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It was the summer of 1914, and the never-to-be-forgotten August had come and passed, firing the match that was destined to set the whole world ablaze. Mrs. McGuire's eldest son John of whom she boasted in season and out and whom she loved with an all-absorbing passion had caught the war-fever, gone to Canada, and enlisted. Mrs.
The most intentionally eloquent passage in his book describes war-fever unifying and carrying away a whole people: that was the summit of moral consciousness and of mystic virtue. His aim, even in ethics, was avowedly to describe that which exists, to describe moral experience, without proposing a different form for it.
The long and oft-vaunted immunity of England from the foot of a foreign foe has its drawbacks: we have forgotten what war really means, we have delegated our courage and patriotism to an army of mercenaries, who represent us in the field as a nobleman's carriage represents him at a funeral; we are valiant vicariously and sublime by deputy; we take the war-fever in its pleasant heats, and contract out the chills and the blood-letting.
"Hullo!" cried Nicky-Nan, unsuspecting. "You caught the war-fever too? I never met 'ee so far afield afore. What with your sedentary figure an' the contempt I've heard 'ee use about soldiers " Mr Latter, as he straightened himself up, appeared to be confused. He was also red in the face, and breathed heavily. Nicky-Nan noted, but innocently misread, these symptoms.
I go further, I affirm that the records of the past, the heroic sacrifices which England made in the sixteenth, in the seventeenth century, and in later times, justify the contrary assumption, justify the assumption that at this crisis this grave and momentous crisis, a crisis such as I think no council of men has had to face for many centuries, perhaps not since the embassy of the Goths to the Emperor Valens the ministry or cabinet which but dares, dares to trust this people's resolution, will find that this enthusiasm is not that of men overwrought with war-fever, but the deep-seated purpose of a people strong to defend the heritage of its fathers, and not to swerve from the path which fate itself has marked out for it amongst the empires of the earth.
But between mere war-fever, Jingoism, and such free, unfettered enthusiasm, a nation's unaltering loyalty in defeat or in triumph to an ideal born of its past, and its joy in the actions in which this ideal is realized, the gulf is wide. Napoleon knew this.
Holding out her moccasin at arm's-length, the better to note the effect of her work, she expressed regret that her father had gone off with the hunters, for she felt sure he would have been able to allay the war-fever among the young braves if he had remained at home. "Ay, he would easily have put down Alizay and Magadar; but the old chief can do nothing, he is growing too old.
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