to give them a false value; to proclaim the young life worthily
and gloriously sacrificed to redeem the liberty of mankind,
instead of to expiate the heedlessness and folly of their
fathers, and expiate it in vain. We had even to assume that the
parents and not the children had made the sacrifice, until at
last the comic papers were driven to satirize fat old men,
sitting comfortably in club chairs, and boasting of the sons they
had "given" to their country.

No one grudged these anodynes to acute personal grief; but they
only embittered those who knew that the young men were having
their teeth set on edge because their parents had eaten sour
political grapes. Then think of the young men themselves! Many of
them had no illusions about the policy that led to the war: they
went clear-sighted to a horribly repugnant duty. Men essentially
gentle and essentially wise, with really valuable work in hand,
laid it down voluntarily and spent months forming fours in the
barrack yard, and stabbing sacks of straw in the public eye, so
that they might go out to kill and maim men as gentle as
themselves. These men, who were perhaps, as a class, our most
efficient soldiers (Frederick Keeling, for example), were not
duped for a moment by the hypocritical melodrama that consoled
and stimulated the others. They left their creative work to
drudge at destruction, exactly as they would have left it to take
their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship. They did not, like
some of the conscientious objectors, hold back because the ship
had been neglected by its officers and scuttled by its wreckers.
The ship had to be saved, even if Newton had to leave his
fluxions and Michael Angelo his marbles to save it; so they threw
away the tools of their beneficent and ennobling trades, and took