"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.
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