Part 23 (2/2)
”Ach!” cried the young man, and sat up in bed and ran his hands through his fair hair.
He had been working late upon this detestable business of the Lusitania; the news of her sinking had come to hand two days before, and all America was aflame with it. It might mean war. His task had been to pour out explanations and justifications to the press; to show that it was an act of necessity, to pretend a conviction that the great s.h.i.+p was loaded with munitions, to fight down the hostility and anger that blazed across a continent. He had worked to his limit. He had taken cup after cup of coffee, and had come to bed worked out not two hours ago. Now here he was awake after a nightmare of drowning women and children, trying to comfort his soul by recalling his own arguments. Never once since the war began had he doubted the rightness of the German cause. It seemed only a proof of his nervous exhaustion that he could doubt it now.
Germany was the best organized, most cultivated, scientific and liberal nation the earth had ever seen, it was for the good of mankind that she should be the dominant power in the world; his patriotism had had the pa.s.sion of a mission. The English were indolent, the French decadent, the Russians barbaric, the Americans basely democratic; the rest of the world was the ”White man's Burthen”; the clear destiny of mankind was subservience to the good Prussian eagle. Nevertheless--those wet draggled bodies that swirled down in the eddies of the sinking t.i.tan--Ach! He wished it could have been otherwise. He nursed his knees and prayed that there need not be much more of these things before the spirit of the enemy was broken and the great Peace of Germany came upon the world.
And suddenly he stopped short in his prayer.
Suddenly out of the nothingness and darkness about him came the conviction that G.o.d did not listen to his prayers....
Was there any other way?
It was the most awful doubt he had ever had, for it smote at the training of all his life. ”Could it be possible that after all our old German G.o.d is not the proper style and t.i.tle of the true G.o.d? Is our old German G.o.d perhaps only the last of a long succession of bloodstained tribal effigies--and not G.o.d at all?”
For a long time it seemed that the bishop watched the thoughts that gathered in the young attache's mind. Until suddenly he broke into a quotation, into that last cry of the dying Goethe, for ”Light. More Light!”...
”Leave him at that,” said the Angel. ”I want you to hear these two young women.”
The hand came back to England and pointed to where Southend at the mouth of the Thames was all agog with the excitement of an overnight Zeppelin raid. People had got up hours before their usual time in order to look at the wrecked houses before they went up to their work in town.
Everybody seemed abroad. Two nurses, not very well trained as nurses go nor very well-educated women, were s.n.a.t.c.hing a little sea air upon the front after an eventful night. They were too excited still to sleep.
They were talking of the horror of the moment when they saw the nasty thing ”up there,” and felt helpless as it dropped its bombs. They had both hated it.
”There didn't ought to be such things,” said one.
”They don't seem needed,” said her companion.
”Men won't always go on like this--making wars and all such wickedness.”
”It's 'ow to stop them?”
”Science is going to stop them.”
”Science?”
”Yes, science. My young brother--oh, he's a clever one--he says such things! He says that it's science that they won't always go on like this. There's more sense coming into the world and more--my young brother says so. Says it stands to reason; it's Evolution. It's science that men are all brothers; you can prove it. It's science that there oughtn't to be war. Science is ending war now by making it horrible like this, and making it so that no one is safe. Showing it up. Only when n.o.body is safe will everybody want to set up peace, he says. He says it's proved there could easily be peace all over the world now if it wasn't for flags and kings and capitalists and priests. They still manage to keep safe and out of it. He says the world ought to be just one state. The World State, he says it ought to be.”
(”Under G.o.d,” said the bishop, ”under G.o.d.”)
”He says science ought to be King of the whole world.”
”Call it Science if you will,” said the bishop. ”G.o.d is wisdom.”
”Out of the mouths of babes and elementary science students,” said the Angel. ”The very children in the board schools are turning against this narrowness and nonsense and mischief of nations and creeds and kings.
You see it at a thousand points, at ten thousand points, look, the world is all flas.h.i.+ng and flickering; it is like a spinthariscope; it is aquiver with the light that is coming to mankind. It is on the verge of blazing even now.”
”Into a light.”
”Into the one Kingdom of G.o.d. See here! See here! And here! This brave little French priest in a helmet of steel who is daring to think for the first time in his life; this gentle-mannered emir from Morocco looking at the grave-diggers on the battlefield; this mother who has lost her son....
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