What were they asking for?

They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had foreseen----

It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous shambling
enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the unexpected, an appeal
to those others who, more fortunate, seemed wiser and more powerful,
for something--for INTELLIGENCE. This mute mass, weary footed, rank
following rank, protested its persuasion that some of these others
must have foreseen these dislocations--that anyhow they ought to have
foreseen--and arranged.

That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so dumbly
to assert.

'Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened room,'
he says. 'These men were praying to their fellow creatures as once they
prayed to God! The last thing that men will realise about anything is
that it is inanimate. They had transferred their animation to mankind.
They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it
was careless or malignant.... It had only to be aroused to be
conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion.... And I saw, too, that
as yet THERE WAS NO SUCH INTELLIGENCE. The world waits for intelligence.
That intelligence has still to be made, that will for good and order has
still to be gathered together, out of scraps of impulse and wandering
seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine and creative in our souls,
into a common purpose. It's something still to come....'

It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that this not
very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might well have been