He covered his eyes and stood silent for a while, swaying. "I can still see visions, thank God," he murmured. "This war's been going on for a year—a year to-day, and a year ago I said it would demand of each one of us whatever we held most dear. Then I looked on it all as a struggle for bodily existence, but now—unless Death seen so near and by such young eyes is going to destroy all regard for the sanctity of life—now we seem to have a chance of winning our souls back.... When I was a child in Prague my father took me to see a picture of Rome in the second century—a street scene with patricians in their bordered togas swinging along in litters, and slaves running on ahead, and priests and eunuchs elbowing each other out of the way, and a popular gladiator being recognized and cheered. There's a blaze of sunlight, and you can almost hear the thunder of victorious material prosperity. Noise of jostling humanity and the polyglot shouts of an Empire's citizens in the capital of the world. And at a street-corner stands an elderly man, poorly dressed, speaking, I suppose, not the purest Latin to a half-circle of loafers. There is nothing noteworthy about him, save perhaps his eyes and, I imagine, the sincerity of his voice as he tells his tale for the thousandth time, 'Sirs, I saw him with these eyes—my Master, whom I had denied; and they judged Him ... and nailed Him to a cross ... and He died...."
There was a deep silence as O'Rane paused. "I—all of us who were out there—have seen it. We can't forget. The courage, the cold, heart-breaking courage ... and the smile on a dying man's face.... We must never let it be forgotten; we've earned the right. As long as a drunkard kicks his wife, or a child goes hungry, or a woman is driven through shame to disease and death.... Is it a great thing to ask? To demand of England to remember that the criminals and loafers and prostitutes are somebody's children, mothers and sisters? And that we've all been saved by a miracle of suffering? Is that too great a strain on our chivalry? I'll go out if need be, but—but must we stand at street-corners to tell what we have seen? To ask the bystanders—and ourselves—whether we went to war to preserve the right of inflicting pain?"
THE END