The Invisible Victory

38

Today I retired. The afternoon of my sixty-fifth birthday saw a pleasant little ceremony in the great hall of Arundel College, where I was presented with a leather-bound book of congratulatory essays from my colleagues. The affair was managed by Hargreaves, both efficiently and enthusiastically. Elizabeth looked charming, and even our two sons managed an air of amiable sufferance.

The swords forged in the decade of the thirties were sheathed or shattered in the next. Now we have much better ones. I have seen only three truly significant happenings in my lifetime. The Nazis, and the toppling of their _horrid king, besmear'd with blood Of human sacrifice, and parents' tears._ Secondly, the invention of drugs to kill the germs which have prowled so dangerously round man ever since he evolved to intrude into their atmosphere on earth. And atomic fission, which keeps the world alive by frightening it to death. There is nothing like war as a stimulant of technical progress.

In Bunyan's day, tuberculosis was the Captain of the Men of Death. But whenever their captain falls, he is replaced by another. 'Malignant Fever' carved on old tombstones has been replaced in our ignorance by 'malignant disease'. I might myself have achieved the fourth significant event by producing the cure for at least some cancers. But I lost my enthusiasm for cancer research. It was replaced by doubt that the prolongation of life in our overcrowded and quarrelsome planet was an activity as saintly as we thought. Dogmagk felt the same about sulphonamides in the days of Hitler. Florey did about penicillin in the war.

The cubs of Hitler now purr in well-fed contentment. Himmler's death mask has a glass case in the Black Museum of Scotland Yard. We British become our old selves again when an excavator discovers a forgotten Nazi bomb, when we can evacuate our houses, drink tea together, and sing songs of happy cheer like William Blake's child on a cloud. And what do I conclude, who have been close enough to kiss the smiling and murderous faces of our century?

I can only agree with a voice of the 1930s, Susan Stebbing-_Human beings are too fine in their highest achievements to justify despair._

Leaving the hall afterwards, David Mellors came up to me, grinning. 'Do you remember in Germany after the war, when you desperately wanted some penicillin? You pinched it from my office when I left you alone for a minute. I did that on purpose, you know. I'm not such a fool as I look, boy.'