The effect of India upon Benham's mind was a peculiar mixture of attraction and irritation.He was attracted by the Hindu spirit of intellectualism and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great world of India into a thousand futile little worlds, all aloof and hostile one to the other."I came to see India," he wrote, "and there is no India.
There is a great number of Indias, and each goes about with its chin in the air, quietly scorning everybody else."His Indian adventures and his great public controversy on caste began with a tremendous row with an Indian civil servant who had turned an Indian gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and culminated in a disgraceful fracas with a squatting brown holiness at Benares, who had thrown aside his little brass bowlful of dinner because Benham's shadow had fallen upon it.
"You unendurable snob!" said Benham, and then lapsing into the forceful and inadvisable: "By Heaven, you SHALL eat it!..."8
Benham's detestation of human divisions and hostilities was so deep in his character as to seem almost instinctive.But he had too a very clear reason for his hostility to all these amazing breaks in human continuity in his sense of the gathering dangers they now involve.They had always, he was convinced, meant conflict, hatred, misery and the destruction of human dignity, but the new conditions of life that have been brought about by modern science were making them far more dangerous than they had ever been before.He believed that the evil and horror of war was becoming more and more tremendous with every decade, and that the free play of national prejudice and that stupid filching ambitiousness that seems to be inseparable from monarchy, were bound to precipitate catastrophe, unless a real international aristocracy could be brought into being to prevent it.
In the drawer full of papers labelled "Politics," White found a paper called "The Metal Beast." It showed that for a time Benham had been greatly obsessed by the thought of the armaments that were in those days piling up in every country in Europe.He had gone to Essen, and at Essen he had met a German who had boasted of Zeppelins and the great guns that were presently to smash the effete British fleet and open the Imperial way to London.
"I could not sleep," he wrote, "on account of this man and his talk and the streak of hatred in his talk.He distressed me not because he seemed exceptional, but because he seemed ordinary.I realized that he was more human than I was, and that only killing and killing could come out of such humanity.I thought of the great ugly guns Ihad seen, and of the still greater guns he had talked about, and how gloatingly he thought of the destruction they could do.I felt as Iused to feel about that infernal stallion that had killed a man with its teeth and feet, a despairing fear, a sense of monstrosity in life.And this creature who had so disturbed me was only a beastly snuffy little man in an ill-fitting frock-coat, who laid his knife and fork by their tips on the edge of his plate, and picked his teeth with gusto and breathed into my face as he talked to me.The commoneside.The monster of steel and iron carries Kaiser and Germany and all Europe captive.It has persuaded them to mount upon its back and now they must follow the logic of its path.Whither?...Only kingship will ever master that beast of steel which has got loose into the world.Nothing but the sense of unconquerable kingship in us all will ever dare withstand it....Men must be kingly aristocrats--it isn't MAY be now, it is MUST be--or, these confederated metals, these things of chemistry and metallurgy, these explosives and mechanisms, will trample the blood and life out of our race into mere red-streaked froth and filth...."Then he turned to the question of this metallic beast's release.
Would it ever be given blood?
"Men of my generation have been brought up in this threat of a great war that never comes; for forty years we have had it, so that it is with a note of incredulity that one tells oneself, "After all this war may happen.But can it happen?"He proceeded to speculate upon the probability whether a great war would ever devastate western Europe again, and it was very evident to White that he wanted very much to persuade himself against that idea.It was too disagreeable for him to think it probable.The paper was dated 1910.It was in October, 1914, that White, who was still working upon the laborious uncertain account of Benham's life and thought he has recently published, read what Benham had written.
Benham concluded that the common-sense of the world would hold up this danger until reason could get "to the head of things.""There are already mighty forces in Germany," Benham wrote, "that will struggle very powerfully to avoid a war.And these forces increase.Behind the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama and the display of the vulgarer sort there arises a great and noble people....I have talked with Germans of the better kind....
You cannot have a whole nation of Christophes....There also the true knighthood discovers itself....I do not believe this war will overtake us.""WELL!" said White.
"I must go back to Germany and understand Germany better," the notes went on.
But other things were to hold Benham back from that resolve.Other things were to hold many men back from similar resolves until it was too late for them....
