumpled here and curled;
They died to save their country and they only saved the world.*

[* _Collected Poems_, pp. 79-80, "The English Graves."]

In the _New Witness_ he wrote (July 25, 1919):

On Peace Day I set up outside my house two torches, and twined them
with laurel; because I thought at least there was nothing pacifist
about laurel. But that night, after the bonfire and the fireworks had
faded, a wind grew and blew with gathering violence, blowing away the
rain. And in the morning I found one of the laurelled posts torn off
and lying at random on the rainy ground; while the other still stood
erect, green and glittering in the sun. I thought that the pagans
would certainly have called it an omen; and it was one that strangely
fitted my own sense of some great work half fulfilled and half
frustrated. And I thought vaguely of that man in Virgil, who pray