n it and himself stretched
the weary generations still to come, generations of bickering and
accusation, greed and faintheartedness, and half truth and the hasty
blow. And all those years would be full of pitiful things, such pitiful
things as the blackened ruins in the town behind, the little grey-faced
corpses, the lives torn and wasted, the hopes extinguished and the
gladness gone....

He was no longer thinking of the Germans as diabolical. They were human;
they had a case. It was a stupid case, but our case, too, was a stupid
case. How stupid were all our cases! What was it we missed? Something,
he felt, very close to us, and very elusive. Something that would
resolve a hundred tangled oppositions....

His mind hung at that. Back upon his consciousness came crowding the
horrors and desolations that had been his daily food now for three
quarters of a year. He groaned aloud. He struggled against that renewed
envelopment of his spirit. "Oh, blood-stained fools!" he cried, "oh,
pitiful, tormented fools!

"Even that vile airship was a ship of fools!

"We are all fools still. Striving apes, irritated beyond measure by our
own striving, easily moved to anger."

Some train of subconscious suggestion brought a long-forgotten speech
back into Mr. Britling's mind, a speech that is full of that light which
still seeks so mysteriously and indefatigably to break through the
darkness and thickness of the human mind.

He whispered the words. No unfamiliar words could have had the same
effect of comfort and conviction.

He whispered it of those men whom he still imagined flying far away
there eastward, through the clear freezing air beneath the stars, those
muffled sailors and engineers who had caused so much pain and agony in
this little town.

"_Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do._"

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE

Section 1

Hugh's letters were becoming a very important influence upon Mr.
Britling's thought. Hugh had always been something of a letter-writer,
and now what was perhaps an inherited desire to set things down was
manifest. He had been accustomed to decorate his letters from school
with absurd little sketches--sometimes his letters had been all
sketches--and now he broke from drawing to writing and back to drawing
in a way that pleased his father mightily. The father loved this queer
trick of caricature; he did not possess it himself, and so it seemed to
him