When this war began the Englishman rubbed his eyes steeped in peace; he
is still rubbing them just a little, but less and less every day. A
profound lover of peace by habit and tradition, he has actually realized
by now that he is in for it up to the neck. To any one who really knows
him--_c'est quelque chose_!
It shall be freely confessed that, from an aesthetic point of view, the
Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and
super-humanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the
wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the
Englishman--fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous,
competitive, practical, never in extremes, a dumb, inveterate optimist,
and terribly tenacious--is undoubtedly equipped with Victory.
Bernard Shaw's Terms of Peace
_A letter written by G. Bernard Shaw to a friend in Vienna is published
in the Muenchener Neueste Nachrichten and in the Frankfurter Zeitung of
April 21, 1915. Mr. Shaw says:_
We are already on the way out of the first and worst phase. When reason
began to bestir itself, I appeared each week in great open meetings in
London; and when the newspapers discovered that I was not only not being
torn to pieces, but that I was growing better and better liked, then the
feeling that patriotism consists of insane lies began to give place to
the discovery that the presentation of the truth is not so dangerous as
every one had believed.
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