Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to
fight, and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the
inestimable loss to the world of four years of the life of a
generation wasted on destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making
works of the human mind might not have been aborted or destroyed
by taking their authors away from their natural work for four
critical years. Not only were Shakespeares and Platos being
killed outright; but many of the best harvests of the survivors
had to be sown in the barren soil of the trenches. And this was
no mere British consideration. To the truly civilized man, to the
good European, the slaughter of the German youth was as
disastrous as the slaughter of the English. Fools exulted in
"German losses." They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting
in the death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death
blow!



Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel

But most people could not comprehend these sorrows. There was a
frivolous exultation in death for its own sake, which was at
bottom an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths
and not stage ones. Again and again, when an air raider dropped a
bomb which tore a child and its mother limb from limb, the people
who saw it, though they had been reading with great cheerfulness
of thousands of such happenings day after day in their
newspapers, suddenly burst into furious imprecations on "the
Huns" as murderers, and shrieked for savage and satisfying