The salving might tell too much.
TUMULTY. You mean that talk about fuse caps being on board might have been
true? Would it matter now?
EX-PRES. Yes. It was a horrible thing in any case--disproportionate, like
most other acts of war--and it did immeasurable harm to those who thought
to benefit. But this--I still only guess--might do too much good--bring
things a little nearer to proportion again, which the Treaty did not try
to do.... What I've been realising these last two years is a terrible
thing. You go to war, you get up to it from your knees--God driving you to
it--unable, yes, unable to do else. Your will is to do right, your cause
is just, you are a united nation, a people convinced, glad, selfless, with
hearts heroic and clean. And then war takes hold of it, and it all changes
under your eyes; you see the heart of your people becoming fouled, getting
hard, self-righteous, revengeful. Your cause remains, in theory, what it
was at the beginning; but it all goes to the Devil. And the Devil makes on
it a pile that he can make no otherwise--because of the virtue that is in
it, the love, the beauty, the heroism, the giving-up of so much that man's
heart desires. That's where he scores! Look at all that valiance, that
beauty of life gone out to perish for a cause it knows to be right; think
of the generosity of that giving by the young men; think of the faithful
courage of the women who steel themselves to let them go; think of the
increase of spirit and selflessness which everywhere rises to meet the
claim.
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