If we had taken a poll of the eager disputants at the other end of the verandah, I doubt if the verdict would have satisfied her. On their own admission, the mailed fist of Philip Hornbeck, the diplomacy of Lucien de Grammont and the first-hand experience of war which Laurence and Sam Dainton had won on four fronts provided no more security than the religion of Violet Loring that another war, equally or more cruel, unnecessary and futile, should not break out as soon as the memories of one generation were grown dim and the exhaustion of one generation had been repaired.
“Doesn’t that depend on the people who’ve survived?,” I asked. “Until the conscriptionists turned a crusade into a hunt for cannon-fodder, the war had a moral grandeur. Whether Jim’s death served a useful purpose for any one but himself depends on our power to recapture the spirit of 1914.”
For this elastic formula I can claim little credit. The cynic is now sure of his laugh if he mocks the idea of “a war to end war”; but I saw too much of my contemporaries in 1914 to join the later chorus of fashionable disparagement. Before their first idealism became jaded, the young men who had been reared in an atmosphere of war-preparations and war-scares, who aspired to a world orderly and a life beautiful and who saw their aspirations thwarted by men too old for hope or faith, resolved to create from the war a world of which they need not be ashamed. They enlisted in the service of man. From their deaths I learned the phrase. One of them, the last and best of my friends, who was literally and awfully crucified, came back blinded and broken to tell me that he was unrepentant.
“I was in New York,” O’Rane wrote at this time, “when the armistice was proclaimed. If you’d shouted ‘as you were’ from the Woolworth Tower, you couldn’t have scattered people more quickly. ‘As you were before the war’ is the general feeling. I expect it’s been the same in England. We must do better than that.” . . .
“I’m not sure that I know what you mean,” said Violet.
“And I’m not sure that I can put it into words,” I answered. “In general terms, no sacrifice was too great in the war; I want people to feel no sacrifice is too great in peace. It’s an empty victory if a high proportion of the victors are diseased, hungry, verminous, discontented. Any one of imagination must be ashamed of the slums in our big cities; but we won’t make the effort or the sacrifice to cure them. I want to fan the crusading spirit of 1914 back to life. . . . Before that, though, we must make sure that we aren’t going to drift into another war. That means a crusade covering the whole inhabited world.”
“I don’t know how you’ll begin.”
“Nor do I yet. I may be able to tell you more in a week’s time. Have you heard that the O’Ranes are coming here? He cabled to say that he was in urgent need of my advice. I cabled back that I was in much more urgent need of his.”
Glancing at my manuscript for the last time before sending it to be typed, I felt that, in a week’s time, I might know better how to paint my third panel. We had to see now whether those who had failed to avert war were capable of ending war.