And now it is time that a few questions be asked, simple and direct. It is due him.
Why is it that when he set himself to create he had to contend against that dead-weight of indifference if not the active hostility of organized society recorded in these pages; but when he was commandeered to destroy, that society clothed him, fed him, sheltered him, trained him, transported him, paid him, nursed him, and buried him?
It is well that we should know what has been squandered. He that might have ennobled generations of men with his great visions and his splendid dreams is mingling his clay with the soil of Belgium. He had the seeds of genius. Capitalism made him a machine gunner.
Is this the best we can find for our artists to do? Is it any wonder that the creative minds of to-day are finding themselves driven to social revolution as their art-form?
In the brown-owl hut beside the Merrimac that summer day in 1917 he remarked in a tone of indulgent irony:
"The 'military experts' have found a nice, polite term for men killed or too badly maimed to fight any more."
"What is it?" I asked.
"'Wastage.'"
—Beethoven: Finale of The Ninth Symphony.