)'
Then, while he was walking in the Moselle Valley, came the war. He had
loved Germany, and the force of his love kept him strangely free from
illusions; he was not the stuff that "our modern Elizabethans" are made
of. The keen candour of spiritual innocence is in what he wrote while
training at Shorncliffe:--
'For the joke of seeing an obviously just cause defeated, I hope
Germany will win. It would do the world good, and show that real
faith is not that which says "we _must_ win for our cause is just,"
but that which says "our cause is just: therefore we can disregard
defeat."'...
'England--I am sick of the sound of the word. In training to fight
for England, I am training to fight for that deliberate hypocrisy,
that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook and appalling
"imaginative indolence" that has marked us out from generation to
generation.... And yet we have the impudence to write down Germany
(who with all their bigotry are at least seekers) as "Huns," because
they are doing what every brave man ought to do and making
experiments in morality.
Pages:
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230