must be fierce. This conviction pressed upon him....

In spite of his detestation of war Mr. Britling found it impossible to
maintain that any sort of peace state was better than a state of war. If
wars produced destructions and cruelties, peace could produce indolence,
perversity, greedy accumulation and selfish indulgences. War is
discipline for evil, but peace may be relaxation from good. The poor man
may be as wretched in peace time as in war time. The gathering forces of
an evil peace, the malignity and waste of war, are but obverse and
reverse of the medal of ill-adjusted human relationships. Was there no
Greater Peace possible; not a mere recuperative pause in killing and
destruction, but a phase of noble and creative living, a phase of
building, of discovery, of beauty and research? He remembered, as one
remembers the dead, dreams he had once dreamt of the great cities, the
splendid freedoms, of a coming age, of marvellous enlargements of human
faculty, of a coming science that would be light and of art that could
be power....

But would that former peace have ever risen to that?...

After all, had such visions ever been more than idle dreams? Had the war
done more than unmask reality?...

He came to a gate and leant over it.

The darkness drizzled about him; he turned up his collar and watched the
dim shapes of trees and hedges gather out of the night to meet the
dismal dawn. He was cold and hungry and weary.

He may have drowsed; at least he had a vision, very real and plain, a