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Scalawag on the Web Sectory 19
Page 11
The campaign in Bucharest was at first attended by a certain measure of success, owing to the attitude of M. Bratiano, the Premier; of M. Carp, a former Prime Minister, and of M. Marghiloman, the present leader of the Conservative Opposition. But many influential Liberals have already associated themselves with the programme of the action advocated by M. Take Jonesco, the chief of the Conservative-Democratic Party, and of M. Filipescu, a former Conservative Minister, whose advocacy of a forward policy threatens to cause a split in the Conservative camp. The great bulk of the political world desires to profit by the European crisis to secure Transylvania, the only difference of opinion being with regard to the advisability of immediate action. The consultative committee of the Conservative Party has passed a resolution demanding the abandonment of neutrality.
To brood over the war, to spend our time in disentangling its intricate causes, seems to me a task for future historians. But a lover of peace, confronted by the hideousness of war, does best to try, if he can, to make plain what he means by peace and why he desires it. I do not mean by peace an indolent life, lost in gentle reveries. I mean hard daily work, and mutual understanding, and lavish help, and the effort to reassure and console and uplift. And I mean, too, a real conflict--not a conflict where we set the best and bravest of each nation to spill each other's blood--but a conflict against crime and disease and selfishness and greediness and cruelty. There is much fighting to be done; can we not combine to fight our common foes, instead of weakening each other against evil? We destroy in war our finest parental stock, we waste our labour, we lose our garnered store; we give every harsh passion a chance to grow; we live in the traditions of the past, and not in the hopes of the future.
The last trial of all was yet to be added, when we had come to within 300 m. of the river. The _seringueiro_, from whose hut we had started on our way out, had evidently since our departure set the forest on fire in order to make a _roca_ so as to cultivate the land. Hundreds of carbonized trees had fallen down in all directions; others had been cut down. So that for those last two or three hundred metres we had to get over or under those burned trees and struggle through their blackened boughs, the stumps of which drove holes into and scratched big patches of skin from my legs, arms and face. Where the skin was not taken off altogether it was smeared all over with the black from the burnt trees. We did not look unlike nigger minstrels, with the exception that we were also bleeding all over.
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