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XL CONCLUSION 
been taken sat weeping silently. I took hold of her 
hand and wanted to comfort her, but she went on 
crpng as if she did not hear me. Suddenly I felt that 
I was crying with her, silently, towards the setting sun, 
as she was. 
About that time I read a magazine article which 
maintained that there would always be wars, because 
a noble thirst for glory is an ineradicable element in 
the heart of man. These champions of militarism think 
of war only as idealised by ignorant enthusiasm or 
the necessity of self-defence. They would probably 
reconsider their opinions if they spent a day in one of 
the African theatres of war, walking along the paths 
in the virgin forest between lines of corpses of carriers 
who had sunk under their load and found a sohtary 
death by the roadside, and if, with these innocent and 
unwilling victims before them, they were to meditate 
in the gloomy stillness of the forest on war as it really is. 
* 
sN * 
How shall I sum up the resulting experience of these 
four and a half years ? On the whole it has confirmed 
my view of the considerations which drew me from 
the world of learning and art to the primeval forest. 
“ The natives who live in the bosom of Nature are 
never so ill as we are, and do not feel pain so much.” 
That is what my friends used to say to me, to try to keep 
me at home, but I have come to see that such state- 
ments are not true. Out here there prevail most of 
the diseases which we know in Europe, and several of 
them — those hideous ones, I mean, which we brought 
here — produce, if possible, more misery than they do 
amongst us. And the child of nature feels them as we 
