CHAPTER II. Death in the Village
CHAPTER III. The Doctor’s Theory
CHAPTER IV. The Spread of the Terror
CHAPTER V. The Incident of the Unknown Tree
CHAPTER VI. Mr. Remnant’s Z Ray
CHAPTER VII. The Case of the Hidden Germans
CHAPTER VIII. What Mr. Merritt Found
CHAPTER IX. The Light on the Water
CHAPTER X. The Child and the Moth
CHAPTER XI. At Treff Loyne Farm
CHAPTER XII. The Letter of Wrath
CHAPTER XIII. The Last Words of Mr. Secretan
CHAPTER XIV. The End of the Terror
CHAPTER I.
The Coming of the Terror
After two years we are turning once more to the morning’s news with a
sense of appetite and glad expectation. There were thrills at the
beginning of the war; the thrill of horror and of a doom that seemed at
once incredible and certain; this was when Namur fell and the German
host swelled like a flood over the French fields, and drew very near to
the walls of Paris. Then we felt the thrill of exultation when the good
news came that the awful tide had been turned back, that Paris and the
world were safe; for awhile at all events.
Then for days we hoped for more news as good as this or better. Has Von
Kluck been surrounded? Not to-day, but perhaps he will be surrounded
to-morrow. But the days became weeks, the weeks drew out to months; the
battle in the West seemed frozen. Now and again things were done that
seemed hopeful, with promise of events still better. But Neuve Chapelle
and Loos dwindled into disappointments as their tale was told fully;
the lines in the West remained, for all practical purposes of victory,
immobile. Nothing seemed to happen; there was nothing to read save the
record of operations that were clearly trifling and insignificant.
People speculated as to the reason of this inaction; the hopeful said
that Joffre had a plan, that he was “nibbling,” others declared that we
were short of munitions, others again that the new levies were not yet
ripe for battle. So the months went by, and almost two years of war had
been completed before the motionless English line began to stir and
quiver as if it awoke from a long sleep, and began to roll onward,
overwhelming the enemy.
The secret of the long inaction of the British Armies has been well
kept. On the one hand it was rigorously protected by the censorship,
which severe, and sometimes severe to the point of absurdity—“the
captains and the ... depart,” for instance—became in this particular
matter ferocious. As soon as the real significance of that which was
happening, or beginning to happen, was perceived by the authorities, an
underlined circular was issued to the newspaper proprietors of Great
Britain and Ireland. It warned each proprietor that he might impart the
contents of this circular to one other person only, such person being
the responsible editor of his paper, who was to keep the communication
secret under the severest penalties. The circular forbade any mention
of certain events that had taken place, that might take place; it
forbade any kind of allusion to these events or any hint of their
existence, or of the possibility of their existence, not only in the
Press, but in any form whatever. The subject was not to be alluded to
in conversation, it was not to be hinted at, however obscurely, in
letters; the very existence of the circular, its subject apart, was to
be a dead secret.
These measures were successful. A wealthy newspaper proprietor of the
North, warmed a little at the end of the Throwsters’ Feast (which was
held as usual, it will be remembered), ventured to say to the man next
to him: “How awful it would be, wouldn’t it, if....” His words were
repeated, as proof, one regrets to say, that it was time for “old
Arnold” to “pull himself together”; and he was fined a thousand pounds.
Then, there was the case of an obscure weekly paper published in the
county town of an agricultural district in Wales. The _Meiros Observer_
(we will call it) was issued from a stationer’s back premises, and
filled its four pages with accounts of local flower shows, fancy fairs
at vicarages, reports of parish councils, and rare bathing fatalities.
It also issued a visitors’ list, which has been known to contain six
names.
This enlightened organ printed a paragraph, which nobody noticed, which
was very like paragraphs that small country newspapers have long been
in the habit of printing, which could hardly give so much as a hint to
any one—to any one, that is, who was not fully instructed in the
secret. As a matter of fact, this piece of intelligence got into the
paper because the proprietor, who was also the editor, incautiously
left the last processes of this particular issue to the staff, who was
the Lord-High-Everything-Else of the establishment; and the staff put
in a bit of gossip he had heard in the market to fill up two inches on
the back page. But the result was that the _Meiros Observer_ ceased to
appear, owing to “untoward circumstances” as the proprietor said; and
he would say no more. No more, that is, by way of explanation, but a
great deal more by way of execration of “damned, prying busybodies.”
Now a censorship that is sufficiently minute and utterly remorseless
can do amazing things in the way of hiding ... what it wants to hide.
Before the war, one would have thought otherwise; one would have said
that, censor or no censor, the fact of the murder at X or the fact of
the bank robbery at Y would certainly become known; if not through the
Press, at all events through rumor and the passage of the news from
mouth to mouth. And this would be true—of England three hundred years
ago, and of savage tribelands of to-day. But we have grown of late to
such a reverence for the printed word and such a reliance on it, that
the old faculty of disseminating news by word of mouth has become
atrophied. Forbid the Press to mention the fact that Jones has been
murdered, and it is marvelous how few people will hear of it, and of
those who hear how few will credit the story that they have heard. You
meet a man in the train who remarks that he has been told something
about a murder in Southwark; there is all the difference in the world
between the impression you receive from such a chance communication and
that given by half a dozen lines of print with name, and street and
date and all the facts of the case. People in trains repeat all sorts
of tales, many of them false; newspapers do not print accounts of
murders that have not been committed.
Then another consideration that has made for secrecy. I may have seemed
to say that the old office of rumor no longer exists; I shall be
reminded of the strange legend of “the Russians” and the mythology of
the “Angels of Mons.” But let me point out, in the first place, that
both these absurdities depended on the papers for their wide
dissemination. If there had been no newspapers or magazines Russians
and Angels would have made but a brief, vague appearance of the most
shadowy kind—a few would have heard of them, fewer still would have
believed in them, they would have been gossiped about for a bare week
or two, and so they would have vanished away.
And, then, again, the very fact of these vain rumors and fantastic
tales having been so widely believed for a time was fatal to the credit
of any stray mutterings that may have got abroad. People had been taken
in twice; they had seen how grave persons, men of credit, had preached
and lectured about the shining forms that had saved the British Army at
Mons, or had testified to the trains, packed with gray-coated
Muscovites, rushing through the land at dead of night: and now there
was a hint of something more amazing than either of the discredited
legends. But this time there was no word of confirmation to be found in
daily paper, or weekly review, or parish magazine, and so the few that
heard either laughed, or, being serious, went home and jotted down
notes for essays on “War-time Psychology: Collective Delusions.”
I followed neither of these courses. For before the secret circular had
been issued my curiosity had somehow been aroused by certain paragraphs
concerning a “Fatal Accident to Well-known Airman.” The propeller of
the airplane had been shattered, apparently by a collision with a
flight of pigeons; the blades had been broken and the machine had
fallen like lead to the earth. And soon after I had seen this account,
I heard of some very odd circumstances relating to an explosion in a
great munition factory in the Midlands. I thought I saw the possibility
of a connection between two very different events.
It has been pointed out to me by friends who have been good enough to
read this record, that certain phrases I have used may give the
impression that I ascribe all the delays of the war on the Western
front to the extraordinary circumstances which occasioned the issue of
the Secret Circular. Of course this is not the case, there were many
reasons for the immobility of our lines from October 1914 to July 1916.
These causes have been evident enough and have been openly discussed
and deplored. But behind them was something of infinitely greater
moment. We lacked men, but men were pouring into the new army; we were
short of shells, but when the shortage was proclaimed the nation set
itself to mend this matter with all its energy. We could undertake to
supply the defects of our army both in men and munitions—_if_ the new
and incredible danger could be overcome. It has been overcome; rather,
perhaps, it has ceased to exist; and the secret may now be told.
I have said my attention was attracted by an account of the death of a
well-known airman. I have not the habit of preserving cuttings, I am
sorry to say, so that I cannot be precise as to the date of this event.
To the best of my belief it was either towards the end of May or the
beginning of June 1915. The newspaper paragraph announcing the death of
Flight-Lieutenant Western-Reynolds was brief enough; accidents, and
fatal accidents, to the men who are storming the air for us are,
unfortunately, by no means so rare as to demand an elaborated notice.
But the manner in which Western-Reynolds met his death struck me as
extraordinary, inasmuch as it revealed a new danger in the element that
we have lately conquered. He was brought down, as I said, by a flight
of birds; of pigeons, as appeared by what was found on the bloodstained
and shattered blades of the propeller. An eye-witness of the accident,
a fellow-officer, described how Western-Reynolds set out from the
aerodrome on a fine afternoon, there being hardly any wind. He was
going to France; he had made the journey to and fro half a dozen times
or more, and felt perfectly secure and at ease.
“‘Wester’ rose to a great height at once, and we could scarcely see the
machine. I was turning to go when one of the fellows called out, ‘I
say! What’s this?’ He pointed up, and we saw what looked like a black
cloud coming from the south at a tremendous rate. I saw at once it
wasn’t a cloud; it came with a swirl and a rush quite different from
any cloud I’ve ever seen. But for a second I couldn’t make out exactly
what it was. It altered its shape and turned into a great crescent, and
wheeled and veered about as if it was looking for something. The man
who had called out had got his glasses, and was staring for all he was
worth. Then he shouted that it was a tremendous flight of birds,
‘thousands of them.’ They went on wheeling and beating about high up in
the air, and we were watching them, thinking it was interesting, but
not supposing that they would make any difference to ‘Wester,’ who was
just about out of sight. His machine was just a speck. Then the two
arms of the crescent drew in as quick as lightning, and these thousands
of birds shot in a solid mass right up there across the sky, and flew
away somewhere about nor’-nor’-by-west. Then Henley, the man with the
glasses, called out, ‘He’s down!’ and started running, and I went after
him. We got a car and as we were going along Henley told me that he’d
seen the machine drop dead, as if it came out of that cloud of birds.
He thought then that they must have mucked up the propeller somehow.
That turned out to be the case. We found the propeller blades all
broken and covered with blood and pigeon feathers, and carcasses of the
birds had got wedged in between the blades, and were sticking to them.”
This was the story that the young airman told one evening in a small
company. He did not speak “in confidence,” so I have no hesitation in
reproducing what he said. Naturally, I did not take a verbatim note of
his conversation, but I have something of a knack of remembering talk
that interests me, and I think my reproduction is very near to the tale
that I heard. And let it be noted that the flying man told his story
without any sense or indication of a sense that the incredible, or all
but the incredible, had happened. So far as he knew, he said, it was
the first accident of the kind. Airmen in France had been bothered once
or twice by birds—he thought they were eagles—flying viciously at them,
but poor old “Wester” had been the first man to come up against a
flight of some thousands of pigeons.
“And perhaps I shall be the next,” he added, “but why look for trouble?
Anyhow, I’m going to see _Toodle-oo_ to-morrow afternoon.”
Well, I heard the story, as one hears all the varied marvels and
terrors of the air; as one heard some years ago of “air pockets,”
strange gulfs or voids in the atmosphere into which airmen fell with
great peril; or as one heard of the experience of the airman who flew
over the Cumberland mountains in the burning summer of 1911, and as he
swam far above the heights was suddenly and vehemently blown upwards,
the hot air from the rocks striking his plane as if it had been a blast
from a furnace chimney. We have just begun to navigate a strange
region; we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils.
And here a new chapter in the chronicles of these perils and adventures
had been opened by the death of Western-Reynolds; and no doubt
invention and contrivance would presently hit on some way of countering
the new danger.
It was, I think, about a week or ten days after the airman’s death that
my business called me to a northern town, the name of which, perhaps,
had better remain unknown. My mission was to inquire into certain
charges of extravagance which had been laid against the working people,
that is, the munition workers of this especial town. It was said that
the men who used to earn £2 10s. a week were now getting from seven to
eight pounds, that “bits of girls” were being paid two pounds instead
of seven or eight shillings, and that, in consequence, there was an
orgy of foolish extravagance. The girls, I was told, were eating
chocolates at four, five, and six shillings a pound, the women were
ordering thirty-pound pianos which they couldn’t play, and the men
bought gold chains at ten and twenty guineas apiece.
I dived into the town in question and found, as usual, that there was a
mixture of truth and exaggeration in the stories that I had heard.
Gramophones, for example: they cannot be called in strictness
necessaries, but they were undoubtedly finding a ready sale, even in
the more expensive brands. And I thought that there were a great many
very spick and span perambulators to be seen on the pavement; smart
perambulators, painted in tender shades of color and expensively
fitted.
“And how can you be surprised if people will have a bit of a fling?” a
worker said to me. “We’re seeing money for the first time in our lives,
and it’s bright. And we work hard for it, and we risk our lives to get
it. You’ve heard of explosion yonder?”
He mentioned certain works on the outskirts of the town. Of course,
neither the name of the works nor of the town had been printed; there
had been a brief notice of “Explosion at Munition Works in the Northern
District: Many Fatalities.” The working man told me about it, and added
some dreadful details.
“They wouldn’t let their folks see bodies; screwed them up in coffins
as they found them in shop. The gas had done it.”
“Turned their faces black, you mean?”
“Nay. They were all as if they had been bitten to pieces.”
This was a strange gas.
I asked the man in the northern town all sorts of questions about the
extraordinary explosion of which he had spoken to me. But he had very
little more to say. As I have noted already, secrets that may not be
printed are often deeply kept; last summer there were very few people
outside high official circles who knew anything about the “Tanks,” of
which we have all been talking lately, though these strange instruments
of war were being exercised and tested in a park not far from London.
So the man who told me of the explosion in the munition factory was
most likely genuine in his profession that he knew nothing more of the
disaster. I found out that he was a smelter employed at a furnace on
the other side of the town to the ruined factory; he didn’t know even
what they had been making there; some very dangerous high explosive, he
supposed. His information was really nothing more than a bit of
gruesome gossip, which he had heard probably at third or fourth or
fifth hand. The horrible detail of faces “as if they had been bitten to
pieces” had made its violent impression on him, that was all.
I gave him up and took a tram to the district of the disaster; a sort
of industrial suburb, five miles from the center of the town. When I
asked for the factory, I was told that it was no good my going to it as
there was nobody there. But I found it; a raw and hideous shed with a
walled yard about it, and a shut gate. I looked for signs of
destruction, but there was nothing. The roof was quite undamaged; and
again it struck me that this had been a strange accident. There had
been an explosion of sufficient violence to kill workpeople in the
building, but the building itself showed no wounds or scars.
A man came out of the gate and locked it behind him. I began to ask him
some sort of question, or rather, I began to “open” for a question with
“A terrible business here, they tell me,” or some such phrase of
convention. I got no farther. The man asked me if I saw a policeman
walking down the street. I said I did, and I was given the choice of
getting about my business forthwith or of being instantly given in
charge as a spy. “Th’ast better be gone and quick about it,” was, I
think, his final advice, and I took it.
Well, I had come literally up against a brick wall. Thinking the
problem over, I could only suppose that the smelter or his informant
had twisted the phrases of the story. The smelter had said the dead
men’s faces were “bitten to pieces”; this might be an unconscious
perversion of “eaten away.” That phrase might describe well enough the
effect of strong acids, and, for all I knew of the processes of
munition-making, such acids might be used and might explode with
horrible results in some perilous stage of their admixture.
It was a day or two later that the accident to the airman,
Western-Reynolds, came into my mind. For one of those instants which
are far shorter than any measure of time there flashed out the
possibility of a link between the two disasters. But here was a wild
impossibility, and I drove it away. And yet I think that the thought,
mad as it seemed, never left me; it was the secret light that at last
guided me through a somber grove of enigmas.
It was about this time, so far as the date can be fixed, that a whole
district, one might say a whole county, was visited by a series of
extraordinary and terrible calamities, which were the more terrible
inasmuch as they continued for some time to be inscrutable mysteries.
It is, indeed, doubtful whether these awful events do not still remain
mysteries to many of those concerned; for before the inhabitants of
this part of the country had time to join one link of evidence to
another the circular was issued, and thenceforth no one knew how to
distinguish undoubted fact from wild and extravagant surmise.
The district in question is in the far west of Wales; I shall call it,
for convenience, Meirion. In it there is one seaside town of some
repute with holiday-makers for five or six weeks in the summer, and
dotted about the county there are three or four small old towns that
seem drooping in a slow decay, sleepy and gray with age and
forgetfulness. They remind me of what I have read of towns in the west
of Ireland. Grass grows between the uneven stones of the pavements, the
signs above the shop windows decline, half the letters of these signs
are missing, here and there a house has been pulled down, or has been
allowed to slide into ruin, and wild greenery springs up through the
fallen stones, and there is silence in all the streets. And, it is to
be noted, these are not places that were once magnificent. The Celts
have never had the art of building, and so far as I can see, such towns
as Towy and Merthyr Tegveth and Meiros must have been always much as
they are now, clusters of poorish, meanly-built houses, ill-kept and
down at heel.
And these few towns are thinly scattered over a wild country where
north is divided from south by a wilder mountain range. One of these
places is sixteen miles from any station; the others are doubtfully and
deviously connected by single-line railways served by rare trains that
pause and stagger and hesitate on their slow journey up mountain
passes, or stop for half an hour or more at lonely sheds called
stations, situated in the midst of desolate marshes. A few years ago I
traveled with an Irishman on one of these queer lines, and he looked to
right and saw the bog with its yellow and blue grasses and stagnant
pools, and he looked to left and saw a ragged hillside, set with gray
stone walls. “I can hardly believe,” he said, “that I’m not still in
the wilds of Ireland.”
Here, then, one sees a wild and divided and scattered region a land of
outland hills and secret and hidden valleys. I know white farms on this
coast which must be separate by two hours of hard, rough walking from
any other habitation, which are invisible from any other house. And
inland, again, the farms are often ringed about by thick groves of ash,
planted by men of old days to shelter their roof-trees from rude winds
of the mountain and stormy winds of the sea; so that these places, too,
are hidden away, to be surmised only by the wood smoke that rises from
the green surrounding leaves. A Londoner must see them to believe in
them; and even then he can scarcely credit their utter isolation.
Such, then in the main is Meirion, and on this land in the early summer
of last year terror descended—a terror without shape, such as no man
there had ever known.
It began with the tale of a little child who wandered out into the
lanes to pick flowers one sunny afternoon, and never came back to the
cottage on the hill.