There have been other wars!  Wars not inferior in the greatness of the stake and in the fierce animosity of feelings.  During that one which was finished a hundred years ago it happened that while the English Fleet was keeping watch on Brest, an American, perhaps Fulton himself, offered to the Maritime Prefect of the port and to the French Admiral, an invention which would sink all the unsuspecting English ships one after another—­or, at any rate most of them.  The offer was not even taken into consideration; and the Prefect ends his report to the Minister in Paris with a fine phrase of indignation:  “It is not the sort of death one would deal to brave men.”

And behold, before history had time to hatch another war of the like proportions in the intensity of aroused passions and the greatness of issues, the dead flavour of archaism descended on the manly sentiment of those self-denying words.  Mankind has been demoralised since by its own mastery of mechanical appliances.  Its spirit is apparently so weak now, and its flesh has grown so strong, that it will face any deadly horror of destruction and cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy, murderous contrivance.  It has become the intoxicated slave of its own detestable ingenuity.  It is true, too, that since the Napoleonic time another sort of war-doctrine has been inculcated in a nation, and held out to the world.

IV.

On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a progress, but a retracing of footsteps on the road of life, I had no beacons to look for in Germany.  I had never lingered in that land which, on the whole, is so singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous sympathies and magnanimous impulses.  An ineradicable, invincible, provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like a frowsy garment.  Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from it instinctively as from a threatening phantom.  I believe that children and dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of perception as far as spectral apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned.

I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space, without sights, without sounds.  No whispers of the war reached my voluntary abstraction.  And perhaps not so very voluntary after all!  Each of us is a fascinating spectacle to himself, and I had to watch my own personality returning from another world, as it were, to revisit the glimpses of old moons.  Considering the condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much to blame for giving myself up to that occupation.  We prize the sensation of our continuity, and we can only capture it in that way.  By watching.

We arrived in Cracow late at night.  After a scrambly supper, I said to my eldest boy, “I can’t go to bed.  I am going out for a look round.  Coming?”

He was ready enough.  For him, all this was part of the interesting adventure of the whole journey.  We stepped out of the portal of the hotel into an empty street, very silent and bright with moonlight.  I was, indeed, revisiting the glimpses of the moon.  I felt so much like a ghost that the discovery that I could remember such material things as the right turn to take and the general direction of the street gave me a moment of wistful surprise.