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UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


GIFT   OF   CAPT.   AND    MRS. 
PAUL  MCBRIDE  PERIGORD 


The  Old  Corner  Book 

Store,  Inc. 
Boston,       -       Mass 


UNIVERSITY  of  CALIFORNIA 

AT 

LOS  ANGELES 

LIBRARY 


THE  NEW  DEATH 


THE  NEW  DEATH 


By 
WINIFRED  KIRKLAND 


•  •  •  •  • 


■  j  >  *  t 


BOSTON  &  NEW  YORK 
HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

<ri)t  iUbrrfii&e  J3rf68.<£ambr(t)at 


-(    r%  r*  r* 


COPYRIGHT,  ItplS,  BY  WINIFRED  KIHKLAND 
ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED 

Published  June  iqiS 


« <      »   ■  , '  •     „•  •   •.     "       «   >        i    .  .  ■ 


«     i  «  i 


; 

i 


-i 


lo3f\ 


TO  MY  FATHER 
1843-1917 


THE   NEW   DEATH 


Jh 


w: 


'E  are  accustomed  in  these  days  to 
hear  many  ancient  things  called 
new.  New  Thought,  New  Poetry,  New 
Religion,  are  terms  which,  when  stripped 
of  their  faddist  connotation,  can  honestly 
claim  a  novelty  of  approach  in  regard  to 
these  three  oldest  of  spiritual  activities.  By 
an  analogous  use  of  the  word  "new,"  one 
may  direct  attention  to  the  change  in 
standards  that  is  being  wrought  in  every- 
day living  by  the  present  concentration 

o)  upon  death.  Never  before  in  history  has 
death  been  so  prominent  a  fact.  Always 

^5         before  it  has  been  possible  to  avoid  think- 


ing about  it.  To-day  no  one  can  escape 
the  constant  presence,  before  his  mind, 
of  dissolution.   The  most  casual  concerns 

m  flash  forth  at  unexpected  moments  in  star- 

tling focus  against  the  present  holocaust  of 

*&  ruin.  No  one  can  forget  them,  no  one  can 

get  away  from  them,  those  boys  dead  upon 

&  the  battle-fields  of  Europe.  We  are  used  to 


2  THE  NEW  DEATH 

speaking  of  this  or  that  friend's  philoso- 
phy of  life;  the  time  has  come  when  every 
one  who  is  to  live  at  peace  with  his  own 
brain  must  possess  also  a  philosophy  of 
death.  The  enigma  of  the  young  dying  by 
the  thousands,  the  millions,  is  as  insistent 
for  the  humblest  as  for  the  most  intellec- 
tual thinker;  it  is  universal.  There  is  not 
one  of  us  who  has  not  thought  more  about 
death  within  the  last  four  years  than  in  a 
whole  lifetime  before,  and  by  their  very  in- 
tensity our  thoughts  are  new.  Contempo- 
rary publications  of  every  sort  are  prolific 
in  evidence  of  the  focusing  of  the  popular 
mind  upon  death,  but  this  preoccupation  is 
a  force  too  fresh  to  be  easily  formulated, 
while  already  it  is  so  pervasive  and  so  pro- 
found in  its  effect  upon  the  motives  and 
the  standards  which  must  both  sustain  a 
world  in  agony  and  rebuild  it  for  the  fu- 
ture, that  the  psychologist  may  well  term 
this  naked  intimacy  with  facts  formerly 
avoided,  the  New  Death. 

It  is  probably  more  by  its  poignancy 
than  by  its  numbers  that  death  has  shocked 


THE  NEW  DEATH  3 

us  into  this  novel  realization  of  its  im- 
portance. If  the  European  harvest  had 
reaped  old  men,  however  many,  rather  than 
young,  the  challenge  for  explanation  would 
not  have  been  so  stinging.  Concerning  the 
extinction  of  the  old,  we  should  have  felt 
as  we  do  about  the  sequence  of  blossom, 
fruitage,  decay,  and  seed  —  always  seed. 
We  should  have  had  the  reassurance  of  an 
ordered  economy  perceived  as  rational:  the 
old,  dying,  had  had  their  opportunity,  had 
served  their  purpose.  For  their  passing,  we 
should  not  have  had  to  remake  our  think- 
ing; we  should  have  grieved  a  little  and 
gone  on  about  our  business.  The  only  way 
in  which  death  could  exact  from  us  its  due 
consideration  was  to  break  our  hearts  with 
pity  and  baffle  our  brains  with  wastage.  It 
may  be  that  the  enigma  of  the  youth  of  the 
world  destroyed  is  insoluble,  but  the  New 
Death,  this  unprecedented  readiness  at  last 
to  look  into  the  unseen,  is  the  effort  of 
popular  thought  to  translate  pity  into  mo- 
tive, and  bewildering  waste  into  a  recon- 
structed relationship  to  spiritual  values. 
Not  alone  by  the  youth  of  its  victims  has 


4  THE  NEW  DEATH 

the  war  horrified  us  into  a  new  adjustment 
to  death,  but  by  their  type.  The  shining 
best  are  those  most  surely  sacrificed.  Those 
that  might  have  been  our  leaders,  —  paint- 
ers, scholars,  scientists,  statesmen,  poets, 

—  and  those  others  so-called  "humbler," 
who  might  have  brought  new  vision,  new 
fellowship  into  the  ranks  of  labor,  —  the 
passionate  idealists  of  every  class  and  kind, 

—  these  are  the  youths  the  war  has  taken 
and  will  take.  For  a  long  time  we  in  the 
United  States  felt  the  suffering  chiefly  in 
imagination  only.  Not  even  yet  have  we 
thought  so  deeply  about  the  mystery  as 
have  the  other  nations,  but,  God  knows,  we 
shall  presently  be  thinking!  Premonitions 
of  our  new  spiritual  insight  came  to  us 
when  first  we  watched  the  set  faces  of  our 
own  boys  as  they  marched  to  their  fate. 
How  can  the  world  spare  its  best  before 
they  have  lived  to  bless  it?  What  is  the 
meaning  of  the  frenzy  with  which  the  uni- 
verse blasts  its  benefactors?  And  what  is 
the  significance  of  the  strange,  the  well- 
nigh  occult,  reassurance  without  which  we 
could  not  "carry  on"  the  ideals  they  have 


THE  NEW  DEATH  5 

left  us  in  the  face  of  such  utter  prodigality 
of  destruction?  What  is  this  grave  the 
world  was  coming  in  its  heart  and  in  its 
daily  practices  more  and  more  to  treat  as 
final? 

Many  of  us  know  that  spot  in  Washing- 
ton where,  remote  even  in  the  "crowded 
loneliness"  of  those  many  graves,  there  sits 
aPbronze  figure  of  mystery.  For  a  few 
hurried  moments  of  sight-seeing,  we  have 
paused,  awed  and  dumb.  Not  the  most 
smug  among  us  has  seen  that  face  and  not 
questioned  it,  then  we  have  stepped  forth 
from  the  cypresses  and  gone  back  by  the 
clanging  cars  to  the  cheerful  hurly-burly  of 
our  little  busy  hours.  Now  it  is  as  if  that 
seated  statue  had  been  placed  in  every 
house.  Perhaps  we  veil  it  with  a  curtain, 
but  always  we  feel  it  there,  obtruding  on 
our  most  casual  affairs  its  stern,  strange 
presence.  Some  humble  household  impor- 
tunity every  now  and  then  twitches  aside 
the  curtain,  unveiling  that  face  of  enigma, 
silent,  looking  steadily  —  into  what?  All 
over  the  world  it  is  the  same,  in  a  million 
homes  that  baffling  and  majestic  shape.  It 


6  THE  NEW  DEATH 

seems,  as  we  gaze  at  that  statue,  as  if  it 
were  seated  before  a  familiar  door,  through 
which  some  dear  boy  has  suddenly  van- 
ished, some  actual  living  laughing  boy,  our 
own  now,  bearing  some  name  precious  to 
our  sobbing  lips.  That  half  the  world  is 
asking  of  that  shrouded  form,  "Where  has 
he  gone,  and  why?"  makes  all  life  tremu- 
lous with  a  new  inquiry.  When  every  one 
is  asking  the  same  question,  may  it  not  be 
that  the  answers,  still  hesitant,  still  experi- 
mental, may  bring  into  being  a  new  adapta- 
tion of  living  to  dying,  a  New  Death? 

It  is  not  always  that  the  popular  mind 
moves  in  advance  of  accredited  intellec- 
tual leaders,  but  it  appears  that  to-day  the 
common  people  have  become  their  own 
prophets,  that  a  belief  in  personal  survival 
is  becoming  so  strong  an  influence  in  thou- 
sands of  humble  and  bereaved  homes  that 
it  would  seem  as  if  novelists  and  psycholo- 
gists should  reckon  with  it  as  an  important 
phase  of  the  contemporary,  however  little 
they  accept  it  as  a  philosophy  for  them- 
selves. Scientists  and  philosophers  are  still 
honestly  agnostic,  but  they  should  beware 


THE  NEW  DEATH  7 

of  any  longer  attributing  their  own  creed 
to  people  at  large.  By  very  wistfulness  of 
grief,  current  thought  is  being  influenced 
in  practical  ways  by  the  possibility  of  im- 
mortality as  never  before  in  history.  Yet 
Mr.  Galsworthy  writes:  "Not  one  English- 
man in  ten  now  really  believes  that  he  is 
going  to  live  again";  and  of  the  French, 
"The  poilu  has  no  faith  at  all  now,  if  he 
ever  had,  save  faith  in  his  country." 

One  wonders  if  it  is  conceivable  that 
Mr.  Galsworthy  has  read  the  many  brief, 
immortal  credos  of  the  many  Englishmen 
who  have  left  us  their  breathless,  blotted 
memoirs  of  the  trenches,  or  has  been  deaf  to 
the  triumph  songs  of  parents  who  have  sur- 
vived them,  or  that  he  can  fail  to  have  been 
stirred  by  the  flaming  faith  of  the  young 
soldiers  of  France.  These  soldier-writers 
say,  and  surely  they  were  intimate  enough 
to  know,  that  they  merely  voice  the  inar- 
ticulate convictions  of  ten  thousand  hum- 
bler comrades.  Whatever  our  personal  be- 
liefs, indurated  by  lifelong  habit,  we  are 
strangely  stupid  if  we  are  not  startled  by 
the  overwhelming  evidence  of  the  present 


8  THE  NEW  DEATH 

centering  of  the  general  attention  upon  the 
possibilities  of  survival. 

If  we  look,  not  to  the  theorists  in  fiction, 
philosophy,  or  science,  but  to  that  instant, 
living  register  of  the  contemporary,  the 
newspaper  or  the  magazine,  we  find  con- 
vincing corroboration.  The  following  is  not 
the  sort  of  thing  that  four  years  ago  we 
should  have  prophesied  from  any  war  cor- 
respondent. It  is  from  the  pen  of  Charles 
Grasty,  writing  from  England  to  the  "New 
York  Times  " :  — 

"One  of  the  best-read  columns  in  the 
newspapers  in  these  melancholy  days  is 
that  devoted  to  deaths  and  in  memoriam 
notices.  They  bring  home  the  sentimental 
and  spiritual  side  of  this  terrible  conflict. 
Bereaved  relatives  pay  tribute  to  their 
dead  and  give  public  expression  to  their 
grief  who  in  the  old  days  would  have 
shrunk  from  breaking  their  reserve  on  sub- 
jects regarded  as  private  and  sacred.  The 
effect  of  this  community  expression  is  to 
set  in  the  very  midst  of  commonplace, 
workaday  life  the  beautiful  thought  of  im- 
mortality." 


THE  NEW  DEATH  9 

In  another  issue  of  the  same  journal, 
the  editor  of  a  popular  woman's  magazine 
speaks  of  her  "realization  of  the  fact  that 
every  one,  rich  and  poor,  educated  and  il- 
literate, has  a  craving  for  knowledge  of  life 
after  death;  has  a  craving  for  belief  in  life 
after  death.  And  the  war  has  raised  this 
feeling  to  the  nth.  power;  we  feel  that  we 
shall  go  mad  if  there  is  no  hereafter." 

Still  another  writes:  "Not  for  a  century- 
has  interest  in  the  great  themes  of  death, 
immortality,  and  the  life  everlasting  been 
so  widespread  and  so  profound.  The  war 
has  made  a  new  heaven,  let  us  trust  that  it 
may  aid  in  making  a  new  earth." 

The  attention  of  the  popular  mind  to 
death  is  not  only  at  variance  with  the  at- 
titude of  the  accepted  leaders  of  thought, 
but  is  contradictory  to  its  own  attitude 
of  only  a  few  years  ago,  when  death  was 
still  the  isolated,  not  the  average,  experi- 
ence of  the  average  person.  In  the  old  days 
the  bereaved  was  a  little  apart,  a  little  ab- 
normal. We  were  always  glad  when  our 
friends  set  aside  their  mourning  and  became 


io  THE  NEW  DEATH 

again  like  the  rest  of  us.  For  an  every-day 
man  or  woman,  death  was  a  subject  a  little 
indecorous,  had  a  little  of  the  old  Hebrew 
abhorrence  which  made  the  Jews  regard 
its  presence  as  a  defilement  of  their  Pass- 
over; yet  it  was  a  young  man's  dying  that, 
in  the  history  of  religion,  re-created  that 
Passover  by  the  promise  of  a  resurrection. 
We  of  this  country  are  now  only  begin- 
ning the  new  investigation  of  mortality, 
but  in  the  other  nations  this  investigation 
is  already  potent  in  its  practical  effects. 
That  the  first  manifested  result  is  a  seren- 
ity as  yet  inexplicable  even  to  its  posses- 
sors has  a  significance  that  intrigues  our 
divination,  and  contains  possibilities  for 
the  human  spirit  not  yet  to  be  prophesied. 

"Though  the  Abhorred  taketh  the  groom,  and  to 
the  bride  hath  sent 

The  dagger  of  anguish  with  the  ice-cold  hilt, 
Both  of  them  triumph  in  a  strange  content  — 

And  out  of  souls  like  these  will  heavens  be  built 
And  holy  cities  peopled  for  the  Lord." 

Thus  an  English  father,  who  has  lost 
two  sons  in  the  war,  glimpses  the  possibili- 
ties of  the  new  enforced  familiarity  with 


THE  NEW  DEATH  n 

fate,  which  varies,  according  to  the  indi- 
vidual, all  the  way  from  uneasiness  at  the 
intrusion  of  the  spiritual  upon  his  smug- 
ness to  an  absorption  so  engrossing  that 
some  of  us  feel  that  we  cannot  go  on  living 
one  day  longer  until  we  have  decided  what 
is  the  relation  of  dying  to  every  hour  of 
existence.  In  terms  of  immediate  living, 
the  New  Death  is  the  constant  influence 
upon  us  of  the  boys  who  have  passed. 
All  the  ramifications  of  experience  and  of 
endeavor  growing  out  of  our  attitude  to- 
ward our  young  dead  must  become  a  new 
psychological  factor  in  the  world's  thought 
and  action.  The  whole  subject  is  still  as 
formless  as  it  is  forceful,  but  it  is  already 
possible  to  analyze  some  of  its  obvious 
characteristics  and  to  conjecture  some  pos- 
sible results  to  public  life  and  to  private 
thinking.  Like  many  other  felt  but  not  yet 
formulated  influences  of  the  war,  the  po- 
tentialities of  the  New  Death  are  still  to 
be  discovered,  as,  led  by  grief,  the  souls 
of  survivors  seek  to  penetrate  the  path 
whither  so  imperiously  the  splendid  young 
dead  compel  our  thoughts. 


12  THE  NEW  DEATH 

The  new  attitude  toward  dissolution  can 
be  clarified  by  comparing  it  with  the  atti- 
tude of  other  ages  toward  the  age-old  fact. 
We  must  remember  always  that  the  point 
of  view  under  scrutiny  is  not  that  of  the 
philosophers,  but  that  of  the  people;  that 
we  are  seeking  humbly  to  penetrate  the 
profundities  of  a  plain  man's  thinking, 
whether  that  plain  man  is  a  sturdy  Greek 
farmer  whose  Homer  is  his  Bible,  or  a 
young  British  stevedore  with  no  Bible  at 
all.  Greek  life  was  more  influenced  by  the 
man  in  the  street  than  by  the  philosopher, 
just  as  to-day  the  after-the-war  world  will 
be  more  affected  by  Tommy  from  the 
trenches  than  by  Mr.  Galsworthy  or  Mr. 
Wells.  In  every  period  the  most  powerful 
influence  upon  the  living  present  has  been 
the  every-day  attitude  of  every-day  men 
and  women  toward  dying.  The  Greek  felt 
the  physical  life  as  so  vivid  and  busy  and 
beautiful  that  he  had  small  imagination 
left  with  which  to  prefigure  post-mundane 
existence.  The  average  Greek  gave  cre- 
dence to  personal  survival,  but  in  a  region 
that  was  neither  a  heaven  nor  a  hell,  but 


THE  NEW  DEATH  13 

merely  a  pallid  reflection  of  earthly  ex- 
perience. The  futile  ghosts  retained  their 
individuality,  but  only  as  they  wistfully 
re-lived  their  mortal  course.  The  ancient 
world,  rejoicing  in  sunshine  and  strength, 
had  only  pity  for  the  poor  shade,  "who  had 
now  no  steadfast  strength  nor  power  at  all 
in  moving,  such  as  was  aforetime  in  his 
supple  limbs."  The  highest  honors  of  the 
spirit  world  are  only  a  pale  repetition  of 
the  honors  of  the  physical. 

Nothing  could  be  in  clearer  contrast  to 
the  ancient  than  the  medieval  standpoint, 
persisting  with  certain  changes  of  shape 
into  the  Puritan.  The  conception  was  the 
ascetic,  the  depreciation  of  all  physical 
life.  The  body  was  the  degrading,  the 
purely  disciplinary,  vesture  of  the  spirit. 
This  world  was  but  the  sordid  vestibule  of 
the  next.  Yet,  ironically  enough,  the  medi- 
eval imagination  was  not  much  more  in- 
ventive than  the  ancient  in  its  pictures 
of  immortality.  The  life  after  death,  in- 
stead of  being  a  denuded  reproduction  of 
previous  existence,  was  a  glorious  ideal- 


14  THE  NEW  DEATH 

ization  of  it,  reflecting  in  its  imperial  hier- 
archy of  spirits  the  worldly  hierarchies  of 
Church  and  State.  The  medieval  mind  was 
as  firmly  convinced  as  the  Hellenic  of  its 
ability  to  establish  every  detail  of  the  un- 
known and  unknowable  existence  beyond 
the  grave.  The  Greek  exalted  the  present 
at  the  expense  of  the  future,  the  medieval 
man  exalted  the  future  at  the  expense  of 
the  present,  both  with  equal  conviction  and 
both  with  equal,  though  opposed,  effects 
upon  contemporary  history. 

The  modern  view  of  death,  the  scien- 
tific, the  agnostic,  differs  from  both  the  an- 
cient and  the  medieval,  except  that  per- 
haps its  confidence  that  we  can  know 
nothing  of  life  after  death  is  as  arrogant 
as  the  confidence  of  past  ages  that  we  can 
know  everything.  The  medieval  believer 
exalted  immortality,  the  Greek  debased  it, 
but  neither  lived  as  if  it  were  not;  neither 
the  ancient  nor  the  medieval  world  could 
have  been  called  materialistic.  We  mod- 
erns have  also  lived  our  creed  of  death,  with 
all  its  results  to  present  history.  In  poli- 
cies and  practices,  in  public  morality  and 


THE  NEW  DEATH  15 

in  personal,  every  nation  has  been  in- 
fected by  materialism.  The  Germans  have 
been  more  logical,  more  obedient  to  the 
dicta  of  science,  than  the  rest  of  us,  but  it 
can  hardly  be  denied  that  one's  philosophy 
of  death  is  the  most  decisive  element  in 
one's  philosophy  of  life,  if  one  stops  to  con- 
jecture the  difference  in  current  events  if 
the  Germans,  as  a  nation,  had  believed  in 
the  personal  survival  after  slaughter  of 
their  own  sons,  or  of  others'. 

The  New  Death,  now  entering  history 
as  an  influence,  is  not  Greek  nor  medieval 
nor  modern.  It  is  so  far  mainly  an  im- 
mense yearning  receptivity,  an  unprece- 
dented humility  of  both  brain  and  heart 
toward  all  the  implications  of  survival.  It 
is  a  great  intuition  entering  into  the  lives 
of  the  simple,  the  sort  of  people  who  have 
made  the  past  and  will  make  the  future.  It 
does  not  matter  in  the  least  whether  or  not 
the  intellectuals  share  this  intuition,  and 
it  does  not  matter  whether  or  not  the  in- 
tuition is  true,  or  whether  future  genera- 
tions, returned  to  the  lassitude  of  peace, 
shall  again  deny  the  present  perceptions; 


16  THE  NEW  DEATH 

what  matters  is  the  effect  upon  emergent 
public  life  and  private  of  the  fact  that  every- 
day men  and  women  are  believing  the  dead 
live. 

These  every-day  men  and  women  are 
not  looking  to  their  former  teachers,  the 
scientist  and  the  theologian,  for  light  upon 
death.  In  the  urgency  of  grief  we  turn 
instinctively  to  more  authoritative  solace 
than  either  of  these  is  able  to  promise.  Be- 
fore 1914  we  had  seen  the  disestablishment 
of  the  Church  as  an  unquestioned  arbiter; 
since  1 914  we  have  seen  the  disestablish- 
ment of  science  as  an  unquestioned  arbi- 
ter. We  have  seen  what  happens  to  people 
whom  science  commands,  so  that  we  can 
never  again  feel  our  old  trust  in  its  dicta. 
And  what  has  science  to  say  about  our 
young  men  dead?  What  comfort  does  it 
offer  for  their  extinction  or  our  own?  Only 
the  hideous  revelation  that  it  is  science  it- 
self that  is  destroying  the  civilization  which 
science  itself  built  up.  Even  at  this  hour 
science  is  as  deaf  to  the  prophet  voices  of 
the  people  as  is  orthodoxy.  Science  has  its 
Pharisaism  of  reason  matching  the  Phari- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  17 

saism  of  religion,  but  pride  of  intellect  is 
precisely  the  German  disease  that  all  the 
world  has  gone  forth  to  eradicate. 

Through  all  this  testing  by  tragedy,  how- 
ever, we  still  pay  science  this  much  of  re- 
spect: we  continue  to  practice  its  methods, 
while  we  no  longer  give  blind  acquiescence 
to  its  conclusions.  In  the  immense  desola- 
tion of  grief  to-day,  the  authority  both  of 
the  religion  and  of  the  science  of  yesterday 
grows  faint,  and  to  the  enigma  of  that  inex- 
orable shape  now  present  at  every  hearth- 
side,  each  person  must  find  his  own  an- 
swer. For  this  intellectual  initiative  the 
common  man  is  far  better  prepared  than 
he  knew.  Widespread  education,  wide- 
spread communication,  has  equipped  the 
popular  mind  for  mental  achievement  that 
materialism  had  diverted  to  grosser  direc- 
tions than  it  deserved.  Universal  sorrow 
has  now  cleared  a  path  for  its  progress. 
This  new  moral  earnestness  can  be  ob- 
served in  relation  to  many  present  prob- 
lems, but  nowhere  more  clearly  than  in  its 
application  to  the  supreme  present  prob- 
lem, death.    Science,  permeating  the  com- 


18  THE  NEW  DEATH 

monest  education,  has  given  to  each  one 
of  us  a  manner  of  practical  approach  to 
any  subject  that  will  always  safeguard  and 
secure  all  our  advances  into  wisdom.  Uni- 
versal bereavement  by  its  torture  makes  it 
impossible  for  us  any  longer  to  deny  the 
existence  of  spiritual  faculties  that  are  the 
anguished  proof  of  their  own  existence. 
No  science  can  convince  us  that  we  have 
not  a  soul  when  we  feel  it  suffer  so.  Neither 
can  any  science  make  a  grief-bowed  father 
believe  that  the  response  of  his  soul  to  the 
call  of  the  soul  that  has  passed,  is  any- 
thing that  mere  reason  can  explain.  It  is 
impossible  for  ordinary  people  any  longer 
to  deny  that  spiritual  facts  must  be  spir- 
itually investigated.  When  the  air  to-day 
is  palpitant  with  the  breath  of  lives  sud- 
denly snuffed  out,  it  is  impossible  for  sur- 
vivors to  regard  dying  as  other  than  a 
spiritual  phenomenon,  to  the  interpreta- 
tion of  which  they  must  bring  their  spir- 
itual perceptions.  We  are,  however,  too 
thoroughly  imbued  with  scientific  method 
entirely  to  abrogate  it  even  in  the  exercise 
of  our  intuitions. 


THE  NEW  DEATH  19 

We  therefore  approach  a  new  wisdom  of 
death  by  enlisting  every  faculty  we  pos- 
sess, intuitive  as  well  as  merely  rational, 
and  we  seek  light  along  every  avenue  of 
approach,  philosophy,  poetry,  science,  the- 
ology, old  or  new,  even  spiritism  with  all 
its  perils.  We  test  each  step  into  the  un- 
known pragmatically,  scientifically,  for  we 
must  have  ease  from  grief  if  we  are  not 
to  be  paralyzed,  and  we  must  have  power 
to  remake  our  own  lives  and  the  life  of 
the  world  in  saner  accord  with  eternal  pur- 
poses, if  in  any  way  these  can  be  ascer- 
tained. Always  the  motiving  of  this  uni- 
versal search  is  the  same,  just  so  much 
knowledge  of  dying  as  will  enable  us  to  go 
on  living  through  this  horror.  Instant  con- 
solation, instant  reconstruction,  we  must  at- 
tain, if  the  whole  world  is  not  in  a  moment 
to  be  tossed  back  into  chaos.  For  count- 
less centuries  the  world  has  been  able  to 
live  by  evasion:  our  energy  for  living  has 
been  based  on  our  ability  to  forget  dy- 
ing. To-day  we  wake  to  such  havoc  as 
can  never  in  all  the  future  be  offset  un- 
less we  discover  how  to  make  destruction 


20  THE  NEW  DEATH 

itself    the    stimulus   of    an   indestructible 
vigor. 

We  recognize  that  the  first  step  toward 
wisdom  must  be  a  vast,  clear-reasoned  hu- 
mility. We  put  out  of  our  minds  all  the 
former  facile  denials  belonging  to  science, 
denial  both  of  survival  in  itself  and  of  the 
right  to  exercise  spiritual  perceptions  in 
obtaining  knowledge  of  the  spirit's  future. 
Our  faithful  practice  of  scientific  method 
itself  makes  us  admit  the  possibility  of 
psychic  faculties  still  embryonic,  which 
may  give  us  even  on  this  side  of  the  grave 
glimpses  of  a  power  ordained  to  fuller 
growth  in  a  non-physical  existence,  where 
perhaps  we  may 

"Hear,  know,  and  say 
What  this  tumultuous  body  now  denies; 
And  feel,  who  have  laid  our  groping  hands  away, 
And  see,  unblinded  by  our  eyes." 

We  must,  in  our  approach,  abandon  the 
pride  of  the  theologian  as  well  as  of  the 
scientist.  His  assertion  of  details  is  as 
much  at  variance  with  our  method  as  are 
the  scientist's  denials.  We  accept  rever- 
ently from  theology   those   many   truths 


THE  NEW  DEATH  21 

that  nerve  us  to  effort,  but  we  discard  its 
dangerous  practice  of  carrying  over  into  the 
unknown  world  any  of  the  grossness  of  this 
one.    We  deny  denial  of  survival  as  too 
superficial,  we  deny  detail  as  too  arrogant. 
This  great  popular  pressing  into  mystery 
is  far  too  vital  for  any  present  crystalliza- 
tion into  creed.  Unlike  the  ancient  and  the 
medieval  views,  the  New  Death  does  not 
prefigure   the   circumstances   of   survival, 
while  it  more  and  more  accepts  it.    The 
New  Death  is  experimental,  humble;  it  in- 
vestigates, it  does  not  dogmatize.   It  prac- 
tices rather  than  theorizes.    It  is  also  in- 
dependent, personal;  it  is  the  sum  total  of 
an  attitude  lived  rather  than  argued  by 
millions  of  individuals  who  in  the  intensity 
of  their  own  experience  hardly  perceive 
how  widespread  is  that  experience.  A  study 
of  the  New  Death  cannot  too  often  em- 
phasize the  point  that  it  is  not  a  study  of 
abstract  truth  about  death,  but  a  study  of 
the  fact  that  myriads  of  people  are  to-day 
ordering  their  lives  on  the  hypothesis  of 
immortality.    For  one  man  four  years  ago 
who  lived  in  accordance  with  this  hypoth- 


22  THE  NEW  DEATH 

esis,  to-day  a  thousand  do.  There  is  noth- 
ing new  about  the  oldest  fact  on  earth; 
there  is  everything  new  in  the  present  atti- 
tude toward  it.  For  the  first  time  in  his- 
tory, immortality  has  become  a  practical 
issue  for  the  common  man  to  meet,  or  his- 
tory will  cease. 

It  is  because  of  the  intensity  of  their  new 
need  that  people  are  turning  less  to  their 
old  masters,  the  theologians  and  the  sci- 
entists, but  with  an  awed  docility  are  seek- 
ing illumination  from  those  who  are  to-day 
the  supreme  critics  of  death,  our  young 
men  who  are  dying.  These  speak,  these 
act,  as  men  having  authority,  and  the 
force  of  their  influence  on  the  world  they 
have  left  cannot  be  calculated,  so  powerful 
are  the  reasons  for  this  influence.  In  the 
death  of  any  soldier  there  has  always  been 
something  peculiarly  memorable;  no  hum- 
blest village  ever  forgets  the  graves  of  its 
soldiers;  no  family  ever  fails  to  be  proud 
of  a  fighting  ancestor.  While  the  memory 
of  any  individual  soldier  has  always  been 
vivid,  to-day  such  memory  is  multiplied 


THE  NEW  DEATH  23 

by  the  million.  But  no  mere  multiplica- 
tion accounts  for  the  power  over  the  living 
of  our  young  dead;  apart  from  this,  the 
circumstances  of  their  death  are  in  them- 
selves cogent,  for  the  boys  buried  on  the 
battle-fields  leave  behind  them  an  illusion 
of  their  continuance  due  to  the  suddenness 
of  their  passing.  They  depart  from  the 
homes  that  love  them,  the  homes  they  have 
dominated,  and  are  not  seen  again.  They 
go  forth  electric  with  life;  no  dull  announce- 
ment from  a  war  office  can  utterly  annul 
the  expectation  that  they  may  return.  It 
always  needs  all  the  accompaniments  of 
visible  sickness  and  slow  dissolution  quite 
to  convince  us  that  our  living  have  become 
our  dead.  The  boys  killed  in  the  trenches 
are  still  a  present  force  because  our  brains 
cannot  believe  them  dead,  when  our  eyes 
have  not  seen  them  die. 

Even  when  loss  has  been  all  too  sadly 
visible,  it  has  always  been  difficult  to  real- 
ize a  premature  fate.  There  is  something 
strangely  persistent  about  any  unfulfilled 
life;  it  always  leaves  a  curious  sense  of  ab- 
normality and  waste,  and   a  deep,  blind 


24  THE  NEW  DEATH 

impulse  somehow  to  give  the  aspirant  young 
soul  the  earthly  gifts  it  lacked.  There  is 
not  a  family  which  has  ever  lost  a  child 
that  does  not  always  have  as  an  undercur- 
rent of  its  thoughts  conjectures  of  that 
child's  development,  and  a  conscious  or 
unconscious  adjustment  to  that  child's  de- 
sires. There  is  always  this  psychological 
continuing  of  an  arrested  life,  and  it  is 
always  the  more  powerful,  the  more  per- 
sonality the  dead  youth  had  attained.  The 
supreme  example  of  this  fact  is  seen  in  the 
Christian  religion,  for  it  was  the  force  of  a 
young  man's  death  that  established  that 
religion;  it  was  founded  on  the  psychology 
of  the  universal  instinct  to  fulfill  an  inter- 
rupted ministry  as  being  the  only  outlet 
left  to  affection. 

If  this  dominance  of  the  youthful  dead 
is  potent  when  the  end  comes  uncourted, 
how  much  more  potent  when  a  young  man 
has  offered  himself  for  a  great  ideal!  The 
men  capable  of  offering  themselves  for  an 
ideal,  must  necessarily  have  been  men  who 
had  practiced  ideals;  they  must  have  pos- 
sessed clearly  or  obscurely  the  attributes 


THE  NEW  DEATH  25 

of  beauty  that  dignified  their  final  mo- 
ments. They  must,  therefore,  be  worth  the 
study  of  memory,  worth  our  re-living  after 
them  of  the  creed  and  the  conduct  their  brief 
sojourn  exhibited.  If  in  a  hundred  humble 
ways  they  inspire  us  to  imitate  them,  surely 
their  philosophy  and  example  must  be  our 
supreme  illumination  in  the  matterof  which 
they  knew  most,  and  that  is  death. 

More  young  men,  and  these  more  artic- 
ulate, more  capable  of  inspired  utterance, 
are  seeing  death  to-day  than  ever  before 
in  history.  For  one  Byron  of  the  past,  how 
many  poets  and  artists  and  musicians  are 
at  this  time  defending  the  things  of  the 
spirit!  The  interpretation  of  fate  by  such 
men  may  be  more  valuable  than  that  of  the 
aged,  for  they  see  dissolution  in  sharper 
contrast  to  vigor;  the  colors  of  death  are 
to  them  more  accurate,  perhaps,  than  to 
older  men  whose  faculties  are  duller,  and  to 
whom  life,  being  experienced,  is  not  so  al- 
luring in  promise.  The  chief  value  of  the 
testimony  of  these  young  heroes,  however, 
is  not  so  much  in  the  words  they  speak  of 
death,  as  in  the  fact  that  they  chose  it. 


26  THE  NEW  DEATH 

Seeing  that  they  have  voluntarily  laid 
down  their  lives, —  not  one  only,  but  whole 
armies,  —  how  could  the  world  go  on  its 
way  uninfluenced  by  their  loss?  How 
could  it  take  its  eyes  from  the  fate  they 
accepted?  If  self-preservation  exists  for 
the  survival  of  something,  may  not  self- 
immolation  exist  for  the  survival  of  some- 
thing? If  so,  what?  We  can  only  grope  for 
an  answer,  but,  groping,  we  still  follow  our 
boys  who  have  passed,  feeling  that  they 
alone  have  the  right  to  lead  us. 

One  approaches  in  reverence  the  reve- 
lations of  trench  autobiography,  which, 
whether  expressed  in  loftiest  poetry  or  in 
homeliest  slang,  comprise  the  symposium 
of  the  sacrificed.  Do  we  realize  that  the 
testimony  of  the  trenches  forms  already  a 
literature  of  its  own,  disclosing  torment 
we  can  scarcely  endure,  and  disclosing  far 
more  an  idealism  in  conceptions  and  in 
practice  before  which  our  aspiration  stands 
awed?  All  of  us  who  mourn  to-day  may 
well  turn  constantly  to  this  sacred  treasury, 
as  to  a  Bible  of  beauty  and  of  holy  hope. 
Older  men,  as  they  give  to  the  public  these 


THE  NEW  DEATH  27 

private  records  of  young  lives,  appear  to 
feel  abashed  and  half-envious,  —  Gilbert 
Murray  in  his  account  of  Arthur  Heath, 
William  Archer  as  he  writes  of  Alan  Seeger, 
Maurice  Barres  as  he  opens  to  us  the  let- 
ters of  French  lads,  Andre  Chevrilion  as  he 
writes  of  that  anonymous  young  seer,  the 
author  of  "Lettres  d'un  Soldat."  The  bulk 
of  war  autobiography  increases  daily,  mak- 
ing quotation  overwhelming,  but  the  uni- 
formity of  its  revelations  is  a  truth  too 
startling  for  any  reader  to  escape.  While 
his  actions  are  supported  by  an  immense 
comradeship,  the  thoughts  of  the  soldier 
move  in  a  great  loneliness;  therefore,  one 
must  give  full  credit  to  the  singular  har- 
mony of  utterance,  to  the  strange  identity 
of  faith,  that  so  many  diverse  voices  speak. 
Neither  must  one  ever  forget  the  sur- 
roundings in  which  these  records  were 
written;  if  these  writers  can  succeed  in 
believing  the  spirit  superior  to  the  body, 
surely  of  all  men  who  ever  lived,  their 
creed  is  the  most  triumphant.  We  our- 
selves have  shrunk  at  the  mere  footfall  of 
the  undertaker,  at  the  waxen  stateliness 


28  THE  NEW  DEATH 

of  a  face  once  ruddy,  at  the  thud  of  earth 
upon  a  seemly  coffin;  these  circumstances 
have  been  enough  to  make  our  sensitive- 
ness accept  the  finality  of  dissolution.  None 
of  us  have  seen  a  human  body  in  actual 
decay,  but  merely  because  we  know  it  does 
decay,  we  have  been  overwhelmed  and 
have  denied  the  soul's  immortality.  The 
boys  upon  the  battle-fields  have  seen  the 
forms  of  their  comrades  rot  before  their 
eyes  for  months.  They  write  of  the  stench 
of  putrefaction,  of  its  colors  and  shapes,  or 
else  they  preserve  a  reticence  that  is  even 
more  evidence  of  their  tortured  senses.  One 
cannot  imagine  a  more  sensitive  man  than 
the  young  French  artist  who  wrote  to  his  mo- 
ther those  letters  of  imperishable  inspira- 
tion. To  what  inward  serenity  he  attains! 

"Two  good  friends  of  mine,  one  of  them 
the  charming  subject  of  one  of  my  latest 
sketches,  have  been  killed.  This  was  a  ter- 
rible discovery  for  me  last  night.  A  corpse 
white  and  splendid  in  the  moonlight.  I  lay 
down  near  by.  The  sense  of  the  beauty  of 
all  things  awoke  once  more  within  me." 

Others  who  are  less  subtle  folk,  still  with 


THE  NEW  DEATH  29 

instinctive  poetry  lift  their  thoughts  from 
the  unclean  charnel  to  the  clean  winds  of 
dawn  and  the  singing  of  the  larks.  Strange 
how  many  records  tell  of  the  singing  of  the 
larks  above  the  battle-fields! 

"Sun-song,  up  the  blue  air  flinging 
Its  challenge  to  the  battle-dark  and  dust." 

What  cowardice  our  old  facile  doubt 
seems  compared  with  the  faith  of  those  at 
the  front!  And  cowardice  even  more  cra- 
ven seems  our  love  of  life,  our  reluctance 
to  leave  earth's  treasures,  when  we  per- 
ceive the  passion  of  yearning  these  men  feel 
for  the  life  they  relinquish.  Was  ever  the 
poignancy  of  parenthood  more  touchingly 
expressed  than  in  Harold  Chapin's  letters 
to  bis  baby  son?  What  passion  of  yearning 
for  his  child's  understanding  of  his  purpose 
breathes  from  the  beautiful  sonnet  that  is 
Thomas  Kettle's  battle-field  legacy  to  his 
little  girl! 

To  My  Daughter  Betty,  the  Gift  of  God 

"In  wiser  days,  my  darling  rosebud,  blown 
To  beauty  proud  as  was  your  mother's  prime, 
In  that  desired,  delayed,  incredible  time, 
You  '11  ask  why  I  abandoned  you,  my  own, 


3o  THE  NEW  DEATH 

And  the  dear  heart  that  was  your  baby  throne, 
To  dice  with  death.    And,  oh!  they'll  give  you 

rhyme 
And  reason:  some  will  call  the  thing  sublime, 
And  some  decry  it  in  a  knowing  tone. 
So  here,  while  the  mad  guns  curse  overhead, 
And  tired  men  sigh,  with  mud  for  couch  and  floor, 
Know  that  we  fools,  now  with  the  foolish  dead, 
Died  not  for  flag,  nor  King,  nor  Emperor, 
But  for  a  dream,  born  in  a  herdsman's  shed, 
And  for  the  secret  Scripture  of  the  poor." 

Can  any  one  read  calmly  Alan  Seeger's 
solicitude  for  his  manuscript  of  poems,  or 
the  French  "Soldat's"  passion  to  achieve 
the  dreams  of  his  brush?  And  did  ever 
homesickness  become  so  divine  a  thing  as 
on  the  battle-line  of  Europe?  The  hunger 
for  the  home  letters!  The  nostalgia  some 
glimpse  of  alien  village  can  evoke!  The 
author  of  the  following  was  only  nineteen 
when  he  fell,  "gallantly  fighting":  — 

"And  here  among  the  wreckage,  where  a  back- 
wall  should  have  been, 

We  found  a  garden  green. 

"Hungry  for  Spring  I  bent  my  head; 
The  perfume  fanned  my  face, 
And  all  my  soul  was  dancing 
In  that  lovely  little  place,  — 


THE  NEW  DEATH  31 

Dancing  with  a  measured  step  from  wrecked 

and  shattered  towns 
Away  —  upon  the  Downs. 

"  I  saw  green  banks  of  daffodil 
Slim  poplars  in  the  breeze, 
Great  tan-brown  hares  in  gusty  March 
A-courting  on  the  leas, 
And  meadows  with  their  glittering  streams 
And  silver-scurrying  dace  — 
Home,  what  a  perfect  place!" 

Tortured  with  the  sights  and  cries  and 
odors  of  carnage,  and  yearning  in  every 
fiber  for  the  earth  they  relinquished,  the 
boys  of  the  world  have  marched  unfal- 
teringly to  their  destruction,  rebuking  in 
their  every  gesture  our  easy  despair,  and 
leaving  behind  them,  words  of  confidence 
coercing  us  to  conviction. 

In  addition  to  the  force  of  their  ideal- 
ism and  of  their  written  words,  the  carriage 
of  these  young  heroes  immediately  before 
death  must  have  a  peculiar  illumination. 
How  do  they  bear  themselves  when  they 
reach  the  border-land?  In  their  conduct 
on  that  day,  hour,  moment,  before  actual 
demise,  one  may  reverently  study  the  sig- 
nificance   of   instincts  that  are    stronger 


32  THE  NEW  DEATH 

than  self-preservation.  There  is  in  the 
memoirs  a  noteworthy  parallelism  in  the 
cheer  and  hope  just  before  the  final  hour. 
One  must  remember  that  so  far  as  rea- 
son could  influence  their  actions,  these 
men,  living  for  months  constantly  under 
the  menace  of  destruction,  often  show 
themselves  humanly  weary  and  depressed, 
yet  with  a  startling  uniformity  they  ex- 
perience a  buoyancy  of  spirit  as  the  act- 
ual moment  of  fatality  approaches.  This 
buoyancy  is  sometimes  accompanied  by  a 
clear  presentiment  of  their  passing,  but 
oftener  not;  oftener  it  is  combined  with  a 
vivid  hope  of  return  home  with  new  ener- 
gies to  carry  on  their  interrupted  careers. 
Alan  Seeger's  last  poem  runs:  — 

"Beauty  of  Earth,  when  in  thy  harmonies 
The  cannon's  note  has  ceased  to  be  a  part, 
I  shall  return  once  more  and  bring  to  thee 
The  worship  of  an  undivided  heart. 
Of  those  sweet  potentialities  that  wait 
For  my  heart's  deep  desire  to  fecundate, 
I  shall  resume  the  search,  if  Fortune  grants; 
And  the  great  cities  of  the  world  shall  yet 
Be  golden  frames  for  me  in  which  to  set 
New  masterpieces  of  more  rare  romance." 


THE  NEW  DEATH  33 

The  last  letter  received  from  Harold 
Chapin  comments:  "Everybody  seems 
very  high-spirited  out  here  and  grumbling 
is  a  thing  of  the  past.  I  suspect  that  the 
weather  is  the  reason.  Day  after  day  is 
glorious." 

In  the  course  of  his  In  Memoriam,  "Ox- 
ford and  the  War,"  Gilbert  Murray  writes 
of  certain  Oxford  heroes : "  Woodhead,  wait- 
ing in  advance  under  machine-gun  fire,  and 
knowing  that  the  first  man  to  rise  would 
be  a  certain  victim,  chose  carefully  the  right 
moment  and  rose  first.  The  only  words 
that  Philip  Brown  spoke,  after  he  was  mor- 
tally wounded,  were  words  of  thought  and 
praise  for  his  servant.  Leslie  Hunter,  on 
the  day  before  he  died,  spoke  to  a  friend 
of  his  presentiment  that  death  was  com- 
ing, and  then  lay  for  a  while  in  a  grassy 
meadow,  singing,  *Im  Wunderschonen 
MonatMai.'" 

That  multitudes  of  soldiers  have  met 
their  end  not  only  with  serenity,  but  with 
a  high-hearted  gayety,  is  a  fact  of  over- 
whelming evidence.  This  hilarity  of  hero- 
ism is  the  highest  proof  a  man  can  give 


34  THE  NEW  DEATH 

of  his  certainty  that  soul  is  more  enduring 
than  body,  and  exhibited  so  often  at  the 
very  instant  of  passing,  may  be,  to  the  open- 
minded,  argument  for  some  strange  reas- 
surance from  that  other  side.  Surely,  con- 
viction of  immortality  from  those  who  have 
seen  the  hideousness  of  carnage  in  a  degree 
no  other  men  in  all  history  have  seen  it,  is  a 
conviction  deserving  our  respectful  study. 
Coningsby  Dawson  writes:  "There's  a 
marvelous  grandeur  about  all  this  carnage 
and  desolation  —  men's  souls  rise  above 
the  distress  —  they  have  to  in  order  to 
survive.  When  you  see  how  cheap  men's 
bodies  are,  you  cannot  help  but  know  that 
the  body  is  the  least  part  of  personality." 
Gilbert  Murray  quotes  a  former  pupil 
who  wrote  to  me  the  other  day  about 
the  Somme  battles,  and  how  they  had 
made  him  feel  the  difference  between  soul 
and  body;  how  the  body  of  man  seemed  a 
weak  and  poor  thing,  which  he  had  seen 
torn  to  rags  all  about  him  and  trodden  into 
mud,  and  the  soul  of  man  something  mag- 
nificent and  indomitable,  greater  than  he 
had  ever  conceived."  Harold  Chapin  writes 


THE  NEW  DEATH  35 

his  wife:  "I  swear  I've  heard  more  real 
mirthful,  unjarring  laughter  in  the  last  six 
months  than  in  the  previous  six  years.  I 
am  developing  a  theory  that  men  who  face 
death  have  a  right  to  face  it  how  they 
please,  so  long  as  their  attitude  is  genu- 
ine, and  the  happy-go-lucky,  laughing-phi- 
losopher attitude  of  our  men  is  absolutely 
true  and  neither  assumed  nor  callous." 

Donald  Hankey  only  deepens  the  em- 
phasis in  his  beautiful  memorial,  "Of 
Some  who  were  Lost  and  afterward  were 
Found":  — 

"Never  was  such  a  triumph  of  spirit  over 
matter.  As  for  death,  it  was  in  a  way  the 
greatest  joke  of  all.  In  a  way,  for  if  it  was 
another  fellow  that  was  hit,  it  was  an 
occasion  for  tenderness  and  grief.  But  if 
one  of  them  was  hit,  O  Death,  where  is 
thy  sting?  .  .  .  Portentous,  solemn  Death, 
you  looked  like  a  fool  when  you  tackled 
one  of  them.  .  .  .  One  by  one  Death  chal- 
lenged them.  One  by  one  they  smiled  in 
his  grim  visage,  and  refused  to  be  dis- 
mayed. They  had  been  lost,  but  they  had 
found  the  path  that  led  them  home;  and 


36  THE  NEW  DEATH 

when  at  last  they  laid  their  lives  at  the 
feet  of  the  Good  Shepherd,  what  could  they 
do  but  smile?" 

The  manifestations  of  his  experience 
shown  by  any  human  being,  soldier  or  any 
other,  in  the  moment  before  dissolution, 
are  of  priceless  value  to  the  student  of 
death,  and  to-day  we  are  all  students  of 
death.  We  know  that  the  face  of  the  dy- 
ing is  often  dull,  unawakened,  and  the 
passing  of  the  soul  as  little  noteworthy  as 
the  coming  of  sleep,  but  we  know  also  that 
there  are  times  when  the  approach  of  death 
is  miraculous.  Any  death-bed  watcher  who 
has  ever  been  privileged  to  see  that  sudden 
unearthly  kindling  of  a  face  sodden  with 
disease,  of  eyes  and  lips  suddenly  wide 
with  ineffable  surprise  and  joy,  as  though 
they  looked  at  something  beautiful  beyond 
any  imagining,  can  ever  again  be  quite  the 
same  person.  The  radiance  lasts  only  a 
moment,  and  then  the  face  is  clay,  but 
that  moment  is  unforgettable,  its  evidence 
transcends  argument.  If  one  is  to  be 
honestly  open-minded,  honestly  scientific, 


THE  NEW  DEATH  37 

this  fact  of  transfiguration  at  the  instant 
of  exit  must  be  incorporated  in  our  phi- 
losophy of  death,  for  to-day  in  the  stern 
torments  of  reality  we  turn  for  light  on  dy- 
ing to  those  who  know,  both  those  whose 
wide,  illumined  eyes  we  remember,  and 
those  others  who,  sailing  near  the  brink, 
have  returned  and  can  describe  their  sen- 
sations. One  such  record  is  quoted  in 
Sir  Oliver  Lodge's  "Raymond,"  a  letter 
from  a  woman  who  survived  the  Lusitania 
wreck.  "Names  of  books  went  through 
my  brain;  one  especially,  called  'Where 
no  Fear  is,'  seemed  to  express  my  feeling 
at  the  time!  Loneliness,  yes,  and  sorrow 
on  account  of  others  —  but  no  Fear.  It 
seemed  very  normal,  very  right,  —  a  nat- 
ural development  of  some  kind  about  to 
take  place.  How  can  it  be  otherwise,  when 
it  is  natural?  I  rather  wished  I  knew  some 
one  on  the  other  side,  and  wondered  if 
there  are  friendly  strangers  there  who 
come  to  the  rescue.  I  was  very  near  the 
border-land  when  a  wandering  lifeboat 
came  quietly  up  behind  me.  .  .  .  Others 
on  that  day  were  passing  through  a  Gate 


II  o 
O       )  ±  O 


38  THE  NEW  DEATH 

which  was  not  open  for  me  —  but  I  do  not 
expect  they  were  afraid  when  the  time  came 
—  they,  too,  probably  felt  that  whatever 
they  were  to  find  would  be  beautiful  — 
only  a  fulfillment  of  some  kind.  ...  I  have 
reason  to  think  that  the  passing  from  here 
is  very  painless  —  at  least  when  there  is  no 
illness.  We  seemed  to  be  passing  through 
a  stage  on  the  road  of  life." 

Of  all  the  diverse  mass  of  contemporary 
literature  —  diary,  letters,  essay,  poem, 
fiction  —  that  gives  evidence  of  the  pres- 
ent intensity  of  interest  in  death,  "The 
Dark  Forest"  stands  forth  as  a  novel  whose 
entire  plot  turns  on  the  possibility  of  per- 
sonal survival.  In  no  sense  whatever  a 
ghost  story,  it  is  wholly  a  novel  of  the 
border-land.  More  than  this,  it  has  dis- 
tinct autobiographic  authority,  being  the 
result  of  Hugh  Walpole's  sojourn  in  Rus- 
sia. The  passage  he  attributes  to  the  Eng- 
lishman serving  in  a  Russian  Red  Cross 
unit  is  most  significant,  and  could  hardly 
have  been  written  except  out  of  personal 
experience. 

"Here,  in  nine  out  of  every  ten  deaths 


THE  NEW  DEATH  39 

that  I  have  seen  there  has  been  peace  or 
even  happiness.  This  is  the  merest  truth 
and  will  be  confirmed  by  any  one  who  has 
worked  here.  Again  and  again  I  have  seen 
that  strange  flash  of  surprised,  almost 
startled,  interest,  again  and  again  I  have 
been  conscious  —  behind,  not  in,  the  eyes 
—  of  the  expression  of  one  who  is  startled 
by  fresh  conditions,  a  fine  view,  a  sudden 
piece  of  news.  This  is  no  argument  for  re- 
ligion, for  any  creed  or  dogma;  I  only  say 
that  here  it  is  so,  that  Death  seems  to  be 
happiness  and  the  beginning  of  something 
new  and  unexpected.  .  .  .  These  are  all 
commonplaces,  I  suppose,  that  I  am  de- 
scribing. The  only  importance  is  that  some 
ten  million  human  beings  are,  in  this  war, 
making  these  discoveries  for  themselves, 
just  as  I  am.  Who  can  tell  what  that  may 
mean?  I  have  seen  here  no  visions,  nor 
have  I  met  any  one  who  has  seen  them, 
but  there  are  undoubted  facts  —  not  easy 
things  to  discount." 

It  would  be  hard  to  cite  any  paragraphs 
from  current  publications  that  testify  so 
concretely  to  the  mysterious  transforma- 


40  THE  NEW  DEATH 

tion  to  be  seen  from  time  to  time  in  the 
faces  of  the  dying,  or  that  illustrate  more 
convincingly  the  present  preoccupation  with 
the  unseen  world. 

What  the  boys  who  are  gone  have  said 
and  have  practiced  in  regard  to  dying,  what 
we  who  are  left  can  add  to  their  vivid  vi- 
sion from  the  wisdom  of  our  experience  of 
loss,  the  enlightenment  of  our  deprivation, 
in  this  combined  testimony  of  the  dead  and 
of  the  bereaved,  lies  the  material  for  one 
who  tries  to  formulate  from  contemporary 
evidence  the  elements  characterizing  the 
New  Death.     Nothing  is  harder  than  to 
analyze  the  trend  of  any  contemporary 
thought  movement,  and  at  the  same  time 
nothing  is   more   illuminating  than   such 
effort  toward  self-discovery.    Each  one  of 
us  is  conscious  of  his  own  new  scrutiny 
of  mortality  and  of  immortality,  unaware 
how  universal  is  this  impulse  toward  new 
light.    All  manifestations  of  life  are  diffi- 
cult to  dissect,  and  the  new  interest  in 
death  is  a  manifestation  of  life,  instant, 
vital  with  the  instinct,  not  of  a  mere  in- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  41 

dividual,  but  of  a  whole  world,  for  self- 
preservation.  With  an  intensity  that  only 
a  world-ruin  could  have  wrought,  plain 
people  everywhere  are  making  trial  of 
immortality  as  the  sole  speculation  to 
nerve  our  action  instantly  needed,  and  to 
safeguard  the  future  that  it  is  our  duty 
instantly  to  reconstruct.  All  the  expres- 
sions of  this  supreme  experiment  to  be 
observed  in  present-day  activities  and  at- 
titude have  the  same  motive,  to  sift  the 
permanent  from  the  perishable  elements 
of  our  civilization.  All  the  characteristics 
of  the  New  Death  are  different  aspects  of 
the  effort  to  discover  a  set  of  standards  to 
weigh  what  is  destructive  against  what  is 
deathless. 

The  first  element  to  impress  one  is  the 
directness  of  approach  to  realities  formerly 
shunned,  or  obscured  by  ceremonies,  or 
too  elaborately  interpreted  by  theology, 
or  too  elaborately  denied  by  science. 
Lashed  by  grief  to  realization,  the  plain 
man  recalls  with  wonder  his  old  indiffer- 
ence. When  one  is  normally  comfortable, 
it  is  easy  enough  to  forget  one's  end,  but 


42  THE  NEW  DEATH 

today  nobody  is  normally  comfortable. 
Nobody  ever  quite  forgets  that  corpse- 
covered  No  Man's  Land.  When  a  man 
perceives  his  son  killed,  or  menaced,  he 
wakes  to  do  his  own  reckoning  with  the 
Destroyer.  He  must  find  his  own  way  of 
bearing  the  loss  of  his  child,  he  must  find 
his  own  way  of  awaiting  his  own  dissolu- 
tion. The  former  evasiveness  is  impossible. 
Each  man  is  testing  for  himself  the  old 
symbolism,  the  old  creed,  the  old  agnos- 
ticism, for  its  vitality.  For  the  new  world 
to  be  built,  only  so  much  of  the  old  world's 
ritual  and  philosophy  of  death  can  hold, 
as  can  bear  the  purging  of  such  grief  as 
the  old  world  never  knew. 

Both  the  bereaved  at  home  and  the  men 
at  the  front  exhibit  the  same  impulse  to 
sift  all  ceremonies.  One  cannot  fail  to  note 
in  trench  memoirs  the  soldier's  utter  in- 
difference to  the  conventions  associated 
with  demise.  This  indifference  varies  all 
the  way  from  the  reassuring,  healthy 
laughter,  that  is  in  itself  expression  of 
reverence  for  the  soul  through  impatience 
of  false  reverence  for  the  clay,  to  Harold 


THE  NEW  DEATH  43 

Chapin's  and  the  French  artistes  irritation 
with  all  funeral  equipage.  The  English 
playwright  writes  this  letter  of  condolence 
to  his  wife :  — 

"I  am  so  sorry  not  to  be  with  you  at 
such  a  time.  I  know  how  much  of  it  will 
fall  on  you,  and  what  a  gloomy,  long- 
winded  affair  the  funeral  is  bound  to  be. 
I  cannot  find  any  feeling  in  myself  about 
him;  we  have  all  known  so  long  it  was 
coming,  and  I  have  seen  so  many  die  out 
here  that  a  death  is  not  so  looming  a  thing 
now  as  it  used  to  be.  You,  though,  I  do 
feel  most  awfully  for.  I  can  see  you  looking 
pinched  and  pale,  and  sticking  the  long, 
useless  service  because  it's  got  to  be  stuck, 
and  the  long  ride  there  and  the  long  ride 
back  in  the  stuffy  funeral  carriage  —  I 
have  a  hope  you  may  come  back  some 
other  way  —  will  add  their  weight  of  de- 
pression —  where  depression  is  needless." 
The  italics  are  Harold  Chapin's. 

The  French  painter  gives  us  a  thought 
still  more  subtle  and  more  serene,  discover- 
ing new  ground  for  faith  in  the  very  fact 
of  putrefaction :  — 


44  THE  NEW  DEATH 

"How  closely  in  harmony  with  earth 
is  death,  and  with  what  dignity  the  re- 
absorption  into  the  maternal  body  is 
effected,  when  one  compares  it  with  the 
tawdriness  of  our  funeral  ceremonies. 
Only  yesterday  I  might  have  regarded  the 
poor  abandoned  dead  of  the  battle-field  as 
ill-treated,  but  after  having  attended  the 
obsequies  of  an  officer  at  V.,  I  have  come 
to  feel  that  nature  treats  the  dead  more 
tenderly  than  do  men. 

"In  truth  a  soldier's  death  shares  the 
distinction  belonging  to  natural  proc- 
esses, for  it  is  a  frank  horror  and  plays  no 
tricks  with  the  laws  of  violence.  I  have 
often  had  to  pass  near  corpses  whose  pro- 
gressive decay  I  could  observe,  and  this 
manifestation  of  new  life  was  far  more 
reassuring  than  the  chill  and  changeless 
aspect  of  an  urban  monument." 

There  is  to-day  a  widespread  tendency 
to  examine  all  our  ritual  of  dissolution,  re- 
taining only  that  which  is  essentially  beau- 
tiful and  essentially  true  to  our  emerging 
convictions.  Symbolism  has  a  more  direct 
relation  to  our  conduct  than  we  are  always 


THE  NEW  DEATH  45 

ready  to  grant.  The  old  conventions  of 
burial  and  of  grief  over-emphasized  the 
importance  of  the  physical  and  over-em- 
phasized the  importance  of  individual  loss, 
and  so  were  in  themselves  an  obscura- 
tion of  the  new  light  we  are  seeking  upon 
the  inexorable  face  of  death.  The  growing 
practice  of  wearing  white  rather  than  black 
for  mourning,  or  of  continuing  the  habitual 
colors  of  one's  dress,  the  movement  for 
placing  upon  the  service  flag  a  gold  star 
in  memory  of  a  soldier  killed,  are  an  at- 
tempt toward  a  fresher  and  truer  sym- 
bolism expressing  our  growing  protest 
against  the  depression  and  paralysis  too 
often  resultant  upon  the  passage  of  a  loved 
one  from  the  known  world  to  the  unknown. 
As  each  of  us  to-day  tests  each  for  him- 
self all  the  connotations  of  a  possible 
immortality,  we  become  more  and  more 
indifferent  to  any  liturgy  or  dogma  that 
insists  on  anything  more  explicit  than  our 
increasing  confidence  that  they  survive, 
those  battalions  of  our  young  dead. 

The  present  force  of  individual  initia- 
tive in  examining  all  the  former  creeds  and 


46  THE  NEW  DEATH 

conventions  of  decease  is  a  characteristic 
of  the  New  Death  closely  connected  with 
another.  The  practical  trend  of  the  new 
inquiry  into  the  unseen  causes  us  to  seek 
light  from  each  other  in  a  way  we  never  did 
before.  We  observe  other  people  who  are 
living  without  their  loved  ones,  and  we 
wonder  by  what  personal  philosophy  they 
are  upheld.  The  new  attitude  toward 
death  is  unlike  the  old  in  being  the  result 
of  universal  bereavement,  and  of  such  a 
sharing  of  sympathy  as  the  human  soul  has 
never  before  in  all  history  experienced.  In 
such  vast  grief,  class  distinctions  are  swept 
away;  high  and  low,  rich  and  poor,  are 
seeking  inspiration  from  each  other  in  the 
same  naked  need.  Even  the  fierce  animosi- 
ties of  nation  to  nation  are  dulled  by  their 
shared  losses.  Blinded  and  brutalized  as 
are  the  Germans,  they  must  still  love  their 
slaughtered  sons.  Mr.  Britling's  letter  of 
sympathy  to  the  German  father  is  but 
typical  of  much  inarticulate  mutual  pity. 
We  know  the  true  story  of  the  old  Belgian 
woman  tending  in  her  tiny  garden  three 
flower-covered  graves  of  Germans.    When 


THE  NEW  DEATH  47 

the  authorities  offered  to  remove  these 
bodies :  — 

" '  Oh,  nay,  nay,'  she  remonstrated, 
shaking  her  head  emphatically; '  nay,  myn- 
heeren,  God  gave  me  these  graves  instead 
of  the  grave  of  my  boy.  I  could  not  tend 
them  so  well  if  they  were  in  the  church- 
yard. It  is  too  far  from  my  house.  Nay, 
nay,  let  the  three  sleep  here.' 

'"But  you  have  not  the  room,  madam.' 

"'There  is  room  in  my  heart  and  in  my 
garden,  mynheer.  I  shall  keep  these  three 
graves  and  maybe  in  Germany  is  one  who 
will  keep  the  grave  of  my  boy.'" 

The  cry  of  another  mother  echoes  from 
stricken  Serbia,  "Oh,  if  I  were  the  only 
mother  who  is  weeping  now,  it  would  be 
nothing;  but  there  are  a  million  mothers 
weeping  to-day." 

"  If  I  were  the  only  mother,  it  would  be 
nothing!"  But  this  is  the  first  time  in  the 
history  of  bereavement  that  grief  has  been 
so  selfless  as  that!  In  other  days  the  loss 
of  an  only  child  would  have  been  accepted 
as  cause  enough  to  darken  life  for  any 
individual  mother.     We  should  have  re- 


48  THE  NEW  DEATH 

garded  such  a  one  as  pitifully  isolated  by 
her  fate.  In  former  days  people  offered 
sympathy  genuinely,  but  awkwardly.  For 
ourselves  we  felt  it  the  decent  thing  to  con- 
ceal grief,  just  as  we  try  not  to  obtrude  our 
own  sickness  upon  acquaintance  who  are 
in  normal  health.  Sorrow  was  a  loneliness 
that  only  the  comparatively  few  who  had 
tasted  it,  understood.  The  usual  manner 
was  to  shun  the  subject,  to  eat  and  drink 
and  work  and  forget.  We  were  always  a 
little  embarrassed  by  people  who  talked 
easily,  even  cheerily,  of  the  dead,  as  if  per- 
haps these  had  not  gone  far  from  us.  The 
New  Death  is  but  another  illustration  of 
the  tendency  toward  frankness  and  sin- 
cerity in  many  human  experiences  that 
used  by  general  consent  to  be  shoved  out 
of  sight.  Birth  was  once  a  subject  for  false 
reserve;  now  death,  like  birth,  is  becoming 
a  subject  for  frank  and  fruitful  discussion. 
The  old  death  was  a  barrier  rather  than  a 
bond;  the  New  Death  is  a  universal  welding 
of  mutual  sympathy.  The  old  death,  like 
many  other  things  remade  by  the  war,  was 
too  often  self-absorbed,  self-pitying;  now 


THE  NEW  DEATH  49 

there  are  too  many  grief-burdened  people 
everywhere  not  to  unite  in  seeking  some 
sane  solace.  In  the  search  there  is  a  rein- 
forcement of  bravery  not  possible  in  that 
former  time  when  we  each  walked  solitary 
in  sorrow.  People  to-day  are  thinking,  and 
feeling,  in  terms  no  longer  personal,  but 
universal. 

More  conspicuous  than  shared  sym- 
pathy, as  an  element  of  the  New  Death, 
is  the  shared  resilience  of  these  millions 
of  mourners.  One  aspect  of  this  strange, 
sacred  buoyancy  grows  directly  out  of  mu- 
tual pity.  When  the  world  is  so  full  of 
pain,  it  seems  as  if  one's  own  serenity  in 
suffering  must  be  the  only  sure  way  of 
strengthening  one's  neighbor.  The  need 
of  fortitude  for  some  one  else's  sake  has 
always  been  a  quality  of  individual  hero- 
ism, but  now  our  neighbor's  dependence  on 
our  courage  has  been  multiplied  beyond 
calculation,  so  that  the  resultant  intensi- 
fying of  each  nation's  resources  of  bravery 
is  equally  incalculable. 

From  countless  sources,  familiar  to 
every  reader,  comes  testimony  to  the  amaz- 


50  THE  NEW  DEATH 

ing  recuperation  of  sorrowing  survivors  in 
this  universal  tragedy.  "Go  about  Eng- 
land to-day,"  writes  Gilbert  Murray,  "and 
you  will  find  in  every  town  men  and 
women  whose  hearts  are  broken,  but  who 
are  uplifted  by  a  new  spiritual  strength." 
Agnes  Repplier  comments,  "That  tranquil- 
lity should  walk  hand  in  hand  with  vio- 
lence, that  the  mental  attitude  of  men 
and  women  forever  face  to  face  with  grief 
should  be  a  composed  attitude,  has  a  psy- 
chological rather  than  a  spiritual  signifi- 
cance." It  is  both  the  spiritual  and  the 
psychological  phenomena  of  the  new  re- 
lationship to  death  that  interest  the  stu- 
dent of  the  human  soul.  It  is  noteworthy 
for  this  study  that  the  first  response  to  the 
enigma  of  that  majestic  presence  now  dom- 
inating uncounted  homes  is  not  in  theo- 
ries, but  in  actions,  in  a  great  unargued 
energy.  Our  boys  have  died,  therefore  we 
must  live,  is  an  arresting  and  illogical  con- 
clusion, but  surely  it  is  the  one  that  has 
long  actuated  both  the  armies  and  the 
households  of  Europe,  and  must  now  sup- 
port us  of  the  United  States,  a  nation  still 


THE  NEW  DEATH  51 

new  to  anguish.  How  different  is  the  pres- 
ent inspired  effort  from  the  paralysis  of 
bereavement,  too  readily  condoned  in  the 
old  days! 

The  magnificent  recuperative  promise 
of  that  clarion  cry,  "After  the  war,"  does 
not  draw  its  first  impulse  from  the  ideals 
of  our  young  dead,  ideals  we  dare  not  for 
an  instant  discontinue!  Their  example  lies 
upon  the  survivors  like  a  command  that 
no  desolation  of  grief  dares  deny.  Is  not 
this  splendid,  dogged  hopefulness,  on  the 
surface  as  mad  and  monstrous  as  the  suf- 
fering that  has  engendered  it,  a  strange,  un- 
earthly tribute  to  the  powers  of  the  soul,  and 
a  mysterious  reassurance  for  the  new  world 
that  shall  rise  from  to-day's  destruction? 

The  capacities  of  the  human  spirit  for 
courage  are  perhaps  as  startling  to  those 
who  are  to-day  themselves  testing  them 
as  to  those  who  but  observe  and  reverence. 
There  is  a  strange  self-security  in  those 
strongholds  of  the  heart  that  utter  loss  has 
rendered  unassailable.  One  recalls  the 
tragic  triumph  of  the  mother  in  "Riders 
to  the  Sea,"  when  she  knows  that  the  sea 


52  THE  NEW  DEATH 

has  devoured  her  seventh  and  last  son. 
Many  a  mother's  heart  to-day  must  echo 
the  relief:  — 

"How  it  was  he  died 
I  know  not,  but  my  heart  is  satisfied; 
Never  again  of  all  my  days  will  one 
Bring  anguish  for  the  anguish  of  my  son. 

Sorrow  is  mine,  but  there  is  no  more  dread. 
The  word  has  come  — *  On  the  field  of  battle, 
dead.'" 

The  word  "death"  has  for  each  of  us  a 
twofold  meaning:  it  implies  both  our  own 
passing  and  the  loss  of  our  loved  ones.  Few 
of  us  consciously  fear  our  own  death,  few 
of  us  are  ever  so  alarmed  at  the  knowledge 
that  we  are  ourselves  dangerously  ill,  as 
at  the  knowledge  that  a  loved  one  is  in 
peril.  Most  of  us  have  a  wholesome  care- 
lessness of  our  own  fate,  but  an  over-solic- 
itude in  regard  to  those  dear  to  us.  The 
new  adaptation  of  living  to  dying,  if  it  is 
to  bear  the  test  of  the  new  world's  needs, 
must  afford  us  both  a  better  adjustment 
of  our  own  mundane  existence  to  its  post- 
mundane  possibilities,  so  that  we  shall  each 
regard  his  life  with  more  respect  as  being 


THE  NEW  DEATH  53 

perhaps  not  too  surely  finite,  and  also  a 
new  enfranchisement  from  paralyzing  anx- 
iety in  regard  to  our  loved  ones.  During 
a  long  century  of  materialism,  we  have 
been  always  handicapped  by  the  fear  of 
loss  until  in  a  moment  of  time,  by  a  su- 
preme irony,  all  fear  has  been  swept  away 
by  utter  desolation. 

With  brains  and  hearts  clean  now  of  all 
terror,  grief-purged  men  and  women  every- 
where are  rising  from  this  devastation  with 
a  wondering  respect  for  the  resilience  of 
the  human  soul,  and  with  a  great  instinct 
toward  rebuilding  driving  them  on  into  the 
new  future.  Evolution  teaches  that  sur- 
vival depends  on  the  power  of  adaptation 
to  environment;  is  not  the  effort  of  each 
nation  to  reconstruct  this  destruction  con- 
stant evidence  of  the  vast  impulse  of  the 
human  race  to  discover  an  adjustment  of 
life  to  death  that  shall  make  for  endurance 
rather  than  decay? 

The  immediate  expression  of  this  vast 
impulse  to  rebuilding  is  for  individual  men 
and  women  the  revaluation  of  humble  daily 
life.  More  and  more  we  each  feel  too  small 


54  THE  NEW  DEATH 

to  grasp  the  world-issues  of  to-day,  yet  at 
the  same  time  find  inactivity  unbearable. 
We  turn  to  the  nearest  task  in  desperate 
desire  to  make  that  somehow  count  for 
relief  and  restoration  to  a  war-ridden 
world.  The  Young  Women's  Christian 
Association  of  our  own  country  has  been 
quick  to  utilize  this  new  blind  energy,  and 
to  make  it  articulate.  The  first  declara- 
tion of  its  Patriotic  League  reads,  "I 
pledge  to  express  my  patriotism  by  do- 
ing better  than  ever  before  whatever  work 
I  have  to  do."  The  humdrum  suddenly 
stands  forth  in  beauty,  dignified  by  new 
motives.  The  humblest  tasks  become  sa- 
cred, the  merely  normal  becomes  sublime 
by  contrast  with  carnage.  To  preserve  un- 
broken all  the  beauty  of  the  old  and  com- 
mon things,  we  realize  as  our  first  obliga- 
tion toward  our  boys  who  also  are  fighting 
to  maintain  all  the  priceless  common- 
places of  peace.  Thoughtful  people  every- 
where, in  the  trenches  and  at  home,  chal- 
lenged to  perceive  the  worth  of  what  is  still 
left  unassailable,  are  finding  a  new  valua- 
tion for  daily  existence. 


THE  NEW  DEATH  $S 

Always  our  attitude  is  inextricably  in- 
fluenced by  the  words  and  the  conduct  of 
the  boys  whose  battle-hours  are  continu- 
ally before  our  imaginations.  They  have 
been  driven  to  discover  what  remains  to 
them  of  joy  in  spite  of  the  tumult,  just  as 
we  at  home,  agonized  by  each  morning's 
headlines,  suddenly  perceive  the  worth  of 
many  experiences  too  familiar  to  be  prized 
until  contrasted  with  horror.  If  in  the  fire 
and  the  mud  "out  there,"  men  can  discover 
things  to  give  them  joy  and  faith,  surely 
we  at  home  in  peace  can  emulate  a  little 
of  their  serenity.  As  we  read  the  records 
of  their  hearts,  as  we  meet  corresponding 
experiences  in  our  own,  we  know  that  no 
holocaust  can  unself  the  soul,  and  that  the 
deathless  privileges  of  friendship  and  of 
family  affection  and  of  the  beauty  of  na- 
ture can  be  interrupted,  but  never  de- 
stroyed. What  father  could  read  Harold 
Chapin's  yearning  for  his  little  Vallie,  and 
not  hold  priceless  his  own  evening  romps 
with  his  baby?  "Dear  mother,"  writes 
the  French  artist  shortly  before  his  death, 
"my  love  —  it  is  the  sole  human  emotion 


56  THE  NEW  DEATH 

that  one  is  allowed  to  retain."  Alan  Seeger 
declares:  "There  is  that  authority  which  he 
alone  possesses  who,  having  stood  at  the 
very  gates  of  Death,  not  knowing  at  what 
moment  his  call  might  come,  has,  looking 
backward,  surveyed  life  in  the  perspective 
that  can  be  had  from  this  angle  alone.  I 
have  seen  my  life  all  unrolled  in  such  mo- 
ments, and  I  can  assure  you  that  in  that 
panorama  everything  else  faded  away,  ob- 
scured in  the  haze  of  oblivion,  through 
which  only  gleamed  clear  and  distinct,  like 
green,  sunlit  islands,  the  hours  when  we 
have  loved  and  been  beloved.'' 

To  what  a  worn  commonplace  family 
affection  had  faded  before  the  war  came 
to  menace  and  reveal!  Throughout  all  this 
land  has  not  every  household  that  pos- 
sessed a  boy  treated  him  with  a  new  sym- 
pathy, a  real,  if  often  awkward,  tender- 
ness? With  the  threat  of  loss  always  over 
our  heads,  we  are  learning  how  much  we 
love.  How  petty  old  irritations  seem  to- 
day! How  beneficent  a  privilege  the  mere 
fact  of  an  unbroken  family  circle  appears, 
now  that  yonder  by  the  hearth  a  shrouded 


p 


THE  NEW  DEATH  57 

form  of  mystery  sits  listening  to  our  care- 
less chat.  We  read  this  swan-song  of  an 
English  lad,  and  know  it  is  articulate  of  the 
dumb  yearning  of  whole  armies  of  brave 
and  homesick  boys  for  those  small  daily 
blessings  we  used  to  hold  so  lightly:  — 

"  By  beauty  lavishly  outpoured, 
And  blessings  carelessly  received, 
By  all  the  days  that  I  have  lived, 
Make  me  a  soldier,  Lord. 

"  I,  that  on  my  familiar  hill 
Saw  with  uncomprehending  eyes 
A  hundred  of  thy  sunsets  spill 
Their  fresh  and  sanguine  sacrifice, 
Ere  the  sun  swings  his  noonday  sword 
Must  say  good-bye  to  all  of  this. 
By  all  delights  that  I  shall  miss, 
Help  me  to  die,  O  Lord." 

As  the  smallest  home  humdrum  be- 
comes sacred  because  of  the  brave  home- 
sickness of  our  boys,  so  the  views  from  our 
windows,  a  wind-blown  tree,  the  sifting  of 
snow,  the  twitter  of  a  sparrow,  suddenly 
speak  to  us  in  a  language  to  which  we  had 
never  before  listened  with  such  under- 
standing, for  we  know  that  the  men  of  the 
trenches  have  found  undreamed-of  heart- 


58  THE  NEW  DEATH 

ening  in  the  mere  line  of  hills,  in  the  mere 
recurrence  of  sunrise  and  of  moon.  How 
gratefully,  how  gayly,  they  write  of  larks 
and  of  violets,  the  soldier-poets,  tortured 
with  carnage!  Harold  Chapin  says  to  his 
wife:  "You  must  convince  yourself  that 
there  are  skylarks  above  the  sand  dunes 
near  Ostend,  just  as  there  used  to  be  pi- 
geons in  ruined  Louvain,  early  butterflies 
in  the  air  among  the  bullets,  crows  and 
rooks  around  Ypres  and  Rheims,  daisies 
growing  among  the  Jack  Johnson  holes  at 
Neuve  Chapelle,  violets  in  the  ruins  of 
Givenchy,  primroses  at  La  Bassee,  and  so 
on.   Nature  carries  on  business  as  usual." 

In  a  curiously  similar  passage  Alan 
Seeger  writes:  "Nothing  more  adorable  in 
nature  than  this  daybreak  in  the  North- 
east in  May  and  June.  One  hears  the 
cockcrows  in  the  villages  of  that  mysteri- 
ous land  behind  the  German  lines.  Then 
the  cuckoos  begin  to  call  in  the  green  val- 
leys, and  all  at  once,  almost  simultaneously, 
all  the  birds  of  the  forest  begin  to  sing.  The 
cannon  may  roar,  and  the  rifles  crackle,  but 
Nature's  programme  goes  on  just  the  same." 


THE  NEW  DEATH  S9 

No  one  could  read  the  French  artist's 
letters,  with  their  vistas  of  French  land- 
scape sketched  in  words  that  could  only 
have  come  to  a  painter's  pen,  and  not  ever 
afterwards  regard  the  mere  daybreak,  so 
divinely  usual,  with  new  reverence.  Sun- 
shine and  starshine,  the  grace  of  a  tree 
etched  black  against  a  winter  sky,  we  see 
these  now  with  new  eyes  of  thankfulness, 
when  they  used  to  be  too  commonplace  for 
our  comforting. 

Another  lesson  from  the  trenches  the 
constant  presence  of  death  in  our  thought 
is  teaching  us  to  incorporate  into  our  daily 
living,  their  glorified  epicureanism.  Men 
who  know  that  their  every  second  on  earth 
is  numbered,  see  every  instant's  experience 
in  fresh  focus.  The  philosophy  of  living 
each  minute  to  the  full  is  again  and  again 
extolled  by  the  French  artist  in  his  letters 
to  his  mother,  —  "Let  us  take  refuge  in  the 
peace  of  the  spring-time  and  in  the  price- 
lessness  of  the  present  moment";  and  in 
another  passage:  "I  dare  no  longer  hope. 
All  that  one  can  pray  for  is  the  power  to 


60  THE  NEW  DEATH 

exhaust  all  the  beauty  that  each  instant 
possesses.  This  is  a  new  way  of  living  one's 
life  and  one  that  literature  did  not  fore- 
see." Alan  Seeger  practices  the  same  phi- 
losophy: "I  took  my  fill  of  all  the  pleasures 
that  Paris  can  give  (and  it  was  Paris  at  its 
most  beautiful).  I  lived  as  though  I  were 
saying  good-bye  to  life,  and  now  I  am  quite 
content  to  return." 

"To  live  as  if  one  were  saying  good-bye 
to  life"  implies  such  an  appreciation  of  the 
normal  as  was  never  before  so  accurate,  so 
exquisite,  so  deeply  joyous.  Our  new  atti- 
tude toward  dying  necessarily  has  for  its 
complement  this  new  attitude  toward  liv- 
ing. Never  was  the  commonplace  so  shot 
through  with  inspiration,  never  were  its 
spiritual  possibilities  so  clear  to  us  as  they 
stand  to-day  revealed  by  the  presence  of 
death.  An  illustration  of  our  new  spirit- 
ualizing of  the  homely  and  familiar  was 
seen  in  our  manner  of  celebrating  the 
Christmas  of  1917.  It  was  a  Christmas 
shorn  of  all  that  was  irrelevant,  burden- 
some; we  gave  gifts  only  where  gifts  were 
spontaneous,  to  the  poor,  the  soldiers,  the 


THE  NEW  DEATH  61 

children.  Countless  households  obeyed  an 
instinct  to  make  the  day  a  little  strong- 
hold of  true  joy.  It  was  the  joy,  not  of  in- 
difference, but  of  acceptance.  There  were, 
for  example,  poems  and  stories  in  the  holi- 
day magazines  that  could  never  in  the  old 
days  of  materialism  have  found  place  there, 
poems  that  spoke  of  death  with  beauty  and 
buoyancy.  For  many  of  us  our  first  war 
Christmas  was  the  most  sacredly  joyous 
that  we  had  ever  known.  We  did  not  for- 
get the  horrors  across  the  water,  but  rather 
sought  to  strengthen  ourselves  in  a  Christ- 
mas hopefulness  unassailable  by  any  hor- 
ror. In  the  vast  deprivation  of  to-day  we 
take  inventory  of  our  resources,  and  stand 
amazed  at  riches.  Is  not  the  present  en- 
hancing of  daily  existence,  so  that  it  dares 
to  be  frankly  sacred,  an  argument  for  the 
true  worth  of  death  as  a  constant,  accepted 
presence  to  dignify  every  hour?  The  re- 
sult we  feel  in  a  new  enfranchisement  from 
our  old  fever  and  hurry,  in  a  less  intense 
but  a  more  intensive  living. 

This  new  spiritual  valuation  of  daily 
existence   is    still    vague,    but   struggling 


62  THE  NEW  DEATH 

toward  clearness,  toward  continuity,  to- 
ward community  effort.  The  humblest, 
the  least  articulate,  of  us  are  conscious  of 
a  deep  impulse  to  help,  to  make  dullest 
duties  somehow  contribute  to  the  great 
need.  All  this  instinctive  effort  gropes 
toward  better  perception  and  more  uni- 
fied purpose.  We  look  into  life,  we  look 
into  death,  inquiring  as  never  before  what 
is  really  worth  while,  really  enduring. 
Always  with  eyes  on  their  great  example, 
we  long  to  dignify  our  daily  work  by  devo- 
tion to  some  cause,  we  long  to  know  our- 
selves in  line  with  them,  our  dead.  Al- 
ways in  healthy  revulsion  at  the  wastage 
of  their  lives,  we  keep  searching,  searching, 
for  those  ultimate  standards  that  shall 
harmonize  their  apparent  loss  with  their 
actual  usefulness.  We,  the  obscure,  sor- 
rowing fathers  and  mothers,  sisters  and 
brothers,  of  young  soldiers  killed,  we,  the 
mourners  all  over  the  world,  want  to  feel 
that  our  lives  are  moving  in  tune  with 
theirs.  And  this  need  for  better  ordering  of 
our  every-day  life  intensifies  our  scrutiny 
of  their  dying.  What  is  the  force  so  mys- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  63 

terious,  so  coercive,  that  commanded  them 
to  die?  What  is  the  force  so  mysterious, 
so  coercive,  that  commands  us  to  live  as 
they  would  have  us  live?  The  New  Death 
is  asking  with  an  intensity  and  a  univer- 
sality never  known  before,  Where  are  our 
dead?  Is  there  a  God?  The  need  of  direc- 
tion for  our  energy,  and  of  a  standard 
of  valuation,  profoundly  affects  the  two 
most  important  characteristics  of  the  New 
Death,  its  essentially  practical  acceptance 
of  immortality,  its  essentially  practical 
approach  to  God. 

Both  the  bereaved  and  the  young  men 
dead  view  survival  under  several  different 
aspects.  Created  out  of  a  yearning  for  the 
physical  privileges  so  abruptly  denied, 
there  is  apparent  a  wistful  half-belief  in 
an  actual  return  to  earthly  scenes.  This 
wish  cries  out  in  several  of  Alan  Seeger's 
poems :  — 

"So  shall  one  coveting  no  higher  plane 

Than  nature  clothes  in  color  and  flesh  and  tone, 

Even  from  the  grave  put  forward  to  attain 
The  dreams  youth  cherished  and  missed  and 
might  have  known. 


64  THE  NEW  DEATH 

"Exiled  afar  from  youth  and  happy  love, 
If  death  should  banish  my  fond  spirit  hence, 

I  have  no  doubt,  but,  like  a  homing  dove, 
It  would  return  to  its  dear  residence 

And  through  a  thousand  stars  find  out  the  road 
Back  into  earthly  flesh  that  was  its  loved  abode." 

In  the  same  spirit  of  yearning  Rupert 
Brooke  hopes:  — 

"Still  may  time  hold  some  golden  space 

Where  I'll  unpack  that  scented  store 
Of  song  and  flower  and  sky  and  face, 

And  count,  and  touch,  and  turn  them  o'er, 
Musing  upon  them  as  a  mother,  who 

Has  watched  her  children  all  the  long  day  through, 
Sits,  silent-handed,  in  the  fading  light, 

When  children  sleep  ere  night." 

Such  perception  of  the  true  beauty  of 
earth  things,  to  which  we,  privileged  to 
grow  old,  are  often  blind,  is  the  tribute  of 
soul  to  body  for  the  blessings  its  harbor- 
ing permitted. 

The  possible  revisiting  of  earth  by  our 
dead,  invisible,  but  near  to  us  and  tender, 
gives  its  note  of  beauty  to  many  a  poem 
written  by  people  whose  perceptions  are 
keen   with   grief.      Winifred   Letts's    two 


THE  NEW  DEATH  65 

Hallowe'en  poems  speak  a  fearless  famili- 
arity with  the  departed:  — 

"We  have  no  fear  of  you,  silent  shadows,  who  tread 
The  leaf-bestrewn  paths,  the  dew-wet  lawns;  draw 

near 
To  the  glowing  fire,  the  empty  chair,  —  we  shall 

not  fear, 
Being  but  ghosts  for  the  lack  of  you,  ghosts  of 
Our  well-beloved  dead." 

The  same  thought  is  in  Rowland  Thirl- 
mere's  "Jimmy  Doane":  — 

"My  house  is  always  open  to  you: 
Dear  spirit,  come  often,  and  you  will  find 
Welcome,  where  mind  can  foregather  with  mind." 

Have  we  noticed,  in  self-examination, 
that  the  world-wide  devastation  of  to-day 
has  already  destroyed  our  old  instinctive 
shudder  at  the  supernatural?  What  living 
man  can  do  to  living  man  has  proved  so 
much  more  horrible  than  what  ghost  or 
devil  might  do,  that  gruesomeness  has  been 
transferred  from  the  supernatural  to  the 
physical.  Both  in  literature  and  in  life  the 
supernatural  as  such  fails  to  frighten  us. 
How  could  we  be  sorry  to  have  them  return 
to  us,  the  vivid,  splendid  boys  we  loved? 
Would  not  any  occult  assurance  of  their 


66  THE  NEW  DEATH 

possible  presence  be  welcome?  We  have, 
of  course,  no  sure  confidence  that  they 
thus  return,  but  at  least  we  have  no  phys- 
ical shrinking  from  the  possibility.  The 
New  Death  conceives  an  interrelated 
universe  in  which  spirits  still  in  the  flesh 
and  spirits  freed  from  it  shall  both  be  as- 
sociated in  some  mystic  effort  toward  the 
future.  Certainly  the  idea  of  this  comrade- 
ship is  to-day  familiar  to  every  soldier,  as 
powerful  as  it  is  inarticulate. 

Persistence  through  cooperation  con- 
stantly renewed  is  a  forceful  element  in  the 
conceptions  of  survival  characteristic  of 
the  present-day  examination  of  death.  How 
many  fighting  men  there  are  to-day  whose 
biography  might  be  compressed  into  the 
two  words  "  Carry  on ! "  These  words  epit- 
omize the  soldier's  identity  with  the  com- 
rades that  have  fallen  before  him  and  the 
comrades  who  will  come  after  him.  The 
dedication  of  "Carry  on"  effects  a  se- 
quence, a  survival,  in  ideal  and  in  effort, 
that  annuls  any  individual  death.  The 
conduct  that  should  be  the  first  instinct 
of  every  survivor  is  compressed  into  that 


THE  NEW  DEATH  67 

courage  cry,  "Carry  on!"  It  means  the 
instant  filling  of  the  ranks  of  the  fallen.  It 
means  that  there  shall  be  no  gap  in  the 
procession  of  progress.  It  means  that  each 
death  shall  be  an  inspiration  to  endeavor. 
Many  a  record  from  the  trenches  reveals 
how  constant  a  presence  a  slain  comrade 
remains  to  his  mate.  We  know  how  many 
a  regiment,  decimated  again  and  again,  has 
been  remade  again  and  again  by  that  cla- 
rion spirit  of  "Carry  on!"  It  is  the  sol- 
dier's answer  in  action  to  the  enigma  of 
death,  and  it  is  the  innermost  expression 
of  his  love  for  those  who  are  gone. 

That  no  one  who  has  died  for  a  great 
cause  is  ever  wasted,  that  the  only  right 
expression  of  grief  is  a  fresh  self-dedica- 
tion to  the  cause  the  loved  one  loved,  is  an 
attitude  toward  loss  that  may  well  pass 
from  the  army  of  warriors  to  that  greater 
army  of  civilians;  it  is  already  the  secret 
of  the  strange  resilience  of  sorrowing  thou- 
sands. This  new  energy  of  grief  is  already 
clear  in  many  a  book,  provides  the  mo- 
tiving, for  example,  of  "The  Worn  Door- 
step," with  its  haunting  sentence,  "I  keep 


68  THE  NEW  DEATH 

forgetting  you  are  dead,"  and  of  Winifred 
Letts's  sequence,  "Ad  Mortuum,"  whose 
sonnet,  "Alive,"  is  memorable:  — 

"Because  you  live,  though  out  of  sight  and  reach, 
I  will,  so  help  me  God,  live  bravely,  too, 
Taking  the  road  with  laughter  and  gay  speech, 
Alert,  intent  to  give  life  all  its  due." 

The  New  Death  is  characterized  by  this 
new  grief,  reverently  joyous  in  its  con- 
secrated energy,  and  indicative  of  that 
needed  adaptation  of  living  to  dying  which 
shall  liberate  us  from  the  old  paralysis  of 
bereavement. 

The  soldier's  action  to-day  is  motived, 
not  alone  by  devotion  to  his  comrades  who 
have  fallen,  but  by  his  sense  of  unity  with 
the  heroes  of  all  time.  He  is  supported  by 
this  kinship,  whether  it  connotes  for  him 
merely  association  in  all  high  endeavor,  or 
whether  it  signifies  actual  companionship 
in  that  mysterious  after  world.  Herbert 
Asquith,  himself  marked  by  fate,  writes  of 
one 

"Who  found  his  battle  in  the  last  resort, 

Nor  needs  he  any  hearse  to  bear  him  hence, 
Who  goes  to  join  the  men  of  Agincourt." 


THE  NEW  DEATH  69 

The  band  of  happy  warriors  is  constantly 
before  the  imaginations  of  men  as  diverse 
as  Guy  Empey,  Ian  Hay,  and  Alan  Seeger; 
the  communion  of  the  brave  challenges 
through  the  battle-agony:  — 

"So  die  as  though  your  funeral 

Ushered  you  through  the  doors  that  led 
Into  a  stately  banquet  hall 
Where  heroes  banqueted. 

"And  it  shall  all  depend  therein 

Whether  you  come  as  slave  or  lord, 
If  they  acclaim  you  as  their  kin, 
Or  spurn  you  from  their  board." 

The  soldier's  relation  to  the  dead  who 
have  inspired  him  is  in  itself  a  revelation 
to  him  of  his  own  influence  upon  those  who 
shall  follow  him.  He  is  no  mere  individ- 
ual, evanescent,  isolated,  but  is  welded 
into  the  eternal  whole  by  his  responsibility 
toward  the  heroic  who  have  preceded  him 
and  toward  the  heroic  who  shall  succeed 
him.  The  continuity  of  an  ideal  annuls 
the  ephemeral,  and  establishes  upon  earth 
the  eternal.  Volume  after  volume  of  war 
autobiography  reveals  the  fighter's  faith  in 
the  future,  upholding  him  through  every 


70  THE  NEW  DEATH 

extremity.  Even  those  two  books  so  cu- 
riously alike  in  impression,  although  so 
different  in  expression,  "Under  Fire,'* 
by  Henri  Barbusse,  and  a  "German  De- 
serter's War  Experience,"  books  so  grue- 
somely  convincing  in  their  pessimism, 
show  against  their  blackness  the  star- 
flashes  of  hope.  "Under  Fire,"  perhaps  the 
most  terrible  arraignment  of  war  that  the 
war  has  produced,  closes  with  reassurance 
for  the  future:  — 

"My  still  living  companions  have  at 
last  got  up,  standing  with  difficulty  in  the 
foundered  soil,  enclosed  in  their  bemired 
garb,  laid  out  in  strange  upright  coffins 
of  mud,  raising  their  huge  simplicity  out 
of  the  earth's  depths  —  a  profundity  like 
that  of  ignorance.  They  move  and  cry  out, 
with  their  gaze,  their  arms,  and  their  fists 
extended  toward  the  sky  whence  fall  day- 
light and  storm.  .  .  . 

"And  a  soldier  ventures  to  add  this  sen- 
tence, 'If  the  present  war  has  advanced 
progress  by  one  step,  its  miseries  and 
slaughter  will  count  for  little.'" 

In  sharpest  contrast  to  the  brutalities 


THE  NEW  DEATH  71 

of  "Under  Fire,"  another  French  volume 
stands  forth  palpitant  with  spirituality. 
Maurice  Barres's  compilation,  "Les  Di- 
verses  Families  Spirituelles  de  la  France,"1 
is  a  book  unique  in  history;  nothing  so 
quiveringly  fresh  from  national  experience 
has  ever  been  written.  It  records,  in  their 
letters,  the  inspiration  that  has  carried 
the  young  soldiers  of  France  beyond  the 
grave.  No  one,  reading,  can  doubt  that 
this  new  burning  faith  in  the  future,  the  fu- 
ture of  this  physical  world,  and  the  future 
in  that  world  to  which  they  go,  both  alike 
so  passionately  believed  in  by  these  boys, 
can  fail  to  affect  the  era  we  are  entering, 
in  ways  hardly  yet  to  be  prophesied. 

It  is  in  their  service  to  the  future  that 
young  men  of  proved  genius  find  comfort 
for  their  arrested  course.  With  eyes  made 
tragically  clear,  they  perceive  that  a  prema- 
ture fate  may  have  greater  influence  than 
an  accomplished  career.  A  profound  intui- 
tion reveals  to  them  that  it  is  more  divine 
to  be  a  man  than  to  be  an  artist,  and  that 
their  deepest  peril  is  to  fail  the  challenge 

1  Translated  into  English  by  Elizabeth  Marbury  under 
the  title  of  The  Faith  of  France. 


72  THE  NEW  DEATH 

to  battle,  for  if  they  presume  to  believe 
themselves  more  valuable  to  the  world 
alive  than  lost,  they  may  choke  at  its 
source  the  wellspring  of  their  inspiration. 
If  they  choose  sacrifice,  they  have  hope 
that  other  men  may  achieve  the  fulfill- 
ment they  set  aside;  while,  if  they  choose 
life,  they  may  live  barren  of  all  achieve- 
ment. With  all  his  passionate  longing  for 
life,  Alan  Seeger  has  the  vision  to  see  that 
"their  death  was  the  death  which  beyond 
all  others  they  would  have  chosen  for 
themselves,  that  they  went  to  it  smiling 
and  without  regret,  feeling  that  whatever 
value  their  continued  presence  in  the 
world  might  be  to  humanity,  it  would  not 
be  greater  than  the  example  and  inspira- 
tion that  they  were  to  it  in  departing.  We 
to  whom  the  idea  of  death  is  familiar, 
walking  always  among  the  little  mounds 
and  crosses  of  the  men  'morts  au  champ 
d'honneur,'  know  what  this  means." 

The  French  artist  gazes  from  his  dugout 
into  the  distant  future  as  he  studies  the 
far  reverberations  of  all  heroic  example:  — 

"TellM.  that  fate  strikes  down  the  best, 


THE  NEW  DEATH  73 

but  it  is  not  unjust.  The  bad  who  survive 
are  thereby  ennobled.  Let  her  accept  the 
sacrifice  knowing  that  it  is  not  vain.  You 
do  not  know  the  lesson  taught  by  him  who 
falls.   But  I,  I  know  it!" 

And  in  an  unforgettable  passage  he  ex- 
pands the  thought:  — 

"Who  shall  say  that  the  survivor,  the 
comrade  of  some  fallen  thinker,  shall  not 
be  the  inheritor  of  his  thought?  No  ex- 
perience can  disprove  this  sublime  intui- 
tion. The  peasant's  son  who  sees  the  death 
of  some  young  scholar,  some  young  artist, 
may  he  not  perhaps  continue  the  inter- 
rupted work?  It  may  become  for  him  the 
link  in  an  evolution  only  for  an  instant  sus- 
pended. Yet  the  crucial  sacrifice  for  each 
is  this:  to  renounce  the  hope  of  being 
the  torch-bearer.  It  is  a  fine  thing  for  the 
child,  in  his  play,  to  carry  the  flag,  but 
for  the  man,  let  it  be  enough  to  know  that 
the  flag  will  be  carried  whatever  befall." 

A  chance  paragraph  from  a  newspaper 
corroborates  the  truth  of  this  vision  by 
showing  that  a  poet  dead  before  his  time 
may    still    influence    the    world    in    ways 


74  THE  NEW  DEATH 

which  perhaps  he  would  gladly  have  died 
to  establish.  A  publishing  house  states, 
as  a  phase  of  the  war-time  book  market, 
"an  increasing  interest  in  poetry,  started 
perhaps  by  the  tragic  and  untimely  death 
of  the  talented  Rupert  Brooke."  Of  the 
young  French  artist  himself  one  may  won- 
der whether  any  pictures  by  his  mature 
brush  would  ever  have  gripped  the  memory 
as  do  his  pen-pictures  of  the  rolling  plains 
and  hills  he  saw  from  his  dugout,  or  whether 
any  accomplishment  of  his  genius  would 
ever  have  equaled  the  inspiration  born  in 
him  by  his  service  and  his  sacrifice. 

Earthly  sacrifice  through  continuity  of 
courageous  endeavor  appears  to  be  the  sol- 
dier's most  immediate  inspiration  to  fear- 
less dying.  The  spirit  of  "Carry  on"  im- 
plies the  support  of  vast  cooperation,  of 
liberation  from  all  that  is  petty,  flashes  be- 
fore the  meanest  man  a  vision  of  impersonal 
living  and  impersonal  dying  which  both 
alike  attest  the  perpetuity  of  an  immortal 
something.  Apart  from  this  earthly  im- 
mortality through  effort,  what  does  the 


THE  NEW  DEATH  75 

soldier  see  for  himself,  each  single  lad  in 
the  ranks,  in  that  misty  land  he  knows  he 
is  entering?  What  promise  does  he  per- 
ceive for  the  persistence  of  his  individual 
soul?  Searching  for  the  answer,  one  is  over- 
whelmed by  the  impression  given  by  all 
trench  records:  whatever  else  the  soldier 
may  expect  of  that  other  side,  of  one  thing 
he  seems  absolutely  assured,  measureless 
well-being;  he  is  going  to  a  place  that  is 
good,  and  he  is  going  with  every  faculty 
alert  for  new  adventure.  Almost  nothing 
in  the  mass  of  memoirs  reveals  any  def- 
inite shaping  of  that  existence  about  to 
begin.  Assurance  takes  almost  no  color 
from  previous  education,  Catholic,  Protes- 
tant, agnostic.  All  we  can  perceive  is  the 
absolute  confidence  in  a  new  glad  life  just 
opening.  This  perception  of  joyous  ad- 
venture is  implicit  in  that  beautiful  term 
of  soldier  slang,  "Going  West."  The  Brit- 
ish Tommy  does  not  guess  how  many 
ages  have  contributed  their  beauty  to  the 
phrase.  The  Happy  Isles  of  Greek  myth 
had  welcome  for  those  whose  purpose 
held  "to  sail  beyond  the  sunset."    Medie- 


76  THE  NEW  DEATH 

val  legend  rewarded  its  defeated  Arthur 
with  a  new  kingdom  in  the  island  valley 
of  Avilion.  The  Happy  Isles  of  the  Greeks, 
the  Avilion  of  medieval  dreamers,  both 
set  in  western  waters,  were  mystic  ports 
reached  without  dissolution.  Ulysses,  Ar- 
thur, sailed  westward  from  living  ken,  to 
some  mysterious  harbor,  but  not  through 
the  portals  of  decay.  Those  bygone  leg- 
ends that  have  lent  their  loveliness  to  the 
words,  "Going  West,"  believed 

"There  is  no  death, 
What  seems  so  is  transition." 

For  the  modern  centuries  "West"  has 
been  a  word  to  conjure  with.  It  still  holds 
all  the  glamour  of  a  new  world,  the  daunt- 
less discovery  of  a  Columbus,  daring  all  his 
soul's  passion  in  the  quest  of  the  unknown. 
The  traveler  tales  that  enthralled  Eliza- 
bethan England,  were  tales  of  the  West. 
Eldorado  and  the  Klondike  have  contrib- 
uted their  more  recent  romance.  "Go- 
ing West"  has  always  spelled  adventure;  it 
has  connoted,  too,  the  inspiration  of  self- 
dependence,  the  fair,  free  chance;  it  has 
implied  lonely  effort,  lonely  exploration, 


THE  NEW  DEATH  77 

crowned  by  some  unguessed  felicity.  Yet 
to-day  the  actual  Occident  is  shorn  of  its 
stimulus.  The  earth  has  been  over-dis- 
covered; a  man  may  sail  clear  around  it, 
and  arrive  at  no  legendary  West.  Wher- 
ever he  goes,  other  men  have  been  before 
him.  But  there  is  left  for  us  one  land  for- 
ever undiscovered,  one  unploughed  sea- 
path  for  Columbus  courage.  The  British 
Tommy  endues  death  with  all  the  ro- 
mance of  three  thousand  years  when  he 
calls  it  "Going  West." 

Passing  from  the  general  to  particular 
testimony  to  the  soldier's  premonition  of  a 
joyous  life  to  come,  one  recalls  the  reassur- 
ance of  Rupert  Brooke  and  of  Alan  Seeger, 
so  different  from  the  agnosticism  of  their 
poems  written  before  the  war.  Rupert 
Brooke's  words  ring  like  a  triumphal  chant: 

"Safe  shall  be  my  going, 
Secretly  armed  against  all  death's  endeavor; 
Safe  though  all  safety  's  lost;  safe  where  men  fall, 
And  if  these  poor  limbs  die,  safest  of  all." 

"Death  is  nothing  terrible  after  all," 
writes  Alan  Seeger;  "it  may  mean  some- 
thing even  more  wonderful  than  life." 


78  THE  NEW  DEATH 

The  following  was  written  by  a  boy, 
"killed  in  action"  when  he  was  twenty:  — 

"And  this  we  know:  Death  is  not  life  effete, 
Life  crushed,  the  broken  paiI/*We  who  have  seen 
So  marvelous  things  know  well  the  end  not  yet. 
Victor  and  vanquished  are  a-one  in  death: 
Coward  and  brave:  friend,  foe.   Ghosts  do  not  say, 
'Come,   what  was   your   record   when  you  drew 

breath?' 
But  a  big  blot  has  hid  each  yesterday, 
So  poor,  so  manifestly  incomplete. 
And  your  bright  Promise,  withered  long  and  sped, 
Is  touched,  stirs,  rises,  opens,  and  grows  sweet, 
And  blossoms  and  is  you,  when  you  are  dead." 

The  conviction  of  the  divine  adventure 
has  caught  the  imagination  of  a  young 
American,  still  only  a  junior  in  college,  so 
that  his  recent  sonnet  is  but  one  more  evi- 
dence to  the  change  of  feeling  toward 
death: — 

"  I  feared  the  lonely  dead  and  turned  away 
From  thoughts  of  somber  death  and  endless  night; 
Thus,  through  the  dismal  hours  I  longed  for  light 
To  drive  my  utter  hopelessness  away. 

"But  now  my  nights  are  filled  with  flowered  dreams 
Of  singing  warriors,  beautiful  and  young; 
Strong  men  and  boys  within  whose  eyes  there  gleams 
The  triumph  song  of  worlds  unknown,  unsung; 


THE  NEW  DEATH  79 

Grim  Death  has  vanished,  leaving  in  its  stead 
The  shining  glory  of  the  living  dead." 

The  sense  of  triumph  and  delight  is  as 
clear  a  note  in  the  words  of  the  bereaved, 
as  in  the  expectations  of  those  who  have 
gone  beyond.  For  Winifred  Letts,  there  is 

"a  fairer  place 
Than  even  Oxford  town," 

where  there  is 

"  laughter  and  a  merry  noise 
Now  that  the  fields  of  Heaven  shine 
With  all  those  golden  boys." 

In  "War  Poems  by  X,"  the  anonymous 
English  father  who  has  given  two  sons  to 
the  sacrifice,  there  is  the  same  dwelling  on 
the  joys  the  youthful  legions  have  found:  — 

"And  each  of  them  in  raiment 
Of  honor  goeth  drest 
And  hath  his  fee  and  payment 
And  glory  on  his  breast." 

That  the  young  and  splendid  cannot 
die,  that  their  arrested  powers  must  per- 
sist somewhere,  is  the  growing  conviction 
of  all  who  mourn  to-day.  That  vision 
which  through  all  the  ages  individuals  have 
glimpsed  and  have  incorporated  into  in- 


80  THE  NEW  DEATH 

spired  living  is  by  universality  of  loss  be- 
coming the  vision,  no  longer  of  the  few, 
but  of  the  many.  The  vision  of  the  many  is 
the  material  of  which  the  motives  of  prog- 
ress are  made.  They  were  so  beautiful  that 
it  is  impossible  to  believe  them  extinct, 
those  dead  boys  we  long  for.  Perhaps  they 
would  gladly  have  died  for  this  alone,  to 
free  the  new  world  from  the  old  world's 
dread  of  death. 

Conviction  of  immortality  as  shown  in 
the  soldier  records  is  in  the  main  pro- 
foundly intuitive,  but  so  powerful  and  so 
common  that  one  cannot  believe  that  so 
many  men,  and  these  alert  in  every  fiber, 
could  be  altogether  deluded.  It  seems 
more  scientific  to  query  whether  perhaps 
they  possess  truer  illumination  than  mere 
intellect,  unsupplemented  by  the  subtler 
capacities  of  soul  evoked  by  their  tragic 
situation,  could  ever  attain.  Men  who  in 
peace  were  as  keenly  rationalistic  as  any, 
yield  themselves  on  the  battle-field  to  over- 
powering intuitions  which  they  sometimes 
feel  helpless  to  transmit  to  loved  ones  still 
in  safety. 


THE  NEW  DEATH  81 

In  so  far  as  their  marvelous  inner  secu- 
rity has  for  themselves  any  basis  in  reason 
it  rests  partly  on  the  immortal  renewal 
they  observe  in  nature.  Sunrise  and  recur- 
rent star  and  the  pushing-up  of  the  indom- 
itable flowers  are  argument  for  human  per- 
sistence, since  man,  too,  is  a  part  of  the 
great  earth  force.  To  the  young  French 
painter  the  vitality,  the  repose,  the  beauty, 
of  nature  are  so  constant  an  inspiration 
that  one  closes  the  book  rebuked  for  one's 
indifference  to  the  lesson  that  through  all 
his  agony  he  perceived  and  practiced. 
The  reassurance  of  beauty  breathes  from 
every  page,  —  "Every  day  I  see  a  new 
cross  in  the  little  cemetery,  and  the  tri- 
umphant spring-time  over  all." 

Sometimes  the  indomitable  joy  of  earth 
takes  hold  of  a  boy's  soul  like  wine,  as  in 
these  verses  of  Charles  Sorley's,  dead  at 
twenty :  — 

"Earth  that  never  doubts  nor  fears, 
Earth  that  knows  of  death,  not  tears, 
Earth  that  bore  with  joyful  ease 
Hemlock  for  Socrates, 
Earth  that  blossomed  and  was  glad 
'Neath  the  cross  that  Christ  had, 


82  THE  NEW  DEATH 

Shall  rejoice  and  blossom,  too, 
When  the  bullet  reaches  you. 

Wherefore,  men  marching, 

On  the  road  to  death,  sing ! 

Pour  your  gladness  on  earth's  head, 

So  be  merry,  so  be  dead." 

Apart  from  identification  with  Nature, 
and  from  the  reasoned  argument  of  her  ex- 
haustless  vitality,  many  a  soldier  reveals 
a  consciousness  of  an  indestructible  immor- 
tal something  within  him.  He  would  still 
feel  this  inner  confidence  even  if  all  com- 
munication with  external  nature  were  de- 
nied him,  if  he  could  hear  no  bird-songs,  see 
no  stars.  Page  after  page  of  "Lettres  d'un 
Soldat"  testify  to  that  sense  of  eternity 
which  is  the  core  of  his  courage  and  his 
calm.  "All  this  human  madness  is  nothing 
compared  with  that  portion  of  eternity 
which  each  man  carries  within  his  soul." 
Again,  he  speaks  of  those  precious  mo- 
ments when  "we  perceive  within  us 
through  all  the  wounds  and  upheavals  of 
our  poor  humanity,  a  sure  tendency  to- 
ward the  permanent,  the  absolute,  and  we 
recognize  the  divine  inheritance  of  which 
we  are  the  heirs." 


THE  NEW  DEATH  83 

Alan  Seeger  delights  to  feel  himself  in 
the  play  of  world-forces  that  are  eternal  in 
energy.  Rupert  Brooke  is  comforted  to  be 
"a  pulse  in  the  eternal  mind."  One  might 
envy  these  three  seer-soldiers,  French, 
American,  English,  what  one  might  call 
their  cosmic  security,  the  content  of  the 
atom  that  perceives  itself  part  of  an  in- 
destructible whole.  There  is,  however,  in 
the  fourfold  sense  of  survival  to  be  studied 
in  soldier  records  —  comradeship  of  ideal- 
ism, expectation  of  glad  adventure,  the  re- 
assurance from  the  vitality  of  nature,  the 
consciousness  of  something  eternal  at  the 
center  of  the  soul  —  little  that  is  definitely 
personal,  just  as  there  is  little  that  sug- 
gests the  old  conventional  doctrines  either 
of  science  or  of  theology.  In  contrast 
there  flashes  before  us  the  warm  personal 
hope  of  Donald  Hankey,  in  his  last  re- 
corded words:  "If  wounded,  Blighty.  If 
killed,  the  Resurrection!" 

As  one  studies  the  views  on  survival  in- 
herent in  the  new  attitude  toward  death, 
one  finds  that  the  ideas  of  those  who  have 


84  THE  NEW  DEATH 

gone,  and  the  ideas  of  those  who  survive, 
differ.  The  soldier  seems  swept  on  in  a 
great  confident  current  toward  some  pro- 
found blessing  and  happy  experience,  but, 
as  in  his  earthly  action,  his  individuality  is 
gladly  merged  into  the  mass,  so  his  con- 
ception of  the  after  life  is  not  personal,  self- 
occupied.  On  the  other  hand,  the  minds 
of  mourners  dwell  more  intensely  than 
ever  in  history  on  personal  survival,  on 
the  continued  existence  of  the  boys  they 
have  lost,  as  vivid,  separate  entities.!  Yet 
the  two  views,  confident,  the  one  of  the 
general,  the  other  of  the  individual,  be- 
atitude of  that  new  existence,  are  equally 
characteristic  of  the  nature  of  the  New 
Death.  The  New  Death  is  always  essen- 
tially the  readjustment  of  daily  living  to 
the  new  fact  of  universal  destruction. 
The  New  Death,  forced  to  be  instantly 
practical,  seeks  not  theories,  but  inspi- 
ration to  energy.  The  boy  about  to  die 
would  find  these  two  needs  best  satisfied 
by  fusing  himself  with  the  great  heroic 
whole,  caring  little  for  individual  persist- 
ence if  only  the  goal  of  the  universal  ideal 


THE  NEW  DEATH  85 

be  attained,  while  the  survivors  who  had 
lost  him  could  not  be  readily  comforted 
by  so  indefinite  an  inspiration;  they  would 
need  assurance  that  the  boy  himself  whom 
they  loved  was  still  alive  beyond  the  veil. 

It  is  the  views  of  survivors  that  will 
affect  the  future.  Those  who  are  left  share 
with  those  who  have  passed  the  idea  of 
well-being  beyond  the  grave,  but  supple- 
ment this  with  a  vivid  belief  in  personal 
continuance.  That  our  dead  are  alive  and 
the  same  that  we  loved,  and  that  they 
joyously  continue  the  upward  march,  is 
the  dominating  faith  of  the  New  Death. 
There  is  in  this  creed  nothing  new,  except 
the  incalculable  novelty  that  never  before 
did  so  many  people  evolve  it,  each  for  him- 
self, and  never  before  did  so  many  people 
practice  it  as  the  deepest  inspiration  of 
their  daily  conduct. 

Would  it  be  possible  to  believe  in  the 
immortality  of  the  soul  and  not  at  the  same 
time  believe  in  Deity?  Would  it  be  pos- 
sible to  believe  that  the  spirit  advances 
here  and  beyond  the  grave,  and  not  believe 
its  course  divinely  directed?   All  continu- 


86  THE  NEW  DEATH 

ity,  both  of  abstract  progress  and  of  indi- 
vidual human  life,  implies  a  guidance,  a 
purpose.  Just  as  the  New  Death  conceives 
the  spirit-world  as  an  ever-pressing  real- 
ity, requiring  an  incessant  revaluing  of  our 
mundane  occupations  as  we  attain  new 
spiritual  standards,  so  it  looks  at  God  with 
a  new  directness.  As  an  examination  of 
the  present  views  on  survival  shows  them 
independent,  unconventional,  and  as  pro- 
foundly intuitive  as  if  a  century  of  science 
had  not*grounded  us  in  materialism,  so 
the  approach  to  God  is  to-day  immediate, 
intense,  practical,  in  its  cry  for  instant 
guidance  through  this  horror.  A  few  years 
ago  we  avoided  thinking  about  God  as 
easily  as  we  avoided  thinking  about  death. 
That  indifference  is  destroyed.  We  find 
thoughtful  men,  especially  in  England 
and  France,  looking  back  with  shame  at 
our  days  of  facile  faithlessness,  equally 
aghast  at  our  former  disregard  of  the  di- 
vine, and  at  the  Kaiser's  championship 
of  a  tribal  God  of  battle  revived  from  an 
age  grown  almost  legendary.  In  the  words 
both  of   statesmen    and    soldiers    to-day 


THE  NEW  DEATH  87 

one  sees  a  return  to  the  first  condition  of 
true  religion,  humility.  Only  the  bewilder- 
ment of  agony  could  have  made  us  humble 
enough  to  be  reverent.  Because  action  and 
conviction  require  a  mutual  reinforcement, 
a  condition  too  often  through  ignorance 
of  psychology  neglected  by  religious  teach- 
ers, because  we  can  neither  act  heartily 
unless  we  first  believe,  nor  believe  heartily 
unless  we  also  act,  because  full  conviction 
is  obtained  solely  by  embodiment  in  ac- 
tion, —  it  is  the  soldier,  through  his  utter 
abandonment  of  self  to  service,  who  has  to- 
day attained  the  clearest  religious  certainty. 
The  faith  of  fighters  revealed  in  their 
memoirs  is  vital,  unfaltering,  but  the  ex- 
pression of  the  same  fundamental  creed 
differs  according  to  the  individual.  Alan 
Seeger  calls  his  God,  Destiny,  but  it  is 
Destiny  so  deeply  trusted  as  to  become 
personal.  To  him  God  is  first  the  artist  of 
whose  kindness  we  may  be  confident  because 
He  has  given  us  beauty,  because  His  is 

"The  hand  that  peopled  the  earth  and  air 
And  set  the  stars  in  the  infinite 
And  made  night  gorgeous  and  morning  fair" ; 


88  THE  NEW  DEATH 

and  also  God  is  the  captain  of  man's  soul, 
to  whose  unknown  but  splendid  guidance 
the  soldier  gladly  yields,  — 

"We  saw  not  clearly,  nor  understood, 

But  yielding  ourselves  to  the  master-hand, 
Each  in  his  part  as  best  he  could 

We  played  it  through  as  the  Author  planned." 

As  a  rule  the  soldier  is  a  fatalist,  but  his 
is  the  fatalism  of  profound  faith.  Julian 
Grenfell,  another  of  the  slain,  reveals  the 
soldier  psychology:  — 

"Through  joy  and  blindness  he  shall  know 
Not  caring  much  to  know,  that  still 
Nor  lead  nor  steel  shall  reach  him,  so 
That  it  be  not  the  Destined  will." 

The  "Lettres  d'un  Soldat"  read  like  a 
psalm  of  serenity,  although,  in  terms  of 
expression,  his  religion  is  neither  pagan  nor 
Christian.  Through  all  the  battle  din, 
God  led  him  by  the  still  waters:  "Some- 
times a  shell  covered  me  with  earth  and 
deafened  me,  and  then  quiet  fell  once  more 
upon  the  frosty  world.  I  paid  dear,  but 
I  had  moments  of  solitude  full  of  God." 
He  has  absolute  trust  in  a  divinely  ordered 
evolution  victorious  over  all  havoc:  "It 


THE  NEW  DEATH  89 

is  perhaps  a  high  destiny  and  privilege 
that  our  generation  should  be  witness  of 
these  horrors,  but  what  a  terrible  price  to 
pay!  And  yet,  Faith  eternal  dominating 
all.  Faith  in  an  Evolution,  an  order,  tran- 
scending human  patience." 

His  exquisite  submission  echoes  a  greater 
renunciation:  "Dear,  after  revolt  that  has 
shaken  me  to  tears,  I  find  that  I  can  still 
say,  'Thy  will  be  done'";  and  in  a  later 
letter,  "I  still  had  something  noble  to  ac- 
complish upon  earth  —  and  yet,  since  God 
is  unwilling  to  remove  His  cup,  may  His 
will  be  done." 

This  absolute  subjection  of  the  soldier 
to  his  divine  superior  has  exact  parallel  in 
Harold  Chapin's  letters  about  the  religious 
training  of  his  tiny  son,  that  privilege  he 
was  so  loath  to  entrust  to  others:  — 

"Of  course  I  have  no  objection  to  your 
teaching  Vallie  a  prayer,  —  why  should  I 
have?  Only  please  teach  him  one  thing: 
that  his  prayer  may  not  be  answered,  and 
that  if  it  is  n't,  he  must  not  think  God 
cruel  or  unmindful.  'Thy  will  be  done'  is 
the  safety-valve  in  all  prayer,  and  believers 


90  THE  NEW  DEATH 

in  God  must  surely  think  —  if  they  do 
not  say  —  those  words  as  a  part  of  every 
prayer." 

For  that  Christian  warrior,  Donald 
Hankey,  faith  is  the  highest  spiritual  ad- 
venture: — 

"If  belief  in  God  is  illusion,  happy  he 
who  is  deluded!  He  gains  this  world  and 
thinks  he  will  gain  the  next." 

"The  disbeliever  loses  this  world  and 
risks  losing  the  next." 

"True  religion  is  betting  one's  life  that 
there  is  a  God." 

Much  evidence  shows  that  religion 
"over  there"  is  not  the  monopoly  of  the 
educated.  Both  the  French  painter  and 
Alan  Seeger  tell  of  churches  crowded  with 
poilus.  Donald  Hankey,  in  his  sympa- 
thetic study  of  the  religion  of  the  inartic- 
ulate, testifies  that  his  cockney  comrade? 
have  deepest  respect  for  the  Christian 
virtues  and  for  the  personality  of  Christ, 
although  they  are  often  doubtful  of  the 
forms  of  faith  and  practice  as  presented 
by  the  churches. 

The  religion  of  the  soldier  facing  death 


THE  NEW  DEATH  91 

is  a  denial  of  all  the  old  materialism  that 
once  infected  equally  the  educated  and  the 
uneducated.  The  color  and  shape  of  the 
faith  differ  in  different  men,  but  not  its 
intensity,  its  confidence.  Its  practice  is 
definitely  Christian  in  its  democracy,  its 
kindness.  Even  the  two  books  that  might 
boast  themselves  untainted  by  faith  in 
God  pour  their  repressed  idealism  into 
faith  in  man.  "Under  Fire"  and  "A  Ger- 
man Deserter's  War  Experience"  honor 
the  common  man,  his  natural  instincts 
toward  brotherhood,  in  a  way  that  con- 
troverts all  the  seeming  cynicism  by  a 
reverence  for  the  Holy  Ghost  triumphant 
in  the  tortured  human  spirit. 

As  in  all  departments  of  life  to-day  our 
attitude  and  action  are  inextricably  in- 
fluenced by  the  attitude  and  action  of  the 
young  dead  always  present  to  our  mem- 
ories, so  the  religion  of  the  home  army 
accepts  the  distinctly  soldier  elements  of 
their  creed.  The  soldier  regards  God  as 
the  intelligence  that  marshals  the  moral 
forces  of  all  time,  but  as  an  intelligence, 
like  his  general's,  to  be  trusted,  rather  than 


92  THE  NEW  DEATH 

understood,  and  he  regards  a  blind  and  un- 
questioning obedience  to  this  direction  as 
the  individual's  only  possible  contribution 
to  the  ultimate  victory.  His  religion  is 
therefore,  first,  absolute  trust,  and  then 
absolute  submission.  The  immediacy  of 
the  fighter's  need  makes  it  easier  for  him 
to  attain  these  two  conditions  than  for  us, 
whose  incorporation  of  creed  in  conduct  is 
not  so  instant  a  constraint,  but  the  reli- 
gion at  the  front  and  at  home  has  the 
same  frankly  intuitive  character.  The  new 
philosophy  of  death,  born  of  our  naked 
defenselessness,  openly  employs  intuition, 
spiritual  reassurance,  half-occult,  perhaps, 
but  overpowering.  The  God  perceived 
through  the  effort  to  reconcile  living  to 
universal  destruction  is  not  the  God  of 
theology.  He  is  sometimes  frankly  an  evo- 
lutional God,  Himself  travailing  with  His 
universe  toward  perfection.  It  is  not,  how- 
ever, the  attributes  of  God  that  concern 
the  New  Death,  but  the  attitude  toward 
Him,  and  the  practical  expression  of  this 
attitude  both  in  public  actions  and  in 
private. 


THE  NEW  DEATH  93 

After  decades  of  materialism  a  new 
mysticism  is  being  born.  The  quickened 
sense  of  a  God  controlling  the  issues  o{ 
life  and  death  is  a  natural  reaction  against 
our  puzzlement  at  wanton  wastage  of 
lives.  All  of  us  to-day  perceive  a  Power 
in  the  world  beyond  all  human  compre- 
hension. Some  great  force  is  let  loose  upon 
us,  for  our  destruction  or  our  regeneration? 
A  Power  is  certainly  at  work,  —  is  it  God 
or  devil,  for  no  one  dares  longer  to  call  it 
chance?  Every  instinct  answers,  God.  We 
are  growing  readier  in  using  His  name.  The 
young  soldier-thinkers  quoted  were  none 
of  them  men  who  in  earlier  life  would  have 
talked  easily  of  religion.  We  have  become 
less  awkward  in  acknowledging  that  we 
stand  in  the  presence  of  mysteries  too  deep 
for  us.  A  young  doctor  gone  to  the  front 
recently  startled  the  society  acquaintance 
he  had  left  by  writing  home,  "There  is  no 
fear  here  but  the  fear  of  God."  God  and 
immortality  have  become  facts  for  our 
every-day  life,  while  they  were  only  words, 
and  words  avoided,  before. 

The   new   thing  about  faith  to-day  is 


94  THE  NEW  DEATH 

that  it  is  voluntarily  intuitive,  and  that 
its  mysticism  is  not  contemplative  but 
active.  This  mysticism  is  conscious.  Ear- 
lier ages  have  been  intuitive  because  they 
had  not  had  experience  of  being  scientific. 
The  scientific  attitude  was  a  stage  of 
growth  ordained  for  our  adolescence,  but  it 
did  not  indicate  the  maturity  we  thought 
it  did.  Our  intuitions  of  God  to-day  are 
more  to  be  relied  upon  than  those  of  ear- 
lier periods  that  were  unaware  of  pitfalls. 
The  evidence  of  our  mature  wisdom  is 
that,  having  experienced  the  pitfalls,  we 
have  voluntarily  returned  to  a  childlike 
acceptance.  For  how  many  decades  we 
used  to  gaze  wistfully  at  cathedrals,  help- 
lessly proud  to  have  outgrown  the  vision 
that  created  them!  The  only  way  to  re- 
store faith  was  to  sweep  our  self-reliance 
from  us,  to  make  us  again  like  children, 
helpless  before  unknown  things,  like  chil- 
dren who  are  always  both  eager  and 
afraid. 

As  children  are  forced  to  trust  some 
grown-up  as  they  advance  into  the  mys- 
teries of  existence,  we  of  to-day  are  con- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  95 

scious  of  some  strange,  unearthly  power 
sustaining  us  through  incredible  shock,  and 
therefore  become  the  promise  for  each  of 
us  of  some  new  and  splendid  adventure  of 
development.  We  do  not  argue  about  God, 
we  accept  Him.  We  do  not  argue  about 
survival,  we  accept  it.  Universal  destruc- 
tion has  swept  from  us  every  other  de- 
pendence. It  is  frankly  an  experiment, 
this  new  spirituality,  this  new  adjustment, 
this  New  Death.  For  the  first  time  in  the 
world,  millions  of  people  are  making  the 
adventure  of  faith,  engrossed  in  the  im- 
port of  immortality,  the  import  of  God, 
not  as  a  dogma  of  the  next  world,  but  as 
a  practice  for  this  one.  There  is  nothing 
new  about  immortality,  there  is  nothing 
new  about  God;  there  is  everything  new  in 
the  fact  that  we  are  at  last  willing  to  live 
as  if  we  believed  in  both.  This  is  the  re- 
ligion of  the  New  Death. 

Imperceptibly  during  these  four  tragic 
years  the  light  on  the  adamantine  face  of 
death  has  been  changing  for  each  one  of  us. 
That  mask  of  mystery  is  no  longer  cold  and 


96  THE  NEW  DEATH 

gray,  but  warm  with  dawn.  Not  one  of  us 
is  so  afraid  of  dying  as  he  used  to  be.  If 
we  take  inventory,  we  shall  see  that  we 
have  traveled  farther  than  we  knew  toward 
friendship  with  death.  The  aspects  of  the 
New  Death  already  clear  to  any  examina- 
tion,—  its  frank  treatment  of  mysteries  our 
materialism  used  to  shun,  its  measureless 
comradeship  in  sympathy  and  in  energy, 
its  confidence  in  the  survival  both  of  the 
individual  and  of  his  ideals,  its  direct  ap- 
proach to  God,  —  have  we  not  each  one 
of  us  felt  all  these  impulses  stirring  in  his 
soul?  What  we  had  not  perceived,  per- 
haps, is  the  universality  of  the  great  in- 
quiry, and  its  significance  for  the  great 
reconstruction.  As  we  see  before  us  de- 
struction, more  and  more  and  more,  we 
are  conscious  within  us  of  a  determination 
ever  grimmer,  and  —  yes,  gladder!  Our 
own  inner  witness  is  corroborated  by  life 
and  literature  all  about  us,  so  that  the 
recuperative  promise  of  the  new  energies 
released  by  the  new  intimacy  with  death 
is  hardly  yet  to  be  calculated.  Yet  to  con- 
jecture the  future  trend  of  our  new  spir- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  97 

itual  impulsion  is  to  illuminate  the  black 
present  with  shining  hope. 

The  tendencies  of  future  thought  and 
action  that  will  be  born  of  the  present  re- 
coil from  materialism,  will  be  an  intensi- 
fying and  enlarging  of  the  characteristics 
of  the  New  Death  already  clearly  observ- 
able, because  the  motives  for  inquiry  and 
for  activity  will  remain  the  same  —  in- 
stant recuperation  from  ruin,  instant  re- 
lief from  grief.  The  investigation  of  the 
soul's  relation  to  body  will  become  even 
more  intensely  practical  in  the  after  time 
than  now,  for  the  cessation  of  war  will 
give  us  a  realization  that  the  pressure 
of  the  fight  now  mercifully  spares  us.  Not 
until  the  curtain  of  fire  is  lifted  shall  be 
revealed  the  loss  to  the  world's  life  of  the 
lives  laid  down.  Not  until  then  shall  each 
of  us  left  alive  feel  to  the  full  his  respon- 
sibility to  the  world  to  come.  We  are  co- 
erced to  a  better  understanding  of  death 
if  the  sacrifice  of  our  sons  is  not  to  be 
empty,  and  if  the  future  is  to  contain  the 
elements  that  make  for  continuity  rather 
than  for  corruption.    A  new  vision  of  our 


98  THE  NEW  DEATH 

mortality  is  necessary  if  we  are  not  to 
remain  moribund.  In  some  strange  way 
not  yet  fully  fathomable  the  old  world 
is  proved  to  have  had  within  it  the  seeds 
of  its  own  destruction.  It  is  our  sacramen- 
tal duty  to  see  that  the  new  world  shall 
have  within  it  the  seeds  of  its  own  resur- 
rection. 

The  responsibility  to  the  dead  to  build 
the  future  they  died  for  is  to-day  the  un- 
argued impulse  of  all  the  bereaved;  the 
future  itself  will  clarify  this  popular  im- 
pulse and  transform  it  into  a  binding  ob- 
ligation that  will  be  the  clue  to  all  emer- 
gent activities,  both  mental  and  material. 
Universal  grief  has  made  responsibility 
for  the  future  also  universal,  so  that  the 
making  of  to-morrow  is  no  longer  the  ex- 
clusive performance  of  the  philosopher  and 
the  statesman;  it  has  been  transferred  to 
every  humble  man  and  woman  who  has 
given  a  son  to  the  world's  war.  For  us  who 
fight  for  the  rights  of  the  individual,  the 
symbol  of  cooperation  must  be  the  respon- 
sibility of  each  individual  among  us.  In  a 
free  democracy  the  attitude  toward  govern- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  99 

ment  should  not  be  noisy  blame  for  mis- 
takes, since  the  mistakes  are  each  man's 
own,  nor  yet  noisy  praise  of  achievements, 
since  the  achievements  are  also  each  man's 
own;  and  both  for  a  man  and  for  a  na- 
tion accomplishment  should  never  lead  to 
that  self-approval  which  is  enervating,  but 
to  that  endeavor  which  is  inexhaustibly 
aspirant.  It  is  the  responsibility  of  each 
man  and  woman  and  child  to-day  to  see 
that  we  Americans  shall  have  as  clear  and 
efficient  expression  for  our  idealism  as  the 
Germans  have  had  for  their  deviltry, 
—  a  responsibility  which,  translated  into 
immediate  practice,  means  that  each  one 
of  us  must  be  tireless  in  transforming  the 
lethargy,  ease,  indifference,  both  of  his 
small  community  and  of  his  great  country, 
into  enlightenment,  energy,  and  sacrifice. 
We  have  long  been  the  most  careless  and 
comfortable  nation  in  the  world:  to-day, 
by  the  graves  of  the  boys  we  have  offered 
for  the  world's  service  may  each  man  and 
woman  of  us  be  inspired  to  a  holy  intelli- 
gence and  to  an  iron  endurance.  The  battle 
for  freedom  cannot  be  won,  the  broken 


ioo  THE  NEW  DEATH 

world  cannot  be  rebuilt,  except  through  the 
dedication  of  each  one  of  us.  The  dawn  is 
already  breaking  of  a  day  when  duty  can 
no  longer  be  deputed  to  any  government 
—  the  new  world  must  be  the  work  of 
plain  men  and  women  everywhere.  These 
plain  men  and  women  realize  that  their 
first  need  in  their  rebuilding  is  enlighten- 
ment as  to  what  is  imperishable.  They 
perceive  that  universal  death  has  destroyed 
the  old  standards  of  living;  they  must  first 
of  all,  therefore,  understand  death  better, 
if  in  the  time  to  come  they  are  to  make 
death  itself  the  inspirer  rather  than  the 
destroyer  of  progress.  Of  course,  there  are 
few  for  whom  the  investigation  is  so  defi- 
nitely articulate  as  this,  and  yet  a  better 
understanding  of  death  solely  in  order  to 
have  a  better  understanding  of  living,  is 
the  dominating  motive  of  a  popular  in- 
quiry as  profound  in  its  need  as  it  is  prac- 
tical in  its  application  of  every  spiritual 
discovery. 

Because  this  vast  examination  of  the 
unseen  is  a  people's  movement  pressing 
from  below  upward,  it  is  the  more  difficult 


THE  NEW  DEATH  101 

to  prophesy  the  force  of  its  effects;  but  one 
may  safely  say  that  this  spiritualizing  of 
popular  purposes  will  provide  such  a  sup- 
port to  any  statesman  possessing  idealist 
vision  as  thinkers  who  are  still  walking  ac- 
cording to  bygone  lights  could  not  readily 
admit.  It  will  be  as  impossible  for  the 
human  spirit  as  for  human  statecraft,  to 
return  to  the  status  quo  ante,  yet  there  are 
Americans  as  well  as  Germans  who  are 
blind  to  the  import  of  the  new  popular 
vision.  American  thought  has  been  slower 
than  French  or  English  to  allow  its  old 
agnosticism  to  be  permeated  by  the  new 
intuitions  of  immortality,  and  the  reasons 
are  simple.  The  newest  nations  are  al- 
ways, like  children,  the  most  conservative, 
and  we  of  America  are  always  as  afraid 
to  accept  innovations  in  thought  as  we  are 
ready  to  accept  them  in  practical  affairs. 
The  only  other  contemporary  movement 
comparable  in  force  with  the  New  Death 
is  socialism.  Both  these  movements  are 
underestimated  by  the  so-called  upper 
classes  —  will  the  leveling  of  this  war  leave 
any  such?  Honor  to  those  intellectuals,  far 


102  THE  NEW  DEATH 

more  common  in  smug  England  and  skep- 
tic France  than  here,  who  are  not  afraid 
to  rank  themselves  frankly  one  with  the 
common  man  —  humbled  to  reverence, 
open  to  mystery,  curious  of  immortality. 
Gilbert  Murray  writes  of  England's  ad- 
vance into  "the  knowledge  that  there  are 
things  in  life  which  are  greater  than  life. 
We  have  learnt  more  than  we  ever  learnt 
before,  that  the  true  work  of  mankind 
upon  earth  is  to  live  for  these  greater 
things.  I  am  not  exaggerating  or  using 
highfalutin  language.  Go  out  into  the 
street  and  talk  with  the  first  bus-driver 
or  cabman  who  has  lost  his  son  in  the  war; 
he  may  be  inarticulate,  but  if  once  he  be- 
gins to  speak  freely,  you  will  find  him  tell- 
ing you  that  he  does  not  grudge  his  son's 
life." 

Another  English  thinker  frankly  voices 
his  wonder  before  the  implications  of  sur- 
vival: "An  acceptance  of  the  faith  that 
the  human  personality  survives  death  in- 
volves a  tremendous  change  in  one's  out- 
look on  life.  No  longer  is  the  universe  seen 
as  the  ruthless  scheme  of  an  unknown  and 


THE  NEW  DEATH  103 

terrible  God.  .  .  .  Human  life  does  not 
stop  short  at  the  grave,  a  truncated  thing, 
but  takes  up  its  growth  and  development 
after  death,  and  continues  the  course  of 
evolution  in  future  worlds  as  yet  unknown 
and  unguessed." 

The  permeation  of  the  upper  strata  of 
thought  by  the  popular  intuitions  has 
come  to  England  and  France  through  the 
welding  of  all  classes  in  the  common  needs 
of  suiTering  and  of  succor,  but  even  in  those 
two  countries  one  can  see  a  difference  in 
attitude  among  the  young,  the  middle- 
aged,  and  the  old.  The  young  men,  facing 
death,  write  of  their  continued  existence 
with  rapt  certainty,  the  old  men  regard 
that  vision  with  wistful  credence;  these  are 
old  enough  to  be  humble,  while  the  young 
men  are  young  enough  to  be  intrepid.  The 
middle-aged,  however,  are  as  tenacious 
as  they  are  timid.  Insulated  by  intellect, 
they  do  not  readily  admit  the  present 
electrifying  of  all  life  by  the  new  popular 
perceptions.  They  do  not  see  how  many 
people  everywhere  are  believing  the  soul 


104  THE  NEW  DEATH 

survives,  and  contrary  to  the  indifference 
of  four  years  ago,  living  as  if  they  believed 
it.  To  many  persons  thinking  and  writing 
to-day,  especially  on  this  side  of  the  water, 
immortality  still  appears  a  senseless  super- 
stition. From  such  old  sluggishness  of  ag- 
nosticism the  future  is  bound  to  awaken 
us.  More  and  more,  in  all  departments  of 
thought  and  opinion,  we  shall  be  affected 
by  the  thoughts  and  opinions  of  our  allies. 
Before  the  devastation  of  to-morrow,  an 
alliance  of  ideals,  a  unity  of  vision,  will  be 
a  need  even  more  instantly  pressing  than 
our  present  military  cooperation.  As  in 
the  helplessness  and  horror  of  loss,  Eng- 
land and  France  have  been  humbled  to 
dependence  on  the  great  intuition,  so  we, 
too,  shall  be  humbled.  In  that  relentless 
day  we,  too,  blinded  and  weak  with  grief, 
shall  be  seeking  with  the  rest  that  light 
on  death  that  shall  illumine  our  rebuild- 
ing. 

This  widespread  questioning  of  the 
grave's  secrets  can  be  seen  in  two  mani- 
festations, its  effect  upon  contemporary 
literature,  and  its  stimulus  to  psychic  re- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  105 

search,  effects  which  promise  to  increase 
in  intensity  as  time  goes  on.  That  majes- 
tic mystery,  constantly  present  at  every 
hearth,  constantly  present  in  every  one's 
imagination,  rebukes  the  flippancy  of  lit- 
erature, which  shows  everywhere  a  deep- 
ening insight.  Poetry  is  an  increasing  de- 
mand, philosophic  treatment  of  politics 
and  history  is  popular,  essays  of  acumen 
are  read  before  one  reads  the  fiction  in  the 
magazines.  The  intensified  emotion  and 
quickened  intellect  exhibited  everywhere 
in  our  periodicals  are  producing  the  in- 
evitable result  of  better  artistic  expres- 
sion. An  increasingly  higher  level  of 
thought  and  phrasing  is  conspicuous  in 
periodical  literature. 

Less  and  less  in  every  day  of  this  pro- 
longed agony  is  death  either  in  a  book  or 
in  actuality  regarded  as  final  for  any  in- 
dividual. Conjectures  of  the  soul's  career 
after  exit  were  accepted  material  for  fic- 
tion long  before  the  war.  Matter  as  di- 
verse as  "The  Glimpse"  and  "The  Re- 
turn of  Peter  Grimm"  appealed  without 
apology  to  popular  fancy.  Patience  Worth 


106  THE  NEW  DEATH 

has  been  an  entity  we  have  puzzled  over 
rather  than  curtly  dismissed.  This  open- 
ness to  the  possibility  of  spiritual  persist- 
ence and  adventure  has  been  incalculably 
increased  to-day,  and  current  fiction  may 
well  be  examined  for  the  degree  to  which  it 
reflects  the  attitude.  This  reflection  may 
be  studied  from  two  aspects,  either  as 
it  reveals  the  actual  philosophy  of  the 
writer,  or  as  it  is  his  conscientious  effort 
to  mirror  the  psychology  of  his  era,  and 
both  aspects  are  clearly  testimony  to  the 
present  preoccupation  with  immortality. 
One  does  not  conceive  the  author  as  hold- 
ing a  brief  for  survival,  but  as  being,  like 
the  reader,  alert,  full  of  question,  so  that 
he  cannot  altogether  kill  a  character,  or 
quite  convince  us  that  the  story  is  finished 
when  a  man  dies.  Snaith's  latest  novel, 
"The  Coming,"  lately  alarmed  a  milita- 
rist critic  by  the  tendency  of  its  spiritual 
standards  to  nullify  the  hearty  death-de- 
cisiveness of  warfare.  "  Changing  Winds  " 
possesses  a  death-scene  that  in  any  novel 
of  five  years  ago  would  have  been  heart- 
rending, but  which  in  emphasis  is  passed 


THE  NEW  DEATH  107 

over  as  lightly  as  if  the  most  lovable 
character  in  the  volume  had  been  merely 
speeding  on  some  joyous  journey.  "  Chang- 
ing Winds"  is,  in  its  totally  different  way, 
like  "Under  Fire,"  an  arraignment  of  war, 
yet  its  clearest  impression  is  that  the  de- 
struction of  its  splendid  young  quartette 
is  for  the  world  loss,  but  for  themselves 
liberation.  New  spiritual  vision  has  dur- 
ing this  war-period  given  us  some  of  the 
most  beautiful  short  stories  our  maga- 
zines have  ever  shown;  for  example,  Will 
Levington  Comfort's  "Chautonville,"  and 
Alice  Brown's  "Flying  Teuton,"  in  both 
of  which  the  seen  world  and  the  unseen 
are  exquisitely  interfused.  Many  short 
stories  of  to-day  and  novels  also  have  for 
motive  the  dedication  of  a  joyous  grief  — 
conspicuously,  "The  Worn  Doorstep." 

One  department  of  literature  has  to-day 
lost  its  grip  upon  the  imagination.  The 
ghost  story  is  a  legitimate  form  of  art, 
but  to-day  it  fails  to  affect  one.  Compare 
one's  reactions,  for  instance,  to  Algernon 
Blackwood's  tales  and  Mrs.  Burnett's 
;' White  People."  The  supernatural  as  such 


108  THE  NEW  DEATH 

completely  fails  to  frighten  us;  we  have 
been  forced  to  live  too  close  to  it.  How 
could  a  ghost  story  evoke  its  old  chill  in  a 
day  when  grief  would  be  glad  of  the  mani- 
festation of  any  spirit's  persistence? 

It  is  Mrs.  Willsie,  of  the  "  Delineator," 
who  attributes  the  new  tendencies  of  lit- 
erature directly  to  the  fresh  conceptions 
of  spirit-power:  "This  craving  for  con- 
viction of  the  hereafter,  increased  by  the 
war,  inevitably  makes  our  literature  more 
spiritual,  so  we  are  seeing  the  last  for  a 
while  of  the  sex  novel  and  of  sordid  real- 
ism. We  no  longer  find  people  who  be- 
lieve that  since  you  are  an  artist  you  should 
describe  the  contents  of  a  garbage  can. 
The  soul  of  man  as  well  as  the  body  of 
man  is  coming  into  its  own  as  the  theme 
of  the  novelist.  And  the  war  is  respon- 
sible. You  can't  stick  out  your  tongue 
and  make  a  face  at  God  when  a  shell  may 
momentarily  hurl  you  from  the  earth." 

We  all  feel  a  reaction  to-day  against 
writers  who  are  consciously  clever  or 
purely  frivolous.  In  spite  of  the  deepen- 
ing and  purifying  of  contemporary  litera- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  109 

ture,  the  desires  of  readers  are  as  yet  un- 
satisfied by  the  response  of  writers,  but 
the  readiness  of  the  public  to  read  what  is 
thoughtful  will  undoubtedly  produce  pro- 
founder  matter  for  its  reading.  Both 
writers  and  readers  are  thinking  and  feel- 
ing and  acting  too  intensely  for  imme- 
diate expression,  but  when  our  minds  are 
again  released  from  battle,  we  may  expect 
an  output  rich  in  spiritual  perception. 
As  a  quickened  nationalism  and  the  dis- 
covery of  a  new  world  were  the  strongest 
influences  to  make  the  Elizabethan  renais- 
sance, so  we  may  believe  that  in  our  own 
to-morrow  the  new  national  consciousness 
and  the  new  intuitions  of  a  spirit-world 
may  produce  a  literature  of  novel  power 
and  beauty. 

There  are,  however,  indications  of  tem- 
porary dangers  due  to  the  popular  press- 
ing into  the  unseen.  It  is  possible  that 
both  books  and  living  may  be  too  much 
affected  by  occultism.  "The  Dark  For- 
est" is  an  example.  There  the  romance 
is  so  surely  handled  as  to  avoid  the  risk, 
but  it  goes  to  the  brink  of  the  peril,  and 


no  THE  NEW  DEATH 

one  step  farther  into  the  supernatural 
would  carry  it  from  the  realm  of  the  real 
into  that  of  the  fantastic.  Perhaps  as  far 
as  novel  or  real  life  may  safely  proceed 
is  to  treat  death  as  a  gateway  on  the 
upward  pilgrimage  of  evolution,  without 
too  much  conjecture  of  the  path  beyond 
the  portal. 

There  is  undoubtedly  to-day  a  greatly 
increased  interest  in  psychic  discovery; 
one  cannot  conjecture  whether  this  in- 
terest may  have  results  altogether  good, 
or  partly  bad.  Occultism  is  a  natural  re- 
action from  materialism,  yet  occultism  is 
an  accusation  attaching  only  to  the  igno- 
rant; it  cannot  apply  to  the  patient  science 
or  to  the  sane  advice  of  real  investigators. 
There  is  an  increasing  readiness  to  al- 
low spiritist  study  its  legitimate  place  in 
scientific  research,  and  no  longer  to  ridi- 
cule its  exemplars  as  either  fools  or  knaves. 
Psychic  investigations  are  to-day  no  longer 
lightly  dismissed,  and  few  people  who 
pride  themselves  on  intellectual  liberalism 
do  so  dismiss  them.  .  Too  many  men  of 


THE  NEW  DEATH  m 

unimpeachable  scientific  method  and  de- 
votion, too  conspicuous  revelations  for  fac- 
ile denial,  too  intense  a  desire  to  believe, 
prevent  our  former  nonchalant  disregard 
for  such  facts  as  spiritism  may  teach  us. 

In  our  noisy  scorn  of  the  infinitely 
painstaking  students  of  spirit-phenomena, 
we  have  failed  entirely  to  hear  the  wis- 
dom of  some  of  their  words.  They  dis- 
tinctly warn  the  laity  against  presuming 
itself  any  better  equipped  to  carry  on  in- 
dependent investigations  in  spiritist  sci- 
ence than  in  any  other  branch.  As  we 
leave  electricity  to  electricians,  and  med- 
icine to  doctors,  merely  accepting  their 
hypotheses  as  guidance  for  our  practical 
affairs,  so  we  may  safely  do  in  regard  to 
spiritism.  The  advice  of  Sir  Oliver  Lodge 
is  certainly  clear-headed:  "Unless  people 
are  well-balanced,  and  self-critical  and 
wholesomely  occupied,  they  had  better 
leave  the  subject  alone." 

In  another  passage:  "It  may  be  asked 
do  I  recommend  all  bereaved  persons  to 
devote  the  time  and  attention  which  I 
have  done  to  getting  communications  and 


ii2  THE  NEW  DEATH 

reading  them?  Most  certainly  I  do  not. 
I  am  a  student  of  the  subject,  and  a  stu- 
dent often  undertakes  detailed  labor  of  a 
special  kind.  I  recommend  people  in  gen- 
eral to  learn  and  realize  that  their  loved 
ones  are  still  active  and  useful  and  inter- 
ested and  happy  —  more  alive  than  ever 
in  one  sense  —  and  to  make  up  their 
minds  to  live  a  useful  life  until  they  rejoin 
them." 

Another  student  of  the  occult,  Dr. 
Hyslop,  warns  against  the  danger  of  be- 
coming so  engrossed  in  the  realities  of  the 
future  as  to  neglect  the  realities  of  the 
present,  declaring  the  ultimate  purpose 
of  all  spirit-discovery  to  be  better  light 
on  the  present  nature  of  the  soul  en- 
trusted to  our  care.  He  declares,  "We 
are,  of  course,  not  to  live  only  for  that 
future,  but  to  apply  the  moral  law  in  the 
present  so  that  its  effects  will  not  con- 
flict with  the  larger  outlook  that  the  cos- 
mos may  provide." 

The  safe  attitude  toward  the  intrepid 
investigators  of  the  spirit-world  would 
seem  to  be  our  obligation   toward  them 


THE  NEW  DEATH  113 

of  an  openness  of  intellect  and  imagina- 
tion, combined  with  the  sure  sense  for 
ourselves  that  the  light  shed  on  this  world 
by  light  on  that  other  only  points  us  to 
greater  present  activity.  Both  the  fullest 
and  the  most  tentative  acceptance  of  the 
evidence  from  spirit-testimony  would  seem 
to  contribute  to  the  same  practical  result. 
This  testimony  asserts  the  survival  of 
personality,  evolving  in  freedom,  achieve- 
ment, and  service,  and  rising  to  clearer 
and  clearer  understanding  of  the  mystery 
of  God ;  therefore,  either  a  whole  or  a  half- 
belief  in  the  evidence,  would,  through  re- 
newed sense  of  the  dignity  of  the  soul, 
reconsecrate  all  present  endeavor. 

The  intensity  with  which  we  are  study- 
ing the  nature  of  our  mortality  and  of  our 
immortality  will  increase  with  our  grow- 
ing sense  of  obligation  to  the  armies  that 
defend  us.  That  obligation  will  change 
from  a  diffused  impulse  to  a  definite  re- 
sponsibility to  the  future,  pressing  upon 
each  one  of  us.  Which  of  us  this  very  day 
who   passes   a   khaki-clad   boy   can    help 


ii4  THE  NEW  DEATH 

thinking,  He  is  ready  to  die  for  me  —  or 
me  —  or  me?  Just  a  happy-go-lucky  lad, 
but  in  an  instant  ready  to  give  himself 
to  torture  to  keep  me  here,  safe  and  in 
comfort!  How  many  of  us  go  about  our 
humdrum  tasks  uninspired?  If  the  mere 
thought  of  the  sacrifice  coerces  us  to  no- 
bler endeavor,  how  must  the  aggregate 
obligation  in  millions  of  homes  defended, 
affect  the  future?  Already  we  hold  our 
lives  in  fief  to  unknown  boys  of  Belgium, 
France,  England,  and  now  our  own  chil- 
dren sail  away  to  save  us.  There  is  no 
one  to-day  who  has  a  right  to  walk  as 
if  death  were  not  fronting  unnumbered 
hearts.  How  can  we  pay  our  debt  to  the 
dead  and  the  dedicated? 

We  have  to-day  a  duty  more  urgent 
than  we  ever  knew  before  both  to  the  boys 
who  have  died,  and  to  the  boys  who  are 
ready  to  die  for  us.  We  no  longer  belong 
to  ourselves,  but  to  them.  Unescapably, 
the  young  men  dead  will  affect  the  after 
history  of  every  country  for  which  they 
have  died,  according  to  the  attitude  to- 
ward their  loss  that  the  majority  of  their 


THE  NEW  DEATH  115 

countrymen  shall  take:  whether  that  atti- 
tude be  revenge,  the  purpose  to  exact 
other  lives  for  theirs;  or  gross  reckoning 
of  profits,  so  many  soldiers  slain,  so  much 
commercial  advantage  for  their  nation;  or 
the  aspiration  to  accomplish  upon  earth 
the  ideals  they  died  for. 

To  convert  our  shuddering  into  service 
should  be  the  purpose  of  all  our  life  still 
before  us,  but  we  must  not,  in  larger  out- 
look, forget  the  immediate  future,  nor  our 
immediate  duty  to  our  own  fighters  in  a 
war  not  yet  won.  Our  debt  due  to  those 
who  offer  themselves  to  the  slaughter  is 
not  alone  for  their  renunciation  of  earth, 
their  mere  dying,  as  for  the  torture  that 
must  accompany  it.  Never  did  soldiers 
go  so  steadfastly  to  such  sure  agony  as 
to-day  our  boys  in  all  our  camps  are  fac- 
ing. They  have  read  the  newspapers  for 
four  years.  We  stay-at-homes  may  laud 
the  glory  of  war  in  the  old  fashion,  but  the 
boys  know  better.  "V.C.'s  be  hanged!" 
cries  Harold  Chapin,  himself  intrepid 
unto  the  end.  There  is  no  glamour  to- 
day, nothing  but  horror  that  our  young 


n6  THE  NEW  DEATH 

soldiers  see,  grim,  unfaltering.  But  look 
at  them!  There  is  something  splendid  in 
their  faces,  but  youth  has  gone  out  of  their 
eyes  forever.  It  is  well  that  we  should  un- 
derstand better  the  nature  of  trench  suf- 
fering, because  our  first  duty  to  the  future 
is  to  offer  what  help  we  may  in  those  spe- 
cific trials  the  trenches  find  it  hardest  to 
endure.  War  records  reveal  these  clearly 
enough,  and  should  be  our  chief  illumina- 
tion. Surely  we  can  listen  without  cen- 
sure, we,  the  safe  and  snug,  when  men 
of  imperishable  bravery  drop  for  an  in- 
stant their  high  reserve,  and  cry  out 
against  the  torment  of  the  duty  they  have 
undertaken. 

The  soldier  annalists  protest,  not  against 
the  pain  that  affects  their  bodies,  but 
against  forces  they  feel  disintegrating  their 
souls.  There  is  a  conspicuous  difference 
between  those  writers  who  died  after  but 
a  few  months  of  war  and  those  that  en- 
dured years  of  it.  It  is  these  last  who 
have  to  combat  their  bitterness  at  their 
degradation.  One  may  note  the  contrast, 
say,    between    Alan    Seeger    and     Henri 


THE  NEW  DEATH  117 

Barbusse.  Of  soul-suffering,  men  feel 
profoundly  the  deadly  ennui,  the  pro- 
longed abnormality  of  the  battle-field. 
People  who  think  to  stimulate  the  sol- 
dier's courage  by  constantly  holding  out 
the  prospect  of  a  long  war  are  singularly 
ignorant  of  the  reactions  revealed  by 
trench  autobiography.  "When  will  this 
horror  end?"  is  the  cry  from  page  after 
page.  Every  speech  by  every  statesman 
who  clarifies  war  aims,  thus  promising 
a  definite  conclusion,  has  profound  en- 
couragement for  the  fighter.  More  than 
to  any  other  class,  we  owe  our  soldiers  the 
constant  restatement  of  the  high  purpose 
for  which  they  struggle. 

We  send  our  soldier  forth  to  the  degrada- 
tion of  murder;  we  owe  him  the  noblest 
motive.  Let  him  slay  as  executioner,  not 
as  assassin.  The  crimes  he  goes  forward 
to  stop  are  so  monstrous  that  there  is  no 
taint  of  Pharisaism  in  assuming  the  atti- 
tude of  the  instrument  of  justice.  Let  our 
boys  kill  as  the  executioner  kills,  without 
personal  bitterness,  for  the  sake  of  the 
safety  of   those   helpless   before  violence. 


n8  THE  NEW  DEATH 

To  slay  a  slayer  a  man  need  not  lose  his 
soul.  No  one  has  realized  more  clearly  than 
Gilbert  Murray  the  duty  of  the  home- 
keeping  army  to  the  army  in  the  field,  and 
his  comment  on  killing  is  worth  remem- 
bering: — 

"Do  you  remember  how  Sir  Francis 
Drake  once  had  to  hang  one  of  his  offi- 
cers, and  how  before  executing  the  sen- 
tence he  passed  some  time  in  prayer,  and 
then  shook  hands  with  the  offender?  That 
is  the  sort  of  spirit,  perhaps  the  only  sort 
of  spirit,  in  which  any  man  of  conscience 
can  without  inward  misery  approach  the 
killing  and  torturing  of  his  fellow  crea- 
tures. The  slaying  of  men,  if  you  do  it 
for  the  right  motive,  may  be  a  high  and 
austere  duty." 

The  soldier's  revulsion  against  killing 
is  one  of  the  haunting  impressions  re- 
ceived from  trench  memoirs.  It  is  note- 
worthy that  this  revulsion  receives  in- 
tense expression  from  two  soldiers  of  the 
Central  Powers,  the  German  Deserter  and 
Fritz  Kreisler.  It  is  not  fear  of  death,  the 
Great  Release,  that  troubles  the  fighter, 


THE  NEW  DEATH  119 

it  is  the  conquering  of  his  fear  of  killing 
that  comprises  his  transcendent  courage. 
This  is  something  that  we,  concentrating 
our  attention  on  the  glory  of  meeting 
death  unflinchingly,  too  often  forget,  and 
yet,  if  our  resolutions  for  the  future  are 
to  be  forged  firm  beyond  all  breaking,  we 
cannot  share  too  deeply  all  the  sufferings 
over  there  that  should  consecrate  us  over 
here.  We  should  remember  that  men  of 
unimpeachable  courage  exclaim,  as  does 
Arthur  Heath,  "These  are  days  when 
men  should  be  born  without  mothers!" 
The  finer  the  man,  the  more  he  recoils 
before  his  first  bayonet  thrust,  and  even 
more  at  the  primitive  blood-lust  it  rouses 
in  him.  Can  we  ever  estimate  the  cost  of 
killing  to  men  whose  lives  had  been  de- 
voted to  the  saving  and  bettering  of  the 
lives  of  their  fellows?  Donald  Hankey 
gives  the  truth  without  faltering:  "You 
who  sit  at  home  and  read  of  glorious  bayo- 
net charges  do  not  realize  what  it  means 
to  the  man  behind  the  bayonet.  You 
don't  realize  the  repugnance  of  the  first 
thrust  —  a  repugnance  which  has  got   to 


120  THE  NEW  DEATH 

be  overcome.  You  don't  realize  the  change 
that  comes  over  a  man  when  his  bayonet 
is  wet  with  the  blood  of  his  first  enemy. 
He  sees  red." 

The  revulsion  of  the  French  artist  in- 
creases with  experience  from  his  first  pro- 
test, "Never  will  there  be  enough  glory 
to  cover  all  this  blood  and  mud,"  to  his 
agony  at  the  indignity  of  having  to  be  a 
human  being,  with  a  human  being's  tragic 
distinction  of  being  forced  to  kill. 

"You  cannot  conceive,  my  precious 
mother,  what  man  can  do  to  man." 

"All  of  us  deplore  this  infamous  war,  but 
the  experience  of  most  is  that  the  perform- 
ing of  a  horrible  duty  is  the  only  thing  that 
can  excuse  the  hideous  necessity  of  being 
a  man." 

"The  other  day,  before  the  noble  stretch 
of  this  countryside  spread  out  to  the  spring, 
I  recalled  the  delight  I  once  had  merely  in 
being  a  man  —  and  now,  to  be  a  man  — !" 

All  trench  revelations  show  the  reader 
ever  more  clearly  that  it  is  not  his  life  that 
any  soldier  trembles  to  lose,  but  other  pos- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  121 

sessions.  Every  sensitive  man  who  enters 
the  trenches  knows  the  menace  to  his  san- 
ity. Worse  than  the  loss  of  his  friends  is 
watching  them  go  mad.  The  horrors  of  this 
war  unhinge  the  brain.  The  men  who  enter 
it  know  that  they  risk  the  madhouse.  But 
deeper  than  the  degradation  of  murder  and 
of  madness  is  a  subtler,  sadder  one,  the  peril 
of  disillusion.  The  utter  abnormality,  the 
hopeless  ennui  of  prolonged  fighting,  cause 
despair.  That  is  the  most  hideous  wound 
that  a  man  may  endure.  Of  all  the  duties 
we,  the  safe,  owe  to  the  soldiers  for  the  na- 
ture of  their  sacrifice,  the  most  imperative 
is  to  relieve  this  depression.  Few  passages 
of  trench  testimony  are  more  tragic  than 
the  following  arraignment  of  civilians  by 
a  private  who  had  fought  steadfastly  for 
month  after  month:  — 

"Of  your  soldier's  internal  life,  the  con- 
stant collision  of  contradictory  moral  stand- 
ards, the  liability  of  the  soul  to  be  crushed 
by  mechanical  monotony,  the  sensation  of 
taking  a  profitless  part  in  a  game  played 
by  monkeys  and  organized  by  lunatics,  you 
realize,  I  think,  nothing.  .  .  .  They  carry 


122  THE  NEW  DEATH 

their  burden  with  little  help  from  you.  For 
when  men  work  in  the  presence  of  death, 
they  cannot  be  satisfied  with  conventional 
justifications  of  a  sacrifice  which  seems  to 
the  poor  weakness  of  our  flesh  intolerable. 
They  hunger  for  an  assurance  which  is  ab- 
solute, for  a  revelation  of  the  spirit  as  poig- 
nant and  unmistakable  as  the  weariness  of 
their  suffering  bodies.  .  .  .  To  most  of  us  it 
must  come  from  you  or  not  at  all.  For  an 
army  does  not  live  by  munitions,  but  also 
by  fellowship  in  a  moral  idea  or  purpose." 
Pulsing  atoms  in  a  maelstrom  of  horror, 
our  soldiers  may  lose  the  vision  that  leads 
them  dauntless  toward  death;  we,  to  save 
whom  they  suffer,  owe  them  their  own  in- 
spiration. Quiet  at  home,  and  purged  by 
our  thought  of  their  peril,  cannot  we  keep 
their  own  vision  clear  to  them?  Cannot  we 
find  a  way  by  our  words,  by  our  attitude,  to 
make  plain  to  them  our  oneness  with  their 
purpose?  We  at  home,  they  in  the  field, 
dedicate  our  lives  to  the  rebuilding  of  the 
world.  But  as  they  fall,  thousand  after 
thousand,  of  our  bravest  and  most  beauti- 
ful, can  we,  broken  by  mourning,  keep  our 


THE  NEW  DEATH  123 

endeavor  unfaltering?  A  flaming  radiance 
has  led  our  boys  beyond  all  battle,  but 
without  them  are  we  not  left  too  blind  and 
weak  for  the  great  remaking? 

We  may  well  falter  before  our  task,  we 
who  remain,  middle-aged,  or  old,  incapable 
now  of  youth's  fire,  youth's  rebound,  we 
who  are  in  a  hundred  ways  enslaved  to  the 
old  world's  views  and  practices,  that  old 
world  proved  moribund.    In  our  doubt  of 
our  power  to  build  indestructibly  for  the 
future,  we  must  remember  that  we  do  not 
advance  unassisted.     Two  companies  of 
young  idealists  show  us  the  way.    One  of 
these  companies  has  passed  beyond  all  com- 
bat, but  has  left  us  both  words  and  devotion 
to  give  us  explicit  inspiration  for  the  vast 
rebuilding.    These  met  death  believing  it 
the  gate  of  an  upward  path.    Their  every 
attitude  has  revealed  their  conviction  that 
death  does  not  close,  but  opens.   Should  it 
have  cost  millions  of  lives  to  teach  us  that? 
At  whatever  cost,  the  life  either  of  man  or 
nation  makes  no  sure  advance  until  it  be- 
lieves death  a  gate.  But  what  if  we  accept  the 
sacrifice,  and  still  preserve  our  old  doubt  of 


124  THE  NEW  DEATH 

immortality  ?  From  the  millions  of  bereaved 
homes  the  answer  rings,  "We  must  believe! 
They  knew  they  were  to  live!  It  is  desecra- 
tion of  their  memories  to  doubt  their  creed ! " 

We  cannot,  if  we  would,  deny  the  faith 
to  which  their  intuition  testified.  It  is  pos- 
sible, perhaps,  to  deny  it  full  credence;  it  is 
impossible  to  deny  the  action  responsive 
to  their  belief.  Whether  we  believe  or  not, 
we  who  loved  them  must  act  as  if  we  be- 
lieved, we  should  be  so  hideously  separated 
from  them  if  we  did  not!  They  mingle  with 
our  every  purpose,  they  affect  our  every 
moment.  Never  was  the  world  so  coerced 
by  its  dead.  Wasted,  the  boys  of  this  war! 
They  are  the  strongest  influence  alive  to- 
day, and  for  to-morrow!  If  they  had  lived, 
we  might  never  have  known  them,  but 
dead,  they  are  forever  revealed. 

We  face  the  future  knowing  of  it  only 
this,  that  it  is  not  ours,  but  theirs.  Our 
obligation  to  build  it  out  of  their  ideals  of 
service,  of  immortality,  of  God,  is  inex- 
orable. Hecatombs  of  splendid  men,  tossed 
to  the  cannon  on  every  day  of  this  agony, 
lives  poured  forth  as  if  human  beauty  were 


THE  NEW  DEATH  125 

cheap  as  ditch-water!  Shall  such  sacrifice 
be  wasted?  Ours  fearlessly  to  apply  to  the 
morrow  all  that  the  new  intimacy  with  death 
reveals  to  the  men  who  face  it,  all  that  the 
new  grief  will  reveal  to  us  who  practice  its 
energy.  More  and  more  must  the  vast  im- 
pulse of  vast  mourning  be  directed  and  clar- 
ified and  focused.  And  those  who  shall  best 
help  us  in  this  effort  comprise  the  second 
group  of  young  idealists,  those  soldiers  who 
shall  return  to  us,  wounded  or  whole,  but 
strangely  enlightened. 

Men,  however  young,  however  crude, 
who  have  for  months  passed  every  moment 
under  the  eyes  of  death,  will  not  come  back 
to  us  ignorant  as  they  went.  They  cannot 
fail  to  have  gained  new  social  wisdom,  and 
a  bravery  to  embody  it  in  practice  to  which 
theold  hesitancies  in  civic  improvement  and 
initiative  will  seem  an  amusing  cowardice. 
Facing  death,  they  have  discovered  secrets 
of  man-soul  and  of  God-soul  that  we  can- 
not know.  They  have  shared  the  vision  and 
the  actions  of  those  who  have  passed  on; 
it  is  by  mere  accident  that  they  themselves 
survive,  and  return  to  us.   Less  and  less  in 


126  THE  NEW  DEATH 

the  future  shall  we  instruct  our  young  men, 
for  they  have  lived  and  dared  more  than  we 
can  know.  This  war  is  not  like  former  wars 
that  often  let  loose  upon  a  comfortable 
world  the  wild  unrest  of  an  army  made 
degenerate  by  abnormal  living.  The  battle 
of  to-day  is  of  civilization  against  cruelty. 
The  men  who  have  fought  in  this  crusade 
will  bring  back  with  them  the  power  of 
their  dedication.  He  is  blind  who  dares 
prophesy  any  characteristics  of  the  after- 
the-war  world  without  reckoning  with  the 
armies  that  will  come  home,  consecrated 
to  the  "Carry  on"  enjoined  by  comrades 
gone,  and  intrepid  for  the  innovations  due 
a  new  faith  in  God  and  in  man. 

We  can  divine  a  little  of  the  purposes  of 
these  men  by  studying  the  words  of  their 
companions  who  have  passed  on.  The  con- 
stant parallelism  of  battle  memoirs  forces 
one  to  believe  that  the  writers  are  merely 
articulate  for  the  hopes  of  the  masses,  liv- 
ing and  dead,  who  act,  but  do  not  speak, 
but  whose  influence  at  home  will  in  future 
both  speak  and  act.  Some  reforms  that 
soldier  motives  may  establish  are  revealed 


THE  NEW  DEATH  127 

both  by  the  soldiers  themselves,  and  by 
grief-enlightened  members  of  home  ranks, 
who  look  to  their  young  crusaders  for  guid- 
ance. This  humility  of  age  toward  the  in- 
spiration of  youth  is  clear  in  many  a  writer 
of  England  and  of  France,  but  is  still  too 
recent  an  attitude  to  have  affected  our  in- 
experience. Men  who  have  given  their  lives 
and  men  who  have  risked  them  shall  be  the 
holy  fellowship  to  illumine  the  great  re- 
construction. These  men  learned  all  their 
wisdom  through  a  revaluing  of  life  by  the 
presence  of  death.  On  the  battle-field  they 
learned  that  they  were  immortal  — ■  can 
those  who  return  readily  forget?  These  are 
the  men  to  whose  risk  we  owe  a  debt  to  be 
paid  in  terms  of  cooperation.  With  them  we 
are  bound  by  the  spirit  of  "  Carry  on."  Yet 
we  must  analyze  our  obligation  or  it  may 
be  impotently  expended.  We  owe  our  boys 
the  remaking  of  the  world,  but  we  should 
look  to  soldier  testimony  to  see  in  what 
respects  they  desire  its  reform. 

In  the  new  world  now  issuing,  some  old 
things  will  be  absent,  some  new  things  will 


128  THE  NEW  DEATH 

be  emergent.    Under  the  influence  of  the 
soldiers  dead  and  surviving  who  have  fought 
to  the  uttermost,  shall  war  still  be  accepted 
as  an  arbiter?    We  talk  of  armament  and 
disarmament,  universal  service  and  much 
else,  without  questioning  what  the  men  who 
must  do  the  fighting  will  have  to  say  about 
all  this.  Perhaps  there  are  no  more  whole- 
hearted militarists  alive  to-day  than  the 
men  of  the  sixties:  what  has  happened  in 
the  intervening  years  both  to  man  and 
to  war  that  the  opinions  of  the  young  men 
of  to-day,  whose  bravery  has  been  proved 
beyond  question,  almost  beyond  concep- 
tion, should  be  at  variance  with  those  of  an 
older  generation?    The  distinction  cannot 
be  too  clearly   made  between  what  the 
young  soldiers  of  to-day  think  of  this  war, 
and  what  they  think  of  war  in  general. 
Newspapers  at  home  may  ridicule  as  fan- 
tastically idealistic  the  idea  of  this  as  the 
last  war,  but  what  are  the  boys  of  England, 
France,  Italy,  America,   giving  their  lives 
for  except  that  this  shall  be  the  last  war? 
To  conquer  an  enemy  who  would  make  war 
the  law  of  nations,  to  free  the  men  to  come 


THE  NEW  DEATH  129 

from  the  torment  they  themselves  elect  to 
suffer,  are  the  motives  that  to-day  carry 
men  to  the  guns.  One  cannot  read  the  "Ger- 
man Deserter"  and  "Under  Fire"  and  not 
be  conscious  equally  in  the  French  and  in  the 
German  transcript  from  life  of  the  mighty 
resolution  of  the  common  soldier  never  to 
let  war  recur.   In  both  books  one  sees  that 
as  men  fight  on,  month  by  month,  year  by 
year,  the  entire  force  of  their  being  is  fo- 
cused into  the  overmastering  desire  to  end 
warfare.  One  thing  is  clearly  promised  for 
the  future,  at  the  cost  of  whatever  renova- 
tion of  governmental  responsibility:  hence- 
forth the  men  who  fight  will  be  the  men  who 
decide  for  or  against  the  waging  of  war. 
One  cannot  read  the  "German  Deserter" 
and  doubt,  even  in  Germany,  the  coming 
control  of  war-making  by  the  proletariat. 
The  soldier's  reaction  to  battle  as  shown 
in  his  writings  is,  of  course,  complex.    It 
would  seem  that  the  testimony  of  those 
who  have  been  longest  under  the  strain 
should  be  considered  more  valuable  than 
the  first  glad  brief  impulse  to  adventure. 
Undoubtedly  many  a  man  has  found  him- 


130  THE  NEW  DEATH 

self  in  the  trenches,  and  rejoiced  in  the  dis- 
covery, but  it  is  never  the  man  who  had 
the  ability  to  find  himself  before.  To  such 
heroes  as  Harold  Chapin,  Raymond  Lodge, 
Ferdinand  Belmont,  Tom  Kettle,  war  is 
not  a  matter  of  stimulating  adventure,  but 
of  terrible  duty.  The  soldier  of  to-day  is 
as  clear  that  this  war  is  right  as  being  war 
on  war,  as  he  is  that  war  itself  should  at 
whatever  price  be  wiped  from  the  world. 
Kettle's  ringing  words  cry  to  us  from  that 
battle  which  was  to  be  his  last:  "If  I  live 
I  mean  to  spend  the  rest  of  my  life  work- 
ing for  perpetual  peace.  I  have  seen  war 
and  I  know  what  an  outrage  it  is  against 
simple  men";  and  these  others  to  the  full 
significance  of  which  we  may  well  give 
deep  attention:  "Unless  you  hate  war,  as 
such,  you  cannot  really  hate  Prussia.  If 
you  admit  war  as  an  essential  part  of  civili- 
zation, then  what  you  are  hating  is  merely 
Prussian  efficiency."  The  man  who  is  giv- 
ing his  body  to  the  shells  protests  against 
the  shallow  pretense  that  war  is  in  itself 
educative  in  heroism.  He  admits  that  high 
motive  may  consecrate  slaughter,  but  in- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  131 

sists  that  war  is  in  itself  bestial.  He  is  ready 
to  die,  but  he  is  not  ready  to  deny  this 
distinction.  The  following  is  a  rooky's 
thoughtful  analysis  of  his  reactions,  estab- 
lishing a  fundamental  truth,  contributing 
like  much  other  evidence  to  show  that 
our  young  men  have  clearer  views  for 
the  reconstruction  than  we  of  the  old 
order: — 

"No,  to  submit  to  this  war  business 
means  a  sacrifice,  temporary,  at  least,  and 
for  some  of  us  final,  of  the  finest  things 
that  all  evolution  has  produced;  and  the 
sacrifice  is  a  hideous  one,  sickening,  ter- 
rible. It  is  lightened  only  by  the  faith  that 
it  is  a  temporary  one  and  necessary;  made 
excusable  only  by  the  hope  of  thus  safe- 
guarding and  creating  a  greater  opportu- 
nityfor  precisely  such  cultural  development 
in  the  future.  But  let  it  never  be  glorified 
for  its  own  sake,  on  the  ground  that  it  has 
displaced  a  lesser  order.  In  spite  of  the  fine 
stoicism,  the  cool  and  ardent  courage,  the 
patient  and  reckless  faith  it  has  produced, 
it  is  essentially  a  stimulus  of  a  lower,  less 
imaginative,  less  vital  sort  than  the  less 


i32  THE  NEW  DEATH 

unified  but  more  pregnant  appeals  of  a 
peace  culture." 

Another  young  American  voices  the 
protest  of  the  drafted  man  against  the  cre- 
ation of  a  large  permanent  army,  and  of  a 
system  of  universal  service  as  being  essen- 
tially.  opposed  to  the  very  policy  which 
made  our  acceptance  of  conscription  so 
ready.  He  says  of  this  proposed  increase: 
"In  looking  for  a  'next  great  war'  it  is 
hostile  to  the  administration  and  to  the 
spirit  in  which  America  has  entered  the 
present  conflict.  Our  valid  aim  is  not  that 
of  national  conquest  nor  simply  of  German 
subjugation,  but  the  creation  of  a  more 
enduring  international  peace  —  one  that 
shall  make  for  a  reduction,  not  an  increase, 
of  armament.  The  proposal  of  the  Army 
League  presupposes  that  our  aims  in  the 
present  war  are  futile." 

The  innermost  motiving  of  the  soldier's 
revulsion  toward  war  as  united  to  his 
dedication  to  this  crusade,  is  the  same  as 
divides  the  principles  of  the  Allies  from 
the  principles  of  the  Central  Powers.  The 
Allied  soldier  fights  because  he  believes  war 


THE  NEW  DEATH  133 

wrong,  the  German  because  he  believes  it 
right,  and  the  essential  difference  between 
the  two  is  in  their  creeds  of  death.  If  death 
is  extinction,  then  force  is  the  law  for  a  ma- 
terial world;  if  death  is  a  portal,  then  kind- 
ness is  the  law  for  a  spiritual  world.  The 
soldier's  views,  therefore,  of  war  in  general, 
and  of  this  particular  war,  are  essentially 
inherent  in  his  perception  that  if  death  is  a 
portal,  then  earth-existence  is  a  vestibule 
of  development  that  no  one  has  a  right  to 
desecrate  or  curtail.  However  blind  and 
inarticulate,  the  faith  of  our  soldiers  con- 
ceives this  war  as  a  war  of  spirit  against 
matter,  between  men  who  believe  in  the 
survival  of  the  fittest  of  spiritual  attain- 
ment, and  men  who  believe  in  the  survival 
of  the  fittest  of  material  achievement.  All 
the  varieties  of  cruelty  that  the  German 
soul  has  exhibited  can  be  traced  to  its  creed 
of  death,  to  thinking  that  men  perish  both 
as  an  earthly  influence  and  as  personal 
entities  beyond  the  grave.  The  Germans 
hold  that  if  they  killed  every  Belgian,  the 
Belgians  would  be  dead.  For  so  learned  a 
nation,  this  belief  argues  a  strange  igno- 


134  THE  NEW  DEATH 

ranee  of  history  —  are  the  Greeks  of  Ther- 
mopylae dead?  The  new  world  we  are  to 
construct  must  not  make  so  impractical 
a  mistake,  it  must  not  fail  to  reckon  with 
the  presence  of  the  dead. 

The  soldier  of  to-day,  however  revolted 
by  war,  recognizes  the  full  value  of  army  life. 
There  is  not  a  record  that  fails  to  appreciate 
the  educational  value  for  himself  and  for 
his  companions.  One  cannot  read  trench 
testimony  and  not  realize  what  a  thought- 
ful being  is  the  soldier  of  the  present.  One 
wonders  if  so  much  concentrated  thinking 
was  ever  done  as  is  now  being  done  in  the 
battle-lines.  Even  the  humblest  memoirs 
are  as  illuminating  as  they  are  laconic. 
Donald  Hankey,  always  both  the  subtlest 
and  the  sanest  analyst  of  soldier  psychol- 
ogy, discusses  the  evils  and  the  benefits 
of  military  training  in  two  summaries,  in 
which  the  good  far  outweighs  the  evil.  If 
the  highest  ideals  now  being  shaped  in  the 
trenches  can  be  used  to  inspire  the  emer- 
gent future,  one  of  their  finest  results  will 
be  introducing  into  civilian  existence  the 


THE  NEW  DEATH  135 

inspiration  hitherto  allowed  only  to  army 
life.  The  enlisted  man  is  swept  to  high  en- 
thusiasm as  he  tests  the  worth  of  discipline, 
of  democracy,  of  comradeship  in  purpose 
and  in  mutual  helpfulness,  but  he  turns  to 
us  in  ironic  protest  that  to  obtain  these 
benefits  he  is  forced  to  go  forth  and  kill  his 
fellow  man.  The  call  of  war  to  the  volun- 
teer is  as  complex  as  it  is  noble;  the  impulse 
of  the  individual  to  abandon  himself  to  a 
directing  destiny,  the  testing  of  self  against 
hardship,  the  grapple  with  unknown  ad- 
venture, the  sense  of  being  part  of  the  soli- 
darity of  a  great  cooperative  effort,  the 
testifying,  by  the  light  tossing  of  one's  life 
to  the  flame,  that  spirit  is  more  valuable 
than  body.  These  are  the  motives  of  war's 
compulsion  to  youth.  But  has  peace  become 
so  gross  a  condition  that  it  could  not  hold 
all  these  motives  of  inspiration?  Only  be- 
cause the  conditions  of  peace  have  become 
so  materialistic,  could  war  have  seemed  by 
contrast  spiritualizing;  with  all  its  brutali 
ties,  more  enfranchising  to  the  soul  than 
peace.  But  is  not  this  decay  of  the  oppor- 
tunities of  peace  due  to  the  old  material- 


136  THE  NEW  DEATH 

istic  views  of  death  that  this  war  with  its 
prodigal  destruction  has  annulled?  The 
war  has  brought  into  being  a  new  regard 
for  death  that  effects  a  new  regard  for  life. 
The  more  sacredly  we  regard  the  poten- 
tialities of  peace,  the  more  they  will  reveal 
their  opportunities  for  that  self-abandon- 
ment to  service  which  is  the  essential  at- 
traction of  war.  Our  soldiers  know  how 
light  a  thing  is  dying,  but  how  terrible  a 
thing  is  killing;  and  with  this  knowledge 
they  will  try  to  incorporate  into  civil  life 
the  high  devotion  of  the  army.  The  only 
real  death  is  the  destructive  frenzy  of  mu- 
tual murder,  and  the  only  life  that  can 
combat  such  death  is  that  which  offers  as 
much  mass  enthusiasm  toward  saving  and 
beautifying  the  existence  of  the  mass  as 
is  now  bent  on  destroying  it.  The  passion- 
ate desire  to  give  one's  life  for  an  ideal,  for 
a  community  conception  like  patriotism, 
is  as  far  as  we  have  yet  attained.  In  the 
Great  Reconstruction  we  shall  follow  the 
glamour  of  heroic  living  where  we  now 
perceive  only  the  glamour  of  heroic  dy- 
ing. 


THE  NEW  DEATH  137 

One  of  the  ideals  that  the  returning  sol- 
dier will  surely  bring  back  with  him  is  his 
enthusiasm  for  democracy.  The  dignity  of 
democracy  is  so  far  the  most  salient  social 
result  of  the  war.    There  is  not  a  soldier- 
writer  who  does  not  confess  himself  hum- 
bled and  inspired  by  contact  with  men  with 
whom  only  war  could  have  associated  him. 
Oxonian  and  cockney,  Parisian  litterateur 
and  Breton  fisher-lad,  plutocrat  and  pau- 
per, are  all  tossed  together  into  the  fiery 
melting  pot.   In  mutual  revelation,  in  mu- 
tual surprise,  in  the  sheer  vistas  of  demo- 
cratic comradeship,  the  soldiers  forget  the 
tragic  cause  that  alone  could  bring  about 
this  joyous   association.     Friendships   are 
formed  that  in  peace-times  would  have 
seemed  grotesque.   Victor  Chapman's  por- 
traits of  the   Foreign  Legion   make  cut- 
throats and  criminals  so  human   that  we 
become  as  unconscious  as  the  author  that 
these  are  the  sympathetic  pen-sketches  of 
a  young  American  millionaire.    Educated 
men  writing  from  the  battle-line  acknowl- 
edge their  debt  of  inspiration  to  their  hum- 
blest  messmates,   and   their  tone   proves 


138  THE  NEW  DEATH 

them  as  unconscious  of  the  benefit  they 
themselves  bestow,  as  are  the  inarticulate 
heroes  inspiring  them.  The  sympathy 
cemented  in  camp  cannot  be  afterwards 
severed.  If  mere  school  or  fraternity  asso- 
ciation becomes  a  lifelong  bond,  how  much 
more  powerful  must  be  the  fellowship 
founded  on  fighting  together  under  rain  of 
fire!  Pauper  and  millionaire  have  warded 
death  from  each  other,  sharing  thoughts 
and  actions  made  utterly  sincere  by  the 
clean  presence  of  destruction.  Can  they, 
returned  home,  ever  contend  with  the  old 
animosity?  A  man  you  have  shielded  from 
death  is  dear  to  you  forever.  For  the 
indestructible  understanding  thus  estab- 
lished, we  who  gaze  into  the  future  may 
give  thanks,  for  of  all  signs  of  the  times  no 
trend  is  more  obvious  than  that  of  syn- 
dicalism. No  one  can  escape  the  fear  that 
the  war  of  nations  may  be  followed  by  a 
war  of  classes.  The  leveling  comradeship 
of  the  army,  the  affection  of  man  for  man 
where  purse  and  privilege  are  nothing,  may 
be  the  strongest  influence  to  secure  the 
new  world  from  the  menace  of  class  bitter- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  139 

ness,  and  to  show  the  ideals  common  to 
rich  and  poor,  educated  and  ignorant. 

Democratic  kindliness  is  not  the  only 
democratic  principle  taught  in  the  trenches. 
There  is  born  there  a  new  sense  of  the  re- 
sponsibility of  the  individual  to  his  nation 
and  to  his  neighbor.  In  a  massed  comrade- 
ship of  millions,  a  man  offers  himself  for 
ideals  he  had  hardly  guessed  he  owned,  and 
at  the  same  moment  he  would  risk  his  last 
breath  to  succor  his  comrade.  This  two- 
fold responsibility  lifting  the  soldier  out 
of  the  personal  into  the  eternal  is  the 
glory  of  the  army,  but  is  it  not  exactly  the 
glory  that  the  army  itself  is  beginning  to 
see  should  belong  to  civilian  life,  and  not 
merely  to  military?  A  man  on  leave  from 
one  of  our  camps  in  the  spring  of  1917,  at 
the  time  when  the  obstructionists  in  Con- 
gress were  doing  their  best  to  nullify  the 
devotion  of  our  volunteers,  said  that  his 
strongest  impression  was  the  purpose  of 
enlisted  men,  when  they  returned,  to  re- 
form governmental  machinery. 

In  every  aspect  of  the  reconstruction 
one  can  see  the  vivifying  force  of  the  New 


140  THE  NEW  DEATH 

Death.    Every  department  of  existence  is 

being  tested  by  the  presence  of  death.    It 

has  become  the  great  cleanser  and  clarifier 

of  all  our  purposes,  private  and  public;  as 

a  recent  newspaper  poem  expresses  it:  — 

"0  blessed  War, 
That  sends  a  blast  of  brightness  from  the  grave 
To  show  the  souls  of  mortals  as  they  are." 

Fighting  men  who  have  risked  their  lives 
for  an  ideal,  fathers  who  have  offered  sons 
for  that  same  ideal  of  democracy,  can  never 
again  vote  carelessly  for  office-holders 
whose  principles,  with  those  of  their  con- 
stituents, control  the  keys  of  life  and  death 
for  whole  battalions  of  splendid  youth. 
There  is  for  the  future  a  force  for  demo- 
cratic control  of  government  that  is  incal- 
culable. Not  even  in  Germany  will  it  ever 
again  be  possible  for  men  to  send  others 
blindly  to  war,  or  themselves  blindly  to  go. 

The  impetus  to  democracy  is  unescap- 
ably  an  impetus  to  internationalism  as 
well.  The  new  inspiration  of  democracy 
is  a  readjustment  of  emphasis.  Before  the 
war,  we  talked  of  the  rights  of  the  indi- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  141 

vidual;  through  the  war,  we  have  come  to 
emphasize  the  responsibilities  of  the  indi- 
vidual. You  cannot  construct  statecraft 
on  the  twin  principles  of  individual  right 
and  individual  responsibility,  and  at  the 
same  time  think  or  act  as  if  these  prin- 
ciples of  justice  stopped  short  at  the  fron- 
tier. You  are  impelled  to  practice  the  same 
consideration  for  the  neighbor  across  the 
border,  as  for  the  one  within  it.  The  chau- 
vinism of  the  press  in  all  the  belligerent 
nations  is  oddly  at  variance  with  the  tol- 
eration of  the  trenches.  Soldiers  have  never 
been  nursers  of  hatred.  The  long  after- 
bitterness  of  our  own  Civil  War  was  due 
to  those  who  had  not  fought  it;  it  is  the 
soldiers  of  both  sides  who  have  done  more 
than  any  one  to  heal  the  wounds  they 
caused.  Some  analogous  influence  will  help 
in  the  great  international  healing.  It  is  the 
fighters  who  will  have  most  influence  on 
international  relations. 

One  must  never  forget  the  new  force  of 
the  association  of  races  characteristic  of 
the  Allied  armies.  For  the  most  ignorant 
soldier  of  every  army,  there  must  necessa- 


142  THE  NEW  DEATH 

rily  be  a  new  knowledge  of  distant  peoples. 
He  knows  now  that  the  people  of  India,  Af- 
rica, Asia,  are  living  men.  He  has  seen  them 
die  and  suffer.  Their  needs  at  an  interna- 
tional tribunal  can  never  again  be  quite 
alien  to  him.  He  has  acquired  not  only  ac- 
tual data  in  regard  to  specific  strangers,  but 
a  new  openness,  a  new  hospitality  of  ideas, 
in  regard  to  the  rights  of  unknown  races. 
For  him,  in  future,  the  foreigner  as  such 
has  rights  as  such. 

Soldier  records  are  as  clean  of  hatred  for 
the  enemy  as  home  newspapers  are  full  of 
it.  Proof  of  this  is  unavoidable,  absolute. 
Donald  Hankey  tells  us  how  the  Tommy  is 
sympathetic  with  Fritz,  "who  wants  to  get 
back  home  same  as  us."  The  "German  De- 
serter" is  pitiful  of  the  Belgians;  Kreisler 
reveals  the  genuine  friendliness  of  Rus- 
sian and  Austrian;  Frenchman  and  German 
are  merged  in  the  same  hopeless  mire  in 
the  last  terrible  picture  in  "Under  Fire." 
Personal  ferocity  toward  the  enemy  is  not 
the  natural  attitude  of  the  soldier.  It  is 
engendered  only  by  evidence  of  personal 
brutality  on  the  part  of  the  foe.    Wanton 


THE  NEW  DEATH  143 

cruelty  makes  the  fighter  see  red,  but  this 
motive  is  not  hatred  of  nation  for  nation, 
but  hatred  of  cruelty,  hatred  of  hate.  The 
last  place  to  look  for  a  mutual  animosity 
hostile  to  an  international  federation  will 
be  in  the  opposing  armies.  Just  as  class 
distinctions  have  been  leveled  in  each  army 
by  sharing  the  expectation  of  death,  so  na- 
tional hostilities  have  for  the  soldier  been 
softened  by  that  presence  common  to  both 
battle-lines.  Death  has  been  too  pitiless  on 
both  sides  that  the  soldiers  should  not  be 
the  first  men  to  teach  how  to  forgive. 

Not  alone  in  practice  of  sympathy  is 
internationalism  being  forged  in  the 
trenches;  it  is  the  clear  avowed  belief  of 
many  a  man.  Socialism  is  to-day  a  power 
so  widespread  as  to  be  incalculable.  So- 
cialism is  as  active  in  the  trenches  as  in 
other  places,  and  internationalism  is  its 
fundamental  tenet.  Barbusse,  proclaiming 
Liebknecht  the  greatest  hero  of  this  epoch, 
the  "German  Deserter,"  hotly  asserting 
the  rights  of  the  people  his  army  oppresses, 
utter  the  burning  passion  of  socialism.  The 
French  painter  declares  that  after  the  war 


144  THE  NEW  DEATH 

each  man  who  has  fulfilled  his  duty  to  his 
country  will  have  before  him  a  new  duty 
to  the  world-state.  "This  new  state  will 
not  be  established  without  blows,  despoil- 
ings,  disputes,  for  an  indefinite  period,  but 
without  doubt,  a  door  is  even  now  open- 
ing upon  a  new  horizon."  He  conceives  re- 
sponsibility to  the  world-state  as  following 
upon  one's  responsibility  to  the  nation. 
Duty  to  others  is  progressive  —  obligation 
to  family,  community,  nation,  world.  Ad- 
vance is  retarded  if  any  one  of  these  du- 
ties is  put  out  of  sequence  or  exaggerated. 
At  present  the  soldier  has  a  clearer  con- 
ception of  internationalism  than  has  the 
civilian,  who  fails  to  see  its  inevitable  place 
in  the  solidarity  of  a  man's  obligations.  No 
man  is  fit  to  perform  his  duty  to  his  com- 
munity who  has  not  first  performed  his 
duty  to  his  family;  no  man  is  fit  to  perform 
his  duty  to  his  country  who  has  not  first 
performed  his  duty  to  his  community; 
but  no  man  capable  of  the  noblest  devo- 
tion to  his  country  can  be  indifferent  to 
the  world  beyond  its  borders.  That  inter- 
nationalism has  for  its  firmest  foundation 


THE  NEW  DEATH  145 

a  white-hot  patriotism  can  be  instantly- 
proved  by  reference  to  the  soldier  sup- 
porters of  a  world-federation,  such  as 
Kettle,  Hankey,  Belmont,  and  unnum- 
bered others.  Many  a  man  reveals  that  the 
German  challenge  is  for  him  a  challenge  to 
his  very  humanity,  for  his  protection  not 
only  of  his  country,  but  of  all  civiliza- 
tion. In  a  book  whose  vision  and  devo- 
tion should  inspire  the  vision  and  devotion 
of  his  fellow  Americans,  Edwin  Abbey 
writes  of  the  impulses  that  made  him  a 
volunteer:  — 

"It  was  good  to  hear  from  you  and  your 
feeling  about  the  Lusitania.  The  dishonor 
to  the  flag  is  great,  but  it  seems  to  me  more 
a  dishonor  to  manhood  and  humanity.  I 
can  see  very  little  patriotism  or  flags  or 
country;  it  is  more  a  struggle  of  mankind 
to  defend  the  principles  of  humanity  and 
chivalry  which  the  Creator  has  handed 
down.  No  country  or  flag  can  be  mine  ex- 
cept the  United  States,  but  if  I  could  go  to 
this  war  as  a  citizen  of  the  world,  I  would 
pray  to  be  allowed." 

This  verse  of  a  Canadian  major  expresses 


146  THE  NEW  DEATH 

that  clear  world-hope  to  be  found  in  all 
soldier  testimony:  — 

"Bright  is  the  path  that  is  opening  before  us, 
Upward  and  onward  it  mounts  through  the  night, 

Sword  shall  not  sever  the  bonds  that  unite  us, 
Leading  the  world  to  the  fullness  of  light." 

It  is  not  enough  for  the  soldier  to  fight 
only  for  his  own  country,  but  for  other 
countries  also.  We  are  prone  to  under- 
value the  inspiration  of  our  fighting 
men  and  of  the  mothers  and  fathers  who 
speed  them  on  their  way.  We  are  prone 
also  to  forget  that  American  soldiers 
have  had  more  time  to  think  and  weigh 
their  motives  than  have  those  of  any  other 
nation.  Four  years  of  watching  have  re- 
moved from  war  all  its  spell  for  the  imagi- 
nation. The  principles  at  stake  stand  out 
grimly  for  a  man's  choice :  might  or  right, 
which?  spirituality  or  savagery,  which? 
Ours,  more  than  any  army  before,  is  in- 
fluenced by  intellect  rather  than  by  emo- 
tion; rendered  thus  thoughtful,  our  sol- 
diers demand  full  value  for  the  life  they 
offer.  That  priceless  thing,  human  exist- 
ence, must  be   given  for  humanity.    We 


THE  NEW  DEATH  147 

demand  highest  sacrifice  for  highest  serv- 
ice. At  home  and  in  the  field  we  are 
ready  to  endure  to  the  last  blood-drop 
for  the  sake  of  our  fellow  man,  for  a  fu- 
ture that  will  prove  our  faith  in  each 
man's  freedom.  Internationalism  is  a  word 
taboo  in  our  noisy  newspapers.  It  is  not 
taboo  in  our  President's  messages,  it  is 
not  taboo  in  a  soldier's  ideals.  It  is  the 
most  powerful  aspiration  in  both,  as  well 
as  the  strongest  purpose  to  hold  stead- 
fast millions  of  humble  men  and  women 
who  give  their  loved  ones  to  the  fire.  Per- 
haps some  of  us  never  knew  how  pas- 
sionately we  loved  our  land  until  we  con- 
ceived its  mission  to  the  world.  Death, 
become  a  familiar  presence  in  every  imag- 
ination, clears  all  vision,  making  us  see  pa- 
triotism in  a  new  radiance.  That  nation 
of  the  world  that  is  ready  to  sacrifice  most 
for  the  other  nations  shall  attain  the  high- 
est patriotism.  Our  armies  who  go  forth 
to  fight,  our  armies  who  wait  at  home, 
ask  one  deathless  battle-call  to  courage  — ■ 
America  first  in  service! 

We  are    strangely  blind  if  we  do  not 


148  THE  NEW  DEATH 

perceive  that  an  international  conscience 
would  make,  not  against,  but  for,  national 
development.  The  men  who  are  living  in 
the  momentary  nearness  of  death,  daily 
seeing  their  friends  blown  to  atoms,  are 
reexamining  patriotism,  as  well  as  other 
emotions.  Seeing  evidence  on  every  side 
that  spirit  outweighs  matter,  overwhelmed 
by  their  intuition  that  a  man's  soul  out- 
lives his  body,  both  as  earthly  influence 
and  as  immortal  entity,  they  are  conceiv- 
ing national  distinctions  as  changed  for 
the  future,  not  in  intensity,  but  in  kind. 
Superiority  of  nation  to  nation  is  seen 
to  depend  on  spiritual,  not  material,  val- 
uations. The  British  hesitation  before 
reprisals  was  a  patriotic  reluctance  to  re- 
linquish a  spiritual  contention  for  a  physi- 
cal one.  A  world-federation  following  this 
period  of  passionate  patriotism,  would 
guarantee  each  nation  physical  freedom, 
while  it  would  pour  into  purely  spiritual 
channels  the  present  flood-tide  of  devo- 
tion to  country.  The  result  would  be  such 
an  enhancing  of  national  individuality, 
such  intensive  patriotism,  as  history  has 


THE  NEW  DEATH  149 

never  seen.  This  is  the  sort  of  patriotism 
for  which  the  armies  of  the  Allies  are 
ready  to  die,  this  is  the  patriotism  with 
which  they  will  return  home. 

In  no  country  are  politicians  as  yet 
awake  to  the  leavening  force  of  the  ideal- 
ism of  the  masses.  It  is  a  strange  anomaly 
that  in  America  many  men  who  conceive 
themselves  as  authorities  on  patriotism 
are  least  aware  of  the  demands  made  by 
the  new  popular  vision,  while  the  man 
whom  the  nation  as  a  whole  has  put  in 
authority,  perceives  and  interprets  the 
new  perception  more  clearly  than  any 
other  Allied  statesman.  That  in  every 
country  the  common  people  accept  his 
messages  with  incalculable  enthusiasm 
has  a  significance  that  reactionaries  would 
do  well  to  heed.  In  every  land  the  suffer- 
ing populace  is  demanding  surer  spirit- 
ual vision  of  those  whom  it  delegates  to 
govern.  It  may  well  seem  for  a  while  a 
topsy-turvy  world  in  which  idealism  shall 
perhaps  become  the  fashion.  This  is  no 
fantastic  foreshadowing;   all   sorts  of  di- 


ISO  THE  NEW  DEATH 

vinations,  aspirations,  spiritual  develop- 
ments will  necessarily  affect  the  structure 
of  government,  in  an  era  when  universal 
ruin,  removing  every  accustomed  prop, 
has  forced  men  in  the  trenches  and  men 
at  home  to  act  on  the  hypothesis  of  an 
immortality  and  a  God.  To  know  there 
is  a  new  adjustment  to  dying  needs  only 
a  little  self-examination.  Before  19 14  how 
many  of  us  really  believed  in  immortal- 
ity? Perhaps  we  thought  we  did,  perhaps 
we  knew  we  did  not,  but  how  much  of 
private  or  public  life  took  any  real  ac- 
count of  survival?  Or  even  really  wanted 
to?  It  seemed  more  than  a  little  super- 
stitious to  believe  in  immortality.  It  still 
seems  so  to  many  people.  These  do  not 
perceive  their  own  minority,  nor  the  pro- 
fundity of  the  popular  resolve  that  the 
new  world  shall  not  be  constructed  on  the 
old  materialist  basis.  And  yet  five  years 
ago  what  other  test  was  ever  applied  to 
the  projects  of  statesman  or  of  individual 
than  the  test  of  material  advantage  for 
the  nation  or  the  man?  We  called  such 
tests  practical;  to-day  we  are  gazing  at 


THE  NEW  DEATH  151 

to-morrow,  querying  whether  spiritual 
forces  are  not  the  most  practical  that  exist; 
the  utter  vanity  of  our  old  standards  has 
been  too  practically  proved!  The  world 
before  the  war  had  no  greater  need  than 
a  creed  of  death  that  tended  toward  per- 
manence rather  than  toward  decadence. 

Whether  or  not  the  hypothesis  of  an 
eternal  evolution  for  the  soul  is  true,  the 
most  agnostic  could  not  deny  that  no 
motive  of  effort  could  so  much  contribute 
toward  ennobling  government  policies. 
One  cannot  readily  conjecture  the  novel 
channels  of  human  enterprise  if  even  for 
a  few  generations  plain  people  are  going 
to  believe  in  a  life  after  death.  If  in  this 
supreme  struggle,  that  side  wins  which 
believes  soul  more  enduring  than  body, 
then  the  greater  victories  of  the  Great 
Peace  will  be  victories  still  of  spirit  over 
matter.  To  our  slogan,  Democracy,  a  faith 
in  survival  gives  definite  support  in  its 
stress  on  equality  and  on  the  value  of  each 
individual  soul.  The  effort  of  each  person 
who  shares  to-day's  vast  popular  intui- 
tion will  be  a  motive  to  permeate  every 


152  THE  NEW  DEATH 

department  of  life,  political  and  economic 
even  more  than  what  we  narrowly  term 
religious.  Once  before,  an  age  that  had 
neglected  death,  as  we  had  neglected  it, 
was  remade  by  the  doctrine  of  immor- 
tality. Once  again  in  human  history 
death,  the  disregarded,  has  come  into  its 
own,  sweeping  all  pride  from  us,  but  clari- 
fying our  political  vision  by  a  new  rever- 
ence for  the  human  soul,  by  a  new  con- 
sciousness of  God.  A  writer  of  to-day 
analyzes  the  changes  in  pagan  statecraft 
due  to  the  Christian  creed:  "This  change 
in  content  and  direction  of  conduct,  was 
accomplished  by  its  doctrine  of  the  im- 
mortality of  the  soul.  Usually  this  fact  is 
assumed  to  represent  a  purely  religious 
conception  with  no  political  importance 
whatever.  But  it  was  in  fact  the  pro- 
foundest  political  force  in  history." 

One  can  hardly  fail  to  be  startled  by 
the  new  strange  admission  by  statesmen 
to-day  of  purely  spiritual  ideals,  of  pur- 
poses openly  cognizant  of  an  immortal 
destiny  with  which  all  aspiration,  to  be- 
come permanent,  must  harmonize.  Presi- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  153 

dent  Wilson's  faith  is  outspoken.  Four 
years  ago  we  should  have  been  embarrassed 
by  such  frank  belief  in  God  and  in  eter- 
nity as  is  now  received  with  enthusi- 
asm. This  enthusiasm  is  partly  the  result 
of  German  challenge;  it  is  the  return  to 
a  Christianity  we  had  forgotten  we  pos- 
sessed until  it  was  contrasted  with  the 
German  creed  of  a  tribal  God,  a  deity  for 
other  nations  long  outgrown  and  legend- 
ary. The  Kaiser's  impious  prayers  have 
revealed  the  distinction  between  Teu- 
tonic morality  and  ours,  the  first  founded 
on  the  pagan  conception  of  the  debt  of 
the  weak  to  the  strong,  the  second  founded 
on  the  Christian  conception  of  the  debt 
of  the  strong  to  the  weak.  The  New  Death 
demands  of  the  new  statesmanship  fur- 
ther vision;  for  with  eternity  before  us 
we  can  afford  to  be  patient  with  projects 
planned  to  benefit  far  generations;  and 
it  demands  the  testing  of  all  statecraft 
not  by  material,  but  by  moral,  standards, 
for,  forced  to  faith,  we  adventure  the 
guess  that  God  is  perhaps  the  securest 
foundation  for  government. 


154  THE  NEW  DEATH 

In  the  ebb  and  flow  that  govern  all 
spiritual  advance,  lethargy  and  indiffer- 
ence may  again  dull  our  present  intui- 
tions, but  for  a  while  at  least  the  future 
promises  a  renaissance  of  religion.  The 
vital  quality  in  the  creed  of  the  New 
Death  is  that  it  is  frankly  evolutional 
rather  than  absolute.  It  takes  God  and  im- 
mortality for  instant  experiment  to  help 
overwhelming  agony,  which,  if  it  but  ad- 
vance the  human  spirit  one  step  toward 
the  divine,  is  a  light  price  to  pay.  Events 
move  so  swiftly  that  only  instinct,  not 
logic,  is  swift  enough  to  meet  them.  Con- 
templation is  impossible  when  a  creed 
must  be  instantly  transmuted  into  act. 
Our  boys,  like  ourselves,  blinded  and  ago- 
nized, have  turned  in  certainty  to  God  and 
immortality.  For  us  also  these  seem  the 
only  props.  The  religion  of  the  future 
cannot  fail  to  be  frankly  mystic.  The 
grapple  with  naked  horror  has  forced  us 
to  employ  spiritual  powers  and  muscles 
that  science  had  long  forbidden  us  to 
trust.  It  no  longer  seems  beneath  our 
dignity  to  admit  that  we  can  feel  God 


THE  NEW  DEATH  155 

near  us.  We  know  that  if  we  had  not  felt 
Him  we  should  have  been  unselfed  by- 
despair.  In  the  smuggest  days  of  science 
we  depended  on  our  intuitions  far  more 
than  we  knew;  if  we  had  not,  would  they 
not  have  decayed  beyond  supporting  us 
to-day? 

The  more  we  put  in  practice  the  resili- 
ence of  the  New  Death,  which  is  a  vast 
recuperative  instinct  rather  than  an  ar- 
gued faith,  —  that  is,  the  more  we  prac- 
tice the  hypothesis  of  immortality,  —  the 
more  we  shall  believe  it.  The  relation  of 
conviction  and  action  is  as  much  mat- 
ter of  psychology  as  of  religion.  You 
cannot  reach  complete  conviction  ab- 
stractly; you  must  act  it  before  your  brain 
can  give  full  assent.  First  do,  then  under- 
stand, is  a  psychological  sequence.  It  is 
safe  to  trust  our  mysticism  in  a  period 
redeemed  from  all  peril  of  rhapsody  by 
its  instant  need  of  energy.  Thus  safe- 
guarded, the  mere  employment  of  our 
spiritual  faculties  may  develop  them  in 
ways  not  to  be  foreseen.  One  cannot  pro- 
phesy to  what  new  spiritual  vision  a  faith 


156  THE  NEW  DEATH 

confidently  developed,  but  constantly  em- 
bodied in  conduct,  may  attain. 

The  whole  world  is  to-day  breathless 
before  some  Purposer  directing  the  ghastly 
battle.  Palpitant  with  expectancy,  the  re- 
ligion of  the  New  Death  accepts  God, 
but  without  daring  to  dictate  to  him 
His  manner  of  proving  Himself.  Nor  can 
the  urgent  practicality  of  faith  to-day 
take  time  to  formulate  creed  or  ritual. 
Probably  many,  needing  the  support  of 
demonstration,  will  turn  with  new  rev- 
erence to  old  forms,  but  without  any 
bitterness  toward  those  who  differ  from 
them  in  external  practice.  Jew  and  Cath- 
olic have  ministered  side  by  side  in  the 
trenches. 

In  medieval  times  faith  expressed  itself 
in  cathedrals,  embodied  its  aspiration  in 
architecture,  in  painting.  To-day  it  has 
been  overwhelmingly  impressed  upon  us 
how  perishable  are  all  human  monu- 
ments, and  yet  how  imperishable  is  human 
character.  The  new  religion  will  try  to 
express  itself,  as  indeed  long  before  the 
war  it  had  begun  to  do,  in  purely  moral 


THE  NEW  DEATH  157 

performance,  not  in  cathedrals  for  men's 
worship,  but  in  opportunities  for  their  im- 
provement. It  will  see  that  social  serv- 
ice is  an  achievement  that  endures  while 
stone  and  marble  may  be  in  an  instant 
made  dust.  As  we  feel  our  way  into  the 
future,  one  thing  we  ever  hold  fast:  the 
new  world  must  be  in  every  department 
composed  of  indestructible  elements.  The 
war  has  proved  that  spirit  alone  is  inde- 
structible. 

In  its  attitude  toward  the  Christian 
creed  the  religion  of  the  immediate  future 
promises  to  incorporate  into  society  the 
principles  of  Christianity  in  a  franker  way 
than  ever  before,  copying  the  character  of 
Christ,  rather  than  insisting  on  the  actual 
worship  of  his  person.  This  is  merely  a 
readjustment  of  emphasis.  The  articles 
of  faith  revealed  in  many  a  soldier  creed 
are  principles  inaugurated  in  Nazareth 
for  the  undoing  of  heathendom:  democ- 
racy; human  brotherhood;  the  responsi- 
bility of  the  strong  to  the  weak;  the  su- 
periority of  moral  to  material  standards; 
a  supreme  instinctive  trust  in  a  divine 


'  ,■ 


158  THE  NEW  DEATH 

being;  faith  that  the  soul  survives; —  all 
these  principles  were  set  in  motion  by 
Jesus,  but  had  become  obscured,  and  yet 
beneath  all  our  materialism  have  remained 
powerful  enough  to  sway  the  battle  of 
to-day.  This  is  perhaps  the  last  physical 
battle  of  Christian  against  pagan  force. 
Few  soldiers  of  the  Allied  armies  would 
recognize  themselves  as  Christian  martyrs, 
yet  they  fall,  as  did  the  early  Christians, 
to  assert  the  rights  of  humanity  against 
the  despotism  of  the  State. 

One  cannot  say  whether  the  religion 
to  come  will  clearly  label  itself  Chris- 
tian, although  there  are  thoughtful  men 
who  think  so,  as,  for  example,  Sir  Oliver 
Lodge :  —  ? '' 

"Those  who  think  that  the  day  of  the 
Messiah  is  over  are  strangely  mistaken; 
it  has  hardly  begun.  In  individual  souls 
Christianity  has  flourished  and  borne 
fruit,  but  for  the  ills  of  the  world  itself 
it  is  an  almost  untried  panacea.  It  will 
be  strange  if  this  ghastly  war  fosters  and 
simplifies  and  improves  a  knowledge  of 
Christ,  and  aids  a  perception  of  the  in- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  159 

effable  beauty  of  his  life  and  teaching;  yet 
stranger  things  have  happened;  and  what- 
ever the  Church  may  do,  I  believe  that 
the  call  of  Christ  himself  will  be  heard 
and  attended  to  by  a  large  part  of  human- 
ity in  the  near  future,  as  never  yet  has 
it  been  heard  and  attended  to  on  earth." 

As  far  as  trench  records  indicate  the 
tendency  toward  the  rehabilitation  of  the 
Christian  creed,  one  observes,  in  support, 
Donald  Hankey's  testimony,  and  that 
of  many  others,  to  the  common  soldier's 
respect  for  the  character  of  Christ,  and 
also  in  support  the  beautiful  re-created 
Catholicism  of  the  Irishman,  Tom  Kettle, 
of  the  Frenchman,  Ferdinand  Belmont, 
while  against  it  one  notes,  for  example,  the 
splendid  pantheism  of  the  French  painter, 
the  utter  confidence  in  a  directing  des- 
tiny rather  than  personality  of  such  men 
as  Alan  Seeger  or  Rupert  Brooke,  or  the 
faith  in  the  holy  spirit  in  man,  which  is 
the  sole  religion  of  Henri  Barbusse  or  the 
"German  Deserter."  The  point  of  in- 
terest is  that  all  these  creeds  would  agree 
as  to  the  practice  of  the  Christian  tenets, 


160  THE  NEW  DEATH 

all  of  them  are  ready  to  put  to  proof  at 
once  the  audacities  of  its  altruism.  Per- 
haps the  only  thing  that  we  can  surely 
say  of  the  religion  to  which  the  univer- 
sality of  death  has  to-day  driven  us  is 
that  it  is  profoundly  mystical,  and  at 
the  same  time  profoundly  practical.  The 
fusion  of  these  qualities  is  a  new  spiritual 
force  whose  expression  in  conduct  com- 
mands our  attention  in  the  days  to  be. 

More  and  more,  as  we  stake  our  all  on 
our  possible  immortality,  shall  we  gain 
that  enfranchisement  of  the  soul  that 
can  come  from  no  other  conception.  The 
mere  yielding  of  the  imagination  to  so 
glorious  a  guess  promises  emancipation 
from  war's  havoc,  from  the  indignity 
of  our  puniness,  from  the  menace  of 
bereavement.  These  three  have  been 
fetters  fastened  upon  progress  through 
the  materialistic  views  of  the  old  death. 
These  three  have  so  hampered  civiliza- 
tion that  to-day  we  see  it  dwarfed  and 
diseased  almost  to  its  own  destruction. 
From  these  fetters  the  New  Death,  by 


THE  NEW  DEATH  161 

its  adjustment  of  our  mortality  to  our 
immortality,  offers  freedom. 

The  intuitions  of  immortality  every- 
where stirring  the  hearts  of  people  to-day 
forbid  us  to  believe  that  physical  disso- 
lution has  any  finality.  Death,  we  more 
and  more  suspect,  is  simply  the  exchange 
of  one  field  of  opportunities  for  another, 
the  post-physical  for  the  physical  devel- 
opment of  the  soul,  which  remains  itself 
and  indestructible.  The  more  we  come  to 
believe  this,  the  less  rational  warfare  will 
appear.  The  essence  of  war  is  that  death 
is  irrevocably  decisive.  War  will  cease 
when  the  influence  against  it  becomes  not 
religion,  not  humanity,  but  sheer  common 
sense:  when  we  believe  no  man  is  killable, 
shall  we  not  cease  to  kill?  It  is  self-de- 
structive to  try  to  destroy  the  indestruct- 
ible, it  is  throwing  yourself  against  a 
rock.  We  who  believe  in  the  New  Death 
watch  the  battle,  holding  that  not  the 
conquering  of  Germany,  but  the  attitude 
toward  death  is  the  fundamental  issue. 
The  outcome  of  the  whole  is  either  the 
reduction  of  armaments,  with  all  that  this 


1 62  THE  NEW  DEATH 

allows  of  energies  released  for  enduring 
achievement,  or  increase  of  armaments 
with  all  that  this  entails  of  aspiration 
impeded  and  infected.  To  increase  and 
improve  armament  is  to  allow  the  mind 
to  become  engrossed  with  engines  of  mur- 
der. The  effect  of  such  absorption  is  evi- 
dent in  the  partial  mortification  shown 
by  the  German  intellect  of  to-day.  You 
cannot  give  all  your  thoughts  to  destroy- 
ing your  fellow  man,  and  not  by  inexo- 
rable laws  of  psychology  court  a  diseased 
imagination  for  yourself. 

The  more  we  believe  that  national 
hostilities  cease  abruptly  at  death,  while 
the  individual  soul  continues,  —  which 
is  precisely  what  numberless  people  to- 
day are  believing  with  growing  intensity, 
—  the  more  we  shall  be  impelled  to  corre- 
late these  two  post-mundane  conditions 
with  our  present  existence.  Universal  de- 
struction, forcing  upon  us  the  hypothesis 
of  survival,  makes  international  brother- 
hood merely  a  logical  condition  to  be 
worked  for,  as  one  would  seek  to  bring 
school  and  college  into  a  relation  eliminat- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  163 

ing  waste  energy.  Even  the  views  of  paci- 
fist and  militarist  are  not  so  antagonistic 
as  they  seem,  both  referring  at  bottom 
to  their  views  of  death.  The  militarist 
believes  in  giving  life  for  an  ideal,  the 
pacifist  believes  in  preserving  life  for  the 
embodiment  of  that  ideal,  but  both  agree 
as  to  the  superiority  of  the  ideal;  both 
believe  spirit  more  valuable  than  body. 
Might  one  even  dream  that  to  Germany, 
only  a  little  more  materialistic  than  the 
rest  of  us  who  were  also  sodden  with  sci- 
ence, may  come  the  most  vital  awaken- 
ing of  all?  Conquered,  she  must  see  most 
clearly  the  wastage  of  her  young  life 
poured  forth,  and  so,  led  by  her  mourn- 
ing mothers,  must  turn  in  her  agony  of 
grief,  like  the  rest,  to  immortality  as  the 
sole  sustaining  hope.  So  may  she,  too, 
find  new  life  at  the  heart  of  destruction, 
and  in  that  far-off  issue,  her  boys,  too, 
may,  however  blindly,  have  given  their 
lives  to  set  in  motion  the  energies  of  the 
New  Death,     'i 

If  even  for  a  few  generations  we  act 
on   our   conjecture   of   immortality,    the 


164  THE  NEW  DEATH 

larger  vision,  the  profounder  basis  of  pur- 
pose, will  so  advance  human  existence  as 
to  make  this  war  worth  its  price.  Our 
accepting  the  finality  of  dissolution  as 
a  law  of  nature  has  been  a  blindness  ob- 
structive to  progress.  The  history  of  civi- 
lization is  made  up  of  two  movements, 
understanding  of  natural  laws  and  sub- 
mission to  them.  We  do  not  chain  the 
lightning;  we  first  ascertain  its  laws,  and 
then  make  all  our  inventions  comply 
with  them.  Civilization  has  been  long 
retarded  because  we  have  not  ruled  our 
lives  in  obedience  to  the  laws  of  death. 
We  have  either  fought  them,  or  neglected 
them,  we  have  never  built  either  our  pri- 
vate plans  or  our  state-edifice  frankly  in 
accordance  with  them.  Civilization  is  first 
a  spiritual  advance,  and  only  secondarily 
a  material  one.  The  liberation  of  the  soul, 
so  that  it  may  be  free  to  conceive  and  to 
accomplish,  is  the  first  condition  of  prog- 
ress, but  it  is  a  condition  that  has  been 
inextricably  bound  by  the  dread  of  death. 
Our  highest  endeavor  has  been  half-sur- 
reptitious,  based  on   the   chance  escape 


THE  NEW  DEATH  165 

from  the  constant  menace  of  interruption. 
We  had  flattered  ourselves  for  a  century 
that  science  was  furthering  human  de- 
velopment. We  know  to-day  how  far 
science  has  put  it  back.  Yet  for  our  fu- 
ture we  have  learned  from  science  the 
invaluable  fact  that  all  new  achievement 
is  founded  on  a  daring  manipulation  of 
the  unknown,  on  adventuring  the  appli- 
cations of  laws  that  are  but  half-divined. 
This  is  the  essentially  scientific  method 
of  discovering  any  truth.  As  soon  as  the 
falsity  of  a  conjecture  is  proved  by  apply- 
ing it,  it  is  discarded  for  some  new  guess 
of  better  promise.  Our  old  hypothesis  of 
extinction  has  wrought  ruin.  It  is  before 
us,  therefore,  to  hazard  our  conjecture  of 
immortality. 

Nature  inexhaustibly  renews  her  ener- 
gies out  of  decay,  in  accordance  with  some 
sure  discernment  of  what  is  indestruct- 
ible. We  shall  advance  our  civilization 
when  we  learn  to  imitate  the  largeness  of 
her  gestures,  and  their  confidence  in  some 
imperishable  plan.    The  more  the  loss  of 


166  THE  NEW  DEATH 

loved  ones  makes  the  world  of  to-day 
turn  wistfully  toward  human  survival,  the 
more  shall  its  mere  possibility  inspire  our 
endeavor  to  bring  all  earth  achievement 
into  better  connection  with  eternity. 

There  are,  of  course,  many  who  may 
be,  like  medieval  dreamers,  rapt  into  con- 
templation of  the  mysterious  loveliness  of 
the  life  to  come,  but  any  general  tend- 
ency to  let  mysticism  undermine  energy 
as  in  the  Middle  Ages,  has  probably  been 
obviated  by  the  period  of  scientific  mate- 
rialism that  has  intervened.  Science  has 
established  for  us  the  rule  of  experimen- 
tal action  as  the  fundamental  attitude 
toward  any  speculation,  psychic  or  phys- 
ical. Greek  thought  undervalued  the  fu- 
ture in  favor  of  the  present,  medieval 
thought  undervalued  the  present  in  favor 
of  the  future,  the  nineteenth  century  dis- 
torted the  present  by  denial  of  any  future 
whatever.  The  attitude  of  mind  now 
emergent  has  more  sanity  than  any  of 
these  three;  it  puts  present  and  future 
on  an  equality  because  they  both  contrib- 
ute to  spiritual  evolution.   It  exaggerates 


THE  NEW  DEATH  167 

the  importance  neither  of  body  nor  of  soul 
at  the  expense  of  the  other.  It  is  more 
and  more  acting  on  the  creed  that  per- 
sonality is  imperishable,  and  possesses  a 
mysterious  upward  destiny.  And  yet  to 
be  like  the  mystics  of  the  Middle  Ages 
preoccupied  with  this  promise,  arro- 
gantly distributing  awards  and  prophesy- 
ing details,  is  in  itself  to  deny  the  dignity 
of  this  destiny  and  of  its  Director.  The 
medieval  absorption  with  the  life  to  come 
could  not  logically  contribute  to  social 
betterment,  for  if  heaven  was  the  aspira- 
tion, and  earth  merely  the  purging  of 
the  soul,  then  reason  would  direct  leav- 
ing earthly  conditions  as  torturing  as  pos- 
sible for  the  greater  disciplining  of  the 
spirit.  The  simple  intimacy  with  death 
on  which  we  are  now  entering  runs  no 
such  peril  of  paralysis,  but  is  wholly  stimu- 
lating to  all  mundane  endeavor.  After  a 
century  of  disbelief  we  return  to  faith,  not 
disparaging  our  bodily  existence,  but  ex- 
alting it.  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  makes  lucid 
this  reverence  for  our  mortality:  — 

"Whatever  may  be  the  case  with  ex- 


i68  THE  NEW  DEATH 

ternal  matter,  the  body  itself  is  cer- 
tainly an  auxiliary  so  long  as  it  is  in  health 
and  strength;  and  it  gives  opportunity  for 
the  development  of  the  soul  in  new  and 
unexpected  ways  —  ways  in  which  but 
for  earth  life  its  practice  would  be  defi- 
cient. This  it  is  which  makes  calamity 
of  too  short  a  life. 

"But  let  us  not  be  over-despondent 
about  the  tragedy  of  the  present.  It  may 
be  that  the  concentrated  training  and 
courageous  facing  of  fate,  which  in  most 
accompanied  voluntary  entering  into  a 
dangerous  war,  compensates  in  intensity 
what  it  lacks  in  duration,  and  that  the 
benefit  of  bodily  terrestrial  life  is  not  so 
much  lost  by  violent  death  of  that  kind 
as  might  at  first  appear.  Yet  even  with 
some  such  assurance,  the  spectacle  of 
thousands  of  youths  in  full  vigor  and  joy 
of  life  having  their  earthly  future  vio- 
lently wrenched  from  them,  amid  scenes 
of  grim  horror  and  nerve-racking  noise 
and  confusion,  is  one  which  cannot  and 
ought  not  to  be  regarded  with  equanim- 
ity.   It  is  a  bad   and   unnatural  trunca- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  169 

tion  of  an  important  part  of  each  individ- 
ual career,  a  part  which  might  have  done 
much  to  develop  faculties  and  enlarge 
experience." 

The  New  Death  with  its  growing  con- 
viction of  survival  makes  men  loath  to 
leave  the  experiences  of  the  present  until 
fully  tested,  not  because  the  present,  as 
materialism  taught,  is  all,  but  because  it 
is  only  a  part,  and  for  that  very  reason 
a  passage  to  be  explored  more  thought- 
fully because  the  dignity  of  continuance 
adds  a  new  dignity  to  every  step  of  our 
eternal  pilgrimage.  If  we  are  immortal, 
then  more  beauty,  not  less,  attaches  to 
our  mortal  sojourn.  The  more  we  believe 
in  an  eternal  sequence  for  the  soul,  the 
more  respect  we  shall  have  for  its  physi- 
cal experience,  and  the  less  lightly  we  shall 
fling  away  the  mysterious  privileges  of 
the  flesh.  The  life  beyond  the  grave  may 
at  moments  entrance  our  imagination, 
but  it  is  not  on  this  account  over-seduc- 
tive, but  rather  it  exalts  our  earth-life  as 
being  the  complement  of  our  after-death 
life;   it   may  even   be  far  more  difficult, 


170  THE  NEW  DEATH 

therefore  more  challenging  to  the  daunt- 
less. 

If  we  are  deathless  beings,  then  each 
hour  on  earth  has  a  new  sublimity,  each 
moment  may  contain  some  development  of 
our  high  destiny  that  it  may  be  porten- 
tous to  miss.  The  old  view  of  our  dying 
that  made  us  seem  to  ourselves  puny  and 
ephemeral  beings,  tossed  by  chance  into 
a  brief  consciousness,  restricted  all  our 
free  growth  here  and  hereafter.  It  was 
essentially  a  maladjustment  of  living  to 
dying  that  retarded  all  genuine  progress. 
The  New  Death  liberates  us  from  our 
paralyzing  puniness  by  its  vista  of  each 
man's  power  to  adapt  his  mortal  course 
to  its  immortal  promise. 

As  the  new  intimacy  with  death  frees 
us  from  the  fear  of  our  own  dissolution, 
transmuting  dread  into  the  stimulus  of 
hope,  so  the  New  Death  provides  that 
adaptation  of  love  to  loss  which  trans- 
mutes bereavement  into  energy.  Five 
years  ago  the  activity  of  the  world  was 
conditioned  on  our  power  to  forget  death. 
Our  dead  lay  coffined  in  our  hearts.    We 


THE  NEW  DEATH  171 

hesitated  to  speak  of  them,  as  we  should 
have  hesitated  to  ask  our  friends  to  go 
with  us  to  a  grave,  a  visit  that  for  our- 
selves was  either  a  duty  or  a  solace,  but 
might  have  hurt  the  sensibilities  of  others. 
Such  conduct  was  to  shun  death,  not 
to  accept  it.  It  was  not  death  that  killed 
our  loved  ones;  it  was  our  manner  of  con- 
cealing grief,  as  if  it  were  a  thing  unclean 
and  painful,  abnormal  as  disease.  To-day 
brave  grief  is  a  sign  of  the  soul's  health. 
We  used  to  hide  away  our  loved  ones 
from  our  conversation,  denying  them  that 
earthly  influence  that  is  one  branch  of 
their  burgeoning.  To-day  when  millions 
of  mothers  grieve,  it  would  be  travesty  to 
pretend  that  their  lost  sons  are  not  their 
foremost  thought.  We  cannot  hide  away 
so  many  dead.  Their  presence  must  enter 
our  daily  talk,  must  mingle  with  our  daily 
tasks.  At  last  we  no  longer  condemn  our 
dead  to  graves  in  a  past  we  keep  private, 
at  last  we  allow  them  their  rightful  place 
in  our  present.  They  have  become  so 
great  an  army  that  their  earthly  influ- 
ence  cannot   be   buried.    We   know   not 


172  THE  NEW  DEATH 

what  dulling  of  our  present  vision  the 
future  may  bring,  but  for  a  little  while 
this  earth  is  going  frankly  to  hold  its 
homes  open  to  its  dead. 

The  New  Death  is  that  attitude  of  the 
soul  which  looks  both  forward  and  back, 
back  to  the  lives  of  the  boys  we  have  lost, 
forward  to  that  immortal  life  they  have 
entered.  Between  that  past  of  ours, 
sacred  to  sorrow,  and  that  eternal  future 
sacred  to  expectation,  lies  for  each  of  us 
an  earth-space  for  endeavor  illuminated 
equally  by  grief  and  by  hope.  The  words 
and  the  deeds  of  our  dead  throw  sure 
radiance  upon  our  way.  Our  debt  to  the 
Great  Design  is  to  weave  into  the  pattern 
both  their  dream  and  our  new  reverence 
for  our  own  destiny.  To  make  each  mo- 
ment granted  us  pregnant  with  energy 
because  of  the  light  shed  on  the  physical 
sojourn  by  their  death  passed,  and  by  our 
death  to  come,  that  is  to  bring  into  the 
new  world  a  force  to  make  death  as  crea- 
tive as  it  used  to  be  corruptive.  The  New 
Death  is  the  perception  of  our  mortal  end 
as  the  mere  portal  of  an  eternal  progres- 


THE  NEW  DEATH  173 

sion,  and  the  immediate  result  is  the  con- 
secration of  all  living.  As  we  step  into 
the  future  we  test  our  ground  now  for  its 
spiritual  foundations.  If  our  faith  is  to 
lead  us  where  our  dead  boys  have  gone,  it 
must  be  a  faith  built  like  theirs  of  spirit- 
values.  On  the  mere  guess  that  death  is 
a  portal  is  founded  the  resilience  of  the 
hell-rocked  world  to-day.  It  is  a  new 
illumination,  a  New  Death,  when  dying 
can  be  the  greatest  inspiration  of  our 
every-day  energy,  the  strongest  impulse 
toward  daily  joy.  If  only  the  beauty  of 
the  vision  that  the  tragedy  has  revealed 
can  be  retained  a  little  while !  For  this  little 
while  has  death  come  into  its  own  as  the 
great  enricher,  the  great  enhancer,  of  life. 
This  is  the  lesson  the  slain  splendor  of 
youth  has  taught  to  a  moribund  world. 
To  construct  a  new  world  on  the  faith 
their  words  and  their  sacrifice  attest  is  the 
sole  expression  permitted  to  our  mourn- 
ing, it  is  the  sole  monument  beautiful 
enough  to  be  their  memorial. 

THE    END 


CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
V  .  S   .  A 


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