The lesson of what is
recorded is incidental and implicit. It is left to the discovery of
the reader, and yet is so plainly indicated that he cannot fail to
discover it. We shall all see this war quite wrongly, and shall
interpret it by imperfect and base equivalents, if we see it only as a
human struggle for human ends. We shall err yet more miserably if all
our thoughts and sensations about it are drawn from its physical
horror, "the deformations of our common manhood" on the battlefield,
the hopeless waste and havoc of it all. We shall only view it in its
real perspective when we recognise the spiritual impulses which direct
it, and the strange spiritual efficacy that is in it to burn out the
deep-fibred cancer of doubt and decadence which has long threatened
civilisation with a slow corrupt death. Seventy-five years ago Mrs.
Browning, writing on _The Greek Christian Poets_, used a striking
sentence to which the condition of human thought to-day lends a new
emphasis. "We want," she said, "the touch of Christ's hand upon our
literature, as it touched other dead things--we want the sense of the
saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets that it may
cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our
humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been
perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest." It is this glory
of divine sacrifice which is the Glory of the Trenches. It is because
the writer recognises this that he is able to walk undismayed among
things terrible and dismaying, and to expound agony into renovation.
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