Читать книгу To-morrow and To-morrow - Stephen McKenna - Страница 11

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When we set out for Cannes three days after my demobilization, I intended to remain out of England for at least a twelvemonth. Since the night when Hornbeck and I waited for news of the armistice I had thought many times of his blank and puzzled confession: ‘This is what the N.O. has been training for, ever since the old Britannia days.’ If I had not also been preparing for the peace and for the war which preceded it, I had at least toiled for the whole of my adult life to preserve the peace which preceded the war. Now I could have adapted Hornbeck’s reasoning of ‘no more wars, no more armies and navies’ to my own case; and, when my friends asked me what I was going to do now, I might have said: ‘No more wars, no more politics or journalism on the old lines.’

And this, I take it, was the attitude of all who had even a smattering of modern history. From the moment when I warned Barbara that we should perhaps never again be able to call our souls our own, I realized that the armistice had ended nothing but the long business of killing. The victors would now contend for the fruits of their victory, as Russians, Prussians and British had contended in the Congress of Vienna; the vanquished would struggle to preserve in defeat all that compassion, adroitness and obstinacy could secure them, as Talleyrand had struggled for France after Waterloo. The alliance, if it was like any other of modern times, would be strained and perhaps broken in the first weeks of peace, as after our wars with Louis XIV and Napoleon. We should hear men speaking, as de Grammont and Hornbeck already spoke, of “the next war”. Any one who was concerned to avert that must be prepared for a continued effort in which he might truly be unable to call his soul his own.