God, be pitiful!
Tarrasch.
This is war, this is! And you can’t expect war to be all swans and shining armour. No—nor smart uniforms either. Look at the mud my friend and I have already annexed from Belgium. Brander, you know it’s a most astonishing fact; but I have remarked it several times. Those women whose eyes glitter at the sight of a spiked helmet are the first to be astonished by the realities of war. They expect the dead to jump up and kiss them and tell them it is all a game, as soon as the battle is ended. No, no, my dear; it’s only in war that one sees how small is one’s personal happiness in comparison with greater things. Isn’t it?
(He fills a glass and drinks. Brander lights a cigar.)
Nanko.
Exactly. In times of peace we forget those eternal silences. We value life too highly. We become domesticated. Why, I suppose in this magnificent war there have been so many women and children killed that they would fill the great Cloth Hall at Ypres; and, as for the young men, there have been so many slaughtered that their dead bodies would fill St. Peter’s at Rome. Why, I suppose they would fill the three hundred abbeys of Flanders and all the cathedrals in the world chock-full from floor to belfry, wouldn’t they? How Goya would have loved to paint them! Can’t you see it?
(He grows ecstatic over the idea.)
Tournai with its five clock-towers, Ghent, and Bruges,
Louvain and Antwerp, Rheims and Westminster,
Under the round white moon, on Christmas Eve,
With towers of frozen needlework, and spires
That point to God; but all their painted panes
Bursting with dreadful arms and gaping faces,
Gargoyles of flesh; and round them, in the snow,
The little cardinals, like gouts of blood,
The little bishops, running like white mice,
Hooded with violet spots, quite, quite dismayed
To find there was no room for them within
Upon that holy night when Christ was born.
But perhaps if Goya were living to-day he would prefer to pack them into Chicago meat factories, with the intellectuals dancing outside like marionettes, and the unconscious Hand of God pulling the strings. You know one of their very latest theories is that He is a somnambulist.
Tarrasch (to Rada).