You frown upon it, and the
people around you also frown. But if a war breaks out, the chances are
that everybody you admire will begin to feel the justification of
killing and hating. At first the vent for these feelings is very
narrow. The selves which come to the front are those which are attuned
to a real love of country, the kind of feeling that you find in Rupert
Brooke, and in Sir Edward Grey's speech on August 3,1914, and in
President Wilson's address to Congress on April 2, 1917. The reality
of war is still abhorred, and what war actually means is learned but
gradually. For previous wars are only transfigured memories. In that
honeymoon phase, the realists of war rightly insist that the nation is
not yet awake, and reassure each other by saying: "Wait for the
casualty lists." Gradually the impulse to kill becomes the main
business, and all those characters which might modify it,
disintegrate. The impulse becomes central, is sanctified, and
gradually turns unmanageable. It seeks a vent not alone on the idea of
the enemy, which is all the enemy most people actually see during the
war, but upon all the persons and objects and ideas that have always
been hateful. Hatred of the enemy is legitimate. These other hatreds
have themselves legitimized by the crudest analogy, and by what, once
having cooled off, we recognize as the most far-fetched analogy. It
takes a long time to subdue so powerful an impulse once it goes loose.
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