"They need it."
This was a new angle. "Shall you hate to kill them?"
There was a stir about the table. The old man and the women seemed to
hang on Derry's answer.
"Yes, I shall hate it. I hate all killing, but it's got to be done."
He spoke presently, at length, of what many men thought of war.
"We are red-blooded enough, we Americans, but I think we hate killing
the other man rather more than we fear being killed. It's
sickening--bayonet practice. Killing at long range is different. The
children of my generation were trained to tender-heartedness. We
looked after the birds and rescued kittens, and were told that wars
were impossible--long wars. But war is not impossible, and it has come
upon us, and we are finding that men must be brave not merely in the
face of losing their own lives, but in the face of taking the lives
of--others. I sometimes wonder what it must have seemed to those
Germans who went first into Belgium. Some of them must have been
kind--some of them must have asked to be shot rather than be set at the
work of butchery.
"I sometimes think," he pursued, "that if we could give moving pictures
of the war just as it is--in all its horror and hideousness--show the
pictures in every little town in every country in the world, that war
would stop at once.
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