'Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and
north-west, they say; and most of the bridges and large areas of
dock. Westminster, which held most of the government offices,
suffered badly from the small bomb that destroyed the Parliament,
there are very few traces of the old thoroughfare of Whitehall or
the Government region thereabout, but there are plentiful
drawings to scale of its buildings, and the great hole in the
east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor district and
very like the north and the south… It will be possible to
reconstruct most of it… It is wanted. Already it becomes
difficult to recall the old time-even for us who saw it.'
'It seems very distant to me,' said the girl.
'It was an unwholesome world,' reflected Karenin. 'I seem to
remember everybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They
were ill. They were sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious
about money and everybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate
a queer mixture of foods, either too much or too little, and at
odd hours. One sees how ill they were by their advertisements.
All this new region of London they are opening up now is
plastered with advertisements of pills. Everybody must have been
taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand they have
found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and
unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill
and tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying
age. They are equally strange to us. People's skins must have
been in a vile state. Very few people were properly washed; they
carried the filth of months on their clothes. All the clothes
they wore were old clothes; our way of pulping our clothes again
after a week or so of wear would have seemed fantastic to them.
Their clothing hardly bears thinking about. And the congestion
of them! Everybody was jostling against everybody in those awful
towns. In an uproar. People were run over and crushed by the
hundred; every year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed
or disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it was worse; people
used to fall dead for want of air in the crowded ways. The
irritation of London, internal and external, must have been
maddening. It was a maddened world. It is like thinking of a
sick child. One has the same effect of feverish urgencies and
acute irrational disappointments.
'All history,' he said, 'is a record of a childhood…
'And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and
keen about even a sick child-and something touching. But so much
of the old times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly
stupid, obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very
opposite to being fresh and young.
'I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of
nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of
blood and iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man.
Indeed, that is what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who
ever became great. I looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost
froggish face, with projecting eyes and a thick moustache to hide
a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing but Germany, Germany
emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his class in
Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to
ideas; his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a
bumpkin's elaborate cunning. And he was the most influential man
in the world, in the whole world, no man ever left so deep a mark
on it, because everywhere there were gross men to resonate to the
heavy notes he emitted. He trampled on ten thousand lovely
things, and a kind of malice in these louts made it pleasant to
them to see him trample. No-he was no child; the dull, national
aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness. Childhood is
promise. He was survival.
'All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education,
art, happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the
clatter of his sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool's
"blood and iron" passed all round the earth. Until the atomic
bombs burnt our way to freedom again…'
'One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium,' said
one of the young men.
'From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a
hundred thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but
war.'
'Were there no sane men in those days,' asked the young man, 'to
stand against that idolatry?'
'In a state of despair,' said Edith Haydon.
'He is so far off-and there are men alive still who were alive
when Bismarck died!'… said the young man…
Section 5
'And yet it may be Iam unjust to Bismarck,' said Karenin,
following his own thoughts. 'You see, men belong to their own
age; we stand upon a common stock of thought and we fancy we
stand upon the ground. I met a pleasant man the other day, a
Maori, whose great-grandfather was a cannibal. It chanced he had
a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the two were marvellously
alike. One felt that a little juggling with time and either
might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a
stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one.
The world also has its moods. Think of the mental food of