Faith, War, and Polic1917 |
Common terms and phrases
accept allies America army Asquith Austria Belgium believe better blockade blood Britain British Bullard Casement cause certainly civil common Concert of Europe course danger Declaration Declaration of London doubt emotion Empire enemy England English Europe evil fact feeling fight force Foreign Office foreign policy Foreign Secretary France French friends Germany Government hate hatred Heath herd herd instinct Home Rule Homer Lea honour human ideals India instinct interest Ireland Irish justice killed Liberal live look Lord matter ment mind nation nature neutral never normal once opinion ordinary Parliament party passion peace perhaps political Ponsonby present proud question reason remember Russia seems sense Serbia ship Sinn Fein Sir Edward Grey soldiers sort speak speech spirit suffering things thought tion treaty true whole wish words wounded wrong
Popular passages
Page 66 - I'll be wise hereafter, And seek for grace : What a thrice-double ass Was I, to take this drunkard for a god, And worship this dull fool ! Pro.
Page 189 - ... we obtained recognition of the fact — which was not seriously disputed — that, as a body, those rules do amount practically to a statement of what is the essence of the law of nations properly applicable to the questions at issue under present-day conditions of maritime commerce and warfare.
Page 244 - You speak lightly, you assume that we shall speak lightly, of things, emotions, states of mind, human relationships, and affairs which are to us solemn or terrible. You seem ashamed, as if they were a kind of weakness, of the ideas which sent us to France, and for which thousands of sons and lovers have died. You calculate the profits to be derived from "War after the War," as though the unspeakable agonies of the Somme were an item in a commercial proposition.
Page 20 - I have spoken and presided at more meetings than I can remember for peace and arbitration and the promotion of international friendship. I opposed the policy of war in South Africa with all my energies, and have been either outspokenly hostile or inwardly unsympathetic towards almost every war that Great Britain has waged in my lifetime. If I may speak more personally, there is none of my own work into which I have put more intense feeling than into my translation of Euripides' Trojan Women, the...
Page 44 - in the midst of death, with the bullets whistling round. The same with all the soldiers. The wounded all want to get well and return to the fight. They fight with tears of joy in their eyes.' Human nature is a mysterious thing, and man finds his weal and woe not in the obvious places. To have something before you, clearly seen, which you know you must do, and can do, and will spend your utmost strength and perhaps your life in doing, that is one form at least of very high happiness, and one that...
Page 246 - They carry their burden with little help from you. For an army does not live by munitions alone, but also by fellowship in a moral idea or purpose. And that you cannot give us. You cannot give it us, because you do not possess it. You are, I see, more divided in soul than you were when I became a soldier, denouncing the apostles of war, yet not altogether disinclined to believe that war is an exalting thing, half implying that our cause is the cause of...
Page 7 - For there is that side of it, too. We have now not only to strain every nerve to help our friend — we must strain every nerve also to injure our enemy. This is horrible, but we must try to face the truth. For my own part, I find that I do desperately desire to hear of German dreadnoughts sunk in the North Sea. Mines are treacherous engines of death; but I should be only too glad to help in laying a mine for them.
Page 245 - Of the first material reality of war, from which everything else takes its colour, the endless and loathsome physical exhaustion, you say little; for it would spoil the piquancy, the verve, of the picture. Of your soldiers...
Page 166 - ... new conditions determined by a new Europe. Millions of men in the trenches will then return to work. The energies of each of the now belligerent nations, highly trained, will then be turned to production. These are days of terrible discipline for the nations at war, but it must not be forgotten that each is developing a national solidarity, a knowledge of method, a realization of capacity hitherto unapproached.
Page 41 - The words come in the official report made by the captain of one of our lost cruisers. But that is the kind of epitaph nearly all men crave for themselves, and the wisest men, I think, even for their nation. And if we accept this there will follow further consequences. War is not all evil. It is a true tragedy, which must have nobleness and triumph in it as well as disaster. . . . This is dangerous ground. The subject lends itself to foolish bombast, especially when accompanied by a lack of true...