It Is Hateful To Them; The Sight Of The
Camp And Troops Marching And Drilling, Of Men In Khaki
Scattered
About everywhere over a hundred square leagues of
plain; the smoke of firing and everlasting booming of guns.
It is
A desecration; the wild ancient charm of the land has
been destroyed in their case, and it saddens and angers them.
I was pretty free from these uncomfortable feelings.
It is said that one of the notions the Japanese have about the
fox - a semi-sacred animal with them - is that, if you chance
to see one crossing your path in the morning, all that comes
before your vision on that day will be illusion. As an
illustration of this belief it is related that a Japanese who
witnessed the eruption of Krakatoa, when the heavens were
covered with blackness and kindled with intermitting flashes
and the earth shaken by the detonations, and when all others,
thinking the end of the world had come, were swooning with
extreme fear, veiwed it without a tremor as a very sublime but
illusory spectacle. For on that very morning he had seen a
fox cross his path.
A somewhat similar effect is produced on our minds if we have
what may be called a sense of historical time - a consciousness
of the transitoriness of most things human - if we see
institutions and works as the branches on a pine or larch,
which fail and die and fall away successively while the tree
itself lives for ever, and if we measure their duration not by
our own few swift years, but by the life of nations and races
of men. It is, I imagine, a sense capable of cultivation, and
enables us to look upon many of man's doings that would
otherwise vex and pain us, and, as some say, destroy all the
pleasure of our lives, not exactly as an illusion, as if we
were Japanese and had seen a fox in the morning, but at all
events in what we call a philosophic spirit.
What troubled me most was the consideration of the effect of
the new conditions on the wild life of the plain - or of a very
large portion of it. I knew of this before, but it was
nevertheless exceedingly unpleasant when I came to witness it
myself when I took to spying on the military as an amusement
during my idle time. Here we have tens of thousands of very
young men, boys in mind, the best fed, healthiest, happiest
crowd of boys in all the land, living in a pure bracing
atmosphere, far removed from towns, and their amusements and
temptations, all mad for pleasure and excitement of some kind
to fill their vacant hours each day and their holidays.
Naturally they take to birds'-nesting and to hunting every
living thing they encounter during their walks on the downs.
Every wild thing runs and flies from them, and is chased or
stoned, the weak-winged young are captured, and the nests
picked or kicked up out of the turf.
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