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Dividend Two Directory 02
Page 02
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.
We crossed two streamlets flowing west. Benedicto and Filippe were in such a bad way that it was breaking my heart to look at them. Every time they fell down in a faint I never knew whether it was for the last time that they had closed their eyes. When I felt their hearts with my hand they beat so faintly that once or twice I really thought they were dead. That day I myself fainted, and fell with the left side of my face resting on the ground. When I recovered consciousness some time later, I touched my face, which was hurting me, and found that nearly the whole skin of my cheek had been eaten up by small ants, the lower lid of the eye having suffered particularly. A nasty sore remained on my face for some two months after that experience, the bites of those ants being very poisonous.
On the evening of October 7th, Benedicto, who was a great glutton, prepared a huge bowl of the _mamao_ fruit stewed and sweetened with quantities of sugar. I had obtained from Albuquerque some tins of shrimps, lobster and salmon, butter and jam--all condemned stuff from some ship--and I gave all my men a feast. Benedicto brought me some of the sweet he had prepared, and it looked so tempting that, ill as I was, I ate a quantity of it. After dinner I persuaded my men to go back to the forest to recover the baggage they had abandoned there. Tempted by a present of money I offered them if they would bring it back safely, they all agreed to go.
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