for war.  But can there be—­a just war?  I mean—­when the will to war takes hold of a people—­does it remain the same people?  Does war in its hands remain an instrument that can be justly used?  Can it be waged justly?  Can it be won justly?  Can it, having been won, make to a just peace?  No!  Something happens:  there comes a change; war in a people’s mind drives justice out....  Can soldiers fight without “seeing red”—­can a nation?  Not when nations have to fight on the tremendous scale of modern war.  Then they are like those monstrous mechanisms of long-range destructiveness, which we so falsely call “weapons of precision,” but which are in fact so horribly unprecise that, once let loose, we cannot know what lives of harmlessness, of innocence, of virtue, they are going to destroy.  You find your range, you fix your elevation, you touch a button:  you hear your gun go off.  And over there, among the unarmed—­the weak, the defenceless, the infirm—­it has done—­what?  Singled out for destruction what life or lives; ten, twenty, a hundred?—­you do not know.  So with nations, when once they have gone to war; their imprecision becomes—­horrible; though the cause of your war may be just.

(Tumulty gives a profound nod, paying his chief the compliment of letting it be seen that he is causing him to think deeply.)

That’s what happened here.  Do you remember, did you realise, Tumulty, what a power my voice was in the world—­till we went in?—­that, because I had the power to keep them back from war (for there my constitutional prerogative was absolute), even my opponents had to give weight to my words.  They were angry, impatient, but they had to obey.  And, because they could not help themselves, they accepted point by point my building up of the justice of our cause.  They didn’t care for justice; but I spoke for the Nation then; and, with justice as my one end, I drove home my point.  And then—­we went in.  After that, justice became vengeance.  When our men went over the trenches, fighting with short arms, “Lusitania!” was their cry:  and they took few prisoners—­you know that, Tumulty.

(Over that point the Ex-President pauses, though Tumulty sees no special reason why he should pause.)

The Lusitania had been sunk, and still we had not gone to war, and no crowds came to cry it madly outside the White House as they might have done—­if that was how they felt then.  The Lusitania lies at the bottom of the sea.  There are proposals for salving her; but I think that there she will remain.  The salving might tell too much.

TUMULTY.  You mean that talk about fuse caps being on board might have been true?  Would it matter now?