nsignificance. When our minds wandered from the preoccupations of our
immediate needs, we speculated upon the possibility of stopping the use
of these frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed.
For to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still greater
power of destruction of which they were the precursors might quite
easily shatter every relationship and institution of mankind.

'"What will they be doing," asked Mylius, "what will they be doing?
It's plain we've got to put an end to war. It's plain things have to be
run some way. THIS--all this--is impossible."

'I made no immediate answer. Something--I cannot think what--had brought
back to me the figure of that man I had seen wounded on the very first
day of actual fighting. I saw again his angry, tearful eyes, and that
poor, dripping, bloody mess that had been a skilful human hand five
minutes before, thrust out in indignant protest. "Damned foolery," he
had stormed and sobbed, "damned foolery. My right hand, sir! My RIGHT
hand. . . ."

'My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me. "I think we are
too--too silly," I said to Mylius, "ever to stop war. If we'd had the
sense to do it, we should have done it before this. I think this----" I
pointed to the gaunt black outline of a smashed windmill that stuck up,
ridiculous and ugly, above the blood-lit waters--"this is the end."'

Section 10

But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and his
barge-load of hungry and starving men.

For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if civilisation
had come to a final collapse. These crowning buds upon the tradition
that Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered, opened and flared 'like
waterlilies of flame' over nations destroyed, over churches smashed or
submerged, towns ruined, fields lost to mankind for ever, and a million
weltering bodies. Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would the
flames of war still burn amidst the ruins?

Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance in
their answers to that question. Already once in the history of
mankind, in America, before its discovery by the whites, an organised
civilisation had given way to a mere cult of warfare, specialised and
cruel, and it seemed for a time to many a thoughtful man as if the
whole world was but to repeat on a larger scale this ascendancy of the
warrior, this triumph of the destructive instincts of the race.

The subse