And behold, before history had time to hatch another war of the like
proportions in the intensity of aroused passions and the greatness of
issues, the dead flavour of archaism descended on the manly sentiment of
those self-denying words. Mankind has been demoralised since by its own
mastery of mechanical appliances. Its spirit is apparently so weak now,
and its flesh has grown so strong, that it will face any deadly horror of
destruction and cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy,
murderous contrivance. It has become the intoxicated slave of its own
detestable ingenuity. It is true, too, that since the Napoleonic time
another sort of war-doctrine has been inculcated in a nation, and held
out to the world.


IV.


On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a progress, but
a retracing of footsteps on the road of life, I had no beacons to look
for in Germany. I had never lingered in that land which, on the whole,
is so singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous
sympathies and magnanimous impulses. An ineradicable, invincible,
provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like
a frowsy garment. Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from
it instinctively as from a threatening phantom. I believe that children
and dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of perception as far
as spectral apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned.

I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space, without
sights, without sounds. No whispers of the war reached my voluntary
abstraction. And perhaps not so very voluntary after all! Each of us is