But I doubt if they would have
thrown any very conclusive light upon the war.
2
I avow myself an extreme Pacifist. I am against the man who first takes
up the weapon. I carry my pacifism far beyond the ambiguous little group
of British and foreign sentimentalists who pretend so amusingly to be
socialists in the _Labour Leader_, whose conception of foreign policy is
to give Germany now a peace that would be no more than a breathing time
for a fresh outrage upon civilisation, and who would even make heroes of
the crazy young assassins of the Dublin crime. I do not understand those
people. I do not merely want to stop this war. I want to nail down war
in its coffin. Modern war is an intolerable thing. It is not a thing
to trifle with in this Urban District Council way, it is a thing to
end forever. I have always hated it, so far that is as my imagination
enabled me to realise it; and now that I have been seeing it, sometimes
quite closely for a full month, I hate it more than ever. I never
imagined a quarter of its waste, its boredom, its futility, its
desolation. It is merely a destructive and dispersive instead of a
constructive and accumulative industrialism. It is a gigantic, dusty,
muddy, weedy, bloodstained silliness. It is the plain duty of every man
to give his life and all that he has if by so doing he may help to end
it.
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