“Only in war, my dear Tilling,” said my father, “only in war. In private life, thank God, we too have soft hearts.”
“Oh yes! I know it. It is a kind of magic. Immediately on the declaration of war one says all at once of any horror: ‘Oh! that goes for nothing’. Children sometimes make the same agreement in their games. ‘If I do this or that it goes for nothing,’ you may hear them say. And in the game of war the same conventions, though unspoken, apply. Manslaughter is no longer to count as manslaughter; robbery counts no longer as robbery; theft is not thieving but ‘requisition’; villages burnt represent, not conflagrations, but ‘positions taken’. To all the precepts of the statute book, of the catechism, of the moral law, as long as the game lasts, the same applies—‘It goes for nothing’. But if ever occasionally the gambling fervour slackens, if the convention that ‘it goes for nothing’ disappears from one’s conscience for one moment, and one comprehends the scenes around one in their reality, and conceives of this depth of misery, this wholesale crime as meaning something, then one would wish for one thing only to deliver one out of the intolerable woe of such a sight—namely, to be dead.”
“Well, really!” remarked Aunt Mary meditatively, “sentences like ‘Thou shalt not murder,’ ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ ‘Forgive thine enemies’——”
“Go for nothing,” repeated Tilling; “and those, whose calling it is to teach these sentences, are the first to bless our arms and call down Heaven’s blessing on our murderous work.”
“And rightly so,” said my father. “The God of the Bible was of old time the God of battles, the Lord of armies. He it is who commands us to draw the sword. He it is——”
“Men always,” interrupted Tilling, “decree that what they themselves want to see done is His will; and they attribute to Him the enactment of eternal laws of love, which, whenever His children begin the great game of hatred, He suspends by His divine ‘Goes for nothing’. Just as rough, just as inconsistent, just as childish as man is the God whom man has set before us. And now, countess,” he added, getting up, “forgive me for having inflicted such a tedious discussion on you, and allow me to take leave.”
Stormy feelings were thrilling through me. All that he had just said had rendered the beloved man yet dearer to me. And must I now part from him, perhaps never to see him again? To exchange thus a cold farewell with him before other people and let all end so? It was not possible. I should have been obliged, if the door had closed on him, to burst out in sobs. That must not be: I rose up.
“One moment, Baron Tilling,” I said; “I must at any rate show you that photograph I spoke to you about a little while ago.”
He looked at me in amazement, for no talk about a photograph had ever passed between us. However he followed me to the other corner of the drawing-room, where some albums were lying on a table, and where we were out of hearing of the others.
I opened an album, and Tilling stooped over it. Meanwhile I spoke to him in a low voice and all in a tremble.