Tietjens said without passion:
"Not necessarily. It means that one has been under mental pressure, but all mental pressure does not drive you over the edge. Not by any means. . . . Besides, what does it matter?"
Levin said:
"You mean you don't care. . . . Good God!" He remained looking at the view, drooping, in intense dejection. He said: "This beastly war! This beastly war! . . . Look at all that view. . . ."
Tietjens said:
"It's an encouraging spectacle, really. The beastliness of human nature is always pretty normal. We lie and betray and are wanting in imagination and deceive ourselves, always, at about the same rate. In peace and in war! But, somewhere in that view there are enormous bodies of men. . . . If you got a still more extended range of view over this whole front you'd have still more enormous bodies of men. . . . Seven to ten million. . . . All moving towards places towards which they desperately don't want to go. Desperately! Every one of them is desperately afraid. But they go on. An immense blind will forces them in the effort to consummate the one decent action that humanity has to its credit in the whole of recorded history. The one we are engaged in. That effort is the one certain creditable fact in all their lives. . . . But the other lives of all those men are dirty, potty and discreditable little affairs. . . . Like yours. . . . Like mine. . . ."
Levin exclaimed:
"Just heavens! What a pessimist you are!"
Tietjens said: "Can't you see that is optimism?"
"But," Levin said, "we're being beaten out of the field. . . . You don't know how desperate things are."