so lavishly. For more than twelve months, on every battlefield, where
the bravest, the truest, the most ardent and self-sacrificing are
necessarily the first to die and where the less courageous, the less
generous, the weak, the ailing, in a word the less desirable, alone
possess some chance of escaping the carnage, for over twelve months a
sort of monstrous inverse selection has been in operation, one which
seems to be deliberately seeking the downfall of the human race. And
we wonder uneasily what the state of the world will be after the great
trial and what will be left of it and what will be the future of this
stunted race, shorn of all the best and noblest part of it.

The problem is certainly one of the darkest that have ever vexed the
minds of men. It contains a material truth before which we remain
defenceless; and, if we accept it as it stands, we can discover no
remedy for the evil that threatens us. But material and tangible
truths are never anything but a more or less salient angle of greater
and deeper-lying truths. And, on the other hand, mankind appears to be
such a necessary and indestructible force of nature that it has
always, hitherto, not only survived the most desperate ordeals, but
succeeded in benefiting by them and emerging greater and stronger than
before.


2

We know that peace is better than war; it were madness to compare the
two. We know that, if this cataclysm let loose by an act of
unutterable folly had not come upon the world, mankind would doubtless
have reached ere long a zenith of wonderful achievement whose
manifestations it is impossible to foreshadow. We know that, if a