In making these remarks I do not for a moment say that the gains
resulting from War are worth the suffering caused by it, or that the
gains are _not_ worth the suffering. The whole subject is too vast and
obscure for one to venture to dogmatize on it. I only say that if we are
to find any order and law (as we must inevitably _try_ to do) in these
convulsions of peoples, these tempests of human history, it is probably
in the direction that I have indicated.

Of course we need not leave out of sight the ordinary theory and
explanation, that wars are simply a part of the general struggle for
existence--culminating explosions of hatred and mutual destruction
between peoples who are competing with each other for the means of
subsistence. That there is something in this view one can hardly deny;
and it is one which I have already touched upon. Still, I cannot help
thinking that there is something even deeper--something that connects
War with the amatory instinct; and that this probably is to be found in
the direction of a physiological impact and fusion between the two (or
more) peoples concerned, which fertilizes and regenerates them, and is
perhaps as necessary in the life of Nations as the fusion of cells is in
the life of Protozoa, or the phenomena of sex in the evolution of Man.

And while the Nations fight, the little mortals who represent them have
only the faintest idea of what is really going on, of what the warfare
means. They _feel_ the sweep of immense passions; ecstasies and horrors
convulse and dislocate their minds; but they do not, cannot, understand.
And the dear creatures in the trenches and the firing-lines give their
lives--equally beautiful, equally justified, on both sides: fascinated,
rapt, beyond and beside themselves, as foes hating each other with a
deadly hatred; seized with hideous, furious, nerve-racking passions;
performing heroic, magnificent deeds, suffering untold, indescribable