Of these some were placid, emotionless, extinguished, consistently noble,
selfless, profoundly and simply religious, as correct in every thought and
deed as the best bourgeois peace society of any land.
But others! Alexina had been horrified at first at the wanderings off
after nightfall of women who had nursed like scientific angels by day,
accompanied by men who were never more men than when any moment might
turn them into carrion. But with her mental suppleness she had quickly
readjusted her point of view. There is nothing as sensual as war. It is
the quintessential carnality. Renan once wrote a story of the French
Revolution, "The Abbess Juarre," in which his thesis was that if warning
were given that the world would end in three days the entire population of
the globe would give itself over to an orgy of sex; sex being life itself.
It is the obsession of the doomed consumptive, the doomed spinster, the
last thought of a man with the rope round his neck.
How much more under the terrific stimulation of war, the constant heedless
annihilation of life in its flower and its maturity? Man's inveterate
enemy, death, shrieking its derision in the very shells of man's one
inviolable right, the right to drift into eternity through the peaceful
corridors of old age. War is a monstrous anachronism and a monstrous
miscarriage of justice. The ignorant feel it less. It is the enlightened,
the intelligent, accustomed to the higher delights of civilization, to the
perfecting of such endowments, however modest, as their ancestors have
transmitted and peace has encouraged, with ambitions and hopes and dreams,
that resent however sub-consciously the constant snarling of death at their
heels.
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