'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