A vast majority of people are being swamped by the spectacular side of the business.  It was very largely my fear of being so swamped myself that made me reluctant to go as a spectator to the front.  I knew that my chances of being hit by a bullet were infinitesimal, but I was extremely afraid of being hit by some too vivid impression.  I was afraid that I might see some horribly wounded man or some decayed dead body that would so scar my memory and stamp such horror into me as to reduce me to a mere useless, gibbering, stop-the-war-at-any-price pacifist.  Years ago my mind was once darkened very badly for some weeks with a kind of fear and distrust of life through a sudden unexpected encounter one tranquil evening with a drowned body.  But in this journey in Italy and France, although I have had glimpses of much death and seen many wounded men, I have had no really horrible impressions at all.  That side of the business has, I think, been overwritten.  The thing that haunts me most is the impression of a prevalent relapse into extreme untidiness, of a universal discomfort, of fields, and of ruined houses treated disregardfully....  But that is not what concerns us now in this discussion.  What concerns us now is the fact that this war is producing spectacular effects so tremendous and incidents so strange, so remarkable, so vivid, that the mind forgets both causes and consequences and simply sits down to stare.

For example, there is this business of the Zeppelin raids in England.  It is a supremely silly business; it is the most conclusive demonstration of the intellectual inferiority of the German to the Western European that is should ever have happened.  There was the clearest a priori case against the gas-bag.  I remember the discussions ten or twelve years ago in which it was established to the satisfaction of every reasonable man that ultimately the “heavier than air” machine (as we called it then) must fly better than the gas-bag, and still more conclusively that no gas-bag was conceivable that could hope to fight and defeat aeroplanes.  Nevertheless the German, with that dull faith of his in mere “Will,” persisted along his line.  He knew instinctively that he could not produce aviators to meet the Western European; all his social instincts made him cling to the idea of a great motherly, almost sow-like bag of wind above him.  At an enormous waste of resources Germany has produced these futile monsters, that drift in the darkness over England promiscuously dropping bombs on fields and houses.  They are now meeting the fate that was demonstrably certain ten years ago.  If they found us unready for them it is merely that we were unable to imagine so idiotic an enterprise would ever be seriously sustained and persisted in.  We did not believe in the probability of Zeppelin raids any more than we believed that Germany would force the world into war.  It was a thing too silly to be believed.  But they came—­to their certain fate.  In the month after I returned from France and Italy, no less than four of these fatuities were exploded and destroyed within thirty miles of my Essex home....  There in chosen phrases you have the truth about these things.  But now mark the perversion of thought due to spectacular effect.