Militarism, Welt Politik, and here we
are! What else _could_ have happened, with Michael and his infernal War
Machine in the very centre of Europe, but this tremendous disaster?
It is a disaster. It may be a necessary disaster; it may teach a lesson
that could be learnt in no other way; but for all that, I insist, it
remains waste, disorder, disaster.
There is a disposition, I know, in myself as well as in others, to
wriggle away from this verity, to find so much good in the collapse that
has come to the mad direction of Europe for the past half-century as to
make it on the whole almost a beneficial thing. But at most I can find
it in no greater good than the good of a nightmare that awakens the
sleeper in a dangerous place to a realisation of the extreme danger of
his sleep. Better had he been awake--or never there. In Venetia Captain
Pirelli, whose task it was to keep me out of mischief in the war zone,
was insistent upon the way in which all Venetia was being opened up
by the new military roads; there has been scarcely a new road made in
Venetia since Napoleon drove his straight, poplar-bordered highways
through the land. M. Joseph Reinach, who was my companion upon the
French front, was equally impressed by the stirring up and exchange of
ideas in the villages due to the movement of the war. Charles Lamb's
story of the discovery of roast pork comes into one's head with an
effect of repartee.
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