And if
they should find us in our last stand girt with such strange swords and
following unfamiliar ensigns, and ask us for what we fight in so singular
a company, we shall know what to reply: "We fight for the trust and for
the tryst; for fixed memories and the possible meeting of men; for all
that makes life anything but an uncontrollable nightmare. We fight for the
long arm of honour and remembrance; for all that can lift a man above the
quicksands of his moods, and give him the mastery of time."
II
THE REFUSAL OF RECIPROCITY
In the last summary I suggested that Barbarism, as we mean it, is not mere
ignorance or even mere cruelty. It has a more precise sense, and means
militant hostility to certain necessary human ideas. I took the case of the
vow or the contract, which Prussian intellectualism would destroy. I urged
that the Prussian is a spiritual Barbarian, because he is not bound by his
own past, any more than a man in a dream. He avows that when he promised
to respect a frontier on Monday, he did not foresee what he calls "the
necessity" of not respecting it on Tuesday. In short, he is like a child,
who at the end of all reasonable explanations and reminders of admitted
arrangements has no answer except "But I _want_ to.
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