It looked then as if the hour was at hand. A year before the end of
the war in both camps there were months and weeks when the infinite
patience of the martyrised people seemed on the point of giving way;
when a great cry was ready to go up, "Enough." For the first time
there was the universal impression of a bloody deception. It is easy
to understand the indignation of the people seeing billions thrown
away on the war when before it their leaders had haggled over a few
hundred thousand for social betterments. There were figures that
exasperated them more than any speeches on the subject. Someone had
calculated that it cost 75,000 francs to kill a man; that made ten
millions of corpses, and for the same sum we could have had ten
millions of stockholders. The stupidest could see the immense value of
the treasure, and the horrible, the shameful, waste for an illusion.
There were things more abject still; from one end of Europe to the
other, there were vermin fattening on death, war-profiteers, robbers
of corpses.
"Do not talk to us any more," said these young men to themselves, "of
the struggle of democracies against autocracies;--they are all tarred
with the same brush. In all countries the war has pointed out the
leaders to the vengeance of the people; that unworthy middle class,
political, financial, intellectual, that in a single century of power
has heaped on the world more exactions, crimes, ruins and follies,
than kings and churches had inflicted in ten centuries.
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