The Catholic and a Future War

The horror of the war of to-morrow is that no fever of collective exaltation, no lyricism of poet or orator, will be able to ennoble it or mark it with the authentic sign of the spirit. The apparent ideological character with which no doubt it will be invested will not long obscure its true nature: the conflict of the selfishness of classes, adding a new complication to the selfishness of nationalisms, will make it wholly inhuman. Not only in its furies, but in its very causes, the war will be wholly barbarous: the bankruptcy of the spirit giving over to the chances of force the care of making a world, the bloody clash of a too numerous population in a too narrow peninsular, the drama of fear and hunger. Such perhaps will be our destiny: to die in a catastrophe, in a medley of causes so confused and of results so dubious for our country itself that we shall really not know for what good we have given our lives” (pp. n, 12). This is perhaps the chief cause of our present distress and despair in face of the future: the knowledge that it is so easy to give our allegiance to a cause which to-morrow may reveal as either wholly or in part the wrong cause: “We are afraid of learning that ultimate bitterness of the dying soldier who does not understand the point of his death; more, we fear lest one day orators stand over our tombs to proclaim us, not what we would have wished but what events have decided for us, or worse still, what the interests of a party will demand should be said” (p. 12

Citation · Library science · Computer Science · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies · Samuel Beckett and Modernism