but when the war actually arrived, and the fever, and the threat of Russia, and the fury of conscription, they perforce had to give way and join in.  How on earth could they do otherwise?  And the peasants—­even if they escaped the fever—­could not escape the compulsion of authority nor the old blind tradition of obedience.  They do not know, even to-day, why they are fighting; and they hardly know whom they are fighting, but in their ancient resignation they accept the inevitable and shout “Deutschland ueber Alles” with the rest.  And so a whole nation is swept off its feet by a small section of it, and the insolence of a class becomes, as in Louvain and Rheim’s, the scandal of the world.[7]

And the people bleed; yes, it is always the people who bleed.  The trains arrive at the hospital bases, hundreds, positively hundreds of them, full of wounded.  Shattered human forms lie in thousands on straw inside the trucks and wagons, or sit painfully reclined in the passenger compartments, their faces grimed, their clothes ragged, their toes protruding from their boots.  Some have been stretched on the battlefield for forty-eight hours, or even more, tormented by frost at night, covered with flies by day, without so much as a drink of water.  And those that have not already become a mere lifeless heap of rags have been jolted in country carts to some railway-station, and there, or at successive junctions, have been shunted on sidings for endless hours.  And now, with their wounds still slowly bleeding or oozing, they are picked out by tender hands, and the most crying cases are roughly, dressed before consigning to a hospital.  And some faces are shattered, hardly recognizable, and some have limbs torn away; and there are internal wounds unspeakable, and countenances deadly pallid, and moanings which cannot be stifled, and silences worse than moans.

Yes, the agony and bloody sweat of battlefields endured for the domination or the ambition of a class is appalling.  But in many cases, though more dramatic and appealing to the imagination, one may doubt if it is worse than the year-long and age-long agony of daily life endured for the same reason.

Maeterlinck, in his eloquent and fiery letter to the Daily Mail of September 14th, maintained that the whole German nation is equally to blame in this affair—­that all classes are equally involved in it, with no degrees of guilt.  We may excuse the warmth of personal feeling which makes him say this, but we cannot accept the view.  We are bound to point out that it is only by some such analysis as the above, and estimation of the method by which the delusions of one class may be communicated to the others, that we can guard ourselves, too, from falling into similar delusions.