A few days ago I saw the Advent of the Great God Gun. The goddess
Aphrodite, according to ancient mythology, rose out of the foam of the
sea, and the Great God Gun, too, emerged from a bath, but it was a bath
of fire--fire so white and intense that the eyes were blinded by it as
they are blinded by the light of the unclouded sun at midday.
Our presence had been timed for the moment of his coming. We stood in
a great chamber higher than a cathedral nave, and with something even
less than the dim religious light of a cathedral nave. The exterior of
the temple was plain even to ugliness, a tower of high, windowless
walls faced with corrugated iron. Within was a maze of immense
mysteries, mighty cylinders towering into the gloom above, great pits
descending into the gloom below, gigantic cranes showing against the
dim skylight, with here and there a Cyclopean figure clad in oily
overalls and with a face grimy and perspiring.
The signal was given. Two shadowy figures that appeared in the
darkness above one of the cylinders began their incantations. A giant
crane towered above them and one saw its mighty claw descend into the
orifice of the cylinder as if to drag some Eurydice out of the hell
within. Then the word was spoken and somewhere a lever, or perhaps
only an electric button, was touched. But at that touch the whole
front of the mighty cylinder from top to bottom opened and swung back
slowly and majestically, and one stood before a pillar of flame forty
feet high, pure and white, an infinity of intolerable light, from
whence a wave of heat came forth like a living thing. And as the door
opened the Cyclops above--strange Dantesque figures now swallowed up in
the gloom, now caught in the light of the furnace--set the crane in
motion, and through the open door of the cylinder came the god,
suspended from the claw of the crane that gripped it like the fingers
of a hand.
It emerged slowly like a column of solid light--mystic, wonderful. All
night it had stood imprisoned in the cylinder enveloped by that bath of
incalculable hotness, and as it came out from the ordeal, it was as
white as the furnace within. The great hand of the crane bore it
forward with a solemn slowness until it paused over the mouth of one of
the pits. I had looked into this pit and seen that it was filled
nearly to the brim with a slimy liquid. It was a pit of oil--tens of
thousands of gallons of high-flash rape oil. It was the second bath of
the god.
The monster, the whiteness of his heat now flushing to pink, paused
above the pit. Then gravely, under the direction of the iron hand that
held him suspended in mid-air, he began to descend into the oil. The
breech end of the incandescent column touched the surface of the
liquid, and at that touch there leapt out of the mouth of the pit great
tongues of flame. As the red pillar sank deeper and deeper in the pit
the flames burst up through the muzzle and licked with fury about the
ruthless claw as if to tear it to pieces. But it would not let go.
Lower and lower sank the god until even his head was submerged and he
stood invisible beneath us, robed in his cloak of oil.
And there we will leave him to toughen and harden as he drinks in the
oil hungrily through his burning pores. Soon he will be caught up in
the claw of the crane again, lifted out of his bath and lowered into an
empty pit near by. And upon him will descend another tube, that has
passed through the same trials, and that will fit him as the skin fits
the body. And then in due course he will be provided with yet another
coat. Round and round him will be wound miles of flattened wire, put
on at a tension of unthinkable resistance. And even then there remains
his outer garment, his jacket, to swell still further his mighty bulk.
After that he will be equipped with his brain--all the wonderful
mechanism of breech and cradle--and then one day he will be carried to
the huge structure near by, where the Great God Gun, in all his
manifestations, from the little mountain ten-pounder to the leviathan
fifteen-inch, rests shining and wonderful, to be sent forth with his
message of death and destruction.
The savage, we are told, is misguided enough to "bow down to wood and
stone." Poor savage! If we could only take him, with his childlike
intelligence, into our temple to see the god that the genius and
industry of civilised man has created, a god so vast that a hundred men
could not lift him, of such incredible delicacy that his myriad parts
are fitted together to the thousandth, the ten-thousandth, and even the
hundred-thousandth of an inch, and out of whose throat there issue
thunders and lightnings that carry ruin for tens of miles--how ashamed
the poor savage would be of his idols of wood and stone! How he would
abase himself before the god of the Christian nations!
And what a voracious deity he is! Here in the great arsenal of
Woolwich one passes through miles and miles of bewildering activities,
foundries where the forty-ton hammer falls with the softness of a
caress upon the great column of molten metal, and gives it the first
crude likeness of the god, where vast converters are sending out flames
of an unearthly hue and brightness, or where men clothed in grime and
perspiration are swinging about billets of steel that scorch you as
they pass from the furnace to the steam-press in which they are stamped
like putty into the rough shape of great shells; shops where the roar
of thousands of lathes drowns the voice, and where the food of the god
is passing through a multitude of preparations more delicate than any
known to the kitchens of Lucullus; pools of silence where grave
scientific men are at their calculations and their tests, and where
mechanics who are the princes of their trade show you delicate
instruments gauged to the hundred-thousandth of an inch that are so
precious that they will scarcely let you handle them; mysterious
chambers where the high explosives are handled and where the shells are
filled, where you walk in felt slippers upon padded floors and dare not
drop a pin lest you wake an earthquake, and where you see men working
(for what pay I know not) with materials more terrible than lightnings,
themselves partitioned off from eternity only by the scrupulous
observance of the stern laws of this realm of the sleeping Furies.
A great town--a town whose activities alone are equal to all the labour
of a city like Leeds--all devoted to the service of the god who lies
there, mystic, wonderful, waiting to speak his oracles to men. I see
the poor savage growing more and more ashamed of his wood and stone.
And this, good savage, is only a trifling part of our devotions. All
over the land wherever you go you shall find furnaces blazing to his
glory, mountains shattered to make his ribs, factories throbbing day
and night to feed his gigantic maw and to clothe his servants.
You shall go down to the great rivers and hear a thousand hammers
beating their music out of the hulls of mighty ships that are to be the
chariots of the god, in which he will go forth to preach his gospel.
You shall go down into the bowels of the earth and see half-naked men
toiling in the blackness by the dim light of the safety lamp to win
that wonderful food which is the ultimate food of the god, power to
forge his frame, power to drive his chariots, power to wing his bolts.
You shall go to our temples of learning and the laboratories of our
universities and see the miracles of destruction that science, the
proudest achievement of man, can wring out of that astonishing mystery
coal-tar. You shall go to our ports and watch the ships riding in
proudly from the seas with their tributes from afar to the god. And
behind all this activity you shall see a nation working day and night
to pay for the food of the god, throwing all its accumulated wealth
into the furnace to keep the engines going, pawning its future to the
uttermost farthing and to the remotest generation.
And wherever the white man dwells, good savage, the same vision awaits
you--
... where Rhine unto the sea,
And Thames and Tiber, Seine and Danube run,
And where great armies glitter in the sun,
And great kings rule and men are boasted free.
Everywhere the hammers are ringing, the forests are falling, the
harvests are being gathered, and men and women toil like galley slaves
chained to the oar to build more and more of the image and feed him
more lavishly with the food of death. You cannot escape the great
traffic of the god though you go to the outposts of the earth. The
horses of the pampas are being rounded up to drag his wagons, the sheep
of Australia are being sheared to clothe his slaves, the pine trees of
Lapland are being split for his service, the silence of the Arctic seas
is broken by the throbbing of his chariots. As a neutral, good savage,
you shall be free to go to Essen and see marvels no less wonderful than
these you have seen at Woolwich, and all through Europe from Bremen to
the Golden Horn the same infinite toil in the service of the Great God
Gun will greet your astonished eyes.
Then, it may be, you will pass to where the god delivers his message;
on sea where one word from his mouth sends a thousand men and twenty
thousand tons of metal in one huge dust storm to the skies; on land
where over hundreds of miles of battle front the towns and villages are
mounds of rubbish, where the desolate earth is riven and shattered by
that treacly stuff you saw being ladled into the shells in the danger
rooms at Woolwich or Essen, where the dead lie thick as leaves in
autumn, and where in every wood you will come upon the secret shrines
of the god. At one light touch of the lever he lifts his head, coughs
his mighty guttural speech and sinks back as if convulsed. He has
spoken, the earth trembles, the trees about him shudder at the shock.
And standing in the observatory you will see far off a great black,
billowy mass rise in the clear sky and you will know that the god has
blown another god like unto him into fragments, and that in that mass
that rises and falls is the wreckage of many a man who has looked his
last upon the sun and will never till the home fields again or gladden
the eyes of those he has left in some distant land.
And then, to complete your experience, you shall hear from the prophets
of the Great God Gun the praises of his gospel, how that gospel is an
abiding part of the white man's faith, how it acts as a moral medicine
to humanity, purging it of its vices and teaching it the higher virtues
(a visit to the music halls and the Strand at midnight will help your
simple mind to realise this), and how the words of the poet, uttered in
satire--
That civilisation doos git forrad
Sometimes upon a powder cart--
were in truth the words of eternal wisdom.
I see the poor savage returning sadly to his home and gazing with
mingled scorn and humiliation at his futile image of wood and stone.
Perhaps another feeling will mingle with his sadness. Perhaps he will
be perplexed and puzzled. For he may have heard of another religion
that the white man serves, and it may be difficult for his simple mind
to reconcile that religion with the gospel of the Great God Gun.