But Logic and Morals are of no use on these occasions.  They are too thin.  They are only threads in a vast fabric.  You extract a single thread from the weaving of a carpet, and note its colour and its concatenations, but that gives you no faintest idea of the pattern of the carpet; and then you extract another, and another, but you are no nearer the design.  Logic and morals are similar threads in the great web of life.  You may follow them in various directions, but without effective result.  Life is so much greater than either; and War is a volcanic manifestation of Life which gives them little or no heed.

There is a madness of nations, as well as of individual people.  Every one who has paid attention to the fluctuations of popular sentiment knows how strange, how unaccountable, these are.  They seem to suggest the coming to the surface, from time to time, of hidden waves—­groundswells of some deep ocean.  The temper, the temperament, the character, the policy of a whole nation will change, and it is difficult to see why.  Sometimes a passion, a fury, a veritable mania, quite unlike its ordinary self, will seize it.  There is a madness of peoples, which causes them for a while to hate each other with bitter hatred, to fight furiously and wound and injure each other; and then lo! a little while more and they are shaking hands and embracing and swearing eternal friendship!  What does it all mean?

It is all as mad and unreasonable as Love is—­and that is saying a good deal!  In love, too, people desire to hurt each other; they do not hesitate to wound one another—­wounding hearts, wounding bodies even, and hating themselves even while they act so.  What does it all mean?  Are they trying the one to reach the other at all costs—­if not by embraces, at least by injuries—­each longing to make his or her personality felt, to impress himself or herself upon the other in such wise as never again to be forgotten.  Sometimes a man will stab the girl he loves, if he cannot get at her any other way.  Sex itself is a positive battle.  Lust connects itself only too frequently with violence and the spilling of blood.

Is it possible that something the same happens with whole nations and peoples—­an actual lust and passion of conflict, a mad intercourse and ravishment, a kind of generation in each other, and exchange of life-essences, leaving the two peoples thereafter never more the same, but each strangely fertilized towards the future?  Is it this that explains the extraordinary ecstasy which men experience on the battlefield, even amid all the horrors—­an ecstasy so great that it calls them again and again to return?  “Have you noticed,” says one of our War correspondents,[25] “how many of our colonels fall?  Do you know why?  It is for five minutes of life.  It is for the joy of riding, when the charge sounds, at the crest of a wave of men.”