The Project Gutenberg EBook of Adam Bede, by George Eliot

THE WORLD SET FREE

BY H. G. WELLS

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Contents

Preface

Prelude: The Sun Snarers

Section I

Section II

Section III

Section IV

Section V

Section VI

Section VII

Section VIII

Chapter the First: The New Source of Energy

Section I

Section II

Section III

Section IV

Section V

Section VI

Section VII

Section VIII

Chapter the Second: The Last War

Section I

Section II

Section III

Section IV

Section V

Section VI

Section VII

Section VIII

Section IX

Section X

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Chapter the Third: The Ending of War

Section I

Section II

Section III

Section IV

Section V

Section VI

Section VII

Section VIII

Chapter the Fourth: The New Phase

Section I

Section II

Section III

Section IV

Section V

Section VI

Section VII

Section VIII

Section IX

Section X

Section XI

Section XII

Chapter the Fifth: The Last Days of Marcus Karenin

Section I

Section II

Section III

Section IV

Section V

Section VI

Section VII

Section VIII

Section IX

Section X

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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.

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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

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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.

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Prelude: The Sun Snarers

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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.

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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

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12

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 II

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 roles 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

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13

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,

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14

aped Caesar 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.

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15

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.

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16

Section III

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. Durer 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 IV

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

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17

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

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18

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 V

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.

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19

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 VI

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.’

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20

‘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 VII

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

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21

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

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22

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 VIII

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

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23

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.’

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24

‘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

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25

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.

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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.’

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Chapter the First: The New Source of Energy

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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

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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 aestheticism. 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.

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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 Creche,’

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

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31

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 II

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....’

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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

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33

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 III

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

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34

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

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35

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 over-

weighting 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.

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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.

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37

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

naive 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

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38

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

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39

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.

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40

‘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 IV

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

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41

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.

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Section V

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

debacle 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

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43

‘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.

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44

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

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45

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 manoeuvres 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.

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46

Section VI

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

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47

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

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48

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.

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49

‘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.’

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50

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

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51

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 VII

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

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52

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.

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53

Section VIII

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....’

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54

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

depot at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink but a cup of cold

water. The depot was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one was free to

leave it.

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Chapter the Second: The Last War

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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

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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 manoeuvres, 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 depot 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

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58

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 II

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 depots 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 Caesar 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,

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59

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

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60

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

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61

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 manoeuvres

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

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62

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.

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63

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,

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64

purplish-crimson light. Then close to her, rising above a confusion of

debris, 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....

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65

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 III

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....

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66

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

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67

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

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68

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....

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69

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

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70

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 IV

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 beta 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

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71

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....

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72

Section V

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....

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73

Section VI

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 them-

selves 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

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74

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 manoeuvred 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 manoeuvres. 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

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75

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....

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76

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 VII

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

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77

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

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78

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

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79

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.

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80

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 VIII

‘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 meer 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

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81

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.

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82

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 meer 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.

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83

‘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

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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

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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....’

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Section IX

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

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87

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

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88

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 X

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

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89

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....

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Chapter the Third: The Ending of War

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Section I

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 debacle 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 role 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

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93

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;

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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

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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 II

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

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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.’

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97

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.’

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98

‘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;

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99

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

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100

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.

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101

‘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.

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102

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.

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103

‘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

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104

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 III

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

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105

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

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106

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.

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107

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

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108

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.

‘Holster, perhaps, and one or two others, might lift us a little,’ the

king conceded. ‘But the rest of us?’

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109

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 cafe. 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

epicier, 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 IV

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 fathered about him a group of congenial spirits and fell into

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110

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.

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111

Section V

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

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112

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 VI

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 naivete 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-

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113

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 debris and the two

dead men. The coffin-shaped box that had occupied the centre of the

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114

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....

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Section VII

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

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116

south those aeroplanes would go swarming over a world that had

disarmed itself, to proclaim Ferdinand Charles, the new Caesar, 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

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117

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.’

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118

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

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119

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 Caesars, 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....’

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120

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 flex 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

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121

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 cafes 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 Caesar, 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

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122

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.

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123

‘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.

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124

‘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.

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125

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 VIII

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.

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126

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.’

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Chapter the Fourth: The New Phase

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Section I

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

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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

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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.

Section II

THIS assembly was no leap of exceptional minds and super-intelligences

into the control of affairs. It was teachable, its members trailed ideas with

them to the gathering, but these were the consequences of the ‘moral

shock’ the bombs had given humanity, and there is no reason for

supposing its individual personalities were greatly above the average. It

would be possible to cite a thousand instances of error and inefficiency in

its proceedings due to the forgetfulness, irritability, or fatigue of its

members. It experimented considerably and blundered often. Excepting

Holsten, whose gift was highly specialised, it is questionable whether

there was a single man of the first order of human quality in the

gathering. But it had a modest fear of itself, and a consequent directness

that gave it a general distinction. There was, of course, a noble simplicity

about Leblanc, but even of him it may be asked whether he was not

rather good and honest-minded than in the fuller sense great.

The ex-king had wisdom and a certain romantic dash, he was a man

among thousands, even if he was not a man among millions, but his

memoirs, and indeed his decision to write memoirs, give the quality of

himself and his associates. The book makes admirable but astonishing

reading. Therein he takes the great work the council was doing for

granted as a little child takes God. It is as if he had no sense of it at all.

He tells amusing trivialities about his cousin Wilhelm and his secretary

Firmin, he pokes fun at the American president, who was, indeed, rather

a little accident of the political machine than a representative American,

and he gives a long description of how he was lost for three days in the

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131

mountains in the company of the only Japanese member, a loss that

seems to have caused no serious interruption of the work of the

council....

The Brissago conference has been written about time after time, as

though it were a gathering of the very flower of humanity. Perched up

there by the freak or wisdom of Leblanc, it had a certain Olympian

quality, and the natural tendency of the human mind to elaborate such a

resemblance would have us give its members the likenesses of gods. It

would be equally reasonable to compare it to one of those enforced

meetings upon the mountain-tops that must have occurred in the opening

phases of the Deluge. The strength of the council lay not in itself but in

the circumstances that had quickened its intelligence, dispelled its

vanities, and emancipated it from traditional ambitions and antagonisms.

It was stripped of the accumulation of centuries, a naked government

with all that freedom of action that nakedness affords. And its problems

were set before it with a plainness that was out of all comparison with the

complicated and perplexing intimations of the former time.

Section III

THE world on which the council looked did indeed present a task quite

sufficiently immense and altogether too urgent for any wanton

indulgence in internal dissension. It may be interesting to sketch in a few

phrases the condition of mankind at the close of the period of warring

states, in the year of crisis that followed the release of atomic power. It

was a world extraordinarily limited when one measures it by later

standards, and it was now in a state of the direst confusion and distress.

It must be remembered that at this time men had still to spread into

enormous areas of the land surface of the globe. There were vast

mountain wildernesses, forest wildernesses, sandy deserts, and frozen

lands. Men still clung closely to water and arable soil in temperate or

sub-tropical climates, they lived abundantly only in river valleys, and all

their great cities had grown upon large navigable rivers or close to ports

upon the sea. Over great areas even of this suitable land flies and

mosquitoes, armed with infection, had so far defeated human invasion,

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and under their protection the virgin forests remained untouched. Indeed,

the whole world even in its most crowded districts was filthy with flies

and swarming with needless insect life to an extent which is now almost

incredible. A population map of the world in 1950 would have followed

seashore and river course so closely in its darker shading as to give an

impression that homo sapiens was an amphibious animal. His roads and

railways lay also along the lower contours, only here and there to pierce

some mountain barrier or reach some holiday resort did they clamber

above 3000 feet. And across the ocean his traffic passed in definite lines;

there were hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean no ship ever

traversed except by mischance.

Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet he had not yet

pierced for five miles, and it was still not forty years since, with a tragic

pertinacity, he had clambered to the poles of the earth. The limitless

mineral wealth of the Arctic and Antarctic circles was still buried

beneath vast accumulations of immemorial ice, and the secret riches of

the inner zones of the crust were untapped and indeed unsuspected. The

higher mountain regions were known only to a sprinkling of guide-led

climbers and the frequenters of a few gaunt hotels, and the vast rainless

belts of land that lay across the continental masses, from Gobi to Sahara

and along the backbone of America, with their perfect air, their daily

baths of blazing sunshine, their nights of cool serenity and glowing stars,

and their reservoirs of deep-lying water, were as yet only desolations of

fear and death to the common imagination.

And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of

population which had gathered into the enormous dingy town centres of

that period were dispossessed and scattered disastrously over the

surrounding rural areas. It was as if some brutal force, grown impatient at

last at man’s blindness, had with the deliberate intention of a

rearrangement of population upon more wholesome lines, shaken the

world. The great industrial regions and the large cities that had escaped

the bombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, in almost

as tragic plight as those that blazed, and the country-side was disordered

by a multitude of wandering and lawless strangers. In some parts of the

world famine raged, and in many regions there was plague.... The plains

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133

of north India, which had become more and more dependent for the

general welfare on the railways and that great system of irrigation canals

which the malignant section of the patriots had destroyed, were in a state

of peculiar distress, whole villages lay dead together, no man heeding,

and the very tigers and panthers that preyed upon the emaciated

survivors crawled back infected into the jungle to perish. Large areas of

China were a prey to brigand bands....

It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of

the explosion of the atomic bombs survives. There are, of course,

innumerable allusions and partial records, and it is from these that

subsequent ages must piece together the image of these devastations.

The phenomena, it must be remembered, changed greatly from day

to day, and even from hour to hour, as the exploding bomb shifted its

position, threw off fragments or came into contact with water or a fresh

texture of soil. Barnet, who came within forty miles of Paris early in

October, is concerned chiefly with his account of the social confusion of

the country-side and the problems of his command, but he speaks of

heaped cloud masses of steam. ‘All along the sky to the south-west’ and

of a red glare beneath these at night. Parts of Paris were still burning, and

numbers of people were camped in the fields even at this distance

watching over treasured heaps of salvaged loot. He speaks too of the

distant rumbling of the explosion—‘like trains going over iron bridges.’

Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the ‘continuous

reverberations,’ or of the ‘thudding and hammering,’ or some such

phrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of steam, from which rain

would fall suddenly in torrents and amidst which lightning played.

Drawing nearer to Paris an observer would have found the salvage camps

increasing in number and blocking up the villages, and large numbers of

people, often starving and ailing, camping under improvised tents

because there was no place for them to go. The sky became more and

more densely overcast until at last it blotted out the light of day and left

nothing but a dull red glare ‘extraordinarily depressing to the spirit.’ In

this dull glare, great numbers of people were still living, clinging to their

houses and in many cases subsisting in a state of partial famine upon the

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134

produce in their gardens and the stores in the shops of the provision

dealers.

Coming in still closer, the investigator would have reached the police

cordon, which was trying to check the desperate enterprise of those who

would return to their homes or rescue their more valuable possessions

within the ‘zone of imminent danger.’

That zone was rather arbitrarily defined. If our spectator could have

got permission to enter it, he would have entered also a zone of uproar, a

zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange purplish-red light, and

quivering and swaying with the incessant explosion of the radio-active

substance. Whole blocks of buildings were alight and burning fiercely,

the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in

comparison with the full-bodied crimson glare beyond. The shells of

other edifices already burnt rose, pierced by rows of window sockets

against the red-lit mist.

Every step farther would have been as dangerous as a descent within

the crater of an active volcano. These spinning, boiling bomb centres

would shift or break unexpectedly into new regions, great fragments of

earth or drain or masonry suddenly caught by a jet of disruptive force

might come flying by the explorer’s head, or the ground yawn a fiery

grave beneath his feet. Few who adventured into these areas of

destruction and survived attempted any repetition of their experiences.

There are stories of puffs of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting

sometimes scores of miles from the bomb centre and killing and

scorching all they overtook. And the first conflagrations from the Paris

centre spread westward half-way to the sea.

Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of red-lit ruins had a

peculiar dryness and a blistering quality, so that it set up a soreness of the

skin and lungs that was very difficult to heal....

Such was the last state of Paris, and such on a larger scale was the

condition of affairs in Chicago, and the same fate had overtaken Berlin,

Moscow, Tokio, the eastern half of London, Toulon, Kiel, and two

hundred and eighteen other centres of population or armament. Each was

a flaming centre of radiant destruction that only time could quench, that

indeed in many instances time has still to quench. To this day, though

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135

indeed with a constantly diminishing uproar and vigour, these explosions

continue. In the map of nearly every country of the world three or four or

more red circles, a score of miles in diameter, mark the position of the

dying atomic bombs and the death areas that men have been forced to

abandon around them. Within these areas perished museums, cathedrals,

palaces, libraries, galleries of masterpieces, and a vast accumulation of

human achievement, whose charred remains lie buried, a legacy of

curious material that only future generations may hope to examine....

Section IV

THE state of mind of the dispossessed urban population which swarmed

and perished so abundantly over the country-side during the dark days of

the autumnal months that followed the Last War, was one of blank

despair. Barnet gives sketch after sketch of groups of these people,

camped among the vineyards of Champagne, as he saw them during his

period of service with the army of pacification.

There was, for example, that ‘man-milliner’ who came out from a

field beside the road that rises up eastward out of Epernay, and asked

how things were going in Paris. He was, says Barnet, a round-faced man,

dressed very neatly in black—so neatly that it was amazing to discover

he was living close at hand in a tent made of carpets—and he had ‘an

urbane but insistent manner,’ a carefully trimmed moustache and beard,

expressive eyebrows, and hair very neatly brushed.

‘No one goes into Paris,’ said Barnet.

‘But, Monsieur, that is very unenterprising,’ the man by the wayside

submitted.

‘The danger is too great. The radiations eat into people’s skins.’

The eyebrows protested. ‘But is nothing to be done?’

‘Nothing can be done.’

‘But, Monsieur, it is extraordinarily inconvenient, this living in exile

and waiting. My wife and my little boy suffer extremely. There is a lack

of amenity. And the season advances. I say nothing of the expense and

difficulty in obtaining provisions. . . . When does Monsieur think that

something will be done to render Paris—possible?’

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136

Barnet considered his interlocutor.

‘I’m told,’ said Barnet, ‘that Paris is not likely to be possible again

for several generations.’

‘Oh! but this is preposterous! Consider, Monsieur! What are people

like ourselves to do in the meanwhile? I am a costumier. All my

connections and interests, above all my style, demand Paris. . . .’

Barnet considered the sky, from which a light rain was beginning to

fall, the wide fields about them from which the harvest had been taken,

the trimmed poplars by the wayside.

‘Naturally,’ he agreed, ‘you want to go to Paris. But Paris is over.’

‘Over!’

‘Finished.’

‘But then, Monsieur—what is to become—of me?’

Barnet turned his face westward, whither the white road led.

‘Where else, for example, may I hope to find—opportunity?’

Barnet made no reply.

‘Perhaps on the Riviera. Or at some such place as Homburg. Or

some plague perhaps.’

‘All that,’ said Barnet, accepting for the first time facts that had lain

evident in his mind for weeks; ‘all that must be over, too.’

There was a pause. Then the voice beside him broke out. ‘But,

Monsieur, it is impossible! It leaves—nothing.’

‘No. Not very much.’

‘One cannot suddenly begin to grow potatoes!’

‘It would be good if Monsieur could bring himself——’

‘To the life of a peasant! And my wife——You do not know the

distinguished delicacy of my wife, a refined helplessness, a peculiar

dependent charm. Like some slender tropical creeper—with great white

flowers.... But all this is foolish talk. It is impossible that Paris, which

has survived so many misfortunes, should not presently revive.’

‘I do not think it will ever revive. Paris is finished. London, too, I am

told—Berlin. All the great capitals were stricken....’

‘But——! Monsieur must permit me to differ.’

‘It is so.’

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137

‘It is impossible. Civilisations do not end in this manner. Mankind

will insist.’

‘On Paris?’

‘On Paris.’

‘Monsieur, you might as well hope to go down the Maelstrom and

resume business there.’

‘I am content, Monsieur, with my own faith.’

‘The winter comes on. Would not Monsieur be wiser to seek a

house?’

‘Farther from Paris? No, Monsieur. But it is not possible, Monsieur,

what you say, and you are under a tremendous mistake.... Indeed you are

in error.... I asked merely for information....’

‘When last I saw him,’ said Barnet, ‘he was standing under the

signpost at the crest of the hill, gazing wistfully, yet it seemed to me a

little doubtfully, now towards Paris, and altogether heedless of a

drizzling rain that was wetting him through and through....’

Section V

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

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138

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.

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139

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.

Section VI

FROM the first the new government handled affairs with a certain

greatness of spirit. Indeed, it was inevitable that they should act greatly.

From the first they had to see the round globe as one problem; it was

impossible any longer to deal with it piece by piece. They had to secure

it universally from any fresh outbreak of atomic destruction, and they

had to ensure a permanent and universal pacification. On this capacity to

grasp and wield the whole round globe their existence depended. There

was no scope for any further performance.

So soon as the seizure of the existing supplies of atomic ammunition

and the apparatus for synthesising Carolinum was assured, the

disbanding or social utilisation of the various masses of troops still under

arms had to be arranged, the salvation of the year’s harvests, and the

feeding, housing, and employment of the drifting millions of homeless

people. In Canada, in South America, and Asiatic Russia there were vast

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140

accumulations of provision that was immovable only because of the

breakdown of the monetary and credit systems. These had to be brought

into the famine districts very speedily if entire depopulation was to be

avoided, and their transportation and the revival of communications

generally absorbed a certain proportion of the soldiery and more able

unemployed. The task of housing assumed gigantic dimensions, and

from building camps the housing committee of the council speedily

passed to constructions of a more permanent type. They found far less

friction than might have been expected in turning the loose population on

their hands to these things. People were extraordinarily tamed by that

year of suffering and death; they were disillusioned of their traditions,

bereft of once obstinate prejudices; they felt foreign in a strange world,

and ready to follow any confident leadership. The orders of the new

government came with the best of all credentials, rations. The people

everywhere were as easy to control, one of the old labour experts who

had survived until the new time witnesses, ‘as gangs of emigrant workers

in a new land.’ And now it was that the social possibilities of the atomic

energy began to appear. The new machinery that had come into existence

before the last wars increased and multiplied, and the council found itself

not only with millions of hands at its disposal but with power and

apparatus that made its first conceptions of the work it had to do seem

pitifully timid. The camps that were planned in iron and deal were built

in stone and brass; the roads that were to have been mere iron tracks

became spacious ways that insisted upon architecture; the cultivations of

foodstuffs that were to have supplied emergency rations, were presently,

with synthesisers, fertilisers, actinic light, and scientific direction, in

excess of every human need.

The government had begun with the idea of temporarily

reconstituting the social and economic system that had prevailed before

the first coming of the atomic engine, because it was to this system that

the ideas and habits of the great mass of the world’s dispossessed

population was adapted. Subsequent rearrangement it had hoped to leave

to its successors—whoever they might be. But this, it became more and

more manifest, was absolutely impossible. As well might the council

have proposed a revival of slavery. The capitalist system had already

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141

been smashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless gold and energy; it

fell to pieces at the first endeavour to stand it up again. Already before

the war half of the industrial class had been out of work, the attempt to

put them back into wages employment on the old lines was futile from

the outset—the absolute shattering of the currency system alone would

have been sufficient to prevent that, and it was necessary therefore to

take over the housing, feeding, and clothing of this worldwide multitude

without exacting any return in labour whatever. In a little while the mere

absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people everywhere

became an evident social danger, and the government was obliged to

resort to such devices as simple decorative work in wood and stone, the

manufacture of hand-woven textiles, fruit-growing, flower-growing, and

landscape gardening on a grand scale to keep the less adaptable out of

mischief, and of paying wages to the younger adults for attendance at

schools that would equip them to use the new atomic machinery.... So

quite insensibly the council drifted into a complete reorganisation of

urban and industrial life, and indeed of the entire social system.

Ideas that are unhampered by political intrigue or financial

considerations have a sweeping way with them, and before a year was

out the records of the council show clearly that it was rising to its

enormous opportunity, and partly through its own direct control and

partly through a series of specific committees, it was planning a new

common social order for the entire population of the earth. ‘There can be

no real social stability or any general human happiness while large areas

of the world and large classes of people are in a phase of civilisation

different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now to have great

blocks of population misunderstanding the generally accepted social

purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the rest.’ So the council

expressed its conception of the problem it had to solve. The peasant, the

field-worker, and all barbaric cultivators were at an ‘economic

disadvantage’ to the more mobile and educated classes, and the logic of

the situation compelled the council to take up systematically the

supersession of this stratum by a more efficient organisation of

production. It developed a scheme for the progressive establishment

throughout the world of the ‘modern system’ in agriculture, a system that

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should give the full advantages of a civilised life to every agricultural

worker, and this replacement has been going on right up to the present

day. The central idea of the modern system is the substitution of

cultivating guilds for the individual cultivator, and for cottage and village

life altogether. These guilds are associations of men and women who

take over areas of arable or pasture land, and make themselves

responsible for a certain average produce. They are bodies small enough

as a rule to be run on a strictly democratic basis, and large enough to

supply all the labour, except for a certain assistance from townspeople

during the harvest, needed upon the land farmed. They have watchers’

bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but the ease and the

costlessness of modern locomotion enables them to maintain a group of

residences in the nearest town with a common dining-room and club

house, and usually also a guild house in the national or provincial capital.

Already this system has abolished a distinctively ‘rustic’ population

throughout vast areas of the old world, where it has prevailed

immemorially. That shy, unstimulated life of the lonely hovel, the

narrow scandals and petty spites and persecutions of the small village,

that hoarding, half inanimate existence away from books, thought, or

social participation and in constant contact with cattle, pigs, poultry, and

their excrement, is passing away out of human experience. In a little

while it will be gone altogether. In the nineteenth century it had already

ceased to be a necessary human state, and only the absence of any

collective intelligence and an imagined need for tough and unintelligent

soldiers and for a prolific class at a low level, prevented its systematic

replacement at that time....

And while this settlement of the country was in progress, the urban

camps of the first phase of the council’s activities were rapidly

developing, partly through the inherent forces of the situation and partly

through the council’s direction, into a modern type of town....

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Section VII

IT is characteristic of the manner in which large enterprises forced

themselves upon the Brissago council, that it was not until the end of the

first year of their administration and then only with extreme reluctance

that they would take up the manifest need for a lingua franca for the

world. They seem to have given little attention to the various theoretical

universal languages which were proposed to them. They wished to give

as little trouble to hasty and simple people as possible, and the world-

wide alstribution of English gave them a bias for it from the beginning.

The extreme simplicity of its grammar was also in its favour.

It was not without some sacrifices that the English-speaking peoples

were permitted the satisfaction of hearing their speech used universally.

The language was shorn of a number of grammatical peculiarities, the

distinctive forms for the subjunctive mood for example and most of its

irregular plurals were abolished; its spelling was systematised and

adapted to the vowel sounds in use upon the continent of Europe, and a

process of incorporating foreign nouns and verbs commenced that

speedily reached enormous proportions. Within ten years from the

establishment of the World Republic the New English Dictionary had

swelled to include a vocabulary of 250,000 words, and a man of 1900

would have found considerable difficulty in reading an ordinary

newspaper. On the other hand, the men of the new time could still

appreciate the older English literature.... Certain minor acts of uniformity

accompanied this larger one. The idea of a common understanding and a

general simplification of intercourse once it was accepted led very

naturally to the universal establishment of the metric system of weights

and measures, and to the disappearance of the various makeshift

calendars that had hitherto confused chronology. The year was divided

into thirteen months of four weeks each, and New Year’s Day and Leap

Year’s Day were made holidays, and did not count at all in the ordinary

week. So the weeks and the months were brought into correspondence.

And moreover, as the king put it to Firmin, it was decided to ‘nail down

Easter.’ . . . In these matters, as in so many matters, the new civilisation

came as a simplification of ancient complications; the history of the

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144

calendar throughout the world is a history of inadequate adjustments, of

attempts to fix seed-time and midwinter that go back into the very

beginning of human society; and this final rectification had a symbolic

value quite beyond its practical convenience. But the council would have

no rash nor harsh innovations, no strange names for the months, and no

alteration in the numbering of the years.

The world had already been put upon one universal monetary basis.

For some months after the accession of the council, the world’s affairs

had been carried on without any sound currency at all. Over great regions

money was still in use, but with the most extravagant variations in price

and the most disconcerting fluctuations of public confidence. The ancient

rarity of gold upon which the entire system rested was gone. Gold was

now a waste product in the release of atomic energy, and it was plain that

no metal could be the basis of the monetary system again. Henceforth all

coins must be token coins. Yet the whole world was accustomed to

metallic money, and a vast proportion of existing human relationships

had grown up upon a cash basis, and were almost inconceivable without

that convenient liquidating factor. It seemed absolutely necessary to the

life of the social organisation to have some sort of currency, and the

council had therefore to discover some real value upon which to rest it.

Various such apparently stable values as land and hours of work were

considered. Ultimately the government, which was now in possession of

most of the supplies of energy-releasing material, fixed a certain number

of units of energy as the value of a gold sovereign, declared a sovereign

to be worth exactly twenty marks, twenty-five francs, five dollars, and so

forth, with the other current units of the world, and undertook, under

various qualifications and conditions, to deliver energy upon demand as

payment for every sovereign presented. On the whole, this worked

satisfactorily. They saved the face of the pound sterling. Coin was

rehabilitated, and after a phase of price fluctuations, began to settle down

to definite equivalents and uses again, with names and everyday values

familiar to the common run of people....

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Section VIII

AS the Brissago council came to realise that what it had supposed to be

temporary camps of refugees were rapidly developing into great towns of

a new type, and that it was remoulding the world in spite of itself, it

decided to place this work of redistributing the non-agricultural

population in the hands of a compactor and better qualified special

committee. That committee is now, far more than the council of any

other of its delegated committees, the active government of the world.

Developed from an almost invisible germ of ‘town-planning’ that came

obscurely into existence in Europe or America (the question is still in

dispute) somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, its

work, the continual active planning and replanning of the world as a

place of human habitation, is now so to speak the collective material

activity of the race. The spontaneous, disorderly spreadings and

recessions of populations, as aimless and mechanical as the trickling of

spilt water, which was the substance of history for endless years, giving

rise here to congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and

everywhere to a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only

picturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power of the

race to aid them, into every available region of the earth. Their cities are

no longer tethered to running water and the proximity of cultivation, their

plans are no longer affected by strategic considerations or thoughts of

social insecurity. The aeroplane and the nearly costless mobile car have

abolished trade routes; a common language and a universal law have

abolished a thousand restraining inconveniences, and so an astonishing

dispersal of habitations has begun. One may live anywhere. And so it is

that our cities now are true social gatherings, each with a character of its

own and distinctive interests of its own, and most of them with a

common occupation. They lie out in the former deserts, these long

wasted sun-baths of the race, they tower amidst eternal snows, they hide

in remote islands, and bask on broad lagoons. For a time the whole

tendency of mankind was to desert the river valleys in which the race had

been cradled for half a million years, but now that the War against Flies

has been waged so successfully that this pestilential branch of life is

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146

nearly extinct, they are returning thither with a renewed appetite for

gardens laced by watercourses, for pleasant living amidst islands and

houseboats and bridges, and for nocturnal lanterns reflected by the sea.

Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and

more a builder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceases to be a

cultivator of the soil the returns of the Redistribution Committee showed.

Every year the work of our scientific laboratories increases the

productivity and simplifies the labour of those who work upon the soil,

and the food now of the whole world is produced by less than one per

cent. of its population, a percentage which still tends to decrease. Far

fewer people are needed upon the land than training and proclivity

dispose towards it, and as a consequence of this excess of human

attention, the garden side of life, the creation of groves and lawns and

vast regions of beautiful flowers, has expanded enormously and

continues to expand. For, as agricultural method intensifies and the quota

is raised, one farm association after another, availing itself of the 1975

regulations, elects to produce a public garden and pleasaunce in the place

of its former fields, and the area of freedom and beauty is increased. And

the chemists’ triumphs of synthesis, which could now give us an entirely

artificial food, remain largely in abeyance because it is so much more

pleasant and interesting to eat natural produce and to grow such things

upon the soil. Each year adds to the variety of our fruits and the

delightfulness of our flowers.

Section IX

THE early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain

recrudescence of political adventure. There was, it is rather curious to

note, no revival of separatism after the face of King Ferdinand Charles

had vanished from the sight of men, but in a number of countries, as the

first urgent physical needs were met, there appeared a variety of

personalities having this in common, that they sought to revive political

trouble and clamber by its aid to positions of importance and satisfaction.

In no case did they speak in the name of kings, and it is clear that

monarchy must have been far gone in obsolescence before the twentieth

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147

century began, but they made appeals to the large survivals of nationalist

and racial feeling that were everywhere to be found, they alleged with

considerable justice that the council was overriding racial and national

customs and disregarding religious rules. The great plain of India was

particularly prolific in such agitators. The revival of newspapers, which

had largely ceased during the terrible year because of the dislocation of

the coinage, gave a vehicle and a method of organisation to these

complaints. At first the council disregarded this developing opposition,

and then it recognised it with an entirely devastating frankness.

Never, of course, had there been so provisional a government. It was

of an extravagant illegality. It was, indeed, hardly more than a club, a

club of about a hundred persons. At the outset there were ninety-three,

and these were increased afterwards by the issue of invitations which

more than balanced its deaths, to as many at one time as one hundred and

nineteen. Always its constitution has been miscellaneous. At no time

were these invitations issued with an admission that they recognised a

right. The old institution or monarchy had come out unexpectedly well in

the light of the new regime. Nine of the original members of the first

government were crowned heads who had resigned their separate

sovereignty, and at no time afterwards did the number of its royal

members sink below six. In their case there was perhaps a kind of

attenuated claim to rule, but except for them and the still more

infinitesimal pretensions of one or two ax-presidents of republics, no

member of the council had even the shade of a right to his participation

in its power. It was natural, therefore, that its opponents should find a

common ground in a clamour for representative government, and build

high hopes upon a return, to parliamentary institutions.

The council decided to give them everything they wanted, but in a

form that suited ill with their aspirations. It became at one stroke a

representative body. It became, indeed, magnificently representative. It

became so representative that the politicians were drowned in a deluge of

votes. Every adult of either sex from pole to pole was given a vote, and

the world was divided into ten constituencies, which voted on the same

day by means of a simple modification of the world post. Membership of

the government, it was decided, must be for life, save in the exceptional

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148

case of a recall; but the elections, which were held quinquenially, were

arranged to add fifty members on each occasion. The method of

proportional representation with one transferable vote was adopted, and

the voter might also write upon his voting paper in a specially marked

space, the name of any of his representatives that he wished to recall. A

ruler was recallable by as many votes as the quota by which he had been

elected, and the original members by as many votes in any constituency

as the returning quotas in the first election.

Upon these conditions the council submitted itself very cheerfully to

the suffrages of the world. None of its members were recalled, and its

fifty new associates, which included twenty-seven which it had seen fit

to recommend, were of an altogether too miscellaneous quality to disturb

the broad trend of its policy. Its freedom from rules or formalities

prevented any obstructive proceedings, and when one of the two newly

arrived Home Rule members for India sought for information how to

bring in a bill, they learnt simply that bills were not brought in. They

asked for the speaker, and were privileged to hear much ripe wisdom

from the ex-king Egbert, who was now consciously among the seniors of

the gathering. Thereafter they were baffled men....

But already by that time the work of the council was drawing to an

end. It was concerned not so much for the continuation of its

construction as for the preservation of its accomplished work from the

dramatic instincts of the politician.

The life of the race becomes indeed more and more independent of

the formal government. The council, in its opening phase, was heroic in

spirit; a dragon-slaying body, it slashed out of existence a vast, knotted

tangle of obsolete ideas and clumsy and jealous proprietorships; it

secured by a noble system of institutional precautions, freedom of

inquiry, freedom of criticism, free communications, a common basis of

education and understanding, and freedom from economic oppression.

With that its creative task was accomplished. It became more and more

an established security and less and less an active intervention. There is

nothing in our time to correspond with the continual petty making and

entangling of laws in an atmosphere of contention that is perhaps the

most perplexing aspect of constitutional history in the nineteenth century.

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In that age they seem to have been perpetually making laws when we

should alter regulations. The work of change which we delegate to these

scientific committees of specific general direction which have the special

knowledge needed, and which are themselves dominated by the broad

intellectual process of the community, was in those days inextricably

mixed up with legislation. They fought over the details; we should as

soon think of fighting over the arrangement of the parts of a machine.

We know nowadays that such things go on best within laws, as life goes

on between earth and sky. And so it is that government gathers now for a

day or so in each year under the sunshine of Brissago when Saint

Bruno’s lilies are in flower, and does little more than bless the work of

its committees. And even these committees are less originative and more

expressive of the general thought than they were at first. It becomes

difficult to mark out the particular directive personalities of the world.

Continually we are less personal. Every good thought contributes now,

and every able brain falls within that informal and dispersed kingship

which gathers together into one purpose the energies of the race.

Section X

IT is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human existence in

which ‘politics,’ that is to say a partisan interference with the ruling

sanities of the world, will be the dominant interest among serious men.

We seem to have entered upon an entirely new phase in history in which

contention as distinguished from rivalry, has almost abruptly ceased to

be the usual occupation, and has become at most a subdued and hidden

and discredited thing. Contentious professions cease to be an honourable

employment for men. The peace between nations is also a peace between

individuals. We live in a world that comes of age. Man the warrior, man

the lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the

grave dreamers, man the curious learner, and man the creative artist,

come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less

ignoble adventure.

There is no natural life of man. He is, and always has been, a sheath

of varied and even incompatible possibilities, a palimpsest of inherited

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dispositions. It was the habit of many writers in the early twentieth

century to speak of competition and the narrow, private life of trade and

saving and suspicious isolation as though such things were in some

exceptional way proper to the human constitution, and as though

openness of mind and a preference for achievement over possession were

abnormal and rather unsubstantial qualities. How wrong that was the

history of the decades immediately following the establishment of the

world republic witnesses. Once the world was released from the

hardening insecurities of a needless struggle for life that was collectively

planless and individually absorbing, it became apparent that there was in

the vast mass of people a long, smothered passion to make things. The

world broke out into making, and at first mainly into aesthetic making.

This phase of history, which has been not inaptly termed the

‘Efflorescence,’ is still, to a large extent, with us. The majority of our

population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in the world lies no

longer with necessities but with their elaboration, decoration, and

refinement. There has been an evident change in the quality of this

making during recent years. It becomes more purposeful than it was,

losing something of its first elegance and prettiness and gaining in

intensity; but that is a change rather of hue than of nature. That comes

with a deepening philosophy and a sounder education. For the first

joyous exercises of fancy we perceive now the deliberation of a more

constructive imagination. There is a natural order in these things, and art

comes before science as the satisfaction of more elemental needs must

come before art, and as play and pleasure come in a human life before

the development of a settled purpose....

For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work must

have struggled in man against the limitations imposed upon him by his

social ineptitude. It was a long smouldering fire that flamed out at last in

all these things. The evidence of a pathetic, perpetually thwarted urgency

to make something, is one of the most touching aspects of the relics and

records of our immediate ancestors. There exists still in the death area

about the London bombs, a region of deserted small homes that furnish

the most illuminating comment on the old state of affairs. These homes

are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat, hideously proportioned,

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uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects quite filthy, only people in

complete despair of anything better could have lived in them, but to each

is attached a ridiculous little rectangle of land called ‘the garden,’

containing usually a prop for drying clothes and a loathsome box of

offal, the dustbin, full of egg-shells, cinders, and such-like refuse. Now

that one may go about this region in comparitive security—for the

London radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable proportions—it is

possible to trace in nearly every one of these gardens some effort to

make. Here it is a poor little plank summer-house, here it is a ‘fountain’

of bricks and oyster-shells, here a ‘rockery,’ here a ‘workshop.’ And in

the houses everywhere there are pitiful little decorations, clumsy models,

feeble drawings. These efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the

drawings of blindfolded men, they are only one shade less harrowing to a

sympathetic observer than the scratchings one finds upon the walls of the

old prisons, but there they are, witnessing to the poor buried instincts that

struggled up towards the light. That god of joyous expression our poor

fathers ignorantly sought, our freedom has declared to us....

In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to

possess a little property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled by others,

an ‘independence’ as the English used to put it. And what made this

desire for freedom and prosperity so strong, was very evidently the

dream of self-expression, of doing something with it, of playing with it,

of making a personal delightfulness, a distinctiveness. Property was

never more than a means to an end, nor avarice more than a perversion.

Men owned in order to do freely. Now that every one has his own

apartments and his own privacy secure, this disposition to own has found

its release in a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they

may leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row of

carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they give

themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in phenomena

as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of riches. The work

that was once the whole substance of social existence—for most men

spent all their lives in earning a living—is now no more than was the

burden upon one of those old climbers who carried knapsacks of

provisions on their backs in order that they might ascend mountains. It

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152

matters little to the easy charities of our emancipated time that most

people who have made their labour contribution produce neither new

beauty nor new wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant

activities and enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They

help, it may be, by reception and reverberation, and they hinder

nothing....

Section XI

NOW all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and appearances

of human life which is going on about us, a change as rapid and as

wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after the

barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral and mental changes at

least as unprecedented. It is not as if old things were going out of life and

new things coming in, it is rather that the altered circumstances of men

are making an appeal to elements in his nature that have hitherto been

suppressed, and checking tendencies that have hitherto been over-

stimulated and over-developed. He has not so much grown and altered

his essential being as turned new aspects to the light. Such turnings

round into a new attitude the world has seen on a less extensive scale

before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for example, were

cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth their descendants were

conspicuously trusty and honourable men. There was not a people in

Western Europe in the early twentieth century that seemed capable of

hideous massacres, and none that had not been guilty of them within the

previous two centuries. The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the

prosperous classes in any European country before the years of the last

wars was in a different world of thought and feeling from that of the

dingy, suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the respectable

poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor and naive passions of

the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real differences of blood and

inherent quality between these worlds; their differences were all in

circumstances, suggestion, and habits of mind. And turning to more

individual instances the constantly observed difference between one

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153

portion of a life and another consequent upon a religious conversion,

were a standing example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities

and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of their old

established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and

prejudices that came down to them from the past. To borrow a word from

the old-fashioned chemists, men were made nascent; they were released

from old ties; for good or evil they were ready for new associations. The

council carried them forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had reached

their destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them back

to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a harder one

than the council’s. The moral shock of the atomic bombs had been a

profound one, and for a while the cunning side of the human animal was

overpowered by its sincere realisation of the vital necessity for

reconstruction. The litigious and trading spirits cowered together, scared

at their own consequences; men thought twice before they sought mean

advantages in the face of the unusual eagerness to realise new

aspirations, and when at last the weeds revived again and ‘claims’ began

to sprout, they sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed, of

laws that pointed to the future instead of the past, and under the blazing

sunshine of a transforming world. A new literature, a new interpretation

of history were springing into existence, a new teaching was already in

the schools, a new faith in the young. The worthy man who forestalled

the building of a research city for the English upon the Sussex downs by

buying up a series of estates, was dispossessed and laughed out of court

when he made his demand for some preposterous compensation; the

owner of the discredited Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the

scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of a paper called The Cry for

Justice, in which he duns the world for a hundred million pounds. That

was the ingenuous Dass’s idea of justice, that he ought to be paid about

five million pounds annually because he had annexed the selvage of one

of Holsten’s discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his

right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private hospital at

Nice. Both of these men would probably have ended their days

enormously wealthy, and of course ennobled in the England of the

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154

opening twentieth century, and it is just this novelty of their fates that

marks the quality of the new age.

The new government early discovered the need of a universal

education to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal rule. It made

no wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and sectarian forms of religious

profession that at that time divided the earth into a patchwork of hatreds

and distrusts; it left these organisations to make their peace with God in

their own time; but it proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truth that

sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had to be shown to all; it

revived schools or set them up afresh all around the world, and

everywhere these schools taught the history of war and the consequences

and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was taught not as a sentiment

but as a matter of fact that the salvation of the world from waste and

contention was the common duty and occupation of all men and women.

These things which are now the elementary commonplaces of human

intercourse seemed to the councillors of Brissago, when first they dared

to proclaim them, marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by

doubt, that flushed the cheek and fired the eye.

The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the hands of

a committee of men and women, which did its work during the next few

decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness. This educational

committee was, and is, the correlative upon the mental and spiritual side

of the redistribution committee. And prominent upon it, and indeed for a

time quite dominating it, was a Russian named Karenin, who was

singular in being a congenital cripple. His body was bent so that he

walked with difficulty, suffered much pain as he grew older, and had at

last to undergo two operations. The second killed him. Already

malformation, which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle

ages so that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of

the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world. It had a

curious effect upon Karenin’s colleagues; their feeling towards him was

mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that it needed usage rather

than reason to overcome. He had a strong face, with little bright brown

eyes rather deeply sunken and a large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His

skin was very yellow and wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all

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155

times an impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven

him because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust

through his being. At the end of his life his personal prestige was very

great. To him far more than to any contemporary is it due that self-

abnegation, self-identification with the world spirit, was made the basis

of universal education. That general memorandum to the teachers which

is the key-note of the modern educational system, was probably entirely

his work.

‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,’ he wrote. ‘That is the

device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point of all we

have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything but a plain statement of

fact. It is the basis for your work. You have to teach self-forgetfulness,

and everything else that you have to teach is contributory and

subordinate to that end. Education is the release of man from self. You

have to widen the horizons of your children, encourage and intensify

their curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge their

sympathies. That is what you are for. Under your guidance and the

suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to shed the old

Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and passions, and to find

themselves again in the great being of the universe. The little circles of

their egotisms have to be opened out until they become arcs in the sweep

of the racial purpose. And this that you teach to others you must learn

also sedulously yourselves. Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill,

every sort of service, love: these are the means of salvation from that

narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding preoccupation with self and

egotistical relationships, which is hell for the individual, treason to the

race, and exile from God....’

Section XII

AS things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one begins

for the first time to see them clearly. From the perspectives of a new age

one can look back upon the great and widening stream of literature with

a complete understanding. Things link up that seemed disconnected, and

things that were once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but

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factors in the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of the

sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries

falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one sees it as a huge

tissue of variations upon one theme, the conflict of human egotism and

personal passion and narrow imaginations on the one hand, against the

growing sense of wider necessities and a possible, more spacious life.

That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire’s Candide,

for example, in which the desire for justice as well as happiness beats

against human contrariety and takes refuge at last in a forced and

inconclusive contentment with little things. Candide was but one of the

pioneers of a literature of uneasy complaint that was presently an

innumerable multitude of books. The novels more particularly of the

nineteenth century, if one excludes the mere story-tellers from our

consideration, witness to this uneasy realisation of changes that call for

effort and of the lack of that effort. In a thousand aspects, now tragically,

now comically, now with a funny affectation of divine detachment, a

countless host of witnesses tell their story of lives fretting between

dreams and limitations. Now one laughs, now one weeps, now one reads

with a blank astonishment at this huge and almost unpremeditated record

of how the growing human spirit, now warily, now eagerly, now

furiously, and always, as it seems, unsuccessfully, tried to adapt itself to

the maddening misfit of its patched and ancient garments. And always in

these books as one draws nearer to the heart of the matter there comes a

disconcerting evasion. It was the fantastic convention of the time that a

writer should not touch upon religion. To do so was to rouse the jealous

fury of the great multitude of professional religious teachers. It was

permitted to state the discord, but it was forbidden to glance at any

possible reconciliation. Religion was the privilege of the pulpit....

It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It was

ignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the

discussion of business questions, it played a trivial and apologetic part in

public affairs. And this was done not out of contempt but respect. The

hold of the old religious organisations upon men’s respect was still

enormous, so enormous that there seemed to be a quality of irreverence

in applying religion to the developments of every day. This strange

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suspension of religion lasted over into the beginnings of the new age. It

was the clear vision of Marcus Karenin much more than any other

contemporary influence which brought it back into the texture of human

life. He saw religion without hallucinations, without superstitious

reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and air, as land and

energy to the life of man and the well-being of the Republic. He saw that

indeed it had already percolated away from the temples and hierarchies

and symbols in which men had sought to imprison it, that it was already

at work anonymously and obscurely in the universal acceptance of the

greater state. He gave it clearer expression, rephrased it to the lights and

perspectives of the new dawn....

But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of the

times it becomes evident as one reads them in their chronological order,

so far as that is now ascertainable, that as one comes to the latter

nineteenth and the earlier twentieth century the writers are much more

acutely aware of secular change than their predecessors were. The earlier

novelists tried to show ‘life as it is,’ the latter showed life as it changes.

More and more of their characters are engaged in adaptation to change or

suffering from the effects of world changes. And as we come up to the

time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of the everyday life as a

reaction to an accelerated development is continually more manifest.

Barnet’s book, which has served us so well, is frankly a picture of the

world coming about like a ship that sails into the wind. Our later

novelists give a vast gallery of individual conflicts in which old habits

and customs, limited ideas, ungenerous temperaments, and innate

obsessions are pitted against this great opening out of life that has

happened to us. They tell us of the feelings of old people who have been

wrenched away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to

make peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still

strange to them. They give us the discord between the opening egotisms

of youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing social life. They

tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to capture and cripple our souls,

of romantic failures and tragical misconceptions of the trend of the

world, of the spirit of adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how

these serve the universal drift. And all their stories lead in the end either

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158

to happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster or salvation. The

clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more certainly do these

novels tell of the possibility of salvation for all the world. For any road in

life leads to religion for those upon it who will follow it far enough....

It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former time

that it should be an open question as it is to-day whether the world is

wholly Christian or not Christian at all. But assuredly we have the spirit,

and as surely have we left many temporary forms behind. Christianity

was the first expression of world religion, the first complete repudiation

of tribalism and war and disputation. That it fell presently into the ways

of more ancient rituals cannot alter that. The common sense of mankind

has toiled through two thousand years of chastening experience to find at

last how sound a meaning attaches to the familiar phrases of the

Christian faith. The scientific thinker as he widens out to the moral

problems of the collective life, comes inevitably upon the words of

Christ, and as inevitably does the Christian, as his thought grows clearer,

arrive at the world republic. As for the claims of the sects, as for the use

of a name and successions, we live in a time that has shaken itself free

from such claims and consistencies.

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159

Chapter the Fifth: The Last Days of Marcus Karenin

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160

Section I

THE second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new

station for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above the Sutlej

Gorge, where it comes down out of Thibet.

It is a place of such wildness and beauty as no other scenery in the

world affords. The granite terrace which runs round the four sides of the

low block of laboratories looks out in every direction upon mountains.

Far below in the hidden depths of a shadowy blue cleft, the river pours

down in its tumultuous passage to the swarming plains of India. No

sound of its roaring haste comes up to those serenities. Beyond that blue

gulf, in which whole forests of giant deodars seem no more than small

patches of moss, rise vast precipices of many-coloured rock, fretted

above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles. These are the

northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and snow which clambers

southward higher and wilder and vaster to the culminating summits of

our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest. Here are cliffs of which no other

land can show the like, and deep chasms in which Mt. Blanc might be

plunged and hidden. Here are icefields as big as inland seas on which the

tumbled boulders lie so thickly that strange little flowers can bloom

among them under the untempered sunshine. To the northward, and

blocking out any vision of the uplands of Thibet, rises that citadel of

porcelain, that gothic pile, the Lio Porgyul, walls, towers, and peaks, a

clear twelve thousand feet of veined and splintered rock above the river.

And beyond it and eastward and westward rise peaks behind peaks,

against the dark blue Himalayan sky. Far away below to the south the

clouds of the Indian rains pile up abruptly and are stayed by an invisible

hand.

Hither it was that with a dreamlike swiftness Karenin flew high over

the irrigations of Rajputana and the towers and cupolas of the ultimate

Delhi; and the little group of buildings, albeit the southward wall

dropped nearly five hundred feet, seemed to him as he soared down to it

like a toy lost among these mountain wildernesses. No road came up to

this place; it was reached only by flight.

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161

His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted by

his secretary clambered down through the wing fabric and made his way

to the officials who came out to receive him.

In this place, beyond infections and noise and any distractions,

surgery had made for itself a house of research and a healing fastness.

The building itself would have seemed very wonderful to eyes

accustomed to the flimsy architecture of an age when power was

precious. It was made of granite, already a little roughened on the outside

by frost, but polished within and of a tremendous solidity. And in a

honeycomb of subtly lit apartments, were the spotless research benches,

the operating tables, the instruments of brass, and fine glass and platinum

and gold. Men and women came from all parts of the world for study or

experimental research. They wore a common uniform of white and ate at

long tables together, but the patients lived in an upper part of the

buildings, and were cared for by nurses and skilled attendants....

The first man to greet Karenin was Ciana, the scientific director of

the institution. Beside him was Rachel Borken, the chief organiser. ‘You

are tired?’ she asked, and old Karenin shook his head.

‘Cramped,’ he said. ‘I have wanted to visit such a place as this.’

He spoke as if he had no other business with them.

There was a little pause.

‘How many scientific people have you got here now?’ he asked.

‘Just three hundred and ninety-two,’ said Rachel Borken.

‘And the patients and attendants and so on?’

‘Two thousand and thirty.’

‘I shall be a patient,’ said Karenin. ‘I shall have to be a patient. But I

should like to see things first. Presently I will be a patient.’

‘You will come to my rooms?’ suggested Ciana.

‘And then I must talk to this doctor of yours,’ said Karenin. ‘But I

would like to see a bit of this place and talk to some of your people

before it comes to that.’

He winced and moved forward.

‘I have left most of my work in order,’ he said.

‘You have been working hard up to now?’ asked Rachel Borken.

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162

‘Yes. And now I have nothing more to do—and it seems strange....

And it’s a bother, this illness and having to come down to oneself. This

doorway and the row of windows is well done; the gray granite and just

the line of gold, and then those mountains beyond through that arch. It’s

very well done....’

Section II

KARENIN lay on the bed with a soft white rug about him, and Fowler,

who was to be his surgeon sat on the edge of the bed and talked to him.

An assistant was seated quietly in the shadow behind the bed. The

examination had been made, and Karenin knew what was before him. He

was tired but serene.

‘So I shall die,’ he said, ‘unless you operate?’

Fowler assented. ‘And then,’ said Karenin, smiling, ‘probably I shall

die.’

‘Not certainly.’

‘Even if I do not die; shall I be able to work?’

‘There is just a chance....’

‘So firstly I shall probably die, and if I do not, then perhaps I shall be

a useless invalid?’

‘I think if you live, you may be able to go on—as you do now.’

‘Well, then, I suppose I must take the risk of it. Yet couldn’t you,

Fowler, couldn’t you drug me and patch me instead of all this—

vivisection? A few days of drugged and active life—and then the end?’

Fowler thought. ‘We are not sure enough yet to do things like that,’

he said.

‘But a day is coming when you will be certain.’

Fowler nodded.

‘You make me feel as though I was the last of deformity—Deformity

is uncertainty—inaccuracy. My body works doubtfully, it is not even

sure that it will die or live. I suppose the time is not far off when such

bodies as mine will no longer be born into the world.’

‘You see,’ said Fowler, after a little pause, ‘it is necessary that spirits

such as yours should be born into the world.’

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163

‘I suppose,’ said Karenin, ‘that my spirit has had its use. But if you

think that is because my body is as it is I think you are mistaken. There is

no peculiar virtue in defect. I have always chafed against—all this. If I

could have moved more freely and lived a larger life in health I could

have done more. But some day perhaps you will be able to put a body

that is wrong altogether right again. Your science is only beginning. It’s

a subtler thing than physics and chemistry, and it takes longer to produce

its miracles. And meanwhile a few more of us must die in patience.’

‘Fine work is being done and much of it,’ said Fowler. ‘I can say as

much because I have nothing to do with it. I can understand a lesson,

appreciate the discoveries of abler men and use my hands, but those

others, Pigou, Masterton, Lie, and the others, they are clearing the

ground fast for the knowledge to come. Have you had time to follow

their work?’

Karenin shook his head. ‘But I can imagine the scope of it,’ he said.

‘We have so many men working now,’ said Fowler. ‘I suppose at

present there must be at least a thousand thinking hard, observing,

experimenting, for one who did so in nineteen hundred.’

‘Not counting those who keep the records?’

‘Not counting those. Of course, the present indexing of research is in

itself a very big work, and it is only now that we are getting it properly

done. But already we are feeling the benefit of that. Since it ceased to be

a paid employment and became a devotion we have had only those

people who obeyed the call of an aptitude at work upon these things.

Here—I must show you it to-day, because it will interest you—we have

our copy of the encyclopaedic index—every week sheets are taken out

and replaced by fresh sheets with new results that are brought to us by

the aeroplanes of the Research Department. It is an index of knowledge

that grows continually, an index that becomes continually truer. There

was never anything like it before.’

‘When I came into the education committee,’ said Karenin, ‘that

index of human knowledge seemed an impossible thing. Research had

produced a chaotic mountain of results, in a hundred languages and a

thousand different types of publication. . . .’ He smiled at his memories.

‘How we groaned at the job!’

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164

‘Already the ordering of that chaos is nearly done. You shall see.’

‘I have been so busy with my own work——Yes, I shall be glad to

see.’

The patient regarded the surgeon for a time with interested eyes.

‘You work here always?’ he asked abruptly.

‘No,’ said Fowler.

‘But mostly you work here?’

‘I have worked about seven years out of the past ten. At times I go

away—down there. One has to. At least I have to. There is a sort of

grayness comes over all this, one feels hungry for life, real, personal

passionate life, love-making, eating and drinking for the fun of the thing,

jostling crowds, having adventures, laughter—above all laughter——’

‘Yes,’ said Karenin understandingly.

‘And then one day, suddenly one thinks of these high mountains

again....’

‘That is how I would have lived, if it had not been for my—defects,’

said Karenin. ‘Nobody knows but those who have borne it the

exasperation of abnormality. It will be good when you have nobody alive

whose body cannot live the wholesome everyday life, whose spirit

cannot come up into these high places as it wills.’

‘We shall manage that soon,’ said Fowler.

‘For endless generations man has struggled upward against the

indignities of his body—and the indignities of his soul. Pains,

incapacities, vile fears, black moods, despairs. How well I’ve known

them. They’ve taken more time than all your holidays. It is true, is it not,

that every man is something of a cripple and something of a beast? I’ve

dipped a little deeper than most; that’s all. It’s only now when he has

fully learnt the truth of that, that he can take hold of himself to be neither

beast nor cripple. Now that he overcomes his servitude to his body, he

can for the first time think of living the full life of his body.... Before

another generation dies you’ll have the thing in hand. You’ll do as you

please with the old Adam and all the vestiges from the brutes and reptiles

that lurk in his body and spirit. Isn’t that so?’

‘You put it boldly,’ said Fowler.

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Karenin laughed cheerfully at his caution.... ‘When,’ asked Karenin

suddenly, ‘when will you operate?’

‘The day after to-morrow,’ said Fowler. ‘For a day I want you to

drink and eat as I shall prescribe. And you may think and talk as you

please.’

‘I should like to see this place.’

‘You shall go through it this afternoon. I will have two men carry

you in a litter. And to-morrow you shall lie out upon the terrace. Our

mountains here are the most beautiful in the world....’

Section III

THE next morning Karenin got up early and watched the sun rise over

the mountains, and breakfasted lightly, and then young Gardener, his

secretary, came to consult him upon the spending of his day. Would he

care to see people? Or was this gnawing pain within him too much to

permit him to do that?

‘I’d like to talk,’ said Karenin. ‘There must be all sorts of lively-

minded people here. Let them come and gossip with me. It will distract

me—and I can’t tell you how interesting it makes everything that is

going on to have seen the dawn of one’s own last day.’

‘Your last day!’

‘Fowler will kill me.’

‘But he thinks not.’

‘Fowler will kill me. If he does not he will not leave very much of

me. So that this is my last day anyhow, the days afterwards if they come

at all to me, will be refuse. I know....’

Gardener was about to speak when Karenin went on again.

‘I hope he kills me, Gardener. Don’t be—old-fashioned. The thing I

am most afraid of is that last rag of life. I may just go on—a scarred

salvage of suffering stuff. And then—all the things I have hidden and

kept down or discounted or set right afterwards will get the better of me.

I shall be peevish. I may lose my grip upon my own egotism. It’s never

been a very firm grip. No, no, Gardener, don’t say that! You know better,

you’ve had glimpses of it. Suppose I came through on the other side of

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166

this affair, belittled, vain, and spiteful, using the prestige I have got

among men by my good work in the past just to serve some small invalid

purpose....’

He was silent for a time, watching the mists among the distant

precipices change to clouds of light, and drift and dissolve before the

searching rays of the sunrise.

‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘I am afraid of these anaesthetics and these fag

ends of life. It’s life we are all afraid of. Death!—nobody minds just

death. Fowler is clever—but some day surgery will know its duty better

and not be so anxious just to save something . . . provided only that it

quivers. I’ve tried to hold my end up properly and do my work. After

Fowler has done with me I am certain I shall be unfit for work—and

what else is there for me? . . . I know I shall not be fit for work....

‘I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing thread of

vitality.... I know it for the splendid thing it is—I who have been a

diseased creature from the beginning. I know it well enough not to

confuse it with its husks. Remember that, Gardener, if presently my heart

fails me and I despair, and if I go through a little phase of pain and

ingratitude and dark forgetfulness before the end.... Don’t believe what I

may say at the last.... If the fabric is good enough the selvage doesn’t

matter. It can’t matter. So long as you are alive you are just the moment,

perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all your life from the first

moment to the last....’

Section IV

PRESENTLY, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to him,

and he could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a long time with

him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and with her was a girl

named Edith Haydon who was already very well known as a cytologist.

And several of the younger men who were working in the place and a

patient named Kahn, a poet, and Edwards, a designer of plays and shows,

spent some time with him. The talk wandered from point to point and

came back upon itself, and became now earnest and now trivial as the

chance suggestions determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote

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167

down notes of things he remembered, and it is possible to put together

again the outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt

about many of the principal things in life.

‘Our age,’ he said, ‘has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We have

been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama that was

played out and growing tiresome.... If I could but sit out the first few

scenes of the new spectacle....

‘How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as I am ailing

with a growth of unmeaning things. It was entangled, feverish, confused.

It was in sore need of release, and I suppose that nothing less than the

violence of those bombs could have released it and made it a healthy

world again. I suppose they were necessary. Just as everything turns to

evil in a fevered body so everything seemed turning to evil in those last

years of the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete organisations

seizing upon all the new fine things that science was giving to the world,

nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the churches and sects,

proprietorship, seizing upon those treat powers and limitless possibilities

and turning them to evil uses. And they would not suffer open speech,

they would not permit of education, they would let no one be educated to

the needs of the new time.... You who are younger cannot imagine the

mixture of desperate hope and protesting despair in which we who could

believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years before atomic

energy came....

‘It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would not

understand, but that those who did understand lacked the power of real

belief. They said the things, they saw the things, and the things meant

nothing to them....

‘I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how our

fathers bore themselves towards science. They hated it. They feared it.

They permitted a few scientific men to exist and work—a pitiful

handful.... “Don’t find out anything about us,” they said to them; “don’t

inflict vision upon us, spare our little ways of life from the fearful shaft

of understanding. But do tricks for us, little limited tricks. Give us cheap

lighting. And cure us of certain disagreeable things, cure us of cancer,

cure us of consumption, cure our colds and relieve us after repletion....”

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168

We have changed all that, Gardener. Science is no longer our servant.

We know it for something greater than our little individual selves. It is

the awakening mind of the race, and in a little while——In a little

while——I wish indeed I could watch for that little while, now that the

curtain has risen....

‘While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs in

London,’ he said. ‘Then they are going to repair the ruins and make it all

as like as possible to its former condition before the bombs fell. Perhaps

they will dig out the old house in St John’s Wood to which my father

went after his expulsion from Russia.... That London of my memories

seems to me like a place in another world. For you younger people it

must seem like a place that could never have existed.’

‘Is there much left standing?’ asked Edith Haydon.

‘Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and north-west,

they say; and most of the bridges and large areas of dock. Westminster,

which held most of the government offices, suffered badly from the

small bomb that destroyed the Parliament, there are very few traces of

the old thoroughfare of Whitehall or the Government region thereabout,

but there are plentiful drawings to scale of its buildings, and the great

hole in the east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor district and

very like the north and the south. . . . It will be possible to reconstruct

most of it. . . . It is wanted. Already it becomes difficult to recall the old

time—even for us who saw it.’

‘It seems very distant to me,’ said the girl.

‘It was an unwholesome world,’ reflected Karenin. ‘I seem to

remember everybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They were

ill. They were sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious about money

and everybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate a queer mixture

of foods, either too much or too little, and at odd hours. One sees how ill

they were by their advertisements. All this new region of London they

are opening up now is plastered with advertisements of pills. Everybody

must have been taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand they

have found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and

unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill and

tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying age. They

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169

are equally strange to us. People’s skins must have been in a vile state.

Very few people were properly washed; they carried the filth of months

on their clothes. All the clothes they wore were old clothes; our way of

pulping our clothes again after a week or so of wear would have seemed

fantastic to them. Their clothing hardly bears thinking about. And the

congestion of them! Everybody was jostling against everybody in those

awful towns. In an uproar. People were run over and crushed by the

hundred; every year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed or

disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it was worse; people used to

fall dead for want of air in the crowded ways. The irritation of London,

internal and external, must have been maddening. It was a maddened

world. It is like thinking of a sick child. One has the same effect of

feverish urgencies and acute irrational disappointments.

‘All history,’ he said, ‘is a record of a childhood....

‘And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and keen

about even a sick child—and something touching. But so much of the old

times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly stupid,

obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very opposite to being

fresh and young.

‘I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of

nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of blood

and iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man. Indeed, that is

what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who ever became great. I

looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost froggish face, with projecting

eyes and a thick moustache to hide a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing

but Germany, Germany emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and

his class in Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to

ideas; his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a bumpkin’s

elaborate cunning. And he was the most influential man in the world, in

the whole world, no man ever left so deep a mark on it, because

everywhere there were gross men to resonate to the heavy notes he

emitted. He trampled on ten thousand lovely things, and a kind of malice

in these louts made it pleasant to them to see him trample. No—he was

no child; the dull, national aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness.

Childhood is promise. He was survival.

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170

‘All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education, art,

happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the clatter of his

sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool’s “blood and iron” passed

all round the earth. Until the atomic bombs burnt our way to freedom

again. . . .’

‘One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium,’ said one

of the young men.

‘From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a

hundred thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but war.’

‘Were there no sane men in those days,’ asked the young man, ‘to

stand against that idolatry?’

‘In a state of despair,’ said Edith Haydon.

‘He is so far off—and there are men alive still who were alive when

Bismarck died!’ . . . said the young man....

Section V

‘AND yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck,’ said Karenin, following

his own thoughts. ‘You see, men belong to their own age; we stand upon

a common stock of thought and we fancy we stand upon the ground. I

met a pleasant man the other day, a Maori, whose great-grandfather was

a cannibal. It chanced he had a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the

two were marvellously alike. One felt that a little juggling with time and

either might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a stupid

age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one. The world also

has its moods. Think of the mental food of Bismarck’s childhood; the

humiliations of Napoleon’s victories, the crowded, crowning victory of

the Battle of the Nations.... Everybody in those days, wise or foolish,

believed that the division of the world under a multitude of governments

was inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of years more. It

was inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who had denied that

inevitability publicly would have been counted—oh! a silly fellow. Old

Bismarck was only just a little—forcible, on the lines of the accepted

ideas. That is all. He thought that since there had to be national

governments he would make one that was strong at home and invincible

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abroad. Because he had fed with a kind of rough appetite upon what we

can see now were very stupid ideas, that does not make him a stupid

man. We’ve had advantages; we’ve had unity and collectivism blasted

into our brains. Where should we be now but for the grace of science? I

should have been an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden member of the

Russian Intelligenza, a conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin. You, my

dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.’

‘Never,’ said Edith stoutly....

For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the young

people gibed at each other across the smiling old administrator, and then

presently one of the young scientific men gave things a new turn. He

spoke like one who was full to the brim.

‘You know, sir, I’ve a fancy—it is hard to prove such things—that

civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic bombs came banging

into it, that if there had been no Holsten and no induced radio-activity,

the world would have—smashed—much as it did. Only instead of its

being a smash that opened a way to better things, it might have been a

smash without a recovery. It is part of my business to understand

economics, and from that point of view the century before Holsten was

just a hundred years’ crescendo of waste. Only the extreme individualism

of that period, only its utter want of any collective understanding or

purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used up material—insanely.

They had got through three-quarters of all the coal in the planet, they had

used up most of the oil, they had swept away their forests, and they were

running short of tin and copper. Their wheat areas were getting weary

and populous, and many of the big towns had so lowered the water level

of their available hills that they suffered a drought every summer. The

whole system was rushing towards bankruptcy. And they were spending

every year vaster and vaster amounts of power and energy upon military

preparations, and continually expanding the debt of industry to capital.

The system was already staggering when Holsten began his researches.

So far as the world in general went there was no sense of danger and no

desire for inquiry. They had no belief that science could save them, nor

any idea that there was a need to be saved. They could not, they would

not, see the gulf beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at

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large that any research at all was in progress. And as I say, sir, if that line

of escape hadn’t opened, before now there might have been a crash,

revolution, panic, social disintegration, famine, and—it is conceivable—

complete disorder. . . . The rails might have rusted on the disused

railways by now, the telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big

liners dropped into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted cities

become the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We might have

been brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may smile,

but that had happened before in human history. The world is still studded

with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric bands made their

fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of Hadrian became a fortress

that warred across the ruins of Rome against the Colosseum.... Had all

that possibility of reaction ended so certainly in 1940? Is it all so very far

away even now?’

‘It seems far enough away now,’ said Edith Haydon.

‘But forty years ago?’

‘No,’ said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, ‘I think you

underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of the

twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that intelligence didn’t

tell—but it was there. And I question your hypothesis. I doubt if that

discovery could have been delayed. There is a kind of inevitable logic

now in the progress of research. For a hundred years and more thought

and science have been going their own way regardless of the common

events of life. You see—they have got loose. If there had been no

Holsten there would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had

not come in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Rome

the march of science had scarcely begun.... Nineveh, Babylon, Athens,

Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in

association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which inquiry was

born. Man had to experiment before he found out the way to begin. But

already two hundred years ago he had fairly begun.... The politics and

dignities and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were only

the last phoenix blaze of the former civilisation flaring up about the

beginnings of the new. Which we serve.... ‘Man lives in the dawn for

ever,’ said Karenin. ‘Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It

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173

begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and does but

gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of ours, which would

have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago, is already the

commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream of the possibilities in

the mind of man that now gather to a head beneath the shelter of its

peace, these great mountains here seem but little things....’

Section VI

ABOUT eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept

among his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he awoke and

some tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small difficulty in

connection with the Moravian schools in the Labrador country and in

Greenland that Gardener knew would interest him. He remained alone

for a little while after that, and then the two women came to him again.

Afterwards Edwards and Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon

love and the place of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of

India lay under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full upon

the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast splinter

of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild rush of snow

and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a wet thread into the

gulfs below, and cease....

Section VII

FOR a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet, talked

of passionate love. He said that passionate, personal love had been the

abiding desire of humanity since ever humanity had begun, and now only

was it becoming a possible experience. It had been a dream that

generation after generation had pursued, that always men had lost on the

verge of attainment. To most of those who had sought it obstinately it

had brought tragedy. Now, lifted above sordid distresses, men and

women might hope for realised and triumphant love. This age was the

Dawn of Love....

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Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these

things. Against that continued silence Kahn’s voice presently seemed to

beat and fail. He had begun by addressing Karenin, but presently he was

including Edith Haydon and Rachel Borken in his appeal. Rachel

listened silently; Edith watched Karenin and very deliberately avoided

Kahn’s eyes.

‘I know,’ said Karenin at last, ‘that many people are saying this sort

of thing. I know that there is a vast release of love-making in the world.

This great wave of decoration and elaboration that has gone about the

world, this Efflorescence, has of course laid hold of that. I know that

when you say that the world is set free, you interpret that to mean that the

world is set free for love-making. Down there,—under the clouds, the

lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical songs, in

which you represent this old hard world dissolving into a luminous haze

of love—sexual love.... I don’t think you are right or true in that. You are

a young, imaginative man, and you see life—ardently—with the eyes of

youth. But the power that has brought man into these high places under

this blue-veiled blackness of the sky and which beckons us on towards

the immense and awful future of our race, is riper and deeper and greater

than any such emotions....

‘All through my life—it has been a necessary part of my work—I

have had to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles that

perfect freedom and almost limitless power will put to the soul of our

race. I can see now, all over the world, a beautiful ecstasy of waste; “Let

us sing and rejoice and be lovely and wonderful.” . . . The orgy is only

beginning, Kahn.... It was inevitable—but it is not the end of mankind....

‘Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of time

that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it forgot itself as

it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts, its moments, were born and

wondered and played and desired and hungered and grew weary and

died. Incalculable successions of vision, visions of sunlit jungle, river

wilderness, wild forest, eager desire, beating hearts, soaring wings and

creeping terror flamed hotly and then were as though they had never

been. Life was an uneasiness across which lights played and vanished.

And then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a question and

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175

hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that dies not

when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind, a

dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to the stars....

Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of, this sex, are but the

elementals of life out of which we have arisen. All these elementals, I

grant you, have to be provided for, dealt with, satisfied, but all these

things have to be left behind.’

‘But Love,’ said Kahn.

‘I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons. And that is

what you mean, Kahn.’

Karenin shook his head. ‘You cannot stay at the roots and climb the

tree,’ he said....

‘No,’ he said after a pause, ‘this sexual excitement, this love story, is

just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far literature and art

and sentiment and all our emotional forms have been almost altogether

adolescent, plays and stories, delights and hopes, they have all turned on

that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but life lengthens out now

and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself. Poets who used to die at

thirty live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn! There are endless years

yet for you—and all full of learning.... We carry an excessive burden of

sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free ourselves from it. We

do free ourselves from it. We have learnt in a thousand different ways to

hold back death, and this sex, which in the old barbaric days was just

sufficient to balance our dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its

anvil, it plunges through human life. You poets, you young people want

to turn it to delight. Turn it to delight. That may be one way out. In a

little while, if you have any brains worth thinking about, you will be

satisfied, and then you will come up here to the greater things. The old

religions and their new offsets want still, I see, to suppress all these

things. Let them suppress. If they can suppress. In their own people.

Either road will bring you here at last to the eternal search for knowledge

and the great adventure of power.’

‘But incidentally,’ said Rachel Borken; ‘incidentally you have half of

humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised for—for this

love and reproduction that is so much less needed than it was.’

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‘Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction,’ said Karenin.

‘But the women carry the heavier burden.’

‘Not in their imaginations,’ said Edwards.

‘And surely,’ said Kahn, ‘when you speak of love as a phase—isn’t

it a necessary phase? Quite apart from reproduction the love of the sexes

is necessary. Isn’t it love, sexual love, which has released the

imagination? Without that stir, without that impulse to go out from

ourselves, to be reckless of ourselves and wonderful, would our lives be

anything more than the contentment of the stalled ox?’

‘The key that opens the door,’ said Karenin, ‘is not the goal of the

journey.’

‘But women!’ cried Rachel. ‘Here we are! What is our future—as

women? Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the imagination for

you men? Let us speak of this question now. It is a thing constantly in

my thoughts, Karenin. What do you think of us? You who must have

thought so much of these perplexities.’

Karenin seemed to weigh his words. He spoke very deliberately. ‘I

do not care a rap about your future—as women. I do not care a rap about

the future of men—as males. I want to destroy these peculiar futures. I

care for your future as intelligences, as parts of and contribution to the

universal mind of the race. Humanity is not only naturally over-

specialised in these matters, but all its institutions, its customs,

everything, exaggerate, intensify this difference. I want to unspecialise

women. No new idea. Plato wanted exactly that. I do not want to go on

as we go now, emphasising this natural difference; I do not deny it, but I

want to reduce it and overcome it.’

‘And—we remain women,’ said Rachel Borken. ‘Need you remain

thinking of yourselves as women?’

‘It is forced upon us,’ said Edith Haydon.

‘I do not think a woman becomes less of a woman because she

dresses and works like a man,’ said Edwards. ‘You women here, I mean

you scientific women, wear white clothing like the men, twist up your

hair in the simplest fashion, go about your work as though there was only

one sex in the world. You are just as much women, even if you are not so

feminine, as the fine ladies down below there in the plains who dress for

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177

excitement and display, whose only thoughts are of lovers, who

exaggerate every difference.... Indeed we love you more.’

‘But we go about our work,’ said Edith Haydon.

‘So does it matter?’ asked Rachel.

‘If you go about your work and if the men go about their work then

for Heaven’s sake be as much woman as you wish,’ said Karenin. ‘When

I ask you to unspecialise, I am thinking not of the abolition of sex, but

the abolition of the irksome, restricting, obstructive obsession with sex. It

may be true that sex made society, that the first society was the sex-

cemented family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations, the first

laws sexual taboos. Until a few years ago morality meant proper sexual

behaviour. Up to within a few years of us the chief interest and motive of

an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and her children and the

chief concern of a woman was to get a man to do that. That was the

drama, that was life. And the jealousy of these demands was the master

motive in the world. You said, Kahn, a little while ago that sexual love

was the key that let one out from the solitude of self, but I tell you that so

far it has only done so in order to lock us all up again in a solitude of

two.... All that may have been necessary but it is necessary no longer. All

that has changed and changes still very swiftly. Your future, Rachel, as

women, is a diminishing future.’

‘Karenin?’ asked Rachel, ‘do you mean that women are to become

men?’

‘Men and women have to become human beings.’

‘You would abolish women? But, Karenin, listen! There is more than

sex in this. Apart from sex we are different from you. We take up life

differently. Forget we are—females, Karenin, and still we are a different

sort of human being with a different use. In some things we are

amazingly secondary. Here am I in this place because of my trick of

management, and Edith is here because of her patient, subtle hands. That

does not alter the fact that nearly the whole body of science is man made;

that does not alter the fact that men do so predominatingly make history,

that you could nearly write a complete history of the world without

mentioning a woman’s name. And on the other hand we have a gift of

devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly loving beautiful

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things, a care for life and a peculiar keen close eye for behaviour. You

know men are blind beside us in these last matters. You know they are

restless—and fitful. We have a steadfastness. We may never draw the

broad outlines nor discover the new paths, but in the future isn’t there a

confirming and sustaining and supplying role for us? As important,

perhaps, as yours? Equally important. We hold the world up, Karenin,

though you may have raised it.’

‘You know very well, Rachel, that I believe as you believe. I am not

thinking of the abolition of woman. But I do want to abolish—the

heroine, the sexual heroine. I want to abolish the woman whose support

is jealousy and whose gift possession. I want to abolish the woman who

can be won as a prize or locked up as a delicious treasure. And away

down there the heroine flares like a divinity.’

‘In America,’ said Edwards, ‘men are fighting duels over the praises

of women and holding tournaments before Queens of Beauty.’

‘I saw a beautiful girl in Lahore,’ said Kahn, ‘she sat under a golden

canopy like a goddess, and three fine men, armed and dressed like the

ancient paintings, sat on steps below her to show their devotion. And

they wanted only her permission to fight for her.’

‘That is the men’s doing,’ said Edith Haydon.

‘I said,’ cried Edwards, ‘that man’s imagination was more

specialised for sex than the whole being of woman. What woman would

do a thing like that? Women do but submit to it or take advantage of it.’

‘There is no evil between men and women that is not a common

evil,’ said Karenin. ‘It is you poets, Kahn, with your love songs which

turn the sweet fellowship of comrades into this woman-centred

excitement. But there is something in women, in many women, which

responds to these provocations; they succumb to a peculiarly self-

cultivating egotism. They become the subjects of their own artistry. They

develop and elaborate themselves as scarcely any man would ever do.

They look for golden canopies. And even when they seem to react

against that, they may do it still. I have been reading in the old papers of

the movements to emancipate women that were going on before the

discovery of atomic force. These things which began with a desire to

escape from the limitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed

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179

assertion of sex, and women more heroines than ever. Helen of Holloway

was at last as big a nuisance in her way as Helen of Troy, and so long as

you think of yourselves as women’—he held out a finger at Rachel and

smiled gently—‘instead of thinking of yourselves as intelligent beings,

you will be in danger of—Helenism. To think of yourselves as women is

to think of yourselves in relation to men. You can’t escape that

consequence. You have to learn to think of yourselves—for our sakes

and your own sakes—in relation to the sun and stars. You have to cease

to be our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon our adventures....’

He waved his hand towards the dark sky above the mountain crests.

Section VIII

‘THESE questions are the next questions to which research will bring us

answers,’ said Karenin. ‘While we sit here and talk idly and inexactly of

what is needed and what may be, there are hundreds of keen-witted men

and women who are working these things out, dispassionately and

certainly, for the love of knowledge. The next sciences to yield great

harvests now will be psychology and neural physiology. These

perplexities of the situation between man and woman and the trouble

with the obstinacy of egotism, these are temporary troubles, the issue of

our own times. Suddenly all these differences that seem so fixed will

dissolve, all these incompatibles will run together, and we shall go on to

mould our bodies and our bodily feelings and personal reactions as

boldly as we begin now to carve mountains and set the seas in their

places and change the currents of the wind.’

‘It is the next wave,’ said Fowler, who had come out upon the terrace

and seated himself silently behind Karenin’s chair.

‘Of course, in the old days,’ said Edwards, ‘men were tied to their

city or their country, tied to the homes they owned or the work they

did....’

‘I do not see,’ said Karenin, ‘that there is any final limit to man’s

power of self-modification.

‘There is none,’ said Fowler, walking forward and sitting down upon

the parapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his face. ‘There is no

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180

absolute limit to either knowledge or power.... I hope you do not tire

yourself talking.’

‘I am interested,’ said Karenin. ‘I suppose in a little while men will

cease to be tired. I suppose in a little time you will give us something that

will hurry away the fatigue products and restore our jaded tissues almost

at once. This old machine may be made to run without slacking or

cessation.’

‘That is possible, Karenin. But there is much to learn.’

‘And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don’t you

think there will be some way of saving these?’

Fowler nodded assent.

‘And then sleep again. When man with his blazing lights made an

end to night in his towns and houses—it is only a hundred years or so

ago that that was done—then it followed he would presently resent his

eight hours of uselessness. Shan’t we presently take a tabloid or lie in

some field of force that will enable us to do with an hour or so of

slumber and rise refreshed again?’

‘Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction.’

‘And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the system

that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen and

lengthen the years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youth

and the contractions of senility. Man who used to weaken and die as his

teeth decayed now looks forward to a continually lengthening,

continually fuller term of years. And all those parts of him that once

gathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous

corners of his body, you know better and better how to deal with. You

carve his body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred. The

psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and remove

bad complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures and broaden

ideas. So that we are becoming more and more capable of transmitting

what we have learnt and preserving it for the race. The race, the racial

wisdom, science, gather power continually to subdue the individual man

to its own end. Is that not so?’

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181

Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of new

work that was in progress in India and Russia. ‘And how is it with

heredity?’ asked Karenin.

Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged

by the genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the laws of

inheritance and how the sex of children and the complexions and many

of the parental qualities could be determined.

‘He can actually do——?’

‘It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,’ said Fowler, ‘but

to-morrow it will be practicable.’

‘You see,’ cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and

Edith, ‘while we have been theorising about men and women, here is

science getting the power for us to end that old dispute for ever. If

woman is too much for us, we’ll reduce her to a minority, and if we do

not like any type of men and women, we’ll have no more of it. These old

bodies, these old animal limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross

inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled cocoon from

an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these things I feel like

that—like a wet, crawling new moth that still fears to spread its wings.

Because where do these things take us?’

‘Beyond humanity,’ said Kahn.

‘No,’ said Karenin. ‘We can still keep our feet upon the earth that

made us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round planet is no

longer chained to us like the ball of a galley slave....

‘In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange

gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar gases and

all the fearful strangenesses of space will be venturing out from this

earth. This ball will be no longer enough for us; our spirit will reach

out.... Cannot you see how that little argosy will go glittering up into the

sky, twinkling and glittering smaller and smaller until the blue swallows

it up. They may succeed out there; they may perish, but other men will

follow them....

‘It is as if a great window opened,’ said Karenin.

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182

Section IX

AS the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went up

upon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better watch the

sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming of the

afterglow. They were joined by two of the surgeons from the laboratories

below, and presently by a nurse who brought Karenin refreshment in a

thin glass cup. It was a cloudless, windless evening under the deep blue

sky, and far away to the north glittered two biplanes on the way to the

observatories on Everest, two hundred miles distant over the precipices

to the east. The little group of people watched them pass over the

mountains and vanish into the blue, and then for a time they talked of the

work that the observatory was doing. From that they passed to the whole

process of research about the world, and so Karenin’s thoughts returned

again to the mind of the world and the great future that was opening upon

man’s imagination. He asked the surgeons many questions upon the

detailed possibilities of their science, and he was keenly interested and

excited by the things they told him. And as they talked the sun touched

the mountains, and became very swiftly a blazing and indented

hemisphere of liquid flame and sank.

Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of incandescence,

and shaded his eyes and became silent.

Presently he gave a little start.

‘What?’ asked Rachel Borken.

‘I had forgotten,’ he said.

‘What had you forgotten?’

‘I had forgotten about the operation to-morrow. I have been so

interested as Man to-day that I have nearly forgotten Marcus Karenin.

Marcus Karenin must go under your knife to-morrow, Fowler, and very

probably Marcus Karenin will die.’ He raised his slightly shrivelled

hand. ‘It does not matter, Fowler. It scarcely matters even to me. For

indeed is it Karenin who has been sitting here and talking; is it not rather

a common mind, Fowler, that has played about between us? You and I

and all of us have added thought to thought, but the thread is neither you

nor me. What is true we all have; when the individual has altogether

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183

brought himself to the test and winnowing of expression, then the

individual is done. I feel as though I had already been emptied out of that

little vessel, that Marcus Karenin, which in my youth held me so tightly

and completely. Your beauty, dear Edith, and your broad brow, dear

Rachel, and you, Fowler, with your firm and skilful hands, are now

almost as much to me as this hand that beats the arm of my chair. And as

little me. And the spirit that desires to know, the spirit that resolves to do,

that spirit that lives and has talked in us to-day, lived in Athens, lived in

Florence, lives on, I know, for ever....

‘And you, old Sun, with your sword of flame searing these poor eyes

of Marcus for the last time of all, beware of me! You think I die—and

indeed I am only taking off one more coat to get at you. I have threatened

you for ten thousand years, and soon I warn you I shall be coming. When

I am altogether stripped and my disguises thrown away. Very soon now,

old Sun, I shall launch myself at you, and I shall reach you and I shall put

my foot on your spotted face and tug you about by your fiery locks. One

step I shall take to the moon, and then I shall leap at you. I’ve talked to

you before, old Sun, I’ve talked to you a million times, and now I am

beginning to remember. Yes—long ago, long ago, before I had stripped

off a few thousand generations, dust now and forgotten, I was a hairy

savage and I pointed my hand at you and—clearly I remember it!—I saw

you in a net. Have you forgotten that, old Sun? . . .

‘Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the individual

that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into

science and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you

slink down behind the mountains from me, well may you cower....’

Section X

KARENIN desired that he might dream alone for a little while before he

returned to the cell in which he was to sleep. He was given relief for a

pain that began to trouble him and wrapped warmly about with furs, for a

great coldness was creeping over all things, and so they left him, and he

sat for a long time watching the afterglow give place to the darkness of

night.

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184

It seemed to those who had to watch over him unobtrusively lest he

should be in want of any attention, that he mused very deeply.

The white and purple peaks against the golden sky sank down into

cold, blue remoteness, glowed out again and faded again, and the burning

cressets of the Indian stars, that even the moonrise cannot altogether

quench, began their vigil. The moon rose behind the towering screen of

dark precipices to the east, and long before it emerged above these, its

slanting beams had filled the deep gorges below with luminous mist and

turned the towers and pinnacles of Lio Porgyul to a magic dreamcastle of

radiance and wonder....

Came a great uprush of ghostly light above the black rim of rocks,

and then like a bubble that is blown and detaches itself the moon floated

off clear into the unfathomable dark sky....

And then Karenin stood up. He walked a few paces along the terrace

and remained for a time gazing up at that great silver disc, that silvery

shield that must needs be man’s first conquest in outer space....

Presently he turned about and stood with his hands folded behind

him, looking at the northward stars. . . .

At length he went to his own cell. He lay down there and slept

peacefully till the morning. And early in the morning they came to him

and the anaesthetic was given him and the operation performed.

It was altogether successful, but Karenin was weak and he had to lie

very still; and about seven days later a blood clot detached itself from the

healing scar and travelled to his heart, and he died in an instant in the

night.

The End

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