It
seems so natural and necessary for a human brain to do this that it is
hard to suppose that everyone has not more or less attempted it. But
few people, in Great Britain at any rate, have the habit of frank
expression, and when people do not seem to have made out any of these
things for themselves there is a considerable element of secretiveness
and inexpressiveness to be allowed for before we decide that they have
not in some sort of fashion done so. Still, after all allowances have
been made, there remains a vast amount of jerry-built and ready-made
borrowed stuff in most of people's philosophies of the war. The systems
of authentic opinion in this world of thought about the war are like
comparatively rare thin veins of living mentality in a vast world of
dead repetitions and echoed suggestions. And that being the case, it is
quite possible that history after the war, like history before the war,
will not be so much a display of human will and purpose as a resultant
of human vacillations, obstructions, and inadvertences. We shall still
be in a drama of blind forces following the line of least resistance.
One of the people who is often spoken of as if he were doing an enormous
amount of concentrated thinking is "the man in the trenches." We are
told--by gentlemen writing for the most part at home--of the most
extraordinary things that are going on in those devoted brains, how they
are getting new views about the duties of labour, religion, morality,
monarchy, and any other notions that the gentleman at home happens to
fancy and wished to push.
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