These were thoughts that Mr. Britling had never faced before the war.  They came to him now, and they came only to be rejected by the inherent quality of his mind.  For weeks, consciously and subconsciously, his mind had been grappling with this riddle.  He had thought of it during his lonely prowlings as a special constable; it had flung itself in monstrous symbols across the dark canvas of his dreams.  “Is there indeed a devil of pure cruelty?  Does any creature, even the very cruellest of creatures, really apprehend the pain it causes, or inflict it for the sake of the infliction?” He summoned a score of memories, a score of imaginations, to bear their witness before the tribunal of his mind.  He forgot cold and loneliness in this speculation.  He sat, trying all Being, on this score, under the cold indifferent stars.

He thought of certain instances of boyish cruelty that had horrified him in his own boyhood, and it was clear to him that indeed it was not cruelty, it was curiosity, dense textured, thick skinned, so that it could not feel even the anguish of a blinded cat.  Those boys who had wrung his childish soul to nigh intolerable misery, had not indeed been tormenting so much as observing torment, testing life as wantonly as one breaks thin ice in the early days of winter.  In very much cruelty the real motive is surely no worse than that obtuse curiosity; a mere step of understanding, a mere quickening of the nerves and mind, makes it impossible.  But that is not true of all or most cruelty.  Most cruelty has something else in it, something more than the clumsy plunging into experience of the hobbledehoy; it is vindictive or indignant; it is never tranquil and sensuous; it draws its incentive, however crippled and monstrous the justification may be, from something punitive in man’s instinct, something therefore that implies a sense, however misguided, of righteousness and vindication.  That factor is present even in spite; when some vile or atrocious thing is done out of envy or malice, that envy and malice has in it always—­always? Yes, always—­a genuine condemnation of the hated thing as an unrighteous thing, as an unjust usurpation, as an inexcusable privilege, as a sinful overconfidence.  Those men in the airship?—­he was coming to that.  He found himself asking himself whether it was possible for a human being to do any cruel act without an excuse—­or, at least, without the feeling of excusability.  And in the case of these Germans and the outrages they had committed and the retaliations they had provoked, he perceived that always there was the element of a perceptible if inadequate justification.  Just as there would be if presently he were to maltreat a fallen German airman.  There was anger in their vileness.  These Germans were an unsubtle people, a people in the worst and best sense of the words, plain and honest; they were prone to moral indignation; and moral indignation is the mother of most of the cruelty in the world.