My nation's policy now has less compassion and insight than a hero. Thus Richard Hannay:
That night I realized the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Huns some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter's cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany's madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children's bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.
For those who haven't read Greenmantle, sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps, think of him as a James Bond precursor; a man's man, happy in war, daring behind the lines, dauntless in fisticuffs and accurate with "a German Mauser of the latest pattern". He also praises himself as a "nigger-driver". This is not a puling new-man liberal hero.
He would, though, stick at killing the parents in front of the child.
Project Gutenberg etext #559
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.). | TrackBack