I find over the Essex countryside, which has been for more than a year and a half a highway for Zeppelins, a new and curious admiration for them that has arisen out of these very disasters.  Previously they were regarded with dislike and a sort of distrust, as one might regard a sneaking neighbour who left his footsteps in one’s garden at night.  But the Zeppelins of Billericay and Potter’s Bar are—­heroic things. (The Cuffley one came down too quickly, and the fourth one which came down for its crew to surrender is despised.) I have heard people describe the two former with eyes shining with enthusiasm.

“First,” they say, “you saw a little round red glow that spread.  Then you saw the whole Zeppelin glowing.  Oh, it was beautiful! Then it began to turn over and come down, and it flames and pieces began to break away.  And then down it came, leaving flaming pieces all up the sky.  At last it was a pillar of fire eight thousand feet high....  Everyone said, ‘Ooooo!’ And then someone pointed out the little aeroplane lit up by the flare—­such a leetle thing up there in the night!  It is the greatest thing I have ever seen.  Oh! the most wonderful—­most wonderful!”

There is a feeling that the Germans really must after all be a splendid people to provide such magnificent pyrotechnics.

Some people in London the other day were pretending to be shocked by an American who boasted that he had been in “two bully bombardments,” but he was only saying what everyone feels more or less.  We are at a spectacle that—­as a spectacle—­our grandchildren will envy.  I understand now better the story of the man who stared at the sparks raining up from his own house as it burnt in the night and whispered “Lovely!  Lovely!”

The spectacular side of the war is really an enormous distraction from thought.  And against thought there also fights the native indolence of the human mind.  The human mind, it seems, was originally developed to think about the individual; it thinks reluctantly about the species.  It takes refuge from that sort of thing if it possibly can.  And so the second great preventive of clear thinking is the tranquillising platitude.

The human mind is an instrument very easily fatigued.  Only a few exceptions go on thinking restlessly—­to the extreme exasperation of their neighbours.  The normal mind craves for decisions, even wrong or false decisions rather than none.  It clutches at comforting falsehoods.  It loves to be told, “There, don’t you worry.  That’ll be all right.  That’s settled.” This war has come as an almost overwhelming challenge to mankind.  To some of us it seems as it if were the Sphynx proffering the alternative of its riddle or death.  Yet the very urgency of this challenge to think seems to paralyse the critical intelligence of very many people altogether.  They will say, “This war is going to produce enormous changes in everything.”  They will then subside mentally