For the first and last time, I post something here I did not write…but it’s in my head…and has been since I saw the Oasis of the Seas…so here it is…
From The Daily Sketch, Thursday April 18, 1912
“AN AFTERTHOUGHT”
Presently, of course, we shall forget. The time will certainly come when the memory will cease to trouble us – but when will it come? It is not wonderful that many are longing to-day for some swift oblivion which would rid us of the remembrance of things too terrible to be faced.
The realisation came slowly. The thing was too vast to be understood at once, the meaning of it too tremendous to be grasped. But the days have gone by: little details have been made known, gradually much of the story has been unfolded and made plain, and the truth has been brought home to us, the bitter truth of disaster and of death, and of a shattered broken pride added to the breaking of human hearts.
So proud we were, so quick with our praise of the skill of man who had made so vast a thing, who had flung so mighty a challenge in the face of Nature. This was the last and greatest triumph over the storms that rage and the billows that toss upwards as to the very skies. This was man’s most recent statement of his power and of his dominion. But the old forces awake and answered the challenge: death came to the very many hundreds of the children of men, and the great ship sank to rest where no human hand may touch her any more for ever.
Once more defeat has overtaken us, once more our boasting has died away, drowned in a flood of tears. As we are greater in act than our fore-fathers, so is our suffering greater. As we reach out to triumphs beyond their furthest imagining, so do we pay penalties heavier than all their dreamings. Our great works serve only to ring us to great disasters. The proportion stands unaltered.
When first man made a little boat to carry him upon the face of the waters, death if it came took him and him only. When the old heroes our began first to cross the Atlantic , the went in small ships with small crews. But now, now that we have exalted ourselves so greatly we have to pay on an equal scale.
That is the though that comes rising above the thought even of those who are now facing in many lands the fact of swift and terrible bereavement. And, in deed, it is well that it should come, for who is there that can bear to think of those sufferers? Easier it is to call the mind to the picture of that last hour on the great ship, when the fact of the approach of death came home to the people she bore, when they knew that they stood before the wide gate of Eternity. One can think and speak of them, but for those whom they have left behind there can be no adequate tribute but silence – silence , silence and a little turning of the head away that they my be left alone with their grief.
And as we turn we come face to face with that other burden of which I have spoken, the burden which we and all our race have to bear. Our pride is broken, and brought low. Our mightiest work has testified against us: the triumphant thing that we made has served only to glorify the power of those forces we made it to over come. What is there for us in this hour of the knowledge of defeat?
There is, waiting behind the horror and the pity and sadness, the fact of the unconquerable heart of man. We are defeated? Then we will fight again and fight better for our defeat. If this ship has failed us we will make another, and another after that; we will reach forever towards final triumph.
And – ponder this carefully, for it is the conclusion of the whole matter – there are many of us who hope, trust and believe, that neither we, nor our children’s children, shall live to see that triumph.
H.L