Section 1

[Illustration]

The World Set Free

by H.G. Wells

We Are All Things That Make And Pass,

Striving Upon A Hidden Mission,

Out To The Open Sea.

TO

Frederick Soddy’s

‘Interpretation Of Radium’

This Story,

Which Owes Long Passages

To The Eleventh Chapter Of That Book,

Acknowledges And Inscribes Itself

Contents

PREFACE

PRELUDE. THE SUN SNARERS

CHAPTER THE FIRST. THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY

CHAPTER THE SECOND. THE LAST WAR

CHAPTER THE THIRD. THE ENDING OF WAR

CHAPTER THE FOURTH. THE NEW PHASE

CHAPTER THE FIFTH. THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN

PREFACE

_The World Set Free_ was written in 1913 and published early in 1914,

and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility,

stories which all turn on the possible developments in the future of

some contemporary force or group of forces. _The World Set Free_ was

written under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent

person in the world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of

averting it, but few of us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how

near the crash was to us. The reader will be amused to find that here

it is put off until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the

reason for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a

prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to be

rather a slow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of reality, for

example, beat the forecast in _Anticipations_ by about twenty years or

so. I suppose a desire not to shock the sceptical reader’s sense of use

and wont and perhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have

something to do with this dating forward of one’s main events, but in

the particular case of _The World Set Free_ there was, I think, another

motive in holding the Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist

to get well forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy.

1956—or for that matter 2056—may be none too late for that crowning

revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this procrastination

of over forty years, the guess at the opening phase of the war was

fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of the Central Empires, the

opening campaign through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the

British Expeditionary Force were all justified before the book had been

published six months. And the opening section of Chapter the Second

remains now, after the reality has happened, a fairly adequate

diagnosis of the essentials of the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter

the Second, Section 2), on which the writer may congratulate himself,

is the forecast that under modern conditions it would be quite

impossible for any great general to emerge to supremacy and concentrate

the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. There could be no

Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the scientific corps

muttering, ‘These old fools,’ exactly as it is here foretold.

These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far

outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of interest

now; the thesis that because of the development of scientific

knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are

no longer possible in the world, that to attempt to keep on with the

old system is to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to

destroy our race altogether. The remaining interest of this book now is

the sustained validity of this thesis and the discussion of the

possible ending of war on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic

of sanity to break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of

mankind. I have represented the native common sense of the French mind

and of the English mind—for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be

‘God’s Englishman’—leading mankind towards a bold and resolute effort

of salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the school book

footnotes say, compare to-day’s newspaper. Instead of a frank and

honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman meeting German and

Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences and in their disaster,

upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in Geneva at the other end of

Switzerland a poor little League of (Allied) Nations (excluding the

United States, Russia, and most of the ‘subject peoples’ of the world),

meeting obscurely amidst a world-wide disregard to make impotent

gestures at the leading problems of the debacle. Either the disaster

has not been vast enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict

the necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion.

Just as the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity and

thought that increase would go on for ever, so now it would seem the

world is growing accustomed to a steady glide towards social

disintegration, and thinks that that too can go on continually and

never come to a final bump. So soon do use and wont establish

themselves, and the most flaming and thunderous of lessons pale into

disregard.

The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question whether

it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of creative sanity in

mankind, to avert this steady glide to destruction, is now one of the

most urgent in the world. It is clear that the writer is

temperamentally disposed to hope that there is such a possibility. But

he has to confess that he sees few signs of any such breadth of

understanding and steadfastness of will as an effectual effort to turn

the rush of human affairs demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old

institutions carries us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is

there any plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as

something overriding any national and patriotic consideration, and that

is in the working class movement throughout the world. And labour

internationalism is closely bound up with conceptions of a profound

social revolution. If world peace is to be attained through labour

internationalism, it will have to be attained at the price of the

completest social and economic reconstruction and by passing through a

phase of revolution that will certainly be violent, that may be very

bloody, which may be prolonged through a long period, and may in the

end fail to achieve anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the

fact remains that it is in the labour class, and the labour class

alone, that any conception of a world rule and a world peace has so far

appeared. The dream of _The World Set Free_, a dream of highly educated

and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily setting

themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has thus far remained a

dream.

H. G. WELLS.

EASTON GLEBE, DUNMOW, 1921.

PRELUDE

THE SUN SNARERS

Section I

The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external

power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of

his terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural strength

and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning and the rough

implement of stone. So he passed beyond the ape. From that he expands.

Presently he added to himself the power of the horse and the ox, he

borrowed the carrying strength of water and the driving force of the

wind, he quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed

first with copper and then with iron, increased and varied and became

more elaborate and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made

his way easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social

relationships and increased his efficiency by the division of labour.

He began to store up knowledge. Contrivance followed contrivance, each

making it possible for a man to do more. Always down the lengthening

record, save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more.... A

quarter of a million years ago the utmost man was a savage, a being

scarcely articulate, sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a

rough-hewn flint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family

groups, killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity

declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would have

sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical river

valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his little herds, a

male, a few females, a child or so.

He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led. He fled

the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the promise of sword

and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of coal; he drank water muddy

with the clay that would one day make cups of porcelain; he chewed the

ear of wild wheat he had plucked and gazed with a dim speculation in

his eyes at the birds that soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he

became aware of the scent of another male and rose up roaring, his

roars the formless precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great

individualist, that original, he suffered none other than himself.

So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor of

all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly.

Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened the

tiger’s claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus to the

swift grace of the horse, was at work upon him—is at work upon him

still. The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him were killed

soonest and oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker eye, the bigger

brain, the better balanced body prevailed; age by age, the implements

were a little better made, the man a little more delicately adjusted to

his possibilities. He became more social; his herd grew larger; no

longer did each man kill or drive out his growing sons; a system of

taboos made them tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon

even after he was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and the

rest of mankind. (But they were forbidden to touch the women of the

tribe, they had to go out and capture women for themselves, and each

son fled from his stepmother and hid from her lest the anger of the Old

Man should be roused. All the world over, even to this day, these

ancient inevitable taboos can be traced.) And now instead of caves came

huts and hovels, and the fire was better tended and there were

wrappings and garments; and so aided, the creature spread into colder

climates, carrying food with him, storing food—until sometimes the

neglected grass-seed sprouted again and gave a first hint of

agriculture.

And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.

Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts

and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the

squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. He

scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued it and began

pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the river brink between

his fingers, and found a pleasure in its patternings and repetitions,

shaped it into the form of vessels, and found that it would hold water.

He watched the streaming river, and wondered from what bountiful breast

this incessant water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that

perhaps he might snare it and spear it as it went down to its

resting-place amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to

his brother that once indeed he had done so—at least that some one had

done so—he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as daring, that

one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith began fiction—pointing

a way to achievement—and the august prophetic procession of tales.

For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations that

life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the ripening of that

phase of human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chipped

flint to the first implements of polished stone, was two or three

thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by

human standards, did humanity gather itself together out of the dim

intimations of the beast. And that first glimmering of speculation,

that first story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and

flushed under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous

listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most

marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the mammoths,

and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch the sun.

Section 2

That dream was but a moment in a man’s life, whose proper business it

seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget after the manner

of all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. About him, hidden

from him by the thinnest of veils, were the untouched sources of Power,

whose magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even to-day, Power

that could make his every conceivable dream come real. But the feet of

the race were in the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.

At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food is

abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his earlier

jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less urgently, more

social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a larger community. There

began a division of labour, certain of the older men specialised in

knowledge and direction, a strong man took the fatherly leadership in

war, and priest and king began to develop their _rôles_ in the opening

drama of man’s history. The priest’s solicitude was seed-time and

harvest and fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a hundred

river valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there were

already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They

flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the

future, for as yet writing had still to begin.

Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable wealth of

Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed certain

animals, he developed his primordially haphazard agriculture into a

ritual, he added first one metal to his resources and then another,

until he had copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and silver to

supplement his stone, he hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddled

down his river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made

the first roads. But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and

more, was the subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger

societies. The history of man is not simply the conquest of external

power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,

that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands

from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents association.

From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the

Peace of the World, man’s dealings were chiefly with himself and his

fellow man, trading, bargaining, law-making, propitiating, enslaving,

conquering, exterminating, and every little increment in Power, he

turned at once and always turns to the purposes of this confused

elaborate struggle to socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his

fellow men into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of

his instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone age

was over he had become a political animal. He made astonishingly

far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then of

writing and making records, and with that his town communities began to

stretch out to dominion; in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and

the great Chinese rivers, the first empires and the first written laws

had their beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers

and knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which

had been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of

pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The

history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the

Roman Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last, aped

Cæsar and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind.

Measured by the duration of human life it is a vast space of time

between that first dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the aeroplane,

but by the scale that looks back to the makers of the eoliths, it is

all of it a story of yesterday.

Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this period of

the warring states, while men’s minds were chiefly preoccupied by

politics and mutual aggression, their progress in the acquirement of

external Power was slow—rapid in comparison with the progress of the

old stone age, but slow in comparison with this new age of systematic

discovery in which we live. They did not very greatly alter the weapons

and tactics of warfare, the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their

knowledge of the habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of

domestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when

Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were inventions and

changes, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out and

then forgotten again; it was, on the whole, a progress, but it

contained no steps; the peasant life was the same, there were already

priests and lawyers and town craftsmen and territorial lords and

rulers, doctors, wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China

and Assyria and south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period,

and they were doing much the same things and living much the same life

as they were in Europe in A.D. 1500. The English excavators of the year

A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and

disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family correspondence

that they could read with the completest sympathy. There were great

religious and moral changes throughout the period, empires and

republics replaced one another, Italy tried a vast experiment in

slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again and again and failed and

failed and was still to be tested again and rejected again in the New

World; Christianity and Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more

specialised cults, but essentially these were progressive adaptations

of mankind to material conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever.

The idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life

would have been entirely strange to human thought through all that

time.

Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his

opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the

wars and processions, the castle building and cathedral building, the

arts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the crusades

and trading journeys of the middle ages. He no longer speculated with

the untrammelled freedom of the stone-age savage; authoritative

explanations of everything barred his path; but he speculated with a

better brain, sat idle and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused

upon the coin and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain

leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found

dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the

assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols in

the world about them, questioning the finality of scholastic wisdom.

Through all the ages of history there were men to whom this whisper had

come of hidden things about them. They could no longer lead ordinary

lives nor content themselves with the common things of this world once

they had heard this voice. And mostly they believed not only that all

this world was as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at,

but that these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by

chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among rare

and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd

utilisable thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied

discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day laughed

at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and ill-treated them,

or was seized with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of

them, or with covetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the

greater part heeded them not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him

who had first dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of

his blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly, was

the snare that will some day catch the sun.

Section 3

Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of

Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His common-place

books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations of the

methods of the early aviators. Dürer was his parallel and Roger

Bacon—whom the Franciscans silenced—of his kindred. Such a man again in

an earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam

nineteen hundred years before it was first brought into use. And

earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the

legendary Daedalus of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history

whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers

appeared. And half the alchemists were of their tribe.

When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might have

supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive engine. But

they could see nothing of the sort. They were not yet beginning to

think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all too poor to make such

engines even had they thought of them. For a time they could not make

instruments sound enough to stand this new force even for so rough a

purpose as hurling a missile. Their first guns had barrels of coopered

timber, and the world waited for more than five hundred years before

the explosive engine came.

Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before the

world could use their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious

purposes. If man in general was not still as absolutely blind to the

unconquered energies about him as his paleolithic precursor, he was at

best purblind.

Section 4

The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the

verge of discovery, before they began to influence human lives.

There were no doubt many such devices as Hero’s toys devised and

forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed that

coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand before it

dawned upon men that here was something more than a curiosity. And it

is to be remarked that the first recorded suggestion for the use of

steam was in war; there is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is

proposed to fire shot out of corked iron bottles full of heated water.

The mining of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale

than men had ever done before, the steam pumping engine, the

steam-engine and the steam-boat, followed one another in an order that

had a kind of logical necessity. It is the most interesting and

instructive chapter in the history of the human intelligence, the

history of steam from its beginning as a fact in human consciousness to

the perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the

utilisation of intra-molecular power. Nearly every human being must

have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands of years; the

women in particular were always heating water, boiling it, seeing it

boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with its fury; millions of

people at different times must have watched steam pitching rocks out of

volcanoes like cricket balls and blowing pumice into foam, and yet you

may search the whole human record through, letters, books,

inscriptions, pictures, for any glimmer of a realisation that here was

force, here was strength to borrow and use.... Then suddenly man woke

up to it, the railways spread like a network over the globe, the ever

enlarging iron steamships began their staggering fight against wind and

wave.

Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning of

the Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the Warring

States.

But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this novelty.

They would not recognise, they were not able to recognise that anything

fundamental had happened to their immemorial necessities. They called

the steam-engine the ‘iron horse’ and pretended that they had made the

most partial of substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production

were visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,

population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and

concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city centres,

food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a scale that made

the one sole precedent, the corn ships of imperial Rome, a petty

incident; and a huge migration of peoples between Europe and Western

Asia and America was in Progress, and—nobody seems to have realised

that something new had come into human life, a strange swirl different

altogether from any previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the

swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of

accumulating water and eddying inactivity....

The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit

at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from

Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New

Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance

at the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinise the prices

current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa,

Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten (in the

place of his father’s eight) that he thought the world changed very

little. They must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old

school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few

scraps of Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and

all would be well with them....

Section 5

Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be

studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the

exploitation of steam. To electricity also, in spite of its provocative

nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly blind for incalculable

ages. Could anything be more emphatic than the appeal of electricity

for attention? It thundered at man’s ears, it signalled to him in

blinding flashes, occasionally it killed him, and he could not see it

as a thing that concerned him enough to merit study. It came into the

house with the cat on any dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever

he stroked her fur. It rotted his metals when he put them together....

There is no single record that any one questioned why the cat’s fur

crackles or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the

sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have done his very

successful best not to think about it at all; until this new spirit of

the Seeker turned itself to these things.

How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant,

before the speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It was

Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth’s court physician, who first puzzled his

brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so

began the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this

universal presence. And even then the science of electricity remained a

mere little group of curious facts for nearly two hundred years,

connected perhaps with magnetism—a mere guess that—perhaps with the

lightning. Frogs’ legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron

railings and twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them.

Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert

before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities

into the life of the common man.... Then suddenly, in the half-century

between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took over

traction, it ousted every other form of household heating, abolished

distance with the perfected wireless telephone and the

telephotograph....

Section 6

And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and

invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific revolution

had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice against a

scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One writer upon these

subjects gives a funny little domestic conversation that happened, he

says, in the year 1898, within ten years, that is to say, of the time

when the first aviators were fairly on the wing. He tells us how he sat

at his desk in his study and conversed with his little boy.

His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak very

seriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy he did not

want to do it too harshly.

This is what happened.

‘I wish, Daddy,’ he said, coming to his point, ‘that you wouldn’t write

all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot me.’

‘Yes!’ said his father.

‘And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots me.’

‘But there is going to be flying—quite soon.’

The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that.

‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t write about it.’

‘You’ll fly—lots of times—before you die,’ the father assured him.

The little boy looked unhappy.

The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a blurred

and under-developed photograph. ‘Come and look at this,’ he said.

The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream and a

meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black, pencil-like

object with flat wings on either side of it. It was the first record of

the first apparatus heavier than air that ever maintained itself in the

air by mechanical force. Across the margin was written: ‘Here we go up,

up, up—from S. P. Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.’

The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘That,’ said the schoolboy, after reflection, ‘is only a model.’

‘Model to-day, man to-morrow.’

The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he

believed quite firmly to be omniscience. ‘But old Broomie,’ he said,

‘he told all the boys in his class only yesterday, “no man will ever

fly.” No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on the

wing would ever believe anything of the sort....’

Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father’s

reminiscences.

Section 7

At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages in

the literature of that time witness, it was thought that the fact that

man had at last had successful and profitable dealings with the steam

that scalded him and the electricity that flashed and banged about the

sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a culminating exercise of his

intelligence and his intellectual courage. The air of ‘Nunc Dimittis’

sounds in same of these writings. ‘The great things are discovered,’

wrote Gerald Brown in his summary of the nineteenth century. ‘For us

there remains little but the working out of detail.’ The spirit of the

seeker was still rare in the world; education was unskilled,

unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people even

then could have realised that Science was still but the flimsiest of

trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No one seems to have

been afraid of science and its possibilities. Yet now where there had

been but a score or so of seekers, there were many thousands, and for

one needle of speculation that had been probing the curtain of

appearances in 1800, there were now hundreds. And already Chemistry,

which had been content with her atoms and molecules for the better part

of a century, was preparing herself for that vast next stride that was

to revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom.

One realises how crude was the science of that time when one considers

the case of the composition of air. This was determined by that strange

genius and recluse, that man of mystery, that disembowelled

intelligence, Henry Cavendish, towards the end of the eighteenth

century. So far as he was concerned the work was admirably done. He

separated all the known ingredients of the air with a precision

altogether remarkable; he even put it upon record that he had some

doubt about the purity of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years

his determination was repeated by chemists all the world over, his

apparatus was treasured in London, he became, as they used to say,

‘classic,’ and always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of

his experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen

(and with a little helium and traces of other substances, and indeed

all the hints that might have led to the new departures of the

twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped unobserved

through the professorial fingers that repeated his procedure.

Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to the

very dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was still

rather a procession of happy accidents than an orderly conquest of

nature?

Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the world.

Even the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere handful who grew

up to feel wonder and curiosity about the secrets of nature in the

nineteenth century, there were now, at the beginning of the twentieth,

myriads escaping from the limitations of intellectual routine and the

habitual life, in Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in

China, and all about the world.

It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be called

by a whole generation of scientific men, ‘the greatest of European

chemists,’ were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico, between Fiesole

and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he was already

distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a savage appetite to

understand. He had been particularly attracted by the mystery of

phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness to every other source of

light. He was to tell afterwards in his reminiscences how he watched

the fireflies drifting and glowing among the dark trees in the garden

of the villa under the warm blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and

kept them in cages, dissected them, first studying the general anatomy

of insects very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the

effect of various gases and varying temperature upon their light. Then

the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir William

Crookes, a toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium particles

impinge upon sulphide of zinc and make it luminous, induced him to

associate the two sets of phenomena. It was a happy association for his

inquiries. It was a rare and fortunate thing, too, that any one with

the mathematical gift should have been taken by these curiosities.

Section 8

And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at Fiesole, a

certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a course of

afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in Edinburgh. They

were lectures that had attracted a very considerable amount of

attention. He gave them in a small lecture-theatre that had become more

and more congested as his course proceeded. At his concluding

discussion it was crowded right up to the ceiling at the back, and

there people were standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so

fascinating did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular,

a chuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging his

knee with great sand-red hands and drinking in every word, eyes aglow,

cheeks flushed, and ears burning.

‘And so,’ said the professor, ‘we see that this Radium, which seemed at

first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all that was most

established and fundamental in the constitution of matter, is really at

one with the rest of the elements. It does noticeably and forcibly what

probably all the other elements are doing with an imperceptible

slowness. It is like the single voice crying aloud that betrays the

silent breathing multitude in the darkness. Radium is an element that

is breaking up and flying to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doing

that at less perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is; thorium—the stuff

of this incandescent gas mantle—certainly is; actinium. I feel that we

are but beginning the list. And we know now that the atom, that once we

thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible and final

and—lifeless—lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy. That is

the most wonderful thing about all this work. A little while ago we

thought of the atoms as we thought of bricks, as solid building

material, as substantial matter, as unit masses of lifeless stuff, and

behold! these bricks are boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the

intensest force. This little bottle contains about a pint of uranium

oxide; that is to say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It

is worth about a pound. And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in

the atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as we

could get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a word, in

one instant I could suddenly release that energy here and now it would

blow us and everything about us to fragments; if I could turn it into

the machinery that lights this city, it could keep Edinburgh brightly

lit for a week. But at present no man knows, no man has an inkling of

how this little lump of stuff can be made to hasten the release of its

store. It does release it, as a burn trickles. Slowly the uranium

changes into radium, the radium changes into a gas called the radium

emanation, and that again to what we call radium A, and so the process

goes on, giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach the

last stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead.

But we cannot hasten it.’

‘I take ye, man,’ whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red hands

tightening like a vice upon his knee. ‘I take ye, man. Go on! Oh, go

on!’

The professor went on after a little pause. ‘Why is the change

gradual?’ he asked. ‘Why does only a minute fraction of the radium

disintegrate in any particular second? Why does it dole itself out so

slowly and so exactly? Why does not all the uranium change to radium

and all the radium change to the next lowest thing at once? Why this

decay by driblets; why not a decay _en masse?_ . . . Suppose presently

we find it is possible to quicken that decay?’

The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful inevitable idea

was coming. He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed in his seat

with excitement. ‘Why not?’ he echoed, ‘why not?’

The professor lifted his forefinger.

‘Given that knowledge,’ he said, ‘mark what we should be able to do! We

should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium; not only

should we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in

his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of

battleships, or drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but

we should also have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the

process of disintegration in all the other elements, where decay is

still so slow as to escape our finest measurements. Every scrap of

solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of

concentrated force. Do you realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these

things would mean for us?’

The scrub head nodded. ‘Oh! go on. Go on.’

‘It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to

the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the

brute. We stand to-day towards radio-activity as our ancestor stood

towards fire before he had learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a

strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the

volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is

that we know radio-activity to-day. This—this is the dawn of a new day

in human living. At the climax of that civilisation which had its

beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just

when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be

borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover

suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilisation. The energy we

need for our very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so

grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all

about us. We cannot pick that lock at present, but——’

He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to hear

him.

‘——we will.’

He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.

‘And then,’ he said....

‘Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to

live on the bare surplus of Nature’s energies will cease to be the lot

of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilisation to the

beginning of the next. I have no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to

express the vision of man’s material destiny that opens out before me.

I see the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer

wildernesses of ice, the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of

man reach out among the stars....’

He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an actor or

orator might have envied.

The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,

sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for dispersal.

More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass of figures became

a bright confusion of movement. Some of the people signalled to

friends, some crowded down towards the platform to examine the

lecturer’s apparatus and make notes of his diagrams. But the

chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair wanted no such detailed

frittering away of the thoughts that had inspired him. He wanted to be

alone with them; he elbowed his way out almost fiercely, he made

himself as angular and bony as a cow, fearing lest some one should

speak to him, lest some one should invade his glowing sphere of

enthusiasm.

He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who sees

visions. He had arms disproportionately long, and ridiculous big feet.

He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of

commonness, of everyday life.

He made his way to the top of Arthur’s Seat, and there he sat for a

long time in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that ever and

again he whispered to himself some precious phrase that had stuck in

his mind.

‘If,’ he whispered, ‘if only we could pick that lock....’

The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn of its

beams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks of cloud

that would presently engulf it.

‘Eh!’ said the youngster. ‘Eh!’

He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the red sun

was there before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without

intelligence, and then with a gathering recognition. Into his mind came

a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a Stone Age

savage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two hundred thousand

years ago.

‘Ye auld thing,’ he said—and his eyes were shining, and he made a kind

of grabbing gesture with his hand; ‘ye auld red thing.... We’ll have ye

_yet_.’

CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY

Section I

The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as

Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth

century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements

and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful

combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon as the

year 1933. From the first detection of radio-activity to its first

subjugation to human purpose measured little more than a quarter of a

century. For twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties

prevented any striking practical application of his success, but the

essential thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human

progress was crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in

a minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into a

heavy gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its turn in

the course of seven days, and it was only after another year’s work

that he was able to show practically that the last result of this rapid

release of energy was gold. But the thing was done—at the cost of a

blistered chest and an injured finger, and from the moment when the

invisible speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy,

Holsten knew that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and

dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power. He recorded as

much in the strange diary biography he left the world, a diary that was

up to that particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations,

and which suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human

record of sensations and emotions that all humanity might understand.

He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true, but

none the less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four hours

following the demonstration of the correctness of his intricate tracery

of computations and guesses. ‘I thought I should not sleep,’ he

writes—the words he omitted are supplied in brackets—(on account of)

‘pain in (the) hand and chest and (the) wonder of what I had done....

Slept like a child.’

He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing to

do, he was living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he decided to

go up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he was a little boy

as a breezy playground. He went up by the underground tube that was

then the recognised means of travel from one part of London to another,

and walked up Heath Street from the tube station to the open heath. He

found it a gully of planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of

house-wreckers. The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow,

steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it

commodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of

Neo-Georgian æstheticism. Such is the illogical quality of humanity

that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard under the seat of

current civilisation, saw these changes with regret. He had come up

Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had known the windows of all the

little shops, spent hours in the vanished cinematograph theatre, and

marvelled at the high-flung early Georgian houses upon the westward

bank of that old gully of a thoroughfare; he felt strange with all

these familiar things gone. He escaped at last with a feeling of relief

from this choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged

upon the old familiar scene about the White Stone Pond. That, at least,

was very much as it used to be.

There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right of

him; the reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble, the

white-fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its portico still

stood out at the angle of the ways, and the blue view to Harrow Hill

and Harrow spire, a view of hills and trees and shining waters and

wind-driven cloud shadows, was like the opening of a great window to

the ascending Londoner. All that was very reassuring. There was the

same strolling crowd, the same perpetual miracle of motors dodging

through it harmlessly, escaping headlong into the country from the

Sabbatical stuffiness behind and below them. There was a band still, a

women’s suffrage meeting—for the suffrage women had won their way back

to the tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace again—socialist

orators, politicians, a band, and the same wild uproar of dogs, frantic

with the gladness of their one blessed weekly release from the back

yard and the chain. And away along the road to the Spaniards strolled a

vast multitude, saying, as ever, that the view of London was

exceptionally clear that day.

Young Holsten’s face was white. He walked with that uneasy affectation

of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and an

under-exercised body. He hesitated at the White Stone Pond whether to

go to the left of it or the right, and again at the fork of the roads.

He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and every now and then he would

get in the way of people on the footpath or be jostled by them because

of the uncertainty of his movements. He felt, he confesses, ‘inadequate

to ordinary existence.’ He seemed to himself to be something inhuman

and mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous,

fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to lead—a week

of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading—and he had

launched something that would disorganise the entire fabric that held

their contentments and ambitions and satisfactions together. ‘Felt like

an imbecile who has presented a box full of loaded revolvers to a

Crêche,’ he notes.

He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history now

knows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and Holsten

walked together and Holsten was sufficiently pale and jumpy for Lawson

to tell him he overworked and needed a holiday. They sat down at a

little table outside the County Council house of Golders Hill Park and

sent one of the waiters to the Bull and Bush for a couple of bottles of

beer, no doubt at Lawson’s suggestion. The beer warmed Holsten’s rather

dehumanised system. He began to tell Lawson as clearly as he could to

what his great discovery amounted. Lawson feigned attention, but indeed

he had neither the knowledge nor the imagination to understand. ‘In the

end, before many years are out, this must eventually change war,

transit, lighting, building, and every sort of manufacture, even

agriculture, every material human concern——’

Then Holsten stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. ‘Damn that

dog!’ cried Lawson. ‘Look at it now. Hi! Here! _Phewoo-phewoo-phewoo!_

Come _here, Bobs!_ Come _here!_’

The young scientific man, with his bandaged hand, sat at the green

table, too tired to convey the wonder of the thing he had sought so

long, his friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and the Sunday people

drifted about them through the spring sunshine. For a moment or so

Holsten stared at Lawson in astonishment, for he had been too intent

upon what he had been saying to realise how little Lawson had attended.

Then he remarked, ‘_Well!_’ and smiled faintly, and—finished the

tankard of beer before him.

Lawson sat down again. ‘One must look after one’s dog,’ he said, with a

note of apology. ‘What was it you were telling me?’

Section 2

In the evening Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint Paul’s

Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the evening

service. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some odd way of the

fireflies at Fiesole. Then he walked back through the evening lights to

Westminster. He was oppressed, he was indeed scared, by his sense of

the immense consequences of his discovery. He had a vague idea that

night that he ought not to publish his results, that they were

premature, that some secret association of wise men should take care of

his work and hand it on from generation to generation until the world

was riper for its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the

thousands of people he passed had really awakened to the fact of

change, they trusted the world for what it was, not to alter too

rapidly, to respect their trusts, their assurances, their habits, their

little accustomed traffics and hard-won positions.

He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging,

brightly-lit masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He sat down

on a seat and became aware of the talk of the two people next to him.

It was the talk of a young couple evidently on the eve of marriage. The

man was congratulating himself on having regular employment at last;

‘they like me,’ he said, ‘and I like the job. If I work up—in’r dozen

years or so I ought to be gettin’ somethin’ pretty comfortable. That’s

the plain sense of it, Hetty. There ain’t no reason whatsoever why we

shouldn’t get along very decently—very decently indeed.’

The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed! So it

struck upon Holsten’s mind. He added in his diary, ‘I had a sense of

all this globe as that....’

By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this populated

world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and villages, its high

roads and the inns beside them, its gardens and farms and upland

pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships coming along the great

circles of the ocean, its time-tables and appointments and payments and

dues as it were one unified and progressive spectacle. Sometimes such

visions came to him; his mind, accustomed to great generalisations and

yet acutely sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively

than the minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming

sphere moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately

swiftness on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living

progress that altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little

deadened him to that incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal

circling. He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities

and recurrencies of the human routine. The remoter past of wandering

savagery, the inevitable changes of to-morrow were veiled, and he saw

only day and night, seed-time and harvest, loving and begetting, births

and deaths, walks in the summer sunlight and tales by the winter

fireside, the ancient sequence of hope and acts and age perennially

renewed, eddying on for ever and ever, save that now the impious hand

of research was raised to overthrow this drowsy, gently humming,

habitual, sunlit spinning-top of man’s existence....

For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions, famine

and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the bitter wind,

failure and insufficiency and retrocession. He saw all mankind in terms

of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat beside him, who schemed their

inglorious outlook and improbable contentments. ‘I had a sense of all

this globe as that.’

His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a time

in vain. He reassured himself against the invasion of this

disconcerting idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a loose

wanderer from the flock returning with evil gifts from his sustained

unnatural excursions amidst the darknesses and phosphorescences beneath

the fair surfaces of life. Man had not been always thus; the instincts

and desires of the little home, the little plot, was not all his

nature; also he was an adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting

curiosity, an insatiable desire. For a few thousand generations indeed

he had tilled the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers,

grinding his corn and trampling the October winepress, yet not for so

long but that he was still full of restless stirrings.

‘If there have been home and routine and the field,’ thought Holsten,

‘there have also been wonder and the sea.’

He turned his head and looked up over the back of the seat at the great

hotels above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow and colour

and stir of feasting. Might his gift to mankind mean simply more of

that? . . .

He got up and walked out of the garden, surveyed a passing tram-car,

laden with warm light, against the deep blues of evening, dripping and

trailing long skirts of shining reflection; he crossed the Embankment

and stood for a time watching the dark river and turning ever and again

to the lit buildings and bridges. His mind began to scheme conceivable

replacements of all those clustering arrangements....

‘It has begun,’ he writes in the diary in which these things are

recorded. ‘It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot

foresee. I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in the

armoury of Change. If I were to burn all these papers, before a score

of years had passed, some other man would be doing this. . .

Section 3

Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominating

every other source of power, but for some years yet a vast network of

difficulties in detail and application kept the new discovery from any

effective invasion of ordinary life. The path from the laboratory to

the workshop is sometimes a tortuous one; electro-magnetic radiations

were known and demonstrated for twenty years before Marconi made them

practically available, and in the same way it was twenty years before

induced radio-activity could be brought to practical utilisation. The

thing, of course, was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time of

its discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but

with very little realisation of the huge economic revolution that

impended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the

production of gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon

unprofitable lines of the alchemist’s dreams; there was a considerable

amount of discussion and expectation in that more intelligent section

of the educated publics of the various civilised countries which

followed scientific development; but for the most part the world went

about its business—as the inhabitants of those Swiss villages which

live under the perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go

about their business—just as though the possible was impossible, as

though the inevitable was postponed for ever because it was delayed.

It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought induced

radio-activity into the sphere of industrial production, and its first

general use was to replace the steam-engine in electrical generating

stations. Hard upon the appearance of this came the Dass-Tata

engine—the invention of two among the brilliant galaxy of Bengali

inventors the modernisation of Indian thought was producing at this

time—which was used chiefly for automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes,

and such-like, mobile purposes. The American Kemp engine, differing

widely in principle but equally practicable, and the Krupp-Erlanger

came hard upon the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic

replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress all

about the habitable globe. Small wonder was this when the cost, even of

these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is compared with that

of the power they superseded. Allowing for lubrication the Dass-Tata

engine, once it was started cost a penny to run thirty-seven miles, and

added only nine and quarter pounds to the weight of the carriage it

drove. It made the heavy alcohol-driven automobile of the time

ridiculous in appearance as well as preposterously costly. For many

years the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had been

clambering to levels that made even the revival of the draft horse seem

a practicable possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this

stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world’s

roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful armoured monsters

that had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for four awful

decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways

thronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel.

At the same time a new impetus was given to aviation by the relatively

enormous power for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible

to add Redmayne’s ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the

vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force of the

aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found themselves

possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover or ascend or

descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly through the air.

The last dread of flying vanished. As the journalists of the time

phrased it, this was the epoch of the Leap into the Air. The new atomic

aeroplane became indeed a mania; every one of means was frantic to

possess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free from the dust

and danger of the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty

thousand of these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and

soared humming softly into the sky.

And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded

industrialism. The railways paid enormous premiums for priority in the

delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was embarked upon

so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous explosions due to

inexperienced handling of the new power, and the revolutionary

cheapening of both materials and electricity made the entire

reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter merely dependent upon a

reorganisation of the methods of the builder and the house-furnisher.

Viewed from the side of the new power and from the point of view of

those who financed and manufactured the new engines and material it

required the age of the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing

prosperity. Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividends of

five or six hundred per cent. and enormous fortunes were made and

fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new

developments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the fact

that in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one of the

recoverable waste products was gold—the former disintegrated dust of

bismuth and the latter dust of lead—and that this new supply of gold

led quite naturally to a rise in prices throughout the world.

This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding

flight of happy and fortunate rich people—every great city was as if a

crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing—was the bright side of the

opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that

brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a

vast development of production there was also a huge destruction of

values. These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering

new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of

dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were

indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out

when the world sinks towards twilight and the night. Between these high

lights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were

manifestly doomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount

of capital invested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal

miners, steel workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or

under-skilled labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung

out of employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the

rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values at

every centre of population, the value of existing house property had

become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all

the securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping

and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of

feverish panic;—this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were the

black and monstrous under-consequences of the Leap into the Air.

There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out into

Threadneedle Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran. ‘The Steel

Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,’ he shouted. ‘The State

Railways are going to scrap all their engines. Everything’s going to be

scrapped—everything. Come and scrap the mint, you fellows, come and

scrap the mint!’

In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of America

quadrupled any previous record. There was an enormous increase also in

violent crime throughout the world. The thing had come upon an

unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human society was to be

smashed by its own magnificent gains.

For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been no

attempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations this flood

of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs. The world in

these days was not really governed at all, in the sense in which

government came to be understood in subsequent years. Government was a

treaty, not a design; it was forensic, conservative, disputatious,

unseeing, unthinking, uncreative; throughout the world, except where

the vestiges of absolutism still sheltered the court favourite and the

trusted servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of

lawyers, who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained caste.

Their professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation

of the fantastically naïve electoral methods by which they clambered to

power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously

unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of

every generosity. Government was an obstructive business of energetic

fractions, progress went on outside of and in spite of public

activities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needs

so clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively established as to

invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very

existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.

The world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty,

in the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything

necessary to satisfy human needs and everything necessary to realise

such will and purpose as existed then in human hearts was already at

hand, one has still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion,

conflict, and incoherent suffering. There was no scheme for the

distribution of this vast new wealth that had come at last within the

reach of men; there was no clear conception that any such distribution

was possible. As one attempts a comprehensive view of those opening

years of the new age, as one measures it against the latent achievement

that later years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the

blindness, the narrowness, the insensate unimaginative individualism of

the pre-atomic time. Under this tremendous dawn of power and freedom,

under a sky ablaze with promise, in the very presence of science

standing like some bountiful goddess over all the squat darknesses of

human life, holding patiently in her strong arms, until men chose to

take them, security, plenty, the solution of riddles, the key of the

bravest adventures, in her very presence, and with the earnest of her

gifts in court, the world was to witness such things as the squalid

spectacle of the Dass-Tata patent litigation.

There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room, during

the exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading counsel of the day

argued and shouted over a miserable little matter of more royalties or

less and whether the Dass-Tata company might not bar the

Holsten-Roberts’ methods of utilising the new power. The Dass-Tata

people were indeed making a strenuous attempt to secure a world

monopoly in atomic engineering. The judge, after the manner of those

times, sat raised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown and a

foolish huge wig, the counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and

queer black gowns over their usual costume, wigs and gowns that were

held to be necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean wooden benches

stirred and whispered artful-looking solicitors, busily scribbling

reporters, the parties to the case, expert witnesses, interested

people, and a jostling confusion of subpoenaed persons, briefless young

barristers (forming a style on the most esteemed and truculent

examples) and casual eccentric spectators who preferred this pit of

iniquity to the free sunlight outside. Every one was damply hot, the

examining King’s Counsel wiped the perspiration from his huge,

clean-shaven upper lip; and into this atmosphere of grasping contention

and human exhalations the daylight filtered through a window that was

manifestly dirty. The jury sat in a double pew to the left of the

judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs that have fallen into an

ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the would-be omnivorous Dass,

under cross-examination....

Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon as

they appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a basis for

further work, and to that confiding disposition and one happy flash of

adaptive invention the alert Dass owed his claim....

But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching,

patenting, pre-empting, monopolising this or that feature of the new

development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to the

purposes of their little lusts and avarice. That trial is just one of

innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the face of the world

festered with patent legislation. It chanced, however, to have one

oddly dramatic feature in the fact that Holsten, after being kept

waiting about the court for two days as a beggar might have waited at a

rich man’s door, after being bullied by ushers and watched by

policemen, was called as a witness, rather severely handled by counsel,

and told not to ‘quibble’ by the judge when he was trying to be

absolutely explicit.

The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, and sneered at Holsten’s

astonishment round the corner of his monstrous wig. Holsten was a great

man, was he? Well, in a law-court great men were put in their places.

‘We want to know has the plaintiff added anything to this or hasn’t

he?’ said the judge, ‘we don’t want to have your views whether Sir

Philip Dass’s improvements were merely superficial adaptations or

whether they were implicit in your paper. No doubt—after the manner of

inventors—you think most things that were ever likely to be discovered

are implicit in your papers. No doubt also you think too that most

subsequent additions and modifications are merely superficial.

Inventors have a way of thinking that. The law isn’t concerned with

that sort of thing. The law has nothing to do with the vanity of

inventors. The law is concerned with the question whether these patent

rights have the novelty the plantiff claims for them. What that

admission may or may not stop, and all these other things you are

saying in your overflowing zeal to answer more than the questions

addressed to you—none of these things have anything whatever to do with

the case in hand. It is a matter of constant astonishment to me in this

court to see how you scientific men, with all your extraordinary claims

to precision and veracity, wander and wander so soon as you get into

the witness-box. I know no more unsatisfactory class of witness. The

plain and simple question is, has Sir Philip Dass made any real

addition to existing knowledge and methods in this matter or has he

not? We don’t want to know whether they were large or small additions

nor what the consequences of your admission may be. That you will leave

to us.’

Holsten was silent.

‘Surely?’ said the judge, almost pityingly.

‘No, he hasn’t,’ said Holsten, perceiving that for once in his life he

must disregard infinitesimals.

‘Ah!’ said the judge, ‘now why couldn’t you say that when counsel put

the question? . . .’

An entry in Holsten’s diary-autobiography, dated five days later, runs:

‘Still amazed. The law is the most dangerous thing in this country. It

is hundreds of years old. It hasn’t an idea. The oldest of old bottles

and this new wine, the most explosive wine. Something will overtake

them.’

Section 4

There was a certain truth in Holsten’s assertion that the law was

‘hundreds of years old.’ It was, in relation to current thought and

widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the material

and methods of life had been changing rapidly and were now changing

still more rapidly, the law-courts and the legislatures of the world

were struggling desperately to meet modern demands with devices and

procedures, conceptions of rights and property and authority and

obligation that dated from the rude compromises of relatively barbaric

times. The horse-hair wigs and antic dresses of the British judges,

their musty courts and overbearing manners, were indeed only the

outward and visible intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal

and political organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century

was indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong,

that now fettered the governing body that once it had protected.

Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and outspoken publication that in

the field of natural science had been the beginning of the conquest of

nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries preparing the spirit of the new world within the degenerating

body of the old. The idea of a greater subordination of individual

interests and established institutions to the collective future, is

traceable more and more clearly in the literature of those times, and

movement after movement fretted itself away in criticism of and

opposition to first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and

political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley, with

no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established rulers of the

world as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas and suggestions that

was known as Socialism, and more particularly its international side,

feeble as it was in creative proposals or any method of transition,

still witnesses to the growth of a conception of a modernised system of

inter-relationships that should supplant the existing tangle of

proprietary legal ideas.

The word ‘Sociology’ was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular writer

upon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the middle of the

nineteenth century, but the idea of a state, planned as an

electric-traction system is planned, without reference to pre-existing

apparatus, upon scientific lines, did not take a very strong hold upon

the popular imagination of the world until the twentieth century. Then,

the growing impatience of the American people with the monstrous and

socially paralysing party systems that had sprung out of their absurd

electoral arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called

the ‘Modern State’ movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in

America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the thought of

bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property, employment,

education, and government, than had ever been contemplated before. No

doubt these Modern State ideas were very largely the reflection upon

social and political thought of the vast revolution in material things

that had been in progress for two hundred years, but for a long time

they seemed to be having no more influence upon existing institutions

than the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the

time of the death of the latter. They were fermenting in men’s minds,

and it needed only just such social and political stresses as the

coming of the atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward

abruptly into crude and startling realisation.

Section 5

Frederick Barnet’s _Wander Jahre_ is one of those autobiographical

novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of the

twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understand

Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literal

sense. It is indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back to the

_Wilhelm Meister_ of Goethe, a century and a half earlier.

Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history of his

life and ideas between his nineteenth and his twenty-third birthdays.

He was neither a very original nor a very brilliant man, but he had a

trick of circumstantial writing; and though no authentic portrait was

to survive for the information of posterity, he betrays by a score of

casual phrases that he was short, sturdy, inclined to be plump, with a

‘rather blobby’ face, and full, rather projecting blue eyes. He

belonged until the financial _débâcle_ of 1956 to the class of fairly

prosperous people, he was a student in London, he aeroplaned to Italy

and then had a pedestrian tour from Genoa to Rome, crossed in the air

to Greece and Egypt, and came back over the Balkans and Germany. His

family fortunes, which were largely invested in bank shares, coal

mines, and house property, were destroyed. Reduced to penury, he sought

to earn a living. He suffered great hardship, and was then caught up by

the war and had a year of soldiering, first as an officer in the

English infantry and then in the army of pacification. His book tells

all these things so simply and at the same time so explicitly, that it

remains, as it were, an eye by which future generations may have at

least one man’s vision of the years of the Great Change.

And he was, he tells us, a ‘Modern State’ man ‘by instinct’ from the

beginning. He breathed in these ideas in the class rooms and

laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, a long and

delicately beautiful facade, along the South Bank of the Thames

opposite the ancient dignity of Somerset House. Such thought was

interwoven with the very fabric of that pioneer school in the

educational renascence in England. After the customary exchange years

in Heidelberg and Paris, he went into the classical school of London

University. The older so-called ‘classical’ education of the British

pedagogues, probably the most paralysing, ineffective, and foolish

routine that ever wasted human life, had already been swept out of this

great institution in favour of modern methods; and he learnt Greek and

Latin as well as he had learnt German, Spanish, and French, so that he

wrote and spoke them freely, and used them with an unconscious ease in

his study of the foundation civilisations of the European system to

which they were the key. (This change was still so recent that he

mentions an encounter in Rome with an ‘Oxford don’ who ‘spoke Latin

with a Wiltshire accent and manifest discomfort, wrote Greek letters

with his tongue out, and seemed to think a Greek sentence a charm when

it was a quotation and an impropriety when it wasn’t.’)

Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam engines upon the English

railways and the gradual cleansing of the London atmosphere as the

smoke-creating sea-coal fires gave place to electric heating. The

building of laboratories at Kensington was still in progress, and he

took part in the students’ riots that delayed the removal of the Albert

Memorial. He carried a banner with ‘We like Funny Statuary’ on one

side, and on the other ‘Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should our

Great Departed Stand in the Rain?’ He learnt the rather athletic

aviation of those days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he

was fined for flying over the new prison for political libellers at

Wormwood Scrubs, ‘in a manner calculated to exhilarate the prisoners

while at exercise.’ That was the time of the attempted suppression of

any criticism of the public judicature and the place was crowded with

journalists who had ventured to call attention to the dementia of Chief

Justice Abrahams. Barnet was not a very good aviator, he confesses he

was always a little afraid of his machine—there was excellent reason

for every one to be afraid of those clumsy early types—and he never

attempted steep descents or very high flying. He also, he records,

owned one of those oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity

and extravagant filthiness still astonish the visitors to the museum of

machinery at South Kensington. He mentions running over a dog and

complains of the ruinous price of ‘spatchcocks’ in Surrey.

‘Spatchcocks,’ it seems, was a slang term for crushed hens.

He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military service to

a minimum, and his want of any special scientific or technical

qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that handicapped his

aviation indicated the infantry of the line as his sphere of training.

That was the most generalised form of soldiering. The development of

the theory of war had been for some decades but little assisted by any

practical experience. What fighting had occurred in recent years, had

been fighting in minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaric

soldiers and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and the

great powers of the world were content for the most part to maintain

armies that sustained in their broader organisation the traditions of

the European wars of thirty and forty years before. There was the

infantry arm to which Barnet belonged and which was supposed to fight

on foot with a rifle and be the main portion of the army. There were

cavalry forces (horse soldiers), having a ratio to the infantry that

had been determined by the experiences of the Franco-German war in

1871. There was also artillery, and for some unexplained reason much of

this was still drawn by horses; though there were also in all the

European armies a small number of motor-guns with wheels so constructed

that they could go over broken ground. In addition there were large

developments of the engineering arm, concerned with motor transport,

motor-bicycle scouting, aviation, and the like.

No first-class intelligence had been sought to specialise in and work

out the problem of warfare with the new appliances and under modern

conditions, but a succession of able jurists, Lord Haldane, Chief

Justice Briggs, and that very able King’s Counsel, Philbrick, had

reconstructed the army frequently and thoroughly and placed it at last,

with the adoption of national service, upon a footing that would have

seemed very imposing to the public of 1900. At any moment the British

Empire could now put a million and a quarter of arguable soldiers upon

the board of Welt-Politik. The traditions of Japan and the Central

European armies were more princely and less forensic; the Chinese still

refused resolutely to become a military power, and maintained a small

standing army upon the American model that was said, so far as it went,

to be highly efficient, and Russia, secured by a stringent

administration against internal criticism, had scarcely altered the

design of a uniform or the organisation of a battery since the opening

decades of the century. Barnet’s opinion of his military training was

manifestly a poor one, his Modern State ideas disposed him to regard it

as a bore, and his common sense condemned it as useless. Moreover, his

habit of body made him peculiarly sensitive to the fatigues and

hardships of service.

‘For three days in succession we turned out before dawn and—for no

earthly reason—without breakfast,’ he relates. ‘I suppose that is to

show us that when the Day comes the first thing will be to get us

thoroughly uncomfortable and rotten. We then proceeded to Kriegspiel,

according to the mysterious ideas of those in authority over us. On the

last day we spent three hours under a hot if early sun getting over

eight miles of country to a point we could have reached in a motor

omnibus in nine minutes and a half—I did it the next day in that—and

then we made a massed attack upon entrenchments that could have shot us

all about three times over if only the umpires had let them. Then came

a little bayonet exercise, but I doubt if I am sufficiently a barbarian

to stick this long knife into anything living. Anyhow in this battle I

shouldn’t have had a chance. Assuming that by some miracle I hadn’t

been shot three times over, I was far too hot and blown when I got up

to the entrenchments even to lift my beastly rifle. It was those others

would have begun the sticking....

‘For a time we were watched by two hostile aeroplanes; then our own

came up and asked them not to, and—the practice of aerial warfare still

being unknown—they very politely desisted and went away and did dives

and circles of the most charming description over the Fox Hills.’

All Barnet’s accounts of his military training were written in the same

half-contemptuous, half-protesting tone. He was of opinion that his

chances of participating in any real warfare were very slight, and

that, if after all he should participate, it was bound to be so

entirely different from these peace manœuvres that his only course as a

rational man would be to keep as observantly out of danger as he could

until he had learnt the tricks and possibilities of the new conditions.

He states this quite frankly. Never was a man more free from sham

heroics.

Section 6

Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest of

masculine youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that for some

time he failed to connect the rush of wonderful new possibilities with

the financial troubles of his family. ‘I knew my father was worried,’

he admits. That cast the smallest of shadows upon his delighted

departure for Italy and Greece and Egypt with three congenial

companions in one of the new atomic models. They flew over the Channel

Isles and Touraine, he mentions, and circled about Mont Blanc—‘These

new helicopters, we found,’ he notes, ‘had abolished all the danger and

strain of sudden drops to which the old-time aeroplanes were

liable’—and then he went on by way of Pisa, Paestum, Ghirgenti, and

Athens, to visit the pyramids by moonlight, flying thither from Cairo,

and to follow the Nile up to Khartum. Even by later standards, it must

have been a very gleeful holiday for a young man, and it made the

tragedy of his next experiences all the darker. A week after his return

his father, who was a widower, announced himself ruined, and committed

suicide by means of an unscheduled opiate.

At one blow Barnet found himself flung out of the possessing, spending,

enjoying class to which he belonged, penniless and with no calling by

which he could earn a living. He tried teaching and some journalism,

but in a little while he found himself on the underside of a world in

which he had always reckoned to live in the sunshine. For innumerable

men such an experience has meant mental and spiritual destruction, but

Barnet, in spite of his bodily gravitation towards comfort, showed

himself when put to the test, of the more valiant modern quality. He

was saturated with the creative stoicism of the heroic times that were

already dawning, and he took his difficulties and discomforts stoutly

as his appointed material, and turned them to expression.

Indeed, in his book, he thanks fortune for them. ‘I might have lived

and died,’ he says, ‘in that neat fool’s paradise of secure lavishness

above there. I might never have realised the gathering wrath and sorrow

of the ousted and exasperated masses. In the days of my own prosperity

things had seemed to me to be very well arranged.’ Now from his new

point of view he was to find they were not arranged at all; that

government was a compromise of aggressions and powers and lassitudes,

and law a convention between interests, and that the poor and the weak,

though they had many negligent masters, had few friends.

‘I had thought things were looked after,’ he wrote. ‘It was with a kind

of amazement that I tramped the roads and starved—and found that no one

in particular cared.’

He was turned out of his lodging in a backward part of London.

‘It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady—she was a needy widow,

poor soul, and I was already in her debt—to keep an old box for me in

which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and the like. She lived in

great fear of the Public Health and Morality Inspectors, because she

was sometimes too poor to pay the customary tip to them, but at last

she consented to put it in a dark tiled place under the stairs, and

then I went forth into the world—to seek first the luck of a meal and

then shelter.’

He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in which a

year or so ago he had been numbered among the spenders.

London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of visible

smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine, had already

ceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the Victorian time; it

had been, and indeed was, constantly being rebuilt, and its main

streets were already beginning to take on those characteristics that

distinguished them throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.

The insanitary horse and the plebeian bicycle had been banished from

the roadway, which was now of a resilient, glass-like surface,

spotlessly clean; and the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow

vestige of the ancient footpath on either side of the track and

forbidden at the risk of a fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway.

People descended from their automobiles upon this pavement and went

through the lower shops to the lifts and stairs to the new ways for

pedestrians, the Rows, that ran along the front of the houses at the

level of the first story, and, being joined by frequent bridges, gave

the newer parts of London a curiously Venetian appearance. In some

streets there were upper and even third-story Rows. For most of the day

and all night the shop windows were lit by electric light, and many

establishments had made, as it were, canals of public footpaths through

their premises in order to increase their window space.

Barnet made his way along this night-scene rather apprehensively since

the police had power to challenge and demand the Labour Card of any

indigent-looking person, and if the record failed to show he was in

employment, dismiss him to the traffic pavement below.

But there was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet’s

appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too, had

other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to reach the

galleries about Leicester Square—that great focus of London life and

pleasure.

He gives a vivid description of the scene that evening. In the centre

was a garden raised on arches lit by festoons of lights and connected

with the Rows by eight graceful bridges, beneath which hummed the

interlacing streams of motor traffic, pulsating as the current

alternated between east and west and north and south. Above rose great

frontages of intricate rather than beautiful reinforced porcelain,

studded with lights, barred by bold illuminated advertisements, and

glowing with reflections. There were the two historical music halls of

this place, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal

players revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shakespeare’s plays,

and four other great houses of refreshment and entertainment whose

pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night. The south

side of the square was in dark contrast to the others; it was still

being rebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars surmounted by the frozen

gestures of monstrous cranes rose over the excavated sites of vanished

Victorian buildings.

This framework attracted Barnet’s attention for a time to the exclusion

of other interests. It was absolutely still, it had a dead rigidity, a

stricken inaction, no one was at work upon it and all its machinery was

quiet; but the constructor’s globes of vacuum light filled its every

interstice with a quivering green moonshine and showed alert but

motionless—soldier sentinels!

He asked a passing stroller, and was told that the men had struck that

day against the use of an atomic riveter that would have doubled the

individual efficiency and halved the number of steel workers.

‘Shouldn’t wonder if they didn’t get chucking bombs,’ said Barnet’s

informant, hovered for a moment, and then went on his way to the

Alhambra music hall.

Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at the

corners of the square. Something very sensational had been flashed upon

the transparencies. Forgetting for a moment his penniless condition, he

made his way over a bridge to buy a paper, for in those days the

papers, which were printed upon thin sheets of metallic foil, were sold

at determinate points by specially licensed purveyors. Half over, he

stopped short at a change in the traffic below; and was astonished to

see that the police signals were restricting vehicles to the half

roadway. When presently he got within sight of the transparencies that

had replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read of the Great

March of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the West

End, and so without expenditure he was able to understand what was

coming.

He watched, and his book describes this procession which the police had

considered it unwise to prevent and which had been spontaneously

organised in imitation of the Unemployed Processions of earlier times.

He had expected a mob but there was a kind of sullen discipline about

the procession when at last it arrived. What seemed for a time an

unending column of men marched wearily, marched with a kind of

implacable futility, along the roadway underneath him. He was, he says,

moved to join them, but instead he remained watching. They were a

dingy, shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part

incapable of any but obsolete and superseded types of labour. They bore

a few banners with the time-honoured inscription: ‘Work, not Charity,’

but otherwise their ranks were unadorned.

They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was nothing

truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no definite

objective they were just marching and showing themselves in the more

prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of that great mass of

unskilled cheap labour which the now still cheaper mechanical powers

had superseded for evermore. They were being ‘scrapped’—as horses had

been ‘scrapped.’

Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened by his

own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt nothing but

despair at the sight; what should be done, what could be done for this

gathering surplus of humanity? They were so manifestly useless—and

incapable—and pitiful.

What were they asking for?

They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had foreseen——

It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous shambling

enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the unexpected, an appeal

to those others who, more fortunate, seemed wiser and more powerful,

for something—for _intelligence_. This mute mass, weary footed, rank

following rank, protested its persuasion that some of these others must

have foreseen these dislocations—that anyhow they ought to have

foreseen—and arranged.

That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so dumbly

to assert.

‘Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened room,’

he says. ‘These men were praying to their fellow creatures as once they

prayed to God! The last thing that men will realise about anything is

that it is inanimate. They had transferred their animation to mankind.

They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was

careless or malignant.... It had only to be aroused to be

conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion.... And I saw, too, that

as yet _there was no such intelligence_. The world waits for

intelligence. That intelligence has still to be made, that will for

good and order has still to be gathered together, out of scraps of

impulse and wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine and

creative in our souls, into a common purpose. It’s something still to

come....’

It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that this not

very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might well have been

altogether occupied with the problem of his own individual necessities,

should be able to stand there and generalise about the needs of the

race.

But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time there was

already dawning the light of a new era. The spirit of humanity was

escaping, even then it was escaping, from its extreme imprisonment in

individuals. Salvation from the bitter intensities of self, which had

been a conscious religious end for thousands of years, which men had

sought in mortifications, in the wilderness, in meditation, and by

innumerable strange paths, was coming at last with the effect of

naturalness into the talk of men, into the books they read, into their

unconscious gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and

everyday acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the

spirit of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of

those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very threat

of hell and torment had failed to drive them. And this young man,

homeless and without provision even for the immediate hours, in the

presence of social disorganisation, distress, and perplexity, in a

blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasure that blotted out the stars,

could think as he tells us he thought.

‘I saw life plain,’ he wrote. ‘I saw the gigantic task before us, and

the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable difficulty filled

me with exaltation. I saw that we have still to discover government,

that we have still to discover education, which is the necessary

reciprocal of government, and that all this—in which my own little

speck of a life was so manifestly overwhelmed—this and its yesterday in

Greece and Rome and Egypt were nothing, the mere first dust swirls of

the beginning, the movements and dim murmurings of a sleeper who will

presently be awake....’

Section 7

And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his descent

from this ecstatic vision of reality.

‘Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold and a

little hungry.’

He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood upon

the Thames Embankment. He made his way through the galleries of the

booksellers and the National Gallery, which had been open continuously

day and night to all decently dressed people now for more than twelve

years, and across the rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the

hotel colonnade to the Embankment. He had long known of these admirable

offices, which had swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all the

casual indigent from the London streets, and he believed that he would,

as a matter of course, be able to procure a ticket for food and a

night’s lodgings and some indication of possible employment.

But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he got

to the Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested and

besieged by a large and rather unruly crowd. He hovered for a time on

the outskirts of the waiting multitude, perplexed and dismayed, and

then he became aware of a movement, a purposive trickling away of

people, up through the arches of the great buildings that had arisen

when all the railway stations were removed to the south side of the

river, and so to the covered ways of the Strand. And here, in the open

glare of midnight, he found unemployed men begging, and not only

begging, but begging with astonishing assurance, from the people who

were emerging from the small theatres and other such places of

entertainment which abounded in that thoroughfare.

This was an altogether unexampled thing. There had been no begging in

London streets for a quarter of a century. But that night the police

were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with the destitute who were

invading those well-kept quarters of the town. They had become stonily

blind to anything but manifest disorder.

Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask; indeed

his bearing must have been more valiant than his circumstances, for

twice he says that he was begged from. Near the Trafalgar Square

gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and blackened eyebrows, who was

walking alone, spoke to him with a peculiar friendliness.

‘I’m starving,’ he said to her abruptly.

‘Oh! poor dear!’ she said; and with the impulsive generosity of her

kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his hand....

It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey, might

under the repressive social legislation of those times, have brought

Barnet within reach of the prison lash. But he took it, he confesses,

and thanked her as well as he was able, and went off very gladly to get

food.

Section 8

A day or so later—and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon the

roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social disorganisation and

police embarrassment—he wandered out into the open country. He speaks

of the roads of that plutocratic age as being ‘fenced with barbed wire

against unpropertied people,’ of the high-walled gardens and trespass

warnings that kept him to the dusty narrowness of the public ways. In

the air, happy rich people were flying, heedless of the misfortunes

about them, as he himself had been flying two years ago, and along the

road swept the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. One was

rarely out of earshot of its whistles and gongs and siren cries even in

the field paths or over the open downs. The officials of the labour

exchanges were everywhere overworked and infuriated, the casual wards

were so crowded that the surplus wanderers slept in ranks under sheds

or in the open air, and since giving to wayfarers had been made a

punishable offence there was no longer friendship or help for a man

from the rare foot passenger or the wayside cottage....

‘I wasn’t angry,’ said Barnet. ‘I saw an immense selfishness, a

monstrous disregard for anything but pleasure and possession in all

those people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how certainly

if the richest had changed places with the poorest, that things would

have been the same. What else can happen when men use science and every

new thing that science gives, and all their available intelligence and

energy to manufacture wealth and appliances, and leave government and

education to the rustling traditions of hundreds of years ago? Those

traditions come from the dark ages when there was really not enough for

every one, when life was a fierce struggle that might be masked but

could not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce

dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony between

material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and the poor grew

savage and every added power that came to men made the rich richer and

the poor less necessary and less free. The men I met in the casual

wards and the relief offices were all smouldering for revolt, talking

of justice and injustice and revenge. I saw no hope in that talk, nor

in anything but patience....’

But he did not mean a passive patience. He meant that the method of

social reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual

rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled aspects

was solved. ‘I tried to talk to those discontented men,’ he wrote, ‘but

it was hard for them to see things as I saw them. When I talked of

patience and the larger scheme, they answered, “But then we shall all

be dead”—and I could not make them see, what is so simple to my own

mind, that that did not affect the question. Men who think in lifetimes

are of no use to statesmanship.’

He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and

a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in the market-place at

Bishop’s Stortford announcing a ‘Grave International Situation’ did not

excite him very much. There had been so many grave international

situations in recent years.

This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly attacking

the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to the help of the

Slavs.

But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the vagrants in

the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master that all

serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the morrow to their

mobilisation centres. The country was on the eve of war. He was to go

back through London to Surrey. His first feeling, he records, was one

of extreme relief that his days of ‘hopeless battering at the underside

of civilisation’ were at an end. Here was something definite to do,

something definitely provided for. But his relief was greatly modified

when he found that the mobilisation arrangements had been made so

hastily and carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at the

improvised depôt at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink but

a cup of cold water. The depôt was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one

was free to leave it.

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 manœuvres, 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 depôt 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 depôts 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 Cæsar 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 manœuvres 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

_débris_, 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 β-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 manœuvred 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 manœuvres. 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 satisfy myself 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 quietly thoughtful 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 know themselves 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 mere 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 mere

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....

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE ENDING OF WAR

Section 1

On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding two long

stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to Bellinzona, and

southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is very

beautiful in springtime with a great multitude of wild flowers. More

particularly is this so in early June, when the slender asphodel Saint

Bruno’s lily, with its spike of white blossom, is in flower. To the

westward of this delightful shelf there is a deep and densely wooded

trench, a great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of which

arise great precipices very high and wild. Above the asphodel fields

the mountains climb in rocky slopes to solitudes of stone and sunlight

that curve round and join that wall of cliffs in one common skyline.

This desolate and austere background contrasts very vividly with the

glowing serenity of the great lake below, with the spacious view of

fertile hills and roads and villages and islands to south and east, and

with the hotly golden rice flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And

because it was a remote and insignificant place, far away out of the

crowding tragedies of that year of disaster, away from burning cities

and starving multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was

here that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest,

if possible, before it was too late, the _débâcle_ of civilisation.

Here, brought together by the indefatigable energy of that impassioned

humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at Washington, the chief

Powers of the world were to meet in a last desperate conference to

‘save humanity.’

Leblanc was one of those ingenuous men whose lot would have been

insignificant in any period of security, but who have been caught up to

an immortal _rôle_ in history by the sudden simplification of human

affairs through some tragical crisis, to the measure of their

simplicity. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln, and such was Garibaldi. And

Leblanc, with his transparent childish innocence, his entire

self-forgetfulness, came into this confusion of distrust and intricate

disaster with an invincible appeal for the manifest sanities of the

situation. His voice, when he spoke, was ‘full of remonstrance.’ He was

a little bald, spectacled man, inspired by that intellectual idealism

which has been one of the peculiar gifts of France to humanity. He was

possessed of one clear persuasion, that war must end, and that the only

way to end war was to have but one government for mankind. He brushed

aside all other considerations. At the very outbreak of the war, so

soon as the two capitals of the belligerents had been wrecked, he went

to the president in the White House with this proposal. He made it as

if it was a matter of course. He was fortunate to be in Washington and

in touch with that gigantic childishness which was the characteristic

of the American imagination. For the Americans also were among the

simple peoples by whom the world was saved. He won over the American

president and the American government to his general ideas; at any rate

they supported him sufficiently to give him a standing with the more

sceptical European governments, and with this backing he set to work—it

seemed the most fantastic of enterprises—to bring together all the

rulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable letters, he

sent messages, he went desperate journeys, he enlisted whatever support

he could find; no one was too humble for an ally or too obstinate for

his advances; through the terrible autumn of the last wars this

persistent little visionary in spectacles must have seemed rather like

a hopeful canary twittering during a thunderstorm. And no accumulation

of disasters daunted his conviction that they could be ended.

For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of

destruction. Power after Power about the armed globe sought to

anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium of

panic, in order to use their bombs first. China and Japan had assailed

Russia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had attacked Japan,

India was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit of fire spouting death

and flame; the redoubtable King of the Balkans was mobilising. It must

have seemed plain at last to every one in those days that the world was

slipping headlong to anarchy. By the spring of 1959 from nearly two

hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the

unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy

fabric of the world’s credit had vanished, industry was completely

disorganised and every city, every thickly populated area was starving

or trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the capital cities of

the world were burning; millions of people had already perished, and

over great areas government was at an end. Humanity has been compared

by one contemporary writer to a sleeper who handles matches in his

sleep and wakes to find himself in flames.

For many months it was an open question whether there was to be found

throughout all the race the will and intelligence to face these new

conditions and make even an attempt to arrest the downfall of the

social order. For a time the war spirit defeated every effort to rally

the forces of preservation and construction. Leblanc seemed to be

protesting against earthquakes, and as likely to find a spirit of

reason in the crater of Etna. Even though the shattered official

governments now clamoured for peace, bands of irreconcilables and

invincible patriots, usurpers, adventurers, and political desperadoes,

were everywhere in possession of the simple apparatus for the

disengagement of atomic energy and the initiation of new centres of

destruction. The stuff exercised an irresistible fascination upon a

certain type of mind. Why should any one give in while he can still

destroy his enemies? Surrender? While there is still a chance of

blowing them to dust? The power of destruction which had once been the

ultimate privilege of government was now the only power left in the

world—and it was everywhere. There were few thoughtful men during that

phase of blazing waste who did not pass through such moods of despair

as Barnet describes, and declare with him: ‘This is the end....’

And all the while Leblanc was going to and fro with glittering glasses

and an inexhaustible persuasiveness, urging the manifest reasonableness

of his view upon ears that ceased presently to be inattentive. Never at

any time did he betray a doubt that all this chaotic conflict would

end. No nurse during a nursery uproar was ever so certain of the

inevitable ultimate peace. From being treated as an amiable dreamer he

came by insensible degrees to be regarded as an extravagant

possibility. Then he began to seem even practicable. The people who

listened to him in 1958 with a smiling impatience, were eager before

1959 was four months old to know just exactly what he thought might be

done. He answered with the patience of a philosopher and the lucidity

of a Frenchman. He began to receive responses of a more and more

hopeful type. He came across the Atlantic to Italy, and there he

gathered in the promises for this congress. He chose those high meadows

above Brissago for the reasons we have stated. ‘We must get away,’ he

said, ‘from old associations.’ He set to work requisitioning material

for his conference with an assurance that was justified by the replies.

With a slight incredulity the conference which was to begin a new order

in the world, gathered itself together. Leblanc summoned it without

arrogance, he controlled it by virtue of an infinite humility. Men

appeared upon those upland slopes with the apparatus for wireless

telegraphy; others followed with tents and provisions; a little cable

was flung down to a convenient point upon the Locarno road below.

Leblanc arrived, sedulously directing every detail that would affect

the tone of the assembly. He might have been a courier in advance

rather than the originator of the gathering. And then there arrived,

some by the cable, most by aeroplane, a few in other fashions, the men

who had been called together to confer upon the state of the world. It

was to be a conference without a name. Nine monarchs, the presidents of

four republics, a number of ministers and ambassadors, powerful

journalists, and such-like prominent and influential men, took part in

it. There were even scientific men; and that world-famous old man,

Holsten, came with the others to contribute his amateur statecraft to

the desperate problem of the age. Only Leblanc would have dared so to

summon figure heads and powers and intelligence, or have had the

courage to hope for their agreement....

Section 2

And one at least of those who were called to this conference of

governments came to it on foot. This was King Egbert, the young king of

the most venerable kingdom in Europe. He was a rebel, and had always

been of deliberate choice a rebel against the magnificence of his

position. He affected long pedestrian tours and a disposition to sleep

in the open air. He came now over the Pass of Sta Maria Maggiore and by

boat up the lake to Brissago; thence he walked up the mountain, a

pleasant path set with oaks and sweet chestnut. For provision on the

walk, for he did not want to hurry, he carried with him a pocketful of

bread and cheese. A certain small retinue that was necessary to his

comfort and dignity upon occasions of state he sent on by the cable

car, and with him walked his private secretary, Firmin, a man who had

thrown up the Professorship of World Politics in the London School of

Sociology, Economics, and Political Science, to take up these duties.

Firmin was a man of strong rather than rapid thought, he had

anticipated great influence in this new position, and after some years

he was still only beginning to apprehend how largely his function was

to listen. Originally he had been something of a thinker upon

international politics, an authority upon tariffs and strategy, and a

valued contributor to various of the higher organs of public opinion,

but the atomic bombs had taken him by surprise, and he had still to

recover completely from his pre-atomic opinions and the silencing

effect of those sustained explosives.

The king’s freedom from the trammels of etiquette was very complete. In

theory—and he abounded in theory—his manners were purely democratic. It

was by sheer habit and inadvertency that he permitted Firmin, who had

discovered a rucksack in a small shop in the town below, to carry both

bottles of beer. The king had never, as a matter of fact, carried

anything for himself in his life, and he had never noted that he did

not do so.

‘We will have nobody with us,’ he said, ‘at all. We will be perfectly

simple.’

So Firmin carried the beer.

As they walked up—it was the king made the pace rather than Firmin—they

talked of the conference before them, and Firmin, with a certain want

of assurance that would have surprised him in himself in the days of

his Professorship, sought to define the policy of his companion. ‘In

its broader form, sir,’ said Firmin; ‘I admit a certain plausibility in

this project of Leblanc’s, but I feel that although it may be advisable

to set up some sort of general control for International affairs—a sort

of Hague Court with extended powers—that is no reason whatever for

losing sight of the principles of national and imperial autonomy.’

‘Firmin,’ said the king, ‘I am going to set my brother kings a good

example.’

Firmin intimated a curiosity that veiled a dread.

‘By chucking all that nonsense,’ said the king.

He quickened his pace as Firmin, who was already a little out of

breath, betrayed a disposition to reply.

‘I am going to chuck all that nonsense,’ said the king, as Firmin

prepared to speak. ‘I am going to fling my royalty and empire on the

table—and declare at once I don’t mean to haggle. It’s haggling—about

rights—has been the devil in human affairs, for—always. I am going to

stop this nonsense.’

Firmin halted abruptly. ‘But, sir!’ he cried.

The king stopped six yards ahead of him and looked back at his

adviser’s perspiring visage.

‘Do you really think, Firmin, that I am here as—as an infernal

politician to put my crown and my flag and my claims and so forth in

the way of peace? That little Frenchman is right. You know he is right

as well as I do. Those things are over. We—we kings and rulers and

representatives have been at the very heart of the mischief. Of course

we imply separation, and of course separation means the threat of war,

and of course the threat of war means the accumulation of more and more

atomic bombs. The old game’s up. But, I say, we mustn’t stand here, you

know. The world waits. Don’t you think the old game’s up, Firmin?’

Firmin adjusted a strap, passed a hand over his wet forehead, and

followed earnestly. ‘I admit, sir,’ he said to a receding back, ‘that

there has to be some sort of hegemony, some sort of Amphictyonic

council——’

‘There’s got to be one simple government for all the world,’ said the

king over his shoulder.

‘But as for a reckless, unqualified abandonment, sir——’

‘_Bang!_’ cried the king.

Firmin made no answer to this interruption. But a faint shadow of

annoyance passed across his heated features.

‘Yesterday,’ said the king, by way of explanation, ‘the Japanese very

nearly got San Francisco.’

‘I hadn’t heard, sir.’

‘The Americans ran the Japanese aeroplane down into the sea and there

the bomb got busted.’

‘Under the sea, sir?’

‘Yes. Submarine volcano. The steam is in sight of the Californian

coast. It was as near as that. And with things like this happening, you

want me to go up this hill and haggle. Consider the effect of that upon

my imperial cousin—and all the others!’

‘_He_ will haggle, sir.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ said the king.

‘But, sir.’

‘Leblanc won’t let him.’

Firmin halted abruptly and gave a vicious pull at the offending strap.

‘Sir, he will listen to his advisers,’ he said, in a tone that in some

subtle way seemed to implicate his master with the trouble of the

knapsack.

The king considered him.

‘We will go just a little higher,’ he said. ‘I want to find this

unoccupied village they spoke of, and then we will drink that beer. It

can’t be far. We will drink the beer and throw away the bottles. And

then, Firmin, I shall ask you to look at things in a more generous

light.... Because, you know, you must....’

He turned about and for some time the only sound they made was the

noise of their boots upon the loose stones of the way and the irregular

breathing of Firmin.

At length, as it seemed to Firmin, or quite soon, as it seemed to the

king, the gradient of the path diminished, the way widened out, and

they found themselves in a very beautiful place indeed. It was one of

those upland clusters of sheds and houses that are still to be found in

the mountains of North Italy, buildings that were used only in the high

summer, and which it was the custom to leave locked up and deserted

through all the winter and spring, and up to the middle of June. The

buildings were of a soft-toned gray stone, buried in rich green grass,

shadowed by chestnut trees and lit by an extraordinary blaze of yellow

broom. Never had the king seen broom so glorious; he shouted at the

light of it, for it seemed to give out more sunlight even than it

received; he sat down impulsively on a lichenous stone, tugged out his

bread and cheese, and bade Firmin thrust the beer into the shaded weeds

to cool.

‘The things people miss, Firmin,’ he said, ‘who go up into the air in

ships!’

Firmin looked around him with an ungenial eye. ‘You see it at its best,

sir,’ he said, ‘before the peasants come here again and make it

filthy.’

‘It would be beautiful anyhow,’ said the king.

‘Superficially, sir,’ said Firmin. ‘But it stands for a social order

that is fast vanishing away. Indeed, judging by the grass between the

stones and in the huts, I am inclined to doubt if it is in use even

now.’

‘I suppose,’ said the king, ‘they would come up immediately the hay on

this flower meadow is cut. It would be those slow, creamy-coloured

beasts, I expect, one sees on the roads below, and swarthy girls with

red handkerchiefs over their black hair.... It is wonderful to think

how long that beautiful old life lasted. In the Roman times and long

ages before ever the rumour of the Romans had come into these parts,

men drove their cattle up into these places as the summer came on....

How haunted is this place! There have been quarrels here, hopes,

children have played here and lived to be old crones and old gaffers,

and died, and so it has gone on for thousands of lives. Lovers,

innumerable lovers, have caressed amidst this golden broom....’

He meditated over a busy mouthful of bread and cheese.

‘We ought to have brought a tankard for that beer,’ he said.

Firmin produced a folding aluminium cup, and the king was pleased to

drink.

‘I wish, sir,’ said Firmin suddenly, ‘I could induce you at least to

delay your decision——’

‘It’s no good talking, Firmin,’ said the king. ‘My mind’s as clear as

daylight.’

‘Sire,’ protested Firmin, with his voice full of bread and cheese and

genuine emotion, ‘have you no respect for your kingship?’

The king paused before he answered with unwonted gravity. ‘It’s just

because I have, Firmin, that I won’t be a puppet in this game of

international politics.’ He regarded his companion for a moment and

then remarked: ‘Kingship!—what do _you_ know of kingship, Firmin?

‘Yes,’ cried the king to his astonished counsellor. ‘For the first time

in my life I am going to be a king. I am going to lead, and lead by my

own authority. For a dozen generations my family has been a set of

dummies in the hands of their advisers. Advisers! Now I am going to be

a real king—and I am going to—to abolish, dispose of, finish, the crown

to which I have been a slave. But what a world of paralysing shams this

roaring stuff has ended! The rigid old world is in the melting-pot

again, and I, who seemed to be no more than the stuffing inside a regal

robe, I am a king among kings. I have to play my part at the head of

things and put an end to blood and fire and idiot disorder.’

‘But, sir,’ protested Firmin.

‘This man Leblanc is right. The whole world has got to be a Republic,

one and indivisible. You know that, and my duty is to make that easy. A

king should lead his people; you want me to stick on their backs like

some Old Man of the Sea. To-day must be a sacrament of kings. Our trust

for mankind is done with and ended. We must part our robes among them,

we must part our kingship among them, and say to them all, now the king

in every one must rule the world.... Have you no sense of the

magnificence of this occasion? You want me, Firmin, you want me to go

up there and haggle like a damned little solicitor for some price, some

compensation, some qualification....’

Firmin shrugged his shoulders and assumed an expression of despair.

Meanwhile, he conveyed, one must eat.

For a time neither spoke, and the king ate and turned over in his mind

the phrases of the speech he intended to make to the conference. By

virtue of the antiquity of his crown he was to preside, and he intended

to make his presidency memorable. Reassured of his eloquence, he

considered the despondent and sulky Firmin for a space.

‘Firmin,’ he said, ‘you have idealised kingship.’

‘It has been my dream, sir,’ said Firmin sorrowfully, ‘to serve.’

‘At the levers, Firmin,’ said the king.

‘You are pleased to be unjust,’ said Firmin, deeply hurt.

‘I am pleased to be getting out of it,’ said the king.

‘Oh, Firmin,’ he went on, ‘have you no thought for me? Will you never

realise that I am not only flesh and blood but an imagination—with its

rights. I am a king in revolt against that fetter they put upon my

head. I am a king awake. My reverend grandparents never in all their

august lives had a waking moment. They loved the job that you, you

advisers, gave them; they never had a doubt of it. It was like giving a

doll to a woman who ought to have a child. They delighted in

processions and opening things and being read addresses to, and

visiting triplets and nonagenarians and all that sort of thing.

Incredibly. They used to keep albums of cuttings from all the

illustrated papers showing them at it, and if the press-cutting parcels

grew thin they were worried. It was all that ever worried them. But

there is something atavistic in me; I hark back to unconstitutional

monarchs. They christened me too retrogressively, I think. I wanted to

get things done. I was bored. I might have fallen into vice, most

intelligent and energetic princes do, but the palace precautions were

unusually thorough. I was brought up in the purest court the world has

ever seen.... Alertly pure.... So I read books, Firmin, and went about

asking questions. The thing was bound to happen to one of us sooner or

later. Perhaps, too, very likely I’m not vicious. I don’t think I am.’

He reflected. ‘No,’ he said.

Firmin cleared his throat. ‘I don’t think you are, sir,’ he said. ‘You

prefer——’

He stopped short. He had been going to say ‘talking.’ He substituted

‘ideas.’

‘That world of royalty!’ the king went on. ‘In a little while no one

will understand it any more. It will become a riddle....

‘Among other things, it was a world of perpetual best clothes.

Everything was in its best clothes for us, and usually wearing bunting.

With a cinema watching to see we took it properly. If you are a king,

Firmin, and you go and look at a regiment, it instantly stops whatever

it is doing, changes into full uniform and presents arms. When my

august parents went in a train the coal in the tender used to be

whitened. It did, Firmin, and if coal had been white instead of black I

have no doubt the authorities would have blackened it. That was the

spirit of our treatment. People were always walking about with their

faces to us. One never saw anything in profile. One got an impression

of a world that was insanely focused on ourselves. And when I began to

poke my little questions into the Lord Chancellor and the archbishop

and all the rest of them, about what I should see if people turned

round, the general effect I produced was that I wasn’t by any means

displaying the Royal Tact they had expected of me....’

He meditated for a time.

‘And yet, you know, there is something in the kingship, Firmin. It

stiffened up my august little grandfather. It gave my grandmother a

kind of awkward dignity even when she was cross—and she was very often

cross. They both had a profound sense of responsibility. My poor

father’s health was wretched during his brief career; nobody outside

the circle knows just how he screwed himself up to things. “My people

expect it,” he used to say of this tiresome duty or that. Most of the

things they made him do were silly—it was part of a bad tradition, but

there was nothing silly in the way he set about them.... The spirit of

kingship is a fine thing, Firmin; I feel it in my bones; I do not know

what I might not be if I were not a king. I could die for my people,

Firmin, and you couldn’t. No, don’t say you could die for me, because I

know better. Don’t think I forget my kingship, Firmin, don’t imagine

that. I am a king, a kingly king, by right divine. The fact that I am

also a chattering young man makes not the slightest difference to that.

But the proper text-book for kings, Firmin, is none of the court

memoirs and Welt-Politik books you would have me read; it is old

Fraser’s _Golden Bough_. Have you read that, Firmin?’

Firmin had. ‘Those were the authentic kings. In the end they were cut

up and a bit given to everybody. They sprinkled the nations—with

Kingship.’

Firmin turned himself round and faced his royal master.

‘What do you intend to do, sir?’ he asked. ‘If you will not listen to

me, what do you propose to do this afternoon?’

The king flicked crumbs from his coat.

‘Manifestly war has to stop for ever, Firmin. Manifestly this can only

be done by putting all the world under one government. Our crowns and

flags are in the way. Manifestly they must go.’

‘Yes, sir,’ interrupted Firmin, ‘but _what_ government? I don’t see

what government you get by a universal abdication!’

‘Well,’ said the king, with his hands about his knees, ‘_We_ shall be

the government.’

‘The conference?’ exclaimed Firmin.

‘Who else?’ asked the king simply.

‘It’s perfectly simple,’ he added to Firmin’s tremendous silence.

‘But,’ cried Firmin, ‘you must have sanctions! Will there be no form of

election, for example?’

‘Why should there be?’ asked the king, with intelligent curiosity.

‘The consent of the governed.’

‘Firmin, we are just going to lay down our differences and take over

government. Without any election at all. Without any sanction. The

governed will show their consent by silence. If any effective

opposition arises we shall ask it to come in and help. The true

sanction of kingship is the grip upon the sceptre. We aren’t going to

worry people to vote for us. I’m certain the mass of men does not want

to be bothered with such things.... We’ll contrive a way for any one

interested to join in. That’s quite enough in the way of democracy.

Perhaps later—when things don’t matter.... We shall govern all right,

Firmin. Government only becomes difficult when the lawyers get hold of

it, and since these troubles began the lawyers are shy. Indeed, come to

think of it, I wonder where all the lawyers are.... Where are they? A

lot, of course, were bagged, some of the worst ones, when they blew up

my legislature. You never knew the late Lord Chancellor....

‘Necessities bury rights. And create them. Lawyers live on dead rights

disinterred.... We’ve done with that way of living. We won’t have more

law than a code can cover and beyond that government will be free....

‘Before the sun sets to-day, Firmin, trust me, we shall have made our

abdications, all of us, and declared the World Republic, supreme and

indivisible. I wonder what my august grandmother would have made of it!

All my rights! . . . And then we shall go on governing. What else is

there to do? All over the world we shall declare that there is no

longer mine or thine, but ours. China, the United States, two-thirds of

Europe, will certainly fall in and obey. They will have to do so. What

else can they do? Their official rulers are here with us. They won’t be

able to get together any sort of idea of not obeying us.... Then we

shall declare that every sort of property is held in trust for the

Republic....’

‘But, sir!’ cried Firmin, suddenly enlightened. ‘Has this been arranged

already?’

‘My dear Firmin, do you think we have come here, all of us, to talk at

large? The talking has been done for half a century. Talking and

writing. We are here to set the new thing, the simple, obvious,

necessary thing, going.’

He stood up.

Firmin, forgetting the habits of a score of years, remained seated.

‘_Well_,’ he said at last. ‘And I have known nothing!’

The king smiled very cheerfully. He liked these talks with Firmin.

Section 3

That conference upon the Brissago meadows was one of the most

heterogeneous collections of prominent people that has ever met

together. Principalities and powers, stripped and shattered until all

their pride and mystery were gone, met in a marvellous new humility.

Here were kings and emperors whose capitals were lakes of flaming

destruction, statesmen whose countries had become chaos, scared

politicians and financial potentates. Here were leaders of thought and

learned investigators dragged reluctantly to the control of affairs.

Altogether there were ninety-three of them, Leblanc’s conception of the

head men of the world. They had all come to the realisation of the

simple truths that the indefatigable Leblanc had hammered into them;

and, drawing his resources from the King of Italy, he had provisioned

his conference with a generous simplicity quite in accordance with the

rest of his character, and so at last was able to make his astonishing

and entirely rational appeal. He had appointed King Egbert the

president, he believed in this young man so firmly that he completely

dominated him, and he spoke himself as a secretary might speak from the

president’s left hand, and evidently did not realise himself that he

was telling them all exactly what they had to do. He imagined he was

merely recapitulating the obvious features of the situation for their

convenience. He was dressed in ill-fitting white silk clothes, and he

consulted a dingy little packet of notes as he spoke. They put him out.

He explained that he had never spoken from notes before, but that this

occasion was exceptional.

And then King Egbert spoke as he was expected to speak, and Leblanc’s

spectacles moistened at that flow of generous sentiment, most amiably

and lightly expressed. ‘We haven’t to stand on ceremony,’ said the

king, ‘we have to govern the world. We have always pretended to govern

the world and here is our opportunity.’

‘Of course,’ whispered Leblanc, nodding his head rapidly, ‘of course.’

‘The world has been smashed up, and we have to put it on its wheels

again,’ said King Egbert. ‘And it is the simple common sense of this

crisis for all to help and none to seek advantage. Is that our tone or

not?’

The gathering was too old and seasoned and miscellaneous for any great

displays of enthusiasm, but that was its tone, and with an astonishment

that somehow became exhilarating it began to resign, repudiate, and

declare its intentions. Firmin, taking notes behind his master, heard

everything that had been foretold among the yellow broom, come true.

With a queer feeling that he was dreaming, he assisted at the

proclamation of the World State, and saw the message taken out to the

wireless operators to be throbbed all round the habitable globe. ‘And

next,’ said King Egbert, with a cheerful excitement in his voice, ‘we

have to get every atom of Carolinum and all the plant for making it,

into our control....’

Firmin was not alone in his incredulity. Not a man there who was not a

very amiable, reasonable, benevolent creature at bottom; some had been

born to power and some had happened upon it, some had struggled to get

it, not clearly knowing what it was and what it implied, but none was

irreconcilably set upon its retention at the price of cosmic disaster.

Their minds had been prepared by circumstances and sedulously

cultivated by Leblanc; and now they took the broad obvious road along

which King Egbert was leading them, with a mingled conviction of

strangeness and necessity. Things went very smoothly; the King of Italy

explained the arrangements that had been made for the protection of the

camp from any fantastic attack; a couple of thousand of aeroplanes,

each carrying a sharpshooter, guarded them, and there was an excellent

system of relays, and at night all the sky would be searched by scores

of lights, and the admirable Leblanc gave luminous reasons for their

camping just where they were and going on with their administrative

duties forthwith. He knew of this place, because he had happened upon

it when holiday-making with Madame Leblanc twenty years and more ago.

‘There is very simple fare at present,’ he explained, ‘on account of

the disturbed state of the countries about us. But we have excellent

fresh milk, good red wine, beef, bread, salad, and lemons.... In a few

days I hope to place things in the hands of a more efficient

caterer....’

The members of the new world government dined at three long tables on

trestles, and down the middle of these tables Leblanc, in spite of the

barrenness of his menu, had contrived to have a great multitude of

beautiful roses. There was similar accommodation for the secretaries

and attendants at a lower level down the mountain. The assembly dined

as it had debated, in the open air, and over the dark crags to the west

the glowing June sunset shone upon the banquet. There was no precedency

now among the ninety-three, and King Egbert found himself between a

pleasant little Japanese stranger in spectacles and his cousin of

Central Europe, and opposite a great Bengali leader and the President

of the United States of America. Beyond the Japanese was Holsten, the

old chemist, and Leblanc was a little way down the other side.

The king was still cheerfully talkative and abounded in ideas. He fell

presently into an amiable controversy with the American, who seemed to

feel a lack of impressiveness in the occasion.

It was ever the Transatlantic tendency, due, no doubt, to the necessity

of handling public questions in a bulky and striking manner, to

over-emphasise and over-accentuate, and the president was touched by

his national failing. He suggested now that there should be a new era,

starting from that day as the first day of the first year.

The king demurred.

‘From this day forth, sir, man enters upon his heritage,’ said the

American.

‘Man,’ said the king, ‘is always entering upon his heritage. You

Americans have a peculiar weakness for anniversaries—if you will

forgive me saying so. Yes—I accuse you of a lust for dramatic effect.

Everything is happening always, but you want to say this or this is the

real instant in time and subordinate all the others to it.’

The American said something about an epoch-making day.

‘But surely,’ said the king, ‘you don’t want us to condemn all humanity

to a world-wide annual Fourth of July for ever and ever more. On

account of this harmless necessary day of declarations. No conceivable

day could ever deserve that. Ah! you do not know, as I do, the

devastations of the memorable. My poor grandparents were—_rubricated_.

The worst of these huge celebrations is that they break up the

dignified succession of one’s contemporary emotions. They interrupt.

They set back. Suddenly out come the flags and fireworks, and the old

enthusiasms are furbished up—and it’s sheer destruction of the proper

thing that ought to be going on. Sufficient unto the day is the

celebration thereof. Let the dead past bury its dead. You see, in

regard to the calendar, I am for democracy and you are for aristocracy.

All things I hold, are august, and have a right to be lived through on

their merits. No day should be sacrificed on the grave of departed

events. What do you think of it, Wilhelm?’

‘For the noble, yes, all days should be noble.’

‘Exactly my position,’ said the king, and felt pleased at what he had

been saying.

And then, since the American pressed his idea, the king contrived to

shift the talk from the question of celebrating the epoch they were

making to the question of the probabilities that lay ahead. Here every

one became diffident. They could see the world unified and at peace,

but what detail was to follow from that unification they seemed

indisposed to discuss. This diffidence struck the king as remarkable.

He plunged upon the possibilities of science. All the huge expenditure

that had hitherto gone into unproductive naval and military

preparations, must now, he declared, place research upon a new footing.

‘Where one man worked we will have a thousand.’ He appealed to Holsten.

‘We have only begun to peep into these possibilities,’ he said. ‘You at

any rate have sounded the vaults of the treasure house.’

‘They are unfathomable,’ smiled Holsten.

‘Man,’ said the American, with a manifest resolve to justify and

reinstate himself after the flickering contradictions of the king,

‘Man, I say, is only beginning to enter upon his heritage.’

‘Tell us some of the things you believe we shall presently learn, give

us an idea of the things we may presently do,’ said the king to

Holsten.

Holsten opened out the vistas....

‘Science,’ the king cried presently, ‘is the new king of the world.’

‘_Our_ view,’ said the president, ‘is that sovereignty resides with the

people.’

‘No!’ said the king, ‘the sovereign is a being more subtle than that.

And less arithmetical. Neither my family nor your emancipated people.

It is something that floats about us, and above us, and through us. It

is that common impersonal will and sense of necessity of which Science

is the best understood and most typical aspect. It is the mind of the

race. It is that which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to

its demands....’

He paused and glanced down the table at Leblanc, and then re-opened at

his former antagonist.

‘There is a disposition,’ said the king, ‘to regard this gathering as

if it were actually doing what it appears to be doing, as if we

ninety-odd men of our own free will and wisdom were unifying the world.

There is a temptation to consider ourselves exceptionally fine fellows,

and masterful men, and all the rest of it. We are not. I doubt if we

should average out as anything abler than any other casually selected

body of ninety-odd men. We are no creators, we are consequences, we are

salvagers—or salvagees. The thing to-day is not ourselves but the wind

of conviction that has blown us hither....’

The American had to confess he could hardly agree with the king’s

estimate of their average.

‘Holsten, perhaps, and one or two others, might lift us a little,’ the

king conceded. ‘But the rest of us?’

His eyes flitted once more towards Leblanc.

‘Look at Leblanc,’ he said. ‘He’s just a simple soul. There are

hundreds and thousands like him. I admit, a certain dexterity, a

certain lucidity, but there is not a country town in France where there

is not a Leblanc or so to be found about two o’clock in its principal

café. It’s just that he isn’t complicated or Super-Mannish, or any of

those things that has made all he has done possible. But in happier

times, don’t you think, Wilhelm, he would have remained just what his

father was, a successful _épicier_, very clean, very accurate, very

honest. And on holidays he would have gone out with Madame Leblanc and

her knitting in a punt with a jar of something gentle and have sat

under a large reasonable green-lined umbrella and fished very neatly

and successfully for gudgeon....’

The president and the Japanese prince in spectacles protested together.

‘If I do him an injustice,’ said the king, ‘it is only because I want

to elucidate my argument. I want to make it clear how small are men and

days, and how great is man in comparison....’

Section 4

So it was King Egbert talked at Brissago after they had proclaimed the

unity of the world. Every evening after that the assembly dined

together and talked at their ease and grew accustomed to each other and

sharpened each other’s ideas, and every day they worked together, and

really for a time believed that they were inventing a new government

for the world. They discussed a constitution. But there were matters

needing attention too urgently to wait for any constitution. They

attended to these incidentally. The constitution it was that waited. It

was presently found convenient to keep the constitution waiting

indefinitely as King Egbert had foreseen, and meanwhile, with an

increasing self-confidence, that council went on governing....

On this first evening of all the council’s gatherings, after King

Egbert had talked for a long time and drunken and praised very

abundantly the simple red wine of the country that Leblanc had procured

for them, he gathered about him a group of congenial spirits and fell

into a discourse upon simplicity, praising it above all things and

declaring that the ultimate aim of art, religion, philosophy, and

science alike was to simplify. He instanced himself as a devotee to

simplicity. And Leblanc he instanced as a crowning instance of the

splendour of this quality. Upon that they all agreed.

When at last the company about the tables broke up, the king found

himself brimming over with a peculiar affection and admiration for

Leblanc, he made his way to him and drew him aside and broached what he

declared was a small matter. There was, he said, a certain order in his

gift that, unlike all other orders and decorations in the world, had

never been corrupted. It was reserved for elderly men of supreme

distinction, the acuteness of whose gifts was already touched to

mellowness, and it had included the greatest names of every age so far

as the advisers of his family had been able to ascertain them. At

present, the king admitted, these matters of stars and badges were

rather obscured by more urgent affairs, for his own part he had never

set any value upon them at all, but a time might come when they would

be at least interesting, and in short he wished to confer the Order of

Merit upon Leblanc. His sole motive in doing so, he added, was his

strong desire to signalise his personal esteem. He laid his hand upon

the Frenchman’s shoulder as he said these things, with an almost

brotherly affection. Leblanc received this proposal with a modest

confusion that greatly enhanced the king’s opinion of his admirable

simplicity. He pointed out that eager as he was to snatch at the

proffered distinction, it might at the present stage appear invidious,

and he therefore suggested that the conferring of it should be

postponed until it could be made the crown and conclusion of his

services. The king was unable to shake this resolution, and the two men

parted with expressions of mutual esteem.

The king then summoned Firmin in order to make a short note of a number

of things that he had said during the day. But after about twenty

minutes’ work the sweet sleepiness of the mountain air overcame him,

and he dismissed Firmin and went to bed and fell asleep at once, and

slept with extreme satisfaction. He had had an active, agreeable day.

Section 5

The establishment of the new order that was thus so humanly begun, was,

if one measures it by the standard of any preceding age, a rapid

progress. The fighting spirit of the world was exhausted. Only here or

there did fierceness linger. For long decades the combative side in

human affairs had been monstrously exaggerated by the accidents of

political separation. This now became luminously plain. An enormous

proportion of the force that sustained armaments had been nothing more

aggressive than the fear of war and warlike neighbours. It is doubtful

if any large section of the men actually enlisted for fighting ever at

any time really hungered and thirsted for bloodshed and danger. That

kind of appetite was probably never very strong in the species after

the savage stage was past. The army was a profession, in which killing

had become a disagreeable possibility rather than an eventful

certainty. If one reads the old newspapers and periodicals of that

time, which did so much to keep militarism alive, one finds very little

about glory and adventure and a constant harping on the

disagreeableness of invasion and subjugation. In one word, militarism

was funk. The belligerent resolution of the armed Europe of the

twentieth century was the resolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to

plunge. And now that its weapons were exploding in its hands, Europe

was only too eager to drop them, and abandon this fancied refuge of

violence.

For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness; nearly all

the clever people who had hitherto sustained the ancient belligerent

separations had now been brought to realise the need for simplicity of

attitude and openness of mind; and in this atmosphere of moral

renascence, there was little attempt to get negotiable advantages out

of resistance to the new order. Human beings are foolish enough no

doubt, but few have stopped to haggle in a fire-escape. The council had

its way with them. The band of ‘patriots’ who seized the laboratories

and arsenal just outside Osaka and tried to rouse Japan to revolt

against inclusion in the Republic of Mankind, found they had

miscalculated the national pride and met the swift vengeance of their

own countrymen. That fight in the arsenal was a vivid incident in this

closing chapter of the history of war. To the last the ‘patriots’ were

undecided whether, in the event of a defeat, they would explode their

supply of atomic bombs or not. They were fighting with swords outside

the iridium doors, and the moderates of their number were at bay and on

the verge of destruction, only ten, indeed, remained unwounded, when

the republicans burst in to the rescue....

Section 6

One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in the new

rule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism, the ‘Slavic

Fox,’ the King of the Balkans. He debated and delayed his submissions.

He showed an extraordinary combination of cunning and temerity in his

evasion of the repeated summonses from Brissago. He affected ill-health

and a great preoccupation with his new official mistress, for his

semi-barbaric court was arranged on the best romantic models. His

tactics were ably seconded by Doctor Pestovitch, his chief minister.

Failing to establish his claims to complete independence, King

Ferdinand Charles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be treated as

a protected state. Finally he professed an unconvincing submission, and

put a mass of obstacles in the way of the transfer of his national

officials to the new government. In these things he was

enthusiastically supported by his subjects, still for the most part an

illiterate peasantry, passionately if confusedly patriotic, and so far

with no practical knowledge of the effect of atomic bombs. More

particularly he retained control of all the Balkan aeroplanes.

For once the extreme _naïveté_ of Leblanc seems to have been mitigated

by duplicity. He went on with the general pacification of the world as

if the Balkan submission was made in absolute good faith, and he

announced the disbandment of the force of aeroplanes that hitherto

guarded the council at Brissago upon the approaching fifteenth of July.

But instead he doubled the number upon duty on that eventful day, and

made various arrangements for their disposition. He consulted certain

experts, and when he took King Egbert into his confidence there was

something in his neat and explicit foresight that brought back to that

ex-monarch’s mind his half-forgotten fantasy of Leblanc as a fisherman

under a green umbrella.

About five o’clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one of the

outer sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring unobtrusively

over the lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted and hailed a strange

aeroplane that was flying westward, and, failing to get a satisfactory

reply, set its wireless apparatus talking and gave chase. A swarm of

consorts appeared very promptly over the westward mountains, and before

the unknown aeroplane had sighted Como, it had a dozen eager attendants

closing in upon it. Its driver seems to have hesitated, dropped down

among the mountains, and then turned southward in flight, only to find

an intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows. He then went round

into the eye of the rising sun, and passed within a hundred yards of

his original pursuer.

The sharpshooter therein opened fire at once, and showed an intelligent

grasp of the situation by disabling the passenger first. The man at the

wheel must have heard his companion cry out behind him, but he was too

intent on getting away to waste even a glance behind. Twice after that

he must have heard shots. He let his engine go, he crouched down, and

for twenty minutes he must have steered in the continual expectation of

a bullet. It never came, and when at last he glanced round, three great

planes were close upon him, and his companion, thrice hit, lay dead

across his bombs. His followers manifestly did not mean either to upset

or shoot him, but inexorably they drove him down, down. At last he was

curving and flying a hundred yards or less over the level fields of

rice and maize. Ahead of him and dark against the morning sunrise was a

village with a very tall and slender campanile and a line of cable

bearing metal standards that he could not clear. He stopped his engine

abruptly and dropped flat. He may have hoped to get at the bombs when

he came down, but his pitiless pursuers drove right over him and shot

him as he fell.

Three other aeroplanes curved down and came to rest amidst grass close

by the smashed machine. Their passengers descended, and ran, holding

their light rifles in their hands towards the _débris_ and the two dead

men. The coffin-shaped box that had occupied the centre of the machine

had broken, and three black objects, each with two handles like the

ears of a pitcher, lay peacefully amidst the litter.

These objects were so tremendously important in the eyes of their

captors that they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and

broken amidst the wreckage as they might have disregarded dead frogs by

a country pathway.

‘By God,’ cried the first. ‘Here they are!’

‘And unbroken!’ said the second.

‘I’ve never seen the things before,’ said the first.

‘Bigger than I thought,’ said the second.

The third comer arrived. He stared for a moment at the bombs and then

turned his eyes to the dead man with a crushed chest who lay in a muddy

place among the green stems under the centre of the machine.

‘One can take no risks,’ he said, with a faint suggestion of apology.

The other two now also turned to the victims. ‘We must signal,’ said

the first man. A shadow passed between them and the sun, and they

looked up to see the aeroplane that had fired the last shot. ‘Shall we

signal?’ came a megaphone hail.

‘Three bombs,’ they answered together.

‘Where do they come from?’ asked the megaphone.

The three sharpshooters looked at each other and then moved towards the

dead men. One of them had an idea. ‘Signal that first,’ he said, ‘while

we look.’ They were joined by their aviators for the search, and all

six men began a hunt that was necessarily brutal in its haste, for some

indication of identity. They examined the men’s pockets, their

bloodstained clothes, the machine, the framework. They turned the

bodies over and flung them aside. There was not a tattoo mark....

Everything was elaborately free of any indication of its origin.

‘We can’t find out!’ they called at last.

‘Not a sign?’

‘Not a sign.’

‘I’m coming down,’ said the man overhead....

Section 7

The Slavic fox stood upon a metal balcony in his picturesque Art

Nouveau palace that gave upon the precipice that overhung his bright

little capital, and beside him stood Pestovitch, grizzled and cunning,

and now full of an ill-suppressed excitement. Behind them the window

opened into a large room, richly decorated in aluminium and crimson

enamel, across which the king, as he glanced ever and again over his

shoulder with a gesture of inquiry, could see through the two open

doors of a little azure walled antechamber the wireless operator in the

turret working at his incessant transcription. Two pompously uniformed

messengers waited listlessly in this apartment. The room was furnished

with a stately dignity, and had in the middle of it a big green

baize-covered table with the massive white metal inkpots and antiquated

sandboxes natural to a new but romantic monarchy. It was the king’s

council chamber and about it now, in attitudes of suspended intrigue,

stood the half-dozen ministers who constituted his cabinet. They had

been summoned for twelve o’clock, but still at half-past twelve the

king loitered in the balcony and seemed to be waiting for some news

that did not come.

The king and his minister had talked at first in whispers; they had

fallen silent, for they found little now to express except a vague

anxiety. Away there on the mountain side were the white metal roofs of

the long farm buildings beneath which the bomb factory and the bombs

were hidden. (The chemist who had made all these for the king had died

suddenly after the declaration of Brissago.) Nobody knew of that store

of mischief now but the king and his adviser and three heavily faithful

attendants; the aviators who waited now in the midday blaze with their

bomb-carrying machines and their passenger bomb-throwers in the

exercising grounds of the motor-cyclist barracks below were still in

ignorance of the position of the ammunition they were presently to take

up. It was time they started if the scheme was to work as Pestovitch

had planned it. It was a magnificent plan. It aimed at no less than the

Empire of the World. The government of idealists and professors away

there at Brissago was to be blown to fragments, and then east, west,

north, and south those aeroplanes would go swarming over a world that

had disarmed itself, to proclaim Ferdinand Charles, the new Cæsar, the

Master, Lord of the Earth. It was a magnificent plan. But the tension

of this waiting for news of the success of the first blow

was—considerable.

The Slavic fox was of a pallid fairness, he had a remarkably long nose,

a thick, short moustache, and small blue eyes that were a little too

near together to be pleasant. It was his habit to worry his moustache

with short, nervous tugs whenever his restless mind troubled him, and

now this motion was becoming so incessant that it irked Pestovitch

beyond the limits of endurance.

‘I will go,’ said the minister, ‘and see what the trouble is with the

wireless. They give us nothing, good or bad.’

Left to himself, the king could worry his moustache without stint; he

leant his elbows forward on the balcony and gave both of his long white

hands to the work, so that he looked like a pale dog gnawing a bone.

Suppose they caught his men, what should he do? Suppose they caught his

men?

The clocks in the light gold-capped belfries of the town below

presently intimated the half-hour after midday.

Of course, he and Pestovitch had thought it out. Even if they had

caught those men, they were pledged to secrecy.... Probably they would

be killed in the catching.... One could deny anyhow, deny and deny.

And then he became aware of half a dozen little shining specks very

high in the blue.... Pestovitch came out to him presently. ‘The

government messages, sire, have all dropped into cipher,’ he said. ‘I

have set a man——’

‘_look!_’ interrupted the king, and pointed upward with a long, lean

finger.

Pestovitch followed that indication and then glanced for one

questioning moment at the white face before him.

‘We have to face it out, sire,’ he said.

For some moments they watched the steep spirals of the descending

messengers, and then they began a hasty consultation....

They decided that to be holding a council upon the details of an

ultimate surrender to Brissago was as innocent-looking a thing as the

king could well be doing, and so, when at last the ex-king Egbert, whom

the council had sent as its envoy, arrived upon the scene, he

discovered the king almost theatrically posed at the head of his

councillors in the midst of his court. The door upon the wireless

operators was shut.

The ex-king from Brissago came like a draught through the curtains and

attendants that gave a wide margin to King Ferdinand’s state, and the

familiar confidence of his manner belied a certain hardness in his eye.

Firmin trotted behind him, and no one else was with him. And as

Ferdinand Charles rose to greet him, there came into the heart of the

Balkan king again that same chilly feeling that he had felt upon the

balcony—and it passed at the careless gestures of his guest. For surely

any one might outwit this foolish talker who, for a mere idea and at

the command of a little French rationalist in spectacles, had thrown

away the most ancient crown in all the world.

One must deny, deny....

And then slowly and quite tiresomely he realised that there was nothing

to deny. His visitor, with an amiable ease, went on talking about

everything in debate between himself and Brissago except——.

Could it be that they had been delayed? Could it be that they had had

to drop for repairs and were still uncaptured? Could it be that even

now while this fool babbled, they were over there among the mountains

heaving their deadly charge over the side of the aeroplane?

Strange hopes began to lift the tail of the Slavic fox again.

What was the man saying? One must talk to him anyhow until one knew. At

any moment the little brass door behind him might open with the news of

Brissago blown to atoms. Then it would be a delightful relief to the

present tension to arrest this chatterer forthwith. He might be killed

perhaps. What?

The king was repeating his observation. ‘They have a ridiculous fancy

that your confidence is based on the possession of atomic bombs.’

King Ferdinand Charles pulled himself together. He protested.

‘Oh, quite so,’ said the ex-king, ‘quite so.’

‘What grounds?’ The ex-king permitted himself a gesture and the ghost

of a chuckle—why the devil should he chuckle? ‘Practically none,’ he

said. ‘But of course with these things one has to be so careful.’

And then again for an instant something—like the faintest shadow of

derision—gleamed out of the envoy’s eyes and recalled that chilly

feeling to King Ferdinand’s spine.

Some kindred depression had come to Pestovitch, who had been watching

the drawn intensity of Firmin’s face. He came to the help of his

master, who, he feared, might protest too much.

‘A search!’ cried the king. ‘An embargo on our aeroplanes.’

‘Only a temporary expedient,’ said the ex-king Egbert, ‘while the

search is going on.’

The king appealed to his council.

‘The people will never permit it, sire,’ said a bustling little man in

a gorgeous uniform.

‘You’ll have to make ‘em,’ said the ex-king, genially addressing all

the councillors.

King Ferdinand glanced at the closed brass door through which no news

would come.

‘When would you want to have this search?’

The ex-king was radiant. ‘We couldn’t possibly do it until the day

after to-morrow,’ he said.

‘Just the capital?’

‘Where else?’ asked the ex-king, still more cheerfully.

‘For my own part,’ said the ex-king confidentially, ‘I think the whole

business ridiculous. Who would be such a fool as to hide atomic bombs?

Nobody. Certain hanging if he’s caught—certain, and almost certain

blowing up if he isn’t. But nowadays I have to take orders like the

rest of the world. And here I am.’

The king thought he had never met such detestable geniality. He glanced

at Pestovitch, who nodded almost imperceptibly. It was well, anyhow, to

have a fool to deal with. They might have sent a diplomatist. ‘Of

course,’ said the king, ‘I recognise the overpowering force—and a kind

of logic—in these orders from Brissago.’

‘I knew you would,’ said the ex-king, with an air of relief, ‘and so

let us arrange——’

They arranged with a certain informality. No Balkan aeroplane was to

adventure into the air until the search was concluded, and meanwhile

the fleets of the world government would soar and circle in the sky.

The towns were to be placarded with offers of reward to any one who

would help in the discovery of atomic bombs....

‘You will sign that,’ said the ex-king.

‘Why?’

‘To show that we aren’t in any way hostile to you.’

Pestovitch nodded ‘yes’ to his master.

‘And then, you see,’ said the ex-king in that easy way of his, ‘we’ll

have a lot of men here, borrow help from your police, and run through

all your things. And then everything will be over. Meanwhile, if I may

be your guest....’ When presently Pestovitch was alone with the king

again, he found him in a state of jangling emotions. His spirit was

tossing like a wind-whipped sea. One moment he was exalted and full of

contempt for ‘that ass’ and his search; the next he was down in a pit

of dread. ‘They will find them, Pestovitch, and then he’ll hang us.’

‘Hang us?’

The king put his long nose into his councillor’s face. ‘That grinning

brute _wants_ to hang us,’ he said. ‘And hang us he will, if we give

him a shadow of a chance.’

‘But all their Modern State Civilisation!’

‘Do you think there’s any pity in that crew of Godless, Vivisecting

Prigs?’ cried this last king of romance. ‘Do you think, Pestovitch,

they understand anything of a high ambition or a splendid dream? Do you

think that our gallant and sublime adventure has any appeal to them?

Here am I, the last and greatest and most romantic of the Cæsars, and

do you think they will miss the chance of hanging me like a dog if they

can, killing me like a rat in a hole? And that renegade! He who was

once an anointed king! . . .

‘I hate that sort of eye that laughs and keeps hard,’ said the king.

‘I won’t sit still here and be caught like a fascinated rabbit,’ said

the king in conclusion. ‘We must shift those bombs.’

‘Risk it,’ said Pestovitch. ‘Leave them alone.’

‘No,’ said the king. ‘Shift them near the frontier. Then while they

watch us here—they will always watch us here now—we can buy an

aeroplane abroad, and pick them up....’

The king was in a feverish, irritable mood all that evening, but he

made his plans nevertheless with infinite cunning. They must get the

bombs away; there must be a couple of atomic hay lorries, the bombs

could be hidden under the hay.... Pestovitch went and came, instructing

trusty servants, planning and replanning.... The king and the ex-king

talked very pleasantly of a number of subjects. All the while at the

back of King Ferdinand Charles’s mind fretted the mystery of his

vanished aeroplane. There came no news of its capture, and no news of

its success. At any moment all that power at the back of his visitor

might crumble away and vanish....

It was past midnight, when the king, in a cloak and slouch hat that

might equally have served a small farmer, or any respectable

middle-class man, slipped out from an inconspicuous service gate on the

eastward side of his palace into the thickly wooded gardens that sloped

in a series of terraces down to the town. Pestovitch and his

guard-valet Peter, both wrapped about in a similar disguise, came out

among the laurels that bordered the pathway and joined him. It was a

clear, warm night, but the stars seemed unusually little and remote

because of the aeroplanes, each trailing a searchlight, that drove

hither and thither across the blue. One great beam seemed to rest on

the king for a moment as he came out of the palace; then instantly and

reassuringly it had swept away. But while they were still in the palace

gardens another found them and looked at them.

‘They see us,’ cried the king.

‘They make nothing of us,’ said Pestovitch.

The king glanced up and met a calm, round eye of light, that seemed to

wink at him and vanish, leaving him blinded....

The three men went on their way. Near the little gate in the garden

railings that Pestovitch had caused to be unlocked, the king paused

under the shadow of an ilex and looked back at the place. It was very

high and narrow, a twentieth-century rendering of mediaevalism,

mediaevalism in steel and bronze and sham stone and opaque glass.

Against the sky it splashed a confusion of pinnacles. High up in the

eastward wing were the windows of the apartments of the ex-king Egbert.

One of them was brightly lit now, and against the light a little black

figure stood very still and looked out upon the night.

The king snarled.

‘He little knows how we slip through his fingers,’ said Pestovitch.

And as he spoke they saw the ex-king stretch out his arms slowly, like

one who yawns, knuckle his eyes and turn inward—no doubt to his bed.

Down through the ancient winding back streets of his capital hurried

the king, and at an appointed corner a shabby atomic-automobile waited

for the three. It was a hackney carriage of the lowest grade, with

dinted metal panels and deflated cushions. The driver was one of the

ordinary drivers of the capital, but beside him sat the young secretary

of Pestovitch, who knew the way to the farm where the bombs were

hidden.

The automobile made its way through the narrow streets of the old town,

which were still lit and uneasy—for the fleet of airships overhead had

kept the cafés open and people abroad—over the great new bridge, and so

by straggling outskirts to the country. And all through his capital the

king who hoped to outdo Cæsar, sat back and was very still, and no one

spoke. And as they got out into the dark country they became aware of

the searchlights wandering over the country-side like the uneasy ghosts

of giants. The king sat forward and looked at these flitting

whitenesses, and every now and then peered up to see the flying ships

overhead.

‘I don’t like them,’ said the king.

Presently one of these patches of moonlight came to rest about them and

seemed to be following their automobile. The king drew back.

‘The things are confoundedly noiseless,’ said the king. ‘It’s like

being stalked by lean white cats.’

He peered again. ‘That fellow is watching us,’ he said.

And then suddenly he gave way to panic. ‘Pestovitch,’ he said,

clutching his minister’s arm, ‘they are watching us. I’m not going

through with this. They are watching us. I’m going back.’

Pestovitch remonstrated. ‘Tell him to go back,’ said the king, and

tried to open the window. For a few moments there was a grim struggle

in the automobile; a gripping of wrists and a blow. ‘I can’t go through

with it,’ repeated the king, ‘I can’t go through with it.’

‘But they’ll hang us,’ said Pestovitch.

‘Not if we were to give up now. Not if we were to surrender the bombs.

It is you who brought me into this....’

At last Pestovitch compromised. There was an inn perhaps half a mile

from the farm. They could alight there and the king could get brandy,

and rest his nerves for a time. And if he still thought fit to go back

he could go back.

‘See,’ said Pestovitch, ‘the light has gone again.’

The king peered up. ‘I believe he’s following us without a light,’ said

the king.

In the little old dirty inn the king hung doubtful for a time, and was

for going back and throwing himself on the mercy of the council. ‘If

there is a council,’ said Pestovitch. ‘By this time your bombs may have

settled it.

‘But if so, these infernal aeroplanes would go.’

‘They may not know yet.’

‘But, Pestovitch, why couldn’t you do all this without me?’

Pestovitch made no answer for a moment. ‘I was for leaving the bombs in

their place,’ he said at last, and went to the window. About their

conveyance shone a circle of bright light. Pestovitch had a brilliant

idea. ‘I will send my secretary out to make a kind of dispute with the

driver. Something that will make them watch up above there. Meanwhile

you and I and Peter will go out by the back way and up by the hedges to

the farm....’

It was worthy of his subtle reputation and it answered passing well.

In ten minutes they were tumbling over the wall of the farm-yard, wet,

muddy, and breathless, but unobserved. But as they ran towards the

barns the king gave vent to something between a groan and a curse, and

all about them shone the light—and passed.

But had it passed at once or lingered for just a second?

‘They didn’t see us,’ said Peter.

‘I don’t think they saw us,’ said the king, and stared as the light

went swooping up the mountain side, hung for a second about a hayrick,

and then came pouring back.

‘In the barn!’ cried the king.

He bruised his shin against something, and then all three men were

inside the huge steel-girdered barn in which stood the two motor hay

lorries that were to take the bombs away. Kurt and Abel, the two

brothers of Peter, had brought the lorries thither in daylight. They

had the upper half of the loads of hay thrown off, ready to cover the

bombs, so soon as the king should show the hiding-place. ‘There’s a

sort of pit here,’ said the king. ‘Don’t light another lantern. This

key of mine releases a ring....’

For a time scarcely a word was spoken in the darkness of the barn.

There was the sound of a slab being lifted and then of feet descending

a ladder into a pit. Then whispering and then heavy breathing as Kurt

came struggling up with the first of the hidden bombs.

‘We shall do it yet,’ said the king. And then he gasped. ‘Curse that

light. Why in the name of Heaven didn’t we shut the barn door?’ For the

great door stood wide open and all the empty, lifeless yard outside and

the door and six feet of the floor of the barn were in the blue glare

of an inquiring searchlight.

‘Shut the door, Peter,’ said Pestovitch.

‘No,’ cried the king, too late, as Peter went forward into the light.

‘Don’t show yourself!’ cried the king. Kurt made a step forward and

plucked his brother back. For a time all five men stood still. It

seemed that light would never go and then abruptly it was turned off,

leaving them blinded. ‘Now,’ said the king uneasily, ‘now shut the

door.’

‘Not completely,’ cried Pestovitch. ‘Leave a chink for us to go out

by....’

It was hot work shifting those bombs, and the king worked for a time

like a common man. Kurt and Abel carried the great things up and Peter

brought them to the carts, and the king and Pestovitch helped him to

place them among the hay. They made as little noise as they could....

‘Ssh!’ cried the king. ‘What’s that?’

But Kurt and Abel did not hear, and came blundering up the ladder with

the last of the load.

‘Ssh!’ Peter ran forward to them with a whispered remonstrance. Now

they were still.

The barn door opened a little wider, and against the dim blue light

outside they saw the black shape of a man.

‘Any one here?’ he asked, speaking with an Italian accent.

The king broke into a cold perspiration. Then Pestovitch answered:

‘Only a poor farmer loading hay,’ he said, and picked up a huge hay

fork and went forward softly.

‘You load your hay at a very bad time and in a very bad light,’ said

the man at the door, peering in. ‘Have you no electric light here?’

Then suddenly he turned on an electric torch, and as he did so

Pestovitch sprang forward. ‘Get out of my barn!’ he cried, and drove

the fork full at the intruder’s chest. He had a vague idea that so he

might stab the man to silence. But the man shouted loudly as the prongs

pierced him and drove him backward, and instantly there was a sound of

feet running across the yard.

‘Bombs,’ cried the man upon the ground, struggling with the prongs in

his hand, and as Pestovitch staggered forward into view with the force

of his own thrust, he was shot through the body by one of the two

new-comers.

The man on the ground was badly hurt but plucky. ‘Bombs,’ he repeated,

and struggled up into a kneeling position and held his electric torch

full upon the face of the king. ‘Shoot them,’ he cried, coughing and

spitting blood, so that the halo of light round the king’s head danced

about.

For a moment in that shivering circle of light the two men saw the king

kneeling up in the cart and Peter on the barn floor beside him. The old

fox looked at them sideways—snared, a white-faced evil thing. And then,

as with a faltering suicidal heroism, he leant forward over the bomb

before him, they fired together and shot him through the head.

The upper part of his face seemed to vanish.

‘Shoot them,’ cried the man who had been stabbed. ‘Shoot them all!’

And then his light went out, and he rolled over with a groan at the

feet of his comrades.

But each carried a light of his own, and in another moment everything

in the barn was visible again. They shot Peter even as he held up his

hands in sign of surrender.

Kurt and Abel at the head of the ladder hesitated for a moment, and

then plunged backward into the pit. ‘If we don’t kill them,’ said one

of the sharpshooters, ‘they’ll blow us to rags. They’ve gone down that

hatchway. Come! . . .

‘Here they are. Hands up! I say. Hold your light while I shoot....’

Section 8

It was still quite dark when his valet and Firmin came together and

told the ex-king Egbert that the business was settled.

He started up into a sitting position on the side of his bed.

‘Did he go out?’ asked the ex-king.

‘He is dead,’ said Firmin. ‘He was shot.’

The ex-king reflected. ‘That’s about the best thing that could have

happened,’ he said. ‘Where are the bombs? In that farm-house on the

opposite hill-side! Why! the place is in sight! Let us go. I’ll dress.

Is there any one in the place, Firmin, to get us a cup of coffee?’

Through the hungry twilight of the dawn the ex-king’s automobile

carried him to the farm-house where the last rebel king was lying among

his bombs. The rim of the sky flashed, the east grew bright, and the

sun was just rising over the hills when King Egbert reached the

farm-yard. There he found the hay lorries drawn out from the barn with

the dreadful bombs still packed upon them. A couple of score of

aviators held the yard, and outside a few peasants stood in a little

group and stared, ignorant as yet of what had happened. Against the

stone wall of the farm-yard five bodies were lying neatly side by side,

and Pestovitch had an expression of surprise on his face and the king

was chiefly identifiable by his long white hands and his blonde

moustache. The wounded aeronaut had been carried down to the inn. And

after the ex-king had given directions in what manner the bombs were to

be taken to the new special laboratories above Zurich, where they could

be unpacked in an atmosphere of chlorine, he turned to these five still

shapes.

Their five pairs of feet stuck out with a curious stiff unanimity....

‘What else was there to do?’ he said in answer to some internal

protest.

‘I wonder, Firmin, if there are any more of them?’

‘Bombs, sir?’ asked Firmin.

‘No, such kings....

‘The pitiful folly of it!’ said the ex-king, following his thoughts.

‘Firmin, as an ex-professor of International Politics, I think it falls

to you to bury them. There? . . . No, don’t put them near the well.

People will have to drink from that well. Bury them over there, some

way off in the field.’

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE NEW PHASE

Section 1

The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we may

view it now from the clarifying standpoint of things accomplished, was

in its broad issues a simple one. Essentially it was to place social

organisation upon the new footing that the swift, accelerated advance

of human knowledge had rendered necessary. The council was gathered

together with the haste of a salvage expedition, and it was confronted

with wreckage; but the wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only

possibilities of the case were either the relapse of mankind to the

agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the

acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order. The

old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy, particularism, and

belligerency, were incompatible with the monstrous destructive power of

the new appliances the inhuman logic of science had produced. The

equilibrium could be restored only by civilisation destroying itself

down to a level at which modern apparatus could no longer be produced,

or by human nature adapting itself in its institutions to the new

conditions. It was for the latter alternative that the assembly

existed.

Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The sudden

development of atomic science did but precipitate and render rapid and

dramatic a clash between the new and the customary that had been

gathering since ever the first flint was chipped or the first fire

built together. From the day when man contrived himself a tool and

suffered another male to draw near him, he ceased to be altogether a

thing of instinct and untroubled convictions. From that day forth a

widening breach can be traced between his egotistical passions and the

social need. Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead,

and his passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and

the tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter and

wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their development.

He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite tamed to the home.

Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest to keep him within the

bounds of the plough-life and the beast-tending. Slowly a vast system

of traditional imperatives superposed itself upon his instincts,

imperatives that were admirably fitted to make him that cultivator,

that cattle-mincer, who was for twice ten thousand years the normal

man.

And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his tilling

came civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural surplus. It

appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed boats out upon the

rivers and presently invaded the seas, and within its primitive courts,

within temples grown rich and leisurely and amidst the gathering medley

of the seaport towns rose speculation and philosophy and science, and

the beginning of the new order that has at last established itself as

human life. Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then with an

accumulating velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole

did not seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand. For

a time men took up and used these new things and the new powers

inadvertently as they came to him, recking nothing of the consequences.

For endless generations change led him very gently. But when he had

been led far enough, change quickened the pace. It was with a series of

shocks that he realised at last that he was living the old life less

and less and a new life more and more.

Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between the

old way of living and the new were intense. They were far intenser than

they had been even at the collapse of the Roman imperial system. On the

one hand was the ancient life of the family and the small community and

the petty industry, on the other was a new life on a larger scale, with

remoter horizons and a strange sense of purpose. Already it was growing

clear that men must live on one side or the other. One could not have

little tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the same market,

sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and arrows

and aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or illiterate peasant

industries and power-driven factories in the same world. And still less

it was possible that one could have the ideas and ambitions and greed

and jealousy of peasants equipped with the vast appliances of the new

age. If there had been no atomic bombs to bring together most of the

directing intelligence of the world to that hasty conference at

Brissago, there would still have been, extended over great areas and a

considerable space of time perhaps, a less formal conference of

responsible and understanding people upon the perplexities of this

world-wide opposition. If the work of Holsten had been spread over

centuries and imparted to the world by imperceptible degrees, it would

nevertheless have made it necessary for men to take counsel upon and

set a plan for the future. Indeed already there had been accumulating

for a hundred years before the crisis a literature of foresight; there

was a whole mass of ‘Modern State’ scheming available for the

conference to go upon. These bombs did but accentuate and dramatise an

already developing problem.