On the King's Service Part 4

'It is impossible to prevent those things, human nature being what it is,' said others of schools like Dotheboys Hall. A little time ago England and Scotland were at one another's throats; a little before that clan fell upon clan with vindictive fury. When we have beaten Germany, who stands for the old, rotten, pagan belief in old, rotten, pagan things we must see that we do not betray the men who died fighting because they hated war.

But war has good in it too, they say. Yes, and amid its hideous wrong no doubt there was good in slavery, as there is in cancer or blindness.

Almost any evil or agony may be the root of n.o.ble qualities, and war is no exception.

These men died in the hope that it might be impossible for a civilised nation again to thrust this evil on the human race. They died trusting us to see that Europe would not again have to choose the alternative of entering upon such an agony or of forgetting its honour towards G.o.d.

Force, it would seem, must long remain the last remedy, but might it not be force resting on a pivot and striking with effect wherever international crime seeks to disturb the peace of the nations? The mere knowledge of such a united determination would at least be a powerful persuasive. That may be only a dream. The immediate fact is that the doctrine of Will to Power must first be crushed, represented as it is to-day by Germany and her dupes. But men who have been through the furnace will not rest content with less than the solemn attempt, in the name of the dead, to put the nations of the world in a worthier relations.h.i.+p to one another than has so far prevailed. Our brothers who have fallen died in the hope that for succeeding generations life would be different. They died believing that because of their sacrifice it might be possible to subst.i.tute for the German (or any other) Will to Power the Christian Will to Righteous Peace. This effort alone can be their fitting monument.