Chapter Twenty

 

Christian soldiers, copulating soldiers; and all those wars, those holy wars, while echo answers, 'Whores, whores, whores!'  The God of Battles is always the God of Brothels, always and inevitably the God of Brothels....

      For Eustace Barnack, there was no longer any need to force the laughter.  It pealed now of its own accord, shattering what remained of that detestable silence, darkening and dissipating the last far gleams of the light.

      The whole universe quivered with amusement, rumbled with enormous hilarities.  And through the laughter echo kept answering.  'Whores and Brothels, Whores and Brothels.'

      A whole section of his intellectual being was suddenly restored to him.  He remembered his collection of Historical Jokes.  A million casualties and the Gettysburg Address, and then those abject, frightened negroes one sees in the little towns of Georgia and Louisiana.  The crusade for liberty, equality, fraternity, and then the rise of Napoleon; the crusade against Napoleon, and then the rise of German nationalism; the crusade against German nationalism, and now those unemployed men, standing, like half-animated corpses, at the corners of mean streets in the rain.

      And this was John's voice that he now remembered - vibrant with repressed enthusiasm, talking about the end of laissez-faire and production for use and the Russian Revolution.  In other words, two and a half times the population of London exterminated, in order that political power might be taken from one set of ruffians and given to another set; in order that a process of industrialization might be made a little more rapid and a great deal more ruthless than it otherwise would have been.  'Downwards and backwards, Anti-Christian soldiers!'  Laughter swelled to a crescendo.  He was filled with an enormous elation with the glory of universal derision, the ecstasy of contempt for everyone.

      Silliness and murder, stupidity and destruction!  He found the phrases waiting for him.  And the motive was always idealism, the instruments were always courage and loyalty - the heroic courage and loyalty without which men and women would never be able to persevere in their long-drawn suicides and assassinations.

      And all those treasures of knowledge placed so unhesitatingly at the service of passion!  All the genius and intelligence dedicated to the attempt to achieve ends either impossible or diabolic!  All the problems inherited from the last crusade and solved by methods that automatically created a hundred new problems.  And each new problem would require a new crusade, and each new crusade would leave fresh problems for yet further crusades to solve and multiply in the good old way.

      And then there were the Triumphs of Religion and Science.  Reforming Protestantism - sponsor of capitalistic exploitation.  Francis of Assisi miraculously upholding a Mystical Body that was also a political machine and a business concern.  Faraday and Clerk Maxwell working indefatigably that the ether might at last become a vehicle for lies and imbecility.

      And then the Triumph of Education - that deity to which his poor father had offered fifty thousand pounds and a Polytechnic Institute in yellow brick.  Education, compulsory and gratuitous.  Everybody had been taught to read, and the result was Northcliffe and advertisements for cigarettes and laxatives and whisky.  Everybody went to school, and everywhere the years of schooling had been made a prelude to military conscription.  And what fine courses in false history and self-congratulation!  What a thorough grounding in the religions of nationalism!  No God any more; but forty-odd infallible Foreign Offices.

      Once again, the whole universe shook with laughter.