there was one of Mr. Van der Pant, smiling at the front door, in Heinrich’s abandoned slippers.  There were endless pictures of Teddy also.  It is the happy instinct of the Kodak to refuse those days that are overcast, and the photographic record of a life is a chain of all its kindlier aspects.  In the drawer above these snapshots there were Hugh’s letters and a miscellany of trivial documents touching on his life.

Mr. Britling discontinued writing and turned these papers over and mused.  Heinrich’s letters and postcards had got in among them, and so had a letter of Teddy’s....

The letters reinforced the photographs in their reminder how kind and pleasant a race mankind can be.  Until the wild asses of nationalism came kicking and slaying amidst them, until suspicion and jostling greed and malignity poison their minds, until the fools with the high explosives blow that elemental goodness into shrieks of hate and splashes of blood.  How kindly men are—­up to the very instant of their cruelties!  His mind teemed suddenly with little anecdotes and histories of the goodwill of men breaking through the ill-will of war, of the mutual help of sorely wounded Germans and English lying together in the mud and darkness between the trenches, of the fellowship of captors and prisoners, of the Saxons at Christmas fraternising with the English....  Of that he had seen photographs in one of the daily papers....

His mind came back presently from these wanderings to the task before him.

He tried to picture these Heinrich parents.  He supposed they were kindly, civilised people.  It was manifest the youngster had come to him from a well-ordered and gentle-spirited home.  But he imagined them—­he could not tell why—­as people much older than himself.  Perhaps young Heinrich had on some occasion said they were old people—­he could not remember.  And he had a curious impulse too to write to them in phrases of consolation; as if their loss was more pitiable than his own.  He doubted whether they had the consolation of his sanguine temperament, whether they could resort as readily as he could to his faith, whether in Pomerania there was the same consoling possibility of an essay on the Better Government of the World.  He did not think this very clearly, but that was what was at the back of his mind.  He went on writing.

If you think that these two boys have both perished, not in some noble common cause but one against the other in a struggle of dynasties and boundaries and trade routes and tyrannous ascendancies, then it seems to me that you must feel as I feel that this war is the most tragic and dreadful thing that has ever happened to mankind.

He sat thinking for some minutes after he had written that, and when presently he resumed his writing, a fresh strain of thought was traceable even in his opening sentence.