seen something far more destructive than thunder in the hand of
every village laborer, and found on the Messines Ridge the
craters of the nineteen volcanoes that were let loose there at
the touch of a finger that might have been a child's finger
without the result being a whit less ruinous? Shakespeare may
have seen a Stratford cottage struck by one of Jove's
thunderbolts, and have helped to extinguish the lighted thatch
and clear away the bits of the broken chimney. What would he have
said if he had seen Ypres as it is now, or returned to Stratford,
as French peasants are returning to their homes to-day, to find
the old familiar signpost inscribed "To Stratford, 1 mile," and
at the end of the mile nothing but some holes in the ground and a
fragment of a broken churn here and there? Would not the
spectacle of the angry ape endowed with powers of destruction
that Jove never pretended to, have beggared even his command of
words?

And yet, what is there to say except that war puts a strain on
human nature that breaks down the better half of it, and makes
the worse half a diabolical virtue? Better, for us if it broke it
down altogether, for then the warlike way out of our difficulties
would be barred to us, and we should take greater care not to get
into them. In truth, it is, as Byron said, "not difficult to
die," and enormously difficult to live: that explains why, at
bottom, peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more
arduous. Did any hero of the war face the glorious risk of death
more bravely than the traitor Bolo faced the ignominious
certainty of it? Bolo taught us all how to die: can we say that
he taught us all how to live? Hardly a week passes now without
some soldier who braved death in the field so recklessly that he