us, but that we seem more and more like the machines.
Everywhere we see processes to which we are subject and of which our
humanity is the result, though in the past we have harboured the
delusion that our humanity was in some way independent of processes. Now
that delusion is fading away from us; and it fades away most of all in
war, where all humanity is evidently dominated by the struggle for life,
and is but a part of it, as raindrops are part of a storm.

It is this sense of tyrannous process that Mr. Nevinson expresses in
his battle pictures, with, we suspect, a bitter feeling of resentment
against it. His pictures look like a visible _reductio ad absurdum_ of
it all. That is how men look, he seems to say, when they are fighting in
modern war; and, being men, they ought not to look so. That, at least,
is the effect the pictures produce on us. They are a bitter satire on
all the modern power of man and the uses to which he has put it. He has
allowed it to make him its slave and to set him to a business which has
no purpose whatever, which is as blind as the process of the universe
seems to one who has no faith. This struggle for life might just as well
be called a struggle for death. It is, in fact, merely a struggle
between two machines intent on wrecking each other; and part of the
machines are the bodies of men, which behave as if there were no souls
in them, as if there were not even life, but merely energy; so that they
collide and destroy each other like masses of matter in space. Nothing
can be said of them except that they obey certain laws; we call their
obedience discipline, but it is only the discipline of things subject to
a process.

Now it is the sense of process, as the ultimate reality in the universe,
which has produced war against the conscience of mankind, and even of
many Germans. Conscience was powerless to prevent it because conscience
had ceased to believe in its own power, had come to think of itself as a
vain and inexplicable rebellion against the nature of things. This
rebellion we call sentimentality, meaning thereby that it is really not
even moral; for true morality would recognize the process to which the
nature of man is subject, of which that nature is itself a part; and
would cure man of his futile rebellions so that he should not suffer
needlessly from them. It would cure man of pity, because it is through
pity that he suffers. He is a machine, and, if he is a conscious
machine,