f the
Old Testament was the Devil of the New? But that had been the idea of
the Manichaeans!...

Mr. Britling, between the black hedges, came back presently from his
attempts to recall his youthful inquiries into man's ancient
speculations, to the enduring riddles that have outlasted a thousand
speculations. Has hate been necessary, and is it still necessary, and
will it always be necessary? Is all life a war forever? The rabbit is
nimble, lives keenly, is prevented from degenerating into a diseased
crawling eater of herbs by the incessant ferret. Without the ferret of
war, what would life become?... War is murder truly, but is not Peace
decay?

It was during these prowling nights in the first winter of the war that
Mr. Britling planned a new writing that was to go whole abysses beneath
the facile superficiality of "And Now War Ends." It was to be called the
"Anatomy of Hate." It was to deal very faithfully with the function of
hate as a corrective to inefficiency. So long as men were slack, men
must be fierce. This conviction pressed upon him....

In spite of his detestation of war Mr. Britling found it impossible to
maintain that any sort of peace state was better than a state of war. If
wars produced destructions and cruelties, peace could produce indolence,
perversity, greedy accumulation and selfish indulgences. War is
discipline for evil, but peace may be relaxation from good. The poor man
may be as wretched in peace time as in war time. The gathering forces of
an evil peace, the malignity and waste of war, are but obverse and
reverse of the medal of ill-adjusted human relationships. Was there no
Greater Peace possible; not a mere recuperative pause in killing and
destruction, but a phase of noble and creative living, a phase of
building, of discovery, of beauty and research? He remembered, as one
remembers the dead, dreams he had once dreamt of the great cities, the
splendid freedoms, of a coming age, of marvellous enlargements of human
faculty, of a coming science that would be light and of art that could
be power....

But would that former peace have ever risen to that?...

After all, had such visions ever been more than idle dreams? Had the war
done more than unmask reality?...

He came to a gate and leant over it.

The darkness drizzled about him; he turned up his collar and watched the
dim shapes of trees and hedges gather out of the night to meet the
dismal dawn. He was cold and hungry and weary.