this man and his talk and
the streak of hatred in his talk. He distressed me not because he seemed
exceptional, but because he seemed ordinary. I realized that he was more
human than I was, and that only killing and killing could come out of
such humanity. I thought of the great ugly guns I had seen, and of the
still greater guns he had talked about, and how gloatingly he thought
of the destruction they could do. I felt as I used to feel about that
infernal stallion that had killed a man with its teeth and feet, a
despairing fear, a sense of monstrosity in life. And this creature
who had so disturbed me was only a beastly snuffy little man in an
ill-fitting frock-coat, who laid his knife and fork by their tips on the
edge of his plate, and picked his teeth with gusto and breathed into
my face as he talked to me. The commonest of representative men. I went
about that Westphalian country after that, with the conviction that
headless, soulless, blood-drinking metal monsters were breeding all
about me. I felt that science was producing a poisonous swarm, a nest
of black dragons. They were crouching here and away there in France and
England, they were crouching like beasts that bide their time, mewed
up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in tarpaulins as hawks are
hooded.... And I had never thought very much about them before, and
there they were, waiting until some human fool like that frock-coated
thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a million, saw fit
to call them out to action. Just out of hatred and nationalism and
faction...."

Then came a queer fancy.

"Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty-apparatus; I see it
more and more as the gathering revenge of dead joyless matter for the
happiness of life. It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an enormous
plot of the rebel metals against sensation. That is why in particular
half-living people seem to love these things. La Ferriere was a fastness
of the kind of tyranny that passes out of human experience, the tyranny
of the strong man over men. Essen comes, the new thing, the tyranny of
the strong machine....

"Science is either slave or master. These people--I mean the German
people and militarist people generally--have no real mastery over the
scientific and economic forces on which they seem to ride. The monster
of steel and iron carries Kaiser and Germany and all Europe captive. It
has persuaded them to mount upon its back and now they must foll