The Spread of the Terror
It is time, I think, for me to make one point clear. I began this
history with certain references to an extraordinary accident to an
airman whose machine fell to the ground after collision with a huge
flock of pigeons; and then to an explosion in a northern munition
factory, an explosion, as I noted, of a very singular kind. Then I
deserted the neighborhood of London, and the northern district, and
dwelt on a mysterious and terrible series of events which occurred in
the summer of 1915 in a Welsh county, which I have named, for
convenience, Meirion.
Well, let it be understood at once that all this detail that I have
given about the occurrences in Meirion does not imply that the county
in the far west was alone or especially afflicted by the terror that
was over the land. They tell me that in the villages about Dartmoor the
stout Devonshire hearts sank as men’s hearts used to sink in the time
of plague and pestilence. There was horror, too, about the Norfolk
Broads, and far up by Perth no one would venture on the path that leads
by Scone to the wooded heights above the Tay. And in the industrial
districts: I met a man by chance one day in an odd London corner who
spoke with horror of what a friend had told him.
“‘Ask no questions, Ned,’ he says to me, ‘but I tell yow a’ was in
Bairnigan t’other day, and a’ met a pal who’d seen three hundred
coffins going out of a works not far from there.’”
And then the ship that hovered outside the mouth of the Thames with all
sails set and beat to and fro in the wind, and never answered any hail,
and showed no light! The forts shot at her and brought down one of the
masts, but she went suddenly about with a change of wind under what
sail still stood, and then veered down Channel, and drove ashore at
last on the sandbanks and pinewoods of Arcachon, and not a man alive on
her, but only rattling heaps of bones! That last voyage of the
_Semiramis_ would be something horribly worth telling; but I only heard
it at a distance as a yarn, and only believed it because it squared
with other things that I knew for certain.
This, then, is my point; I have written of the terror as it fell on
Meirion, simply because I have had opportunities of getting close there
to what really happened. Third or fourth or fifth hand in the other
places; but round about Porth and Merthyr Tegveth I have spoken with
people who have seen the tracks of the terror with their own eyes.
Well, I have said that the people of that far western county realized,
not only that death was abroad in their quiet lanes and on their
peaceful hills, but that for some reason it was to be kept all secret.
Newspapers might not print any news of it, the very juries summoned to
investigate it were allowed to investigate nothing. And so they
concluded that this veil of secrecy must somehow be connected with the
war; and from this position it was not a long way to a further
inference: that the murderers of innocent men and women and children
were either Germans or agents of Germany. It would be just like the
Huns, everybody agreed, to think out such a devilish scheme as this;
and they always thought out their schemes beforehand. They hoped to
seize Paris in a few weeks, but when they were beaten on the Marne they
had their trenches on the Aisne ready to fall back on: it had all been
prepared years before the war. And so, no doubt, they had devised this
terrible plan against England in case they could not beat us in open
fight: there were people ready, very likely, all over the country, who
were prepared to murder and destroy everywhere as soon as they got the
word. In this way the Germans intended to sow terror throughout England
and fill our hearts with panic and dismay, hoping so to weaken their
enemy at home that he would lose all heart over the war abroad. It was
the Zeppelin notion, in another form; they were committing these
horrible and mysterious outrages thinking that we should be frightened
out of our wits.
It all seemed plausible enough; Germany had by this time perpetrated so
many horrors and had so excelled in devilish ingenuities that no
abomination seemed too abominable to be probable, or too ingeniously
wicked to be beyond the tortuous malice of the Hun. But then came the
questions as to who the agents of this terrible design were, as to
where they lived, as to how they contrived to move unseen from field to
field, from lane to lane. All sorts of fantastic attempts were made to
answer these questions; but it was felt that they remained unanswered.
Some suggested that the murderers landed from submarines, or flew from
hiding places on the West Coast of Ireland, coming and going by night;
but there were seen to be flagrant impossibilities in both these
suggestions. Everybody agreed that the evil work was no doubt the work
of Germany; but nobody could begin to guess how it was done. Somebody
at the Club asked Remnant for his theory.
“My theory,” said that ingenious person, “is that human progress is
simply a long march from one inconceivable to another. Look at that
airship of ours that came over Porth yesterday: ten years ago that
would have been an inconceivable sight. Take the steam engine, stake
printing, take the theory of gravitation: they were all inconceivable
till somebody thought of them. So it is, no doubt, with this infernal
dodgery that we’re talking about: the Huns have found it out, and we
haven’t; and there you are. We can’t conceive how these poor people
have been murdered, because the method’s inconceivable to us.”
The club listened with some awe to this high argument. After Remnant
had gone, one member said:
“Wonderful man, that.” “Yes,” said Dr. Lewis. “He was asked whether he
knew something. And his reply really amounted to ‘No, I don’t.’ But I
have never heard it better put.”
It was, I suppose, at about this time when the people were puzzling
their heads as to the secret methods used by the Germans or their
agents to accomplish their crimes that a very singular circumstance
became known to a few of the Porth people. It related to the murder of
the Williams family on the Highway in front of their cottage door. I do
not know that I have made it plain that the old Roman road called the
Highway follows the course of a long, steep hill that goes steadily
westward till it slants down and droops towards the sea. On either side
of the road the ground falls away, here into deep shadowy woods, here
to high pastures, now and again into a field of corn, but for the most
part into the wild and broken land that is characteristic of Arfon. The
fields are long and narrow, stretching up the steep hillside; they fall
into sudden dips and hollows, a well springs up in the midst of one and
a grove of ash and thorn bends over it, shading it; and beneath it the
ground is thick with reeds and rushes. And then may come on either side
of such a field territories glistening with the deep growth of bracken,
and rough with gorse and rugged with thickets of blackthorn, green
lichen hanging strangely from the branches; such are the lands on
either side of the Highway.
Now on the lower slopes of it, beneath the Williams’s cottage, some
three or four fields down the hill, there is a military camp. The place
has been used as a camp for many years, and lately the site has been
extended and huts have been erected. But a considerable number of the
men were under canvas here in the summer of 1915.
On the night of the Highway murder this camp, as it appeared
afterwards, was the scene of the extraordinary panic of the horses.
A good many men in the camp were asleep in their tents soon after 9:30,
when the Last Post was sounded. They woke up in panic. There was a
thundering sound on the steep hillside above them, and down upon the
tents came half a dozen horses, mad with fright, trampling the canvas,
trampling the men, bruising dozens of them and killing two.
Everything was in wild confusion, men groaning and screaming in the
darkness, struggling with the canvas and the twisted ropes, shouting
out, some of them, raw lads enough, that the Germans had landed, others
wiping the blood from their eyes, a few, roused suddenly from heavy
sleep, hitting out at one another, officers coming up at the double
roaring out orders to the sergeants, a party of soldiers who were just
returning to camp from the village seized with fright at what they
could scarcely see or distinguish, at the wildness of the shouting and
cursing and groaning that they could not understand, bolting out of the
camp again and racing for their lives back to the village: everything
in the maddest confusion of wild disorder.
Some of the men had seen the horses galloping down the hill as if
terror itself was driving them. They scattered off into the darkness,
and somehow or another found their way back in the night to their
pasture above the camp. They were grazing there peacefully in the
morning, and the only sign of the panic of the night before was the mud
they had scattered all over themselves as they pelted through a patch
of wet ground. The farmer said they were as quiet a lot as any in
Meirion; he could make nothing of it.
“Indeed,” he said, “I believe they must have seen the devil himself to
be in such a fright as that: save the people!”
Now all this was kept as quiet as might be at the time when it
happened; it became known to the men of the Porth Club in the days when
they were discussing the difficult question of the German outrages, as
the murders were commonly called. And this wild stampede of the farm
horses was held by some to be evidence of the extraordinary and unheard
of character of the dreadful agency that was at work. One of the
members of the club had been told by an officer who was in the camp at
the time of the panic that the horses that came charging down were in a
perfect fury of fright, that he had never seen horses in such a state,
and so there was endless speculation as to the nature of the sight or
the sound that had driven half a dozen quiet beasts into raging
madness.
Then, in the middle of this talk, two or three other incidents, quite
as odd and incomprehensible, came to be known, borne on chance trickles
of gossip that came into the towns from outland farms, or were carried
by cottagers tramping into Porth on market day with a fowl or two and
eggs and garden stuff; scraps and fragments of talk gathered by
servants from the country folk and repeated—to their mistresses. And in
such ways it came out that up at Plas Newydd there had been a terrible
business over swarming the bees; they had turned as wild as wasps and
much more savage. They had come about the people who were taking the
swarms like a cloud. They settled on one man’s face so that you could
not see the flesh for the bees crawling all over it, and they had stung
him so badly that the doctor did not know whether he would get over it,
and they had chased a girl who had come out to see the swarming, and
settled on her and stung her to death. Then they had gone off to a
brake below the farm and got into a hollow tree there, and it was not
safe to go near it, for they would come out at you by day or by night.
And much the same thing had happened, it seemed, at three or four farms
and cottages where bees were kept. And there were stories, hardly so
clear or so credible, of sheep dogs, mild and trusted beasts, turning
as savage as wolves and injuring the farm boys in a horrible manner—in
one case it was said with fatal results. It was certainly true that old
Mrs. Owen’s favorite Brahma-Dorking cock had gone mad; she came into
Porth one Saturday morning with her face and her neck all bound up and
plastered. She had gone out to her bit of a field to feed the poultry
the night before, and the bird had flown at her and attacked her most
savagely, inflicting some very nasty wounds before she could beat it
off.
“There was a stake handy, lucky for me,” she said, “and I did beat him
and beat him till the life was out of him. But what is come to the
world, whatever?”
Now Remnant, the man of theories, was also a man of extreme leisure. It
was understood that he had succeeded to ample means when he was quite a
young man, and after tasting the savors of the law, as it were, for
half a dozen terms at the board of the Middle Temple, he had decided
that it would be senseless to bother himself with passing examinations
for a profession which he had not the faintest intention of practising.
So he turned a deaf ear to the call of “Manger” ringing through the
Temple Courts, and set himself out to potter amiably through the world.
He had pottered all over Europe, he had looked at Africa, and had even
put his head in at the door of the East, on a trip which included the
Greek isles and Constantinople. Now getting into the middle fifties, he
had settled at Porth for the sake, as he said, of the Gulf Stream and
the fuchsia hedges, and pottered over his books and his theories and
the local gossip. He was no more brutal than the general public, which
revels in the details of mysterious crime; but it must be said that the
terror, black though it was, was a boon to him. He peered and
investigated and poked about with the relish of a man to whose life a
new zest has been added. He listened attentively to the strange tales
of bees and dogs and poultry that came into Porth with the country
baskets of butter, rabbits, and green peas; and he evolved at last a
most extraordinary theory.
Full of this discovery, as he thought it, he went one night to see Dr.
Lewis and take his view of the matter.
“I want to talk to you,” said Remnant to the doctor, “about what I have
called provisionally, the Z Ray.”