STUDIES IN A DYING CULTURE
the arbitrament of blood and violence to protect or
extend its own—then an Army realises itself. In spite of
all war's horror and dangers, a kind of wild elation and
well-being fills it, and millions of men who fought in
the war can testify to the collective delirium that lifted
them out of the greyness of bourgeois existence.
Even this peace-time impotence was better to Law-
rence than the bourgeois relations which his soul re-
volted at. So he entered a Fighting Service. Not as an
officer. It was bourgeoisdom he detested, and it would
have been impossible for him to enter that class which
preserved even in the Army the characteristics he
loathed. He entered the ranks. He showed by this
gesture his intuitive knowledge that the nostalgia of his
life was for the future, the world of the proletariat. But
still the conscious forms of his education prevented him
from understanding himself.
He embraced, not only the proletariat, but the
machine. In those bitter later years, machines had a
fascination for him. The aeroplane, the motor-cycle
and the motor-boat seemed to him entities somehow
possessed of a strange power for man. He said and wrote
that to participate in the conquest of the air was at least
a work not altogether vain, yet why he could not say.
With the machine was the future ; and yet it was not
in the machine as a profit-maker that he was interested.
He was right. In the machine lay the significance he
sought. But not in the machine as mere machine, but
w, the machine consciously controlled by man, by whose
use he could regain the freedom and equality of primi-
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