Eleven o'clock in the morning found the village at its field and
household affairs, with birds abroad and dogs at home assisting
in various ways. The plovers wove black and white webs over the
water-meadows, gulls were like drifting snow behind the plow. In a
cottage garden the dog, high on his haunches at the length of his
chain, cocked his ears towards the huswife in the wash-house, hoping
against hope for a miracle. Luxuriously full, the cat slept on the
window-ledge. Meantime a roadman was cleaning a gutter, a thatcher
pegged down his yelm; a milkmaid, driving up the street in a float,
stopped, threw the reins over the pony's quarters, and jumped down,
very trim in her overall and breeches. The church clock struck eleven.
She turned, as if shot, and stood facing the church whose flag
streamed to the south. The roadman straightened himself and leaned
upon his mattock; the huswife shut the back door, and the dog crept
into his barrel. The schoolyard, accustomed at that hour to flood
suddenly with noise, remained empty. But the milkmaid's horse drew
to the hedge for a bite, the birds on the hillside settled about the
halted plow, and the cat slept on.
We are what we are, all of us. Beasts and birds are not sentimental.
Things to them stand for things, not for thoughts about things. I have
seen young rabbits play cross-touch about the stiffened form of
an unfortunate brother. I have seen a barnyard cock flap and crow,
standing upon the dead body of one of his wives. Directly a creature
is dead it ceases to be a creature at all to those which once hailed
it fellow. It becomes part of the landscape in which it lies; and
with certain beasts which we are accustomed to call obscene it becomes
something to eat. But dogs which have lived long with us are not like
that. I knew two dogs which lived in a house together and shared the
same loose-box at night. One night one of them in fidgeting, bit upon
an artery and bled to death. Never again would the survivor enter that
sleeping place. Dogs have learned from us that things may stand for
thoughts.
Anything that persuades the British people to spend two minutes a
year in thought is a good thing; for thinking is not congenial to us.
Feeling is; and feeling may perhaps be described as thinking about
thinking. We feel still, as we felt at the time, the wholesale,
hapless, heroic and entirely monstrous sacrifice of our young men; but
it is out of the question to suppose that we thought about them--or,
for that matter, that any nation in the world did; for if we had
thought as we felt the scythe would have stopt in mid-swathe and Death
been robbed of a crowning victory! But we did not think; and we
were not thinking just now when we stood still in the midst of our
interrupted affairs. The act sufficed us. It was a sacrament. An act,
that is, a thing, stood for a thought about a thing--namely heroic,
hapless death. Of such sacraments, maybe, is the kingdom of this
world, but not, I am persuaded, the Kingdom of Heaven; and assuredly
not of such, nor of any amount of it, will be a League of Nations
which is anything more than a name.
The thought, or the feeling, of those two minutes here in the village,
or in the city eight miles away, where in full market the same
opportunity was taken, was concerned in all human probability, with
the hapless dead rather than with means to preserve the living from
hapless and unnecessary death; and yet, so curiously are we wrought
out of emotion, sensibility and habit, some good besides piety may
come out of a memorial Eleventh of November. Pitying, recording,
respecting the dead or perhaps the bereaved, it may presently become
a fixed idea with us that avoidable death is taboo. It may be borne
in upon us on the next occasion when stung pride, outraged feeling or
panic fear is sweeping like a plague over our land, that nothing
but sorrow and loss was gained by the Four Years War. That is just
possible, but no more than that, we being what we are. Yet, unless we
learn to think rather of life than of death, there is no other way. As
in religion, faith comes before works, and you must fall in love with
God if you are to believe in Him, so it is in politics. Emotional
conviction must precede action. And the conviction to be established
is that war is a crime and in some nations, a vice.
In the Middle Ages a great and ever-present fear of death coincided
with an extraordinary neglect of life. Whole companies, whole classes
of men thought of little but death; yet they killed each other for a
look or a thought; in war whole cities were put to the sword and fire,
as the Black Prince put Limoges. _Timor mortis conturbat me!_ So men
shuddered and wailed, but took not the smallest trouble to keep
each other alive. The Black Death swept off at least a third of the
population of Europe; yet after it things went on exactly as before.
If nations had then possessed the technical skill which they have
to-day, it is quite on the cards that France in the Hundred Years or
Germany in the Thirty Years War, would have been emptied of its folk.
The will thereto was not wanting, that's certain.
Well, we are a little better than that. Sanitation has at last become
a fixed idea. And there is another thing. We no longer consider a man
as magnified by his office, but rather that the office is magnified in
that a man is serving it. In the old days the splendour of an army on
the march was reflected upon the men composing it, and glorified
every one of them. Now it is the other way. We are apt to see the
army glorious because it is composed of men. Lord Kitchener's host,
perhaps, has taught us that. We are getting on, then, if we are
beginning to take manhood seriously.
It is something at least, and so much to the good, that we have
imagined a new sacrament, and found it in the attitude, if not in the
act of thought. "Who rises from his prayer a better man, his prayer is
answered," said a wise man; and if that is true, the King may save
his people yet. But to enable him to do it we must pray for the living
rather than the dead, and pray for Good Will among them. For that is
what we want.