No one can do anything to prevent war who does not recognize its
splendour, for it is by its splendour that it keeps its hold on
humanity, and persists. The wickedest and most selfish war in the world
is not fought by wicked and selfish soldiers. The spirit of man is
immense, and for an old memory, a pledged word, a sense of fellowship,
offers this frail and complicated tissue of flesh and blood, which a pin
or a grain of sand will disorder, to be the victim of all the atrocities
that the wit of man can compound out of fire and steel and poison. If
that spirit is to be changed, or directed into new courses, it must be
by one who understands it, and approaches it reverently, with bared
head.
The best hope seems to me to lie in paying chief attention to the
improvement of war rather than to its abolition; to the decencies of the
craft; to the style rather than the matter. Style is often more
important than matter, and this War would not have been so fierce or so
prolonged if it had not become largely a war on a point of style, a war,
that is to say, to determine the question how war should be waged.
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