My Web Site Page 195 Ovations 04Lorta Pogarlen chose the topics covered by My Web Site Page 195 without reflecting upon the choices others have made. Starring in a mysty evening scenario is another way to look at things in a different light. |
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Naturally, when one has before one the prospect of leaving this world at any moment, and one is working under a severe mental strain, one generally thinks deeply of one's beloved parents and relatives. Thus my father, mother and sister were before me all the time in my imagination. Sometimes when I was half-dazed I could see them so vividly that I could almost believe they were so close that I could touch them. I never thought that I should see them again, in reality, although I never actually lost hope of doing so; but I was thinking incessantly of them, and of the anxiety I was causing them, as I had had no possible way of communicating with them for months and months. |
Now there is a hard and bitter fact of life, very different from the story of the fenland. I am not going to argue about it or discuss it, because to trace the threads of it back into life entangles one at once helplessly in a dreadful series of problems: namely, how it comes to pass that a calamity, grievous and intolerable beyond all calamities in its pain and sorrow and waste, a strife abhorred and dreaded by all who are concerned in it, fruitful in every shade of misery and wretchedness, should yet have come about so inevitably and relentlessly. No one claims to have desired war; all alike plead that it is in self-defence that they are fighting, and maintain that they have laboured incessantly for peace. Yet the great mills of fate are turning, and grinding out death and shame and loss. Everyone sickens for peace, and yet any proposal of peace is drowned in cries of bitterness and rage. The wisest spend their time in pointing out the blessings which the conflict brings. The mother hears that the son she parted with in strength and courage is mouldering in an unknown grave, and chokes her tears down. The fruit of years of labour is consumed, lands are laid desolate, the weak and innocent are wronged; yet the great war-engine goes thundering and smashing on, leaving hatred and horror behind it; and all the while men pray to a God of mercy and loving-kindness and entreat His blessing on the work they are doing. |
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Throughout the reservation those most deeply affected by the messiah belief have been appointed spies over the others. If any persist in the use of old medicine paraphernalia, they are reported at once and harassed by threats of plague, sickness, ill-luck, disaster, and even death, which Das Lan claims to be able to cause or to dispel at pleasure. Once the threat is made, nothing unwelcome can happen to one under the ban that is not immediately attributed, by all the medicine-man's disciples, to the disfavor of the gods; and nothing more potent is necessary to convert the unbeliever, for there is no Indian reared in the wilds who is not steeped in the belief that his gods are all-powerful in both causing and eradicating every ill. | ||
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