And all the countless persons who participated in this war acted in just the same way, as a result of their personal qualities, habits, conditions, and aims. They feared, boasted, rejoiced, resented, reasoned, supposing that they knew what they were doing and that they were doing it for themselves, and yet they were all involuntary instruments of history, and performed work hidden from them but comprehensible to us. Such is the inevitable fate of all men of action, and the higher they stand in the human hierarchy, the less free they are.
