meanest of their daily concerns has a dignity and a spiritual fineness which put to shame the pitiably small affairs of a world redeemed. The war was supposed to be the disorientation, if not the destruction, of everything great and noble in human life; but reading these books and looking upon what has followed I am moved to wonder whether it was not in reality the last high moment of human endeavour, the final magnificent movement of which humanity is capable. It was brutal and wanton and beastly; but for millions of simple men it was honest. It was a demand upon them for every moral and physical energy, and in the exhaustion of all human power it gave, fitfully, a certain happiness. So it may be suggested without too much irony that the war was a time of Arcadian felicity which may never come again.
All the more because both Hamilton Gibbs and Stephen Graham describe the war in terms of hellishness. Gibbs, the amateur of life, obviously considers that the last turn of the screw in the infernal torture is the knowledge that the whole thing was unnecessary in its beginning and futile in its end; the fanatic democrat and Christian, Graham, wills the means because he has willed the end, and consoles himself variously. I have already suggested and am perfectly willing to state openly that the stuff of both books is insignificant. What makes them important is the serious candour with which both reproduce for us something which we have too soon forgot—the intolerably glorious background of the war. I beg you to believe, dear war lords and pacifists, that it is not a phrase. For in any decent civilization it is humanly intolerable that war should be glorious.
I am sure that Mr. Gibbs's book will be promptly forgotten, but it is none the less a triumph for life against all the evil in the world that he was spared to write it, for the war seemed to cut with a particularly vengeful accuracy at youth and health, and if one held beauty sacred he seemed foredoomed to death. Mr. Gibbs was never a poet, but he was always an amateur. I figure him a youth in flannels and blazer; doing a bit of acting and a bit of writing, talking English slang, inoffensively well-bred and competent. He and his kind must have been the despair of Rudyard Kipling and the empire-makers, just as he and his kind were the despair of the high-minded pacifists who saw them go forth "with mingled loathing and elation," but without thought, to die for King and Country. For them the summer of 1914 seemed imperishably halcyon and gentle, and
