The World Set Free

CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE LAST WAR

Section I

Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order,

it is difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow,

the motives that plunged mankind into the war that fills the

histories of the middle decades of the twentieth century.

It must always be remembered that the political structure of the

world at that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the

collective intelligence. That is the central fact of that

history. For two hundred years there had been no great changes in

political or legal methods and pretensions, the utmost change had

been a certain shifting of boundaries and slight readjustment of

procedure, while in nearly every other aspect of life there had

been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, and an enormous

enlargement of scope and outlook. The absurdities of courts and

the indignities of representative parliamentary government,

coupled with the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other

directions, had withdrawn the best intelligences more and more

from public affairs. The ostensible governments of the world in

the twentieth century were following in the wake of the

ostensible religions. They were ceasing to command the services

of any but second-rate men. After the middle of the eighteenth

century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the world's

memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen.

Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted,

common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new

possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the

past.

Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the

boundaries of the various 'sovereign states,' and the conception

of a general predominance in human affairs on the part of some

one particular state. The memory of the empires of Rome and

Alexander squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human

imagination-it bored into the human brain like some grisly

parasite and filled it with disordered thoughts and violent

impulses. For more than a century the French system exhausted

its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then the infection

passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart and

centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later ages

were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this

obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the

infinite knowingness of the political writer, the cunning

refusals to accept plain facts, the strategic devices, the

tactical manoeuvres, the records of mobilisations and

counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible almost as soon as

it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their

state craftsmen sat with their historical candles burning, and,

in spite of strange, new reflections and unfamiliar lights and

shadows, still wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps of

Europe and the world.

It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions

of men and women outside the world of these specialists

sympathised and agreed with their portentous activities. One

school of psychologists inclined to minimise this participation,

but the balance of evidence goes to show that there were massive

responses to these suggestions of the belligerent schemer.

Primitive man had been a fiercely combative animal; innumerable

generations had passed their lives in tribal warfare, and the

weight of tradition, the example of history, the ideals of

loyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the incitements

of the international mischief-maker. The political ideas of the

common man were picked up haphazard, there was practically

nothing in such education as he was given that was ever intended

to fit him for citizenship as such (that conception only

appeared, indeed, with the development of Modern State ideas),

and it was therefore a comparatively easy matter to fill his

vacant mind with the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion and

national aggression.

For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily

patriotic when presently his battalion came up from the depot to

London, to entrain for the French frontier. He tells of children

and women and lads and old men cheering and shouting, of the

streets and rows hung with the flags of the Allied Powers, of a

real enthusiasm even among the destitute and unemployed. The

Labour Bureaux were now partially transformed into enrolment

offices, and were centres of hotly patriotic excitement. At

every convenient place upon the line on either side of the

Channel Tunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the

feeling in the regiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by

grim anticipations, was none the less warlike.

But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of minds without

established ideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it

was with himself, a natural response to collective movement, and

to martial sounds and colours, and the exhilarating challenge of

vague dangers. And people had been so long oppressed by the

threat of and preparation for war that its arrival came with an

effect of positive relief.

Section 2

The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the

lower Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct

from the various British depots to the points in the Ardennes

where they were intended to entrench themselves.

Most of the documents bearing upon the campaign were destroyed

during the war, from the first the scheme of the Allies seems to

have been confused, but it is highly probable that the formation

of an aerial park in this region, from which attacks could be

made upon the vast industrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a

flanking raid through Holland upon the German naval

establishments at the mouth of the Elbe, were integral parts of

the original project. Nothing of this was known to such pawns in

the game as Barnet and his company, whose business it was to do

what they were told by the mysterious intelligences at the

direction of things in Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff

had also been transferred. From first to last these directing

intelligences remained mysterious to the body of the army, veiled

under the name of 'Orders.' There was no Napoleon, no Caesar to

embody enthusiasm. Barnet says, 'We talked of Them. THEY are

sending us up into Luxembourg. THEY are going to turn the

Central European right.'

Behind the veil of this vagueness the little group of more or

less worthy men which constituted Headquarters was beginning to

realise the enormity of the thing it was supposed to control…

In the great hall of the War Control, whose windows looked out

across the Seine to the Trocadero and the palaces of the western

quarter, a series of big-scale relief maps were laid out upon

tables to display the whole seat of war, and the staff-officers

of the control were continually busy shifting the little blocks

which represented the contending troops, as the reports and

intelligence came drifting in to the various telegraphic bureaux

in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller apartments there were

maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for example, the

reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav commanders were

recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps, as upon

chessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard

and the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world

supremacy against the Central European powers. Very probably he

had a definite idea of his game; very probably he had a coherent

and admirable plan.

But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new

strategy of aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy

that Holsten had opened for mankind. While he planned

entrenchments and invasions and a frontier war, the Central

European generalship was striking at the eyes and the brain. And

while, with a certain diffident hesitation, he developed his

gambit that night upon the lines laid down by Napoleon and

Moltke, his own scientific corps in a state of mutinous activity

was preparing a blow for Berlin. 'These old fools!' was the key

in which the scientific corps was thinking.

The War Control in Paris, on the night of July the second, was an

impressive display of the paraphernalia of scientific military

organisation, as the first half of the twentieth century

understood it. To one human being at least the consulting

commanders had the likeness of world-wielding gods.

She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute,

and she had been engaged in relay with other similar women to

take down orders in duplicate and hand them over to the junior

officers in attendance, to be forwarded and filed. There had

come a lull, and she had been sent out from the dictating room to

take the air upon the terrace before the great hall and to eat

such scanty refreshment as she had brought with her until her

services were required again.

From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view

not only of the wide sweep of the river below her, and all the

eastward side of Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to Saint Cloud,

great blocks and masses of black or pale darkness with pink and

golden flashes of illumination and endless interlacing bands of

dotted lights under a still and starless sky, but also the whole

spacious interior of the great hall with its slender pillars and

gracious arching and clustering lamps was visible to her. There,

over a wilderness of tables, lay the huge maps, done on so large

a scale that one might fancy them small countries; the messengers

and attendants went and came perpetually, altering, moving the

little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of men, and

the great commander and his two consultants stood amidst all

these things and near where the fighting was nearest, scheming,

directing. They had but to breathe a word and presently away

there, in the world of reality, the punctual myriads moved. Men

rose up and went forward and died. The fate of nations lay behind

the eyes of these three men. Indeed they were like gods.

Most godlike of the three was Dubois. It was for him to decide;

the others at most might suggest. Her woman's soul went out to

this grave, handsome, still, old man, in a passion of instinctive

worship.

Once she had taken words of instruction from him direct. She had

awaited them in an ecstasy of happiness-and fear. For her

exaltation was made terrible by the dread that some error might

dishonour her…

She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating

minuteness of an impassioned woman's observation.

He said little, she remarked. He looked but little at the maps.

The tall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm

of ideas, conflicting ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting

of the little red, blue, black, and yellow pieces on the board,

and wanted to draw the commander's attention to this and that.

Dubois listened, nodded, emitted a word and became still again,

brooding like the national eagle.

His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she

could not see his eyes; his moustache overhung the mouth from

which those words of decision came. Viard, too, said little; he

was a dark man with a drooping head and melancholy, watchful

eyes. He was more intent upon the French right, which was feeling

its way now through Alsace to the Rhine. He was, she knew, an

old colleague of Dubois; he knew him better, she decided, he

trusted him more than this unfamiliar Englishman…

Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in

profile; these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered

years ago. To seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse

to hurry-itself a confession of miscalculation; by attention to

these simple rules, Dubois had built up a steady reputation from

the days when he had been a promising junior officer, a still,

almost abstracted young man, deliberate but ready. Even then men

had looked at him and said: 'He will go far.' Through fifty

years of peace he had never once been found wanting, and at

manoeuvres his impassive persistence had perplexed and hypnotised

and defeated many a more actively intelligent man. Deep in his

soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery about the

modern art of warfare, the key to his career. And this discovery

was that NOBODY KNEW, that to act therefore was to blunder, that

to talk was to confess; and that the man who acted slowly and

steadfastly and above all silently, had the best chance of

winning through. Meanwhile one fed the men. Now by this same

strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious unknowns of the

Central European command. Delhi might talk of a great flank march

through Holland, with all the British submarines and hydroplanes

and torpedo craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it; Viard

might crave for brilliance with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes,

and ski-men among the Swiss mountains, and a sudden swoop upon

Vienna; the thing was to listen-and wait for the other side to

begin experimenting. It was all experimenting. And meanwhile he

remained in profile, with an air of assurance-like a man who

sits in an automobile after the chauffeur has had his directions.

And every one about him was the stronger and surer for that quiet

face, that air of knowledge and unruffled confidence. The

clustering lights threw a score of shadows of him upon the maps,

great bunches of him, versions of a commanding presence, lighter

or darker, dominated the field, and pointed in every direction.

Those shadows symbolised his control. When a messenger came from

the wireless room to shift this or that piece in the game, to

replace under amended reports one Central European regiment by a

score, to draw back or thrust out or distribute this or that

force of the Allies, the Marshal would turn his head and seem not

to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who approves a

pupil's self-correction. 'Yes, that's better.'

How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how

wonderful it all was. This was the brain of the western world,

this was Olympus with the warring earth at its feet. And he was

guiding France, France so long a resentful exile from

imperialism, back to her old predominance.

It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be

privileged to participate…

It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal

devotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact,

punctual. She must control herself…

She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when

the war would be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this

harshness, this armour would be put aside and the gods might

unbend. Her eyelids drooped…

She roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night

outside was no longer still. That there was an excitement down

below on the bridge and a running in the street and a flickering

of searchlights among the clouds from some high place away beyond

the Trocadero. And then the excitement came surging up past her

and invaded the hall within.

One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of

the room, gesticulating and shouting something.

And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn't

understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed

machinery and cables of the ways beneath, were beating-as pulses

beat. And about her blew something like a wind-a wind that was

dismay.

Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child

might look towards its mother.

He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but

that was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand

gauntly gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too

manifestly disposed to drag him towards the great door that

opened on the terrace. And Viard was hurrying towards the huge

windows and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent forward

and with eyes upturned.

Something up there?

And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.

The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against

the masonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping

down through the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two

of them, there had already started curling trails of red…

Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through

moments that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl

down towards her.

She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the

world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening,

all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out

about her and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting

pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly

flight of huge angular sheets of glass. She had an impression of

a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddened living thing

that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst a chaos of

falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earth furiously,

that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing rabbit…

She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.

She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that

a little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She

tried to raise herself and found her leg was very painful. She

was not clear whether it was night or day nor where she was; she

made a second effort, wincing and groaning, and turned over and

got into a sitting position and looked about her.

Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of

a vast uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing

had been destroyed.

At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous

experience.

She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world,

a world of heaped broken things. And it was lit-and somehow

this was more familiar to her mind than any other fact about

her-by a flickering, purplish-crimson light. Then close to her,

rising above a confusion of debris, she recognised the Trocadero;

it was changed, something had gone from it, but its outline was

unmistakable. It stood out against a streaming, whirling uprush

of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled Paris and the Seine

and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful, luminous

organisation of the War Control…

She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she

lay, and examined her surroundings with an increasing

understanding…

The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the

river. Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water,

from which these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps

of vapour came into circling existence a foot or so from its

mirror-surface. Near at hand and reflected exactly in the water

was the upper part of a familiar-looking stone pillar. On the

side of her away from the water the heaped ruins rose steeply in

a confused slope up to a glaring crest. Above and reflecting

this glare towered pillowed masses of steam rolling swiftly

upward to the zenith. It was from this crest that the livid glow

that lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind

connected this mound with the vanished buildings of the War

Control.

'Mais!' she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite

motionless for a time, crouching close to the warm earth.

Then presently this dim, broken human thing began to look about

it again. She began to feel the need of fellowship. She wanted

to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate her experience.

And her foot hurt her atrociously. There ought to be an

ambulance. A little gust of querulous criticisms blew across her

mind. This surely was a disaster! Always after a disaster there

should be ambulances and helpers moving about…

She craned her head. There was something there. But everything

was so still!

'Monsieur!' she cried. Her ears, she noted, felt queer, and she

began to suspect that all was not well with them.

It was terribly lonely in this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps

this man-if it was a man, for it was difficult to see-might for

all his stillness be merely insensible. He might have been

stunned…

The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a

moment every little detail was distinct. It was Marshal Dubois.

He was lying against a huge slab of the war map. To it there

stuck and from it there dangled little wooden objects, the

symbols of infantry and cavalry and guns, as they were disposed

upon the frontier. He did not seem to be aware of this at his

back, he had an effect of inattention, not indifferent attention,

but as if he were thinking…

She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was

evident he frowned. He frowned slightly, he had an air of not

wanting to be disturbed. His face still bore that expression of

assured confidence, that conviction that if things were left to

him France might obey in security…

She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer.

A strange surmise made her eyes dilate. With a painful wrench

she pulled herself up so that she could see completely over the

intervening lumps of smashed-up masonry. Her hand touched

something wet, and after one convulsive movement she became

rigid.

It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head

and shoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness

and a pool of shining black…

And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled,

and a rush of hot water came pouring over her. Then it seemed to

her that she was dragged downward…

Section 3

When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and

the black hair close-cropped en brosse, who was in charge of the

French special scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster

to the War Control, he was so wanting in imagination in any

sphere but his own, that he laughed. Small matter to him that

Paris was burning. His mother and father and sister lived at

Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had ever had, and it was

poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen. He slapped his

second-in-command on the shoulder. 'Now,' he said, 'there's

nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them

tit-for-tat… Strategy and reasons of state-they're over…

Come along, my boy, and we'll just show these old women what we

can do when they let us have our heads.'

He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the

courtyard of the chateau in which he had been installed and

shouted for his automobile. Things would have to move quickly

because there was scarcely an hour and a half before dawn. He

looked at the sky and noted with satisfaction a heavy bank of

clouds athwart the pallid east.

He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and

aeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck away

in barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods. A hawk could not

have discovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun.

But that night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was

handy and quite prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not

a couple of miles away; he was going to Berlin with that and just

one other man. Two men would be enough for what he meant to

do…

He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts

science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of

destruction, and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic

type…

He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming

face. He smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great

pleasures. There was an exotic richness, a chuckling flavour,

about the voice in which he gave his orders, and he pointed his

remarks with the long finger of a hand that was hairy and

exceptionally big.

'We'll give them tit-for-tat,' he said. 'We'll give them

tit-for-tat. No time to lose, boys…'

And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and

Saxony the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless

as a dancing sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass,

flew like an arrow to the heart of the Central European hosts.

It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above

the banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to

plunge at once into their wet obscurities should some hostile

flier range into vision. The tense young steersman divided his

attention between the guiding stars above and the level, tumbled

surfaces of the vapour strata that hid the world below. Over

great spaces those banks lay as even as a frozen lava-flow and

almost as still, and then they were rent by ragged areas of

translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim patches of the

land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw quite

distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps

and signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid

through a boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill.

But if the world was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through

that vapour floor came the deep roar of trains, the whistles of

horns of motor-cars, a sound of rifle fire away to the south, and

as he drew near his destination the crowing of cocks…

The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at

first starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to

east as the dawn came on. The Milky Way was invisible in the

blue, and the lesser stars vanished. The face of the adventurer

at the steering-wheel, darkly visible ever and again by the oval

greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm

beauty which all concentrated purpose gives, and something of the

happiness of an idiot child that has at last got hold of the

matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his

legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained

in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that

would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far

had ever seen in action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential

substance, had been tested only in almost infinitesimal

quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the

thought of great destruction slumbering in the black spheres

between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out very exactly

the instructions that had been given him, the man's mind was a

blank. His aquiline profile against the starlight expressed

nothing but a profound gloom.

The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital was

approached.

So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by

no aeroplanes at all. The frontier scouts they must have passed

in the night; probably these were mostly under the clouds; the

world was wide and they had had luck in not coming close to any

soaring sentinel. Their machine was painted a pale gray, that

lay almost invisibly over the cloud levels below. But now the

east was flushing with the near ascent of the sun, Berlin was but

a score of miles ahead, and the luck of the Frenchmen held. By

imperceptible degrees the clouds below dissolved…

Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering

light and with all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was

Berlin. The left finger of the steersman verified roads and open

spaces below upon the mica-covered square of map that was

fastened by his wheel. There in a series of lake-like expansions

was the Havel away to the right; over by those forests must be

Spandau; there the river split about the Potsdam island; and

right ahead was Charlottenburg cleft by a great thoroughfare that

fell like an indicating beam of light straight to the imperial

headquarters. There, plain enough, was the Thiergarten; beyond

rose the imperial palace, and to the right those tall buildings,

those clustering, beflagged, bemasted roofs, must be the offices

in which the Central European staff was housed. It was all coldly

clear and colourless in the dawn.

He looked up suddenly as a humming sound grew out of nothing and

became swiftly louder. Nearly overhead a German aeroplane was

circling down from an immense height to challenge him. He made a

gesture with his left arm to the gloomy man behind and then

gripped his little wheel with both hands, crouched over it, and

twisted his neck to look upward. He was attentive, tightly

strung, but quite contemptuous of their ability to hurt him. No

German alive, he was assured, could outfly him, or indeed any one

of the best Frenchmen. He imagined they might strike at him as a

hawk strikes, but they were men coming down out of the bitter

cold up there, in a hungry, spiritless, morning mood; they came

slanting down like a sword swung by a lazy man, and not so

rapidly but that he was able to slip away from under them and get

between them and Berlin. They began challenging him in German

with a megaphone when they were still perhaps a mile away. The

words came to him, rolled up into a mere blob of hoarse sound.

Then, gathering alarm from his grim silence, they gave chase and

swept down, a hundred yards above him perhaps, and a couple of

hundred behind. They were beginning to understand what he was.

He ceased to watch them and concentrated himself on the city

ahead, and for a time the two aeroplanes raced…

A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one

was tearing paper. A second followed. Something tapped the

machine.

It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces

below rushed widening out nearer and nearer to them. 'Ready!'

said the steersman.

The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the

bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied

it against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter.

Between its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he

bent his head until his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in

order to let the air in upon the inducive. Sure of its

accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane

and judged his pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent

forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the side.

'Round,' he whispered inaudibly.

The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a

descending column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a

whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks,

hurled high and sideways and the steersman, with gleaming eyes

and set teeth, fought in great banking curves for a balance. The

gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his nostrils dilated,

his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped…

When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the

crater of a small volcano. In the open garden before the

Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and

poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation. They

were too high to distinguish people clearly, or mark the bomb's

effect upon the building until suddenly the facade tottered and

crumbled before the flare as sugar dissolves in water. The man

stared for a moment, showed all his long teeth, and then

staggered into the cramped standing position his straps

permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down

after its fellow.

The explosion came this time more directly underneath the

aeroplane and shot it upward edgeways. The bomb box tipped to

the point of disgorgement, and the bomb-thrower was pitched

forward upon the third bomb with his face close to its celluloid

stud. He clutched its handles, and with a sudden gust of

determination that the thing should not escape him, bit its stud.

Before he could hurl it over, the monoplane was slipping

sideways. Everything was falling sideways. Instinctively he gave

himself up to gripping, his body holding the bomb in its place.

Then that bomb had exploded also, and steersman, thrower, and

aeroplane were just flying rags and splinters of metal and drops

of moisture in the air, and a third column of fire rushed eddying

down upon the doomed buildings below…

Section 4

Never before in the history of warfare had there been a

continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth

century the only explosives known were combustibles whose

explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and

these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night

were strange even to the men who used them. Those used by the

Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with

unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of

membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by which

the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and

admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up

radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This

liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb

was a blazing continual explosion. The Central European bombs

were the same, except that they were larger and had a more

complicated arrangement for animating the inducive.

Always before in the development of warfare the shells and

rockets fired had been but momentarily explosive, they had gone

off in an instant once for all, and if there was nothing living

or valuable within reach of the concussion and the flying

fragments then they were spent and over. But Carolinum, which

belonged to the beta group of Hyslop's so-called 'suspended

degenerator' elements, once its degenerative process had been

induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing

could arrest it. Of all Hyslop's artificial elements, Carolinum

was the most heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to

make and handle. To this day it remains the most potent

degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists

called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it

poured out half of the huge store of energy in its great

molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen

days' emission was a half of that first period's outpouring, and

so on. As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum,

though every seventeen days its power is halved, though

constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never

entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb

fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with

radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.

What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the

inducive oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the

Carolinum began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only

slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its

explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding

superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and

thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this

state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting

soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, as

more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread

itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of

what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The

Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up

with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam,

and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption

that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of

the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal. Once

launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and

uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from

the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent

vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud,

saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and

blistering energy, were flung high and far.

Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate

explosive that was to give the 'decisive touch' to war…

Section 5

A recent historical writer has described the world of that time

as one that 'believed in established words and was invincibly

blind to the obvious in things.' Certainly it seems now that

nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier

twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming

impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not

see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. Yet

the broad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind. All

through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of

energy that men were able to command was continually increasing.

Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow,

the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no

increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of

passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being

outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side.

Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of

malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of

police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a

matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a

handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a

city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the

children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as

the Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the

paraphernalia and pretensions of war.

It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce

between the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand,

and the world of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men

of a later time can hope to understand this preposterous state of

affairs. Social organisation was still in the barbaric stage.

There were already great numbers of actively intelligent men and

much private and commercial civilisation, but the community, as a

whole, was aimless, untrained and unorganised to the pitch of

imbecility. Collective civilisation, the 'Modern State,' was

still in the womb of the future…

Section 6

But let us return to Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre and its

account of the experiences of a common man during the war time.

While these terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were

happening in Paris and Berlin, Barnet and his company were

industriously entrenching themselves in Belgian Luxembourg.

He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day's journey

through the north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid

phrases. The country was browned by a warm summer, the trees a

little touched with autumnal colour, and the wheat already

golden. When they stopped for an hour at Hirson, men and women

with tricolour badges upon the platform distributed cakes and

glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and there was much

cheerfulness. 'Such good, cool beer it was,' he wrote. 'I had

had nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom.'

A number of monoplanes, 'like giant swallows,' he notes, were

scouting in the pink evening sky.

Barnet's battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place

called Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to

Jemelle. Here they detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the

railway-trains and stores were passing along it all night-and

next morning he: marched eastward through a cold, overcast dawn,

and a morning, first cloudy and then blazing, over a large

spacious country-side interspersed by forest towards Arlon.

There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked

entrenchments and hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton

that were designed to check and delay any advance from the east

upon the fortified line of the Meuse. They had their orders, and

for two days they worked without either a sight of the enemy or

any suspicion of the disaster that had abruptly decapitated the

armies of Europe, and turned the west of Paris and the centre of

Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction of Pompeii.

And the news, when it did come, came attenuated. 'We heard there

had been mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,' Barnet

relates; 'but it didn't seem to follow that "They" weren't still

somewhere elaborating their plans and issuing orders. When the

enemy began to emerge from the woods in front of us, we cheered

and blazed away, and didn't trouble much more about anything but

the battle in hand. If now and then one cocked up an eye into the

sky to see what was happening there, the rip of a bullet soon

brought one down to the horizontal again…

That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of

country between Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It

was essentially a rifle and infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do

not seem to have taken any decisive share in the actual fighting

for some days, though no doubt they effected the strategy from

the first by preventing surprise movements. They were aeroplanes

with atomic engines, but they were not provided with atomic

bombs, which were manifestly unsuitable for field use, nor indeed

had they any very effective kind of bomb. And though they

manoeuvred against each other, and there was rifle shooting at

them and between them, there was little actual aerial fighting.

Either the airmen were indisposed to fight or the commanders on

both sides preferred to reserve these machines for scouting…

After a day or so of digging and scheming, Barnet found himself

in the forefront of a battle. He had made his section of rifle

pits chiefly along a line of deep dry ditch that gave a means of

inter-communication, he had had the earth scattered over the

adjacent field, and he had masked his preparations with tussocks

of corn and poppy. The hostile advance came blindly and

unsuspiciously across the fields below and would have been very

cruelly handled indeed, if some one away to the right had not

opened fire too soon.

'It was a queer thrill when these fellows came into sight,' he

confesses; 'and not a bit like manoeuvres. They halted for a

time on the edge of the wood and then came forward in an open

line. They kept walking nearer to us and not looking at us, but

away to the right of us. Even when they began to be hit, and

their officers' whistles woke them up, they didn't seem to see

us. One or two halted to fire, and then they all went back

towards the wood again. They went slowly at first, looking round

at us, then the shelter of the wood seemed to draw them, and they

trotted. I fired rather mechanically and missed, then I fired

again, and then I became earnest to hit something, made sure of

my sighting, and aimed very carefully at a blue back that was

dodging about in the corn. At first I couldn't satisfymyself

and didn't shoot, his movements were so spasmodic and uncertain;

then I think he came to a ditch or some such obstacle and halted

for a moment. "GOT you," I whispered, and pulled the trigger.

'I had the strangest sensations about that man. In the first

instance, when I felt that I had hit him I was irradiated with

joy and pride…

'I sent him spinning. He jumped and threw up his arms…

'Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping

about. Suddenly I felt sick. I hadn't killed him…

'In some way he was disabled and smashed up and yet able to

struggle about. I began to think…

'For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn.

Either he was calling out or some one was shouting to him…

'Then he jumped up-he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with

one last effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still

and never moved again.

'He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him

dead. I had been wanting to do so for some time…'

The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made

for themselves in the woods below. A man was hit in the pit next

to Barnet, and began cursing and crying out in a violent rage.

Barnet crawled along the ditch to him and found him in great

pain, covered with blood, frantic with indignation, and with the

half of his right hand smashed to a pulp. 'Look at this,' he

kept repeating, hugging it and then extending it. 'Damned

foolery! Damned foolery! My right hand, sir! My right hand!'

For some time Barnet could do nothing with him. The man was

consumed by his tortured realisation of the evil silliness of

war, the realisation which had come upon him in a flash with the

bullet that had destroyed his skill and use as an artificer for

ever. He was looking at the vestiges with a horror that made him

impenetrable to any other idea. At last the poor wretch let

Barnet tie up his bleeding stump and help him along the ditch

that conducted him deviously out of range…

When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water,

and all day long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst.

For food they had chocolate and bread.

'At first,' he says, 'I was extraordinarily excited by my baptism

of fire. Then as the heat of the day came on I experienced an

enormous tedium and discomfort. The flies became extremely

troublesome, and my little grave of a rifle pit was invaded by

ants. I could not get up or move about, for some one in the trees

had got a mark on me. I kept thinking of the dead Prussian down

among the corn, and of the bitter outcries of my own man. Damned

foolery! It WAS damned foolery. But who was to blame? How had

we got to this?…

'Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with

dynamite bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and

suddenly dived down over beyond the trees.

' "From Holland to the Alps this day," I thought, "there must be

crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to

inflict irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic

to the pitch of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall

wake up."…

'Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. "Presently mankind

will wake up."

'I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were

among these hundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in

rebellion against all these ancient traditions of flag and

empire. Weren't we, perhaps, already in the throes of the last

crisis, in that darkest moment of a nightmare's horror before the

sleeper will endure no more of it-and wakes?

'I don't know how my speculations ended. I think they were not

so much ended as distracted by the distant thudding of the guns

that were opening fire at long range upon Namur.'

Section 7

But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of

modern warfare. So far he had taken part only in a little

shooting. The bayonet attack by which the advanced line was

broken was made at a place called Croix Rouge, more than twenty

miles away, and that night under cover of the darkness the rifle

pits were abandoned and he got his company away without further

loss.

His regiment fell back unpressed behind the fortified lines

between Namur and Sedan, entrained at a station called Mettet,

and was sent northward by Antwerp and Rotterdam to Haarlem.

Hence they marched into North Holland. It was only after the

march into Holland that he began to realise the monstrous and

catastrophic nature of the struggle in which he was playing his

undistinguished part.

He describes very pleasantly the journey through the hills and

open land of Brabant, the repeated crossing of arms of the Rhine,

and the change from the undulating scenery of Belgium to the

flat, rich meadows, the sunlit dyke roads, and the countless

windmills of the Dutch levels. In those days there was unbroken

land from Alkmaar and Leiden to the Dollart. Three great

provinces, South Holland, North Holland, and Zuiderzeeland,

reclaimed at various times between the early tenth century and

1945 and all many feet below the level of the waves outside the

dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern sun and

sustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of

laws and custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a

perpetual defence against the beleaguering sea. For more than two

hundred and fifty miles from Walcheren to Friesland stretched a

line of embankments and pumping stations that was the admiration

of the world.

If some curious god had chosen to watch the course of events in

those northern provinces while that flanking march of the British

was in progress, he would have found a convenient and appropriate

seat for his observation upon one of the great cumulus clouds

that were drifting slowly across the blue sky during all these

eventful days before the great catastrophe. For that was the

quality of the weather, hot and clear, with something of a

breeze, and underfoot dry and a little inclined to be dusty. This

watching god would have looked down upon broad stretches of

sunlit green, sunlit save for the creeping patches of shadow cast

by the clouds, upon sky-reflecting meres, fringed and divided up

by masses of willow and large areas of silvery weeds, upon white

roads lying bare to the sun and upon a tracery of blue canals.

The pastures were alive with cattle, the roads had a busy

traffic, of beasts and bicycles and gaily coloured peasants'

automobiles, the hues of the innumerable motor barges in the

canal vied with the eventfulness of the roadways; and everywhere

in solitary steadings, amidst ricks and barns, in groups by the

wayside, in straggling villages, each with its fine old church,

or in compact towns laced with canals and abounding in bridges

and clipped trees, were human habitations.

The people of this country-side were not belligerents. The

interests and sympathies alike of Holland had been so divided

that to the end she remained undecided and passive in the

struggle of the world powers. And everywhere along the roads

taken by the marching armies clustered groups and crowds of

impartially observant spectators, women and children in peculiar

white caps and old-fashioned sabots, and elderly, clean-shaven

men quietlythoughtful over their long pipes. They had no fear of

their invaders; the days when 'soldiering' meant bands of

licentious looters had long since passed away…

That watcher among the clouds would have seen a great

distribution of khaki-uniformed men and khaki-painted material

over the whole of the sunken area of Holland. He would have

marked the long trains, packed with men or piled with great guns

and war material, creeping slowly, alert for train-wreckers,

along the north-going lines; he would have seen the Scheldt and

Rhine choked with shipping, and pouring out still more men and

still more material; he would have noticed halts and

provisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling

caterpillars of cavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons, the

huge beetles of great guns, crawling under the poplars along the

dykes and roads northward, along ways lined by the neutral,

unmolested, ambiguously observant Dutch. All the barges and

shipping upon the canals had been requisitioned for transport. In

that clear, bright, warm weather, it would all have looked from

above like some extravagant festival of animated toys.

As the sun sank westward the spectacle must have become a little

indistinct because of a golden haze; everything must have become

warmer and more glowing, and because of the lengthening of the

shadows more manifestly in relief. The shadows of the tall

churches grew longer and longer, until they touched the horizon

and mingled in the universal shadow; and then, slow, and soft,

and wrapping the world in fold after fold of deepening blue, came

the night-the night at first obscurely simple, and then with

faint points here and there, and then jewelled in darkling

splendour with a hundred thousand lights. Out of that mingling of

darkness and ambiguous glares the noise of an unceasing activity

would have arisen, the louder and plainer now because there was

no longer any distraction of sight.

It may be that watcher drifting in the pellucid gulf beneath the

stars watched all through the night; it may be that he dozed. But

if he gave way to so natural a proclivity, assuredly on the

fourth night of the great flank march he was aroused, for that

was the night of the battle in the air that decided the fate of

Holland. The aeroplanes were fighting at last, and suddenly

about him, above and below, with cries and uproar rushing out of

the four quarters of heaven, striking, plunging, oversetting,

soaring to the zenith and dropping to the ground, they came to

assail or defend the myriads below.

Secretly the Central European power had gathered his flying

machines together, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a

handful of ten thousand knives over the low country. And amidst

that swarming flight were five that drove headlong for the sea

walls of Holland, carrying atomic bombs. From north and west and

south, the allied aeroplanes rose in response and swept down upon

this sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began. Men

rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like

archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth.

Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the

heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking

charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this

giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?

And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped

and locked and dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and

the stars, came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and

first one and then a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged

hungrily down upon the Dutchmen's dykes and struck between land

and sea and flared up again in enormous columns of glare and

crimsoned smoke and steam.

And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires

and trees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea,

tumbled with anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood…

Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous

crying and a flurry of alarm bells…

The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky,

like things that suddenly knowthemselves to be wicked…

Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might

quench, the waves came roaring in upon the land…

Section 8

'We had cursed our luck,' says Barnet, 'that we could not get to

our quarters at Alkmaar that night. There, we were told, were

provisions, tobacco, and everything for which we craved. But the

main canal from Zaandam and Amsterdam was hopelessly jammed with

craft, and we were glad of a chance opening that enabled us to

get out of the main column and lie up in a kind of little harbour

very much neglected and weedgrown before a deserted house. We

broke into this and found some herrings in a barrel, a heap of

cheeses, and stone bottles of gin in the cellar; and with this I

cheered my starving men. We made fires and toasted the cheese and

grilled our herrings. None of us had slept for nearly forty

hours, and I determined to stay in this refuge until dawn and

then if the traffic was still choked leave the barge and march

the rest of the way into Alkmaar.

'This place we had got into was perhaps a hundred yards from the

canal and underneath a little brick bridge we could see the

flotilla still, and hear the voices of the soldiers. Presently

five or six other barges came through and lay up in the meer near

by us, and with two of these, full of men of the Antrim regiment,

I shared my find of provisions. In return we got tobacco. A

large expanse of water spread to the westward of us and beyond

were a cluster of roofs and one or two church towers. The barge

was rather cramped for so many men, and I let several squads,

thirty or forty perhaps altogether, bivouac on the bank. I did

not let them go into the house on account of the furniture, and I

left a note of indebtedness for the food we had taken. We were

particularly glad of our tobacco and fires, because of the

numerous mosquitoes that rose about us.

'The gate of the house from which we had provisioned ourselves

was adorned with the legend, Vreugde bij Vrede, "Joy with Peace,"

and it bore every mark of the busy retirement of a comfort-loving

proprietor. I went along his garden, which was gay and delightful

with big bushes of rose and sweet brier, to a quaint little

summer-house, and there I sat and watched the men in groups

cooking and squatting along the bank. The sun was setting in a

nearly cloudless sky.

'For the last two weeks I had been a wholly occupied man, intent

only upon obeying the orders that came down to me. All through

this time I had been working to the very limit of my mental and

physical faculties, and my only moments of rest had been devoted

to snatches of sleep. Now came this rare, unexpected interlude,

and I could look detachedly upon what I was doing and feel

something of its infinite wonderfulness. I was irradiated with

affection for the men of my company and with admiration at their

cheerful acquiescence in the subordination and needs of our

positions. I watched their proceedings and heard their pleasant

voices. How willing those men were! How ready to accept

leadership and forget themselves in collective ends! I thought

how manfully they had gone through all the strains and toil of

the last two weeks, how they had toughened and shaken down to

comradeship together, and how much sweetness there is after all

in our foolish human blood. For they were just one casual sample

of the species-their patience and readiness lay, as the energy

of the atom had lain, still waiting to be properly utilised.

Again it came to me with overpowering force that the supreme need

of our race is leading, that the supreme task is to discover

leading, to forget oneself in realising the collective purpose of

the race. Once more I saw life plain…'

Very characteristic is that of the 'rather too corpulent' young

officer, who was afterwards to set it all down in the Wander

Jahre. Very characteristic, too, it is of the change in men's

hearts that was even then preparing a new phase of human history.

He goes on to write of the escape from individuality in science

and service, and of his discovery of this 'salvation.' All that

was then, no doubt, very moving and original; now it seems only

the most obvious commonplace of human life.

The glow of the sunset faded, the twilight deepened into night.

The fires burnt the brighter, and some Irishmen away across the

meer started singing. But Barnet's men were too weary for that

sort of thing, and soon the bank and the barge were heaped with

sleeping forms.

'I alone seemed unable to sleep. I suppose I was over-weary, and

after a little feverish slumber by the tiller of the barge I sat

up, awake and uneasy…

'That night Holland seemed all sky. There was just a little

black lower rim to things, a steeple, perhaps, or a line of

poplars, and then the great hemisphere swept over us. As at

first the sky was empty. Yet my uneasiness referred itself in

some vague way to the sky.

'And now I was melancholy. I found something strangely sorrowful

and submissive in the sleepers all about me, those men who had

marched so far, who had left all the established texture of their

lives behind them to come upon this mad campaign, this campaign

that signified nothing and consumed everything, this mere fever

of fighting. I saw how little and feeble is the life of man, a

thing of chances, preposterously unable to find the will to

realise even the most timid of its dreams. And I wondered if

always it would be so, if man was a doomed animal who would never

to the last days of his time take hold of fate and change it to

his will. Always, it may be, he will remain kindly but jealous,

desirous but discursive, able and unwisely impulsive, until

Saturn who begot him shall devour him in his turn…

'I was roused from these thoughts by the sudden realisation of

the presence of a squadron of aeroplanes far away to the

north-east and very high. They looked like little black dashes

against the midnight blue. I remember that I looked up at them at

first rather idly-as one might notice a flight of birds. Then I

perceived that they were only the extreme wing of a great fleet

that was advancing in a long line very swiftly from the direction

of the frontier and my attention tightened.

'Directly I saw that fleet I was astonished not to have seen it

before.

'I stood up softly, undesirous of disturbing my companions, but

with my heart beating now rather more rapidly with surprise and

excitement. I strained my ears for any sound of guns along our

front. Almost instinctively I turned about for protection to the

south and west, and peered; and then I saw coming as fast and

much nearer to me, as if they had sprung out of the darkness,

three banks of aeroplanes; a group of squadrons very high, a main

body at a height perhaps of one or two thousand feet, and a

doubtful number flying low and very indistinct. The middle ones

were so thick they kept putting out groups of stars. And I

realised that after all there was to be fighting in the air.

'There was something extraordinarily strange in this swift,

noiseless convergence of nearly invisible combatants above the

sleeping hosts. Every one about me was still unconscious; there

was no sign as yet of any agitation among the shipping on the

main canal, whose whole course, dotted with unsuspicious lights

and fringed with fires, must have been clearly perceptible from

above. Then a long way off towards Alkmaar I heard bugles, and

after that shots, and then a wild clamour of bells. I determined

to let my men sleep on for as long as they could…

'The battle was joined with the swiftness of dreaming. I do not

think it can have been five minutes from the moment when I first

became aware of the Central European air fleet to the contact of

the two forces. I saw it quite plainly in silhouette against the

luminous blue of the northern sky. The allied aeroplanes-they

were mostly French-came pouring down like a fierce shower upon

the middle of the Central European fleet. They looked exactly

like a coarser sort of rain. There was a crackling sound-the

first sound I heard-it reminded one of the Aurora Borealis, and

I supposed it was an interchange of rifle shots. There were

flashes like summer lightning; and then all the sky became a

whirling confusion of battle that was still largely noiseless.

Some of the Central European aeroplanes were certainly charged

and overset; others seemed to collapse and fall and then flare

out with so bright a light that it took the edge off one's vision

and made the rest of the battle disappear as though it had been

snatched back out of sight.

'And then, while I still peered and tried to shade these flames

from my eyes with my hand, and while the men about me were

beginning to stir, the atomic bombs were thrown at the dykes.

They made a mighty thunder in the air, and fell like Lucifer in

the picture, leaving a flaring trail in the sky. The night,

which had been pellucid and detailed and eventful, seemed to

vanish, to be replaced abruptly by a black background to these

tremendous pillars of fire…

'Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was

filled with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds…

'There was something discontinuous in this impact. At one moment

I was a lonely watcher in a sleeping world; the next saw every

one about me afoot, the whole world awake and amazed…

'And then the wind had struck me a buffet, taken my helmet and

swept aside the summerhouse of Vreugde bij Vrede, as a scythe

sweeps away grass. I saw the bombs fall, and then watched a great

crimson flare leap responsive to each impact, and mountainous

masses of red-lit steam and flying fragments clamber up towards

the zenith. Against the glare I saw the country-side for miles

standing black and clear, churches, trees, chimneys. And

suddenly I understood. The Central Europeans had burst the dykes.

Those flares meant the bursting of the dykes, and in a little

while the sea-water would be upon us…'

He goes on to tell with a certain prolixity of the steps he

took-and all things considered they were very intelligent

steps-to meet this amazing crisis. He got his men aboard and

hailed the adjacent barges; he got the man who acted as barge

engineer at his post and the engines working, he cast loose from

his moorings. Then he bethought himself of food, and contrived to

land five men, get in a few dozen cheeses, and ship his men again

before the inundation reached them.

He is reasonably proud of this piece of coolness. His idea was

to take the wave head-on and with his engines full speed ahead.

And all the while he was thanking heaven he was not in the jam of

traffic in the main canal. He rather, I think, overestimated the

probable rush of waters; he dreaded being swept away, he

explains, and smashed against houses and trees.

He does not give any estimate of the time it took between the

bursting of the dykes and the arrival of the waters, but it was

probably an interval of about twenty minutes or half an hour. He

was working now in darkness-save for the light of his

lantern-and in a great wind. He hung out head and stern

lights…

Whirling torrents of steam were pouring up from the advancing

waters, which had rushed, it must be remembered, through nearly

incandescent gaps in the sea defences, and this vast uprush of

vapour soon veiled the flaring centres of explosion altogether.

'The waters came at last, an advancing cascade. It was like a

broad roller sweeping across the country. They came with a deep,

roaring sound. I had expected a Niagara, but the total fall of

the front could not have been much more than twelve feet. Our

barge hesitated for a moment, took a dose over her bows, and then

lifted. I signalled for full speed ahead and brought her head

upstream, and held on like grim death to keep her there.

'There was a wind about as strong as the flood, and I found we

were pounding against every conceivable buoyant object that had

been between us and the sea. The only light in the world now

came from our lamps, the steam became impenetrable at a score of

yards from the boat, and the roar of the wind and water cut us

off from all remoter sounds. The black, shining waters swirled

by, coming into the light of our lamps out of an ebony blackness

and vanishing again into impenetrable black. And on the waters

came shapes, came things that flashed upon us for a moment, now a

half-submerged boat, now a cow, now a huge fragment of a house's

timberings, now a muddle of packing-cases and scaffolding. The

things clapped into sight like something shown by the opening of

a shutter, and then bumped shatteringly against us or rushed by

us. Once I saw very clearly a man's white face…

'All the while a group of labouring, half-submerged trees

remained ahead of us, drawing very slowly nearer. I steered a

course to avoid them. They seemed to gesticulate a frantic

despair against the black steam clouds behind. Once a great

branch detached itself and tore shuddering by me. We did, on the

whole, make headway. The last I saw of Vreugde bij Vrede before

the night swallowed it, was almost dead astern of us…'

Section 9

Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had

been badly strained, and his men were pumping or baling in

relays. He had got about a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose

boat had capsized near him, and he had three other boats in tow.

He was afloat, and somewhere between Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but

he could not tell where. It was a day that was still half night.

Gray waters stretched in every direction under a dark gray sky,

and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, in many

cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the upper

third of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted

a dimly seen flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned,

furniture, rafts, timbering, and miscellaneous objects.

The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there

did a dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box

or chair or such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was

not till the Thursday that the dead came to the surface in any

quantity. The view was bounded on every side by a gray mist that

closed overhead in a gray canopy. The air cleared in the

afternoon, and then, far away to the west under great banks of

steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of the atomic bombs came

visible across the waste of water.

They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London

sunsets. 'They sat upon the sea,' says Barnet, 'like frayed-out

waterlilies of flame.'

Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the

track of the canal, in helping people who were adrift, in picking

up derelict boats, and in taking people out of imperilled houses.

He found other military barges similarly employed, and it was

only as the day wore on and the immediate appeals for aid were

satisfied that he thought of food and drink for his men, and what

course he had better pursue. They had a little cheese, but no

water. 'Orders,' that mysterious direction, had at last

altogether disappeared. He perceived he had now to act upon his

own responsibility.

'One's sense was of a destruction so far-reaching and of a world

so altered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and

expect to find things as they had been before the war began. I

sat on the quarter-deck with Mylius my engineer and Kemp and two

others of the non-commissioned officers, and we consulted upon

our line of action. We were foodless and aimless. We agreed

that our fighting value was extremely small, and that our first

duty was to get ourselves in touch with food and instructions

again. Whatever plan of campaign had directed our movements was

manifestly smashed to bits. Mylius was of opinion that we could

take a line westward and get back to England across the North

Sea. He calculated that with such a motor barge as ours it would

be possible to reach the Yorkshire coast within four-and-twenty

hours. But this idea I overruled because of the shortness of our

provisions, and more particularly because of our urgent need of

water.

'Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their

demands did much to exasperate our thirst. I decided that if we

went away to the south we should reach hilly country, or at least

country that was not submerged, and then we should be able to

land, find some stream, drink, and get supplies and news. Many of

the barges adrift in the haze about us were filled with British

soldiers and had floated up from the Nord See Canal, but none of

them were any better informed than ourselves of the course of

events. "Orders" had, in fact, vanished out of the sky.

' "Orders" made a temporary reappearance late that evening in the

form of a megaphone hail from a British torpedo boat, announcing

a truce, and giving the welcome information that food and water

were being hurried down the Rhine and were to be found on the

barge flotilla lying over the old Rhine above Leiden.'…

We will not follow Barnet, however, in the description of his

strange overland voyage among trees and houses and churches by

Zaandam and between Haarlem and Amsterdam, to Leiden. It was a

voyage in a red-lit mist, in a world of steamy silhouette, full

of strange voices and perplexity, and with every other sensation

dominated by a feverish thirst. 'We sat,' he says, 'in a little

huddled group, saying very little, and the men forward were mere

knots of silent endurance. Our only continuing sound was the

persistent mewing of a cat one of the men had rescued from a

floating hayrick near Zaandam. We kept a southward course by a

watch-chain compass Mylius had produced…

'I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army,

nor had we any strong sense of the war as the dominating fact

about us. Our mental setting had far more of the effect of a

huge natural catastrophe. The atomic bombs had dwarfed the

international issues to complete insignificance. When our minds

wandered from the preoccupations of our immediate needs, we

speculated upon the possibility of stopping the use of these

frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed. For

to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still

greater power of destruction of which they were the precursors

might quite easily shatter every relationship and institution of

mankind.

' "What will they be doing," asked Mylius, "what will they be

doing? It's plain we've got to put an end to war. It's plain

things have to be run some way. THIS-all this-is impossible."

'I made no immediate answer. Something-I cannot think what-had

brought back to me the figure of that man I had seen wounded on

the very first day of actual fighting. I saw again his angry,

tearful eyes, and that poor, dripping, bloody mess that had been

a skilful human hand five minutes before, thrust out in indignant

protest. "Damned foolery," he had stormed and sobbed, "damned

foolery. My right hand, sir! My RIGHT hand…"

'My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me. "I think we

are too-too silly," I said to Mylius, "ever to stop war. If we'd

had the sense to do it, we should have done it before this. I

think this--" I pointed to the gaunt black outline of a smashed

windmill that stuck up, ridiculous and ugly, above the blood-lit

waters-"this is the end." '

Section 10

But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and

his barge-load of hungry and starving men.

For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if

civilisation had come to a final collapse. These crowning buds

upon the tradition that Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered,

opened and flared 'like waterlilies of flame' over nations

destroyed, over churches smashed or submerged, towns ruined,

fields lost to mankind for ever, and a million weltering bodies.

Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would the flames of war

still burn amidst the ruins?

Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance

in their answers to that question. Already once in the history

of mankind, in America, before its discovery by the whites, an

organised civilisation had given way to a mere cult of warfare,

specialised and cruel, and it seemed for a time to many a

thoughtful man as if the whole world was but to repeat on a

larger scale this ascendancy of the warrior, this triumph of the

destructive instincts of the race.

The subsequent chapters of Barnet's narrative do but supply body

to this tragic possibility. He gives a series of vignettes of

civilisation, shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found

the Belgian hills swarming with refugees and desolated by

cholera; the vestiges of the contending armies keeping order

under a truce, without actual battles, but with the cautious

hostility of habit, and a great absence of plan everywhere.

Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were

rumours of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys

of the Semoy and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes.

There was the report of an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and

Japanese, and of some huge revolutionary outbreak in America.

The weather was stormier than men had ever known it in those

regions, with much thunder and lightning and wild cloud-bursts of

rain…