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The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days Scenes In The Great War - 1915, a non-fiction book by Hall Caine |
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War's Spiritual Compensations |
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_ But, thank God, there is another side to the picture, both for young and old. If we are to be poorer we shall be more free. If we are to be weak and faint from loss of blood we shall rest at night without dread of that shadow of the sword which has darkened the sleep of humanity for forty years. If the countries of our enemies are to be closed to some of us in the future, the countries of our Allies will be more than ever open; nay, they will be almost the same to us as our own. France will be our France, Italy our Italy, Belgium our Belgium, and the next time I, for one, sit by the stove in the log cabin of a Russian moujik on the Steppes, I shall feel as if I were in the thatched cottage of one of my own people in our little island in the Irish Sea. So does blood shed in a common cause break down the barriers of race and language and bind together the children of one Father. The dead of our Allies become our dead, and our dead theirs. That Frenchman died to save my son; therefore he is my brother, and France is my country. "One's country is the place where they lie whom we loved." Thus war, brutal, barbarous war, has its spiritual compensations, and pray heaven the present one may prove to have more than any other. If it does not, something will break in us after all we have gone through. Our faith in the invisible powers to bring a good end out of all this welter of blood and destruction has become a religion. It must not fail us if our souls are to live. _ |
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