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Updated: June 3, 2025
It was a host of the stone age that we were accompanying to battle we with the last word of the gunsmith's art from St. James' Street and the Strand. We had not long to wait for our enemy. A wild shrill clamor rose from the edge of the wood and suddenly a body of ape-men rushed out with clubs and stones, and made for the center of the Indian line.
The speechless ape-men or Alali certainly existed towards the end of the Tertiary period, during the Pliocene, possibly even the Miocene, period. As to the time and place of this real "creation of man" we can only express tentative opinions. I have also dealt fully with the relations of the various races and species of men to each other.
It needed a robust faith in the end to justify such tragic means. As we advanced together through the woods we found the ape-men lying thick, transfixed with spears or arrows. Here and there a little group of shattered Indians marked where one of the anthropoids had turned to bay, and sold his life dearly.
Men like our own H. F. Osborn may still cling to the beloved theory and furnish imaginary pictures of ape-men as proof, in recent books; but hear Prof. Ernest Haeckel himself: "Most modern investigators of science have come to the conclusion that the doctrine of evolution, and particularly Darwinism, is an error, and cannot be maintained." This was said some years before the Great War. Prof.
Our men, living in holes in the earth like ape-men, were taught the ancient code of the jungle law, to track down human beasts in No Man's Land, to jump upon their bodies in the trenches, to kill quickly, silently, in a raid, to drop a hand-grenade down a dugout crowded with men, blowing their bodies to bits, to lie patiently for hours in a shell-hole for a sniping shot at any head which showed, to bludgeon their enemy to death or spit him on a bit of steel, to get at his throat if need be with nails and teeth.
Yet, I can well imagine that the day may come when we may be glad that we were kept, against our will, to see something more of the wonders of this singular place, and of the creatures who inhabit it. The victory of the Indians and the annihilation of the ape-men, marked the turning point of our fortunes.
There was no mistaking the angular form of Professor Summerlee. In front of and around this dejected group of prisoners were several ape-men, who watched them closely and made all escape impossible. Then, right out from all the others and close to the edge of the cliff, were two figures, so strange, and under other circumstances so ludicrous, that they absorbed my attention.
We had, it is true, been only a week or so upon the top of the plateau, but all our spare clothing was in our camp below, and the one week had been a severe one upon us all, though least to me who had not to endure the handling of the ape-men.
Faced by ferocious creatures which they had never before seen, they took refuge in the caves which our young friend has described, but they have no doubt had a bitter fight to hold their own against wild beasts, and especially against the ape-men who would regard them as intruders, and wage a merciless war upon them with a cunning which the larger beasts would lack.
Then, after a long pause, he added: "The king of the ape-men was really a creature of great distinction a most remarkably handsome and intelligent personality. Did it not strike you?" "A most remarkable creature," said I. And the Professor, much eased in his mind, settled down to his slumber once more. "Those Were the Real Conquests"
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