“It’s a vice contracted in the army, this Sir-ing,” said Peter. “It’s Nobby in my mind, anyhow. But you see, I’ve got a kind of habit, at night and odd times, of thinking over my little misadventure with that balloon and my scrap with von Papen. They are my stock dreams, with extra details worked in, nasty details some of them ... and then I wake up and think about them. I think over the parachute affair more than the fight, because it lasted longer and I wasn’t so active. I felt it more. Especially being shot in the legs.... That sort of dream when you float helpless.... But the thing that impresses me most in reflecting on those little experiences is the limitless amount of intelligence that expended itself on such jobs as breaking my wrist, splintering my shoulder-blade and smashing up my leg. The amount of ingenuity and good workmanship in my instruments and the fittings of my basket, for example, was extraordinary, having regard to the fact that it was just one small item in an artillery system for blowing Germans to red rags. And the stuff and intelligence they were putting up against me, that too was wonderful; the way the whole problem had been thought out, the special clock fuse and so on. Well, my point is that the chap who made that equipment wasn’t particularly interested in killing me, and that the chaps who made my outfit weren’t particularly keen on the slaughter of Germans. But they had nothing else to do. They were brought up in a pointless world. They were caught by a vulgar quarrel. What did they care for the Kaiser? Old ass! What they were interested in was making the things....”
Peter became very earnest in his manner. “No peace, as we have known peace hitherto, offers such opportunities for good inventive work as war does. That’s my point, Nobby. There’s no comparison between the excitement and the endless problems of making a real, live, efficient submarine, for example, that has to meet and escape the intensest risks, and the occupation of designing a great, big, safe, upholstered liner in which fat swindlers can cross the Atlantic without being seasick. War tempts imaginative, restless people, and a stagnant peace bores them. And you’ve got to reckon with intelligence and imagination in this world, Nobby, more than anything. They aren’t strong enough to control perhaps, but they will certainly upset. Inventive, restless men are the particular instruments of my Old Experimenter. He prefers them now to plague, pestilence, famine, flood and earthquake. They are more delicate instruments. And more efficient. And they won’t stand a passive peace. Under no circumstances can you hope to induce the chap who contrived the clock fuse and the chap who worked out my gas bag or the chap with a new aeroplane gadget, and me—me, too—to stop cerebrating and making our damndest just in order to sit about safely in meadows joining up daisy chains—like a beastly lot of figures by Walter Crane. The Old Experimenter finds some mischief still for idle brains to do. He insists on it. That’s fundamental to the scheme of things.”
“But that’s no reason,” interrupted Oswald, “why you and the inventors who were behind you, and the Germans who made and loaded and fired that shell, shouldn’t all get together to do something that will grow and endure. Instead of killing one another.”
“Ah, that’s it!” said Peter. “But the word for that isn’t Peace.”
“Then what is the word for it?”
“I don’t know,” said Peter. “The Great Game, perhaps.”
“And where does it take you?”
Peter threw out his hands. “It’s an exploration,” he said. “It will take man to the centre of the earth; it will take him to the ends of space, between the atoms and among the stars. How can we tell beforehand? You must have faith. But of one thing I am sure, that man cannot stagnate. It is forbidden. It is the uttermost sin. Why, the Old Man will come out of his office himself to prevent it! This war and all the blood and loss of it is because the new things are entangled among old and dead things, worn-out and silly things, and we’ve not had the vigour to get them free. Old idiot nationality, national conceit—expanding to imperialism, nationality in a state of megalomania, has been allowed to get hold of the knife that was meant for a sane generation to carve out a new world with. Heaven send he cuts his own throat this time! Or else there may be a next time.... I’m all for the one world state, and the end of flags and kings and custom houses. But I have my doubts of all this talk of making the world safe—safe for democracy. I want the world made one for the adventure of mankind, which is quite another story. I have been in the world now, Nobby, for five-and-twenty years, and I am only beginning to suspect the wonder and beauty of the things we men might know and do. If only we could get our eyes and hands free of the old inheritance. What has mankind done yet to boast about? I despise human history—because I believe in God. Not the God you don’t approve of, Nobby, but in my Old Experimenter, whom I confess I don’t begin to understand, and in the far-off, eternal scheme he hides from us and which he means us to develop age by age. Oh! I don’t understand him, I don’t begin to explain him; he’s just a figure for what I feel is the reality. But he is right, he is wonderful. And instead of just muddling about over the surface of his universe, we have to get into the understanding of it to the very limits of our ability, to live our utmost and do the intensest best we can.”
“Yes,” said Oswald; “yes.” This was after his own heart, and yet it did not run along the lines of the Valedictory that had flowered with such Corinthian richness overnight. He had been thinking then of world peace; what Peter was driving at now was a world purpose; but weren’t the two after all the same thing? He sat with his one eye reflecting the red light of the fire, and the phrases that had come in such generous abundance overnight now refused to come at all.
Peter, on the couch, continued to think aloud.