The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/Nature Goes Her Own Way
NATURE GOES HER OWN WAY
We found it heart-breaking. But it has been
always so. I was in Naples during the whole
period of the last great eruption of Vesuvius,
and, looking through the gloom of the heavens,
piled high with the whorls of fire and smoke that
were covering the Vesuvian valleys and villages
with a grey shroud, waist deep, of volcanic dust,
I thought the face of Nature in that sweet spot
could never be the same again; but when I went
back to it a year later I could see no difference.
I sailed south through the Straits of Messina a
few weeks before the earthquake, and, returning
north a few months later, I looked eagerly for
the change which I imagined must have been
made by the frightful upheaval of the earth that
had killed hundreds of thousands, and shaken
the soul of the entire human family, but I could
see no change at all, even through the strongest
field-glasses, until I came within sight of the
waste and wreckage of the little works of men.
Yes, Nature goes her own way, winter and
summer, seedtime and harvest, healing her own
wounds, but taking no thought of ours.
Yet, cruel as Nature seemed to be at the beginning of the spring, it was not so cruel as man. With the better weather our enemies began to devise and put into operation new and more devilish methods of warfare. Perhaps this was a result of their fear, for there is no cruelty so cruel as the cruelty that comes of fear, and no inhumanity so inhuman. Having expressed themselves as shocked by our alleged use of dum-dum bullets, they were now ransacking their laboratory for gases that would burst the lungs of our soldiers, and for inflammable oils that would set them afire as if they were criminals tarred and feathered and tied to a stake. Their battleships, built to fight craft of their own kind, or at least fortresses capable of replying to their fire, were now sent out to bombard innocent watering-places lying breast open to the sea. Their air-craft, constructed for reconnaissances, were ordered to drop bombs out of the clouds on to sleeping cities in the darkness of the night. And their submarines, tolerated by international courts only as weapons of attack on warships, were authorized to sink harmless merchantmen, without any word of warning, or any effort to save life. Could scientific knowledge under the direction of moral insanity go one step farther? Flying in the highest sky, hiding behind the densest clouds, stealing across the heavens in the dark hours, dropping fireballs on to the silent earth, sneaking back in the dawn; and then sailing through the womb of the great deep, rising like a serpent to spit death at innocent ships, diving to avoid destruction and scudding away under cover of the empty sea—what a spectacle of divine power at the service of devilish passion! It was difficult to believe that our enemies had not gone mad. They were no longer fighting like men, but like demons.