Ten Years After: A Reminder

Ten years ago, as I write these words, a spiritual tremor, as though the last trump were sounding for the judgment of God, shook the souls of many peoples. Something incredible, inconceivable, frightful, was about to happen in a world which believed it could not happen. It was the beginning of the World War in which the most civilised nations on earth, as they believed themselves to be, were to be hurled against each other, with all their power, science, manhood, wealth, in a struggle to the death.

Ten years ago.... Not much in historical time, not a great span in the life of an individual, but so long, because of what has happened, that only by an immense effort of imagination can one’s mind leap the gap between that time and this. One has to think back to another world in order to see again that year 1914 before the drums of war began to beat. It is a different world now, greatly changed, in the mental outlook of men and women, in the frontiers of the soul as well as the frontiers of nations. Dynasties have fallen, kings are in exile, the political maps have been re-drawn, new nations have come into being, old nations have lost their pride and their place. And yet that is nothing to what has happened in the minds of men and women. Old habits of thought have been smashed; old securities, traditions, obediences, convictions, lie in wreckage and, unlike the ruins of the war itself, will never be restored. We are different men and women.

Ten years after! How brief a time since that August in 1914! A mere tick of the clock in the history of mankind, yet we who are alive after so much death, who were stirred by the first shock of that war, and lived through its enormous drama, can hardly get back to ourselves as we were before the War began. Were we indeed those men and women who thought, acted and agonised in those days? Did we really believe the things that were then believed? Were we shaken by those passions, uplifted by those emotions? Are we the people who suffered and served? It is hardly possible to recapture, even in a dream, even for a few moments of illusion, the state of mind which was ours before the War happened and in the beginning of its history. It is very difficult because something has broken in us since then, and the problems of life have a different basis of thought, and all that emotion lies dead within us.