If I were to set a frontispiece to a book about this War I would make
General Joffre the frontispiece.
4
As we swung back along the dusty road to Paris at a pace of fifty
miles an hour and upwards, driven by a helmeted driver with an aquiline
profile fit to go upon a coin, whose merits were a little flawed by a
childish and dangerous ambition to run over every cat he saw upon the
road, I talked to de Tessin about this big blue-coated figure of Joffre,
which is not so much a figure as a great generalisation of certain
hitherto rather obscured French qualities, and of the impression he had
made upon me. And from that I went on to talk about the Super Man, for
this encounter had suddenly crystallised out a set of realisations that
had been for some time latent in my mind.
How much of what follows I said to de Tessin at the time I do not
clearly remember, but this is what I had in mind.
The idea of the superman is an idea that has been developed by various
people ignorant of biology and unaccustomed to biological ways of
thinking. It is an obvious idea that follows in the course of half an
hour or so upon one's realisation of the significance of Darwinism. If
man has evolved from something different, he must now be evolving onward
into something sur-human. The species in the future will be different
from the species of the past.
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