[Illustration: THE JUNKER
"What I have most admired in you, Bethmann, is that you have made
Socialists our best supporters."]
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"MILIEU DE FANTOMES TRISTES ET SANS NOMBRE"
There is something daunting, even to the mind of one not guilty of war
or of massacres, in the thought of multitudes: the multitude of the
dead, of the living, of one generation of men since there have been men
on earth. And war brings this horror to us daily, or rather nightly,
because such great companies of men have suddenly died together, passing
in comradeship and community from the known to the unknown. Yet dare we
say "together?" The unparalleled solitariness and singleness of death is
not altered by the general and simultaneous doom of battle.
And it is with the multitude, and all the _ones_ in it, that the maker
of war is in unconscious relation. He does not know their names, he does
not know them by any kind of distinction, he knows them only by
thousands. Yet every one with a separate life and separate death is in
conscious relation with _him_, knows him for the tyrant who has taken
his youth, his hope, his love, his fatherhood.
What a multitude to meet, whether in thought, in conscience, or in
another world! We all, no doubt, try to make the thought of massacre
less intolerable to our minds by telling ourselves that the sufferers
suffer one by one, to each his own share, and not another's; that though
the numbers may appeal, they do not make each man's part more terrible.
But this is not much comfort. There is not, it is true, a sum of
multiplication; but there is the sum of addition. And that addition--the
multitude man by man--the War Lord has to reckon with: Frederick the
Great with his men, Napoleon with his, the German Emperor with his--each
one of the innumerable unknown knowing his destroyer.