Simon Called Peter
Keable, Robert, 1887-1927
English
We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address
Below is a summary of Simon Called Peter
Proofreading Team.
SIMON CALLED PETER
BY ROBERT KEABLE
AUTHOR OF "THE DRIFT OF PINIONS," "STANDING BY," ETC.
1921
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO JULIE
She never lived, maybe, but it is truer to say that she never dies. Nor
shall she ever die. One may believe in God, though He is hard to find,
and in Women, though such as Julie are far to seek.
THE AUTHOR TO THE READER
The glamour of no other evil thing is stronger than the glamour of war.
It would seem as if the cup of the world's sorrow as a result of war had
been filled to the brim again and again, but still a new generation has
always been found to forget. A new generation has always been found to
talk of the heroisms that the divine in us can manifest in the mouth of
hell and to forget that so great a miracle does not justify our creation
of the circumstance.
Yet if ever war came near to its final condemnation it was in 1914-1918.
Our comrades died bravely, and we had been willing to die, to put an end
to it once and for all. Indeed war-weary men heard the noise of conflict
die away on November 11, 1918, thinking that that end had been attained.
It is not yet three years ago; a little time, but long enough for
betrayal.
Long enough, too, for the making of many books about it all, wherein has
been recorded such heroisms as might make God proud and such horror as
might make the Devil weep. Yet has the truth been told, after all? Has
the world realized that in a modern war a nation but moves in uniform to
perform its ordinary tasks in a new intoxicating atmosphere? Now and
again a small percentage of the whole is flung into the pit, and, for
them, where one in ten was heavy slaughter, now one in ten is reasonable
escape. The rest, for the greater part of the time, live an unnatural
life, death near enough to make them reckless and far enough to make them
gay. Commonly men and women more or less restrain themselves because of
to-morrow; but what if there be no to-morrow? What if the dice are heavily
weighted against it? And what of their already jeoparded restraint when
the crisis has thrown the conventions to the winds and there is little
to lighten the end of the day?
Thus to lift the veil on life behind the lines in time of war is a
thankless task. The stay-at-homes will not believe, and particularly
they whose smug respectability and conventional religion has been put
to no such fiery trial. Moreover they will do more than disbelieve; they
will say that the story is not fit to be told. Nor is it. But then it
should never have been lived. That very respectability, that very
conventionality, that very contented backboneless religion made it
possible--all but made it necessary. For it was those things which
allowed the world to drift into the war, and what the war was nine days
out of ten ought to be thrust under the eyes of those who will not
believe. It is a small thing that men die in battle, for a man has but
one life to live and it is good to give it for one's friends; but it is
such an evil that it has no like, this drifting of a world into a hell to
which men's souls are driven like red maple leaves before the autumn
wind.
The old-fashioned pious books made hell stink of brimstone and painted
the Devil hideous. But Satan is not such a fool. Champagne and Martinis
do not taste like Gregory powder, nor was St. Anthony tempted by
shrivelled hags. Paganism can be gay, and passion look like love.
Moreover, still more truly, Christ could see the potentiality of virtue
in Mary Magdalene and of strength in Simon called Peter. The conventional
religious world does not.
A curious feature, too, of that strange life was its lack of
consecutiveness. It was like the pages of _La Vie Parisienne_. The friend
of to-day was gone for ever to-morrow. A man arrived, weary and dirty and
craving for excitement, in some unknown town; in half an hour he had
stepped into the gay glitter of wine and women's smiles; in half a dozen
he had been whirled away. The days lingered and yet flew; the pages were
twirled ever more dazzlingly; only at the end men saw in a blinding flash
whither they had been led.
These things, then, are set out in this book. This is its atmosphere.
They are truly set out. They are not white-washed; still less are they
pictured as men might have seen them in more sober moments, as the
Back