“I should think so. Those honestly made, well, the chaps with brains deserve them. But, at the same time, there’s a lot of profiteering going on”—Pillivant shook an unctuous head—“which is a perfect disgrace.”
“Profiteering—that’s a new word.”
“You’ll find lots of new words and lots of all sorts of new things now you’ve waked up.”
“I’m sure I shall,” said Baltazar. “And now, if you’ve half an hour to spare, I wonder if you would mind telling me something about the war.”
That day and the next, Baltazar listened to Pillivant, the nurse and the doctor’s story of the world conflict, and read everything bearing on the subject with which they could supply him. Dr. Rewsby, who did not share Pillivant’s disdain for books, ransacked the little town for war literature. He bought him white books, pamphlets, back numbers of magazines and newspapers, maps. . . . What he heard, what he read, was the common knowledge of every intelligent child, but to this man of vast intellectual achievement it was staggeringly new. For those two days he lost sense of time, desire to move from the bewildering mass of lambent history that grew in piles by his bedside. The lies, the treacheries, the horrors that had accumulated on the consciousness of all other men one by one, burst upon him in one thundering concentration of hell. The martyrdom of Belgium, the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral, the sinking of the Lusitania, the use of poison gas, the bombing of open towns, the unmasking of the German Beast in all its lust and shamelessness—stunned him, so that at times he would put his hands to his head and cry: “It’s impossible! I can’t believe it.” And whoever was with him would answer: “It is true. What you read is but the outside of the devilry the civilized world is out to fight.” And his scholar’s mind would revolt. What of intellectual Germany? The mathematicians, the Orientalists, whose names were to him like household words, to say nothing of those eminent in sciences outside the sphere of his own studies? They were worse, the doctor declared, than the brutish peasant or the brutal operative. A monstrous intellectualism developed to the disregard of ethical sanction. The doctor brought him one of the great cartoons of the war, which he had cut out from some paper and kept, by Norman Lindsay, the great Australian black and white artist—the “Jekyll and Hyde” cartoon, representing a typical benevolent elderly German professor regarding himself in a mirror; and the reflection was a gorilla in Prussian spiked helmet and uniform, dripping with blood. And then Baltazar’s blood curdled in his veins as he realized the truth of the picture. All the mighty intellectualism of Germany was but an instrument of its gorilla animalism. It was an overwhelming revelation: the almost mesmeric dominance of Prussia over the other Teutonic States of Germany and Austria, reducing them to Prussia’s own atrophied civilization; that atrophied civilization itself, till now unanalysed, but now a byword of history, the development, on abnormal intellectual lines, of the ruthless barbarism of a non-European race. Strange that he had not thought of it before. Had anything good, any poem, picture, song, music, statue, dream building, sweet philosophy, ever come out of Prussia? Never. Not one. Her children were “fire and sword, red ruin and the breaking-up of laws.” And now the rest of the Germanic Empire had lost its soul. Prussia extended from the Baltic to the Danube. The whole of Central Europe was one vast cesspool, in which all things good were cast to deliquesce in putrefaction, while over it floated supreme the livid miasma of Prussianism.
In some sort of figurative conception as this did his brain realize the psychological meaning of the forces against which the civilized world was struggling. But there was the other side of the world’s embattled hosts, whose tremendous energies baffled his mental grasp. England’s Navy—yes. He had been born and bred in the belief of its invincibility. But the British Army? A glorious army, of course; a blaze of honour from Cressy upwards; a sure shield and buckler in the far-flung posts of Empire; but a thing necessarily apart from the vast military systems of the Continent of Europe. And now he learned, to his stupefaction, that the British Empire, calling up all her sons from within those same far-flung posts, had made itself, within two years, one of the three greatest military powers in the world. The casualties alone exceeded the total strength of the original British Army serving with the colours. The Army now was an organization of millions. Where had they come from? His three interpreters of the outer world gave him information according to their respective lights. All the early gathering of the hosts had been voluntary enlistments. The armies springing up at Lord Kitchener’s call had been labelled numerically by his magic name. Only recently had we been driven to conscription. And Kitchener himself—the only great soldier of whom he had ever heard? Drowned in the Hampshire last June. . . .
Then again the revolution in national life—the paper currency, the darkened streets of towns, the licensing laws—further excited his throbbing curiosity. He remembered with a spasm almost of remorse the few signs and tokens of war which had reached him and passed unheeded; the National Registration, which he had resented as a bureaucratic impertinence; the mad taxation of income which he had regarded as evidence of England’s decay. . . .
“Has ever man been such a fool as I, since the world began?”
The hard-headed doctor to whom this rhetorical question was addressed, replied: