film, the pacifist must organize wisdom in these matters.

And not only indignation and distress must come to this task. The stern,
uncompromising militarist will not be moved from his determinations by
our horror and hostility. These things will but "brace" him. He has a
more vulnerable side. The ultimate lethal weapon for every form of
stupidity is ridicule, and against the high silliness of the militarist
it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that
will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to
trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension
and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of
his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it
is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the
essential triviality at the head of the present war. Not the slaughter
of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser other than
theatrical and silly.

The greater part of the world is in an agony, a fever, but that does not
make the cause of that fever noble or great. A man may die of yellow
fever through the bite of a mosquito; that does not make a mosquito
anything more than a dirty little insect or an aggressive imperialist
better than a pothouse fool.

Henceforth we must recognize no heroic war but defensive war, and as the
only honorable warriors such men as those peasants of Visé who went out
with shotguns against the multitudinous overwhelming nuisance of
invasion that trampled down their fields.

Or war to aid such defensive war.