After picking up more drafts, the train went on, grinding its way heavily through the silent darkness. The men were all asleep. He noticed the carriage was getting stuffy and headachey with foul air. Some one had shut the windows and ventilators while he was day-dreaming. That was the old bother—whether in huts or barracks they _would_ try to sleep in foul air. He softly slipped the window open a couple of inches—better already. Wonder why they like a fug? Mental and moral fug, too. Poor devils. All brought up to touch their hats to the gentry, do what they’re told, and work. Sort of helots. Yet they’re decent enough, got character, but no intelligence. That’s the real war, the only war worth fighting, the battle of the intelligence against inertia and stupidity and... Still, the intelligence is not always defeated, we’ve got here somehow. Yes! and look where we are! His mind half-sleepily ran off along a familiar track. What’s really the cause of wars, of this War? Oh, you can’t say one cause, there are many. The Socialists are silly fanatics when they say it’s the wicked capitalists. I don’t believe the capitalists wanted a war—they stand to lose too much in the disturbance. And I don’t believe the wretched governments really wanted it—they were shoved on by great forces they’re too timid and too unintelligent to control. It’s the superstition of more babies and more bread, more bread and more babies. Of course, all wars haven’t been mere population wars. ’Course not—Greek city states, mediæval Italian republics, wars of petty jealousy; naval wars for commercial advantages—Pisa, Genoa, Venice, Holland, England; the sport of Kings, eighteenth-century diversion of the aristocracy; wars of fanaticism, Moslems, the Crusades; emigration wars like the irruption of the barbarians.... There may be commercial motives behind this war, jolly short-sighted ones—they’ve already lost more than they can possibly gain. No, this is fundamentally a population war—bread and babies, babies and bread. It’s all oddly mixed up with the sexual problem we were battling with so brightly when this little packet of trouble was dumped on us by our virtuous forebears. It’s the babies and bread superstition. You encourage, you force people to have babies, lots of babies, millions of babies. As they grow up, you’ve got to feed ’em. You need bread. We all live from the land. England, and the rest of the world after it, went crazy with the Industrial Revolution—thought you could eat steel and railways. You can’t. The world of men is an inverted pyramid based on the bowed shoulders of the ploughman—or the steel-tractor—on the land. It’s the hunger and death business again. “Increase and multiply.” Damned imbecility of applying to over-populated and huge nations the sexual taboos forced on a little crowd of unhygienic Semitic nomads by sheer force of circumstance. Think of their infantile death rate! Breed like rabbits or vanish. Doesn’t apply to us. We’re a sacrifice to