"
"They ought to be," said the Englishman, and thought. He was struck by
what seemed to him an amazingly novel idea.
"If it weren't for religions all men would serve God together," he
said. "And then there would be no wars--only now and then perhaps just a
little honest fighting...."
"And see here," said the Angel. "Here close behind this frightful
battle, where the German phalanx of guns pounds its way through the
Russian hosts. Here is a young German talking to two wounded Russian
prisoners, who have stopped to rest by the roadside. He is a German of
East Prussia; he knows and thinks a little Russian. And they too are
saying, all three of them, that the war is not God's will, but the
confusion of mankind.
"Here," he said, and the shadow of his hand hovered over the
burning-ghats of Benares, where a Brahmin of the new persuasion watched
the straight spires of funereal smoke ascend into the glow of the late
afternoon, while he talked to an English painter, his friend, of the
blind intolerance of race and caste and custom in India.
"Or here."
The Angel pointed to a group of people who had gathered upon a little
beach at the head of a Norwegian fiord.
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