Rumour spread by voice and radio throughout the world. An island had
been mysteriously exploded. The American fleet had been mysteriously
annihilated in the air. And in the neighbourhood where these events had
occurred, distinguished scientists were gathered in conference. The
European Government sought out the unknown saviour of Europe, to thank
him, and secure his process for their own use. The President of the
scientific society gave an account of the meeting and the unanimous
vote. He and his colleagues were promptly arrested, and ‘pressure’,
first moral and then physical, was brought to bear on them to make them
disclose the secret; for the world was convinced that they really knew
it, and were holding it back for their own purposes.
Meanwhile it was learnt that the American air commander, after he had
defeated the European fleet, had been instructed merely to ‘demonstrate’
above England while peace was negotiated. For in America, big business
had threatened the government with boycott if unnecessary violence were
committed in Europe. Big business was by now very largely international
in sentiment, and it was realized that the destruction of Europe would
inevitably unhinge American finance. But the unprecedented disaster to
the victorious fleet roused the Americans to blind hate, and the peace
party was submerged. Thus it turned out that the Chinese scientist’s one
hostile act had not saved England, but doomed her.
For some days Europeans lived in panic dread, knowing not what horror
might at any moment descend on them. No wonder, then, that the
Government resorted to torture in order to extract the secret from the
scientists. No wonder that out of the forty individuals concerned, one,
the Englishman, saved himself by deceit. He promised to do his best to
’remember’ the intricate process. Under strict supervision, he used his
own knowledge of physics to experiment in search of the Chinese trick.
Fortunately, however, he was on the wrong scent. And indeed he knew it.
For though his first motive was mere self-preservation, later he
conceived the policy of indefinitely preventing the dangerous discovery
by directing research along a blind alley. And so his treason, by
seeming to give the authority of a most eminent physicist to a wholly
barren line of research, saved this undisciplined and scarcely human
race from destroying its planet.
The American people, sometimes tender even to excess, were now
collectively insane with hate of the English and of all Europeans. With
cold efficiency they flooded Europe with the latest and deadliest of
gases, till all the peoples were poisoned in their cities like rats in
their holes. The gas employed was such that its potency would cease
within three days. It was therefore possible for an American sanitary
force to take charge of each metropolis within a week after the attack.
Of those who first descended into the great silence of the murdered
cities, many were unhinged by the overwhelming presence of dead
populations. The gas had operated first upon the ground level, but,
rising like a tide, it had engulfed the top stories, the spires, the
hills. Thus, while in the streets lay thousands who had been overcome by
the first waves of poison, every roof and pinnacle bore the bodies of
those who had struggled upwards in the vain hope of escaping beyond the
highest reach of the tide. When the invaders arrived they beheld on
every height prostrate and contorted figures.
Thus Europe died. All centres of intellectual life were blotted out, and
of the agricultural regions only the uplands and mountains were
untouched. The spirit of Europe lived henceforth only in a piece-meal
and dislocated manner in the minds of Americans, Chinese, Indians, and
the rest.
There were indeed the British Colonies, but they were by now far less
European than American. The war had, of course, disintegrated the
British Empire. Canada sided with the United States. South Africa and
India declared their neutrality at the outbreak of war. Australia, not
through cowardice, but through conflict of loyalties, was soon reduced
to neutrality. The New Zealanders took to their mountains and maintained
an insane but heroic resistance for a year. A simple and gallant folk,
they had almost no conception of the European spirit, yet obscurely and
in spite of their Americanization they were loyal to it, or at least to
that symbol of one aspect of Europeanism, ‘England’. Indeed so
extravagantly loyal were they, or so innately dogged and opinionated,
that when further resistance became impossible, many of them, both men
and women, killed themselves rather than submit.
But the most lasting agony of this war was suffered, not by the
defeated, but by the victors. For when their passion had cooled the
Americans could not easily disguise from themselves that they had
committed murder. They were not at heart a brutal folk, but rather a
kindly. They liked to think of the world as a place of innocent
pleasure-seeking, and of themselves as the main purveyors of delight.
Yet they had been somehow drawn into this fantastic crime; and
henceforth an all-pervading sense of collective guilt warped the
American mind. They had ever been vainglorious and intolerant; but now
these qualities in them became extravagant even to insanity. Both as
individuals and collectively, they became increasingly frightened of
criticism, increasingly prone to blame and hate, increasingly
self-righteous, increasingly hostile to the critical intelligence,
increasingly superstitious.
Thus was this once noble people singled out by the gods to be cursed,
and the minister of curses.