That day and the next, Baltazar listened to Pillivant, the nurse and the doctor’s story of the world conflict, and read everything bearing on the subject with which they could supply him. Dr. Rewsby, who did not share Pillivant’s disdain for books, ransacked the little town for war literature. He bought him white books, pamphlets, back numbers of magazines and newspapers, maps. . . . What he heard, what he read, was the common knowledge of every intelligent child, but to this man of vast intellectual achievement it was staggeringly new. For those two days he lost sense of time, desire to move from the bewildering mass of lambent history that grew in piles by his bedside. The lies, the treacheries, the horrors that had accumulated on the consciousness of all other men one by one, burst upon him in one thundering concentration of hell. The martyrdom of Belgium, the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral, the sinking of the _Lusitania_, the use of poison gas, the bombing of open towns, the unmasking of the German Beast in all its lust and shamelessness—stunned him, so that at times he would put his hands to his head and cry: “It’s impossible! I can’t believe it.” And whoever was with him would answer: “It is true. What you read is but the outside of the devilry the civilized world is out to fight.” And his scholar’s mind would revolt. What of intellectual Germany? The mathematicians, the Orientalists, whose names were to him like household words, to say nothing of those eminent in sciences outside the sphere of his own studies? They were worse, the doctor declared, than the brutish peasant or the brutal operative. A monstrous intellectualism developed to the disregard of ethical sanction. The doctor brought him one of the great cartoons of the war, which he had cut out from some paper and kept, by Norman Lindsay, the great Australian black and white artist—the “Jekyll and Hyde” cartoon, representing a typical benevolent elderly German professor regarding himself in a mirror; and the reflection was a gorilla in Prussian spiked helmet and uniform, dripping with blood. And then Baltazar’s blood curdled in his veins as he realized the truth of the picture. All the mighty intellectualism of Germany was but an instrument of its gorilla animalism. It was an overwhelming revelation: the almost mesmeric dominance of Prussia over the other Teutonic States of Germany and Austria, reducing them to Prussia’s own atrophied civilization; that atrophied civilization itself, till now unanalysed, but now a byword of history, the development, on abnormal intellectual lines, of the ruthless barbarism of a non-European race. Strange that he had not thought of it before. Had anything good, any poem, picture, song, music, statue, dream building, sweet philosophy, ever come out of Prussia? Never. Not one. Her children were “fire and sword, red ruin and the breaking-up of laws.” And now the rest of the Germanic Empire had lost its soul.