Simon Called Peter

Simon Called Peter

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Simon Called Peter, by Robert
Keable This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
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Title: Simon Called Peter
Author: Robert Keable
Release Date: January 3, 2005 [EBook #14579]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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