This effect of chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly apprehended
deepens as Barnet’s record passes on to tell of the approach of winter.
It was too much for the great mass of those unwilling and incompetent
nomads to realise that an age had ended, that the old help and guidance
existed no longer, that times would not mend again, however patiently
they held out. They were still in many cases looking to Paris when the
first snowflakes of that pitiless January came swirling about them. The
story grows grimmer....
If it is less monstrously tragic after Barnet’s return to England, it
is, if anything, harder. England was a spectacle of fear-embittered
householders, hiding food, crushing out robbery, driving the starving
wanderers from every faltering place upon the roads lest they should
die inconveniently and reproachfully on the doorsteps of those who had
failed to urge them onward....
The remnants of the British troops left France finally in March, after
urgent representations from the provisional government at Orleans that
they could be supported no longer. They seem to have been a fairly
well-behaved, but highly parasitic force throughout, though Barnet is
clearly of opinion that they did much to suppress sporadic brigandage
and maintain social order. He came home to a famine-stricken country,
and his picture of the England of that spring is one of miserable
patience and desperate expedients. The country was suffering much more
than France, because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on which
it had hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, and
boiled nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid off. On
the way thither they saw four men hanging from the telegraph posts by
the roadside, who had been hung for stealing swedes. The labour refuges
of Kent, he discovered, were feeding their crowds of casual wanderers
on bread into which clay and sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there
was a shortage of even such fare as that. He himself struck across
country to Winchester, fearing to approach the bomb-poisoned district
round London, and at Winchester he had the luck to be taken on as one
of the wireless assistants at the central station and given regular
rations. The station stood in a commanding position on the chalk hill
that overlooks the town from the east....
Thence he must have assisted in the transmission of the endless cipher
messages that preceded the gathering at Brissago, and there it was that
the Brissago proclamation of the end of the war and the establishment
of a world government came under his hands.
He was feeling ill and apathetic that day, and he did not realise what
it was he was transcribing. He did it mechanically, as a part of his
tedious duty.
Afterwards there came a rush of messages arising out of the declaration
that strained him very much, and in the evening when he was relieved,
he ate his scanty supper and then went out upon the little balcony
before the station, to smoke and rest his brains after this sudden and
as yet inexplicable press of duty. It was a very beautiful, still
evening. He fell talking to a fellow operator, and for the first time,
he declares, ‘I began to understand what it was all about. I began to
see just what enormous issues had been under my hands for the past four
hours. But I became incredulous after my first stimulation. “This is
some sort of Bunkum,” I said very sagely.
‘My colleague was more hopeful. “It means an end to bomb-throwing and
destruction,” he said. “It means that presently corn will come from
America.”
‘“Who is going to send corn when there is no more value in money?” I
asked.
‘Suddenly we were startled by a clashing from the town below. The
cathedral bells, which had been silent ever since I had come into the
district, were beginning, with a sort of rheumatic difficulty, to ring.
Presently they warmed a little to the work, and we realised what was
going on. They were ringing a peal. We listened with an unbelieving
astonishment and looking into each other’s yellow faces.
‘“They mean it,” said my colleague.
‘“But what can they do now?” I asked. “Everything is broken down....”’
And on that sentence, with an unexpected artistry, Barnet abruptly ends
his story.