Item 01: Malcolm Shore Stanley correspondence, 8 December 1916-28 October 1918 - Page 185
Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 185]
Reflections on the war.
A french lecturer sends to us this article
"The present war with its horrors, will perhaps compell one day the people tired by its sufferings and privations to lay down their arms and to entrust the defence of their cause to clever diplomats, who will exert themselves to level all those difficulties created by the astuteness of the adversary in order to arrive at an amiable understanding that will solve definitely the litigation - source of the present awful time.
Although this moment appears now remote and that we may not be initiated to the mysteries of diplomacy, it is nevertheless permitted to us after 3 years of invasion to impartially look forward to the future - which looks so gloomy - in spite of the inconsiderate prognostications of certain unconscious spirits.
A world in ruins transformed into a vast cemetery, an immense desert, that will be the result of this wrestling gigantic which a blind force has unchained but which an implacable logic would have been able to prevent in due time.
The few humans which Destiny shall have spared will contemplate, mute and silently this frightful solitude which shall surround them. Reflecting, he will see behind him, a past - destroyed for ever - moving still in its debris with all the fossils of the past centuries, before him, the dawn of an horizon without end - the first light of hope, soon he will take up courage the mortal hope acquiring new strength under the hand of unhappiness and from this chaos shall spring up laboriously a new generation whose task sublime, will be to make disappear the remains of this abominable war, to reconcile men & to inculcate into them nobler principles which understood and followed will place regenerated humanity on a new basis, permitting him to attain an ideal considered inaccessible today where violence and injustice will be excluded.
The example of our unhappiness merited by our faults will probably exercise a salutory