FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 5:  This and the later passage from Pericles’ funeral oration I have quoted from the late Richard Crawley’s admirable translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, now published in the Temple Classics.—­A.  T. de M.]

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THE DEAD DO NOT DIE

XIV

THE DEAD DO NOT DIE

1

When we behold the terrible loss of so many young lives, when we see so many incarnations of physical and moral vigour, of intellect and of glorious promise pitilessly cut off in their first flower, we are on the verge of despair.  Never before have the fairest energies and aspirations of men been flung recklessly and incessantly into an abyss whence comes no sound or answer.  Never since it came into existence has humanity squandered its treasure, its substance and its prospects so lavishly.  For more than twelve months, on every battlefield, where the bravest, the truest, the most ardent and self-sacrificing are necessarily the first to die and where the less courageous, the less generous, the weak, the ailing, in a word the less desirable, alone possess some chance of escaping the carnage, for over twelve months a sort of monstrous inverse selection has been in operation, one which seems to be deliberately seeking the downfall of the human race.  And we wonder uneasily what the state of the world will be after the great trial and what will be left of it and what will be the future of this stunted race, shorn of all the best and noblest part of it.

The problem is certainly one of the darkest that have ever vexed the minds of men.  It contains a material truth before which we remain defenceless; and, if we accept it as it stands, we can discover no remedy for the evil that threatens us.  But material and tangible truths are never anything but a more or less salient angle of greater and deeper-lying truths.  And, on the other hand, mankind appears to be such a necessary and indestructible force of nature that it has always, hitherto, not only survived the most desperate ordeals, but succeeded in benefiting by them and emerging greater and stronger than before.

2

We know that peace is better than war; it were madness to compare the two.  We know that, if this cataclysm let loose by an act of unutterable folly had not come upon the world, mankind would doubtless have reached ere long a zenith of wonderful achievement whose manifestations it is impossible to foreshadow.  We know that, if a third or a fourth part of the fabulous sums expended on extermination and destruction had been devoted to works of peace, all the iniquities that poison the air we breathe would have been triumphantly redressed and that the social question, the one great question, that matter of life and death which justice demands