The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Coming of Spring
THE COMING OF SPRING
But perhaps, as Zola says, it is only the soft-
hearted philosophers who are loud in their curses
of war, and the truer wisdom was that of the
stoical ancients, who could look with indifference
on the massacre of millions. To keep manly, to
remind ourselves that the generations come and
go, that after all people die, and that more die one
year than another—this should be the wise man's
way of reconciling himself to the inhumanities
of war. It is horrible doctrine, but certainly
nature seems to speak with that voice, and hence
the pang that came to us with the next great
flash as of lightning, which showed us the battle-front
at the beginning of the spring.
The long lines in the West had hardly changed so much as a single point to north or south since October 1914. Yet what horrors of conflict the intervening months had witnessed, bloody in their progress, though barren in their results! The storms of the spring (which in much of Northern Europe is only another name for a second winter) had gone through it all. Our soldiers had suffered frightfully, and some of us at home, awakening in the middle of stormy nights, had thought we heard the booming of far-off guns under the thunder of the sky.
Three millions of men were dead by this time, and that belt of green country, which many of us had crossed with light hearts a score of times, was nothing now but a vast graveyard stretching from the foot of the Swiss mountains to the margin of the North Sea. Here a charred and blackened mass of stones, which had once been a group of houses; there a cottage by the roadside, once sweet and pretty under its mantle of wild roses, now hideous with a gaping hole torn in its walls, and its little bed visible behind curtains that used to be white. And yet Nature was going on the same as ever—hardly giving a hint that the Great Death had passed that way. Our boys at the front wrote home that the leaves were beginning to show on the trees, that the grass was growing again, and that in the lulls of the cannonading they could hear the birds singing.