"However vast the scale of circumstance may be," said the colonel, "a man can change everything. A child cannot push a railway engine; yet he can start it if he opens the right throttle. A man has only to apply his will at the right place, and he will be master of the world. Your determinism is nothing more than a paradox. You build a cage round yourself and then are astonished you are a prisoner."
They were going forward rapidly. Aurelle, mounted on his old white Arab,
trotted between the doctor and Colonel Parker.
"Don't hold your horse in so tightly, Messiou; give him the rein."
"But the road's full of holes, sir."
"My dear chap, when a man is on a horse, the horse is always the more intelligent of the pair."
He slackened his mare's rein to pass by a huge shell-hole, and began to talk of the peace that was at hand.
"The most difficult thing of all," he said, "will be to preserve in our victory the virtues that won it for us. Germany and Russia will do their best to corrupt us. A dishonoured nation always tries to bury its shame under the ruins of the victor's civilization. It's the device of Samson; it's as old as history itself. Rome, surrounded by vanquished and humbled nations, witnessed the lightning speed of Judaic preaching, which was so much like the Bolshevism of our day.
The Russian ghettos of our capitals had their counterpart then in the Syrian dens that swarmed in the large ports; that is where the apostles of mystical communism preached most successfully. And Juvenal and Tacitus, who were gentlemen, had good reason to detest those anarchists, who condemned Roman civilization with the fanatical fury of a Trotsky."
"Yes," said the doctor, "the danger of these prolonged wars is that they end by making the most unusual habits generally acceptable. They require courage; and courage is a dangerous virtue, the mother of revolutions. And it is not easy to accustom a nation of warriors to render due obedience once more to second-rate politicians and profiteers. The oligarchy of parvenus which arose after the Punic wars could not be respected as the Roman senate had been. They possessed neither its hardihood nor its heroic parsimony. Bent only on beautiful slaves,