Then he turned to the question of this metallic beast’s release.  Would it ever be given blood?

“Men of my generation have been brought up in this threat of a great war that never comes; for forty years we have had it, so that it is with a note of incredulity that one tells oneself, ’After all this war may happen.  But can it happen?’”

He proceeded to speculate upon the probability whether a great war would ever devastate western Europe again, and it was very evident to White that he wanted very much to persuade himself against that idea.  It was too disagreeable for him to think it probable.  The paper was dated 1910.  It was in October, 1914, that White, who was still working upon the laborious uncertain account of Benham’s life and thought he has recently published, read what Benham had written.  Benham concluded that the common-sense of the world would hold up this danger until reason could get “to the head of things.”

“There are already mighty forces in Germany,” Benham wrote, “that will struggle very powerfully to avoid a war.  And these forces increase.  Behind the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama and the display of the vulgarer sort there arises a great and noble people. . . .  I have talked with Germans of the better kind. . . .  You cannot have a whole nation of Christophes. . . .  There also the true knighthood discovers itself. . . .  I do not believe this war will overtake us.”

“Well!” said White.

“I must go back to Germany and understand Germany better,” the notes went on.

But other things were to hold Benham back from that resolve.  Other things were to hold many men back from similar resolves until it was too late for them. . . .

“It is preposterous that these monstrous dangers should lower over Europe, because a certain threatening vanity has crept into the blood of a people, because a few crude ideas go inadequately controlled. . . .  Does no one see what that metallic beast will do if they once let it loose?  It will trample cities; it will devour nations. . . .”

White read this on the 9th of October, 1914.  One crumpled evening paper at his feet proclaimed in startled headlines:  “Rain of Incendiary Shells.  Antwerp Ablaze.”  Another declared untruthfully but impressively:  “Six Zeppelins drop Bombs over the Doomed City.”

He had bought all the evening papers, and had read and re-read them and turned up maps and worried over strategic problems for which he had no data at all—­as every one did at that time—­before he was able to go on with Benham’s manuscripts.

These pacific reassurances seemed to White’s war-troubled mind like finding a flattened and faded flower, a girl’s love token, between the pages of some torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked out from a heap of loot after rapine and murder had had their fill. . . .

“How can we ever begin over again?” said White, and sat for a long time staring gloomily into the fire, forgetting forgetting, forgetting too that men who are tired and weary die, and that new men are born to succeed them. . . .