Suddenly the world is up in arms. All mankind takes sides. The same faith
that made him surrender himself to the impulses of normal living and of love,
forces him now to make himself the instrument through which a greater force
works out its inscrutable ends through the impulses of terror and repulsion.
And with no less a sense of moving in harmony with a universe
where masses are in continual conflict and new combinations are engendered
out of eternal collisions, he shoulders arms and marches forth with haste.
==

Already in this passage we can discern the fatalistic acceptance of war
which runs through many of his utterances on the subject,
and may be read especially in the noble conclusion of his poem, "The Hosts":

There was a stately drama writ
By the hand that peopled the earth & air
And set the stars in the infinite
And made night gorgeous & morning fair;
And all that had sense to reason knew
That bloody drama must be gone through.
Some sat & watched how the action veered --
Waited, profited, trembled, cheered --
We saw not clearly nor understood,
But, yielding ourselves to the master hand,
Each in his part, as best he could,
We played it through as the author planned.

It was not, in his own conception, a "war against war" that he was waging;
it was simply a fight for freedom and for France. Some of us may hope
and believe that, in after years, when he was at leisure
to view history in perspective and carry his psychology a little deeper,