'And what is war but accepting that idea. It is simply overcoming force by force. Where does Christianity come in?'
'You don't argue with a mad dog,' he said. 'You kill it. It's best for the dog, and it's essential for the good of the community. Germany's a mad dog, and this virus of war must be overcome, destroyed. Oh, I've thought it all out. I believe in prayer. But it's no use praying for good health while you live over foul drains, and it's just as little praying for the destruction of such a system while you do nothing. God won't do for us what we can do for ourselves. That's why this is a holy war! That's why we must fight until Prussianism is overthrown. We are paying a ghastly price, but it has to be paid. All the same, we are fighting this war in the wrong way.'
'How?' I asked.
'Because we've forgotten God. Because, to a large extent, we regard Him too much as a negligible quantity; because we have become too much poisoned with the German virus.'
'I don't follow,' I said.
'I will try to make my meaning plain. In this war we have the greatest, the holiest cause man ever fought for. We are struggling for the liberty, the well-being of the world. We are fighting God's cause; but we are not fighting it in God's way. We are fighting as if there were no God.'
'How?'
'We started wrongly. Were our soldiers made to realize when they joined the Army that they were going to fight for God? Did the country, the Government ever tell them so? Oh, don't mistake me. I am a private soldier, and I've lived with the Tommies for a long time, and I know what kind of chaps they are. A finer lot of fellows never lived. Braver than lions, and as tender as women many of them; but does God count with the great bulk of them? Is Tommy filled with a passion for God? Is he made to feel the necessity of God? Does Tommy depend primarily on God for victory?'
'Well, do we depend on God for victory?' I asked.
'If God is not with us we are lost!' he said solemnly. 'And that's our trouble. I've read a good many of our English papers, our leading daily papers, and one might think from reading them that either there was no God, or that He didn't count. "How are we to win this war, and crush Germanism?" is the cry, and the answer of the British Government and of the British press is, "Big guns, mountains of munitions, conscription, national service, big battalions, and still more big battalions!"'