The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/And … After?
AND . . . AFTER?
Such is the drama of the war as I have seen it.
How far it has gone, when it will close and the
curtain fall on it none of us can say. With five
millions already dead, twice as many wounded,
one kingdom in ruins, another desolate from
disease, the larger part of Europe under arms,
civil life paralysed, social existence overshadowed
by a mourning that enters into nearly every
household; with a war still in progress compared
with which all other wars sink into insignificance;
with a public debt which Pitt, Fox, and Burke
(who thought £240,000,000 frightful) would have
considered certain to sink the ship of State; with
taxation such as our fathers never conceived
possible—what will be our condition when this
hideous war comes to an end?
It is dangerous to prophesy, but, as far as we can judge, the least of the results will be that we shall all be poorer; that great fortunes will have diminished and vast enterprises disappeared; that what remains of our savings will have a different value; that some of us who thought we had earned our rest will have to go on working; that the industrial classes will have a time of privation; and that (most touching of human tragedies) the old and helpless and dependent among the very poor will more than ever feel themselves to be in the way, filling the beds and eating the bread of the children.
Yet none can say. It is one of the paradoxes of history that after the longest and most exhausting wars, the accumulation of the largest national debts and the imposition of the heaviest taxations, nations have rapidly become rich. Although 1817 was a time of extreme distress in these islands, England prospered after the Napoleonic wars. Although 1871 was a time of fierce trial in Paris, yet France recovered herself quickly after the war with Germany. And though the Civil war in America left poverty in its immediate trail, the United States have since amassed boundless wealth.
So do the nations, generation after generation, renew their strength even after the most prolonged campaigns. But beyond the economic loss there will in this case be the physical loss of ten millions, perhaps, of the young manhood of Europe dead, and ten other millions permanently disabled, with all the injury to the race thereby resulting; and beyond the physical loss there will be the intellectual loss in the ruthless destruction of those ancient monuments which had linked us with the past; and beyond the intellectual loss there will be the moral loss in the uprooting of that sympathy of nation with nation which had seemed to unite us with the future. As a consequence of this war a great part of Europe will be closed to some of us for the rest of our natural lives, and the world will contain more than a hundred millions fewer of our fellow- creatures in whose welfare we shall take joy.