Perhaps Mr. Britling had remarked that Germans were after all human beings, or that if England had listened to Matthew Arnold in the ’eighties our officers by this time might have added efficiency to their courage and good temper.  Perhaps he had himself put a touch of irritant acid into his comment.  Back flared the hate.  “Who are you, Sir?  What are you, Sir?  What right have you, Sir?  What claim have you, Sir?"...

Section 8

“Life had a wrangling birth.  On the head of every one of us rests the ancestral curse of fifty million murders.”

So Mr. Britling’s thoughts shaped themselves in words as he prowled one night in March, chill and melancholy, across a rushy meadow under an overcast sky.  The death squeal of some little beast caught suddenly in a distant copse had set loose this train of thought.  “Life struggling under a birth curse?” he thought.  “How nearly I come back at times to the Christian theology!...  And then, Redemption by the shedding of blood.”

“Life, like a rebellious child, struggling out of the control of the hate which made it what it is.”

But that was Mr. Britling’s idea of Gnosticism, not of orthodox Christianity.  He went off for a time into faded reminiscences of theological reading.  What had been the Gnostic idea?  That the God of the Old Testament was the Devil of the New?  But that had been the idea of the Manichaeans!...

Mr. Britling, between the black hedges, came back presently from his attempts to recall his youthful inquiries into man’s ancient speculations, to the enduring riddles that have outlasted a thousand speculations.  Has hate been necessary, and is it still necessary, and will it always be necessary?  Is all life a war forever?  The rabbit is nimble, lives keenly, is prevented from degenerating into a diseased crawling eater of herbs by the incessant ferret.  Without the ferret of war, what would life become?...  War is murder truly, but is not Peace decay?

It was during these prowling nights in the first winter of the war that Mr. Britling planned a new writing that was to go whole abysses beneath the facile superficiality of “And Now War Ends.”  It was to be called the “Anatomy of Hate.”  It was to deal very faithfully with the function of hate as a corrective to inefficiency.  So long as men were slack, men must be fierce.  This conviction pressed upon him....

In spite of his detestation of war Mr. Britling found it impossible to maintain that any sort of peace state was better than a state of war.  If wars produced destructions and cruelties, peace could produce indolence, perversity, greedy accumulation and selfish indulgences.  War is discipline for evil, but peace may be relaxation from good.  The poor man may be as wretched in peace time as in war time.  The gathering forces of an evil peace, the malignity and waste of war,