The World Set Free by H.G. Wells

The World Set Free by H.G. Wells
WE ARE
ALL THINGS THAT
MAKE AND PASS,
STRIVING UPON A
HIDDEN MISSION,
OUT TO THE
OPEN
SEA.
THE WORLD SET FREE
H.G. WELLS
TO
FREDERICK SODDY'S
'INTERPRETATION OF RADIUM'
THIS STORY, WHICH OWES LONG PASSAGES
TO THE ELEVENTH CHAPTER OF
THAT BOOK, ACKNOWLEDGES
AND INSCRIBES
ITSELF
PREFACE
THE WORLD SET FREE was written in 1913 and published early in
1914, and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of
possibility, stories which all turn on the possible developments
in the future of some contemporary force or group of forces. The
World Set Free was written under the immediate shadow of the
Great War. Every intelligent person in the world felt that
disaster was impending and knew no way of averting it, but few of
us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how near the crash was to
us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is put off
until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the reason
for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a
prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to
be rather a slow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of
reality, for example, beat the forecast in Anticipations by about
twenty years or so. I suppose a desire not to shock the sceptical
reader's sense of use and wont and perhaps a less creditable
disposition to hedge, have something to do with this dating
forward of one's main events, but in the particular case of The
World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding the
Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get well
forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy.
1956--or for that matter 2056--may be none too late for that
crowning revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this
procrastination of over forty years, the guess at the opening
phase of the war was fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of
the Central Empires, the opening campaign through the
Netherlands, and the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force
were all justified before the book had been published six months.
And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after
the reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the
essentials of the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second,
Section 2), on which the writer may congratulate himself, is the
forecast that under modern conditions it would be quite
impossible for any great general to emerge to supremacy and
concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. There
could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the
scientific corps muttering, 'These old fools,' exactly as it is
here foretold.
These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story
far outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of
interest now; the thesis that because of the development of
scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate
sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world, that to
attempt to keep on with the old system is to heap disaster upon
disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race altogether.
The remaining interest of this book now is the sustained validity
of this thesis and the discussion of the possible ending of war
on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity to
break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind.
I have represented the native common sense of the French mind and
of the English mind--for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be
'God's Englishman'--leading mankind towards a bold and resolute
effort of salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the
school book footnotes say, compare to-day's newspaper. Instead
of a frank and honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman
meeting German and Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences
and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in
Geneva at the other end of Switzerland a poor little League of
(Allied) Nations (excluding the United States, Russia, and most
of the 'subject peoples' of the world), meeting obscurely amidst
a world-wide disregard to make impotent gestures at the leading
problems of the debacle. Either the disaster has not been vast
enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict the
necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion.
Just as the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity
and thought that increase would go on for ever, so now it would
seem the world is growing accustomed to a steady glide towards
social disintegration, and thinks that that too can go on
continually and never come to a final bump. So soon do use and
wont establish themselves, and the most flaming and thunderous of
lessons pale into disregard.
The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question
whether it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of
creative sanity in mankind, to avert this steady glide to
destruction, is now one of the most urgent in the world. It is
clear that the writer is temperamentally disposed to hope that
there is such a possibility. But he has to confess that he sees
few signs of any such breadth of understanding and steadfastness
of will as an effectual effort to turn the rush of human affairs
demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old institutions carries
us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is there any
plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as something
overriding any national and patriotic consideration, and that is
in the working class movement throughout the world. And labour
internationalism is closely bound up with conceptions of a
profound social revolution. If world peace is to be attained
through labour internationalism, it will have to be attained at
the price of the completest social and economic reconstruction
and by passing through a phase of revolution that will certainly
be violent, that may be very bloody, which may be prolonged
through a long period, and may in the end fail to achieve
anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains
that it is in the labour class, and the labour class alone, that
any conception of a world rule and a world peace has so far
appeared. The dream of The World Set Free, a dream of highly
educated and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily
setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has thus
far remained a dream.
H. G. WELLS.
EASTON GLEBE,
DUNMOW, 1921.
CONTENTS
PRELUDE
THE SUN SNARERS
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE LAST WAR
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE ENDING OF WAR
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE NEW PHASE
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
PRELUDE
THE SUN SNARERS
Section I
THE history of mankind is the history of the attainment of
external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From
the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing
the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of
burning and the rough implement of stone. So he passed beyond
the ape. From that he expands. Presently he added to himself the
power of the horse and the ox, he borrowed the carrying strength
of water and the driving force of the wind, he quickened his fire
by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first with copper and
then with iron, increased and varied and became more elaborate
and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made his way
easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social
relationships and increased his efficiency by the division of
labour. He began to store up knowledge. Contrivance followed
contrivance, each making it possible for a man to do more.
Always down the lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and
again, he is doing more.... A quarter of a million years ago the
utmost man was a savage, a being scarcely articulate, sheltering
in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn flint or a
fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed
by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity
declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would
have sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical
river valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his
little herds, a male, a few females, a child or so.
He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led.
He fled the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the
promise of sword and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of
coal; he drank water muddy with the clay that would one day make
cups of porcelain; he chewed the ear of wild wheat he had plucked
and gazed with a dim speculation in his eyes at the birds that
soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became aware of the scent
of another male and rose up roaring, his roars the formless
precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great
individualist, that original, he suffered none other than
himself.
So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this
ancestor of all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing
almost imperceptibly.
Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened
the tiger's claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus
to the swift grace of the horse, was at work upon him--is at work
upon him still. The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him
were killed soonest and oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker
eye, the bigger brain, the better balanced body prevailed; age by
age, the implements were a little better made, the man a little
more delicately adjusted to his possibilities. He became more
social; his herd grew larger; no longer did each man kill or
drive out his growing sons; a system of taboos made them
tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon even after
he was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and the rest
of mankind. (But they were forbidden to touch the women of the
tribe, they had to go out and capture women for themselves, and
each son fled from his stepmother and hid from her lest the anger
of the Old Man should be roused. All the world over, even to this
day, these ancient inevitable taboos can be traced.) And now
instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was better
tended and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the
creature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him,
storing food--until sometimes the neglected grass-seed sprouted
again and gave a first hint of agriculture.
And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.
Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his
lusts and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon
the squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his
eyes. He scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued
it and began pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the
river brink between his fingers, and found a pleasure in its
patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of vessels,
and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming
river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant
water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he
might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place
amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his
brother that once indeed he had done so--at least that some one
had done so--he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as
daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith
began fiction--pointing a way to achievement--and the august
prophetic procession of tales.
For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations
that life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the
ripening of that phase of human life, from the first clumsy
eolith of rudely chipped flint to the first implements of
polished stone, was two or three thousand centuries, ten or
fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by human standards, did
humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the
beast. And that first glimmering of speculation, that first
story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed
under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous
listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most
marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the
mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch
the sun.
Section 2
That dream was but a moment in a man's life, whose proper
business it seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget
after the manner of all that belongs to the fellowship of the
beasts. About him, hidden from him by the thinnest of veils, were
the untouched sources of Power, whose magnitude we scarcely do
more than suspect even to-day, Power that could make his every
conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the race were in
the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.
At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food
is abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his
earlier jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less
urgently, more social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a
larger community. There began a division of labour, certain of
the older men specialised in knowledge and direction, a strong
man took the fatherly leadership in war, and priest and king
began to develop their 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
valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there were
already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They
flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the
future, for as yet writing had still to begin.
Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable
wealth of Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He
tamed certain animals, he developed his primordially haphazard
agriculture into a ritual, he added first one metal to his
resources and then another, until he had copper and tin and iron
and lead and gold and silver to supplement his stone, he hewed
and carved wood, made pottery, paddled down his river until he
came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made the first roads.
But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and more, was the
subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger societies.
The history of man is not simply the conquest of external power;
it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,
that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his
hands from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents
association. From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the
achievement of the Peace of the World, man's dealings were
chiefly with himself and his fellow man, trading, bargaining,
law-making, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating,
and every little increment in Power, he turned at once and always
turns to the purposes of this confused elaborate struggle to
socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his fellow men into a
community of purpose became the last and greatest of his
instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone
age was over he had become a political animal. He made
astonishingly far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of
counting and then of writing and making records, and with that
his town communities began to stretch out to dominion; in the
valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the great Chinese rivers,
the first empires and the first written laws had their
beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers and
knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which
had been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle
of pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome.
The history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking
up of the Roman Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to
the last, aped 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.
Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for
his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and
goings, the wars and processions, the castle building and
cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and
incurable feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the middle
ages. He no longer speculated with the untrammelled freedom of
the stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of everything
barred his path; but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle
and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused upon the coin
and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain leisure for
thought throughout these times, then men were to be found
dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with
the assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread
symbols in the world about them, questioning the finality of
scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages of history there were
men to whom this whisper had come of hidden things about them.
They could no longer lead ordinary lives nor content themselves
with the common things of this world once they had heard this
voice. And mostly they believed not only that all this world was
as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at, but that
these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by
chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among
rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some
odd utilisable thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied
discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day
laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and
ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and
sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and
entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them
not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first
dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his
blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly,
was the snare that will some day catch the sun.
Section 3
Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court
of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His
common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious
anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. 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 4
The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on
the verge of discovery, before they began to influence human
lives.
There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised and
forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed
that coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand
before it dawned upon men that here was something more than a
curiosity. And it is to be remarked that the first recorded
suggestion for the use of steam was in war; there is an
Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of
corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining of coal for
fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men had ever
done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam-engine and the
steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of
logical necessity. It is the most interesting and instructive
chapter in the history of the human intelligence, the history of
steam from its beginning as a fact in human consciousness to the
perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the
utilisation of intra-molecular power. Nearly every human being
must have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands of
years; the women in particular were always heating water, boiling
it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with
its fury; millions of people at different times must have watched
steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket balls and
blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the whole human
record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any
glimmer of a realisation that here was force, here was strength
to borrow and use.... Then suddenly man woke up to it, the
railways spread like a network over the globe, the ever enlarging
iron steamships began their staggering fight against wind and
wave.
Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning
of the Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the
Warring States.
But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this
novelty. They would not recognise, they were not able to
recognise that anything fundamental had happened to their
immemorial necessities. They called the steam-engine the 'iron
horse' and pretended that they had made the most partial of
substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production were
visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,
population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and
concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city
centres, food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a
scale that made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of
imperial Rome, a petty incident; and a huge migration of peoples
between Europe and Western Asia and America was in Progress,
and--nobody seems to have realised that something new had come
into human life, a strange swirl different altogether from any
previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the swirl when at
last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of
accumulating water and eddying inactivity....
The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could
sit at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or
coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish
ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West
Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world,
scrutinise the prices current of his geographically distributed
investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two
children he had begotten (in the place of his father's eight)
that he thought the world changed very little. They must play
cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone
to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of
Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all
would be well with them....
Section 5
Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be
studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the
exploitation of steam. To electricity also, in spite of its
provocative nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly
blind for incalculable ages. Could anything be more emphatic than
the appeal of electricity for attention? It thundered at man's
ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes, occasionally it
killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that concerned him
enough to merit study. It came into the house with the cat on any
dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur.
It rotted his metals when he put them together.... There is no
single record that any one questioned why the cat's fur crackles
or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the
sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have done his
very successful best not to think about it at all; until this new
spirit of the Seeker turned itself to these things.
How often things must have been seen and dismissed as
unimportant, before the speculative eye and the moment of vision
came! It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who
first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and
silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind
to the existence of this universal presence. And even then the
science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious
facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with
magnetism--a mere guess that--perhaps with the lightning. Frogs'
legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and
twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them.
Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after
Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of
scientific curiosities into the life of the common man.... Then
suddenly, in the half-century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted
the steam-engine and took over traction, it ousted every other
form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected
wireless telephone and the telephotograph....
Section 6
And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and
invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific
revolution had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice
against a scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One
writer upon these subjects gives a funny little domestic
conversation that happened, he says, in the year 1898, within ten
years, that is to say, of the time when the first aviators were
fairly on the wing. He tells us how he sat at his desk in his
study and conversed with his little boy.
His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak
very seriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy
he did not want to do it too harshly.
This is what happened.
'I wish, Daddy,' he said, coming to his point, 'that you wouldn't
write all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot me.'
'Yes!' said his father.
'And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots
me.'
'But there is going to be flying--quite soon.'
The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that.
'Anyhow,' he said, 'I wish you wouldn't write about it.'
'You'll fly--lots of times--before you die,' the father assured
him.
The little boy looked unhappy.
The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a
blurred and under-developed photograph. 'Come and look at this,'
he said.
The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream
and a meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black,
pencil-like object with flat wings on either side of it. It was
the first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that
ever maintained itself in the air by mechanical force. Across the
margin was written: 'Here we go up, up, up--from S. P. Langley,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington.'
The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon
his son. 'Well?' he said.
'That,' said the schoolboy, after reflection, 'is only a model.'
'Model to-day, man to-morrow.'
The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for
what he believed quite firmly to be omniscience. 'But old
Broomie,' he said, 'he told all the boys in his class only
yesterday, "no man will ever fly." No one, he says, who has ever
shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would ever believe anything
of the sort....'
Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his
father's reminiscences.
Section 7
At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages
in the literature of that time witness, it was thought that the
fact that man had at last had successful and profitable dealings
with the steam that scalded him and the electricity that flashed
and banged about the sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a
culminating exercise of his intelligence and his intellectual
courage. The air of 'Nunc Dimittis' sounds in same of these
writings. 'The great things are discovered,' wrote Gerald Brown
in his summary of the nineteenth century. 'For us there remains
little but the working out of detail.' The spirit of the seeker
was still rare in the world; education was unskilled,
unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people
even then could have realised that Science was still but the
flimsiest of trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No
one seems to have been afraid of science and its possibilities.
Yet now where there had been but a score or so of seekers, there
were many thousands, and for one needle of speculation that had
been probing the curtain of appearances in 1800, there were now
hundreds. And already Chemistry, which had been content with her
atoms and molecules for the better part of a century, was
preparing herself for that vast next stride that was to
revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom.
One realises how crude was the science of that time when one
considers the case of the composition of air. This was
determined by that strange genius and recluse, that man of
mystery, that disembowelled intelligence, Henry Cavendish,
towards the end of the eighteenth century. So far as he was
concerned the work was admirably done. He separated all the known
ingredients of the air with a precision altogether remarkable; he
even put it upon record that he had some doubt about the purity
of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years his determination
was repeated by chemists all the world over, his apparatus was
treasured in London, he became, as they used to say, 'classic,'
and always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his
experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen
(and with a little helium and traces of other substances, and
indeed all the hints that might have led to the new departures of
the twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped
unobserved through the professorial fingers that repeated his
procedure.
Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to
the very dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was
still rather a procession of happy accidents than an orderly
conquest of nature?
Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the
world. Even the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere
handful who grew up to feel wonder and curiosity about the
secrets of nature in the nineteenth century, there were now, at
the beginning of the twentieth, myriads escaping from the
limitations of intellectual routine and the habitual life, in
Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and all
about the world.
It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be
called by a whole generation of scientific men, 'the greatest of
European chemists,' were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico,
between Fiesole and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he
was already distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a
savage appetite to understand. He had been particularly attracted
by the mystery of phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness
to every other source of light. He was to tell afterwards in his
reminiscences how he watched the fireflies drifting and glowing
among the dark trees in the garden of the villa under the warm
blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept them in cages,
dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects
very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the effect
of various gases and varying temperature upon their light. Then
the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir
William Crookes, a toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium
particles impinge upon sulphide of zinc and make it luminous,
induced him to associate the two sets of phenomena. It was a
happy association for his inquiries. It was a rare and fortunate
thing, too, that any one with the mathematical gift should have
been taken by these curiosities.
Section 8
And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at
Fiesole, a certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a
course of afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in
Edinburgh. They were lectures that had attracted a very
considerable amount of attention. He gave them in a small
lecture-theatre that had become more and more congested as his
course proceeded. At his concluding discussion it was crowded
right up to the ceiling at the back, and there people were
standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so fascinating
did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular, a
chuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging
his knee with great sand-red hands and drinking in every word,
eyes aglow, cheeks flushed, and ears burning.
'And so,' said the professor, 'we see that this Radium, which
seemed at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all
that was most established and fundamental in the constitution of
matter, is really at one with the rest of the elements. It does
noticeably and forcibly what probably all the other elements are
doing with an imperceptible slowness. It is like the single
voice crying aloud that betrays the silent breathing multitude in
the darkness. Radium is an element that is breaking up and flying
to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doing that at less
perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is; thorium--the stuff of
this incandescent gas mantle--certainly is; actinium. I feel
that we are but beginning the list. And we know now that the
atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible
and final and--lifeless--lifeless, is really a reservoir of
immense energy. That is the most wonderful thing about all this
work. A little while ago we thought of the atoms as we thought
of bricks, as solid building material, as substantial matter, as
unit masses of lifeless stuff, and behold! these bricks are
boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the intensest force. This
little bottle contains about a pint of uranium oxide; that is to
say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It is worth
about a pound. And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in the
atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as we
could get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a
word, in one instant I could suddenly release that energy here
and now it would blow us and everything about us to fragments; if
I could turn it into the machinery that lights this city, it
could keep Edinburgh brightly lit for a week. But at present no
man knows, no man has an inkling of how this little lump of stuff
can be made to hasten the release of its store. It does release
it, as a burn trickles. Slowly the uranium changes into radium,
the radium changes into a gas called the radium emanation, and
that again to what we call radium A, and so the process goes on,
giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach the last
stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead.
But we cannot hasten it.'
'I take ye, man,' whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red
hands tightening like a vice upon his knee. 'I take ye, man. Go
on! Oh, go on!'
The professor went on after a little pause. 'Why is the change
gradual?' he asked. 'Why does only a minute fraction of the
radium disintegrate in any particular second? Why does it dole
itself out so slowly and so exactly? Why does not all the
uranium change to radium and all the radium change to the next
lowest thing at once? Why this decay by driblets; why not a decay
en masse? . . . Suppose presently we find it is possible to
quicken that decay?'
The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful inevitable
idea was coming. He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed
in his seat with excitement. 'Why not?' he echoed, 'why not?'
The professor lifted his forefinger.
'Given that knowledge,' he said, 'mark what we should be able to
do! We should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium;
not only should we have a source of power so potent that a man
might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year,
fight a fleet of battleships, or drive one of our giant liners
across the Atlantic; but we should also have a clue that would
enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all
the other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our
finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the world
would become an available reservoir of concentrated force. Do
you realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these things would mean
for us?'
The scrub head nodded. 'Oh! go on. Go on.'
'It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only
compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that
lifted man above the brute. We stand to-day towards
radio-activity as our ancestor stood towards fire before he had
learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a strange thing
utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano,
a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that
we know radio-activity to-day. This--this is the dawn of a new
day in human living. At the climax of that civilisation which
had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the
savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our
ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present
sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an
entirely new civilisation. The energy we need for our very
existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly,
is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us.
We cannot pick that lock at present, but----'
He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to
hear him.
'----we will.'
He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.
'And then,' he said. . . .
'Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual
struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will
cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of
this civilisation to the beginning of the next. I have no
eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of man's
material destiny that opens out before me. I see the desert
continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice,
the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out
among the stars....'
He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an
actor or orator might have envied.
The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,
sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for
dispersal. More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass
of figures became a bright confusion of movement. Some of the
people signalled to friends, some crowded down towards the
platform to examine the lecturer's apparatus and make notes of
his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair
wanted no such detailed frittering away of the thoughts that had
inspired him. He wanted to be alone with them; he elbowed his way
out almost fiercely, he made himself as angular and bony as a
cow, fearing lest some one should speak to him, lest some one
should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm.
He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who
sees visions. He had arms disproportionately long, and
ridiculous big feet.
He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of
commonness, of everyday life.
He made his way to the top of Arthur's Seat, and there he sat for
a long time in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that
ever and again he whispered to himself some precious phrase that
had stuck in his mind.
'If,' he whispered, 'if only we could pick that lock. . . .'
The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn
of its beams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks
of cloud that would presently engulf it.
'Eh!' said the youngster. 'Eh!'
He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the red
sun was there before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without
intelligence, and then with a gathering recognition. Into his
mind came a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a
Stone Age savage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two
hundred thousand years ago.
'Ye auld thing,' he said--and his eyes were shining, and he made
a kind of grabbing gesture with his hand; 'ye auld red thing....
We'll have ye YET.'
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
Section I
The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men
as Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the
twentieth century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the
heavier elements and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was
solved by a wonderful combination of induction, intuition, and
luck by Holsten so soon as the year 1933. From the first
detection of radio-activity to its first subjugation to human
purpose measured little more than a quarter of a century. For
twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties prevented any
striking practical application of his success, but the essential
thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human progress
was crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in a
minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into
a heavy gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its
turn in the course of seven days, and it was only after another
year's work that he was able to show practically that the last
result of this rapid release of energy was gold. But the thing
was done--at the cost of a blistered chest and an injured finger,
and from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed
into riving and rending energy, Holsten knew that he had opened a
way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might still be, to
worlds of limitless power. He recorded as much in the strange
diary biography he left the world, a diary that was up to that
particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations, and
which suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human
record of sensations and emotions that all humanity might
understand.
He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true,
but none the less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four
hours following the demonstration of the correctness of his
intricate tracery of computations and guesses. 'I thought I
should not sleep,' he writes--the words he omitted are supplied
in brackets--(on account of) 'pain in (the) hand and chest and
(the) wonder of what I had done.... Slept like a child.'
He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing
to do, he was living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he
decided to go up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he
was a little boy as a breezy playground. He went up by the
underground tube that was then the recognised means of travel
from one part of London to another, and walked up Heath Street
from the tube station to the open heath. He found it a gully of
planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of house-wreckers.
The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow, steep, and
winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it commodious
and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of
Neo-Georgian 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.
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 stared at Lawson in astonishment, for
he had been too intent upon what he had been saying to realise
how little Lawson had attended.
Then he remarked, 'WELL!' and smiled faintly, and--finished the
tankard of beer before him.
Lawson sat down again. 'One must look after one's dog,' he said,
with a note of apology. 'What was it you were telling me?'
Section 2
In the evening Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint Paul's
Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the
evening service. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some
odd way of the fireflies at Fiesole. Then he walked back through
the evening lights to Westminster. He was oppressed, he was
indeed scared, by his sense of the immense consequences of his
discovery. He had a vague idea that night that he ought not to
publish his results, that they were premature, that some secret
association of wise men should take care of his work and hand it
on from generation to generation until the world was riper for
its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the
thousands of people he passed had really awakened to the fact of
change, they trusted the world for what it was, not to alter too
rapidly, to respect their trusts, their assurances, their habits,
their little accustomed traffics and hard-won positions.
He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging,
brightly-lit masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He
sat down on a seat and became aware of the talk of the two people
next to him. It was the talk of a young couple evidently on the
eve of marriage. The man was congratulating himself on having
regular employment at last; 'they like me,' he said, 'and I like
the job. If I work up--in'r dozen years or so I ought to be
gettin' somethin' pretty comfortable. That's the plain sense of
it, Hetty. There ain't no reason whatsoever why we shouldn't get
along very decently--very decently indeed.'
The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed!
So it struck upon Holsten's mind. He added in his diary, 'I had
a sense of all this globe as that....'
By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this
populated world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and
villages, its high roads and the inns beside them, its gardens
and farms and upland pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships
coming along the great circles of the ocean, its time-tables and
appointments and payments and dues as it were one unified and
progressive spectacle. Sometimes such visions came to him; his
mind, accustomed to great generalisations and yet acutely
sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively than the
minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming sphere
moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately
swiftness on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living
progress that altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little
deadened him to that incessancy of life, it seemed now just an
eternal circling. He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the
great fixities and recurrencies of the human routine. The remoter
past of wandering savagery, the inevitable changes of to-morrow
were veiled, and he saw only day and night, seed-time and
harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks in the
summer sunlight and tales by the winter fireside, the ancient
sequence of hope and acts and age perennially renewed, eddying on
for ever and ever, save that now the impious hand of research was
raised to overthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual, sunlit
spinning-top of man's existence....
For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions,
famine and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the
bitter wind, failure and insufficiency and retrocession. He saw
all mankind in terms of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat
beside him, who schemed their inglorious outlook and improbable
contentments. 'I had a sense of all this globe as that.'
His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a
time in vain. He reassured himself against the invasion of this
disconcerting idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a
loose wanderer from the flock returning with evil gifts from his
sustained unnatural excursions amidst the darknesses and
phosphorescences beneath the fair surfaces of life. Man had not
been always thus; the instincts and desires of the little home,
the little plot, was not all his nature; also he was an
adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting curiosity, an
insatiable desire. For a few thousand generations indeed he had
tilled the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers,
grinding his corn and trampling the October winepress, yet not
for so long but that he was still full of restless stirrings.
'If there have been home and routine and the field,' thought
Holsten, 'there have also been wonder and the sea.'
He turned his head and looked up over the back of the seat at the
great hotels above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow
and colour and stir of feasting. Might his gift to mankind mean
simply more of that? . . .
He got up and walked out of the garden, surveyed a passing
tram-car, laden with warm light, against the deep blues of
evening, dripping and trailing long skirts of shining reflection;
he crossed the Embankment and stood for a time watching the dark
river and turning ever and again to the lit buildings and
bridges. His mind began to scheme conceivable replacements of all
those clustering arrangements. . . .
'It has begun,' he writes in the diary in which these things are
recorded. 'It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot
foresee. I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in
the armoury of Change. If I were to burn all these papers,
before a score of years had passed, some other man would be doing
this. . .
Section 3
Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy
dominating every other source of power, but for some years yet a
vast network of difficulties in detail and application kept the
new discovery from any effective invasion of ordinary life. The
path from the laboratory to the workshop is sometimes a tortuous
one; electro-magnetic radiations were known and demonstrated for
twenty years before Marconi made them practically available, and
in the same way it was twenty years before induced radio-activity
could be brought to practical utilisation. The thing, of course,
was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time of its
discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but
with very little realisation of the huge economic revolution that
impended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the
production of gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon
unprofitable lines of the alchemist's dreams; there was a
considerable amount of discussion and expectation in that more
intelligent section of the educated publics of the various
civilised countries which followed scientific development; but
for the most part the world went about its business--as the
inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the
perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go about
their business--just as though the possible was impossible, as
though the inevitable was postponed for ever because it was
delayed.
It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought
induced radio-activity into the sphere of industrial production,
and its first general use was to replace the steam-engine in
electrical generating stations. Hard upon the appearance of this
came the Dass-Tata engine--the invention of two among the
brilliant galaxy of Bengali inventors the modernisation of Indian
thought was producing at this time--which was used chiefly for
automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes, and such-like, mobile
purposes. The American Kemp engine, differing widely in principle
but equally practicable, and the Krupp-Erlanger came hard upon
the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic
replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress
all about the habitable globe. Small wonder was this when the
cost, even of these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is
compared with that of the power they superseded. Allowing for
lubrication the Dass-Tata engine, once it was started cost a
penny to run thirty-seven miles, and added only nine and quarter
pounds to the weight of the carriage it drove. It made the heavy
alcohol-driven automobile of the time ridiculous in appearance as
well as preposterously costly. For many years the price of coal
and every form of liquid fuel had been clambering to levels that
made even the revival of the draft horse seem a practicable
possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this
stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the
world's roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful
armoured monsters that had hooted and smoked and thundered about
the world for four awful decades were swept away to the dealers
in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and clean and
shimmering shapes of silvered steel. At the same time a new
impetus was given to aviation by the relatively enormous power
for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible to add
Redmayne's ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the
vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force
of the aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found
themselves possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover
or ascend or descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly
through the air. The last dread of flying vanished. As the
journalists of the time phrased it, this was the epoch of the
Leap into the Air. The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a
mania; every one of means was frantic to possess a thing so
controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and danger of
the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty thousand of
these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared
humming softly into the sky.
And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded
industrialism. The railways paid enormous premiums for priority
in the delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was
embarked upon so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous
explosions due to inexperienced handling of the new power, and
the revolutionary cheapening of both materials and electricity
made the entire reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter
merely dependent upon a reorganisation of the methods of the
builder and the house-furnisher. Viewed from the side of the new
power and from the point of view of those who financed and
manufactured the new engines and material it required the age of
the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing prosperity.
Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividends of five
or six hundred per cent. and enormous fortunes were made and
fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new
developments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the
fact that in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one
of the recoverable waste products was gold--the former
disintegrated dust of bismuth and the latter dust of lead--and
that this new supply of gold led quite naturally to a rise in
prices throughout the world.
This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this
crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich people--every great
city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing--was
the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human
history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a
deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production
there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring
factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles
swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of
dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were
indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that
gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night.
Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social
catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at
no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil
was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers
upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled
labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of
employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the
rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values
at every centre of population, the value of existing house
property had become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong
depreciation, all the securities upon which the credit of the
world rested were slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the
stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic;--this was the
reverse of the spectacle, these were the black and monstrous
under-consequences of the Leap into the Air.
There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out
into Threadneedle Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran.
'The Steel Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,' he
shouted. 'The State Railways are going to scrap all their
engines. Everything's going to be scrapped--everything. Come and
scrap the mint, you fellows, come and scrap the mint!'
In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of
America quadrupled any previous record. There was an enormous
increase also in violent crime throughout the world. The thing
had come upon an unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human
society was to be smashed by its own magnificent gains.
For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been
no attempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations
this flood of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs.
The world in these days was not really governed at all, in the
sense in which government came to be understood in subsequent
years. Government was a treaty, not a design; it was forensic,
conservative, disputatious, unseeing, unthinking, uncreative;
throughout the world, except where the vestiges of absolutism
still sheltered the court favourite and the trusted servant, it
was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an
enormous advantage in being the only trained caste. Their
professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation
of the fantastically 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
her strong arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty,
the solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in
her very presence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court,
the world was to witness such things as the squalid spectacle of
the Dass-Tata patent litigation.
There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room,
during the exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading
counsel of the day argued and shouted over a miserable little
matter of more royalties or less and whether the Dass-Tata
company might not bar the Holsten-Roberts' methods of utilising
the new power. The Dass-Tata people were indeed making a
strenuous attempt to secure a world monopoly in atomic
engineering. The judge, after the manner of those times, sat
raised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown and a foolish
huge wig, the counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and
queer black gowns over their usual costume, wigs and gowns that
were held to be necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean
wooden benches stirred and whispered artful-looking solicitors,
busily scribbling reporters, the parties to the case, expert
witnesses, interested people, and a jostling confusion of
subpoenaed persons, briefless young barristers (forming a style
on the most esteemed and truculent examples) and casual eccentric
spectators who preferred this pit of iniquity to the free
sunlight outside. Every one was damply hot, the examining King's
Counsel wiped the perspiration from his huge, clean-shaven upper
lip; and into this atmosphere of grasping contention and human
exhalations the daylight filtered through a window that was
manifestly dirty. The jury sat in a double pew to the left of
the judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs that have fallen
into an ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the would-be
omnivorous Dass, under cross-examination....
Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon
as they appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a
basis for further work, and to that confiding disposition and one
happy flash of adaptive invention the alert Dass owed his
claim....
But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching,
patenting, pre-empting, monopolising this or that feature of the
new development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to
the purposes of their little lusts and avarice. That trial is
just one of innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the
face of the world festered with patent legislation. It chanced,
however, to have one oddly dramatic feature in the fact that
Holsten, after being kept waiting about the court for two days as
a beggar might have waited at a rich man's door, after being
bullied by ushers and watched by policemen, was called as a
witness, rather severely handled by counsel, and told not to
'quibble' by the judge when he was trying to be absolutely
explicit.
The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, and sneered at
Holsten's astonishment round the corner of his monstrous wig.
Holsten was a great man, was he? Well, in a law-court great men
were put in their places.
'We want to know has the plaintiff added anything to this or
hasn't he?' said the judge, 'we don't want to have your views
whether Sir Philip Dass's improvements were merely superficial
adaptations or whether they were implicit in your paper. No
doubt--after the manner of inventors--you think most things that
were ever likely to be discovered are implicit in your papers. No
doubt also you think too that most subsequent additions and
modifications are merely superficial. Inventors have a way of
thinking that. The law isn't concerned with that sort of thing.
The law has nothing to do with the vanity of inventors. The law
is concerned with the question whether these patent rights have
the novelty the plantiff claims for them. What that admission
may or may not stop, and all these other things you are saying in
your overflowing zeal to answer more than the questions addressed
to you--none of these things have anything whatever to do with
the case in hand. It is a matter of constant astonishment to me
in this court to see how you scientific men, with all your
extraordinary claims to precision and veracity, wander and wander
so soon as you get into the witness-box. I know no more
unsatisfactory class of witness. The plain and simple question
is, has Sir Philip Dass made any real addition to existing
knowledge and methods in this matter or has he not? We don't
want to know whether they were large or small additions nor what
the consequences of your admission may be. That you will leave to
us.'
Holsten was silent.
'Surely?' said the judge, almost pityingly.
'No, he hasn't,' said Holsten, perceiving that for once in his
life he must disregard infinitesimals.
'Ah!' said the judge, 'now why couldn't you say that when counsel
put the question? . . .'
An entry in Holsten's diary-autobiography, dated five days later,
runs: 'Still amazed. The law is the most dangerous thing in this
country. It is hundreds of years old. It hasn't an idea. The
oldest of old bottles and this new wine, the most explosive wine.
Something will overtake them.'
Section 4
There was a certain truth in Holsten's assertion that the law was
'hundreds of years old.' It was, in relation to current thought
and widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the
material and methods of life had been changing rapidly and were
now changing still more rapidly, the law-courts and the
legislatures of the world were struggling desperately to meet
modern demands with devices and procedures, conceptions of rights
and property and authority and obligation that dated from the
rude compromises of relatively barbaric times. The horse-hair
wigs and antic dresses of the British judges, their musty courts
and overbearing manners, were indeed only the outward and visible
intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal and political
organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century was
indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong,
that now fettered the governing body that once it had protected.
Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and outspoken publication
that in the field of natural science had been the beginning of
the conquest of nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries preparing the spirit of the new world
within the degenerating body of the old. The idea of a greater
subordination of individual interests and established
institutions to the collective future, is traceable more and more
clearly in the literature of those times, and movement after
movement fretted itself away in criticism of and opposition to
first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and
political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley,
with no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established
rulers of the world as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas
and suggestions that was known as Socialism, and more
particularly its international side, feeble as it was in creative
proposals or any method of transition, still witnesses to the
growth of a conception of a modernised system of
inter-relationships that should supplant the existing tangle of
proprietary legal ideas.
The word 'Sociology' was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular
writer upon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the
middle of the nineteenth century, but the idea of a state,
planned as an electric-traction system is planned, without
reference to pre-existing apparatus, upon scientific lines, did
not take a very strong hold upon the popular imagination of the
world until the twentieth century. Then, the growing impatience
of the American people with the monstrous and socially paralysing
party systems that had sprung out of their absurd electoral
arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called the
'Modern State' movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in
America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the
thought of bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property,
employment, education, and government, than had ever been
contemplated before. No doubt these Modern State ideas were very
largely the reflection upon social and political thought of the
vast revolution in material things that had been in progress for
two hundred years, but for a long time they seemed to be having
no more influence upon existing institutions than the writings of
Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the time of the death
of the latter. They were fermenting in men's minds, and it needed
only just such social and political stresses as the coming of the
atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward abruptly
into crude and startling realisation.
Section 5
Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre is one of those autobiographical
novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades
of the twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must
understand Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual
than in a literal sense. It is indeed an allusive title,
carrying the world back to the Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a
century and a half earlier.
Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history
of his life and ideas between his nineteenth and his twenty-third
birthdays. He was neither a very original nor a very brilliant
man, but he had a trick of circumstantial writing; and though no
authentic portrait was to survive for the information of
posterity, he betrays by a score of casual phrases that he was
short, sturdy, inclined to be plump, with a 'rather blobby' face,
and full, rather projecting blue eyes. He belonged until the
financial 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
'classical' education of the British pedagogues, probably the
most paralysing, ineffective, and foolish routine that ever
wasted human life, had already been swept out of this great
institution in favour of modern methods; and he learnt Greek and
Latin as well as he had learnt German, Spanish, and French, so
that he wrote and spoke them freely, and used them with an
unconscious ease in his study of the foundation civilisations of
the European system to which they were the key. (This change was
still so recent that he mentions an encounter in Rome with an
'Oxford don' who 'spoke Latin with a Wiltshire accent and
manifest discomfort, wrote Greek letters with his tongue out, and
seemed to think a Greek sentence a charm when it was a quotation
and an impropriety when it wasn't.')
Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam engines upon the
English railways and the gradual cleansing of the London
atmosphere as the smoke-creating sea-coal fires gave place to
electric heating. The building of laboratories at Kensington was
still in progress, and he took part in the students' riots that
delayed the removal of the Albert Memorial. He carried a banner
with 'We like Funny Statuary' on one side, and on the other
'Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should our Great Departed
Stand in the Rain?' He learnt the rather athletic aviation of
those days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he was
fined for flying over the new prison for political libellers at
Wormwood Scrubs, 'in a manner calculated to exhilarate the
prisoners while at exercise.' That was the time of the attempted
suppression of any criticism of the public judicature and the
place was crowded with journalists who had ventured to call
attention to the dementia of Chief Justice Abrahams. Barnet was
not a very good aviator, he confesses he was always a little
afraid of his machine--there was excellent reason for every one
to be afraid of those clumsy early types--and he never attempted
steep descents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned
one of those oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity
and extravagant filthiness still astonish the visitors to the
museum of machinery at South Kensington. He mentions running
over a dog and complains of the ruinous price of 'spatchcocks' in
Surrey. 'Spatchcocks,' it seems, was a slang term for crushed
hens.
He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military
service to a minimum, and his want of any special scientific or
technical qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that
handicapped his aviation indicated the infantry of the line as
his sphere of training. That was the most generalised form of
soldiering. The development of the theory of war had been for
some decades but little assisted by any practical experience.
What fighting had occurred in recent years, had been fighting in
minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaric soldiers
and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and the
great powers of the world were content for the most part to
maintain armies that sustained in their broader organisation the
traditions of the European wars of thirty and forty years before.
There was the infantry arm to which Barnet belonged and which was
supposed to fight on foot with a rifle and be the main portion of
the army. There were cavalry forces (horse soldiers), having a
ratio to the infantry that had been determined by the experiences
of the Franco-German war in 1871. There was also artillery, and
for some unexplained reason much of this was still drawn by
horses; though there were also in all the European armies a small
number of motor-guns with wheels so constructed that they could
go over broken ground. In addition there were large developments
of the engineering arm, concerned with motor transport,
motor-bicycle scouting, aviation, and the like.
No first-class intelligence had been sought to specialise in and
work out the problem of warfare with the new appliances and under
modern conditions, but a succession of able jurists, Lord
Haldane, Chief Justice Briggs, and that very able King's Counsel,
Philbrick, had reconstructed the army frequently and thoroughly
and placed it at last, with the adoption of national service,
upon a footing that would have seemed very imposing to the public
of 1900. At any moment the British Empire could now put a
million and a quarter of arguable soldiers upon the board of
Welt-Politik. The traditions of Japan and the Central European
armies were more princely and less forensic; the Chinese still
refused resolutely to become a military power, and maintained a
small standing army upon the American model that was said, so far
as it went, to be highly efficient, and Russia, secured by a
stringent administration against internal criticism, had scarcely
altered the design of a uniform or the organisation of a battery
since the opening decades of the century. Barnet's opinion of his
military training was manifestly a poor one, his Modern State
ideas disposed him to regard it as a bore, and his common sense
condemned it as useless. Moreover, his habit of body made him
peculiarly sensitive to the fatigues and hardships of service.
'For three days in succession we turned out before dawn and--for
no earthly reason--without breakfast,' he relates. 'I suppose
that is to show us that when the Day comes the first thing will
be to get us thoroughly uncomfortable and rotten. We then
proceeded to Kriegspiel, according to the mysterious ideas of
those in authority over us. On the last day we spent three hours
under a hot if early sun getting over eight miles of country to a
point we could have reached in a motor omnibus in nine minutes
and a half--I did it the next day in that--and then we made a
massed attack upon entrenchments that could have shot us all
about three times over if only the umpires had let them. Then
came a little bayonet exercise, but I doubt if I am sufficiently
a barbarian to stick this long knife into anything living. Anyhow
in this battle I shouldn't have had a chance. Assuming that by
some miracle I hadn't been shot three times over, I was far too
hot and blown when I got up to the entrenchments even to lift my
beastly rifle. It was those others would have begun the
sticking....
'For a time we were watched by two hostile aeroplanes; then our
own came up and asked them not to, and--the practice of aerial
warfare still being unknown--they very politely desisted and went
away and did dives and circles of the most charming description
over the Fox Hills.'
All Barnet's accounts of his military training were written in
the same half-contemptuous, half-protesting tone. He was of
opinion that his chances of participating in any real warfare
were very slight, and that, if after all he should participate,
it was bound to be so entirely different from these peace
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.
Section 6
Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest
of masculine youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that
for some time he failed to connect the rush of wonderful new
possibilities with the financial troubles of his family. 'I knew
my father was worried,' he admits. That cast the smallest of
shadows upon his delighted departure for Italy and Greece and
Egypt with three congenial companions in one of the new atomic
models. They flew over the Channel Isles and Touraine, he
mentions, and circled about Mont Blanc--'These new helicopters,
we found,' he notes, 'had abolished all the danger and strain of
sudden drops to which the old-time aeroplanes were liable'--and
then he went on by way of Pisa, Paestum, Ghirgenti, and Athens,
to visit the pyramids by moonlight, flying thither from Cairo,
and to follow the Nile up to Khartum. Even by later standards,
it must have been a very gleeful holiday for a young man, and it
made the tragedy of his next experiences all the darker. A week
after his return his father, who was a widower, announced himself
ruined, and committed suicide by means of an unscheduled opiate.
At one blow Barnet found himself flung out of the possessing,
spending, enjoying class to which he belonged, penniless and with
no calling by which he could earn a living. He tried teaching
and some journalism, but in a little while he found himself on
the underside of a world in which he had always reckoned to live
in the sunshine. For innumerable men such an experience has
meant mental and spiritual destruction, but Barnet, in spite of
his bodily gravitation towards comfort, showed himself when put
to the test, of the more valiant modern quality. He was saturated
with the creative stoicism of the heroic times that were already
dawning, and he took his difficulties and discomforts stoutly as
his appointed material, and turned them to expression.
Indeed, in his book, he thanks fortune for them. 'I might have
lived and died,' he says, 'in that neat fool's paradise of secure
lavishness above there. I might never have realised the
gathering wrath and sorrow of the ousted and exasperated masses.
In the days of my own prosperity things had seemed to me to be
very well arranged.' Now from his new point of view he was to
find they were not arranged at all; that government was a
compromise of aggressions and powers and lassitudes, and law a
convention between interests, and that the poor and the weak,
though they had many negligent masters, had few friends.
'I had thought things were looked after,' he wrote. 'It was with
a kind of amazement that I tramped the roads and starved--and
found that no one in particular cared.'
He was turned out of his lodging in a backward part of London.
'It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady--she was a needy
widow, poor soul, and I was already in her debt--to keep an old
box for me in which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and
the like. She lived in great fear of the Public Health and
Morality Inspectors, because she was sometimes too poor to pay
the customary tip to them, but at last she consented to put it in
a dark tiled place under the stairs, and then I went forth into
the world--to seek first the luck of a meal and then shelter.'
He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in
which a year or so ago he had been numbered among the spenders.
London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of
visible smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine,
had already ceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the
Victorian time; it had been, and indeed was, constantly being
rebuilt, and its main streets were already beginning to take on
those characteristics that distinguished them throughout the
latter half of the twentieth century. The insanitary horse and
the plebeian bicycle had been banished from the roadway, which
was now of a resilient, glass-like surface, spotlessly clean; and
the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow vestige of the
ancient footpath on either side of the track and forbidden at the
risk of a fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway. People
descended from their automobiles upon this pavement and went
through the lower shops to the lifts and stairs to the new ways
for pedestrians, the Rows, that ran along the front of the houses
at the level of the first story, and, being joined by frequent
bridges, gave the newer parts of London a curiously Venetian
appearance. In some streets there were upper and even third-story
Rows. For most of the day and all night the shop windows were
lit by electric light, and many establishments had made, as it
were, canals of public footpaths through their premises in order
to increase their window space.
Barnet made his way along this night-scene rather apprehensively
since the police had power to challenge and demand the Labour
Card of any indigent-looking person, and if the record failed to
show he was in employment, dismiss him to the traffic pavement
below.
But there was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet's
appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too,
had other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to
reach the galleries about Leicester Square--that great focus of
London life and pleasure.
He gives a vivid description of the scene that evening. In the
centre was a garden raised on arches lit by festoons of lights
and connected with the Rows by eight graceful bridges, beneath
which hummed the interlacing streams of motor traffic, pulsating
as the current alternated between east and west and north and
south. Above rose great frontages of intricate rather than
beautiful reinforced porcelain, studded with lights, barred by
bold illuminated advertisements, and glowing with reflections.
There were the two historical music halls of this place, the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal players
revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shakespeare's plays,
and four other great houses of refreshment and entertainment
whose pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night.
The south side of the square was in dark contrast to the others;
it was still being rebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars
surmounted by the frozen gestures of monstrous cranes rose over
the excavated sites of vanished Victorian buildings.
This framework attracted Barnet's attention for a time to the
exclusion of other interests. It was absolutely still, it had a
dead rigidity, a stricken inaction, no one was at work upon it
and all its machinery was quiet; but the constructor's globes of
vacuum light filled its every interstice with a quivering green
moonshine and showed alert but motionless--soldier sentinels!
He asked a passing stroller, and was told that the men had struck
that day against the use of an atomic riveter that would have
doubled the individual efficiency and halved the number of steel
workers.
'Shouldn't wonder if they didn't get chucking bombs,' said
Barnet's informant, hovered for a moment, and then went on his
way to the Alhambra music hall.
Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at
the corners of the square. Something very sensational had been
flashed upon the transparencies. Forgetting for a moment his
penniless condition, he made his way over a bridge to buy a
paper, for in those days the papers, which were printed upon thin
sheets of metallic foil, were sold at determinate points by
specially licensed purveyors. Half over, he stopped short at a
change in the traffic below; and was astonished to see that the
police signals were restricting vehicles to the half roadway.
When presently he got within sight of the transparencies that had
replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read of the Great
March of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the
West End, and so without expenditure he was able to understand
what was coming.
He watched, and his book describes this procession which the
police had considered it unwise to prevent and which had been
spontaneously organised in imitation of the Unemployed
Processions of earlier times. He had expected a mob but there was
a kind of sullen discipline about the procession when at last it
arrived. What seemed for a time an unending column of men
marched wearily, marched with a kind of implacable futility,
along the roadway underneath him. He was, he says, moved to join
them, but instead he remained watching. They were a dingy,
shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part
incapable of any but obsolete and superseded types of labour.
They bore a few banners with the time-honoured inscription:
'Work, not Charity,' but otherwise their ranks were unadorned.
They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was
nothing truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no
definite objective they were just marching and showing themselves
in the more prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of
that great mass of unskilled cheap labour which the now still
cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for evermore. They were
being 'scrapped'--as horses had been 'scrapped.'
Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened
by his own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt
nothing but despair at the sight; what should be done, what could
be done for this gathering surplus of humanity? They were so
manifestly useless--and incapable--and pitiful.
What were they asking for?
They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had
foreseen----
It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous
shambling enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the
unexpected, an appeal to those others who, more fortunate, seemed
wiser and more powerful, for something--for INTELLIGENCE. This
mute mass, weary footed, rank following rank, protested its
persuasion that some of these others must have foreseen these
dislocations--that anyhow they ought to have foreseen--and
arranged.
That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so
dumbly to assert.
'Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened
room,' he says. 'These men were praying to their fellow
creatures as once they prayed to God! The last thing that men
will realise about anything is that it is inanimate. They had
transferred their animation to mankind. They still believed
there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or
malignant.... It had only to be aroused to be
conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion.... And I saw, too,
that as yet THERE WAS NO SUCH INTELLIGENCE. The world waits for
intelligence. That intelligence has still to be made, that will
for good and order has still to be gathered together, out of
scraps of impulse and wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever
is fine and creative in our souls, into a common purpose. It's
something still to come....'
It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that
this not very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might
well have been altogether occupied with the problem of his own
individual necessities, should be able to stand there and
generalise about the needs of the race.
But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time
there was already dawning the light of a new era. The spirit of
humanity was escaping, even then it was escaping, from its
extreme imprisonment in individuals. Salvation from the bitter
intensities of self, which had been a conscious religious end for
thousands of years, which men had sought in mortifications, in
the wilderness, in meditation, and by innumerable strange paths,
was coming at last with the effect of naturalness into the talk
of men, into the books they read, into their unconscious
gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and everyday
acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the spirit
of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of
those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very
threat of hell and torment had failed to drive them. And this
young man, homeless and without provision even for the immediate
hours, in the presence of social disorganisation, distress, and
perplexity, in a blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasure that
blotted out the stars, could think as he tells us he thought.
'I saw life plain,' he wrote. 'I saw the gigantic task before
us, and the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable
difficulty filled me with exaltation. I saw that we have still
to discover government, that we have still to discover education,
which is the necessary reciprocal of government, and that all
this--in which my own little speck of a life was so manifestly
overwhelmed--this and its yesterday in Greece and Rome and Egypt
were nothing, the mere first dust swirls of the beginning, the
movements and dim murmurings of a sleeper who will presently be
awake....'
Section 7
And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his
descent from this ecstatic vision of reality.
'Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold
and a little hungry.'
He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood
upon the Thames Embankment. He made his way through the
galleries of the booksellers and the National Gallery, which had
been open continuously day and night to all decently dressed
people now for more than twelve years, and across the
rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the hotel colonnade
to the Embankment. He had long known of these admirable offices,
which had swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all the
casual indigent from the London streets, and he believed that he
would, as a matter of course, be able to procure a ticket for
food and a night's lodgings and some indication of possible
employment.
But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he
got to the Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested
and besieged by a large and rather unruly crowd. He hovered for
a time on the outskirts of the waiting multitude, perplexed and
dismayed, and then he became aware of a movement, a purposive
trickling away of people, up through the arches of the great
buildings that had arisen when all the railway stations were
removed to the south side of the river, and so to the covered
ways of the Strand. And here, in the open glare of midnight, he
found unemployed men begging, and not only begging, but begging
with astonishing assurance, from the people who were emerging
from the small theatres and other such places of entertainment
which abounded in that thoroughfare.
This was an altogether unexampled thing. There had been no
begging in London streets for a quarter of a century. But that
night the police were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with
the destitute who were invading those well-kept quarters of the
town. They had become stonily blind to anything but manifest
disorder.
Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask;
indeed his bearing must have been more valiant than his
circumstances, for twice he says that he was begged from. Near
the Trafalgar Square gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and
blackened eyebrows, who was walking alone, spoke to him with a
peculiar friendliness.
'I'm starving,' he said to her abruptly.
'Oh! poor dear!' she said; and with the impulsive generosity of
her kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his
hand....
It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey,
might under the repressive social legislation of those times,
have brought Barnet within reach of the prison lash. But he took
it, he confesses, and thanked her as well as he was able, and
went off very gladly to get food.
Section 8
A day or so later--and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon
the roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social
disorganisation and police embarrassment--he wandered out into
the open country. He speaks of the roads of that plutocratic age
as being 'fenced with barbed wire against unpropertied people,'
of the high-walled gardens and trespass warnings that kept him to
the dusty narrowness of the public ways. In the air, happy rich
people were flying, heedless of the misfortunes about them, as he
himself had been flying two years ago, and along the road swept
the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. One was rarely
out of earshot of its whistles and gongs and siren cries even in
the field paths or over the open downs. The officials of the
labour exchanges were everywhere overworked and infuriated, the
casual wards were so crowded that the surplus wanderers slept in
ranks under sheds or in the open air, and since giving to
wayfarers had been made a punishable offence there was no longer
friendship or help for a man from the rare foot passenger or the
wayside cottage....
'I wasn't angry,' said Barnet. 'I saw an immense selfishness, a
monstrous disregard for anything but pleasure and possession in
all those people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how
certainly if the richest had changed places with the poorest,
that things would have been the same. What else can happen when
men use science and every new thing that science gives, and all
their available intelligence and energy to manufacture wealth and
appliances, and leave government and education to the rustling
traditions of hundreds of years ago? Those traditions come from
the dark ages when there was really not enough for every one,
when life was a fierce struggle that might be masked but could
not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce
dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony
between material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and
the poor grew savage and every added power that came to men made
the rich richer and the poor less necessary and less free. The
men I met in the casual wards and the relief offices were all
smouldering for revolt, talking of justice and injustice and
revenge. I saw no hope in that talk, nor in anything but
patience....'
But he did not mean a passive patience. He meant that the method
of social reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual
rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled
aspects was solved. 'I tried to talk to those discontented men,'
he wrote, 'but it was hard for them to see things as I saw them.
When I talked of patience and the larger scheme, they answered,
"But then we shall all be dead"--and I could not make them see,
what is so simple to my own mind, that that did not affect the
question. Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to
statesmanship.'
He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those
wanderings, and a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in
the market-place at Bishop's Stortford announcing a 'Grave
International Situation' did not excite him very much. There had
been so many grave international situations in recent years.
This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly
attacking the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to
the help of the Slavs.
But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the
vagrants in the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master
that all serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the
morrow to their mobilisation centres. The country was on the eve
of war. He was to go back through London to Surrey. His first
feeling, he records, was one of extreme relief that his days of
'hopeless battering at the underside of civilisation' were at an
end. Here was something definite to do, something definitely
provided for. But his relief was greatly modified when he found
that the mobilisation arrangements had been made so hastily and
carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at the improvised
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.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE LAST WAR
Section I
Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order,
it is difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow,
the motives that plunged mankind into the war that fills the
histories of the middle decades of the twentieth century.
It must always be remembered that the political structure of the
world at that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the
collective intelligence. That is the central fact of that
history. For two hundred years there had been no great changes in
political or legal methods and pretensions, the utmost change had
been a certain shifting of boundaries and slight readjustment of
procedure, while in nearly every other aspect of life there had
been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, and an enormous
enlargement of scope and outlook. The absurdities of courts and
the indignities of representative parliamentary government,
coupled with the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other
directions, had withdrawn the best intelligences more and more
from public affairs. The ostensible governments of the world in
the twentieth century were following in the wake of the
ostensible religions. They were ceasing to command the services
of any but second-rate men. After the middle of the eighteenth
century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the world's
memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen.
Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted,
common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new
possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the
past.
Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the
boundaries of the various 'sovereign states,' and the conception
of a general predominance in human affairs on the part of some
one particular state. The memory of the empires of Rome and
Alexander squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human
imagination--it bored into the human brain like some grisly
parasite and filled it with disordered thoughts and violent
impulses. For more than a century the French system exhausted
its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then the infection
passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart and
centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later ages
were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this
obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the
infinite knowingness of the political writer, the cunning
refusals to accept plain facts, the strategic devices, the
tactical 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 regiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by
grim anticipations, was none the less warlike.
But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of minds without
established ideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it
was with himself, a natural response to collective movement, and
to martial sounds and colours, and the exhilarating challenge of
vague dangers. And people had been so long oppressed by the
threat of and preparation for war that its arrival came with an
effect of positive relief.
Section 2
The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the
lower Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct
from the various British 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, a series of big-scale relief maps were laid out upon
tables to display the whole seat of war, and the staff-officers
of the control were continually busy shifting the little blocks
which represented the contending troops, as the reports and
intelligence came drifting in to the various telegraphic bureaux
in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller apartments there were
maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for example, the
reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav commanders were
recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps, as upon
chessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard
and the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world
supremacy against the Central European powers. Very probably he
had a definite idea of his game; very probably he had a coherent
and admirable plan.
But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new
strategy of aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy
that Holsten had opened for mankind. While he planned
entrenchments and invasions and a frontier war, the Central
European generalship was striking at the eyes and the brain. And
while, with a certain diffident hesitation, he developed his
gambit that night upon the lines laid down by Napoleon and
Moltke, his own scientific corps in a state of mutinous activity
was preparing a blow for Berlin. 'These old fools!' was the key
in which the scientific corps was thinking.
The War Control in Paris, on the night of July the second, was an
impressive display of the paraphernalia of scientific military
organisation, as the first half of the twentieth century
understood it. To one human being at least the consulting
commanders had the likeness of world-wielding gods.
She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute,
and she had been engaged in relay with other similar women to
take down orders in duplicate and hand them over to the junior
officers in attendance, to be forwarded and filed. There had
come a lull, and she had been sent out from the dictating room to
take the air upon the terrace before the great hall and to eat
such scanty refreshment as she had brought with her until her
services were required again.
From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view
not only of the wide sweep of the river below her, and all the
eastward side of Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to Saint Cloud,
great blocks and masses of black or pale darkness with pink and
golden flashes of illumination and endless interlacing bands of
dotted lights under a still and starless sky, but also the whole
spacious interior of the great hall with its slender pillars and
gracious arching and clustering lamps was visible to her. There,
over a wilderness of tables, lay the huge maps, done on so large
a scale that one might fancy them small countries; the messengers
and attendants went and came perpetually, altering, moving the
little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of men, and
the great commander and his two consultants stood amidst all
these things and near where the fighting was nearest, scheming,
directing. They had but to breathe a word and presently away
there, in the world of reality, the punctual myriads moved. Men
rose up and went forward and died. The fate of nations lay behind
the eyes of these three men. Indeed they were like gods.
Most godlike of the three was Dubois. It was for him to decide;
the others at most might suggest. Her woman's soul went out to
this grave, handsome, still, old man, in a passion of instinctive
worship.
Once she had taken words of instruction from him direct. She had
awaited them in an ecstasy of happiness--and fear. For her
exaltation was made terrible by the dread that some error might
dishonour her....
She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating
minuteness of an impassioned woman's observation.
He said little, she remarked. He looked but little at the maps.
The tall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm
of ideas, conflicting ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting
of the little red, blue, black, and yellow pieces on the board,
and wanted to draw the commander's attention to this and that.
Dubois listened, nodded, emitted a word and became still again,
brooding like the national eagle.
His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she
could not see his eyes; his moustache overhung the mouth from
which those words of decision came. Viard, too, said little; he
was a dark man with a drooping head and melancholy, watchful
eyes. He was more intent upon the French right, which was feeling
its way now through Alsace to the Rhine. He was, she knew, an
old colleague of Dubois; he knew him better, she decided, he
trusted him more than this unfamiliar Englishman....
Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in
profile; these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered
years ago. To seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse
to hurry--itself a confession of miscalculation; by attention to
these simple rules, Dubois had built up a steady reputation from
the days when he had been a promising junior officer, a still,
almost abstracted young man, deliberate but ready. Even then men
had looked at him and said: 'He will go far.' Through fifty
years of peace he had never once been found wanting, and at
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 this or that
force of the Allies, the Marshal would turn his head and seem not
to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who approves a
pupil's self-correction. 'Yes, that's better.'
How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how
wonderful it all was. This was the brain of the western world,
this was Olympus with the warring earth at its feet. And he was
guiding France, France so long a resentful exile from
imperialism, back to her old predominance.
It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be
privileged to participate....
It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal
devotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact,
punctual. She must control herself....
She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when
the war would be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this
harshness, this armour would be put aside and the gods might
unbend. Her eyelids drooped....
She roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night
outside was no longer still. That there was an excitement down
below on the bridge and a running in the street and a flickering
of searchlights among the clouds from some high place away beyond
the Trocadero. And then the excitement came surging up past her
and invaded the hall within.
One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of
the room, gesticulating and shouting something.
And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn't
understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed
machinery and cables of the ways beneath, were beating--as pulses
beat. And about her blew something like a wind--a wind that was
dismay.
Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child
might look towards its mother.
He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but
that was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand
gauntly gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too
manifestly disposed to drag him towards the great door that
opened on the terrace. And Viard was hurrying towards the huge
windows and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent forward
and with eyes upturned.
Something up there?
And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.
The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against
the masonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping
down through the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two
of them, there had already started curling trails of red....
Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through
moments that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl
down towards her.
She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the
world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening,
all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out
about her and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting
pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly
flight of huge angular sheets of glass. She had an impression of
a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddened living thing
that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst a chaos of
falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earth furiously,
that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing rabbit . . .
She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.
She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that
a little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She
tried to raise herself and found her leg was very painful. She
was not clear whether it was night or day nor where she was; she
made a second effort, wincing and groaning, and turned over and
got into a sitting position and looked about her.
Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of
a vast uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing
had been destroyed.
At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous
experience.
She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world,
a world of heaped broken things. And it was lit--and somehow
this was more familiar to her mind than any other fact about
her--by a flickering, purplish-crimson light. Then close to her,
rising above a confusion of 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....
The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a
moment every little detail was distinct. It was Marshal Dubois.
He was lying against a huge slab of the war map. To it there
stuck and from it there dangled little wooden objects, the
symbols of infantry and cavalry and guns, as they were disposed
upon the frontier. He did not seem to be aware of this at his
back, he had an effect of inattention, not indifferent attention,
but as if he were thinking....
She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was
evident he frowned. He frowned slightly, he had an air of not
wanting to be disturbed. His face still bore that expression of
assured confidence, that conviction that if things were left to
him France might obey in security....
She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer.
A strange surmise made her eyes dilate. With a painful wrench
she pulled herself up so that she could see completely over the
intervening lumps of smashed-up masonry. Her hand touched
something wet, and after one convulsive movement she became
rigid.
It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head
and shoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness
and a pool of shining black....
And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled,
and a rush of hot water came pouring over her. Then it seemed to
her that she was dragged downward....
Section 3
When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and
the black hair close-cropped en brosse, who was in charge of the
French special scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster
to the War Control, he was so wanting in imagination in any
sphere but his own, that he laughed. Small matter to him that
Paris was burning. His mother and father and sister lived at
Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had ever had, and it was
poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen. He slapped his
second-in-command on the shoulder. 'Now,' he said, 'there's
nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them
tit-for-tat.... Strategy and reasons of state--they're over....
Come along, my boy, and we'll just show these old women what we
can do when they let us have our heads.'
He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the
courtyard of the chateau in which he had been installed and
shouted for his automobile. Things would have to move quickly
because there was scarcely an hour and a half before dawn. He
looked at the sky and noted with satisfaction a heavy bank of
clouds athwart the pallid east.
He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and
aeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck away
in barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods. A hawk could not
have discovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun.
But that night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was
handy and quite prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not
a couple of miles away; he was going to Berlin with that and just
one other man. Two men would be enough for what he meant to
do....
He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts
science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of
destruction, and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic
type....
He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming
face. He smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great
pleasures. There was an exotic richness, a chuckling flavour,
about the voice in which he gave his orders, and he pointed his
remarks with the long finger of a hand that was hairy and
exceptionally big.
'We'll give them tit-for-tat,' he said. 'We'll give them
tit-for-tat. No time to lose, boys....'
And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and
Saxony the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless
as a dancing sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass,
flew like an arrow to the heart of the Central European hosts.
It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above
the banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to
plunge at once into their wet obscurities should some hostile
flier range into vision. The tense young steersman divided his
attention between the guiding stars above and the level, tumbled
surfaces of the vapour strata that hid the world below. Over
great spaces those banks lay as even as a frozen lava-flow and
almost as still, and then they were rent by ragged areas of
translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim patches of the
land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw quite
distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps
and signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid
through a boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill.
But if the world was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through
that vapour floor came the deep roar of trains, the whistles of
horns of motor-cars, a sound of rifle fire away to the south, and
as he drew near his destination the crowing of cocks....
The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at
first starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to
east as the dawn came on. The Milky Way was invisible in the
blue, and the lesser stars vanished. The face of the adventurer
at the steering-wheel, darkly visible ever and again by the oval
greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm
beauty which all concentrated purpose gives, and something of the
happiness of an idiot child that has at last got hold of the
matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his
legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained
in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that
would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far
had ever seen in action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential
substance, had been tested only in almost infinitesimal
quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the
thought of great destruction slumbering in the black spheres
between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out very exactly
the instructions that had been given him, the man's mind was a
blank. His aquiline profile against the starlight expressed
nothing but a profound gloom.
The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital was
approached.
So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by
no aeroplanes at all. The frontier scouts they must have passed
in the night; probably these were mostly under the clouds; the
world was wide and they had had luck in not coming close to any
soaring sentinel. Their machine was painted a pale gray, that
lay almost invisibly over the cloud levels below. But now the
east was flushing with the near ascent of the sun, Berlin was but
a score of miles ahead, and the luck of the Frenchmen held. By
imperceptible degrees the clouds below dissolved....
Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering
light and with all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was
Berlin. The left finger of the steersman verified roads and open
spaces below upon the mica-covered square of map that was
fastened by his wheel. There in a series of lake-like expansions
was the Havel away to the right; over by those forests must be
Spandau; there the river split about the Potsdam island; and
right ahead was Charlottenburg cleft by a great thoroughfare that
fell like an indicating beam of light straight to the imperial
headquarters. There, plain enough, was the Thiergarten; beyond
rose the imperial palace, and to the right those tall buildings,
those clustering, beflagged, bemasted roofs, must be the offices
in which the Central European staff was housed. It was all coldly
clear and colourless in the dawn.
He looked up suddenly as a humming sound grew out of nothing and
became swiftly louder. Nearly overhead a German aeroplane was
circling down from an immense height to challenge him. He made a
gesture with his left arm to the gloomy man behind and then
gripped his little wheel with both hands, crouched over it, and
twisted his neck to look upward. He was attentive, tightly
strung, but quite contemptuous of their ability to hurt him. No
German alive, he was assured, could outfly him, or indeed any one
of the best Frenchmen. He imagined they might strike at him as a
hawk strikes, but they were men coming down out of the bitter
cold up there, in a hungry, spiritless, morning mood; they came
slanting down like a sword swung by a lazy man, and not so
rapidly but that he was able to slip away from under them and get
between them and Berlin. They began challenging him in German
with a megaphone when they were still perhaps a mile away. The
words came to him, rolled up into a mere blob of hoarse sound.
Then, gathering alarm from his grim silence, they gave chase and
swept down, a hundred yards above him perhaps, and a couple of
hundred behind. They were beginning to understand what he was.
He ceased to watch them and concentrated himself on the city
ahead, and for a time the two aeroplanes raced....
A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one
was tearing paper. A second followed. Something tapped the
machine.
It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces
below rushed widening out nearer and nearer to them. 'Ready!'
said the steersman.
The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the
bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied
it against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter.
Between its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he
bent his head until his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in
order to let the air in upon the inducive. Sure of its
accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane
and judged his pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent
forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the side.
'Round,' he whispered inaudibly.
The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a
descending column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a
whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks,
hurled high and sideways and the steersman, with gleaming eyes
and set teeth, fought in great banking curves for a balance. The
gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his nostrils dilated,
his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped....
When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the
crater of a small volcano. In the open garden before the
Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and
poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation. They
were too high to distinguish people clearly, or mark the bomb's
effect upon the building until suddenly the facade tottered and
crumbled before the flare as sugar dissolves in water. The man
stared for a moment, showed all his long teeth, and then
staggered into the cramped standing position his straps
permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down
after its fellow.
The explosion came this time more directly underneath the
aeroplane and shot it upward edgeways. The bomb box tipped to
the point of disgorgement, and the bomb-thrower was pitched
forward upon the third bomb with his face close to its celluloid
stud. He clutched its handles, and with a sudden gust of
determination that the thing should not escape him, bit its stud.
Before he could hurl it over, the monoplane was slipping
sideways. Everything was falling sideways. Instinctively he gave
himself up to gripping, his body holding the bomb in its place.
Then that bomb had exploded also, and steersman, thrower, and
aeroplane were just flying rags and splinters of metal and drops
of moisture in the air, and a third column of fire rushed eddying
down upon the doomed buildings below....
Section 4
Never before in the history of warfare had there been a
continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth
century the only explosives known were combustibles whose
explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and
these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night
were strange even to the men who used them. Those used by the
Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with
unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of
membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by which
the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and
admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up
radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This
liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb
was a blazing continual explosion. The Central European bombs
were the same, except that they were larger and had a more
complicated arrangement for animating the inducive.
Always before in the development of warfare the shells and
rockets fired had been but momentarily explosive, they had gone
off in an instant once for all, and if there was nothing living
or valuable within reach of the concussion and the flying
fragments then they were spent and over. But Carolinum, which
belonged to the 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 earlier twentieth-century chemists
called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it
poured out half of the huge store of energy in its great
molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen
days' emission was a half of that first period's outpouring, and
so on. As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum,
though every seventeen days its power is halved, though
constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never
entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb
fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with
radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.
What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the
inducive oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the
Carolinum began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only
slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its
explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding
superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and
thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this
state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting
soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, as
more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread
itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of
what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The
Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up
with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam,
and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption
that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of
the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal. Once
launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and
uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from
the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent
vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud,
saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and
blistering energy, were flung high and far.
Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate
explosive that was to give the 'decisive touch' to war....
Section 5
A recent historical writer has described the world of that time
as one that 'believed in established words and was invincibly
blind to the obvious in things.' Certainly it seems now that
nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier
twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming
impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not
see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. Yet
the broad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind. All
through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of
energy that men were able to command was continually increasing.
Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow,
the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no
increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of
passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being
outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side.
Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of
malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of
police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a
matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a
handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a
city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the
children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as
the Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the
paraphernalia and pretensions of war.
It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce
between the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand,
and the world of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men
of a later time can hope to understand this preposterous state of
affairs. Social organisation was still in the barbaric stage.
There were already great numbers of actively intelligent men and
much private and commercial civilisation, but the community, as a
whole, was aimless, untrained and unorganised to the pitch of
imbecility. Collective civilisation, the 'Modern State,' was
still in the womb of the future....
Section 6
But let us return to Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre and its
account of the experiences of a common man during the war time.
While these terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were
happening in Paris and Berlin, Barnet and his company were
industriously entrenching themselves in Belgian Luxembourg.
He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day's journey
through the north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid
phrases. The country was browned by a warm summer, the trees a
little touched with autumnal colour, and the wheat already
golden. When they stopped for an hour at Hirson, men and women
with tricolour badges upon the platform distributed cakes and
glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and there was much
cheerfulness. 'Such good, cool beer it was,' he wrote. 'I had
had nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom.'
A number of monoplanes, 'like giant swallows,' he notes, were
scouting in the pink evening sky.
Barnet's battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place
called Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to
Jemelle. Here they detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the
railway--trains and stores were passing along it all night--and
next morning he: marched eastward through a cold, overcast dawn,
and a morning, first cloudy and then blazing, over a large
spacious country-side interspersed by forest towards Arlon.
There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked
entrenchments and hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton
that were designed to check and delay any advance from the east
upon the fortified line of the Meuse. They had their orders, and
for two days they worked without either a sight of the enemy or
any suspicion of the disaster that had abruptly decapitated the
armies of Europe, and turned the west of Paris and the centre of
Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction of Pompeii.
And the news, when it did come, came attenuated. 'We heard there
had been mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,' Barnet
relates; 'but it didn't seem to follow that "They" weren't still
somewhere elaborating their plans and issuing orders. When the
enemy began to emerge from the woods in front of us, we cheered
and blazed away, and didn't trouble much more about anything but
the battle in hand. If now and then one cocked up an eye into the
sky to see what was happening there, the rip of a bullet soon
brought one down to the horizontal again....
That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of
country between Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It
was essentially a rifle and infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do
not seem to have taken any decisive share in the actual fighting
for some days, though no doubt they effected the strategy from
the first by preventing surprise movements. They were aeroplanes
with atomic engines, but they were not provided with atomic
bombs, which were manifestly unsuitable for field use, nor indeed
had they any very effective kind of bomb. And though they
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 aimed very carefully at a blue back that was
dodging about in the corn. At first I couldn't satisfy myself
and didn't shoot, his movements were so spasmodic and uncertain;
then I think he came to a ditch or some such obstacle and halted
for a moment. "GOT you," I whispered, and pulled the trigger.
'I had the strangest sensations about that man. In the first
instance, when I felt that I had hit him I was irradiated with
joy and pride....
'I sent him spinning. He jumped and threw up his arms....
'Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping
about. Suddenly I felt sick. I hadn't killed him....
'In some way he was disabled and smashed up and yet able to
struggle about. I began to think....
'For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn.
Either he was calling out or some one was shouting to him....
'Then he jumped up--he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with
one last effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still
and never moved again.
'He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him
dead. I had been wanting to do so for some time....'
The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made
for themselves in the woods below. A man was hit in the pit next
to Barnet, and began cursing and crying out in a violent rage.
Barnet crawled along the ditch to him and found him in great
pain, covered with blood, frantic with indignation, and with the
half of his right hand smashed to a pulp. 'Look at this,' he
kept repeating, hugging it and then extending it. 'Damned
foolery! Damned foolery! My right hand, sir! My right hand!'
For some time Barnet could do nothing with him. The man was
consumed by his tortured realisation of the evil silliness of
war, the realisation which had come upon him in a flash with the
bullet that had destroyed his skill and use as an artificer for
ever. He was looking at the vestiges with a horror that made him
impenetrable to any other idea. At last the poor wretch let
Barnet tie up his bleeding stump and help him along the ditch
that conducted him deviously out of range....
When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water,
and all day long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst.
For food they had chocolate and bread.
'At first,' he says, 'I was extraordinarily excited by my baptism
of fire. Then as the heat of the day came on I experienced an
enormous tedium and discomfort. The flies became extremely
troublesome, and my little grave of a rifle pit was invaded by
ants. I could not get up or move about, for some one in the trees
had got a mark on me. I kept thinking of the dead Prussian down
among the corn, and of the bitter outcries of my own man. Damned
foolery! It WAS damned foolery. But who was to blame? How had
we got to this? . . .
'Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with
dynamite bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and
suddenly dived down over beyond the trees.
' "From Holland to the Alps this day," I thought, "there must be
crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to
inflict irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic
to the pitch of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall
wake up." . . .
'Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. "Presently mankind
will wake up."
'I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were
among these hundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in
rebellion against all these ancient traditions of flag and
empire. Weren't we, perhaps, already in the throes of the last
crisis, in that darkest moment of a nightmare's horror before the
sleeper will endure no more of it--and wakes?
'I don't know how my speculations ended. I think they were not
so much ended as distracted by the distant thudding of the guns
that were opening fire at long range upon Namur.'
Section 7
But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of
modern warfare. So far he had taken part only in a little
shooting. The bayonet attack by which the advanced line was
broken was made at a place called Croix Rouge, more than twenty
miles away, and that night under cover of the darkness the rifle
pits were abandoned and he got his company away without further
loss.
His regiment fell back unpressed behind the fortified lines
between Namur and Sedan, entrained at a station called Mettet,
and was sent northward by Antwerp and Rotterdam to Haarlem.
Hence they marched into North Holland. It was only after the
march into Holland that he began to realise the monstrous and
catastrophic nature of the struggle in which he was playing his
undistinguished part.
He describes very pleasantly the journey through the hills and
open land of Brabant, the repeated crossing of arms of the Rhine,
and the change from the undulating scenery of Belgium to the
flat, rich meadows, the sunlit dyke roads, and the countless
windmills of the Dutch levels. In those days there was unbroken
land from Alkmaar and Leiden to the Dollart. Three great
provinces, South Holland, North Holland, and Zuiderzeeland,
reclaimed at various times between the early tenth century and
1945 and all many feet below the level of the waves outside the
dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern sun and
sustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of
laws and custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a
perpetual defence against the beleaguering sea. For more than two
hundred and fifty miles from Walcheren to Friesland stretched a
line of embankments and pumping stations that was the admiration
of the world.
If some curious god had chosen to watch the course of events in
those northern provinces while that flanking march of the British
was in progress, he would have found a convenient and appropriate
seat for his observation upon one of the great cumulus clouds
that were drifting slowly across the blue sky during all these
eventful days before the great catastrophe. For that was the
quality of the weather, hot and clear, with something of a
breeze, and underfoot dry and a little inclined to be dusty. This
watching god would have looked down upon broad stretches of
sunlit green, sunlit save for the creeping patches of shadow cast
by the clouds, upon sky-reflecting meres, fringed and divided up
by masses of willow and large areas of silvery weeds, upon white
roads lying bare to the sun and upon a tracery of blue canals.
The pastures were alive with cattle, the roads had a busy
traffic, of beasts and bicycles and gaily coloured peasants'
automobiles, the hues of the innumerable motor barges in the
canal vied with the eventfulness of the roadways; and everywhere
in solitary steadings, amidst ricks and barns, in groups by the
wayside, in straggling villages, each with its fine old church,
or in compact towns laced with canals and abounding in bridges
and clipped trees, were human habitations.
The people of this country-side were not belligerents. The
interests and sympathies alike of Holland had been so divided
that to the end she remained undecided and passive in the
struggle of the world powers. And everywhere along the roads
taken by the marching armies clustered groups and crowds of
impartially observant spectators, women and children in peculiar
white caps and old-fashioned sabots, and elderly, clean-shaven
men quietly thoughtful over their long pipes. They had no fear of
their invaders; the days when 'soldiering' meant bands of
licentious looters had long since passed away....
That watcher among the clouds would have seen a great
distribution of khaki-uniformed men and khaki-painted material
over the whole of the sunken area of Holland. He would have
marked the long trains, packed with men or piled with great guns
and war material, creeping slowly, alert for train-wreckers,
along the north-going lines; he would have seen the Scheldt and
Rhine choked with shipping, and pouring out still more men and
still more material; he would have noticed halts and
provisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling
caterpillars of cavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons, the
huge beetles of great guns, crawling under the poplars along the
dykes and roads northward, along ways lined by the neutral,
unmolested, ambiguously observant Dutch. All the barges and
shipping upon the canals had been requisitioned for transport. In
that clear, bright, warm weather, it would all have looked from
above like some extravagant festival of animated toys.
As the sun sank westward the spectacle must have become a little
indistinct because of a golden haze; everything must have become
warmer and more glowing, and because of the lengthening of the
shadows more manifestly in relief. The shadows of the tall
churches grew longer and longer, until they touched the horizon
and mingled in the universal shadow; and then, slow, and soft,
and wrapping the world in fold after fold of deepening blue, came
the night--the night at first obscurely simple, and then with
faint points here and there, and then jewelled in darkling
splendour with a hundred thousand lights. Out of that mingling of
darkness and ambiguous glares the noise of an unceasing activity
would have arisen, the louder and plainer now because there was
no longer any distraction of sight.
It may be that watcher drifting in the pellucid gulf beneath the
stars watched all through the night; it may be that he dozed. But
if he gave way to so natural a proclivity, assuredly on the
fourth night of the great flank march he was aroused, for that
was the night of the battle in the air that decided the fate of
Holland. The aeroplanes were fighting at last, and suddenly
about him, above and below, with cries and uproar rushing out of
the four quarters of heaven, striking, plunging, oversetting,
soaring to the zenith and dropping to the ground, they came to
assail or defend the myriads below.
Secretly the Central European power had gathered his flying
machines together, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a
handful of ten thousand knives over the low country. And amidst
that swarming flight were five that drove headlong for the sea
walls of Holland, carrying atomic bombs. From north and west and
south, the allied aeroplanes rose in response and swept down upon
this sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began. Men
rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like
archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth.
Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the
heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking
charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this
giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?
And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped
and locked and dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and
the stars, came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and
first one and then a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged
hungrily down upon the Dutchmen's dykes and struck between land
and sea and flared up again in enormous columns of glare and
crimsoned smoke and steam.
And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires
and trees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea,
tumbled with anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood....
Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous
crying and a flurry of alarm bells... .
The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky,
like things that suddenly know themselves to be wicked....
Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might
quench, the waves came roaring in upon the land....
Section 8
'We had cursed our luck,' says Barnet, 'that we could not get to
our quarters at Alkmaar that night. There, we were told, were
provisions, tobacco, and everything for which we craved. But the
main canal from Zaandam and Amsterdam was hopelessly jammed with
craft, and we were glad of a chance opening that enabled us to
get out of the main column and lie up in a kind of little harbour
very much neglected and weedgrown before a deserted house. We
broke into this and found some herrings in a barrel, a heap of
cheeses, and stone bottles of gin in the cellar; and with this I
cheered my starving men. We made fires and toasted the cheese and
grilled our herrings. None of us had slept for nearly forty
hours, and I determined to stay in this refuge until dawn and
then if the traffic was still choked leave the barge and march
the rest of the way into Alkmaar.
'This place we had got into was perhaps a hundred yards from the
canal and underneath a little brick bridge we could see the
flotilla still, and hear the voices of the soldiers. Presently
five or six other barges came through and lay up in the 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 indebtedness for the food we had taken. We were
particularly glad of our tobacco and fires, because of the
numerous mosquitoes that rose about us.
'The gate of the house from which we had provisioned ourselves
was adorned with the legend, Vreugde bij Vrede, "Joy with Peace,"
and it bore every mark of the busy retirement of a comfort-loving
proprietor. I went along his garden, which was gay and delightful
with big bushes of rose and sweet brier, to a quaint little
summer-house, and there I sat and watched the men in groups
cooking and squatting along the bank. The sun was setting in a
nearly cloudless sky.
'For the last two weeks I had been a wholly occupied man, intent
only upon obeying the orders that came down to me. All through
this time I had been working to the very limit of my mental and
physical faculties, and my only moments of rest had been devoted
to snatches of sleep. Now came this rare, unexpected interlude,
and I could look detachedly upon what I was doing and feel
something of its infinite wonderfulness. I was irradiated with
affection for the men of my company and with admiration at their
cheerful acquiescence in the subordination and needs of our
positions. I watched their proceedings and heard their pleasant
voices. How willing those men were! How ready to accept
leadership and forget themselves in collective ends! I thought
how manfully they had gone through all the strains and toil of
the last two weeks, how they had toughened and shaken down to
comradeship together, and how much sweetness there is after all
in our foolish human blood. For they were just one casual sample
of the species--their patience and readiness lay, as the energy
of the atom had lain, still waiting to be properly utilised.
Again it came to me with overpowering force that the supreme need
of our race is leading, that the supreme task is to discover
leading, to forget oneself in realising the collective purpose of
the race. Once more I saw life plain....'
Very characteristic is that of the 'rather too corpulent' young
officer, who was afterwards to set it all down in the Wander
Jahre. Very characteristic, too, it is of the change in men's
hearts that was even then preparing a new phase of human history.
He goes on to write of the escape from individuality in science
and service, and of his discovery of this 'salvation.' All that
was then, no doubt, very moving and original; now it seems only
the most obvious commonplace of human life.
The glow of the sunset faded, the twilight deepened into night.
The fires burnt the brighter, and some Irishmen away across the
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.
'I stood up softly, undesirous of disturbing my companions, but
with my heart beating now rather more rapidly with surprise and
excitement. I strained my ears for any sound of guns along our
front. Almost instinctively I turned about for protection to the
south and west, and peered; and then I saw coming as fast and
much nearer to me, as if they had sprung out of the darkness,
three banks of aeroplanes; a group of squadrons very high, a main
body at a height perhaps of one or two thousand feet, and a
doubtful number flying low and very indistinct. The middle ones
were so thick they kept putting out groups of stars. And I
realised that after all there was to be fighting in the air.
'There was something extraordinarily strange in this swift,
noiseless convergence of nearly invisible combatants above the
sleeping hosts. Every one about me was still unconscious; there
was no sign as yet of any agitation among the shipping on the
main canal, whose whole course, dotted with unsuspicious lights
and fringed with fires, must have been clearly perceptible from
above. Then a long way off towards Alkmaar I heard bugles, and
after that shots, and then a wild clamour of bells. I determined
to let my men sleep on for as long as they could....
'The battle was joined with the swiftness of dreaming. I do not
think it can have been five minutes from the moment when I first
became aware of the Central European air fleet to the contact of
the two forces. I saw it quite plainly in silhouette against the
luminous blue of the northern sky. The allied aeroplanes--they
were mostly French--came pouring down like a fierce shower upon
the middle of the Central European fleet. They looked exactly
like a coarser sort of rain. There was a crackling sound--the
first sound I heard--it reminded one of the Aurora Borealis, and
I supposed it was an interchange of rifle shots. There were
flashes like summer lightning; and then all the sky became a
whirling confusion of battle that was still largely noiseless.
Some of the Central European aeroplanes were certainly charged
and overset; others seemed to collapse and fall and then flare
out with so bright a light that it took the edge off one's vision
and made the rest of the battle disappear as though it had been
snatched back out of sight.
'And then, while I still peered and tried to shade these flames
from my eyes with my hand, and while the men about me were
beginning to stir, the atomic bombs were thrown at the dykes.
They made a mighty thunder in the air, and fell like Lucifer in
the picture, leaving a flaring trail in the sky. The night,
which had been pellucid and detailed and eventful, seemed to
vanish, to be replaced abruptly by a black background to these
tremendous pillars of fire....
'Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was
filled with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds....
'There was something discontinuous in this impact. At one moment
I was a lonely watcher in a sleeping world; the next saw every
one about me afoot, the whole world awake and amazed....
'And then the wind had struck me a buffet, taken my helmet and
swept aside the summerhouse of Vreugde bij Vrede, as a scythe
sweeps away grass. I saw the bombs fall, and then watched a great
crimson flare leap responsive to each impact, and mountainous
masses of red-lit steam and flying fragments clamber up towards
the zenith. Against the glare I saw the country-side for miles
standing black and clear, churches, trees, chimneys. And
suddenly I understood. The Central Europeans had burst the dykes.
Those flares meant the bursting of the dykes, and in a little
while the sea-water would be upon us....'
He goes on to tell with a certain prolixity of the steps he
took--and all things considered they were very intelligent
steps--to meet this amazing crisis. He got his men aboard and
hailed the adjacent barges; he got the man who acted as barge
engineer at his post and the engines working, he cast loose from
his moorings. Then he bethought himself of food, and contrived to
land five men, get in a few dozen cheeses, and ship his men again
before the inundation reached them.
He is reasonably proud of this piece of coolness. His idea was
to take the wave head-on and with his engines full speed ahead.
And all the while he was thanking heaven he was not in the jam of
traffic in the main canal. He rather, I think, overestimated the
probable rush of waters; he dreaded being swept away, he
explains, and smashed against houses and trees.
He does not give any estimate of the time it took between the
bursting of the dykes and the arrival of the waters, but it was
probably an interval of about twenty minutes or half an hour. He
was working now in darkness--save for the light of his
lantern--and in a great wind. He hung out head and stern
lights....
Whirling torrents of steam were pouring up from the advancing
waters, which had rushed, it must be remembered, through nearly
incandescent gaps in the sea defences, and this vast uprush of
vapour soon veiled the flaring centres of explosion altogether.
'The waters came at last, an advancing cascade. It was like a
broad roller sweeping across the country. They came with a deep,
roaring sound. I had expected a Niagara, but the total fall of
the front could not have been much more than twelve feet. Our
barge hesitated for a moment, took a dose over her bows, and then
lifted. I signalled for full speed ahead and brought her head
upstream, and held on like grim death to keep her there.
'There was a wind about as strong as the flood, and I found we
were pounding against every conceivable buoyant object that had
been between us and the sea. The only light in the world now
came from our lamps, the steam became impenetrable at a score of
yards from the boat, and the roar of the wind and water cut us
off from all remoter sounds. The black, shining waters swirled
by, coming into the light of our lamps out of an ebony blackness
and vanishing again into impenetrable black. And on the waters
came shapes, came things that flashed upon us for a moment, now a
half-submerged boat, now a cow, now a huge fragment of a house's
timberings, now a muddle of packing-cases and scaffolding. The
things clapped into sight like something shown by the opening of
a shutter, and then bumped shatteringly against us or rushed by
us. Once I saw very clearly a man's white face....
'All the while a group of labouring, half-submerged trees
remained ahead of us, drawing very slowly nearer. I steered a
course to avoid them. They seemed to gesticulate a frantic
despair against the black steam clouds behind. Once a great
branch detached itself and tore shuddering by me. We did, on the
whole, make headway. The last I saw of Vreugde bij Vrede before
the night swallowed it, was almost dead astern of us....'
Section 9
Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had
been badly strained, and his men were pumping or baling in
relays. He had got about a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose
boat had capsized near him, and he had three other boats in tow.
He was afloat, and somewhere between Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but
he could not tell where. It was a day that was still half night.
Gray waters stretched in every direction under a dark gray sky,
and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, in many
cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the upper
third of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted
a dimly seen flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned,
furniture, rafts, timbering, and miscellaneous objects.
The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there
did a dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box
or chair or such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was
not till the Thursday that the dead came to the surface in any
quantity. The view was bounded on every side by a gray mist that
closed overhead in a gray canopy. The air cleared in the
afternoon, and then, far away to the west under great banks of
steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of the atomic bombs came
visible across the waste of water.
They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London
sunsets. 'They sat upon the sea,' says Barnet, 'like frayed-out
waterlilies of flame.'
Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the
track of the canal, in helping people who were adrift, in picking
up derelict boats, and in taking people out of imperilled houses.
He found other military barges similarly employed, and it was
only as the day wore on and the immediate appeals for aid were
satisfied that he thought of food and drink for his men, and what
course he had better pursue. They had a little cheese, but no
water. 'Orders,' that mysterious direction, had at last
altogether disappeared. He perceived he had now to act upon his
own responsibility.
'One's sense was of a destruction so far-reaching and of a world
so altered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and
expect to find things as they had been before the war began. I
sat on the quarter-deck with Mylius my engineer and Kemp and two
others of the non-commissioned officers, and we consulted upon
our line of action. We were foodless and aimless. We agreed
that our fighting value was extremely small, and that our first
duty was to get ourselves in touch with food and instructions
again. Whatever plan of campaign had directed our movements was
manifestly smashed to bits. Mylius was of opinion that we could
take a line westward and get back to England across the North
Sea. He calculated that with such a motor barge as ours it would
be possible to reach the Yorkshire coast within four-and-twenty
hours. But this idea I overruled because of the shortness of our
provisions, and more particularly because of our urgent need of
water.
'Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their
demands did much to exasperate our thirst. I decided that if we
went away to the south we should reach hilly country, or at least
country that was not submerged, and then we should be able to
land, find some stream, drink, and get supplies and news. Many of
the barges adrift in the haze about us were filled with British
soldiers and had floated up from the Nord See Canal, but none of
them were any better informed than ourselves of the course of
events. "Orders" had, in fact, vanished out of the sky.
' "Orders" made a temporary reappearance late that evening in the
form of a megaphone hail from a British torpedo boat, announcing
a truce, and giving the welcome information that food and water
were being hurried down the Rhine and were to be found on the
barge flotilla lying over the old Rhine above Leiden.' . . .
We will not follow Barnet, however, in the description of his
strange overland voyage among trees and houses and churches by
Zaandam and between Haarlem and Amsterdam, to Leiden. It was a
voyage in a red-lit mist, in a world of steamy silhouette, full
of strange voices and perplexity, and with every other sensation
dominated by a feverish thirst. 'We sat,' he says, 'in a little
huddled group, saying very little, and the men forward were mere
knots of silent endurance. Our only continuing sound was the
persistent mewing of a cat one of the men had rescued from a
floating hayrick near Zaandam. We kept a southward course by a
watch-chain compass Mylius had produced....
'I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army,
nor had we any strong sense of the war as the dominating fact
about us. Our mental setting had far more of the effect of a
huge natural catastrophe. The atomic bombs had dwarfed the
international issues to complete insignificance. When our minds
wandered from the preoccupations of our immediate needs, we
speculated upon the possibility of stopping the use of these
frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed. For
to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still
greater power of destruction of which they were the precursors
might quite easily shatter every relationship and institution of
mankind.
' "What will they be doing," asked Mylius, "what will they be
doing? It's plain we've got to put an end to war. It's plain
things have to be run some way. THIS--all this--is impossible."
'I made no immediate answer. Something--I cannot think what--had
brought back to me the figure of that man I had seen wounded on
the very first day of actual fighting. I saw again his angry,
tearful eyes, and that poor, dripping, bloody mess that had been
a skilful human hand five minutes before, thrust out in indignant
protest. "Damned foolery," he had stormed and sobbed, "damned
foolery. My right hand, sir! My RIGHT hand. . . ."
'My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me. "I think we
are too--too silly," I said to Mylius, "ever to stop war. If we'd
had the sense to do it, we should have done it before this. I
think this----" I pointed to the gaunt black outline of a smashed
windmill that stuck up, ridiculous and ugly, above the blood-lit
waters--"this is the end." '
Section 10
But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and
his barge-load of hungry and starving men.
For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if
civilisation had come to a final collapse. These crowning buds
upon the tradition that Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered,
opened and flared 'like waterlilies of flame' over nations
destroyed, over churches smashed or submerged, towns ruined,
fields lost to mankind for ever, and a million weltering bodies.
Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would the flames of war
still burn amidst the ruins?
Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance
in their answers to that question. Already once in the history
of mankind, in America, before its discovery by the whites, an
organised civilisation had given way to a mere cult of warfare,
specialised and cruel, and it seemed for a time to many a
thoughtful man as if the whole world was but to repeat on a
larger scale this ascendancy of the warrior, this triumph of the
destructive instincts of the race.
The subsequent chapters of Barnet's narrative do but supply body
to this tragic possibility. He gives a series of vignettes of
civilisation, shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found
the Belgian hills swarming with refugees and desolated by
cholera; the vestiges of the contending armies keeping order
under a truce, without actual battles, but with the cautious
hostility of habit, and a great absence of plan everywhere.
Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were
rumours of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys
of the Semoy and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes.
There was the report of an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and
Japanese, and of some huge revolutionary outbreak in America.
The weather was stormier than men had ever known it in those
regions, with much thunder and lightning and wild cloud-bursts of
rain....
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE ENDING OF WAR
Section 1
On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding
two long stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to
Bellinzona, and southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass
meadows which is very beautiful in springtime with a great
multitude of wild flowers. More particularly is this so in early
June, when the slender asphodel Saint Bruno's lily, with its
spike of white blossom, is in flower. To the westward of this
delightful shelf there is a deep and densely wooded trench, a
great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of which arise
great precipices very high and wild. Above the asphodel fields
the mountains climb in rocky slopes to solitudes of stone and
sunlight that curve round and join that wall of cliffs in one
common skyline. This desolate and austere background contrasts
very vividly with the glowing serenity of the great lake below,
with the spacious view of fertile hills and roads and villages
and islands to south and east, and with the hotly golden rice
flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And because it was a remote
and insignificant place, far away out of the crowding tragedies
of that year of disaster, away from burning cities and starving
multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was here
that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest,
if possible, before it was too late, the 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 France to humanity. He was possessed of one
clear persuasion, that war must end, and that the only way to end
war was to have but one government for mankind. He brushed aside
all other considerations. At the very outbreak of the war, so
soon as the two capitals of the belligerents had been wrecked, he
went to the president in the White House with this proposal. He
made it as if it was a matter of course. He was fortunate to be
in Washington and in touch with that gigantic childishness which
was the characteristic of the American imagination. For the
Americans also were among the simple peoples by whom the world
was saved. He won over the American president and the American
government to his general ideas; at any rate they supported him
sufficiently to give him a standing with the more sceptical
European governments, and with this backing he set to work--it
seemed the most fantastic of enterprises--to bring together all
the rulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable
letters, he sent messages, he went desperate journeys, he
enlisted whatever support he could find; no one was too humble
for an ally or too obstinate for his advances; through the
terrible autumn of the last wars this persistent little visionary
in spectacles must have seemed rather like a hopeful canary
twittering during a thunderstorm. And no accumulation of
disasters daunted his conviction that they could be ended.
For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of
destruction. Power after Power about the armed globe sought to
anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium
of panic, in order to use their bombs first. China and Japan had
assailed Russia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had
attacked Japan, India was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit
of fire spouting death and flame; the redoubtable King of the
Balkans was mobilising. It must have seemed plain at last to
every one in those days that the world was slipping headlong to
anarchy. By the spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres,
and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable
crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy fabric of
the world's credit had vanished, industry was completely
disorganised and every city, every thickly populated area was
starving or trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the
capital cities of the world were burning; millions of people had
already perished, and over great areas government was at an end.
Humanity has been compared by one contemporary writer to a
sleeper who handles matches in his sleep and wakes to find
himself in flames.
For many months it was an open question whether there was to be
found throughout all the race the will and intelligence to face
these new conditions and make even an attempt to arrest the
downfall of the social order. For a time the war spirit defeated
every effort to rally the forces of preservation and
construction. Leblanc seemed to be protesting against
earthquakes, and as likely to find a spirit of reason in the
crater of Etna. Even though the shattered official governments
now clamoured for peace, bands of irreconcilables and invincible
patriots, usurpers, adventurers, and political desperadoes, were
everywhere in possession of the simple apparatus for the
disengagement of atomic energy and the initiation of new centres
of destruction. The stuff exercised an irresistible fascination
upon a certain type of mind. Why should any one give in while he
can still destroy his enemies? Surrender? While there is still
a chance of blowing them to dust? The power of destruction which
had once been the ultimate privilege of government was now the
only power left in the world--and it was everywhere. There were
few thoughtful men during that phase of blazing waste who did not
pass through such moods of despair as Barnet describes, and
declare with him: 'This is the end....'
And all the while Leblanc was going to and fro with glittering
glasses and an inexhaustible persuasiveness, urging the manifest
reasonableness of his view upon ears that ceased presently to be
inattentive. Never at any time did he betray a doubt that all
this chaotic conflict would end. No nurse during a nursery
uproar was ever so certain of the inevitable ultimate peace.
From being treated as an amiable dreamer he came by insensible
degrees to be regarded as an extravagant possibility. Then he
began to seem even practicable. The people who listened to him in
1958 with a smiling impatience, were eager before 1959 was four
months old to know just exactly what he thought might be done.
He answered with the patience of a philosopher and the lucidity
of a Frenchman. He began to receive responses of a more and more
hopeful type. He came across the Atlantic to Italy, and there he
gathered in the promises for this congress. He chose those high
meadows above Brissago for the reasons we have stated. 'We must
get away,' he said, 'from old associations.' He set to work
requisitioning material for his conference with an assurance that
was justified by the replies. With a slight incredulity the
conference which was to begin a new order in the world, gathered
itself together. Leblanc summoned it without arrogance, he
controlled it by virtue of an infinite humility. Men appeared
upon those upland slopes with the apparatus for wireless
telegraphy; others followed with tents and provisions; a little
cable was flung down to a convenient point upon the Locarno road
below. Leblanc arrived, sedulously directing every detail that
would affect the tone of the assembly. He might have been a
courier in advance rather than the originator of the gathering.
And then there arrived, some by the cable, most by aeroplane, a
few in other fashions, the men who had been called together to
confer upon the state of the world. It was to be a conference
without a name. Nine monarchs, the presidents of four republics,
a number of ministers and ambassadors, powerful journalists, and
such-like prominent and influential men, took part in it. There
were even scientific men; and that world-famous old man, Holsten,
came with the others to contribute his amateur statecraft to the
desperate problem of the age. Only Leblanc would have dared so
to summon figure heads and powers and intelligence, or have had
the courage to hope for their agreement....
Section 2
And one at least of those who were called to this conference of
governments came to it on foot. This was King Egbert, the young
king of the most venerable kingdom in Europe. He was a rebel,
and had always been of deliberate choice a rebel against the
magnificence of his position. He affected long pedestrian tours
and a disposition to sleep in the open air. He came now over the
Pass of Sta Maria Maggiore and by boat up the lake to Brissago;
thence he walked up the mountain, a pleasant path set with oaks
and sweet chestnut. For provision on the walk, for he did not
want to hurry, he carried with him a pocketful of bread and
cheese. A certain small retinue that was necessary to his comfort
and dignity upon occasions of state he sent on by the cable car,
and with him walked his private secretary, Firmin, a man who had
thrown up the Professorship of World Politics in the London
School of Sociology, Economics, and Political Science, to take up
these duties. Firmin was a man of strong rather than rapid
thought, he had anticipated great influence in this new position,
and after some years he was still only beginning to apprehend how
largely his function was to listen. Originally he had been
something of a thinker upon international politics, an authority
upon tariffs and strategy, and a valued contributor to various of
the higher organs of public opinion, but the atomic bombs had
taken him by surprise, and he had still to recover completely
from his pre-atomic opinions and the silencing effect of those
sustained explosives.
The king's freedom from the trammels of etiquette was very
complete. In theory--and he abounded in theory--his manners were
purely democratic. It was by sheer habit and inadvertency that he
permitted Firmin, who had discovered a rucksack in a small shop
in the town below, to carry both bottles of beer. The king had
never, as a matter of fact, carried anything for himself in his
life, and he had never noted that he did not do so.
'We will have nobody with us,' he said, 'at all. We will be
perfectly simple.'
So Firmin carried the beer.
As they walked up--it was the king made the pace rather than
Firmin--they talked of the conference before them, and Firmin,
with a certain want of assurance that would have surprised him in
himself in the days of his Professorship, sought to define the
policy of his companion. 'In its broader form, sir,' said Firmin;
'I admit a certain plausibility in this project of Leblanc's, but
I feel that although it may be advisable to set up some sort of
general control for International affairs--a sort of Hague Court
with extended powers--that is no reason whatever for losing sight
of the principles of national and imperial autonomy.'
'Firmin,' said the king, 'I am going to set my brother kings a
good example.'
Firmin intimated a curiosity that veiled a dread.
'By chucking all that nonsense,' said the king.
He quickened his pace as Firmin, who was already a little out of
breath, betrayed a disposition to reply.
'I am going to chuck all that nonsense,' said the king, as Firmin
prepared to speak. 'I am going to fling my royalty and empire on
the table--and declare at once I don't mean to haggle. It's
haggling--about rights--has been the devil in human affairs,
for--always. I am going to stop this nonsense.'
Firmin halted abruptly. 'But, sir!' he cried.
The king stopped six yards ahead of him and looked back at his
adviser's perspiring visage.
'Do you really think, Firmin, that I am here as--as an infernal
politician to put my crown and my flag and my claims and so forth
in the way of peace? That little Frenchman is right. You know he
is right as well as I do. Those things are over. We--we kings
and rulers and representatives have been at the very heart of the
mischief. Of course we imply separation, and of course
separation means the threat of war, and of course the threat of
war means the accumulation of more and more atomic bombs. The old
game's up. But, I say, we mustn't stand here, you know. The
world waits. Don't you think the old game's up, Firmin?'
Firmin adjusted a strap, passed a hand over his wet forehead, and
followed earnestly. 'I admit, sir,' he said to a receding back,
'that there has to be some sort of hegemony, some sort of
Amphictyonic council----'
'There's got to be one simple government for all the world,' said
the king over his shoulder.
'But as for a reckless, unqualified abandonment, sir----'
'BANG!' cried the king.
Firmin made no answer to this interruption. But a faint shadow
of annoyance passed across his heated features.
'Yesterday,' said the king, by way of explanation, 'the Japanese
very nearly got San Francisco.'
'I hadn't heard, sir.'
'The Americans ran the Japanese aeroplane down into the sea and
there the bomb got busted.'
'Under the sea, sir?'
'Yes. Submarine volcano. The steam is in sight of the
Californian coast. It was as near as that. And with things like
this happening, you want me to go up this hill and haggle.
Consider the effect of that upon my imperial cousin--and all the
others!'
'HE will haggle, sir.'
'Not a bit of it,' said the king.
'But, sir.'
'Leblanc won't let him.'
Firmin halted abruptly and gave a vicious pull at the offending
strap. 'Sir, he will listen to his advisers,' he said, in a tone
that in some subtle way seemed to implicate his master with the
trouble of the knapsack.
The king considered him.
'We will go just a little higher,' he said. 'I want to find this
unoccupied village they spoke of, and then we will drink that
beer. It can't be far. We will drink the beer and throw away the
bottles. And then, Firmin, I shall ask you to look at things in a
more generous light.... Because, you know, you must....'
He turned about and for some time the only sound they made was
the noise of their boots upon the loose stones of the way and the
irregular breathing of Firmin.
At length, as it seemed to Firmin, or quite soon, as it seemed to
the king, the gradient of the path diminished, the way widened
out, and they found themselves in a very beautiful place indeed.
It was one of those upland clusters of sheds and houses that are
still to be found in the mountains of North Italy, buildings that
were used only in the high summer, and which it was the custom to
leave locked up and deserted through all the winter and spring,
and up to the middle of June. The buildings were of a soft-toned
gray stone, buried in rich green grass, shadowed by chestnut
trees and lit by an extraordinary blaze of yellow broom. Never
had the king seen broom so glorious; he shouted at the light of
it, for it seemed to give out more sunlight even than it
received; he sat down impulsively on a lichenous stone, tugged
out his bread and cheese, and bade Firmin thrust the beer into
the shaded weeds to cool.
'The things people miss, Firmin,' he said, 'who go up into the
air in ships!'
Firmin looked around him with an ungenial eye. 'You see it at
its best, sir,' he said, 'before the peasants come here again and
make it filthy.'
'It would be beautiful anyhow,' said the king.
'Superficially, sir,' said Firmin. 'But it stands for a social
order that is fast vanishing away. Indeed, judging by the grass
between the stones and in the huts, I am inclined to doubt if it
is in use even now.'
'I suppose,' said the king, 'they would come up immediately the
hay on this flower meadow is cut. It would be those slow,
creamy-coloured beasts, I expect, one sees on the roads below,
and swarthy girls with red handkerchiefs over their black
hair.... It is wonderful to think how long that beautiful old
life lasted. In the Roman times and long ages before ever the
rumour of the Romans had come into these parts, men drove their
cattle up into these places as the summer came on.... How haunted
is this place! There have been quarrels here, hopes, children
have played here and lived to be old crones and old gaffers, and
died, and so it has gone on for thousands of lives. Lovers,
innumerable lovers, have caressed amidst this golden broom....'
He meditated over a busy mouthful of bread and cheese.
'We ought to have brought a tankard for that beer,' he said.
Firmin produced a folding aluminium cup, and the king was pleased
to drink.
'I wish, sir,' said Firmin suddenly, 'I could induce you at least
to delay your decision----'
'It's no good talking, Firmin,' said the king. 'My mind's as
clear as daylight.'
'Sire,' protested Firmin, with his voice full of bread and cheese
and genuine emotion, 'have you no respect for your kingship?'
The king paused before he answered with unwonted gravity. 'It's
just because I have, Firmin, that I won't be a puppet in this
game of international politics.' He regarded his companion for a
moment and then remarked: 'Kingship!--what do YOU know of
kingship, Firmin?
'Yes,' cried the king to his astonished counsellor. 'For the
first time in my life I am going to be a king. I am going to
lead, and lead by my own authority. For a dozen generations my
family has been a set of dummies in the hands of their advisers.
Advisers! Now I am going to be a real king--and I am going
to--to abolish, dispose of, finish, the crown to which I have
been a slave. But what a world of paralysing shams this roaring
stuff has ended! The rigid old world is in the melting-pot again,
and I, who seemed to be no more than the stuffing inside a regal
robe, I am a king among kings. I have to play my part at the head
of things and put an end to blood and fire and idiot disorder.'
'But, sir,' protested Firmin.
'This man Leblanc is right. The whole world has got to be a
Republic, one and indivisible. You know that, and my duty is to
make that easy. A king should lead his people; you want me to
stick on their backs like some Old Man of the Sea. To-day must
be a sacrament of kings. Our trust for mankind is done with and
ended. We must part our robes among them, we must part our
kingship among them, and say to them all, now the king in every
one must rule the world.... Have you no sense of the magnificence
of this occasion? You want me, Firmin, you want me to go up
there and haggle like a damned little solicitor for some price,
some compensation, some qualification....'
Firmin shrugged his shoulders and assumed an expression of
despair. Meanwhile, he conveyed, one must eat.
For a time neither spoke, and the king ate and turned over in his
mind the phrases of the speech he intended to make to the
conference. By virtue of the antiquity of his crown he was to
preside, and he intended to make his presidency memorable.
Reassured of his eloquence, he considered the despondent and
sulky Firmin for a space.
'Firmin,' he said, 'you have idealised kingship.' 'It has been
my dream, sir,' said Firmin sorrowfully, 'to serve.'
'At the levers, Firmin,' said the king.
'You are pleased to be unjust,' said Firmin, deeply hurt.
'I am pleased to be getting out of it,' said the king.
'Oh, Firmin,' he went on, 'have you no thought for me? Will you
never realise that I am not only flesh and blood but an
imagination--with its rights. I am a king in revolt against that
fetter they put upon my head. I am a king awake. My reverend
grandparents never in all their august lives had a waking moment.
They loved the job that you, you advisers, gave them; they never
had a doubt of it. It was like giving a doll to a woman who ought
to have a child. They delighted in processions and opening things
and being read addresses to, and visiting triplets and
nonagenarians and all that sort of thing. Incredibly. They used
to keep albums of cuttings from all the illustrated papers
showing them at it, and if the press-cutting parcels grew thin
they were worried. It was all that ever worried them. But there
is something atavistic in me; I hark back to unconstitutional
monarchs. They christened me too retrogressively, I think. I
wanted to get things done. I was bored. I might have fallen into
vice, most intelligent and energetic princes do, but the palace
precautions were unusually thorough. I was brought up in the
purest court the world has ever seen. . . . Alertly pure.... So I
read books, Firmin, and went about asking questions. The thing
was bound to happen to one of us sooner or later. Perhaps, too,
very likely I'm not vicious. I don't think I am.'
He reflected. 'No,' he said.
Firmin cleared his throat. 'I don't think you are, sir,' he
said. 'You prefer----'
He stopped short. He had been going to say 'talking.' He
substituted 'ideas.'
'That world of royalty!' the king went on. 'In a little while no
one will understand it any more. It will become a riddle....
'Among other things, it was a world of perpetual best clothes.
Everything was in its best clothes for us, and usually wearing
bunting. With a cinema watching to see we took it properly. If
you are a king, Firmin, and you go and look at a regiment, it
instantly stops whatever it is doing, changes into full uniform
and presents arms. When my august parents went in a train the
coal in the tender used to be whitened. It did, Firmin, and if
coal had been white instead of black I have no doubt the
authorities would have blackened it. That was the spirit of our
treatment. People were always walking about with their faces to
us. One never saw anything in profile. One got an impression of
a world that was insanely focused on ourselves. And when I began
to poke my little questions into the Lord Chancellor and the
archbishop and all the rest of them, about what I should see if
people turned round, the general effect I produced was that I
wasn't by any means displaying the Royal Tact they had expected
of me....'
He meditated for a time.
'And yet, you know, there is something in the kingship, Firmin.
It stiffened up my august little grandfather. It gave my
grandmother a kind of awkward dignity even when she was
cross--and she was very often cross. They both had a profound
sense of responsibility. My poor father's health was wretched
during his brief career; nobody outside the circle knows just how
he screwed himself up to things. "My people expect it," he used
to say of this tiresome duty or that. Most of the things they
made him do were silly--it was part of a bad tradition, but there
was nothing silly in the way he set about them.... The spirit of
kingship is a fine thing, Firmin; I feel it in my bones; I do not
know what I might not be if I were not a king. I could die for my
people, Firmin, and you couldn't. No, don't say you could die for
me, because I know better. Don't think I forget my kingship,
Firmin, don't imagine that. I am a king, a kingly king, by right
divine. The fact that I am also a chattering young man makes not
the slightest difference to that. But the proper text-book for
kings, Firmin, is none of the court memoirs and Welt-Politik
books you would have me read; it is old Fraser's Golden Bough.
Have you read that, Firmin?'
Firmin had. 'Those were the authentic kings. In the end they
were cut up and a bit given to everybody. They sprinkled the
nations--with Kingship.'
Firmin turned himself round and faced his royal master.
'What do you intend to do, sir?' he asked. 'If you will not
listen to me, what do you propose to do this afternoon?'
The king flicked crumbs from his coat.
'Manifestly war has to stop for ever, Firmin. Manifestly this
can only be done by putting all the world under one government.
Our crowns and flags are in the way. Manifestly they must go.'
'Yes, sir,' interrupted Firmin, 'but WHAT government? I don't see
what government you get by a universal abdication!'
'Well,' said the king, with his hands about his knees, 'WE shall
be the government.'
'The conference?' exclaimed Firmin.
'Who else?' asked the king simply.
'It's perfectly simple,' he added to Firmin's tremendous silence.
'But,' cried Firmin, 'you must have sanctions! Will there be no
form of election, for example?'
'Why should there be?' asked the king, with intelligent
curiosity.
'The consent of the governed.'
'Firmin, we are just going to lay down our differences and take
over government. Without any election at all. Without any
sanction. The governed will show their consent by silence. If
any effective opposition arises we shall ask it to come in and
help. The true sanction of kingship is the grip upon the sceptre.
We aren't going to worry people to vote for us. I'm certain the
mass of men does not want to be bothered with such things....
We'll contrive a way for any one interested to join in. That's
quite enough in the way of democracy. Perhaps later--when things
don't matter.... We shall govern all right, Firmin. Government
only becomes difficult when the lawyers get hold of it, and since
these troubles began the lawyers are shy. Indeed, come to think
of it, I wonder where all the lawyers are.... Where are they? A
lot, of course, were bagged, some of the worst ones, when they
blew up my legislature. You never knew the late Lord Chancellor.
. . .
'Necessities bury rights. And create them. Lawyers live on dead
rights disinterred.... We've done with that way of living. We
won't have more law than a code can cover and beyond that
government will be free....
'Before the sun sets to-day, Firmin, trust me, we shall have made
our abdications, all of us, and declared the World Republic,
supreme and indivisible. I wonder what my august grandmother
would have made of it! All my rights! . . . And then we shall go
on governing. What else is there to do? All over the world we
shall declare that there is no longer mine or thine, but ours.
China, the United States, two-thirds of Europe, will certainly
fall in and obey. They will have to do so. What else can they
do? Their official rulers are here with us. They won't be able
to get together any sort of idea of not obeying us.... Then we
shall declare that every sort of property is held in trust for
the Republic....'
'But, sir!' cried Firmin, suddenly enlightened. 'Has this been
arranged already?'
'My dear Firmin, do you think we have come here, all of us, to
talk at large? The talking has been done for half a century.
Talking and writing. We are here to set the new thing, the
simple, obvious, necessary thing, going.'
He stood up.
Firmin, forgetting the habits of a score of years, remained
seated.
'WELL,' he said at last. 'And I have known nothing!'
The king smiled very cheerfully. He liked these talks with
Firmin.
Section 3
That conference upon the Brissago meadows was one of the most
heterogeneous collections of prominent people that has ever met
together. Principalities and powers, stripped and shattered until
all their pride and mystery were gone, met in a marvellous new
humility. Here were kings and emperors whose capitals were lakes
of flaming destruction, statesmen whose countries had become
chaos, scared politicians and financial potentates. Here were
leaders of thought and learned investigators dragged reluctantly
to the control of affairs. Altogether there were ninety-three of
them, Leblanc's conception of the head men of the world. They
had all come to the realisation of the simple truths that the
indefatigable Leblanc had hammered into them; and, drawing his
resources from the King of Italy, he had provisioned his
conference with a generous simplicity quite in accordance with
the rest of his character, and so at last was able to make his
astonishing and entirely rational appeal. He had appointed King
Egbert the president, he believed in this young man so firmly
that he completely dominated him, and he spoke himself as a
secretary might speak from the president's left hand, and
evidently did not realise himself that he was telling them all
exactly what they had to do. He imagined he was merely
recapitulating the obvious features of the situation for their
convenience. He was dressed in ill-fitting white silk clothes,
and he consulted a dingy little packet of notes as he spoke.
They put him out. He explained that he had never spoken from
notes before, but that this occasion was exceptional.
And then King Egbert spoke as he was expected to speak, and
Leblanc's spectacles moistened at that flow of generous
sentiment, most amiably and lightly expressed. 'We haven't to
stand on ceremony,' said the king, 'we have to govern the world.
We have always pretended to govern the world and here is our
opportunity.'
'Of course,' whispered Leblanc, nodding his head rapidly, 'of
course.'
'The world has been smashed up, and we have to put it on its
wheels again,' said King Egbert. 'And it is the simple common
sense of this crisis for all to help and none to seek advantage.
Is that our tone or not?'
The gathering was too old and seasoned and miscellaneous for any
great displays of enthusiasm, but that was its tone, and with an
astonishment that somehow became exhilarating it began to resign,
repudiate, and declare its intentions. Firmin, taking notes
behind his master, heard everything that had been foretold among
the yellow broom, come true. With a queer feeling that he was
dreaming, he assisted at the proclamation of the World State, and
saw the message taken out to the wireless operators to be
throbbed all round the habitable globe. 'And next,' said King
Egbert, with a cheerful excitement in his voice, 'we have to get
every atom of Carolinum and all the plant for making it, into our
control....'
Firman was not alone in his incredulity. Not a man there who was
not a very amiable, reasonable, benevolent creature at bottom;
some had been born to power and some had happened upon it, some
had struggled to get it, not clearly knowing what it was and what
it implied, but none was irreconcilably set upon its retention at
the price of cosmic disaster. Their minds had been prepared by
circumstances and sedulously cultivated by Leblanc; and now they
took the broad obvious road along which King Egbert was leading
them, with a mingled conviction of strangeness and necessity.
Things went very smoothly; the King of Italy explained the
arrangements that had been made for the protection of the camp
from any fantastic attack; a couple of thousand of aeroplanes,
each carrying a sharpshooter, guarded them, and there was an
excellent system of relays, and at night all the sky would be
searched by scores of lights, and the admirable Leblanc gave
luminous reasons for their camping just where they were and going
on with their administrative duties forthwith. He knew of this
place, because he had happened upon it when holiday-making with
Madame Leblanc twenty years and more ago. 'There is very simple
fare at present,' he explained, 'on account of the disturbed
state of the countries about us. But we have excellent fresh
milk, good red wine, beef, bread, salad, and lemons. . . . In a
few days I hope to place things in the hands of a more efficient
caterer....'
The members of the new world government dined at three long
tables on trestles, and down the middle of these tables Leblanc,
in spite of the barrenness of his menu, had contrived to have a
great multitude of beautiful roses. There was similar
accommodation for the secretaries and attendants at a lower level
down the mountain. The assembly dined as it had debated, in the
open air, and over the dark crags to the west the glowing June
sunset shone upon the banquet. There was no precedency now among
the ninety-three, and King Egbert found himself between a
pleasant little Japanese stranger in spectacles and his cousin of
Central Europe, and opposite a great Bengali leader and the
President of the United States of America. Beyond the Japanese
was Holsten, the old chemist, and Leblanc was a little way down
the other side.
The king was still cheerfully talkative and abounded in ideas. He
fell presently into an amiable controversy with the American, who
seemed to feel a lack of impressiveness in the occasion.
It was ever the Transatlantic tendency, due, no doubt, to the
necessity of handling public questions in a bulky and striking
manner, to over-emphasise and over-accentuate, and the president
was touched by his national failing. He suggested now that there
should be a new era, starting from that day as the first day of
the first year.
The king demurred.
'From this day forth, sir, man enters upon his heritage,' said
the American.
'Man,' said the king, 'is always entering upon his heritage. You
Americans have a peculiar weakness for anniversaries--if you will
forgive me saying so. Yes--I accuse you of a lust for dramatic
effect. Everything is happening always, but you want to say this
or this is the real instant in time and subordinate all the
others to it.'
The American said something about an epoch-making day.
'But surely,' said the king, 'you don't want us to condemn all
humanity to a world-wide annual Fourth of July for ever and ever
more. On account of this harmless necessary day of declarations.
No conceivable day could ever deserve that. Ah! you do not know,
as I do, the devastations of the memorable. My poor grandparents
were--RUBRICATED. The worst of these huge celebrations is that
they break up the dignified succession of one's contemporary
emotions. They interrupt. They set back. Suddenly out come the
flags and fireworks, and the old enthusiasms are furbished
up--and it's sheer destruction of the proper thing that ought to
be going on. Sufficient unto the day is the celebration thereof.
Let the dead past bury its dead. You see, in regard to the
calendar, I am for democracy and you are for aristocracy. All
things I hold, are august, and have a right to be lived through
on their merits. No day should be sacrificed on the grave of
departed events. What do you think of it, Wilhelm?'
'For the noble, yes, all days should be noble.'
'Exactly my position,' said the king, and felt pleased at what he
had been saying.
And then, since the American pressed his idea, the king contrived
to shift the talk from the question of celebrating the epoch they
were making to the question of the probabilities that lay ahead.
Here every one became diffident. They could see the world
unified and at peace, but what detail was to follow from that
unification they seemed indisposed to discuss. This diffidence
struck the king as remarkable. He plunged upon the possibilities
of science. All the huge expenditure that had hitherto gone into
unproductive naval and military preparations, must now, he
declared, place research upon a new footing. 'Where one man
worked we will have a thousand.' He appealed to Holsten. 'We
have only begun to peep into these possibilities,' he said. 'You
at any rate have sounded the vaults of the treasure house.'
'They are unfathomable,' smiled Holsten.
'Man,' said the American, with a manifest resolve to justify and
reinstate himself after the flickering contradictions of the
king, 'Man, I say, is only beginning to enter upon his heritage.'
'Tell us some of the things you believe we shall presently learn,
give us an idea of the things we may presently do,' said the king
to Holsten.
Holsten opened out the vistas....
'Science,' the king cried presently, 'is the new king of the
world.'
'OUR view,' said the president, 'is that sovereignty resides with
the people.'
'No!' said the king, 'the sovereign is a being more subtle than
that. And less arithmetical. Neither my family nor your
emancipated people. It is something that floats about us, and
above us, and through us. It is that common impersonal will and
sense of necessity of which Science is the best understood and
most typical aspect. It is the mind of the race. It is that
which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to its
demands....'
He paused and glanced down the table at Leblanc, and then
re-opened at his former antagonist.
'There is a disposition,' said the king, 'to regard this
gathering as if it were actually doing what it appears to be
doing, as if we ninety-odd men of our own free will and wisdom
were unifying the world. There is a temptation to consider
ourselves exceptionally fine fellows, and masterful men, and all
the rest of it. We are not. I doubt if we should average out as
anything abler than any other casually selected body of
ninety-odd men. We are no creators, we are consequences, we are
salvagers--or salvagees. The thing to-day is not ourselves but
the wind of conviction that has blown us hither....'
The American had to confess he could hardly agree with the king's
estimate of their average.
'Holster, perhaps, and one or two others, might lift us a
little,' the king conceded. 'But the rest of us?'
His eyes flitted once more towards Leblanc.
'Look at Leblanc,' he said. 'He's just a simple soul. There are
hundreds and thousands like him. I admit, a certain dexterity, a
certain lucidity, but there is not a country town in France where
there is not a Leblanc or so to be found about two o'clock in its
principal 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 4
So it was King Egbert talked at Brissago after they had
proclaimed the unity of the world. Every evening after that the
assembly dined together and talked at their ease and grew
accustomed to each other and sharpened each other's ideas, and
every day they worked together, and really for a time believed
that they were inventing a new government for the world. They
discussed a constitution. But there were matters needing
attention too urgently to wait for any constitution. They
attended to these incidentally. The constitution it was that
waited. It was presently found convenient to keep the
constitution waiting indefinitely as King Egbert had foreseen,
and meanwhile, with an increasing self-confidence, that council
went on governing....
On this first evening of all the council's gatherings, after King
Egbert had talked for a long time and drunken and praised very
abundantly the simple red wine of the country that Leblanc had
procured for them, he fathered about him a group of congenial
spirits and fell into a discourse upon simplicity, praising it
above all things and declaring that the ultimate aim of art,
religion, philosophy, and science alike was to simplify. He
instanced himself as a devotee to simplicity. And Leblanc he
instanced as a crowning instance of the splendour of this
quality. Upon that they all agreed.
When at last the company about the tables broke up, the king
found himself brimming over with a peculiar affection and
admiration for Leblanc, he made his way to him and drew him aside
and broached what he declared was a small matter. There was, he
said, a certain order in his gift that, unlike all other orders
and decorations in the world, had never been corrupted. It was
reserved for elderly men of supreme distinction, the acuteness of
whose gifts was already touched to mellowness, and it had
included the greatest names of every age so far as the advisers
of his family had been able to ascertain them. At present, the
king admitted, these matters of stars and badges were rather
obscured by more urgent affairs, for his own part he had never
set any value upon them at all, but a time might come when they
would be at least interesting, and in short he wished to confer
the Order of Merit upon Leblanc. His sole motive in doing so, he
added, was his strong desire to signalise his personal esteem.
He laid his hand upon the Frenchman's shoulder as he said these
things, with an almost brotherly affection. Leblanc received this
proposal with a modest confusion that greatly enhanced the king's
opinion of his admirable simplicity. He pointed out that eager
as he was to snatch at the proffered distinction, it might at the
present stage appear invidious, and he therefore suggested that
the conferring of it should be postponed until it could be made
the crown and conclusion of his services. The king was unable to
shake this resolution, and the two men parted with expressions of
mutual esteem.
The king then summoned Firmin in order to make a short note of a
number of things that he had said during the day. But after about
twenty minutes' work the sweet sleepiness of the mountain air
overcame him, and he dismissed Firmin and went to bed and fell
asleep at once, and slept with extreme satisfaction. He had had
an active, agreeable day.
Section 5
The establishment of the new order that was thus so humanly
begun, was, if one measures it by the standard of any preceding
age, a rapid progress. The fighting spirit of the world was
exhausted. Only here or there did fierceness linger. For long
decades the combative side in human affairs had been monstrously
exaggerated by the accidents of political separation. This now
became luminously plain. An enormous proportion of the force that
sustained armaments had been nothing more aggressive than the
fear of war and warlike neighbours. It is doubtful if any large
section of the men actually enlisted for fighting ever at any
time really hungered and thirsted for bloodshed and danger. That
kind of appetite was probably never very strong in the species
after the savage stage was past. The army was a profession, in
which killing had become a disagreeable possibility rather than
an eventful certainty. If one reads the old newspapers and
periodicals of that time, which did so much to keep militarism
alive, one finds very little about glory and adventure and a
constant harping on the disagreeableness of invasion and
subjugation. In one word, militarism was funk. The belligerent
resolution of the armed Europe of the twentieth century was the
resolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to plunge. And now that
its weapons were exploding in its hands, Europe was only too
eager to drop them, and abandon this fancied refuge of violence.
For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness;
nearly all the clever people who had hitherto sustained the
ancient belligerent separations had now been brought to realise
the need for simplicity of attitude and openness of mind; and in
this atmosphere of moral renascence, there was little attempt to
get negotiable advantages out of resistance to the new order.
Human beings are foolish enough no doubt, but few have stopped to
haggle in a fire-escape. The council had its way with them. The
band of 'patriots' who seized the laboratories and arsenal just
outside Osaka and tried to rouse Japan to revolt against
inclusion in the Republic of Mankind, found they had
miscalculated the national pride and met the swift vengeance of
their own countrymen. That fight in the arsenal was a vivid
incident in this closing chapter of the history of war. To the
last the 'patriots' were undecided whether, in the event of a
defeat, they would explode their supply of atomic bombs or not.
They were fighting with swords outside the iridium doors, and the
moderates of their number were at bay and on the verge of
destruction, only ten, indeed, remained unwounded, when the
republicans burst in to the rescue....
Section 6
One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in
the new rule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism,
the 'Slavic Fox,' the King of the Balkans. He debated and
delayed his submissions. He showed an extraordinary combination
of cunning and temerity in his evasion of the repeated summonses
from Brissago. He affected ill-health and a great preoccupation
with his new official mistress, for his semi-barbaric court was
arranged on the best romantic models. His tactics were ably
seconded by Doctor Pestovitch, his chief minister. Failing to
establish his claims to complete independence, King Ferdinand
Charles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be treated as a
protected state. Finally he professed an unconvincing
submission, and put a mass of obstacles in the way of the
transfer of his national officials to the new government. In
these things he was enthusiastically supported by his subjects,
still for the most part an illiterate peasantry, passionately if
confusedly patriotic, and so far with no practical knowledge of
the effect of atomic bombs. More particularly he retained control
of all the Balkan aeroplanes.
For once the extreme 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-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 machine had broken, and three black objects,
each with two handles like the ears of a pitcher, lay peacefully
amidst the litter.
These objects were so tremendously important in the eyes of their
captors that they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and
broken amidst the wreckage as they might have disregarded dead
frogs by a country pathway.
'By God,' cried the first. 'Here they are!'
'And unbroken!' said the second.
'I've never seen the things before,' said the first.
'Bigger than I thought,' said the second.
The third comer arrived. He stared for a moment at the bombs and
then turned his eyes to the dead man with a crushed chest who lay
in a muddy place among the green stems under the centre of the
machine.
'One can take no risks,' he said, with a faint suggestion of
apology.
The other two now also turned to the victims. 'We must signal,'
said the first man. A shadow passed between them and the sun,
and they looked up to see the aeroplane that had fired the last
shot. 'Shall we signal?' came a megaphone hail.
'Three bombs,' they answered together.
'Where do they come from?' asked the megaphone.
The three sharpshooters looked at each other and then moved
towards the dead men. One of them had an idea. 'Signal that
first,' he said, 'while we look.' They were joined by their
aviators for the search, and all six men began a hunt that was
necessarily brutal in its haste, for some indication of identity.
They examined the men's pockets, their bloodstained clothes, the
machine, the framework. They turned the bodies over and flung
them aside. There was not a tattoo mark. . . . Everything was
elaborately free of any indication of its origin.
'We can't find out!' they called at last.
'Not a sign?'
'Not a sign.'
'I'm coming down,' said the man overhead....
Section 7
The Slavic fox stood upon a metal balcony in his picturesque Art
Nouveau palace that gave upon the precipice that overhung his
bright little capital, and beside him stood Pestovitch, grizzled
and cunning, and now full of an ill-suppressed excitement. Behind
them the window opened into a large room, richly decorated in
aluminium and crimson enamel, across which the king, as he
glanced ever and again over his shoulder with a gesture of
inquiry, could see through the two open doors of a little azure
walled antechamber the wireless operator in the turret working at
his incessant transcription. Two pompously uniformed messengers
waited listlessly in this apartment. The room was furnished with
a stately dignity, and had in the middle of it a big green
baize-covered table with the massive white metal inkpots and
antiquated sandboxes natural to a new but romantic monarchy. It
was the king's council chamber and about it now, in attitudes of
suspended intrigue, stood the half-dozen ministers who
constituted his cabinet. They had been summoned for twelve
o'clock, but still at half-past twelve the king loitered in the
balcony and seemed to be waiting for some news that did not come.
The king and his minister had talked at first in whispers; they
had fallen silent, for they found little now to express except a
vague anxiety. Away there on the mountain side were the white
metal roofs of the long farm buildings beneath which the bomb
factory and the bombs were hidden. (The chemist who had made all
these for the king had died suddenly after the declaration of
Brissago.) Nobody knew of that store of mischief now but the king
and his adviser and three heavily faithful attendants; the
aviators who waited now in the midday blaze with their
bomb-carrying machines and their passenger bomb-throwers in the
exercising grounds of the motor-cyclist barracks below were still
in ignorance of the position of the ammunition they were
presently to take up. It was time they started if the scheme was
to work as Pestovitch had planned it. It was a magnificent plan.
It aimed at no less than the Empire of the World. The government
of idealists and professors away there at Brissago was to be
blown to fragments, and then east, west, north, and south those
aeroplanes would go swarming over a world that had disarmed
itself, to proclaim Ferdinand Charles, the new 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 king could well be doing, and so, when at last the ex-king
Egbert, whom the council had sent as its envoy, arrived upon the
scene, he discovered the king almost theatrically posed at the
head of his councillors in the midst of his court. The door upon
the wireless operators was shut.
The ex-king from Brissago came like a draught through the
curtains and attendants that gave a wide margin to King
Ferdinand's state, and the familiar confidence of his manner
belied a certain hardness in his eye. Firmin trotted behind him,
and no one else was with him. And as Ferdinand Charles rose to
greet him, there came into the heart of the Balkan king again
that same chilly feeling that he had felt upon the balcony--and
it passed at the careless gestures of his guest. For surely any
one might outwit this foolish talker who, for a mere idea and at
the command of a little French rationalist in spectacles, had
thrown away the most ancient crown in all the world.
One must deny, deny....
And then slowly and quite tiresomely he realised that there was
nothing to deny. His visitor, with an amiable ease, went on
talking about everything in debate between himself and Brissago
except----.
Could it be that they had been delayed? Could it be that they
had had to drop for repairs and were still uncaptured? Could it
be that even now while this fool babbled, they were over there
among the mountains heaving their deadly charge over the side of
the aeroplane?
Strange hopes began to lift the tail of the Slavic fox again.
What was the man saying? One must talk to him anyhow until one
knew. At any moment the little brass door behind him might open
with the news of Brissago blown to atoms. Then it would be a
delightful relief to the present tension to arrest this chatterer
forthwith. He might be killed perhaps. What?
The king was repeating his observation. 'They have a ridiculous
fancy that your confidence is based on the possession of atomic
bombs.'
King Ferdinand Charles pulled himself together. He protested.
'Oh, quite so,' said the ex-king, 'quite so.'
'What grounds?' The ex-king permitted himself a gesture and the
ghost of a chuckle--why the devil should he chuckle? 'Practically
none,' he said. 'But of course with these things one has to be
so careful.'
And then again for an instant something--like the faintest shadow
of derision--gleamed out of the envoy's eyes and recalled that
chilly feeling to King Ferdinand's spine.
Some kindred depression had come to Pestovitch, who had been
watching the drawn intensity of Firmin's face. He came to the
help of his master, who, he feared, might protest too much.
'A search!' cried the king. 'An embargo on our aeroplanes.'
'Only a temporary expedient,' said the ex-king Egbert, 'while the
search is going on.'
The king appealed to his council.
'The people will never permit it, sire,' said a bustling little
man in a gorgeous uniform.
'You'll have to make 'em,' said the ex-king, genially addressing
all the councillors.
King Ferdinand glanced at the closed brass door through which no
news would come.
'When would you want to have this search?'
The ex-king was radiant. 'We couldn't possibly do it until the
day after to-morrow,' he said.
'Just the capital?'
'Where else?' asked the ex-king, still more cheerfully.
'For my own part,' said the ex-king confidentially, 'I think the
whole business ridiculous. Who would be such a fool as to hide
atomic bombs? Nobody. Certain hanging if he's caught--certain,
and almost certain blowing up if he isn't. But nowadays I have to
take orders like the rest of the world. And here I am.'
The king thought he had never met such detestable geniality. He
glanced at Pestovitch, who nodded almost imperceptibly. It was
well, anyhow, to have a fool to deal with. They might have sent a
diplomatist. 'Of course,' said the king, 'I recognise the
overpowering force--and a kind of logic--in these orders from
Brissago.'
'I knew you would,' said the ex-king, with an air of relief, 'and
so let us arrange----'
They arranged with a certain informality. No Balkan aeroplane
was to adventure into the air until the search was concluded, and
meanwhile the fleets of the world government would soar and
circle in the sky. The towns were to be placarded with offers of
reward to any one who would help in the discovery of atomic
bombs....
'You will sign that,' said the ex-king.
'Why?'
'To show that we aren't in any way hostile to you.'
Pestovitch nodded 'yes' to his master.
'And then, you see,' said the ex-king in that easy way of his,
'we'll have a lot of men here, borrow help from your police, and
run through all your things. And then everything will be over.
Meanwhile, if I may be your guest....' When presently Pestovitch
was alone with the king again, he found him in a state of
jangling emotions. His spirit was tossing like a wind-whipped
sea. One moment he was exalted and full of contempt for 'that
ass' and his search; the next he was down in a pit of dread.
'They will find them, Pestovitch, and then he'll hang us.'
'Hang us?'
The king put his long nose into his councillor's face. 'That
grinning brute WANTS to hang us,' he said. 'And hang us he will,
if we give him a shadow of a chance.'
'But all their Modern State Civilisation!'
'Do you think there's any pity in that crew of Godless,
Vivisecting Prigs?' cried this last king of romance. 'Do you
think, Pestovitch, they understand anything of a high ambition or
a splendid dream? Do you think that our gallant and sublime
adventure has any appeal to them? Here am I, the last and
greatest and most romantic of the 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....'
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 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 in the automobile; a gripping of wrists and a blow. 'I
can't go through with it,' repeated the king, 'I can't go through
with it.'
'But they'll hang us,' said Pestovitch.
'Not if we were to give up now. Not if we were to surrender the
bombs. It is you who brought me into this....'
At last Pestovitch compromised. There was an inn perhaps half a
mile from the farm. They could alight there and the king could
get brandy, and rest his nerves for a time. And if he still
thought fit to go back he could go back.
'See,' said Pestovitch, 'the light has gone again.'
The king peered up. 'I believe he's following us without a
light,' said the king.
In the little old dirty inn the king hung doubtful for a time,
and was for going back and throwing himself on the mercy of the
council. 'If there is a council,' said Pestovitch. 'By this time
your bombs may have settled it.
'But if so, these infernal aeroplanes would go.'
'They may not know yet.'
'But, Pestovitch, why couldn't you do all this without me?'
Pestovitch made no answer for a moment. 'I was for leaving the
bombs in their place,' he said at last, and went to the window.
About their conveyance shone a circle of bright light. Pestovitch
had a brilliant idea. 'I will send my secretary out to make a
kind of dispute with the driver. Something that will make them
watch up above there. Meanwhile you and I and Peter will go out
by the back way and up by the hedges to the farm....'
It was worthy of his subtle reputation and it answered passing
well.
In ten minutes they were tumbling over the wall of the farm-yard,
wet, muddy, and breathless, but unobserved. But as they ran
towards the barns the king gave vent to something between a groan
and a curse, and all about them shone the light--and passed.
But had it passed at once or lingered for just a second?
'They didn't see us,' said Peter.
'I don't think they saw us,' said the king, and stared as the
light went swooping up the mountain side, hung for a second about
a hayrick, and then came pouring back.
'In the barn!' cried the king.
He bruised his shin against something, and then all three men
were inside the huge steel-girdered barn in which stood the two
motor hay lorries that were to take the bombs away. Kurt and
Abel, the two brothers of Peter, had brought the lorries thither
in daylight. They had the upper half of the loads of hay thrown
off, ready to cover the bombs, so soon as the king should show
the hiding-place. 'There's a sort of pit here,' said the king.
'Don't light another lantern. This key of mine releases a
ring....'
For a time scarcely a word was spoken in the darkness of the
barn. There was the sound of a slab being lifted and then of feet
descending a ladder into a pit. Then whispering and then heavy
breathing as Kurt came struggling up with the first of the hidden
bombs.
'We shall do it yet,' said the king. And then he gasped. 'Curse
that light. Why in the name of Heaven didn't we shut the barn
door?' For the great door stood wide open and all the empty,
lifeless yard outside and the door and six feet of the floor of
the barn were in the blue glare of an inquiring searchlight.
'Shut the door, Peter,' said Pestovitch.
'No,' cried the king, too late, as Peter went forward into the
light. 'Don't show yourself!' cried the king. Kurt made a step
forward and plucked his brother back. For a time all five men
stood still. It seemed that light would never go and then
abruptly it was turned off, leaving them blinded. 'Now,' said
the king uneasily, 'now shut the door.'
'Not completely,' cried Pestovitch. 'Leave a chink for us to go
out by....'
It was hot work shifting those bombs, and the king worked for a
time like a common man. Kurt and Abel carried the great things
up and Peter brought them to the carts, and the king and
Pestovitch helped him to place them among the hay. They made as
little noise as they could....
'Ssh!' cried the king. 'What's that?'
But Kurt and Abel did not hear, and came blundering up the ladder
with the last of the load.
'Ssh!' Peter ran forward to them with a whispered remonstrance.
Now they were still.
The barn door opened a little wider, and against the dim blue
light outside they saw the black shape of a man.
'Any one here?' he asked, speaking with an Italian accent.
The king broke into a cold perspiration. Then Pestovitch
answered: 'Only a poor farmer loading hay,' he said, and picked
up a huge hay fork and went forward softly.
'You load your hay at a very bad time and in a very bad light,'
said the man at the door, peering in. 'Have you no electric
light here?'
Then suddenly he turned on an electric torch, and as he did so
Pestovitch sprang forward. 'Get out of my barn!' he cried, and
drove the fork full at the intruder's chest. He had a vague idea
that so he might stab the man to silence. But the man shouted
loudly as the prongs pierced him and drove him backward, and
instantly there was a sound of feet running across the yard.
'Bombs,' cried the man upon the ground, struggling with the
prongs in his hand, and as Pestovitch staggered forward into view
with the force of his own thrust, he was shot through the body by
one of the two new-comers.
The man on the ground was badly hurt but plucky. 'Bombs,' he
repeated, and struggled up into a kneeling position and held his
electric torch full upon the face of the king. 'Shoot them,' he
cried, coughing and spitting blood, so that the halo of light
round the king's head danced about.
For a moment in that shivering circle of light the two men saw
the king kneeling up in the cart and Peter on the barn floor
beside him. The old fox looked at them sideways--snared, a
white-faced evil thing. And then, as with a faltering suicidal
heroism, he leant forward over the bomb before him, they fired
together and shot him through the head.
The upper part of his face seemed to vanish.
'Shoot them,' cried the man who had been stabbed. 'Shoot them
all!'
And then his light went out, and he rolled over with a groan at
the feet of his comrades.
But each carried a light of his own, and in another moment
everything in the barn was visible again. They shot Peter even
as he held up his hands in sign of surrender.
Kurt and Abel at the head of the ladder hesitated for a moment,
and then plunged backward into the pit. 'If we don't kill them,'
said one of the sharpshooters, 'they'll blow us to rags. They've
gone down that hatchway. Come! . . .
'Here they are. Hands up! I say. Hold your light while I
shoot....'
Section 8
It was still quite dark when his valet and Firmin came together
and told the ex-king Egbert that the business was settled.
He started up into a sitting position on the side of his bed.
'Did he go out?' asked the ex-king.
'He is dead,' said Firmin. 'He was shot.'
The ex-king reflected. 'That's about the best thing that could
have happened,' he said. 'Where are the bombs? In that
farm-house on the opposite hill-side! Why! the place is in sight!
Let us go. I'll dress. Is there any one in the place, Firmin, to
get us a cup of coffee?'
Through the hungry twilight of the dawn the ex-king's automobile
carried him to the farm-house where the last rebel king was lying
among his bombs. The rim of the sky flashed, the east grew
bright, and the sun was just rising over the hills when King
Egbert reached the farm-yard. There he found the hay lorries
drawn out from the barn with the dreadful bombs still packed upon
them. A couple of score of aviators held the yard, and outside a
few peasants stood in a little group and stared, ignorant as yet
of what had happened. Against the stone wall of the farm-yard
five bodies were lying neatly side by side, and Pestovitch had an
expression of surprise on his face and the king was chiefly
identifiable by his long white hands and his blonde moustache.
The wounded aeronaut had been carried down to the inn. And after
the ex-king had given directions in what manner the bombs were to
be taken to the new special laboratories above Zurich, where they
could be unpacked in an atmosphere of chlorine, he turned to
these five still shapes.
Their five pairs of feet stuck out with a curious stiff
unanimity....
'What else was there to do?' he said in answer to some internal
protest.
'I wonder, Firmin, if there are any more of them?'
'Bombs, sir?' asked Firmin.
'No, such kings....
'The pitiful folly of it!' said the ex-king, following his
thoughts. 'Firmin,' as an ex-professor of International Politics,
I think it falls to you to bury them. There? . . . No, don't put
them near the well. People will have to drink from that well.
Bury them over there, some way off in the field.'
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE NEW PHASE
Section 1
The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we
may view it now from the clarifying standpoint of things
accomplished, was in its broad issues a simple one. Essentially
it was to place social organisation upon the new footing that the
swift, accelerated advance of human knowledge had rendered
necessary. The council was gathered together with the haste of a
salvage expedition, and it was confronted with wreckage; but the
wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only possibilities of
the case were either the relapse of mankind to the agricultural
barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the
acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social
order. The old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy,
particularism, and belligerency, were incompatible with the
monstrous destructive power of the new appliances the inhuman
logic of science had produced. The equilibrium could be restored
only by civilisation destroying itself down to a level at which
modern apparatus could no longer be produced, or by human nature
adapting itself in its institutions to the new conditions. It was
for the latter alternative that the assembly existed.
Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The
sudden development of atomic science did but precipitate and
render rapid and dramatic a clash between the new and the
customary that had been gathering since ever the first flint was
chipped or the first fire built together. From the day when man
contrived himself a tool and suffered another male to draw near
him, he ceased to be altogether a thing of instinct and
untroubled convictions. From that day forth a widening breach can
be traced between his egotistical passions and the social need.
Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead, and his
passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and
the tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter
and wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their
development. He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite
tamed to the home. Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest
to keep him within the bounds of the plough-life and the
beast-tending. Slowly a vast system of traditional imperatives
superposed itself upon his instincts, imperatives that were
admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, that cattle-mincer,
who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man.
And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his
tilling came civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural
surplus. It appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed
boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded the seas, and
within its primitive courts, within temples grown rich and
leisurely and amidst the gathering medley of the seaport towns
rose speculation and philosophy and science, and the beginning of
the new order that has at last established itself as human life.
Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then with an accumulating
velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole did not
seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand. For a
time men took up and used these new things and the new powers
inadvertently as they came to him, recking nothing of the
consequences. For endless generations change led him very
gently. But when he had been led far enough, change quickened the
pace. It was with a series of shocks that he realised at last
that he was living the old life less and less and a new life more
and more.
Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between
the old way of living and the new were intense. They were far
intenser than they had been even at the collapse of the Roman
imperial system. On the one hand was the ancient life of the
family and the small community and the petty industry, on the
other was a new life on a larger scale, with remoter horizons and
a strange sense of purpose. Already it was growing clear that men
must live on one side or the other. One could not have little
tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the same market,
sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and
arrows and aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or
illiterate peasant industries and power-driven factories in the
same world. And still less it was possible that one could have
the ideas and ambitions and greed and jealousy of peasants
equipped with the vast appliances of the new age. If there had
been no atomic bombs to bring together most of the directing
intelligence of the world to that hasty conference at Brissago,
there would still have been, extended over great areas and a
considerable space of time perhaps, a less formal conference of
responsible and understanding people upon the perplexities of
this world-wide opposition. If the work of Holsten had been
spread over centuries and imparted to the world by imperceptible
degrees, it would nevertheless have made it necessary for men to
take counsel upon and set a plan for the future. Indeed already
there had been accumulating for a hundred years before the crisis
a literature of foresight; there was a whole mass of 'Modern
State' scheming available for the conference to go upon. These
bombs did but accentuate and dramatise an already developing
problem.
Section 2
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 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 3
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, 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 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 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 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 4
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?'
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.'
'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 5
This effect of chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly
apprehended deepens as Barnet's record passes on to tell of the
approach of winter. It was too much for the great mass of those
unwilling and incompetent nomads to realise that an age had
ended, that the old help and guidance existed no longer, that
times would not mend again, however patiently they held out. They
were still in many cases looking to Paris when the first
snowflakes of that pitiless January came swirling about them. The
story grows grimmer....
If it is less monstrously tragic after Barnet's return to
England, it is, if anything, harder. England was a spectacle of
fear-embittered householders, hiding food, crushing out robbery,
driving the starving wanderers from every faltering place upon
the roads lest they should die inconveniently and reproachfully
on the doorsteps of those who had failed to urge them onward....
The remnants of the British troops left France finally in March,
after urgent representations from the provisional government at
Orleans that they could be supported no longer. They seem to have
been a fairly well-behaved, but highly parasitic force
throughout, though Barnet is clearly of opinion that they did
much to suppress sporadic brigandage and maintain social order.
He came home to a famine-stricken country, and his picture of the
England of that spring is one of miserable patience and desperate
expedients. The country was suffering much more than France,
because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on which it had
hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, and
boiled nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid
off. On the way thither they saw four men hanging from the
telegraph posts by the roadside, who had been hung for stealing
swedes. The labour refuges of Kent, he discovered, were feeding
their crowds of casual wanderers on bread into which clay and
sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there was a shortage of even
such fare as that. He himself struck across country to
Winchester, fearing to approach the bomb-poisoned district round
London, and at Winchester he had the luck to be taken on as one
of the wireless assistants at the central station and given
regular rations. The station stood in a commanding position on
the chalk hill that overlooks the town from the east....
Thence he must have assisted in the transmission of the endless
cipher messages that preceded the gathering at Brissago, and
there it was that the Brissago proclamation of the end of the war
and the establishment of a world government came under his hands.
He was feeling ill and apathetic that day, and he did not realise
what it was he was transcribing. He did it mechanically, as a
part of his tedious duty.
Afterwards there came a rush of messages arising out of the
declaration that strained him very much, and in the evening when
he was relieved, he ate his scanty supper and then went out upon
the little balcony before the station, to smoke and rest his
brains after this sudden and as yet inexplicable press of duty.
It was a very beautiful, still evening. He fell talking to a
fellow operator, and for the first time, he declares, 'I began to
understand what it was all about. I began to see just what
enormous issues had been under my hands for the past four hours.
But I became incredulous after my first stimulation. "This is
some sort of Bunkum," I said very sagely.
'My colleague was more hopeful. "It means an end to
bomb-throwing and destruction," he said. "It means that
presently corn will come from America."
' "Who is going to send corn when there is no more value in
money?" I asked.
'Suddenly we were startled by a clashing from the town below. The
cathedral bells, which had been silent ever since I had come into
the district, were beginning, with a sort of rheumatic
difficulty, to ring. Presently they warmed a little to the work,
and we realised what was going on. They were ringing a peal. We
listened with an unbelieving astonishment and looking into each
other's yellow faces.
' "They mean it," said my colleague.
' "But what can they do now?" I asked. "Everything is broken
down...." '
And on that sentence, with an unexpected artistry, Barnet
abruptly ends his story.
Section 6
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
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 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
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....
Section 7
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
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....
Section 8
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
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 9
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
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 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. 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 10
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 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, 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 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 11
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 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 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 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 12
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 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 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 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.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
Section 1
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.
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.
'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 2
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.'
'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!'
'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.
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 3
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
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 4
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 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...." 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 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.
'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 5
'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 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
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
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 6
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 7
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....
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
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.'
'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 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 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
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 8
'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 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?'
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.
Section 9
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 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 10
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.
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.