All over the world as late as July
25th men were making goods that they would not be able to ship, buying
goods they would not be able to import, careers were being planned,
enterprises contemplated, hopes and expectations entertained, all in
the belief that the world as known was the world as it was. Men were
writing books describing that world. They trusted the picture in their
heads. And then over four years later, on a Thursday morning, came the
news of an armistice, and people gave vent to their unutterable relief
that the slaughter was over. Yet in the five days before the real
armistice came, though the end of the war had been celebrated, several
thousand young men died on the battlefields.
Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in
which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us
now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true
picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself. It is harder
to remember that about the beliefs upon which we are now acting, but
in respect to other peoples and other ages we flatter ourselves that
it is easy to see when they were in deadly earnest about ludicrous
pictures of the world. We insist, because of our superior hindsight,
that the world as they needed to know it, and the world as they did
know it, were often two quite contradictory things. We can see, too,
that while they governed and fought, traded and reformed in the world
as they imagined it to be, they produced results, or failed to produce
any, in the world as it was.
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