“And see here,” said the Angel.  “Here close behind this frightful battle, where the German phalanx of guns pounds its way through the Russian hosts.  Here is a young German talking to two wounded Russian prisoners, who have stopped to rest by the roadside.  He is a German of East Prussia; he knows and thinks a little Russian.  And they too are saying, all three of them, that the war is not God’s will, but the confusion of mankind.

“Here,” he said, and the shadow of his hand hovered over the burning-ghats of Benares, where a Brahmin of the new persuasion watched the straight spires of funereal smoke ascend into the glow of the late afternoon, while he talked to an English painter, his friend, of the blind intolerance of race and caste and custom in India.

“Or here.”

The Angel pointed to a group of people who had gathered upon a little beach at the head of a Norwegian fiord.  There were three lads, an old man and two women, and they stood about the body of a drowned German sailor which had been washed up that day.  For a time they had talked in whispers, but now suddenly the old man spoke aloud.

“This is the fourth that has come ashore,” he said.  “Poor drowned souls!  Because men will not serve God.”

“But folks go to church and pray enough,” said one of the women.

“They do not serve God,” said the old man.  “They just pray to him as one nods to a beggar.  They do not serve God who is their King.  They set up their false kings and emperors, and so all Europe is covered with dead, and the seas wash up these dead to us.  Why does the world suffer these things?  Why did we Norwegians, who are a free-spirited people, permit the Germans and the Swedes and the English to set up a king over us?  Because we lack faith.  Kings mean secret counsels, and secret counsels bring war.  Sooner or later war will come to us also if we give the soul of our nation in trust to a king....  But things will not always be thus with men.  God will not suffer them for ever.  A day comes, and it is no distant day, when God himself will rule the earth, and when men will do, not what the king wishes nor what is expedient nor what is customary, but what is manifestly right."....

“But men are saying that now in a thousand places,” said the Angel.  “Here is something that goes a little beyond that.”

His pointing hand went southward until they saw the Africanders riding down to Windhuk.  Two men, Boer farmers both, rode side by side and talked of the German officer they brought prisoner with them.  He had put sheep-dip in the wells of drinking-water; his life was fairly forfeit, and he was not to be killed.  “We want no more hate in South Africa,” they agreed.  “Dutch and English and German must live here now side by side.  Men cannot always be killing.”

“And see his thoughts,” said the Angel.