r
indeed! Kamerad! Take _that_, you foul murderer!"

In the dim light the sentinel saw the retreating figure of Mr. Britling
make an extravagant gesture, and wondered what it might mean.
Signalling? What ought an intelligent sentry to do? Let fly at him?
Arrest him?... Take no notice?...

Mr. Britling was at that moment killing Count Zeppelin and beating out
his brains. Count Zeppelin was killed that night and the German Emperor
was assassinated; a score of lesser victims were offered up to the
_manes_ of Aunt Wilshire; there were memorable cruelties before the
wrath and bitterness of Mr. Britling was appeased. And then suddenly he
had had enough of these thoughts; they were thrust aside, they vanished
out of his mind.

Section 12

All the while that Mr. Britling had been indulging in these imaginative
slaughterings and spending the tears and hate that had gathered in his
heart, his reason had been sitting apart and above the storm, like the
sun waiting above thunder, like a wise nurse watching and patient above
the wild passions of a child. And all the time his reason had been
maintaining silently and firmly, without shouting, without speech, that
the men who had made this hour were indeed not devils, were no more
devils than Mr. Britling was a devil, but sinful men of like nature with
himself, hard, stupid, caught in the same web of circumstance. "Kill
them in your passion if you will," said reason, "but understand. This
thing was done neither by devils nor fools, but by a conspiracy of
foolish motives, by the weak acquiescences of the clever, by a crime
that was no man's crime but the natural necessary outcome of the
ineffectiveness, the blind motives and muddleheadedness of all mankind."

So reason maintained her thesis, like a light above the head of Mr.
Britling at which he would not look, while he hewed airmen to quivering
rags with a spade that he had sharpened, and stifled German princes with
their own poison gas, given slowly and as painfully as possible. "And
what of the towns _our_ ships have bombarded?" asked reason unheeded.
"What of those Tasmanians _our_ people utterly swept away?"

"What of French machine-guns in the Atlas?" reason pressed the case. "Of
Himalayan villages burning? Of the things we did in China? Especially
of the things we did in China...."

Mr. Britling gave no heed to that.

"The Germans in China were worse than we were," he threw out....

He was maddened by the thought of