Never Again! | Page 5

secret betrayal and murder of bodies and souls for
profit -- at last written out in letters of blood and fire across the

continents, for all to behold --
This must not be again !
Let the Allies by all means accuse Germany of world-ambition and
world-plunder, and let the German people accuse their Prussian lords
but let every nation also search its own heart and accuse itself.
For have not the lords of every nation set before themselves the same
goal, the goal of world-ambition and glory and 'empire' and plunder?
And have not the mass-peoples of every nation stood meanly by and
acclaimed the fraud, nor spoken out against it, silently consenting to
these things in the prospect of some advantage also to themselves?
Have not all the nations without exception acted meanly and dastardly
towards the out lying black races, and even towards those more
civilized peoples whom they thought weaker than themselves -- and
now in the stress of war are they not finding that their own rights and
liberties are being slowly filched from them?
Yes, that is, the end of Glory and of Greed.
But the day of glory is departed. The newspapers, it is true, still keep
up the phrase. They talk of a battalion "covering itself with glory." But
the men themselves do not talk so. They know too well what it all
means. They see no glory in covering themselves with the blood of
their brothers of the opposing trenches; with whom a few moments
before they were joining in songs and jokes.
They only say: Now that we have begun, we will see it through -- but it
must not be Again.

Never I think in all the history of the world has there been a thing so
great in its way as the present British Army and Navy. This enormous
force, raised -- except for a small remnant -- by Voluntary enlistment
from all classes of the nation, and inspired more by a general and
protective sense towards the Motherland than by anything else, has
fulfilled what it considered to be its duty and its honour with a devotion
and a heroism unsurpassed. It were impossible to stay and recount its
many wonderful deeds.
A young officer said to me one day -- "Horrible as the whole thing is,
yet it almost seems worth while, when you think of the splendid things
done -- and done too in such a simple matter-of-fact way: when you
think of all the love and devotion poured out, and the lives our men

have given one for the sake of another."
Great indeed is the spirit of such an army, great its magnanimity, its
simplicity of mind, its unself-consciousness, its single concentration on
its purpose.
Yet perhaps the most surprising thing about our men is that they have
done all this with so little hatred in their hearts for the enemy.
Whatever the Germans may have felt, and whatever the French, the
Britishers have just done their fighting in their own nonchalant way
"because they had to" -- with scarcely a shadow of malice or revenge --
rather with that respect for a doughty opponent which always
distinguishes the true fighter.
Think of that quaint story (Between The Lines, by Boyd Cable, pp 188
ff) of the German Burschen in their trenches, singing with pious
enthusiasm the Song of Hate (probably commanded and compelled,
poor devils, to sing it) and our men for days secretly listening, learning
the words, practicing the tune on their muffled, mouth-organs; till
having got it all complete they one morning, burst it forth in full chorus
on the astonished Teutons, nor failed at the end to blaze out "Gott strafe
England" at the top of, their voices as if they really meant it -- and then
subsided into a roar of laughter. They simply would not take the
German "Hate" seriously.
Well, what can an enemy do with such an army? It would seem indeed
to be invincible.
The other surprising thing about this Army is (but it is also in part true
of the Russians and others) that the members of it not only bear so little
malice in their heart of hearts against the enemy, but that all the time
they (or nine-tenths of them) are giving their life-blood, for a Country
which in hardly any available or adequate sense can really be said to
belong to them.
Not one man of ours in ten, probably not one in a hundred, has any
direct rights or interest in his native soil; and the Motherland has too
often (at any rate in the past) turned out a stepmother who disowned
him later when crippled in her service.
He is told that he is fighting for his country, but