Quite true—­and absolutely unjust.  The Hollander, whose households we were guarding, chose to interpret our motive at its most ignoble worth.  Our men were receiving in their bodies the wounds which would have been inflicted on Holland, had we elected to stand out.  In the light of subsequent events, all the world acknowledges that we were and are fighting for our own households; but it is a glorious certainty that scarcely a Britisher who died in those early days had the least realisation of the fact.  It was the chivalrous vision of a generous Crusade that led our chaps from their firesides to the trampled horror that is Flanders.  They said farewell to their habitual affections, and went out singing to their marriage with death.

I suppose there has been no war that could not be interpreted ultimately as a war of self-interest.  The statesmen who make wars always carefully reckon the probabilities of loss or gain; but the lads who kiss their sweethearts good-bye require reasons more vital than those of pounds, shillings and pence.  Few men lay down their lives from self-interested motives.  Courage is a spiritual quality which requires a spiritual inducement.  Men do not set a price on their chance of being blown to bits by shells.  Even patriotism is too vague to be a sufficient incentive.  The justice of the cause to be fought for helps; it must be proportionate to the magnitude of the sacrifice demanded.  But always an ideal is necessary—­an ideal of liberty, indignation and mercy.  If this is true of the men who go out to die, it is even more true of the women who send them,

  “Where there’re no children left to pull
  The few scared, ragged flowers—­
  All that was ours, and, God, how beautiful! 
  All, all that was once ours,
  Lies faceless, mouthless, mire to mire,
  So lost to all sweet semblance of desire
  That we, in those fields seeking desperately
  One face long-lost to love, one face that lies
  Only upon the breast of Memory,
  Would never find it—­even the very blood
  Is stamped into the horror of the mud—­
  Something that mad men trample under-foot
  In the narrow trench—­for these things are not men—­
  Things shapeless, sodden, mute
  Beneath the monstrous limber of the guns;
  Those things that loved us once... 
  Those that were ours, but never ours again.”

For two and a half years the American press specialized on the terror aspect of the European hell.  Every sensational, exceptional fact was not only chronicled, but widely circulated.  The bodily and mental havoc that can be wrought by shell fire was exaggerated out of all proportion to reality.  Photographs, almost criminal in type, were published to illustrate the brutal expression of men who had taken part in bayonet charges.  Lies were spread broadcast by supposedly reputable persons, stating how soldiers had to be maddened with drugs or alcohol before they would go over the top.  Much of what was recorded