Some time or
other, when German militarism acknowledged defeat by the break of its
machine or by the revolt of its people--not until then--there must be
a new order of things, which would prevent such another massacre in
the fair fields of life, and that could come only by a faith in the
hearts of many peoples breaking down old barriers of hatred and
reaching out to one another in a fellowship of common sense based on
common interests, and inspired by an ideal higher than this beast-like
rivalry of nations. So thinking men thought and talked. So said the
soldier--poets who wrote from the trenches. So said many onlookers.
The simple soldier did not talk like that unless he were a Frenchman.
Our men only began to talk like that after the war--as many of them
are now talking--and the revolt of the spirit, vague but passionate,
against the evil that had produced this devil's trap of war, and the
German challenge, was subconscious as they sat in their dugouts and
crowded in their ditches in the battles of the Somme.
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