Faraday's trip to Germany profoundly depressed his spirit. Europe was back again in the Dark Ages, all the darker for the glow of the blast furnaces churning out huge maimers of men, and he realised that all that millions had died and suffered for was to make the world an intolerable place for sensitive people to live in. He thought of the thousands of little village war memorials, those cheaply chiselled catalogues of chiselled men. And everywhere the strong and the brutal were flogging on their purblind serfs to pour out the gas, the shells, the phosphorus bombs, by which they themselves would be sent screaming to their deaths, instructed by the scientists, blessed by the priests - the ultimate irony. For Science should coldly, Religion passionately, have repudiated that vileness, the one made possible, the other sanctified.