The Saint was in one of his queer moments of vision. He went on speaking, his voice curiously low against the background clamour of brass and drums and marching feet:
"Yes, it's horrible; but you ought to listen. We ought to remember what hangs over our peace… I've heard just the same thing before — one night when I was fiddling with the radio and I caught some Nazi anniversary jamboree in Nuremberg… This is the noise of a world gone mad. This is the climax of two thousand years of progress. This is why philosophers have searched for wisdom, and poets have revealed beauty, and martyrs have died for freedom — so that whole nations that call themselves intelligent human beings can exchange their brains for a brass band, and tax themselves to starvation to buy bombs and battleships, and live in a mental slavery that no physical slave in the old days was ever condemned to. And be so carried away by it that most of them really and honestly believe that they're proud crusaders building a new and glorious world… I know you can wipe out two thousand years of education with one generation of censorship and propaganda. But what is this sickness that makes one nation after another in Europe want to wipe them out?"
The bugles blared again and the feet marched against the tapping of the drums, in mocking denial of an answer. And then he touched the switch and the noise ceased.
Peace came back into the night with a strange softness, as if on tiptoe, fearful of a fresh intrusion. Once more there was only the murmuring hiss of the smooth-running engine and the rustle of the passing air, not even loud enough to blanket the hoot of an indignant owl scared from its perch on an overhanging bough; but it was a peace like waking from an ugly dream, with their ears still haunted by what they had heard before. It was some time before Patricia spoke though Simon knew she was wide awake now.
"What was it?" she asked at last, in a voice too even to be wholly natural.
"That was the Sons of France — Colonel Marteau's blue-shirt gang. You remember, they grew out of the breakup of the old Croix de Feu, only about ten times worse. They've been holding a midnight jamboree outside Paris, with torches and bonfires and flags and bands and everything. What we cut in on must have been the grand finale — Colonel Marteau's pep talk to the assembled cannon fodder."
He paused.
"First Russia, then Italy, then Germany, then Spain," he said soberly. "And now France is next. There, but for the grace of God, goes the next tin-pot dictator, on his way to make the world a little less fit to live in… There are almost enough of them now — marching mobs of idiots backwards and forwards and building guns and armies because they can't build anything else, and because it's the perfect solution to all economic problems so long as it lasts. How can you have peace and progress when fighting is the only gospel they've got to preach?… If you wanted to be pessimistic, you could feel that Nature had got the whole idea of progress licked from the start; because as soon as even the dumbest mass of people had just got educated. to the futility of modern warfare and the stupidity of patriotism, she could turn round and come back with some strutting monomaniac to sell the old stock all over again under a new trade mark and put the whole show back where it started from."
"But why?"
He shrugged.