possible--all but made it necessary. For it was those things which
allowed the world to drift into the war, and what the war was nine days
out of ten ought to be thrust under the eyes of those who will not
believe. It is a small thing that men die in battle, for a man has but
one life to live and it is good to give it for one's friends; but it is
such an evil that it has no like, this drifting of a world into a hell to
which men's souls are driven like red maple leaves before the autumn
wind.

The old-fashioned pious books made hell stink of brimstone and painted
the Devil hideous. But Satan is not such a fool. Champagne and Martinis
do not taste like Gregory powder, nor was St. Anthony tempted by
shrivelled hags. Paganism can be gay, and passion look like love.
Moreover, still more truly, Christ could see the potentiality of virtue
in Mary Magdalene and of strength in Simon called Peter. The conventional
religious world does not.

A curious feature, too, of that strange life was its lack of
consecutiveness. It was like the pages of _La Vie Parisienne_. The friend
of to-day was gone for ever to-morrow. A man arrived, weary and dirty and
craving for excitement, in some unknown town; in half an hour he had
stepped into the gay glitter of wine and women's smiles; in half a dozen
he had been whirled away. The days lingered and yet flew; the pages were
twirled ever more dazzlingly; only at the end men saw in a blinding flash
whither they had been led.

These things, then, are set out in this book. This is its atmosphere.
They are truly set out. They are not white-washed; still less are they
pictured as men might have seen them in more sober moments, as the
Puritan world would see them now. Nor does the book set forth the