THE WORLD SET FREE

H. G. WELLS

We Are All Things That Make And Pass, Striving Upon A Hidden Mission, Out To The Open Sea. 

TO

Frederick Soddy's

'Interpretation Of Radium'

This Story, Which Owes Long Passages To The Eleventh Chapter Of ThatBook, Acknowledges And Inscribes Itself

PREFACE

THE WORLD SET FREE was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, andit is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, storieswhich all turn on the possible developments in the future of somecontemporary force or group of forces. The World Set Free was writtenunder the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent person inthe world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of avertingit, but few of us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how near thecrash was to us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is putoff until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the reason forwhat will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a prophet, the authormust confess he has always been inclined to be rather a slow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of reality, for example, beat theforecast in Anticipations by about twenty years or so. I suppose adesire not to shock the sceptical reader's sense of use and wont andperhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have something to dowith this dating forward of one's main events, but in the particularcase of The World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holdingthe Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get wellforward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy. 1956--or forthat matter 2056--may be none too late for that crowning revolution inhuman potentialities. And apart from this procrastination of over fortyyears, the guess at the opening phase of the war was fairly lucky; theforecast of an alliance of the Central Empires, the opening campaignthrough the Netherlands, and the despatch of the British ExpeditionaryForce were all justified before the book had been published six months. And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after thereality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the essentials ofthe matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second, Section 2), on whichthe writer may congratulate himself, is the forecast that under modernconditions it would be quite impossible for any great general to emergeto supremacy and concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of eitherside. There could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard thescientific corps muttering, 'These old fools, ' exactly as it is hereforetold. 

These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story faroutnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of interestnow; the thesis that because of the development of scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no longerpossible in the world, that to attempt to keep on with the old systemis to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroyour race altogether. The remaining interest of this book now is thesustained validity of this thesis and the discussion of the possibleending of war on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanityto break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind. Ihave represented the native common sense of the French mind and ofthe English mind--for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be 'God'sEnglishman'--leading mankind towards a bold and resolute effort ofsalvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the school bookfootnotes say, compare to-day's newspaper. Instead of a frank andhonourable gathering of leading men, Englishman meeting German andFrenchman Russian, brothers in their offences and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in Geneva at the other end ofSwitzerland a poor little League of (Allied) Nations (excluding theUnited States, Russia, and most of the 'subject peoples' of the world), meeting obscurely amidst a world-wide disregard to make impotentgestures at the leading problems of the debacle. Either the disaster hasnot been vast enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict thenecessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion. Just asthe world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity and thought thatincrease would go on for ever, so now it would seem the world is growingaccustomed to a steady glide towards social disintegration, and thinksthat 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 andthunderous of lessons pale into disregard. 

The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question whetherit is still possible to bring about an outbreak of creative sanity inmankind, to avert this steady glide to destruction, is now one of themost urgent in the world. It is clear that the writer is temperamentallydisposed to hope that there is such a possibility. But he has toconfess that he sees few signs of any such breadth of understanding andsteadfastness of will as an effectual effort to turn the rush of humanaffairs demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old institutions carriesus on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is there any plainrecognition of the idea of a human commonweal as something overridingany national and patriotic consideration, and that is in the workingclass movement throughout the world. And labour internationalism isclosely bound up with conceptions of a profound social revolution. Ifworld peace is to be attained through labour internationalism, it willhave to be attained at the price of the completest social and economicreconstruction and by passing through a phase of revolution that willcertainly be violent, that may be very bloody, which may be prolongedthrough a long period, and may in the end fail to achieve anything butsocial destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is in thelabour class, and the labour class alone, that any conception of a worldrule and a world peace has so far appeared. The dream of The World SetFree, a dream of highly educated and highly favoured leading and rulingmen, 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 1

THE history of mankind is the history of the attainment of externalpower. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of histerrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural strength andbodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning and the rough implementof stone. So he passed beyond the ape. From that he expands. Presentlyhe added to himself the power of the horse and the ox, he borrowedthe carrying strength of water and the driving force of the wind, hequickened his fire by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed firstwith copper and then with iron, increased and varied and became moreelaborate and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made hisway easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social relationshipsand increased his efficiency by the division of labour. He began tostore up knowledge. Contrivance followed contrivance, each making itpossible 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 ofa million years ago the utmost man was a savage, a being scarcelyarticulate, sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewnflint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile activitydeclined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would havesought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical rivervalleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his little herds, amale, a few females, a child or so. 

He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led. He fledthe cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the promise of swordand spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of coal; he drank water muddywith the clay that would one day make cups of porcelain; he chewed theear of wild wheat he had plucked and gazed with a dim speculation in hiseyes at the birds that soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he becameaware of the scent of another male and rose up roaring, his roarsthe formless precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a greatindividualist, that original, he suffered none other than himself. 

So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor ofall of us, fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly. 

Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened thetiger's claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus to the swiftgrace 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 andoftenest; the finer hand, the quicker eye, the bigger brain, the betterbalanced body prevailed; age by age, the implements were a little bettermade, the man a little more delicately adjusted to his possibilities. Hebecame more social; his herd grew larger; no longer did each man killor drive out his growing sons; a system of taboos made them tolerableto him, and they revered him alive and soon even after he was dead, andwere his allies against the beasts and the rest of mankind. (But theywere forbidden to touch the women of the tribe, they had to go out andcapture women for themselves, and each son fled from his stepmother andhid from her lest the anger of the Old Man should be roused. All theworld over, even to this day, these ancient inevitable taboos can betraced. ) And now instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire wasbetter tended and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, thecreature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him, storingfood--until sometimes the neglected grass-seed sprouted again and gave afirst 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 andhis fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the squatting-placeand dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. He scratched upon a boneand found resemblance and pursued it and began pictorial art, mouldedthe soft, warm clay of the river brink between his fingers, and found apleasure in its patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form ofvessels, and found that it would hold water. He watched the streamingriver, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant watercame; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare itand spear it as it went down to its resting-place amidst the distanthills. Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once indeed hehad done so--at least that some one had done so--he mixed that perhapswith another dream almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had beenbeset; and therewith began fiction--pointing a way to achievement--andthe august prophetic procession of tales. 

For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations thatlife of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the ripening of thatphase of human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chippedflint to the first implements of polished stone, was two or threethousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by human standards, did humanity gather itself together out of the dimintimations of the beast. And that first glimmering of speculation, thatfirst story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushedunder his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulouslistener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the mostmarvellous 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 itseemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget after the mannerof all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. About him, hiddenfrom him by the thinnest of veils, were the untouched sources of Power, whose magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even to-day, Power thatcould make his every conceivable dream come real. But the feet of therace were in the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing. 

At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food isabundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his earlierjealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less urgently, moresocial and tolerant and amenable, achieved a larger community. Therebegan a division of labour, certain of the older men specialised inknowledge and direction, a strong man took the fatherly leadership inwar, and priest and king began to develop their roles in the openingdrama of man's history. The priest's solicitude was seed-time andharvest and fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a hundredriver valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth therewere already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. Theyflourished 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 wealthof Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed certainanimals, he developed his primordially haphazard agriculture into aritual, 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 tosupplement his stone, he hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddleddown his river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel and madethe first roads. But his chief activity for a hundred centuries andmore, was the subjugation of himself and others to larger and largersocieties. The history of man is not simply the conquest of externalpower; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses, that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his handsfrom taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents association. From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of thePeace of the World, man's dealings were chiefly with himself and hisfellow man, trading, bargaining, law-making, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating, and every little increment in Power, heturned at once and always turns to the purposes of this confusedelaborate struggle to socialise. To incorporate and comprehend hisfellow men into a community of purpose became the last and greatest ofhis instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stoneage was over he had become a political animal. He made astonishinglyfar-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then ofwriting and making records, and with that his town communities began tostretch out to dominion; in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, andthe great Chinese rivers, the first empires and the first written lawshad their beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiersand knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which hadbeen a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of piratepolities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The historyof Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the RomanEmpire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last, aped Caesarand called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind. Measuredby the duration of human life it is a vast space of time between thatfirst dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the aeroplane, but by the scalethat looks back to the makers of the eoliths, it is all of it a story ofyesterday. 

Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this periodof the warring states, while men's minds were chiefly preoccupied bypolitics and mutual aggression, their progress in the acquirement ofexternal Power was slow--rapid in comparison with the progress of theold stone age, but slow in comparison with this new age of systematicdiscovery in which we live. They did not very greatly alter the weaponsand tactics of warfare, the methods of agriculture, seamanship, theirknowledge of the habitable globe, or the devices and utensils ofdomestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and the days whenChristopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were inventions andchanges, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out andthen forgotten again; it was, on the whole, a progress, but it containedno steps; the peasant life was the same, there were already priests andlawyers and town craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers doctors, wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria andsouth-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they weredoing much the same things and living much the same life as they were inEurope in A. D. 1500. The English excavators of the year A. D. 1900could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and disinter legaldocuments, domestic accounts, and family correspondence that they couldread with the completest sympathy. There were great religious andmoral changes throughout the period, empires and republics replaced oneanother, Italy tried a vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slaverywas tried again and again and failed and failed and was still to betested again and rejected again in the New World; Christianity andMohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults, butessentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind tomaterial conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever. The idea ofrevolutionary changes in the material conditions of life would have beenentirely strange to human thought through all that time. 

Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for hisopportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, thewars and processions, the castle building and cathedral building, thearts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the crusadesand trading journeys of the middle ages. He no longer speculatedwith the untrammelled freedom of the stone-age savage; authoritativeexplanations of everything barred his path; but he speculated with abetter brain, sat idle and gazed at circling stars in the sky and musedupon the coin and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certainleisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be founddissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with theassurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbolsin the world about them, questioning the finality of scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages of history there were men to whom this whisper hadcome of hidden things about them. They could no longer lead ordinarylives nor content themselves with the common things of this world oncethey had heard this voice. And mostly they believed not only that allthis world was as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at, but that these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men bychance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among rare andcurious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd utilisablething, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied discovery, sometimespretending to find. The world of every day laughed at these eccentricbeings, or found them annoying and ill-treated them, or was seizedwith fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of them, or withcovetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the greater partheeded them not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had firstdreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his blood anddescent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly, was the snare thatwill some day catch the sun. 

Section 3

Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court ofSforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His common-placebooks are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations ofthe methods of the early aviators. Durer was his parallel and RogerBacon--whom the Franciscans silenced--of his kindred. Such a man againin an earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power ofsteam nineteen hundred years before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier thelegendary Daedalus of Cnossos. All up and down the record of historywhenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekersappeared. And half the alchemists were of their tribe. 

When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might havesupposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive engine. Butthey could see nothing of the sort. They were not yet beginning to thinkof seeing things; their metallurgy was all too poor to make suchengines even had they thought of them. For a time they could not makeinstruments sound enough to stand this new force even for so rough apurpose as hurling a missile. Their first guns had barrels of cooperedtimber, and the world waited for more than five hundred years before theexplosive engine came. 

Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before theworld could use their findings for any but the roughest, most obviouspurposes. If man in general was not still as absolutely blind to theunconquered energies about him as his paleolithic precursor, he was atbest purblind. 

Section 4

The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on theverge of discovery, before they began to influence human lives. 

There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised andforgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed thatcoal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand before itdawned upon men that here was something more than a curiosity. And it isto be remarked that the first recorded suggestion for the use of steamwas in war; there is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed tofire shot out of corked iron bottles full of heated water. The miningof coal for fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men hadever done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam-engine and thesteam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of logicalnecessity. It is the most interesting and instructive chapter inthe history of the human intelligence, the history of steam from itsbeginning as a fact in human consciousness to the perfection of thegreat turbine engines that preceded the utilisation of intra-molecularpower. Nearly every human being must have seen steam, seen itincuriously for many thousands of years; the women in particular werealways heating water, boiling it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lidsof vessels dance with its fury; millions of people at different timesmust have watched steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricketballs and blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the wholehuman record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for anyglimmer of a realisation that here was force, here was strength toborrow and use.... Then suddenly man woke up to it, the railways spreadlike a network over the globe, the ever enlarging iron steamships begantheir staggering fight against wind and wave. 

Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning of theAge 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 anythingfundamental had happened to their immemorial necessities. They calledthe steam-engine the 'iron horse' and pretended that they had made themost partial of substitutions. Steam machinery and factory productionwere visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production, population was streaming steadily in from the country-side andconcentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city centres, food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a scale thatmade the one sole precedent, the corn ships of imperial Rome, a pettyincident; and a huge migration of peoples between Europe and WesternAsia and America was in Progress, and--nobody seems to have realisedthat something new had come into human life, a strange swirl differentaltogether from any previous circling and mutation, a swirl like theswirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase ofaccumulating water and eddying inactivity.... 

The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sitat his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee fromBrazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a NewZealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance atthe latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinise the prices currentof his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten (in the place ofhis father's eight) that he thought the world changed very little. Theymust play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had goneto, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of Horace andVirgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all would be well withthem.... 

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 ofsteam. To electricity also, in spite of its provocative nearness allabout him, mankind had been utterly blind for incalculable ages. Couldanything 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 thatconcerned him enough to merit study. It came into the house with the caton any dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur. It rotted his metals when he put them together.... There is no singlerecord that any one questioned why the cat's fur crackles or why hairis 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 tothink about it at all; until this new spirit of the Seeker turned itselfto these things. 

How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant, before the speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It wasGilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who first puzzled his brainswith rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so beganthe quickening of the human mind to the existence of this universalpresence. And even then the science of electricity remained a merelittle group of curious facts for nearly two hundred years, connectedperhaps with magnetism--a mere guess that--perhaps with the lightning. Frogs' legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings andtwitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them. Exceptfor the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert beforeelectricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities intothe life of the common man.... Then suddenly, in the half-centurybetween 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took overtraction, it ousted every other form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected wireless telephone and thetelephotograph.... 

Section 6

And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery andinvention for at least a hundred years after the scientific revolutionhad begun. Each new thing made its way into practice against ascepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One writer upon thesesubjects gives a funny little domestic conversation that happened, hesays, in the year 1898, within ten years, that is to say, of the timewhen the first aviators were fairly on the wing. He tells us how he satat his desk in his study and conversed with his little boy. 

His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak veryseriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy he did notwant to do it too harshly. 

This is what happened. 

'I wish, Daddy, ' he said, coming to his point, 'that you wouldn't writeall 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 andunder-developed photograph. 'Come and look at this, ' he said. 

The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream anda meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black, pencil-likeobject with flat wings on either side of it. It was the first record ofthe first apparatus heavier than air that ever maintained itself in theair 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 hebelieved quite firmly to be omniscience. 'But old Broomie, ' he said, 'hetold 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 wouldever believe anything of the sort.... '

Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father'sreminiscences. 

Section 7

At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages in theliterature of that time witness, it was thought that the fact that manhad at last had successful and profitable dealings with the steam thatscalded him and the electricity that flashed and banged about the skyat him, was an amazing and perhaps a culminating exercise of hisintelligence 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 usthere remains little but the working out of detail. ' The spirit ofthe seeker was still rare in the world; education was unskilled, unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people eventhen could have realised that Science was still but the flimsiest oftrial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No one seems to havebeen afraid of science and its possibilities. Yet now where there hadbeen but a score or so of seekers, there were many thousands, andfor one needle of speculation that had been probing the curtain ofappearances in 1800, there were now hundreds. And already Chemistry, which had been content with her atoms and molecules for the better partof a century, was preparing herself for that vast next stride that wasto revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom. 

One realises how crude was the science of that time when one considersthe case of the composition of air. This was determined by thatstrange genius and recluse, that man of mystery, that disembowelledintelligence, Henry Cavendish, towards the end of the eighteenthcentury. So far as he was concerned the work was admirably done. He separated all the known ingredients of the air with a precisionaltogether remarkable; he even put it upon record that he had some doubtabout the purity of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years hisdetermination was repeated by chemists all the world over, his apparatuswas treasured in London, he became, as they used to say, 'classic, ' andalways, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen (and with a littlehelium and traces of other substances, and indeed all the hintsthat might have led to the new departures of the twentieth-centurychemistry), and every time it slipped unobserved through theprofessorial fingers that repeated his procedure. 

Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to thevery dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was still rathera procession of happy accidents than an orderly conquest of nature?

Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the world. Eventhe schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere handful who grew up tofeel wonder and curiosity about the secrets of nature in the nineteenthcentury, there were now, at the beginning of the twentieth, myriadsescaping from the limitations of intellectual routine and the habituallife, in Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, andall about the world. 

It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be calledby a whole generation of scientific men, 'the greatest of Europeanchemists, ' were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico, between Fiesoleand Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he was already distinguishedas a mathematician and possessed by a savage appetite to understand. Hehad been particularly attracted by the mystery of phosphorescence andits apparent unrelatedness to every other source of light. He wasto tell afterwards in his reminiscences how he watched the firefliesdrifting and glowing among the dark trees in the garden of the villaunder the warm blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept them incages, dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insectsvery elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the effect ofvarious gases and varying temperature upon their light. Then the chancepresent of a little scientific toy invented by Sir William Crookes, atoy called the spinthariscope, on which radium particles impinge uponsulphide of zinc and make it luminous, induced him to associate the twosets of phenomena. It was a happy association for his inquiries. It wasa rare and fortunate thing, too, that any one with the mathematical giftshould 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 ofafternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in Edinburgh. They were lectures that had attracted a very considerable amount ofattention. He gave them in a small lecture-theatre that had become moreand more congested as his course proceeded. At his concluding discussionit was crowded right up to the ceiling at the back, and there peoplewere standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so fascinatingdid they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular, achuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging hisknee 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 seemedat first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all that was mostestablished and fundamental in the constitution of matter, is really atone with the rest of the elements. It does noticeably and forciblywhat probably all the other elements are doing with an imperceptibleslowness. It is like the single voice crying aloud that betrays thesilent breathing multitude in the darkness. Radium is an element thatis breaking up and flying to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doingthat at less perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is; thorium--the stuffof this incandescent gas mantle--certainly is; actinium. I feel that weare but beginning the list. And we know now that the atom, that oncewe thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible and finaland--lifeless--lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy. Thatis the most wonderful thing about all this work. A little while agowe thought of the atoms as we thought of bricks, as solid buildingmaterial, as substantial matter, as unit masses of lifeless stuff, and behold! these bricks are boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of theintensest force. This little bottle contains about a pint of uraniumoxide; that is to say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. Itis worth about a pound. And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in theatoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as we couldget by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a word, in oneinstant I could suddenly release that energy here and now it would blowus and everything about us to fragments; if I could turn it into themachinery that lights this city, it could keep Edinburgh brightly litfor a week. But at present no man knows, no man has an inkling of howthis little lump of stuff can be made to hasten the release of itsstore. It does release it, as a burn trickles. Slowly the uraniumchanges into radium, the radium changes into a gas called the radiumemanation, and that again to what we call radium A, and so the processgoes on, giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach thelast stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead. Butwe cannot hasten it. '

'I take ye, man, ' whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red handstightening like a vice upon his knee. 'I take ye, man. Go on! Oh, goon!'

The professor went on after a little pause. 'Why is the change gradual?'he asked. 'Why does only a minute fraction of the radium disintegratein any particular second? Why does it dole itself out so slowly andso exactly? Why does not all the uranium change to radium and allthe radium change to the next lowest thing at once? Why this decay bydriblets; why not a decay en masse? . . . Suppose presently we find itis possible to quicken that decay?'

The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful inevitable idea wascoming. He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed in his seat withexcitement. 'Why not?' he echoed, 'why not?'

The professor lifted his forefinger. 

'Given that knowledge, ' he said, 'mark what we should be able to do! Weshould not only be able to use this uranium and thorium; not only shouldwe have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in his handthe energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of battleships, ordrive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but we should alsohave a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process ofdisintegration in all the other elements, where decay is still so slowas to escape our finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in theworld would become an available reservoir of concentrated force. Do yourealise, 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 tothe discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above thebrute. We stand to-day towards radio-activity as our ancestor stoodtowards fire before he had learnt to make it. He knew it then only asa strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of thevolcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is thatwe know radio-activity to-day. This--this is the dawn of a new day inhuman living. At the climax of that civilisation which had its beginningin the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just when itis becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borneindefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly thepossibility of an entirely new civilisation. The energy we need for ourvery existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. Wecannot pick that lock at present, but----'

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

'----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 tolive on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will cease to be the lotof Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilisation to thebeginning of the next. I have no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, toexpress the vision of man's material destiny that opens out before me. Isee the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernessesof ice, the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach outamong the stars.... '

He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an actor ororator might have envied. 

The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds, sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for dispersal. Morelight was turned on and what had been a dim mass of figures became abright confusion of movement. Some of the people signalled to friends, some crowded down towards the platform to examine the lecturer'sapparatus and make notes of his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed ladwith the scrub hair wanted no such detailed frittering away of thethoughts that had inspired him. He wanted to be alone with them; heelbowed his way out almost fiercely, he made himself as angular andbony as a cow, fearing lest some one should speak to him, lest some oneshould invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm. 

He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who seesvisions. He had arms disproportionately long, and ridiculous big feet. 

He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding ofcommonness, of everyday life. 

He made his way to the top of Arthur's Seat, and there he sat for a longtime in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that ever and againhe 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 itsbeams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks of cloud thatwould presently engulf it. 

'Eh!' said the youngster. 'Eh!'

He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the redsun was there before his eyes. He stared at it, at first withoutintelligence, and then with a gathering recognition. Into his mindcame a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a Stone Agesavage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two hundred thousandyears ago. 

'Ye auld thing, ' he said--and his eyes were shining, and he made a kindof grabbing gesture with his hand; 'ye auld red thing.... We'll have yeYET. '

CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY

Section 1

The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men asRamsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentiethcentury, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elementsand so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderfulcombination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon asthe year 1933. From the first detection of radio-activity to its firstsubjugation to human purpose measured little more than a quarter ofa century. For twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficultiesprevented any striking practical application of his success, but theessential thing was done, this new boundary in the march of humanprogress was crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in aminute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into a heavygas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its turn in thecourse of seven days, and it was only after another year's work that hewas able to show practically that the last result of this rapid releaseof energy was gold. But the thing was done--at the cost of a blisteredchest and an injured finger, and from the moment when the invisiblespeck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy, Holsten knewthat he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and dark it mightstill be, to worlds of limitless power. He recorded as much in thestrange diary biography he left the world, a diary that was up to thatparticular moment a mass of speculations and calculations, and whichsuddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human record ofsensations and emotions that all humanity might understand. 

He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true, but nonethe less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four hours followingthe demonstration of the correctness of his intricate tracery ofcomputations and guesses. 'I thought I should not sleep, ' he writes--thewords he omitted are supplied in brackets--(on account of) 'pain in(the) hand and chest and (the) wonder of what I had done.... Slept likea 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 goup to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he was a little boy as abreezy playground. He went up by the underground tube that was thenthe recognised means of travel from one part of London to another, andwalked up Heath Street from the tube station to the open heath. Hefound it a gully of planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings ofhouse-wreckers. The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow, steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making itcommodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals ofNeo-Georgian aestheticism. Such is the illogical quality of humanitythat Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard under the seatof current civilisation, saw these changes with regret. He had come upHeath Street perhaps a thousand times, had known the windows of all thelittle shops, spent hours in the vanished cinematograph theatre, andmarvelled at the high-flung early Georgian houses upon the westwardbank of that old gully of a thoroughfare; he felt strange with all thesefamiliar things gone. He escaped at last with a feeling of relief fromthis choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged upon theold familiar scene about the White Stone Pond. That, at least, was verymuch as it used to be. 

There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right ofhim; the reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble, thewhite-fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its portico stillstood out at the angle of the ways, and the blue view to Harrow Hilland Harrow spire, a view of hills and trees and shining waters andwind-driven cloud shadows, was like the opening of a great window tothe ascending Londoner. All that was very reassuring. There was the samestrolling crowd, the same perpetual miracle of motors dodging throughit harmlessly, escaping headlong into the country from the Sabbaticalstuffiness behind and below them. There was a band still, a women'ssuffrage meeting--for the suffrage women had won their way back to thetolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace again--socialist orators, politicians, a band, and the same wild uproar of dogs, frantic with thegladness of their one blessed weekly release from the back yard andthe chain. And away along the road to the Spaniards strolled a vastmultitude, saying, as ever, that the view of London was exceptionallyclear that day. 

Young Holsten's face was white. He walked with that uneasy affectationof ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and an under-exercisedbody. He hesitated at the White Stone Pond whether to go to the left ofit or the right, and again at the fork of the roads. He kept shiftinghis stick in his hand, and every now and then he would get in the way ofpeople on the footpath or be jostled by them because of the uncertaintyof his movements. He felt, he confesses, 'inadequate to ordinaryexistence. ' He seemed to himself to be something inhuman andmischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous, fairlyhappy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to lead--a week of workand a Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading--and he had launchedsomething that would disorganise the entire fabric that held theircontentments and ambitions and satisfactions together. 'Felt like animbecile 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 nowknows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and Holstenwalked together and Holsten was sufficiently pale and jumpy for Lawsonto tell him he overworked and needed a holiday. They sat down at alittle table outside the County Council house of Golders Hill Park andsent one of the waiters to the Bull and Bush for a couple of bottles ofbeer, no doubt at Lawson's suggestion. The beer warmed Holsten's ratherdehumanised system. He began to tell Lawson as clearly as he could towhat his great discovery amounted. Lawson feigned attention, but indeedhe had neither the knowledge nor the imagination to understand. 'Inthe end, before many years are out, this must eventually change war, transit, lighting, building, and every sort of manufacture, evenagriculture, every material human concern----'

Then Holsten stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. 'Damn thatdog!' 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 greentable, too tired to convey the wonder of the thing he had sought solong, his friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and the Sunday peopledrifted about them through the spring sunshine. For a moment or soHolsten stared at Lawson in astonishment, for he had been too intentupon what he had been saying to realise how little Lawson had attended. 

Then he remarked, 'WELL!' and smiled faintly, and--finished the tankardof beer before him. 

Lawson sat down again. 'One must look after one's dog, ' he said, with anote of apology. 'What was it you were telling me?'

Section 2

In the evening Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint Paul'sCathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the eveningservice. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some odd way of thefireflies at Fiesole. Then he walked back through the evening lights toWestminster. He was oppressed, he was indeed scared, by his sense of theimmense consequences of his discovery. He had a vague idea that nightthat he ought not to publish his results, that they were premature, thatsome secret association of wise men should take care of his work andhand it on from generation to generation until the world was riper forits practical application. He felt that nobody in all the thousands ofpeople he passed had really awakened to the fact of change, they trustedthe world for what it was, not to alter too rapidly, to respect theirtrusts, their assurances, their habits, their little accustomed trafficsand hard-won positions. 

He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging, brightly-litmasses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He sat down on a seat andbecame aware of the talk of the two people next to him. It was thetalk of a young couple evidently on the eve of marriage. The man wascongratulating himself on having regular employment at last; 'they likeme, ' he said, 'and I like the job. If I work up--in'r dozen years orso I ought to be gettin' somethin' pretty comfortable. That's the plainsense of it, Hetty. There ain't no reason whatsoever why we shouldn'tget along very decently--very decently indeed. '

The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed! So itstruck upon Holsten's mind. He added in his diary, 'I had a sense of allthis globe as that.... '

By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this populatedworld as a whole, of all its cities and towns and villages, its highroads and the inns beside them, its gardens and farms and uplandpastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships coming along the greatcircles of the ocean, its time-tables and appointments and payments anddues as it were one unified and progressive spectacle. Sometimes suchvisions came to him; his mind, accustomed to great generalisations andyet acutely sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensivelythan the minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming spheremoved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately swiftnesson its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living progress thataltered under his regard. But now fatigue a little deadened him to thatincessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal circling. He lapsedto the commoner persuasion of the great fixities and recurrencies of thehuman routine. The remoter past of wandering savagery, the inevitablechanges of to-morrow were veiled, and he saw only day and night, seed-time and harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walksin the summer sunlight and tales by the winter fireside, the ancientsequence of hope and acts and age perennially renewed, eddying on forever and ever, save that now the impious hand of research was raised tooverthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual, sunlit spinning-top ofman's existence.... 

For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions, famineand pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the bitter wind, failure and insufficiency and retrocession. He saw all mankind in termsof the humble Sunday couple upon the seat beside him, who schemed theiringlorious outlook and improbable contentments. 'I had a sense of allthis globe as that. '

His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a timein vain. He reassured himself against the invasion of this disconcertingidea that he was something strange and inhuman, a loose wandererfrom the flock returning with evil gifts from his sustained unnaturalexcursions amidst the darknesses and phosphorescences beneath thefair surfaces of life. Man had not been always thus; the instincts anddesires of the little home, the little plot, was not all his nature;also he was an adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting curiosity, aninsatiable desire. For a few thousand generations indeed he had tilledthe earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers, grinding hiscorn and trampling the October winepress, yet not for so long but thathe 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 greathotels above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow and colourand stir of feasting. Might his gift to mankind mean simply more ofthat? . . . 

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 andtrailing long skirts of shining reflection; he crossed the Embankmentand stood for a time watching the dark river and turning ever and againto the lit buildings and bridges. His mind began to scheme conceivablereplacements of all those clustering arrangements. . . . 

'It has begun, ' he writes in the diary in which these things arerecorded. 'It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannotforesee. I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in thearmoury of Change. If I were to burn all these papers, before a score ofyears had passed, some other man would be doing this. . . 

Section 3

Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominatingevery other source of power, but for some years yet a vast network ofdifficulties in detail and application kept the new discovery from anyeffective invasion of ordinary life. The path from the laboratory to theworkshop is sometimes a tortuous one; electro-magnetic radiationswere known and demonstrated for twenty years before Marconi made thempractically available, and in the same way it was twenty years beforeinduced radio-activity could be brought to practical utilisation. Thething, of course, was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time ofits discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but withvery little realisation of the huge economic revolution that impended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the production ofgold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon unprofitable lines ofthe alchemist's dreams; there was a considerable amount of discussionand expectation in that more intelligent section of the educatedpublics of the various civilised countries which followed scientificdevelopment; but for the most part the world went about its business--asthe inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the perpetualthreat of overhanging rocks and mountains go about their business--justas though the possible was impossible, as though the inevitable waspostponed for ever because it was delayed. 

It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought inducedradio-activity into the sphere of industrial production, and its firstgeneral use was to replace the steam-engine in electrical generatingstations. Hard upon the appearance of this came the Dass-Tataengine--the invention of two among the brilliant galaxy of Bengaliinventors the modernisation of Indian thought was producing at thistime--which was used chiefly for automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes, and such-like, mobile purposes. The American Kemp engine, differingwidely in principle but equally practicable, and the Krupp-Erlangercame hard upon the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a giganticreplacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress allabout the habitable globe. Small wonder was this when the cost, even ofthese earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is compared with thatof the power they superseded. Allowing for lubrication the Dass-Tataengine, once it was started cost a penny to run thirty-seven miles, and added only nine and quarter pounds to the weight of the carriageit drove. It made the heavy alcohol-driven automobile of the timeridiculous in appearance as well as preposterously costly. Formany years the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had beenclambering to levels that made even the revival of the draft horse seema practicable possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of thisstringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world'sroads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful armoured monstersthat had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for four awfuldecades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highwaysthronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel. At the same time a new impetus was given to aviation by the relativelyenormous power for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possibleto add Redmayne's ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to thevertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force of theaeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found themselvespossessed of an instrument of flight that could hover or ascend ordescend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly through the air. The last dread of flying vanished. As the journalists of the timephrased it, this was the epoch of the Leap into the Air. The new atomicaeroplane became indeed a mania; every one of means was frantic topossess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free from the dust anddanger of the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty thousandof these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soaredhumming softly into the sky. 

And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invadedindustrialism. The railways paid enormous premiums for priority in thedelivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was embarkedupon so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous explosions dueto inexperienced handling of the new power, and the revolutionarycheapening of both materials and electricity made the entirereconstruction of domestic buildings a matter merely dependent upon areorganisation of the methods of the builder and the house-furnisher. Viewed from the side of the new power and from the point of view ofthose who financed and manufactured the new engines and materialit required the age of the Leap into the Air was one of astonishingprosperity. Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividendsof five or six hundred per cent. And enormous fortunes were madeand fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the newdevelopments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the fact thatin both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one of the recoverablewaste products was gold--the former disintegrated dust of bismuth andthe latter dust of lead--and that this new supply of gold led quitenaturally to a rise in prices throughout the world. 

This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowdingflight of happy and fortunate rich people--every great city was as ifa crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing--was the bright side of theopening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightnesswas a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vastdevelopment of production there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring factories working night and day, these glitteringnew vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights ofdragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeedno more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when theworld sinks towards twilight and the night. Between these high lightsaccumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestlydoomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount of capitalinvested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steelworkers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilledlabourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of employmentby the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the rapid fall inthe cost of transit was destroying high land values at every centreof population, the value of existing house property had becomeproblematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all thesecurities upon which the credit of the world rested were slippingand sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes offeverish panic;--this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were theblack and monstrous under-consequences of the Leap into the Air. 

There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out intoThreadneedle Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran. 'The SteelTrust is scrapping the whole of its plant, ' he shouted. 'The StateRailways are going to scrap all their engines. Everything's going tobe scrapped--everything. Come and scrap the mint, you fellows, come andscrap the mint!'

In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of Americaquadrupled any previous record. There was an enormous increase alsoin violent crime throughout the world. The thing had come upon anunprepared humanity; it seemed as though human society was to be smashedby its own magnificent gains. 

For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been noattempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations this floodof inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs. The world in thesedays was not really governed at all, in the sense in which governmentcame 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 vestigesof absolutism still sheltered the court favourite and the trustedservant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained caste. Theirprofessional education and every circumstance in the manipulation of thefantastically naive electoral methods by which they clambered topower, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiouslyunimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious ofevery generosity. Government was an obstructive business of energeticfractions, progress went on outside of and in spite of publicactivities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needsso clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively established asto invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the veryexistence of the otherwise inattentive political machine. 

The world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty, inthe full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything necessaryto satisfy human needs and everything necessary to realise such willand purpose as existed then in human hearts was already at hand, onehas still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict, andincoherent suffering. There was no scheme for the distribution of thisvast new wealth that had come at last within the reach of men; therewas no clear conception that any such distribution was possible. As oneattempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of the new age, as one measures it against the latent achievement that later years havedemonstrated, one begins to measure the blindness, the narrowness, theinsensate unimaginative individualism of the pre-atomic time. Under thistremendous dawn of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise, in the very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddessover all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patiently inher strong arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty, thesolution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in her verypresence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court, the world was towitness such things as the squalid spectacle of the Dass-Tata patentlitigation. 

There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room, duringthe exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading counsel of the dayargued and shouted over a miserable little matter of more royaltiesor less and whether the Dass-Tata company might not bar theHolsten-Roberts' methods of utilising the new power. The Dass-Tatapeople were indeed making a strenuous attempt to secure a world monopolyin atomic engineering. The judge, after the manner of those times, satraised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown and a foolish hugewig, the counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and queer blackgowns over their usual costume, wigs and gowns that were held to benecessary to their pleading, and upon unclean wooden benches stirred andwhispered artful-looking solicitors, busily scribbling reporters, theparties to the case, expert witnesses, interested people, and a jostlingconfusion of subpoenaed persons, briefless young barristers (forming astyle on the most esteemed and truculent examples) and casual eccentricspectators who preferred this pit of iniquity to the free sunlightoutside. Every one was damply hot, the examining King's Counsel wipedthe perspiration from his huge, clean-shaven upper lip; and into thisatmosphere of grasping contention and human exhalations the daylightfiltered through a window that was manifestly dirty. The jury sat in adouble pew to the left of the judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogsthat have fallen into an ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied thewould-be omnivorous Dass, under cross-examination.... 

Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon asthey appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a basis forfurther work, and to that confiding disposition and one happy flash ofadaptive 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 thenew development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to thepurposes of their little lusts and avarice. That trial is just one ofinnumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the face of the worldfestered with patent legislation. It chanced, however, to have one oddlydramatic feature in the fact that Holsten, after being kept waitingabout the court for two days as a beggar might have waited at a richman's door, after being bullied by ushers and watched by policemen, wascalled 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'sastonishment round the corner of his monstrous wig. Holsten was a greatman, 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 PhilipDass's improvements were merely superficial adaptations or whetherthey were implicit in your paper. No doubt--after the manner ofinventors--you think most things that were ever likely to be discoveredare implicit in your papers. No doubt also you think too that mostsubsequent additions and modifications are merely superficial. Inventorshave a way of thinking that. The law isn't concerned with that sort ofthing. The law has nothing to do with the vanity of inventors. The lawis concerned with the question whether these patent rights have thenovelty the plantiff claims for them. What that admission may or may notstop, and all these other things you are saying in your overflowing zealto answer more than the questions addressed to you--none of these thingshave anything whatever to do with the case in hand. It is a matter ofconstant astonishment to me in this court to see how you scientific men, with all your extraordinary claims to precision and veracity, wanderand wander so soon as you get into the witness-box. I know no moreunsatisfactory class of witness. The plain and simple question is, hasSir Philip Dass made any real addition to existing knowledge and methodsin this matter or has he not? We don't want to know whether they werelarge or small additions nor what the consequences of your admission maybe. 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 hemust disregard infinitesimals. 

'Ah!' said the judge, 'now why couldn't you say that when counsel putthe 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. Itis hundreds of years old. It hasn't an idea. The oldest of old bottlesand this new wine, the most explosive wine. Something will overtakethem. '

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 andwidely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the materialand methods of life had been changing rapidly and were now changingstill more rapidly, the law-courts and the legislatures of the worldwere struggling desperately to meet modern demands with devices andprocedures, conceptions of rights and property and authority andobligation that dated from the rude compromises of relatively barbarictimes. The horse-hair wigs and antic dresses of the British judges, their musty courts and overbearing manners, were indeed only the outwardand visible intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal andpolitical organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century wasindeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong, thatnow fettered the governing body that once it had protected. 

Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and outspoken publication that inthe field of natural science had been the beginning of the conquestof nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies preparing the spirit of the new world within the degeneratingbody of the old. The idea of a greater subordination of individualinterests and established institutions to the collective future, istraceable more and more clearly in the literature of those times, and movement after movement fretted itself away in criticism of andopposition to first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, andpolitical order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley, withno scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established rulers of theworld as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas and suggestions thatwas 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 systemof inter-relationships that should supplant the existing tangle ofproprietary legal ideas. 

The word 'Sociology' was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular writerupon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the middle ofthe nineteenth century, but the idea of a state, planned as anelectric-traction system is planned, without reference to pre-existingapparatus, upon scientific lines, did not take a very strong hold uponthe popular imagination of the world until the twentieth century. Then, the growing impatience of the American people with the monstrous andsocially paralysing party systems that had sprung out of their absurdelectoral arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be calledthe 'Modern State' movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, inAmerica, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the thoughtof bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property, employment, education, and government, than had ever been contemplated before. Nodoubt these Modern State ideas were very largely the reflection uponsocial and political thought of the vast revolution in material thingsthat had been in progress for two hundred years, but for a long timethey seemed to be having no more influence upon existing institutionsthan the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at thetime 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 comingof the atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward abruptlyinto crude and startling realisation. 

Section 5

Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre is one of those autobiographicalnovels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of thetwentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understandWander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literalsense. It is indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back to theWilhelm Meister of Goethe, a century and a half earlier. 

Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history of hislife and ideas between his nineteenth and his twenty-third birthdays. Hewas neither a very original nor a very brilliant man, but he had atrick of circumstantial writing; and though no authentic portrait wasto survive for the information of posterity, he betrays by a score ofcasual phrases that he was short, sturdy, inclined to be plump, with a'rather blobby' face, and full, rather projecting blue eyes. He belongeduntil the financial debacle of 1956 to the class of fairly prosperouspeople, he was a student in London, he aeroplaned to Italy and then hada pedestrian tour from Genoa to Rome, crossed in the air to Greece andEgypt, and came back over the Balkans and Germany. His family fortunes, which were largely invested in bank shares, coal mines, and houseproperty, 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 ayear of soldiering, first as an officer in the English infantry and thenin the army of pacification. His book tells all these things so simplyand at the same time so explicitly, that it remains, as it were, an eyeby which future generations may have at least one man's vision of theyears of the Great Change. 

And he was, he tells us, a 'Modern State' man 'by instinct' fromthe beginning. He breathed in these ideas in the class rooms andlaboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, a long anddelicately beautiful facade, along the South Bank of the Thames oppositethe ancient dignity of Somerset House. Such thought was interwoven withthe very fabric of that pioneer school in the educational renascence inEngland. After the customary exchange years in Heidelberg and Paris, hewent into the classical school of London University. The older so-called'classical' education of the British pedagogues, probably the mostparalysing, ineffective, and foolish routine that ever wasted humanlife, had already been swept out of this great institution in favour ofmodern methods; and he learnt Greek and Latin as well as he had learntGerman, Spanish, and French, so that he wrote and spoke them freely, and used them with an unconscious ease in his study of the foundationcivilisations of the European system to which they were the key. (Thischange was still so recent that he mentions an encounter in Rome withan 'Oxford don' who 'spoke Latin with a Wiltshire accent and manifestdiscomfort, wrote Greek letters with his tongue out, and seemed to thinka Greek sentence a charm when it was a quotation and an impropriety whenit wasn't. ')

Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam engines upon the Englishrailways and the gradual cleansing of the London atmosphere as thesmoke-creating sea-coal fires gave place to electric heating. Thebuilding of laboratories at Kensington was still in progress, and hetook part in the students' riots that delayed the removal of the AlbertMemorial. He carried a banner with 'We like Funny Statuary' on one side, and on the other 'Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should our GreatDeparted Stand in the Rain?' He learnt the rather athletic aviation ofthose days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he was fined forflying 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 thepublic judicature and the place was crowded with journalists who hadventured to call attention to the dementia of Chief Justice Abrahams. Barnet was not a very good aviator, he confesses he was always a littleafraid of his machine--there was excellent reason for every one tobe afraid of those clumsy early types--and he never attempted steepdescents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned one of thoseoil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity and extravagantfilthiness still astonish the visitors to the museum of machinery atSouth Kensington. He mentions running over a dog and complains of theruinous price of 'spatchcocks' in Surrey. 'Spatchcocks, ' it seems, was aslang term for crushed hens. 

He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military service toa minimum, and his want of any special scientific or technicalqualification and a certain precocious corpulence that handicapped hisaviation indicated the infantry of the line as his sphere of training. That was the most generalised form of soldiering. The development ofthe theory of war had been for some decades but little assisted by anypractical experience. What fighting had occurred in recent years, hadbeen fighting in minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaricsoldiers and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and thegreat powers of the world were content for the most part to maintainarmies that sustained in their broader organisation the traditionsof the European wars of thirty and forty years before. There was theinfantry arm to which Barnet belonged and which was supposed to fighton foot with a rifle and be the main portion of the army. There werecavalry forces (horse soldiers), having a ratio to the infantry thathad been determined by the experiences of the Franco-German war in 1871. There was also artillery, and for some unexplained reason much of thiswas still drawn by horses; though there were also in all the Europeanarmies a small number of motor-guns with wheels so constructed that theycould go over broken ground. In addition there were large developmentsof the engineering arm, concerned with motor transport, motor-bicyclescouting, aviation, and the like. 

No first-class intelligence had been sought to specialise in and workout the problem of warfare with the new appliances and under modernconditions, but a succession of able jurists, Lord Haldane, ChiefJustice Briggs, and that very able King's Counsel, Philbrick, hadreconstructed the army frequently and thoroughly and placed it at last, with the adoption of national service, upon a footing that would haveseemed very imposing to the public of 1900. At any moment the BritishEmpire could now put a million and a quarter of arguable soldiers uponthe board of Welt-Politik. The traditions of Japan and the CentralEuropean armies were more princely and less forensic; the Chinese stillrefused resolutely to become a military power, and maintained a smallstanding army upon the American model that was said, so far as itwent, to be highly efficient, and Russia, secured by a stringentadministration against internal criticism, had scarcely altered thedesign of a uniform or the organisation of a battery since the openingdecades of the century. Barnet's opinion of his military training wasmanifestly a poor one, his Modern State ideas disposed him to regard itas a bore, and his common sense condemned it as useless. Moreover, his habit of body made him peculiarly sensitive to the fatigues andhardships of service. 

'For three days in succession we turned out before dawn and--for noearthly reason--without breakfast, ' he relates. 'I suppose that isto show us that when the Day comes the first thing will be to get usthoroughly uncomfortable and rotten. We then proceeded to Kriegspiel, according to the mysterious ideas of those in authority over us. Onthe last day we spent three hours under a hot if early sun gettingover eight miles of country to a point we could have reached in a motoromnibus in nine minutes and a half--I did it the next day in that--andthen we made a massed attack upon entrenchments that could have shot usall about three times over if only the umpires had let them. Then came alittle bayonet exercise, but I doubt if I am sufficiently a barbarianto stick this long knife into anything living. Anyhow in this battle Ishouldn't have had a chance. Assuming that by some miracle I hadn't beenshot three times over, I was far too hot and blown when I got up to theentrenchments even to lift my beastly rifle. It was those others wouldhave begun the sticking.... 

'For a time we were watched by two hostile aeroplanes; then our owncame up and asked them not to, and--the practice of aerial warfare stillbeing unknown--they very politely desisted and went away and did divesand circles of the most charming description over the Fox Hills. '

All Barnet's accounts of his military training were written in the samehalf-contemptuous, half-protesting tone. He was of opinion that hischances of participating in any real warfare were very slight, andthat, if after all he should participate, it was bound to be so entirelydifferent from these peace manoeuvres that his only course as a rationalman would be to keep as observantly out of danger as he could until hehad learnt the tricks and possibilities of the new conditions. He statesthis quite frankly. Never was a man more free from sham heroics. 

Section 6

Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest ofmasculine youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that for sometime he failed to connect the rush of wonderful new possibilities withthe financial troubles of his family. 'I knew my father was worried, ' headmits. That cast the smallest of shadows upon his delighted departurefor Italy and Greece and Egypt with three congenial companions in one ofthe new atomic models. They flew over the Channel Isles and Touraine, he mentions, and circled about Mont Blanc--'These new helicopters, wefound, ' he notes, 'had abolished all the danger and strain of suddendrops to which the old-time aeroplanes were liable'--and then he went onby way of Pisa, Paestum, Ghirgenti, and Athens, to visit the pyramidsby moonlight, flying thither from Cairo, and to follow the Nile upto Khartum. Even by later standards, it must have been a very gleefulholiday for a young man, and it made the tragedy of his next experiencesall the darker. A week after his return his father, who was a widower, announced himself ruined, and committed suicide by means of anunscheduled opiate. 

At one blow Barnet found himself flung out of the possessing, spending, enjoying class to which he belonged, penniless and with no calling bywhich he could earn a living. He tried teaching and some journalism, butin a little while he found himself on the underside of a world in whichhe had always reckoned to live in the sunshine. For innumerable men suchan experience has meant mental and spiritual destruction, but Barnet, inspite of his bodily gravitation towards comfort, showed himself when putto the test, of the more valiant modern quality. He was saturated withthe creative stoicism of the heroic times that were already dawning, and he took his difficulties and discomforts stoutly as his appointedmaterial, and turned them to expression. 

Indeed, in his book, he thanks fortune for them. 'I might have lived anddied, ' he says, 'in that neat fool's paradise of secure lavishness abovethere. I might never have realised the gathering wrath and sorrow of theousted and exasperated masses. In the days of my own prosperity thingshad seemed to me to be very well arranged. ' Now from his new point ofview he was to find they were not arranged at all; that government wasa compromise of aggressions and powers and lassitudes, and law aconvention between interests, and that the poor and the weak, thoughthey had many negligent masters, had few friends. 

'I had thought things were looked after, ' he wrote. 'It was with a kindof amazement that I tramped the roads and starved--and found that no onein 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 inwhich I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and the like. She lived ingreat fear of the Public Health and Morality Inspectors, because shewas sometimes too poor to pay the customary tip to them, but at last sheconsented to put it in a dark tiled place under the stairs, and thenI went forth into the world--to seek first the luck of a meal and thenshelter. '

He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in which ayear or so ago he had been numbered among the spenders. 

London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of visiblesmoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine, had alreadyceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the Victorian time; ithad been, and indeed was, constantly being rebuilt, and its mainstreets were already beginning to take on those characteristics thatdistinguished them throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. The insanitary horse and the plebeian bicycle had been banished from theroadway, which was now of a resilient, glass-like surface, spotlesslyclean; and the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow vestige of theancient footpath on either side of the track and forbidden at the riskof a fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway. People descended fromtheir automobiles upon this pavement and went through the lower shops tothe lifts and stairs to the new ways for pedestrians, the Rows, thatran 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 acuriously Venetian appearance. In some streets there were upper and eventhird-story Rows. For most of the day and all night the shop windowswere lit by electric light, and many establishments had made, as itwere, canals of public footpaths through their premises in order toincrease their window space. 

Barnet made his way along this night-scene rather apprehensively sincethe police had power to challenge and demand the Labour Card of anyindigent-looking person, and if the record failed to show he was inemployment, dismiss him to the traffic pavement below. 

But there was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet'sappearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too, hadother things to think of that night, and he was permitted to reach thegalleries about Leicester Square--that great focus of London life andpleasure. 

He gives a vivid description of the scene that evening. In the centrewas a garden raised on arches lit by festoons of lights and connectedwith the Rows by eight graceful bridges, beneath which hummed theinterlacing streams of motor traffic, pulsating as the currentalternated between east and west and north and south. Above rose greatfrontages of intricate rather than beautiful reinforced porcelain, studded with lights, barred by bold illuminated advertisements, andglowing with reflections. There were the two historical music halls ofthis place, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipalplayers revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shakespeare's plays, and four other great houses of refreshment and entertainment whosepinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night. The southside of the square was in dark contrast to the others; it was stillbeing rebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars surmounted by the frozengestures of monstrous cranes rose over the excavated sites of vanishedVictorian buildings. 

This framework attracted Barnet's attention for a time to the exclusionof other interests. It was absolutely still, it had a dead rigidity, astricken inaction, no one was at work upon it and all its machinery wasquiet; but the constructor's globes of vacuum light filled its everyinterstice with a quivering green moonshine and showed alert butmotionless--soldier sentinels!

He asked a passing stroller, and was told that the men had struck thatday against the use of an atomic riveter that would have doubled theindividual efficiency and halved the number of steel workers. 

'Shouldn't wonder if they didn't get chucking bombs, ' said Barnet'sinformant, hovered for a moment, and then went on his way to theAlhambra music hall. 

Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at thecorners of the square. Something very sensational had been flashed uponthe transparencies. Forgetting for a moment his penniless condition, hemade 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 atdeterminate points by specially licensed purveyors. Half over, hestopped short at a change in the traffic below; and was astonishedto see that the police signals were restricting vehicles to the halfroadway. When presently he got within sight of the transparencies thathad replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read of the Great Marchof the Unemployed that was already in progress through the West End, andso without expenditure he was able to understand what was coming. 

He watched, and his book describes this procession which the policehad considered it unwise to prevent and which had been spontaneouslyorganised in imitation of the Unemployed Processions of earlier times. He had expected a mob but there was a kind of sullen discipline aboutthe procession when at last it arrived. What seemed for a timean unending column of men marched wearily, marched with a kind ofimplacable 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 ofany but obsolete and superseded types of labour. They bore a few bannerswith the time-honoured inscription: 'Work, not Charity, ' but otherwisetheir ranks were unadorned. 

They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was nothingtruculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no definiteobjective they were just marching and showing themselves in the moreprosperous parts of London. They were a sample of that great mass ofunskilled cheap labour which the now still cheaper mechanical powers hadsuperseded for evermore. They were being 'scrapped'--as horses had been'scrapped. '

Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened byhis own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt nothing butdespair at the sight; what should be done, what could be done for thisgathering surplus of humanity? They were so manifestly useless--andincapable--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 shamblingenigma below meant. It was an appeal against the unexpected, an appealto those others who, more fortunate, seemed wiser and more powerful, for something--for INTELLIGENCE. This mute mass, weary footed, rankfollowing rank, protested its persuasion that some of these othersmust have foreseen these dislocations--that anyhow they ought to haveforeseen--and arranged. 

That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so dumblyto 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 theyprayed to God! The last thing that men will realise about anything isthat it is inanimate. They had transferred their animation to mankind. They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if itwas careless or malignant.... It had only to be aroused to beconscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion.... And I saw, too, thatas yet THERE WAS NO SUCH INTELLIGENCE. The world waits for intelligence. That intelligence has still to be made, that will for good and order hasstill to be gathered together, out of scraps of impulse and wanderingseeds 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 notvery heroical young man who, in any previous age, might well have beenaltogether occupied with the problem of his own individual necessities, should be able to stand there and generalise about the needs of therace. 

But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time therewas already dawning the light of a new era. The spirit of humanity wasescaping, even then it was escaping, from its extreme imprisonment inindividuals. Salvation from the bitter intensities of self, which hadbeen a conscious religious end for thousands of years, which men hadsought in mortifications, in the wilderness, in meditation, and byinnumerable strange paths, was coming at last with the effect ofnaturalness into the talk of men, into the books they read, into theirunconscious gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes andeveryday acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that thespirit of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out ofthose ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very threatof hell and torment had failed to drive them. And this young man, homeless and without provision even for the immediate hours, in thepresence of social disorganisation, distress, and perplexity, in ablazing 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, andthe very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable difficulty filledme with exaltation. I saw that we have still to discover government, that we have still to discover education, which is the necessaryreciprocal of government, and that all this--in which my own littlespeck of a life was so manifestly overwhelmed--this and its yesterdayin Greece and Rome and Egypt were nothing, the mere first dust swirlsof the beginning, the movements and dim murmurings of a sleeper who willpresently be awake.... '

Section 7

And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his descentfrom this ecstatic vision of reality. 

'Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold and alittle hungry. '

He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood uponthe Thames Embankment. He made his way through the galleries of thebooksellers and the National Gallery, which had been open continuouslyday and night to all decently dressed people now for more than twelveyears, and across the rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by thehotel colonnade to the Embankment. He had long known of these admirableoffices, which had swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all thecasual 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 anight's lodgings and some indication of possible employment. 

But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he got tothe Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested and besieged bya large and rather unruly crowd. He hovered for a time on the outskirtsof the waiting multitude, perplexed and dismayed, and then he becameaware of a movement, a purposive trickling away of people, up throughthe arches of the great buildings that had arisen when all the railwaystations were removed to the south side of the river, and so to thecovered ways of the Strand. And here, in the open glare of midnight, he found unemployed men begging, and not only begging, but begging withastonishing assurance, from the people who were emerging from the smalltheatres and other such places of entertainment which abounded in thatthoroughfare. 

This was an altogether unexampled thing. There had been no begging inLondon streets for a quarter of a century. But that night the policewere evidently unwilling or unable to cope with the destitute who wereinvading those well-kept quarters of the town. They had become stonilyblind to anything but manifest disorder. 

Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask; indeedhis bearing must have been more valiant than his circumstances, fortwice he says that he was begged from. Near the Trafalgar Squaregardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and blackened eyebrows, who waswalking 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 herkind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his hand.... 

It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey, might underthe repressive social legislation of those times, have brought Barnetwithin reach of the prison lash. But he took it, he confesses, andthanked her as well as he was able, and went off very gladly to getfood. 

Section 8

A day or so later--and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon theroads may be taken as a mark of increasing social disorganisation andpolice embarrassment--he wandered out into the open country. He speaksof the roads of that plutocratic age as being 'fenced with barbed wireagainst unpropertied people, ' of the high-walled gardens and trespasswarnings that kept him to the dusty narrowness of the public ways. Inthe air, happy rich people were flying, heedless of the misfortunesabout them, as he himself had been flying two years ago, and alongthe road swept the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. One wasrarely out of earshot of its whistles and gongs and siren cries evenin the field paths or over the open downs. The officials of the labourexchanges were everywhere overworked and infuriated, the casual wardswere so crowded that the surplus wanderers slept in ranks under shedsor in the open air, and since giving to wayfarers had been made apunishable offence there was no longer friendship or help for a man fromthe rare foot passenger or the wayside cottage.... 

'I wasn't angry, ' said Barnet. 'I saw an immense selfishness, amonstrous disregard for anything but pleasure and possession in allthose people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how certainlyif the richest had changed places with the poorest, that things wouldhave been the same. What else can happen when men use science and everynew thing that science gives, and all their available intelligence andenergy to manufacture wealth and appliances, and leave government andeducation to the rustling traditions of hundreds of years ago? Thosetraditions come from the dark ages when there was really not enoughfor every one, when life was a fierce struggle that might be maskedbut could not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fiercedispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony betweenmaterial and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and the poor grewsavage and every added power that came to men made the rich richer andthe poor less necessary and less free. The men I met in the casualwards and the relief offices were all smouldering for revolt, talkingof justice and injustice and revenge. I saw no hope in that talk, nor inanything but patience.... '

But he did not mean a passive patience. He meant that the methodof social reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectualrearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled aspectswas 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 ofpatience and the larger scheme, they answered, "But then we shall all bedead"--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 ofno use to statesmanship. '

He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, anda chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in the market-place atBishop's Stortford announcing a 'Grave International Situation' didnot excite him very much. There had been so many grave internationalsituations in recent years. 

This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly attackingthe Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to the help of theSlavs. 

But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the vagrantsin the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master that allserviceable trained men were to be sent back on the morrow to theirmobilisation centres. The country was on the eve of war. He was to goback through London to Surrey. His first feeling, he records, was one ofextreme relief that his days of 'hopeless battering at the undersideof civilisation' were at an end. Here was something definite to do, something definitely provided for. But his relief was greatly modifiedwhen he found that the mobilisation arrangements had been madeso hastily and carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at theimprovised depot at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink buta cup of cold water. The depot was absolutely unprovisioned, and no onewas free to leave it. 

CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE LAST WAR

Section 1

Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order, it isdifficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow, the motivesthat plunged mankind into the war that fills the histories of the middledecades of the twentieth century. 

It must always be remembered that the political structure of the worldat that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the collectiveintelligence. That is the central fact of that history. For two hundredyears there had been no great changes in political or legal methods andpretensions, the utmost change had been a certain shifting of boundariesand slight readjustment of procedure, while in nearly every other aspectof life there had been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, andan enormous enlargement of scope and outlook. The absurdities of courtsand the indignities of representative parliamentary government, coupledwith the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other directions, hadwithdrawn the best intelligences more and more from public affairs. The ostensible governments of the world in the twentieth century werefollowing in the wake of the ostensible religions. They were ceasing tocommand the services of any but second-rate men. After the middle ofthe eighteenth century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon theworld'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 newpossibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the past. 

Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were theboundaries of the various 'sovereign states, ' and the conception of ageneral predominance in human affairs on the part of some one particularstate. The memory of the empires of Rome and Alexander squatted, anunlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human imagination--it bored into thehuman brain like some grisly parasite and filled it with disorderedthoughts and violent impulses. For more than a century the Frenchsystem exhausted its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then theinfection passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart andcentre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later ages wereto store and neglect the vast insane literature of this obsession, theintricate treaties, the secret agreements, the infinite knowingness ofthe political writer, the cunning refusals to accept plain facts, thestrategic devices, the tactical manoeuvres, the records of mobilisationsand counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible almost as soon asit ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their statecraftsmen sat with their historical candles burning, and, in spiteof strange, new reflections and unfamiliar lights and shadows, stillwrangling 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 menand women outside the world of these specialists sympathised and agreedwith their portentous activities. One school of psychologists inclinedto minimise this participation, but the balance of evidence goes toshow that there were massive responses to these suggestions of thebelligerent schemer. Primitive man had been a fiercely combative animal;innumerable generations had passed their lives in tribal warfare, andthe weight of tradition, the example of history, the ideals ofloyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the incitements of theinternational mischief-maker. The political ideas of the common man werepicked up haphazard, there was practically nothing in such education ashe was given that was ever intended to fit him for citizenship as such(that conception only appeared, indeed, with the development of ModernState ideas), and it was therefore a comparatively easy matter to fillhis vacant mind with the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion andnational aggression. 

For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily patriotic whenpresently his battalion came up from the depot to London, to entrain forthe French frontier. He tells of children and women and lads and old mencheering and shouting, of the streets and rows hung with the flags ofthe Allied Powers, of a real enthusiasm even among the destitute andunemployed. The Labour Bureaux were now partially transformed intoenrolment offices, and were centres of hotly patriotic excitement. At every convenient place upon the line on either side of the ChannelTunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the feeling in theregiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by grim anticipations, wasnone the less warlike. 

But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of minds without establishedideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it was with himself, a natural response to collective movement, and to martial sounds andcolours, and the exhilarating challenge of vague dangers. And people hadbeen so long oppressed by the threat of and preparation for war that itsarrival came with an effect of positive relief. 

Section 2

The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the lowerMeuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct from thevarious British depots to the points in the Ardennes where they wereintended to entrench themselves. 

Most of the documents bearing upon the campaign were destroyed duringthe war, from the first the scheme of the Allies seems to have beenconfused, but it is highly probable that the formation of an aerialpark in this region, from which attacks could be made upon the vastindustrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a flanking raid through Hollandupon the German naval establishments at the mouth of the Elbe, wereintegral parts of the original project. Nothing of this was known tosuch pawns in the game as Barnet and his company, whose business itwas to do what they were told by the mysterious intelligences at thedirection of things in Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff hadalso been transferred. From first to last these directing intelligencesremained mysterious to the body of the army, veiled under the name of'Orders. ' There was no Napoleon, no Caesar to embody enthusiasm. Barnetsays, 'We talked of Them. THEY are sending us up into Luxembourg. THEYare going to turn the Central European right. '

Behind the veil of this vagueness the little group of more or lessworthy men which constituted Headquarters was beginning to realise theenormity of the thing it was supposed to control.... 

In the great hall of the War Control, whose windows looked out acrossthe Seine to the Trocadero and the palaces of the western quarter, aseries of big-scale relief maps were laid out upon tables to displaythe whole seat of war, and the staff-officers of the control werecontinually busy shifting the little blocks which represented thecontending troops, as the reports and intelligence came drifting in tothe various telegraphic bureaux in the adjacent rooms. In other smallerapartments there were maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, forexample, the reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav commanderswere recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps, as uponchessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard and theEarl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world supremacy againstthe Central European powers. Very probably he had a definite idea of hisgame; very probably he had a coherent and admirable plan. 

But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new strategyof aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy that Holsten hadopened for mankind. While he planned entrenchments and invasions and afrontier war, the Central European generalship was striking at theeyes and the brain. And while, with a certain diffident hesitation, hedeveloped his gambit that night upon the lines laid down by Napoleonand Moltke, his own scientific corps in a state of mutinous activity waspreparing a blow for Berlin. 'These old fools!' was the key in which thescientific corps was thinking. 

The War Control in Paris, on the night of July the second, wasan impressive display of the paraphernalia of scientific militaryorganisation, as the first half of the twentieth century understood it. To one human being at least the consulting commanders had the likenessof world-wielding gods. 

She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute, andshe had been engaged in relay with other similar women to take downorders in duplicate and hand them over to the junior officers inattendance, to be forwarded and filed. There had come a lull, and shehad been sent out from the dictating room to take the air upon theterrace before the great hall and to eat such scanty refreshment as shehad brought with her until her services were required again. 

From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view not onlyof the wide sweep of the river below her, and all the eastward side ofParis from the Arc de Triomphe to Saint Cloud, great blocks and massesof black or pale darkness with pink and golden flashes of illuminationand endless interlacing bands of dotted lights under a still andstarless sky, but also the whole spacious interior of the great hallwith its slender pillars and gracious arching and clustering lamps wasvisible 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; themessengers and attendants went and came perpetually, altering, movingthe little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of men, and thegreat commander and his two consultants stood amidst all these thingsand near where the fighting was nearest, scheming, directing. They hadbut 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. Thefate of nations lay behind the eyes of these three men. Indeed they werelike gods. 

Most godlike of the three was Dubois. It was for him to decide; theothers 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 awaitedthem in an ecstasy of happiness--and fear. For her exaltation was madeterrible by the dread that some error might dishonour her.... 

She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetratingminuteness of an impassioned woman's observation. 

He said little, she remarked. He looked but little at the maps. Thetall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm of ideas, conflicting ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting of the littlered, blue, black, and yellow pieces on the board, and wanted to draw thecommander's attention to this and that. Dubois listened, nodded, emitteda word and became still again, brooding like the national eagle. 

His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she couldnot see his eyes; his moustache overhung the mouth from which thosewords of decision came. Viard, too, said little; he was a dark man witha drooping head and melancholy, watchful eyes. He was more intent uponthe French right, which was feeling its way now through Alsace to theRhine. 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. Toseem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse to hurry--itself aconfession of miscalculation; by attention to these simple rules, Dubois had built up a steady reputation from the days when he had beena promising junior officer, a still, almost abstracted young man, deliberate but ready. Even then men had looked at him and said: 'Hewill go far. ' Through fifty years of peace he had never once been foundwanting, and at manoeuvres his impassive persistence had perplexed andhypnotised and defeated many a more actively intelligent man. Deep inhis soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery about the modernart of warfare, the key to his career. And this discovery was thatNOBODY KNEW, that to act therefore was to blunder, that to talk was toconfess; and that the man who acted slowly and steadfastly and above allsilently, had the best chance of winning through. Meanwhile one fedthe men. Now by this same strategy he hoped to shatter those mysteriousunknowns of the Central European command. Delhi might talk of a greatflank march through Holland, with all the British submarines andhydroplanes 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 uponVienna; the thing was to listen--and wait for the other side to beginexperimenting. It was all experimenting. And meanwhile he remained inprofile, with an air of assurance--like a man who sits in an automobileafter 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 lightsthrew a score of shadows of him upon the maps, great bunches of him, versions of a commanding presence, lighter or darker, dominated thefield, and pointed in every direction. Those shadows symbolised hiscontrol. When a messenger came from the wireless room to shift this orthat piece in the game, to replace under amended reports one CentralEuropean regiment by a score, to draw back or thrust out or distributethis or that force of the Allies, the Marshal would turn his head andseem not to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who approvesa pupil's self-correction. 'Yes, that's better. '

How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how wonderful itall was. This was the brain of the western world, this was Olympus withthe warring earth at its feet. And he was guiding France, France so longa resentful exile from imperialism, back to her old predominance. 

It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should beprivileged to participate.... 

It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personaldevotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact, punctual. Shemust control herself.... 

She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when the warwould be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this harshness, this armour would be put aside and the gods might unbend. Her eyelidsdrooped.... 

She roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night outsidewas no longer still. That there was an excitement down below on thebridge and a running in the street and a flickering of searchlightsamong the clouds from some high place away beyond the Trocadero. Andthen the excitement came surging up past her and invaded the hallwithin. 

One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of theroom, gesticulating and shouting something. 

And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn'tunderstand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed machinery andcables of the ways beneath, were beating--as pulses beat. And about herblew something like a wind--a wind that was dismay. 

Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child mightlook towards its mother. 

He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but thatwas natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand gauntlygesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too manifestlydisposed to drag him towards the great door that opened on the terrace. And Viard was hurrying towards the huge windows and doing so in thestrangest 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 themasonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping down throughthe torn clouds, and from a point a little below two of them, there hadalready started curling trails of red.... 

Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through momentsthat seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl down towardsher. 

She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world buta crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuingsound. Every other light had gone out about her and against this glarehung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments ofcornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass. Shehad an impression of a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddenedliving thing that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidsta chaos of falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earthfuriously, 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 alittle rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She tried toraise herself and found her leg was very painful. She was not clearwhether 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 positionand looked about her. 

Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of avast uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing had beendestroyed. 

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, aworld of heaped broken things. And it was lit--and somehow this was morefamiliar to her mind than any other fact about her--by a flickering, purplish-crimson light. Then close to her, rising above a confusion ofdebris, she recognised the Trocadero; it was changed, something hadgone from it, but its outline was unmistakable. It stood out against astreaming, whirling uprush of red-lit steam. And with that she recalledParis 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 whichthese warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps of vapour cameinto circling existence a foot or so from its mirror-surface. Nearat hand and reflected exactly in the water was the upper part of afamiliar-looking stone pillar. On the side of her away from the waterthe heaped ruins rose steeply in a confused slope up to a glaring crest. Above and reflecting this glare towered pillowed masses of steam rollingswiftly upward to the zenith. It was from this crest that the livid glowthat lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind connectedthis mound with the vanished buildings of the War Control. 

'Mais!' she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite motionlessfor a time, crouching close to the warm earth. 

Then presently this dim, broken human thing began to look about itagain. She began to feel the need of fellowship. She wanted to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate her experience. And her foot hurt heratrociously. There ought to be an ambulance. A little gust of querulouscriticisms blew across her mind. This surely was a disaster! Alwaysafter a disaster there should be ambulances and helpers moving about.... 

She craned her head. There was something there. But everything was sostill!

'Monsieur!' she cried. Her ears, she noted, felt queer, and she began tosuspect that all was not well with them. 

It was terribly lonely in this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps thisman--if it was a man, for it was difficult to see--might for all hisstillness be merely insensible. He might have been stunned.... 

The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a momentevery little detail was distinct. It was Marshal Dubois. He was lyingagainst a huge slab of the war map. To it there stuck and from it theredangled little wooden objects, the symbols of infantry and cavalry andguns, as they were disposed upon the frontier. He did not seem tobe aware of this at his back, he had an effect of inattention, notindifferent attention, but as if he were thinking.... 

She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was evidenthe frowned. He frowned slightly, he had an air of not wanting to bedisturbed. His face still bore that expression of assured confidence, that conviction that if things were left to him France might obey insecurity.... 

She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer. Astrange surmise made her eyes dilate. With a painful wrench she pulledherself up so that she could see completely over the intervening lumpsof smashed-up masonry. Her hand touched something wet, and after oneconvulsive movement she became rigid. 

It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head andshoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness and a poolof shining black.... 

And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled, and arush of hot water came pouring over her. Then it seemed to her that shewas dragged downward.... 

Section 3

When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and the blackhair close-cropped en brosse, who was in charge of the French specialscientific corps, heard presently of this disaster to the War Control, he was so wanting in imagination in any sphere but his own, that helaughed. Small matter to him that Paris was burning. His mother andfather and sister lived at Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had everhad, and it was poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen. He slappedhis second-in-command on the shoulder. 'Now, ' he said, 'there's nothingon 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, andwe'll just show these old women what we can do when they let us have ourheads. '

He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into thecourtyard of the chateau in which he had been installed and shoutedfor his automobile. Things would have to move quickly because there wasscarcely an hour and a half before dawn. He looked at the sky and notedwith satisfaction a heavy bank of clouds athwart the pallid east. 

He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material andaeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck awayin barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods. A hawk could not havediscovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun. But thatnight he only wanted one of the machines, and it was handy and quiteprepared 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 wouldbe enough for what he meant to do.... 

He had in his hands the black complement to all those other giftsscience 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 voicein which he gave his orders, and he pointed his remarks with the longfinger 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. Notime to lose, boys.... '

And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and Saxonythe swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancingsunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow tothe heart of the Central European hosts. 

It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above thebanked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to plunge at onceinto their wet obscurities should some hostile flier range into vision. The tense young steersman divided his attention between the guidingstars above and the level, tumbled surfaces of the vapour strata thathid the world below. Over great spaces those banks lay as even as afrozen lava-flow and almost as still, and then they were rent by raggedareas of translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim patchesof the land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw quitedistinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps andsignals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid through aboiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill. But if the worldwas masked it was alive with sounds. Up through that vapour floor camethe deep roar of trains, the whistles of horns of motor-cars, a soundof rifle fire away to the south, and as he drew near his destination thecrowing of cocks.... 

The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at firststarry and then paler with a light that crept from north to east as thedawn came on. The Milky Way was invisible in the blue, and the lesserstars vanished. The face of the adventurer at the steering-wheel, darklyvisible 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 gothold of the matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat withhis legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which containedin its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that wouldcontinue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seenin action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential substance, had beentested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel chambersembedded in lead. Beyond the thought of great destruction slumberingin the black spheres between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow outvery exactly the instructions that had been given him, the man's mindwas a blank. His aquiline profile against the starlight expressednothing but a profound gloom. 

The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital wasapproached. 

So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by noaeroplanes at all. The frontier scouts they must have passed in thenight; probably these were mostly under the clouds; the world was wideand they had had luck in not coming close to any soaring sentinel. Theirmachine was painted a pale gray, that lay almost invisibly over thecloud levels below. But now the east was flushing with the near ascentof the sun, Berlin was but a score of miles ahead, and the luck of theFrenchmen held. By imperceptible degrees the clouds below dissolved.... 

Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering light andwith all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was Berlin. The leftfinger of the steersman verified roads and open spaces below upon themica-covered square of map that was fastened by his wheel. There in aseries of lake-like expansions was the Havel away to the right; over bythose forests must be Spandau; there the river split about the Potsdamisland; and right ahead was Charlottenburg cleft by a great thoroughfarethat fell like an indicating beam of light straight to the imperialheadquarters. There, plain enough, was the Thiergarten; beyond rosethe imperial palace, and to the right those tall buildings, thoseclustering, beflagged, bemasted roofs, must be the offices in whichthe Central European staff was housed. It was all coldly clear andcolourless in the dawn. 

He looked up suddenly as a humming sound grew out of nothing and becameswiftly louder. Nearly overhead a German aeroplane was circling downfrom an immense height to challenge him. He made a gesture with his leftarm to the gloomy man behind and then gripped his little wheel with bothhands, crouched over it, and twisted his neck to look upward. He wasattentive, tightly strung, but quite contemptuous of their ability tohurt him. No German alive, he was assured, could outfly him, or indeedany one of the best Frenchmen. He imagined they might strike at him asa hawk strikes, but they were men coming down out of the bitter cold upthere, in a hungry, spiritless, morning mood; they came slanting downlike a sword swung by a lazy man, and not so rapidly but that he wasable to slip away from under them and get between them and Berlin. Theybegan challenging him in German with a megaphone when they were stillperhaps a mile away. The words came to him, rolled up into a mere blobof hoarse sound. Then, gathering alarm from his grim silence, they gavechase and swept down, a hundred yards above him perhaps, and a couple ofhundred behind. They were beginning to understand what he was. He ceasedto watch them and concentrated himself on the city ahead, and for a timethe two aeroplanes raced.... 

A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one wastearing paper. A second followed. Something tapped the machine. 

It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces belowrushed widening out nearer and nearer to them. 'Ready!' said thesteersman. 

The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands thebomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied itagainst the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter. Betweenits handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he bent his headuntil his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in order to let the airin upon the inducive. Sure of its accessibility, he craned his neck overthe side of the aeroplane and judged his pace and distance. Then veryquickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over theside. 

'Round, ' he whispered inaudibly. 

The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a descendingcolumn of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a whirlwind. Both theaeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks, hurled high and sideways andthe steersman, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, fought in great bankingcurves for a balance. The gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; hisnostrils dilated, his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped.... 

When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the craterof a small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle ashuddering star of evil splendour spurted and poured up smoke and flametowards them like an accusation. They were too high to distinguishpeople clearly, or mark the bomb's effect upon the building untilsuddenly the facade tottered and crumbled before the flare as sugardissolves in water. The man stared for a moment, showed all his longteeth, and then staggered into the cramped standing position his strapspermitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down after itsfellow. 

The explosion came this time more directly underneath the aeroplaneand shot it upward edgeways. The bomb box tipped to the point ofdisgorgement, and the bomb-thrower was pitched forward upon the thirdbomb with his face close to its celluloid stud. He clutched its handles, and with a sudden gust of determination that the thing should not escapehim, bit its stud. Before he could hurl it over, the monoplane wasslipping sideways. Everything was falling sideways. Instinctively hegave himself up to gripping, his body holding the bomb in its place. 

Then that bomb had exploded also, and steersman, thrower, and aeroplanewere just flying rags and splinters of metal and drops of moisture inthe air, and a third column of fire rushed eddying down upon the doomedbuildings below.... 

Section 4

Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuingexplosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the onlyexplosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirelyto their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burstupon 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 theoutside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in acase of membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by whichthe bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off andadmit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set upradio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. Thisliberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was ablazing continual explosion. The Central European bombs were the same, except that they were larger and had a more complicated arrangement foranimating the inducive. 

Always before in the development of warfare the shells and rockets firedhad been but momentarily explosive, they had gone off in an instant oncefor all, and if there was nothing living or valuable within reach of theconcussion 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 hadbeen induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing couldarrest it. Of all Hyslop's artificial elements, Carolinum was the mostheavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to make and handle. Tothis day it remains the most potent degenerator known. What the earliertwentieth-century chemists called its half period was seventeen days;that is to say, it poured out half of the huge store of energy in itsgreat molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen days'emission was a half of that first period's outpouring, and so on. Aswith all radio-active substances this Carolinum, though every seventeendays its power is halved, though constantly it diminishes towardsthe imperceptible, is never entirely exhausted, and to this day thebattle-fields and bomb fields of that frantic time in human history aresprinkled with radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays. 

What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the induciveoxidised and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum began todegenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance ofthe bomb. A moment or so after its explosion began it was still mainlyan inert sphere exploding superficially, a big, inanimate nucleuswrapped in flame and thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanesfell in this state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, asmore and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread itself outinto a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of what became veryspeedily a miniature active volcano. The Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling confusion of moltensoil and superheated steam, and so remained spinning furiously andmaintaining an eruption that lasted for years or months or weeksaccording to the size of the bomb employed and the chances of itsdispersal. Once launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable anduncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from thecrater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent vapour andfragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and blistering energy, were flung highand far. 

Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimateexplosive that was to give the 'decisive touch' to war.... 

Section 5

A recent historical writer has described the world of that time as onethat 'believed in established words and was invincibly blind to theobvious in things. ' Certainly it seems now that nothing could have beenmore obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than therapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly theydid not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst intheir fumbling hands. Yet the broad facts must have glared upon anyintelligent mind. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesthe amount of energy that men were able to command was continuallyincreasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict ablow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There wasno increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passivedefence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmasteredby this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction wasbecoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; itwas revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Beforethe last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man couldcarry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient towreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody;the children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as theAmericans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the paraphernalia andpretensions of war. 

It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce betweenthe scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand, and the worldof the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men of a later timecan hope to understand this preposterous state of affairs. Socialorganisation was still in the barbaric stage. There were already greatnumbers of actively intelligent men and much private and commercialcivilisation, but the community, as a whole, was aimless, untrained andunorganised 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 accountof the experiences of a common man during the war time. While theseterrific disclosures of scientific possibility were happening in Parisand Berlin, Barnet and his company were industriously entrenchingthemselves in Belgian Luxembourg. 

He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day's journey through thenorth of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid phrases. The countrywas browned by a warm summer, the trees a little touched with autumnalcolour, and the wheat already golden. When they stopped for an hourat Hirson, men and women with tricolour badges upon the platformdistributed cakes and glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and therewas much cheerfulness. 'Such good, cool beer it was, ' he wrote. 'I hadhad nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom. '

A number of monoplanes, 'like giant swallows, ' he notes, were scoutingin the pink evening sky. 

Barnet's battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place calledVirton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to Jemelle. Herethey detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the railway--trains and storeswere passing along it all night--and next morning he: marched eastwardthrough a cold, overcast dawn, and a morning, first cloudy and thenblazing, over a large spacious country-side interspersed by foresttowards Arlon. 

There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked entrenchmentsand hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton that were designed tocheck and delay any advance from the east upon the fortified line ofthe Meuse. They had their orders, and for two days they worked withouteither a sight of the enemy or any suspicion of the disaster that hadabruptly decapitated the armies of Europe, and turned the west of Parisand the centre of Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction ofPompeii. 

And the news, when it did come, came attenuated. 'We heard there hadbeen mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris, ' Barnet relates; 'butit didn't seem to follow that "They" weren't still somewhere elaboratingtheir plans and issuing orders. When the enemy began to emerge from thewoods in front of us, we cheered and blazed away, and didn't troublemuch more about anything but the battle in hand. If now and then onecocked up an eye into the sky to see what was happening there, the ripof a bullet soon brought one down to the horizontal again.... 

That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of countrybetween Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It was essentiallya rifle and infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do not seem to have takenany decisive share in the actual fighting for some days, though nodoubt they effected the strategy from the first by preventing surprisemovements. They were aeroplanes with atomic engines, but they were notprovided with atomic bombs, which were manifestly unsuitable for fielduse, nor indeed had they any very effective kind of bomb. And thoughthey manoeuvred against each other, and there was rifle shooting at themand between them, there was little actual aerial fighting. Eitherthe airmen were indisposed to fight or the commanders on both sidespreferred to reserve these machines for scouting.... 

After a day or so of digging and scheming, Barnet found himself in theforefront of a battle. He had made his section of rifle pits chieflyalong 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 hadmasked his preparations with tussocks of corn and poppy. The hostileadvance came blindly and unsuspiciously across the fields below andwould have been very cruelly handled indeed, if some one away to theright had not opened fire too soon. 

'It was a queer thrill when these fellows came into sight, ' heconfesses; 'and not a bit like manoeuvres. They halted for a time onthe edge of the wood and then came forward in an open line. They keptwalking 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 themup, they didn't seem to see us. One or two halted to fire, and then theyall went back towards the wood again. They went slowly at first, lookinground at us, then the shelter of the wood seemed to draw them, and theytrotted. I fired rather mechanically and missed, then I fired again, andthen I became earnest to hit something, made sure of my sighting, andaimed 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 wereso spasmodic and uncertain; then I think he came to a ditch or some suchobstacle and halted for a moment. "GOT you, " I whispered, and pulled thetrigger. 

'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 struggleabout. I began to think.... 

'For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn. Either hewas calling out or some one was shouting to him.... 

'Then he jumped up--he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with onelast effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still and nevermoved again. 

'He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him dead. Ihad been wanting to do so for some time.... '

The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made forthemselves 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 crawledalong 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 toa pulp. 'Look at this, ' he kept repeating, hugging it and then extendingit. 'Damned foolery! Damned foolery! My right hand, sir! My right hand!'

For some time Barnet could do nothing with him. The man was consumed byhis tortured realisation of the evil silliness of war, the realisationwhich had come upon him in a flash with the bullet that had destroyedhis skill and use as an artificer for ever. He was looking at thevestiges with a horror that made him impenetrable to any other idea. Atlast the poor wretch let Barnet tie up his bleeding stump and help himalong the ditch that conducted him deviously out of range.... 

When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water, and allday long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst. For food theyhad chocolate and bread. 

'At first, ' he says, 'I was extraordinarily excited by my baptism offire. Then as the heat of the day came on I experienced an enormoustedium and discomfort. The flies became extremely troublesome, and mylittle grave of a rifle pit was invaded by ants. I could not get upor move about, for some one in the trees had got a mark on me. I keptthinking of the dead Prussian down among the corn, and of the bitteroutcries of my own man. Damned foolery! It WAS damned foolery. But whowas to blame? How had we got to this? . . . 

'Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with dynamitebombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and suddenly dived downover beyond the trees. 

'"From Holland to the Alps this day, " I thought, "there must becrouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to inflictirreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic to the pitchof impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall wake up. " . . . 

'Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. "Presently mankind will wakeup. "

'I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were among thesehundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in rebellion against all theseancient traditions of flag and empire. Weren't we, perhaps, already inthe throes of the last crisis, in that darkest moment of a nightmare'shorror before the sleeper will endure no more of it--and wakes?

'I don't know how my speculations ended. I think they were not somuch ended as distracted by the distant thudding of the guns that wereopening fire at long range upon Namur. '

Section 7

But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of modernwarfare. So far he had taken part only in a little shooting. The bayonetattack by which the advanced line was broken was made at a place calledCroix Rouge, more than twenty miles away, and that night under cover ofthe darkness the rifle pits were abandoned and he got his company awaywithout further loss. 

His regiment fell back unpressed behind the fortified lines betweenNamur and Sedan, entrained at a station called Mettet, and was sentnorthward by Antwerp and Rotterdam to Haarlem. Hence they marched intoNorth Holland. It was only after the march into Holland that he began torealise the monstrous and catastrophic nature of the struggle in whichhe was playing his undistinguished part. 

He describes very pleasantly the journey through the hills and open landof Brabant, the repeated crossing of arms of the Rhine, and the changefrom the undulating scenery of Belgium to the flat, rich meadows, thesunlit dyke roads, and the countless windmills of the Dutch levels. In those days there was unbroken land from Alkmaar and Leiden to theDollart. Three great provinces, South Holland, North Holland, andZuiderzeeland, reclaimed at various times between the early tenthcentury and 1945 and all many feet below the level of the waves outsidethe dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern sun andsustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of lawsand custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a perpetualdefence against the beleaguering sea. For more than two hundred andfifty miles from Walcheren to Friesland stretched a line of embankmentsand pumping stations that was the admiration of the world. 

If some curious god had chosen to watch the course of events in thosenorthern provinces while that flanking march of the British was inprogress, he would have found a convenient and appropriate seat forhis observation upon one of the great cumulus clouds that were driftingslowly across the blue sky during all these eventful days before thegreat catastrophe. For that was the quality of the weather, hot andclear, with something of a breeze, and underfoot dry and a littleinclined to be dusty. This watching god would have looked down uponbroad stretches of sunlit green, sunlit save for the creeping patchesof shadow cast by the clouds, upon sky-reflecting meres, fringed anddivided up by masses of willow and large areas of silvery weeds, uponwhite roads lying bare to the sun and upon a tracery of blue canals. Thepastures were alive with cattle, the roads had a busy traffic, of beastsand bicycles and gaily coloured peasants' automobiles, the hues of theinnumerable motor barges in the canal vied with the eventfulness of theroadways; and everywhere in solitary steadings, amidst ricks and barns, in groups by the wayside, in straggling villages, each with its fine oldchurch, or in compact towns laced with canals and abounding in bridgesand clipped trees, were human habitations. 

The people of this country-side were not belligerents. The interestsand sympathies alike of Holland had been so divided that to the end sheremained undecided and passive in the struggle of the world powers. Andeverywhere along the roads taken by the marching armies clustered groupsand crowds of impartially observant spectators, women and children inpeculiar white caps and old-fashioned sabots, and elderly, clean-shavenmen quietly thoughtful over their long pipes. They had no fear of theirinvaders; the days when 'soldiering' meant bands of licentious lootershad long since passed away.... 

That watcher among the clouds would have seen a great distribution ofkhaki-uniformed men and khaki-painted material over the whole of thesunken area of Holland. He would have marked the long trains, packedwith men or piled with great guns and war material, creeping slowly, alert for train-wreckers, along the north-going lines; he would haveseen the Scheldt and Rhine choked with shipping, and pouring out stillmore men and still more material; he would have noticed halts andprovisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling caterpillars ofcavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons, the huge beetles of greatguns, crawling under the poplars along the dykes and roads northward, along ways lined by the neutral, unmolested, ambiguously observantDutch. All the barges and shipping upon the canals had beenrequisitioned for transport. In that clear, bright, warm weather, itwould all have looked from above like some extravagant festival ofanimated toys. 

As the sun sank westward the spectacle must have become a littleindistinct because of a golden haze; everything must have become warmerand more glowing, and because of the lengthening of the shadows moremanifestly in relief. The shadows of the tall churches grew longer andlonger, until they touched the horizon and mingled in the universalshadow; and then, slow, and soft, and wrapping the world in fold afterfold of deepening blue, came the night--the night at first obscurelysimple, and then with faint points here and there, and then jewelled indarkling splendour with a hundred thousand lights. Out of that minglingof darkness and ambiguous glares the noise of an unceasing activitywould have arisen, the louder and plainer now because there was nolonger any distraction of sight. 

It may be that watcher drifting in the pellucid gulf beneath the starswatched all through the night; it may be that he dozed. But if he gaveway to so natural a proclivity, assuredly on the fourth night of thegreat flank march he was aroused, for that was the night of the battlein the air that decided the fate of Holland. The aeroplanes werefighting at last, and suddenly about him, above and below, with criesand 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 machinestogether, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a handful of tenthousand knives over the low country. And amidst that swarming flightwere five that drove headlong for the sea walls of Holland, carryingatomic bombs. From north and west and south, the allied aeroplanes rosein response and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that warin the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew andfell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavypounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge ofchariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, thisheadlong swoop to death?

And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped andlocked 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 andthen a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged hungrily down uponthe Dutchmen's dykes and struck between land and sea and flared up againin enormous columns of glare and crimsoned smoke and steam. 

And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires andtrees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea, tumbled withanger, red-foaming like a sea of blood.... 

Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous crying anda flurry of alarm bells... . 

The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky, likethings 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 ourquarters at Alkmaar that night. There, we were told, were provisions, tobacco, and everything for which we craved. But the main canal fromZaandam and Amsterdam was hopelessly jammed with craft, and we were gladof a chance opening that enabled us to get out of the main column andlie up in a kind of little harbour very much neglected and weedgrownbefore a deserted house. We broke into this and found some herrings ina 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 thecheese and grilled our herrings. None of us had slept for nearly fortyhours, and I determined to stay in this refuge until dawn and then ifthe traffic was still choked leave the barge and march the rest of theway into Alkmaar. 

'This place we had got into was perhaps a hundred yards from the canaland underneath a little brick bridge we could see the flotilla still, and hear the voices of the soldiers. Presently five or six other bargescame 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. Inreturn we got tobacco. A large expanse of water spread to the westwardof 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 letthem go into the house on account of the furniture, and I left a note ofindebtedness for the food we had taken. We were particularly glad of ourtobacco and fires, because of the numerous mosquitoes that rose aboutus. 

'The gate of the house from which we had provisioned ourselves wasadorned with the legend, Vreugde bij Vrede, "Joy with Peace, " and itbore every mark of the busy retirement of a comfort-loving proprietor. I went along his garden, which was gay and delightful with big bushes ofrose and sweet brier, to a quaint little summer-house, and there I satand watched the men in groups cooking and squatting along the bank. Thesun was setting in a nearly cloudless sky. 

'For the last two weeks I had been a wholly occupied man, intent onlyupon obeying the orders that came down to me. All through this time Ihad 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. Nowcame this rare, unexpected interlude, and I could look detachedly uponwhat I was doing and feel something of its infinite wonderfulness. I wasirradiated with affection for the men of my company and with admirationat their cheerful acquiescence in the subordination and needs of ourpositions. I watched their proceedings and heard their pleasant voices. How willing those men were! How ready to accept leadership and forgetthemselves in collective ends! I thought how manfully they had gonethrough all the strains and toil of the last two weeks, how theyhad toughened and shaken down to comradeship together, and how muchsweetness there is after all in our foolish human blood. For they werejust one casual sample of the species--their patience and readinesslay, as the energy of the atom had lain, still waiting to be properlyutilised. Again it came to me with overpowering force that the supremeneed of our race is leading, that the supreme task is to discoverleading, to forget oneself in realising the collective purpose of therace. Once more I saw life plain.... '

Very characteristic is that of the 'rather too corpulent' youngofficer, who was afterwards to set it all down in the Wander Jahre. Verycharacteristic, too, it is of the change in men's hearts that was eventhen preparing a new phase of human history. 

He goes on to write of the escape from individuality in science andservice, and of his discovery of this 'salvation. ' All that was then, no doubt, very moving and original; now it seems only the most obviouscommonplace of human life. 

The glow of the sunset faded, the twilight deepened into night. Thefires burnt the brighter, and some Irishmen away across the meer startedsinging. But Barnet's men were too weary for that sort of thing, andsoon the bank and the barge were heaped with sleeping forms. 

'I alone seemed unable to sleep. I suppose I was over-weary, and aftera little feverish slumber by the tiller of the barge I sat up, awake anduneasy.... 

'That night Holland seemed all sky. There was just a little black lowerrim to things, a steeple, perhaps, or a line of poplars, and then thegreat hemisphere swept over us. As at first the sky was empty. Yet myuneasiness referred itself in some vague way to the sky. 

'And now I was melancholy. I found something strangely sorrowful andsubmissive in the sleepers all about me, those men who had marched sofar, who had left all the established texture of their lives behind themto come upon this mad campaign, this campaign that signified nothing andconsumed everything, this mere fever of fighting. I saw how little andfeeble is the life of man, a thing of chances, preposterously unableto find the will to realise even the most timid of its dreams. And Iwondered if always it would be so, if man was a doomed animal who wouldnever to the last days of his time take hold of fate and change it tohis will. Always, it may be, he will remain kindly but jealous, desirousbut discursive, able and unwisely impulsive, until Saturn who begot himshall devour him in his turn.... 

'I was roused from these thoughts by the sudden realisation of thepresence of a squadron of aeroplanes far away to the north-east and veryhigh. They looked like little black dashes against the midnight blue. I remember that I looked up at them at first rather idly--as one mightnotice a flight of birds. Then I perceived that they were only theextreme wing of a great fleet that was advancing in a long line veryswiftly 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 myheart beating now rather more rapidly with surprise and excitement. I strained my ears for any sound of guns along our front. Almostinstinctively I turned about for protection to the south and west, andpeered; and then I saw coming as fast and much nearer to me, as if theyhad sprung out of the darkness, three banks of aeroplanes; a groupof squadrons very high, a main body at a height perhaps of one or twothousand feet, and a doubtful number flying low and very indistinct. Themiddle ones were so thick they kept putting out groups of stars. And Irealised that after all there was to be fighting in the air. 

'There was something extraordinarily strange in this swift, noiselessconvergence of nearly invisible combatants above the sleeping hosts. Every one about me was still unconscious; there was no sign as yet ofany agitation among the shipping on the main canal, whose whole course, dotted with unsuspicious lights and fringed with fires, must have beenclearly perceptible from above. Then a long way off towards Alkmaar Iheard bugles, and after that shots, and then a wild clamour of bells. Idetermined 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 itcan have been five minutes from the moment when I first became aware ofthe Central European air fleet to the contact of the two forces. I sawit quite plainly in silhouette against the luminous blue of the northernsky. The allied aeroplanes--they were mostly French--came pouring downlike a fierce shower upon the middle of the Central European fleet. They looked exactly like a coarser sort of rain. There was a cracklingsound--the first sound I heard--it reminded one of the Aurora Borealis, and I supposed it was an interchange of rifle shots. There were flasheslike summer lightning; and then all the sky became a whirling confusionof battle that was still largely noiseless. Some of the Central Europeanaeroplanes were certainly charged and overset; others seemed to collapseand fall and then flare out with so bright a light that it took the edgeoff one's vision and made the rest of the battle disappear as though ithad been snatched back out of sight. 

'And then, while I still peered and tried to shade these flames from myeyes 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 inthe air, and fell like Lucifer in the picture, leaving a flaringtrail in the sky. The night, which had been pellucid and detailedand eventful, seemed to vanish, to be replaced abruptly by a blackbackground to these tremendous pillars of fire.... 

'Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was filledwith flickering lightnings and rushing clouds.... 

'There was something discontinuous in this impact. At one moment I wasa lonely watcher in a sleeping world; the next saw every one about meafoot, the whole world awake and amazed.... 

'And then the wind had struck me a buffet, taken my helmet and sweptaside the summerhouse of Vreugde bij Vrede, as a scythe sweeps awaygrass. I saw the bombs fall, and then watched a great crimson flare leapresponsive to each impact, and mountainous masses of red-lit steam andflying fragments clamber up towards the zenith. Against the glare I sawthe country-side for miles standing black and clear, churches, trees, chimneys. And suddenly I understood. The Central Europeans had burstthe dykes. Those flares meant the bursting of the dykes, and in a littlewhile the sea-water would be upon us.... '

He goes on to tell with a certain prolixity of the steps he took--andall things considered they were very intelligent steps--to meet thisamazing 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 enginesworking, he cast loose from his moorings. Then he bethought himself offood, and contrived to land five men, get in a few dozen cheeses, andship his men again before the inundation reached them. 

He is reasonably proud of this piece of coolness. His idea was to takethe wave head-on and with his engines full speed ahead. And all thewhile he was thanking heaven he was not in the jam of traffic in themain canal. He rather, I think, overestimated the probable rush ofwaters; he dreaded being swept away, he explains, and smashed againsthouses and trees. 

He does not give any estimate of the time it took between the burstingof the dykes and the arrival of the waters, but it was probably aninterval of about twenty minutes or half an hour. He was working nowin darkness--save for the light of his lantern--and in a great wind. Hehung 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 incandescentgaps in the sea defences, and this vast uprush of vapour soon veiled theflaring centres of explosion altogether. 

'The waters came at last, an advancing cascade. It was like a broadroller sweeping across the country. They came with a deep, roaringsound. I had expected a Niagara, but the total fall of the front couldnot have been much more than twelve feet. Our barge hesitated for amoment, took a dose over her bows, and then lifted. I signalled for fullspeed ahead and brought her head upstream, and held on like grim deathto keep her there. 

'There was a wind about as strong as the flood, and I found we werepounding against every conceivable buoyant object that had been betweenus 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, andthe roar of the wind and water cut us off from all remoter sounds. Theblack, shining waters swirled by, coming into the light of our lamps outof an ebony blackness and vanishing again into impenetrable black. And on the waters came shapes, came things that flashed upon us for amoment, now a half-submerged boat, now a cow, now a huge fragment of ahouse's timberings, now a muddle of packing-cases and scaffolding. The things clapped into sight like something shown by the opening of ashutter, and then bumped shatteringly against us or rushed by us. Once Isaw very clearly a man's white face.... 

'All the while a group of labouring, half-submerged trees remained aheadof us, drawing very slowly nearer. I steered a course to avoid them. They seemed to gesticulate a frantic despair against the black steamclouds behind. Once a great branch detached itself and tore shudderingby me. We did, on the whole, make headway. The last I saw of Vreugde bijVrede 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 badlystrained, and his men were pumping or baling in relays. He had got abouta dozen half-drowned people aboard whose boat had capsized near him, andhe had three other boats in tow. He was afloat, and somewhere betweenAmsterdam and Alkmaar, but he could not tell where. It was a day thatwas still half night. Gray waters stretched in every direction under adark gray sky, and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, inmany cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the upper thirdof all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted a dimly seenflotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned, furniture, rafts, timbering, and miscellaneous objects. 

The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there did adead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box or chair orsuch-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was not till the Thursdaythat the dead came to the surface in any quantity. The view was boundedon every side by a gray mist that closed overhead in a gray canopy. Theair cleared in the afternoon, and then, far away to the west under greatbanks of steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of the atomic bombscame visible across the waste of water. 

They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London sunsets. 'Theysat upon the sea, ' says Barnet, 'like frayed-out waterlilies of flame. '

Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the trackof the canal, in helping people who were adrift, in picking up derelictboats, and in taking people out of imperilled houses. He found othermilitary barges similarly employed, and it was only as the day wore onand the immediate appeals for aid were satisfied that he thought of foodand drink for his men, and what course he had better pursue. They had alittle cheese, but no water. 'Orders, ' that mysterious direction, had atlast altogether disappeared. He perceived he had now to act upon his ownresponsibility. 

'One's sense was of a destruction so far-reaching and of a world soaltered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and expect to findthings as they had been before the war began. I sat on the quarter-deckwith Mylius my engineer and Kemp and two others of the non-commissionedofficers, and we consulted upon our line of action. We were foodless andaimless. We agreed that our fighting value was extremely small, and thatour first duty was to get ourselves in touch with food and instructionsagain. Whatever plan of campaign had directed our movements wasmanifestly smashed to bits. Mylius was of opinion that we could takea line westward and get back to England across the North Sea. Hecalculated that with such a motor barge as ours it would be possible toreach the Yorkshire coast within four-and-twenty hours. But this ideaI overruled because of the shortness of our provisions, and moreparticularly because of our urgent need of water. 

'Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their demands didmuch to exasperate our thirst. I decided that if we went away to thesouth we should reach hilly country, or at least country that was notsubmerged, 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 aboutus were filled with British soldiers and had floated up from the NordSee Canal, but none of them were any better informed than ourselves ofthe course of events. "Orders" had, in fact, vanished out of the sky. 

'"Orders" made a temporary reappearance late that evening in the formof a megaphone hail from a British torpedo boat, announcing a truce, andgiving the welcome information that food and water were being hurrieddown the Rhine and were to be found on the barge flotilla lying over theold Rhine above Leiden. ' . . . 

We will not follow Barnet, however, in the description of his strangeoverland voyage among trees and houses and churches by Zaandam andbetween Haarlem and Amsterdam, to Leiden. It was a voyage in a red-litmist, in a world of steamy silhouette, full of strange voices andperplexity, and with every other sensation dominated by a feverishthirst. 'We sat, ' he says, 'in a little huddled group, saying verylittle, and the men forward were mere knots of silent endurance. Ouronly continuing sound was the persistent mewing of a cat one of the menhad rescued from a floating hayrick near Zaandam. We kept a southwardcourse by a watch-chain compass Mylius had produced.... 

'I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army, nor hadwe any strong sense of the war as the dominating fact about us. Ourmental setting had far more of the effect of a huge natural catastrophe. The atomic bombs had dwarfed the international issues to completeinsignificance. When our minds wandered from the preoccupations of ourimmediate needs, we speculated upon the possibility of stopping the useof these frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed. For to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still greaterpower of destruction of which they were the precursors might quiteeasily 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 berun some way. THIS--all this--is impossible. "

'I made no immediate answer. Something--I cannot think what--had broughtback to me the figure of that man I had seen wounded on the very firstday of actual fighting. I saw again his angry, tearful eyes, and thatpoor, dripping, bloody mess that had been a skilful human hand fiveminutes before, thrust out in indignant protest. "Damned foolery, " hehad stormed and sobbed, "damned foolery. My right hand, sir! My RIGHThand. . . . "

'My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me. "I think we aretoo--too silly, " I said to Mylius, "ever to stop war. If we'd had thesense to do it, we should have done it before this. I think this----" Ipointed 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 hisbarge-load of hungry and starving men. 

For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if civilisationhad come to a final collapse. These crowning buds upon the traditionthat Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered, opened and flared 'likewaterlilies of flame' over nations destroyed, over churches smashed orsubmerged, towns ruined, fields lost to mankind for ever, and a millionweltering bodies. Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would theflames of war still burn amidst the ruins?

Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance intheir answers to that question. Already once in the history ofmankind, in America, before its discovery by the whites, an organisedcivilisation had given way to a mere cult of warfare, specialised andcruel, and it seemed for a time to many a thoughtful man as if thewhole world was but to repeat on a larger scale this ascendancy of thewarrior, this triumph of the destructive instincts of the race. 

The subsequent chapters of Barnet's narrative do but supply body tothis tragic possibility. He gives a series of vignettes of civilisation, shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found the Belgian hillsswarming with refugees and desolated by cholera; the vestiges of thecontending armies keeping order under a truce, without actual battles, but with the cautious hostility of habit, and a great absence of planeverywhere. 

Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were rumoursof cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoyand the forest region of the eastern Ardennes. There was the reportof an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and Japanese, and of some hugerevolutionary outbreak in America. The weather was stormier than men hadever known it in those regions, with much thunder and lightning and wildcloud-bursts of rain.... 

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE ENDING OF WAR

Section 1

On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding twolong stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to Bellinzona, andsouthward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is verybeautiful in springtime with a great multitude of wild flowers. Moreparticularly is this so in early June, when the slender asphodel SaintBruno's lily, with its spike of white blossom, is in flower. To thewestward of this delightful shelf there is a deep and densely woodedtrench, a great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of whicharise great precipices very high and wild. Above the asphodel fields themountains climb in rocky slopes to solitudes of stone and sunlight thatcurve round and join that wall of cliffs in one common skyline. Thisdesolate and austere background contrasts very vividly with the glowingserenity of the great lake below, with the spacious view of fertilehills and roads and villages and islands to south and east, and with thehotly golden rice flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And becauseit was a remote and insignificant place, far away out of the crowdingtragedies of that year of disaster, away from burning cities andstarving multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was herethat there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest, ifpossible, before it was too late, the debacle of civilisation. Here, brought together by the indefatigable energy of that impassionedhumanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at Washington, the chiefPowers of the world were to meet in a last desperate conference to 'savehumanity. '

Leblanc was one of those ingenuous men whose lot would have beeninsignificant in any period of security, but who have been caught upto an immortal role in history by the sudden simplification ofhuman affairs through some tragical crisis, to the measure of theirsimplicity. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln, and such was Garibaldi. And Leblanc, with his transparent childish innocence, his entireself-forgetfulness, came into this confusion of distrust and intricatedisaster with an invincible appeal for the manifest sanities of thesituation. His voice, when he spoke, was 'full of remonstrance. ' He wasa little bald, spectacled man, inspired by that intellectual idealismwhich has been one of the peculiar gifts of France to humanity. He waspossessed of one clear persuasion, that war must end, and that the onlyway to end war was to have but one government for mankind. He brushedaside all other considerations. At the very outbreak of the war, so soonas the two capitals of the belligerents had been wrecked, he went to thepresident in the White House with this proposal. He made it as if it wasa matter of course. He was fortunate to be in Washington and in touchwith that gigantic childishness which was the characteristic of theAmerican imagination. For the Americans also were among the simplepeoples by whom the world was saved. He won over the American presidentand the American government to his general ideas; at any rate theysupported him sufficiently to give him a standing with the moresceptical European governments, and with this backing he set to work--itseemed the most fantastic of enterprises--to bring together all therulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable letters, hesent messages, he went desperate journeys, he enlisted whatever supporthe could find; no one was too humble for an ally or too obstinatefor his advances; through the terrible autumn of the last wars thispersistent little visionary in spectacles must have seemed rather like ahopeful canary twittering during a thunderstorm. And no accumulation ofdisasters daunted his conviction that they could be ended. 

For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase ofdestruction. Power after Power about the armed globe sought toanticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium ofpanic, in order to use their bombs first. China and Japan had assailedRussia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had attacked Japan, Indiawas in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit of fire spouting death andflame; the redoubtable King of the Balkans was mobilising. It musthave seemed plain at last to every one in those days that the worldwas slipping headlong to anarchy. By the spring of 1959 from nearlytwo hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared theunquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsyfabric of the world's credit had vanished, industry was completelydisorganised and every city, every thickly populated area was starvingor trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the capital cities ofthe world were burning; millions of people had already perished, andover great areas government was at an end. Humanity has been comparedby one contemporary writer to a sleeper who handles matches in his sleepand wakes to find himself in flames. 

For many months it was an open question whether there was to be foundthroughout all the race the will and intelligence to face these newconditions and make even an attempt to arrest the downfall of the socialorder. For a time the war spirit defeated every effort to rally theforces of preservation and construction. Leblanc seemed to be protestingagainst earthquakes, and as likely to find a spirit of reason in thecrater of Etna. Even though the shattered official governments nowclamoured for peace, bands of irreconcilables and invincible patriots, usurpers, adventurers, and political desperadoes, were everywhere inpossession of the simple apparatus for the disengagement of atomicenergy and the initiation of new centres of destruction. The stuffexercised 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? Thepower of destruction which had once been the ultimate privilegeof government was now the only power left in the world--and it waseverywhere. There were few thoughtful men during that phase ofblazing waste who did not pass through such moods of despair as Barnetdescribes, and declare with him: 'This is the end.... '

And all the while Leblanc was going to and fro with glittering glassesand an inexhaustible persuasiveness, urging the manifest reasonablenessof his view upon ears that ceased presently to be inattentive. Never atany 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 inevitableultimate peace. From being treated as an amiable dreamer he came byinsensible degrees to be regarded as an extravagant possibility. Then hebegan to seem even practicable. The people who listened to him in 1958with a smiling impatience, were eager before 1959 was four months oldto know just exactly what he thought might be done. He answered with thepatience of a philosopher and the lucidity of a Frenchman. He began toreceive responses of a more and more hopeful type. He came acrossthe Atlantic to Italy, and there he gathered in the promises for thiscongress. He chose those high meadows above Brissago for the reasons wehave stated. 'We must get away, ' he said, 'from old associations. ' Heset to work requisitioning material for his conference with an assurancethat was justified by the replies. With a slight incredulity theconference which was to begin a new order in the world, gathered itselftogether. Leblanc summoned it without arrogance, he controlled it byvirtue of an infinite humility. Men appeared upon those upland slopeswith the apparatus for wireless telegraphy; others followed with tentsand provisions; a little cable was flung down to a convenient pointupon the Locarno road below. Leblanc arrived, sedulously directing everydetail that would affect the tone of the assembly. He might have been acourier in advance rather than the originator of the gathering. Andthen there arrived, some by the cable, most by aeroplane, a few in otherfashions, the men who had been called together to confer upon the stateof 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, tookpart in it. There were even scientific men; and that world-famous oldman, Holsten, came with the others to contribute his amateur statecraftto the desperate problem of the age. Only Leblanc would have dared so tosummon figure heads and powers and intelligence, or have had the courageto hope for their agreement.... 

Section 2

And one at least of those who were called to this conference ofgovernments came to it on foot. This was King Egbert, the young kingof the most venerable kingdom in Europe. He was a rebel, and had alwaysbeen of deliberate choice a rebel against the magnificence of hisposition. He affected long pedestrian tours and a disposition to sleepin the open air. He came now over the Pass of Sta Maria Maggiore andby boat up the lake to Brissago; thence he walked up the mountain, apleasant path set with oaks and sweet chestnut. For provision on thewalk, for he did not want to hurry, he carried with him a pocketfulof bread and cheese. A certain small retinue that was necessary to hiscomfort and dignity upon occasions of state he sent on by the cable car, and with him walked his private secretary, Firmin, a man who hadthrown up the Professorship of World Politics in the London School ofSociology, Economics, and Political Science, to take up these duties. Firmin was a man of strong rather than rapid thought, he had anticipatedgreat influence in this new position, and after some years he was stillonly beginning to apprehend how largely his function was to listen. Originally he had been something of a thinker upon internationalpolitics, an authority upon tariffs and strategy, and a valuedcontributor to various of the higher organs of public opinion, but theatomic bombs had taken him by surprise, and he had still to recovercompletely from his pre-atomic opinions and the silencing effect ofthose sustained explosives. 

The king's freedom from the trammels of etiquette was very complete. Intheory--and he abounded in theory--his manners were purely democratic. It was by sheer habit and inadvertency that he permitted Firmin, who haddiscovered a rucksack in a small shop in the town below, to carryboth bottles of beer. The king had never, as a matter of fact, carriedanything for himself in his life, and he had never noted that he did notdo so. 

'We will have nobody with us, ' he said, 'at all. We will be perfectlysimple. '

So Firmin carried the beer. 

As they walked up--it was the king made the pace rather thanFirmin--they talked of the conference before them, and Firmin, with acertain want of assurance that would have surprised him in himselfin the days of his Professorship, sought to define the policy of hiscompanion. 'In its broader form, sir, ' said Firmin; 'I admit a certainplausibility in this project of Leblanc's, but I feel that althoughit may be advisable to set up some sort of general control forInternational affairs--a sort of Hague Court with extended powers--thatis no reason whatever for losing sight of the principles of national andimperial autonomy. '

'Firmin, ' said the king, 'I am going to set my brother kings a goodexample. '

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 Firminprepared to speak. 'I am going to fling my royalty and empire on thetable--and declare at once I don't mean to haggle. It's haggling--aboutrights--has been the devil in human affairs, for--always. I am going tostop this nonsense. '

Firmin halted abruptly. 'But, sir!' he cried. 

The king stopped six yards ahead of him and looked back at his adviser'sperspiring visage. 

'Do you really think, Firmin, that I am here as--as an infernalpolitician to put my crown and my flag and my claims and so forth in theway of peace? That little Frenchman is right. You know he is rightas well as I do. Those things are over. We--we kings and rulers andrepresentatives have been at the very heart of the mischief. Of coursewe imply separation, and of course separation means the threat of war, and of course the threat of war means the accumulation of more and moreatomic bombs. The old game's up. But, I say, we mustn't stand here, youknow. The world waits. Don't you think the old game's up, Firmin?'

Firmin adjusted a strap, passed a hand over his wet forehead, andfollowed earnestly. 'I admit, sir, ' he said to a receding back, 'thatthere has to be some sort of hegemony, some sort of Amphictyoniccouncil----'

'There's got to be one simple government for all the world, ' said theking 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 ofannoyance passed across his heated features. 

'Yesterday, ' said the king, by way of explanation, 'the Japanese verynearly got San Francisco. '

'I hadn't heard, sir. '

'The Americans ran the Japanese aeroplane down into the sea and therethe 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 wantme to go up this hill and haggle. Consider the effect of that upon myimperial 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 insome subtle way seemed to implicate his master with the trouble of theknapsack. 

The king considered him. 

'We will go just a little higher, ' he said. 'I want to find thisunoccupied village they spoke of, and then we will drink that beer. Itcan't be far. We will drink the beer and throw away the bottles. Andthen, Firmin, I shall ask you to look at things in a more generouslight.... Because, you know, you must.... '

He turned about and for some time the only sound they made was thenoise of their boots upon the loose stones of the way and the irregularbreathing of Firmin. 

At length, as it seemed to Firmin, or quite soon, as it seemed to theking, the gradient of the path diminished, the way widened out, and theyfound themselves in a very beautiful place indeed. It was one of thoseupland clusters of sheds and houses that are still to be found in themountains of North Italy, buildings that were used only in the highsummer, and which it was the custom to leave locked up and desertedthrough all the winter and spring, and up to the middle of June. Thebuildings were of a soft-toned gray stone, buried in rich green grass, shadowed by chestnut trees and lit by an extraordinary blaze of yellowbroom. Never had the king seen broom so glorious; he shouted at thelight of it, for it seemed to give out more sunlight even than itreceived; he sat down impulsively on a lichenous stone, tugged out hisbread and cheese, and bade Firmin thrust the beer into the shaded weedsto cool. 

'The things people miss, Firmin, ' he said, 'who go up into the air inships!'

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 orderthat is fast vanishing away. Indeed, judging by the grass between thestones and in the huts, I am inclined to doubt if it is in use evennow. '

'I suppose, ' said the king, 'they would come up immediately the hayon this flower meadow is cut. It would be those slow, creamy-colouredbeasts, I expect, one sees on the roads below, and swarthy girls withred handkerchiefs over their black hair.... It is wonderful to think howlong that beautiful old life lasted. In the Roman times and long agesbefore ever the rumour of the Romans had come into these parts, mendrove their cattle up into these places as the summer came on.... Howhaunted is this place! There have been quarrels here, hopes, childrenhave played here and lived to be old crones and old gaffers, and died, and so it has gone on for thousands of lives. Lovers, innumerablelovers, 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 todrink. 

'I wish, sir, ' said Firmin suddenly, 'I could induce you at least todelay your decision----'

'It's no good talking, Firmin, ' said the king. 'My mind's as clear asdaylight. '

'Sire, ' protested Firmin, with his voice full of bread and cheese andgenuine emotion, 'have you no respect for your kingship?'

The king paused before he answered with unwonted gravity. 'It's justbecause I have, Firmin, that I won't be a puppet in this game ofinternational politics. ' He regarded his companion for a moment and thenremarked: 'Kingship!--what do YOU know of kingship, Firmin?

'Yes, ' cried the king to his astonished counsellor. 'For the first timein my life I am going to be a king. I am going to lead, and lead bymy own authority. For a dozen generations my family has been a set ofdummies in the hands of their advisers. Advisers! Now I am going to be areal king--and I am going to--to abolish, dispose of, finish, the crownto which I have been a slave. But what a world of paralysing shamsthis roaring stuff has ended! The rigid old world is in the melting-potagain, and I, who seemed to be no more than the stuffing inside a regalrobe, I am a king among kings. I have to play my part at the head ofthings 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 likesome Old Man of the Sea. To-day must be a sacrament of kings. Our trustfor 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 theking in every one must rule the world.... Have you no sense of themagnificence of this occasion? You want me, Firmin, you want me to goup there and haggle like a damned little solicitor for some price, somecompensation, 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 mindthe phrases of the speech he intended to make to the conference. Byvirtue of the antiquity of his crown he was to preside, and he intendedto make his presidency memorable. Reassured of his eloquence, heconsidered 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 neverrealise that I am not only flesh and blood but an imagination--with itsrights. 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 augustlives 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 toa woman who ought to have a child. They delighted in processions andopening things and being read addresses to, and visiting triplets andnonagenarians and all that sort of thing. Incredibly. They used to keepalbums of cuttings from all the illustrated papers showing them at it, and if the press-cutting parcels grew thin they were worried. It was allthat ever worried them. But there is something atavistic in me; Ihark back to unconstitutional monarchs. They christened me tooretrogressively, I think. I wanted to get things done. I was bored. Imight have fallen into vice, most intelligent and energetic princes do, but the palace precautions were unusually thorough. I was brought up inthe purest court the world has ever seen. . . . Alertly pure.... So Iread books, Firmin, and went about asking questions. The thing was boundto happen to one of us sooner or later. Perhaps, too, very likely I'mnot 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. 'Youprefer----'

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 onewill 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 whateverit is doing, changes into full uniform and presents arms. When my augustparents went in a train the coal in the tender used to be whitened. Itdid, Firmin, and if coal had been white instead of black I have no doubtthe authorities would have blackened it. That was the spirit of ourtreatment. People were always walking about with their faces to us. Onenever saw anything in profile. One got an impression of a world thatwas insanely focused on ourselves. And when I began to poke my littlequestions into the Lord Chancellor and the archbishop and all the restof them, about what I should see if people turned round, the generaleffect I produced was that I wasn't by any means displaying the RoyalTact they had expected of me.... '

He meditated for a time. 

'And yet, you know, there is something in the kingship, Firmin. Itstiffened up my august little grandfather. It gave my grandmother akind of awkward dignity even when she was cross--and she was veryoften cross. They both had a profound sense of responsibility. My poorfather's health was wretched during his brief career; nobody outside thecircle knows just how he screwed himself up to things. "My people expectit, " he used to say of this tiresome duty or that. Most of the thingsthey made him do were silly--it was part of a bad tradition, butthere was nothing silly in the way he set about them.... The spirit ofkingship is a fine thing, Firmin; I feel it in my bones; I do not knowwhat 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, becauseI know better. Don't think I forget my kingship, Firmin, don't imaginethat. I am a king, a kingly king, by right divine. The fact that I amalso a chattering young man makes not the slightest difference to that. But the proper text-book for kings, Firmin, is none of the court memoirsand Welt-Politik books you would have me read; it is old Fraser's GoldenBough. Have you read that, Firmin?'

Firmin had. 'Those were the authentic kings. In the end they were cutup and a bit given to everybody. They sprinkled the nations--withKingship. '

Firmin turned himself round and faced his royal master. 

'What do you intend to do, sir?' he asked. 'If you will not listen tome, 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 onlybe done by putting all the world under one government. Our crowns andflags are in the way. Manifestly they must go. '

'Yes, sir, ' interrupted Firmin, 'but WHAT government? I don't see whatgovernment you get by a universal abdication!'

'Well, ' said the king, with his hands about his knees, 'WE shall be thegovernment. '

'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 ofelection, 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 overgovernment. Without any election at all. Without any sanction. Thegoverned will show their consent by silence. If any effective oppositionarises we shall ask it to come in and help. The true sanction ofkingship is the grip upon the sceptre. We aren't going to worry peopleto vote for us. I'm certain the mass of men does not want to be botheredwith such things.... We'll contrive a way for any one interested to joinin. That's quite enough in the way of democracy. Perhaps later--whenthings don't matter.... We shall govern all right, Firmin. Governmentonly becomes difficult when the lawyers get hold of it, and since thesetroubles began the lawyers are shy. Indeed, come to think of it, Iwonder 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 rightsdisinterred.... We've done with that way of living. We won't have morelaw 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 ourabdications, all of us, and declared the World Republic, supreme andindivisible. I wonder what my august grandmother would have made of it!All my rights! . . . And then we shall go on governing. What else isthere to do? All over the world we shall declare that there is no longermine 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 canthey do? Their official rulers are here with us. They won't be ableto get together any sort of idea of not obeying us.... Then weshall declare that every sort of property is held in trust for theRepublic.... '

'But, sir!' cried Firmin, suddenly enlightened. 'Has this been arrangedalready?'

'My dear Firmin, do you think we have come here, all of us, to talkat large? The talking has been done for half a century. Talkingand 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 mostheterogeneous collections of prominent people that has ever mettogether. Principalities and powers, stripped and shattered until alltheir pride and mystery were gone, met in a marvellous new humility. Here were kings and emperors whose capitals were lakes of flamingdestruction, statesmen whose countries had become chaos, scaredpoliticians and financial potentates. Here were leaders of thought andlearned investigators dragged reluctantly to the control of affairs. Altogether there were ninety-three of them, Leblanc's conception ofthe head men of the world. They had all come to the realisation of thesimple truths that the indefatigable Leblanc had hammered into them;and, drawing his resources from the King of Italy, he had provisionedhis conference with a generous simplicity quite in accordance with therest of his character, and so at last was able to make his astonishingand entirely rational appeal. He had appointed King Egbert thepresident, he believed in this young man so firmly that he completelydominated him, and he spoke himself as a secretary might speak from thepresident's left hand, and evidently did not realise himself that he wastelling them all exactly what they had to do. He imagined he wasmerely recapitulating the obvious features of the situation for theirconvenience. He was dressed in ill-fitting white silk clothes, and heconsulted 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 thisoccasion was exceptional. 

And then King Egbert spoke as he was expected to speak, and Leblanc'sspectacles moistened at that flow of generous sentiment, most amiablyand lightly expressed. 'We haven't to stand on ceremony, ' said the king, 'we have to govern the world. We have always pretended to govern theworld 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 wheelsagain, ' said King Egbert. 'And it is the simple common sense of thiscrisis for all to help and none to seek advantage. Is that our tone ornot?'

The gathering was too old and seasoned and miscellaneous for any greatdisplays of enthusiasm, but that was its tone, and with an astonishmentthat somehow became exhilarating it began to resign, repudiate, anddeclare its intentions. Firmin, taking notes behind his master, heardeverything that had been foretold among the yellow broom, cometrue. With a queer feeling that he was dreaming, he assisted at theproclamation of the World State, and saw the message taken out to thewireless operators to be throbbed all round the habitable globe. 'Andnext, ' said King Egbert, with a cheerful excitement in his voice, 'wehave 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 avery amiable, reasonable, benevolent creature at bottom; some had beenborn to power and some had happened upon it, some had struggled to getit, not clearly knowing what it was and what it implied, but none wasirreconcilably set upon its retention at the price of cosmic disaster. Their minds had been prepared by circumstances and sedulously cultivatedby Leblanc; and now they took the broad obvious road along which KingEgbert was leading them, with a mingled conviction of strangeness andnecessity. Things went very smoothly; the King of Italy explained thearrangements that had been made for the protection of the camp from anyfantastic attack; a couple of thousand of aeroplanes, each carrying asharpshooter, guarded them, and there was an excellent system of relays, and at night all the sky would be searched by scores of lights, and theadmirable Leblanc gave luminous reasons for their camping just wherethey were and going on with their administrative duties forthwith. Heknew of this place, because he had happened upon it when holiday-makingwith Madame Leblanc twenty years and more ago. 'There is very simplefare at present, ' he explained, 'on account of the disturbed state ofthe countries about us. But we have excellent fresh milk, good red wine, beef, bread, salad, and lemons. . . . In a few days I hope to placethings in the hands of a more efficient caterer.... '

The members of the new world government dined at three long tables ontrestles, and down the middle of these tables Leblanc, in spite ofthe barrenness of his menu, had contrived to have a great multitude ofbeautiful roses. There was similar accommodation for the secretaries andattendants at a lower level down the mountain. The assembly dined as ithad debated, in the open air, and over the dark crags to the west theglowing June sunset shone upon the banquet. There was no precedency nowamong the ninety-three, and King Egbert found himself between a pleasantlittle Japanese stranger in spectacles and his cousin of Central Europe, and opposite a great Bengali leader and the President of the UnitedStates of America. Beyond the Japanese was Holsten, the old chemist, andLeblanc was a little way down the other side. 

The king was still cheerfully talkative and abounded in ideas. He fellpresently into an amiable controversy with the American, who seemed tofeel a lack of impressiveness in the occasion. 

It was ever the Transatlantic tendency, due, no doubt, to the necessityof handling public questions in a bulky and striking manner, toover-emphasise and over-accentuate, and the president was touched byhis 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 theAmerican. 

'Man, ' said the king, 'is always entering upon his heritage. YouAmericans have a peculiar weakness for anniversaries--if you willforgive 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 thereal 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 humanityto a world-wide annual Fourth of July for ever and ever more. On accountof this harmless necessary day of declarations. No conceivable day couldever deserve that. Ah! you do not know, as I do, the devastations ofthe memorable. My poor grandparents were--RUBRICATED. The worst of thesehuge celebrations is that they break up the dignified succession ofone's contemporary emotions. They interrupt. They set back. Suddenlyout come the flags and fireworks, and the old enthusiasms are furbishedup--and it's sheer destruction of the proper thing that ought to begoing on. Sufficient unto the day is the celebration thereof. Let thedead past bury its dead. You see, in regard to the calendar, I am fordemocracy 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 besacrificed 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 hadbeen saying. 

And then, since the American pressed his idea, the king contrived toshift the talk from the question of celebrating the epoch they weremaking to the question of the probabilities that lay ahead. Here everyone became diffident. They could see the world unified and at peace, butwhat detail was to follow from that unification they seemed indisposedto discuss. This diffidence struck the king as remarkable. He plungedupon the possibilities of science. All the huge expenditure that hadhitherto gone into unproductive naval and military preparations, mustnow, he declared, place research upon a new footing. 'Where one manworked we will have a thousand. ' He appealed to Holsten. 'We have onlybegun to peep into these possibilities, ' he said. 'You at any rate havesounded the vaults of the treasure house. '

'They are unfathomable, ' smiled Holsten. 

'Man, ' said the American, with a manifest resolve to justify andreinstate 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, giveus 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 thepeople. '

'No!' said the king, 'the sovereign is a being more subtle than that. And less arithmetical. Neither my family nor your emancipated people. Itis something that floats about us, and above us, and through us. It isthat common impersonal will and sense of necessity of which Science isthe 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 itsdemands.... '

He paused and glanced down the table at Leblanc, and then re-opened athis former antagonist. 

'There is a disposition, ' said the king, 'to regard this gathering as ifit were actually doing what it appears to be doing, as if we ninety-oddmen of our own free will and wisdom were unifying the world. There isa temptation to consider ourselves exceptionally fine fellows, andmasterful men, and all the rest of it. We are not. I doubt if we shouldaverage out as anything abler than any other casually selected bodyof ninety-odd men. We are no creators, we are consequences, we aresalvagers--or salvagees. The thing to-day is not ourselves but the windof conviction that has blown us hither.... '

The American had to confess he could hardly agree with the king'sestimate of their average. 

'Holster, perhaps, and one or two others, might lift us a little, ' theking 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 arehundreds and thousands like him. I admit, a certain dexterity, a certainlucidity, but there is not a country town in France where there is not aLeblanc or so to be found about two o'clock in its principal cafe. It'sjust that he isn't complicated or Super-Mannish, or any of those thingsthat has made all he has done possible. But in happier times, don'tyou think, Wilhelm, he would have remained just what his father was, a successful epicier, very clean, very accurate, very honest. And onholidays he would have gone out with Madame Leblanc and her knittingin a punt with a jar of something gentle and have sat under a largereasonable green-lined umbrella and fished very neatly and successfullyfor 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 wantto elucidate my argument. I want to make it clear how small are men anddays, and how great is man in comparison.... '

Section 4

So it was King Egbert talked at Brissago after they had proclaimed theunity of the world. Every evening after that the assembly dined togetherand talked at their ease and grew accustomed to each other and sharpenedeach other's ideas, and every day they worked together, and really fora time believed that they were inventing a new government for the world. They discussed a constitution. But there were matters needing attentiontoo urgently to wait for any constitution. They attended to theseincidentally. The constitution it was that waited. It was presentlyfound convenient to keep the constitution waiting indefinitely as KingEgbert 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 Egberthad talked for a long time and drunken and praised very abundantly thesimple red wine of the country that Leblanc had procured for them, he fathered about him a group of congenial spirits and fell into adiscourse upon simplicity, praising it above all things and declaringthat the ultimate aim of art, religion, philosophy, and science alikewas to simplify. He instanced himself as a devotee to simplicity. AndLeblanc he instanced as a crowning instance of the splendour of thisquality. Upon that they all agreed. 

When at last the company about the tables broke up, the king foundhimself brimming over with a peculiar affection and admiration forLeblanc, he made his way to him and drew him aside and broached what hedeclared was a small matter. There was, he said, a certain order in hisgift that, unlike all other orders and decorations in the world, had never been corrupted. It was reserved for elderly men of supremedistinction, the acuteness of whose gifts was already touched tomellowness, and it had included the greatest names of every age sofar as the advisers of his family had been able to ascertain them. At present, the king admitted, these matters of stars and badges wererather obscured by more urgent affairs, for his own part he had neverset any value upon them at all, but a time might come when they wouldbe at least interesting, and in short he wished to confer the Orderof Merit upon Leblanc. His sole motive in doing so, he added, was hisstrong desire to signalise his personal esteem. He laid his handupon the Frenchman's shoulder as he said these things, with an almostbrotherly affection. Leblanc received this proposal with a modestconfusion that greatly enhanced the king's opinion of his admirablesimplicity. He pointed out that eager as he was to snatch at theproffered distinction, it might at the present stage appear invidious, and he therefore suggested that the conferring of it should be postponeduntil it could be made the crown and conclusion of his services. Theking was unable to shake this resolution, and the two men parted withexpressions of mutual esteem. 

The king then summoned Firmin in order to make a short note of a numberof things that he had said during the day. But after about twentyminutes' work the sweet sleepiness of the mountain air overcame him, andhe dismissed Firmin and went to bed and fell asleep at once, and sleptwith 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 rapidprogress. The fighting spirit of the world was exhausted. Only hereor there did fierceness linger. For long decades the combative sidein human affairs had been monstrously exaggerated by the accidents ofpolitical separation. This now became luminously plain. An enormousproportion of the force that sustained armaments had been nothing moreaggressive than the fear of war and warlike neighbours. It is doubtfulif any large section of the men actually enlisted for fighting ever atany time really hungered and thirsted for bloodshed and danger. Thatkind of appetite was probably never very strong in the species after thesavage stage was past. The army was a profession, in which killing hadbecome a disagreeable possibility rather than an eventful certainty. Ifone reads the old newspapers and periodicals of that time, which didso much to keep militarism alive, one finds very little about glory andadventure and a constant harping on the disagreeableness of invasionand subjugation. In one word, militarism was funk. The belligerentresolution of the armed Europe of the twentieth century was theresolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to plunge. And now that itsweapons were exploding in its hands, Europe was only too eager to dropthem, and abandon this fancied refuge of violence. 

For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness; nearly allthe clever people who had hitherto sustained the ancient belligerentseparations had now been brought to realise the need for simplicityof attitude and openness of mind; and in this atmosphere of moralrenascence, there was little attempt to get negotiable advantages out ofresistance to the new order. Human beings are foolish enough no doubt, but few have stopped to haggle in a fire-escape. The council had itsway with them. The band of 'patriots' who seized the laboratories andarsenal just outside Osaka and tried to rouse Japan to revolt againstinclusion in the Republic of Mankind, found they had miscalculated thenational pride and met the swift vengeance of their own countrymen. Thatfight in the arsenal was a vivid incident in this closing chapter of thehistory of war. To the last the 'patriots' were undecided whether, inthe event of a defeat, they would explode their supply of atomic bombsor not. They were fighting with swords outside the iridium doors, and the moderates of their number were at bay and on the verge ofdestruction, only ten, indeed, remained unwounded, when the republicansburst in to the rescue.... 

Section 6

One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in the newrule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism, the 'SlavicFox, ' the King of the Balkans. He debated and delayed his submissions. He showed an extraordinary combination of cunning and temerity in hisevasion of the repeated summonses from Brissago. He affected ill-healthand a great preoccupation with his new official mistress, for hissemi-barbaric court was arranged on the best romantic models. Histactics were ably seconded by Doctor Pestovitch, his chief minister. Failing to establish his claims to complete independence, King FerdinandCharles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be treated as aprotected state. Finally he professed an unconvincing submission, andput a mass of obstacles in the way of the transfer of his nationalofficials to the new government. In these things he was enthusiasticallysupported by his subjects, still for the most part an illiteratepeasantry, passionately if confusedly patriotic, and so far with nopractical knowledge of the effect of atomic bombs. More particularly heretained control of all the Balkan aeroplanes. 

For once the extreme naivete of Leblanc seems to have been mitigated byduplicity. He went on with the general pacification of the world as ifthe Balkan submission was made in absolute good faith, and he announcedthe disbandment of the force of aeroplanes that hitherto guarded thecouncil at Brissago upon the approaching fifteenth of July. But insteadhe doubled the number upon duty on that eventful day, and made variousarrangements for their disposition. He consulted certain experts, andwhen he took King Egbert into his confidence there was something in hisneat and explicit foresight that brought back to that ex-monarch'smind his half-forgotten fantasy of Leblanc as a fisherman under a greenumbrella. 

About five o'clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one of theouter sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring unobtrusivelyover the lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted and hailed a strangeaeroplane that was flying westward, and, failing to get a satisfactoryreply, set its wireless apparatus talking and gave chase. A swarm ofconsorts appeared very promptly over the westward mountains, and beforethe unknown aeroplane had sighted Como, it had a dozen eager attendantsclosing in upon it. Its driver seems to have hesitated, dropped downamong the mountains, and then turned southward in flight, only to findan intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows. He then went roundinto the eye of the rising sun, and passed within a hundred yards of hisoriginal pursuer. 

The sharpshooter therein opened fire at once, and showed an intelligentgrasp of the situation by disabling the passenger first. The man at thewheel must have heard his companion cry out behind him, but he was toointent on getting away to waste even a glance behind. Twice after thathe must have heard shots. He let his engine go, he crouched down, andfor twenty minutes he must have steered in the continual expectation ofa bullet. It never came, and when at last he glanced round, three greatplanes were close upon him, and his companion, thrice hit, lay deadacross his bombs. His followers manifestly did not mean either to upsetor shoot him, but inexorably they drove him down, down. At last he wascurving and flying a hundred yards or less over the level fields ofrice and maize. Ahead of him and dark against the morning sunrise wasa village with a very tall and slender campanile and a line of cablebearing metal standards that he could not clear. He stopped his engineabruptly and dropped flat. He may have hoped to get at the bombs when hecame down, but his pitiless pursuers drove right over him and shot himas he fell. 

Three other aeroplanes curved down and came to rest amidst grass closeby the smashed machine. Their passengers descended, and ran, holdingtheir light rifles in their hands towards the debris and the two deadmen. The coffin-shaped box that had occupied the centre of the machinehad broken, and three black objects, each with two handles like the earsof a pitcher, lay peacefully amidst the litter. 

These objects were so tremendously important in the eyes of theircaptors that they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and brokenamidst the wreckage as they might have disregarded dead frogs by acountry 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 thenturned his eyes to the dead man with a crushed chest who lay in a muddyplace 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 thefirst man. A shadow passed between them and the sun, and they looked upto 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 thedead men. One of them had an idea. 'Signal that first, ' he said, 'whilewe look. ' They were joined by their aviators for the search, and allsix men began a hunt that was necessarily brutal in its haste, forsome indication of identity. They examined the men's pockets, theirbloodstained clothes, the machine, the framework. They turned the bodiesover and flung them aside. There was not a tattoo mark. . . . Everythingwas 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 Nouveaupalace that gave upon the precipice that overhung his bright littlecapital, and beside him stood Pestovitch, grizzled and cunning, and nowfull of an ill-suppressed excitement. Behind them the window opened intoa large room, richly decorated in aluminium and crimson enamel, acrosswhich the king, as he glanced ever and again over his shoulder with agesture of inquiry, could see through the two open doors of a littleazure walled antechamber the wireless operator in the turret working athis incessant transcription. Two pompously uniformed messengers waitedlistlessly in this apartment. The room was furnished with a statelydignity, and had in the middle of it a big green baize-covered tablewith the massive white metal inkpots and antiquated sandboxes natural toa new but romantic monarchy. It was the king's council chamber andabout it now, in attitudes of suspended intrigue, stood the half-dozenministers who constituted his cabinet. They had been summoned for twelveo'clock, but still at half-past twelve the king loitered in the balconyand seemed to be waiting for some news that did not come. 

The king and his minister had talked at first in whispers; they hadfallen silent, for they found little now to express except a vagueanxiety. Away there on the mountain side were the white metal roofs ofthe long farm buildings beneath which the bomb factory and the bombswere hidden. (The chemist who had made all these for the king had diedsuddenly after the declaration of Brissago. ) Nobody knew of that storeof mischief now but the king and his adviser and three heavily faithfulattendants; the aviators who waited now in the midday blaze withtheir bomb-carrying machines and their passenger bomb-throwers in theexercising grounds of the motor-cyclist barracks below were still inignorance of the position of the ammunition they were presently to takeup. It was time they started if the scheme was to work as Pestovitchhad planned it. It was a magnificent plan. It aimed at no less than theEmpire of the World. The government of idealists and professors awaythere at Brissago was to be blown to fragments, and then east, west, north, and south those aeroplanes would go swarming over a world thathad disarmed itself, to proclaim Ferdinand Charles, the new Caesar, theMaster, Lord of the Earth. It was a magnificent plan. But the tensionof this waiting for news of the success of the first blowwas--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 toonear together to be pleasant. It was his habit to worry his moustachewith short, nervous tugs whenever his restless mind troubled him, andnow this motion was becoming so incessant that it irked Pestovitchbeyond the limits of endurance. 

'I will go, ' said the minister, 'and see what the trouble is with thewireless. They give us nothing, good or bad. '

Left to himself, the king could worry his moustache without stint; heleant his elbows forward on the balcony and gave both of his long whitehands 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 hismen?

The clocks in the light gold-capped belfries of the town below presentlyintimated the half-hour after midday. 

Of course, he and Pestovitch had thought it out. Even if they had caughtthose men, they were pledged to secrecy.... Probably they would bekilled in the catching.... One could deny anyhow, deny and deny. 

And then he became aware of half a dozen little shining specks very highin the blue.... Pestovitch came out to him presently. 'The governmentmessages, sire, have all dropped into cipher, ' he said. 'I have set aman----'

'LOOK!' interrupted the king, and pointed upward with a long, leanfinger. 

Pestovitch followed that indication and then glanced for one questioningmoment 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 descendingmessengers, and then they began a hasty consultation.... 

They decided that to be holding a council upon the details of anultimate surrender to Brissago was as innocent-looking a thing as theking could well be doing, and so, when at last the ex-king Egbert, whomthe council had sent as its envoy, arrived upon the scene, he discoveredthe king almost theatrically posed at the head of his councillors in themidst of his court. The door upon the wireless operators was shut. 

The ex-king from Brissago came like a draught through the curtains andattendants that gave a wide margin to King Ferdinand's state, and thefamiliar confidence of his manner belied a certain hardness in hiseye. Firmin trotted behind him, and no one else was with him. And asFerdinand Charles rose to greet him, there came into the heart of theBalkan king again that same chilly feeling that he had felt upon thebalcony--and it passed at the careless gestures of his guest. For surelyany one might outwit this foolish talker who, for a mere idea and at thecommand of a little French rationalist in spectacles, had thrown awaythe most ancient crown in all the world. 

One must deny, deny.... 

And then slowly and quite tiresomely he realised that there was nothingto deny. His visitor, with an amiable ease, went on talking abouteverything in debate between himself and Brissago except----. 

Could it be that they had been delayed? Could it be that they had hadto drop for repairs and were still uncaptured? Could it be that evennow while this fool babbled, they were over there among the mountainsheaving 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. Atany moment the little brass door behind him might open with the newsof Brissago blown to atoms. Then it would be a delightful relief to thepresent tension to arrest this chatterer forthwith. He might be killedperhaps. What?

The king was repeating his observation. 'They have a ridiculous fancythat 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 ofa 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 ofderision--gleamed out of the envoy's eyes and recalled that chillyfeeling to King Ferdinand's spine. 

Some kindred depression had come to Pestovitch, who had been watchingthe 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 searchis going on. '

The king appealed to his council. 

'The people will never permit it, sire, ' said a bustling little man in agorgeous uniform. 

'You'll have to make 'em, ' said the ex-king, genially addressing all thecouncillors. 

King Ferdinand glanced at the closed brass door through which no newswould come. 

'When would you want to have this search?'

The ex-king was radiant. 'We couldn't possibly do it until the day afterto-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 wholebusiness ridiculous. Who would be such a fool as to hide atomic bombs?Nobody. Certain hanging if he's caught--certain, and almost certainblowing up if he isn't. But nowadays I have to take orders like the restof the world. And here I am. '

The king thought he had never met such detestable geniality. He glancedat Pestovitch, who nodded almost imperceptibly. It was well, anyhow, to have a fool to deal with. They might have sent a diplomatist. 'Ofcourse, ' said the king, 'I recognise the overpowering force--and a kindof logic--in these orders from Brissago. '

'I knew you would, ' said the ex-king, with an air of relief, 'and so letus arrange----'

They arranged with a certain informality. No Balkan aeroplane was toadventure into the air until the search was concluded, and meanwhilethe fleets of the world government would soar and circle in the sky. Thetowns were to be placarded with offers of reward to any one who wouldhelp 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'llhave a lot of men here, borrow help from your police, and run throughall your things. And then everything will be over. Meanwhile, if I maybe your guest.... ' When presently Pestovitch was alone with the kingagain, he found him in a state of jangling emotions. His spirit wastossing like a wind-whipped sea. One moment he was exalted and full ofcontempt for 'that ass' and his search; the next he was down in a pit ofdread. '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 grinningbrute WANTS to hang us, ' he said. 'And hang us he will, if we give him ashadow of a chance. '

'But all their Modern State Civilisation!'

'Do you think there's any pity in that crew of Godless, VivisectingPrigs?' cried this last king of romance. 'Do you think, Pestovitch, theyunderstand anything of a high ambition or a splendid dream? Do you thinkthat our gallant and sublime adventure has any appeal to them? Here amI, the last and greatest and most romantic of the Caesars, and do youthink 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 ananointed 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, ' saidthe 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 theywatch us here--they will always watch us here now--we can buy anaeroplane abroad, and pick them up.... '

The king was in a feverish, irritable mood all that evening, but he madehis plans nevertheless with infinite cunning. They must get the bombsaway; there must be a couple of atomic hay lorries, the bombs could behidden under the hay.... Pestovitch went and came, instructing trustyservants, planning and replanning.... The king and the ex-king talkedvery pleasantly of a number of subjects. All the while at the backof King Ferdinand Charles's mind fretted the mystery of his vanishedaeroplane. There came no news of its capture, and no news of itssuccess. At any moment all that power at the back of his visitor mightcrumble away and vanish.... 

It was past midnight, when the king, in a cloak and slouch hatthat might equally have served a small farmer, or any respectablemiddle-class man, slipped out from an inconspicuous service gate on theeastward side of his palace into the thickly wooded gardens that slopedin a series of terraces down to the town. Pestovitch and his guard-valetPeter, both wrapped about in a similar disguise, came out among thelaurels that bordered the pathway and joined him. It was a clear, warmnight, but the stars seemed unusually little and remote because of theaeroplanes, each trailing a searchlight, that drove hither and thitheracross the blue. One great beam seemed to rest on the king for a momentas he came out of the palace; then instantly and reassuringly it hadswept away. But while they were still in the palace gardens anotherfound 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 towink at him and vanish, leaving him blinded.... 

The three men went on their way. Near the little gate in the gardenrailings that Pestovitch had caused to be unlocked, the king pausedunder the shadow of an flex and looked back at the place. It wasvery 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 theeastward 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 blackfigure 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, likeone who yawns, knuckle his eyes and turn inward--no doubt to his bed. 

Down through the ancient winding back streets of his capital hurried theking, and at an appointed corner a shabby atomic-automobile waited forthe three. It was a hackney carriage of the lowest grade, with dintedmetal panels and deflated cushions. The driver was one of the ordinarydrivers of the capital, but beside him sat the young secretary ofPestovitch, 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 hadkept the cafes open and people abroad--over the great new bridge, and soby straggling outskirts to the country. And all through his capital theking who hoped to outdo Caesar, sat back and was very still, and no onespoke. And as they got out into the dark country they became aware ofthe searchlights wandering over the country-side like the uneasyghosts of giants. The king sat forward and looked at these flittingwhitenesses, and every now and then peered up to see the flying shipsoverhead. 

'I don't like them, ' said the king. 

Presently one of these patches of moonlight came to rest about them andseemed to be following their automobile. The king drew back. 

'The things are confoundedly noiseless, ' said the king. 'It's like beingstalked 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, clutchinghis minister's arm, 'they are watching us. I'm not going through withthis. They are watching us. I'm going back. '

Pestovitch remonstrated. 'Tell him to go back, ' said the king, and triedto open the window. For a few moments there was a grim struggle in theautomobile; a gripping of wrists and a blow. 'I can't go through withit, ' 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 milefrom 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 backhe could go back. 

'See, ' said Pestovitch, 'the light has gone again. '

The king peered up. 'I believe he's following us without a light, ' saidthe king. 

In the little old dirty inn the king hung doubtful for a time, and wasfor going back and throwing himself on the mercy of the council. 'Ifthere is a council, ' said Pestovitch. 'By this time your bombs may havesettled 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 bombsin their place, ' he said at last, and went to the window. About theirconveyance shone a circle of bright light. Pestovitch had a brilliantidea. 'I will send my secretary out to make a kind of dispute with thedriver. Something that will make them watch up above there. Meanwhileyou and I and Peter will go out by the back way and up by the hedges tothe 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 barnsthe king gave vent to something between a groan and a curse, and allabout 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 wentswooping up the mountain side, hung for a second about a hayrick, andthen came pouring back. 

'In the barn!' cried the king. 

He bruised his shin against something, and then all three men wereinside the huge steel-girdered barn in which stood the two motorhay lorries that were to take the bombs away. Kurt and Abel, the twobrothers of Peter, had brought the lorries thither in daylight. They hadthe 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 ofpit here, ' said the king. 'Don't light another lantern. This key of minereleases 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 aladder into a pit. Then whispering and then heavy breathing as Kurt camestruggling up with the first of the hidden bombs. 

'We shall do it yet, ' said the king. And then he gasped. 'Curse thatlight. Why in the name of Heaven didn't we shut the barn door?' For thegreat door stood wide open and all the empty, lifeless yard outside andthe door and six feet of the floor of the barn were in the blue glare ofan 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 andplucked his brother back. For a time all five men stood still. It seemedthat light would never go and then abruptly it was turned off, leavingthem blinded. 'Now, ' said the king uneasily, 'now shut the door. '

'Not completely, ' cried Pestovitch. 'Leave a chink for us to go outby.... '

It was hot work shifting those bombs, and the king worked for a timelike a common man. Kurt and Abel carried the great things up and Peterbrought them to the carts, and the king and Pestovitch helped him toplace 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 withthe last of the load. 

'Ssh!' Peter ran forward to them with a whispered remonstrance. Now theywere still. 

The barn door opened a little wider, and against the dim blue lightoutside 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: 'Onlya poor farmer loading hay, ' he said, and picked up a huge hay fork andwent forward softly. 

'You load your hay at a very bad time and in a very bad light, ' said theman at the door, peering in. 'Have you no electric light here?'

Then suddenly he turned on an electric torch, and as he did soPestovitch sprang forward. 'Get out of my barn!' he cried, and drove thefork full at the intruder's chest. He had a vague idea that so hemight stab the man to silence. But the man shouted loudly as the prongspierced him and drove him backward, and instantly there was a sound offeet running across the yard. 

'Bombs, ' cried the man upon the ground, struggling with the prongs inhis hand, and as Pestovitch staggered forward into view with the forceof his own thrust, he was shot through the body by one of the twonew-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 torchfull upon the face of the king. 'Shoot them, ' he cried, coughing andspitting blood, so that the halo of light round the king's head dancedabout. 

For a moment in that shivering circle of light the two men saw the kingkneeling up in the cart and Peter on the barn floor beside him. The oldfox looked at them sideways--snared, a white-faced evil thing. And then, as with a faltering suicidal heroism, he leant forward over the bombbefore 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 feetof his comrades. 

But each carried a light of his own, and in another moment everything inthe barn was visible again. They shot Peter even as he held up his handsin sign of surrender. 

Kurt and Abel at the head of the ladder hesitated for a moment, and thenplunged backward into the pit. 'If we don't kill them, ' said one ofthe sharpshooters, 'they'll blow us to rags. They've gone down thathatchway. 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 toldthe 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 havehappened, ' he said. 'Where are the bombs? In that farm-house on theopposite 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 carriedhim to the farm-house where the last rebel king was lying among hisbombs. The rim of the sky flashed, the east grew bright, and the sun wasjust rising over the hills when King Egbert reached the farm-yard. Therehe found the hay lorries drawn out from the barn with the dreadful bombsstill packed upon them. A couple of score of aviators held the yard, andoutside a few peasants stood in a little group and stared, ignorant asyet of what had happened. Against the stone wall of the farm-yard fivebodies were lying neatly side by side, and Pestovitch had an expressionof surprise on his face and the king was chiefly identifiable by hislong white hands and his blonde moustache. The wounded aeronaut had beencarried down to the inn. And after the ex-king had given directions inwhat manner the bombs were to be taken to the new special laboratoriesabove 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 fallsto 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 wayoff in the field. '

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE NEW PHASE

Section 1

The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we may viewit now from the clarifying standpoint of things accomplished, was inits broad issues a simple one. Essentially it was to place socialorganisation upon the new footing that the swift, accelerated advanceof human knowledge had rendered necessary. The council was gatheredtogether with the haste of a salvage expedition, and it was confrontedwith wreckage; but the wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the onlypossibilities of the case were either the relapse of mankind to theagricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or theacceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order. Theold tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy, particularism, andbelligerency, were incompatible with the monstrous destructive powerof the new appliances the inhuman logic of science had produced. Theequilibrium could be restored only by civilisation destroying itselfdown to a level at which modern apparatus could no longer be produced, or by human nature adapting itself in its institutions to the newconditions. It was for the latter alternative that the assembly existed. 

Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The suddendevelopment of atomic science did but precipitate and render rapidand dramatic a clash between the new and the customary that had beengathering since ever the first flint was chipped or the first fire builttogether. From the day when man contrived himself a tool and sufferedanother male to draw near him, he ceased to be altogether a thing ofinstinct and untroubled convictions. From that day forth a wideningbreach can be traced between his egotistical passions and the socialneed. Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead, and hispassionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and thetribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter andwanderer 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 thebounds of the plough-life and the beast-tending. Slowly a vast systemof traditional imperatives superposed itself upon his instincts, imperatives that were admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, thatcattle-mincer, who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man. 

And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his tillingcame civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural surplus. Itappeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed boats out upon therivers and presently invaded the seas, and within its primitive courts, within temples grown rich and leisurely and amidst the gathering medleyof the seaport towns rose speculation and philosophy and science, andthe beginning of the new order that has at last established itselfas human life. Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then with anaccumulating velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a wholedid not seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand. Fora time men took up and used these new things and the new powersinadvertently as they came to him, recking nothing of the consequences. For endless generations change led him very gently. But when he hadbeen led far enough, change quickened the pace. It was with a series ofshocks that he realised at last that he was living the old life less andless and a new life more and more. 

Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between the oldway of living and the new were intense. They were far intenser than theyhad been even at the collapse of the Roman imperial system. On the onehand was the ancient life of the family and the small community andthe petty industry, on the other was a new life on a larger scale, withremoter horizons and a strange sense of purpose. Already it was growingclear that men must live on one side or the other. One could not havelittle tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the same market, sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and arrowsand aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or illiterate peasantindustries and power-driven factories in the same world. And still lessit was possible that one could have the ideas and ambitions and greedand jealousy of peasants equipped with the vast appliances of the newage. If there had been no atomic bombs to bring together most ofthe directing intelligence of the world to that hasty conference atBrissago, there would still have been, extended over great areas anda considerable space of time perhaps, a less formal conference ofresponsible and understanding people upon the perplexities of thisworld-wide opposition. If the work of Holsten had been spread overcenturies and imparted to the world by imperceptible degrees, it wouldnevertheless have made it necessary for men to take counsel upon and seta plan for the future. Indeed already there had been accumulating for ahundred years before the crisis a literature of foresight; there was awhole mass of 'Modern State' scheming available for the conference to goupon. These bombs did but accentuate and dramatise an already developingproblem. 

Section 2

This assembly was no leap of exceptional minds and super-intelligencesinto the control of affairs. It was teachable, its members trailedideas with them to the gathering, but these were the consequences of the'moral shock' the bombs had given humanity, and there is no reason forsupposing its individual personalities were greatly above the average. It would be possible to cite a thousand instances of error andinefficiency in its proceedings due to the forgetfulness, irritability, or fatigue of its members. It experimented considerably and blunderedoften. Excepting Holsten, whose gift was highly specialised, it isquestionable whether there was a single man of the first order of humanquality in the gathering. But it had a modest fear of itself, and aconsequent directness that gave it a general distinction. There was, of course, a noble simplicity about Leblanc, but even of him it maybe asked whether he was not rather good and honest-minded than in thefuller sense great. 

The ex-king had wisdom and a certain romantic dash, he was a man amongthousands, even if he was not a man among millions, but his memoirs, andindeed his decision to write memoirs, give the quality of himselfand his associates. The book makes admirable but astonishing reading. Therein he takes the great work the council was doing for granted asa little child takes God. It is as if he had no sense of it at all. Hetells amusing trivialities about his cousin Wilhelm and his secretaryFirmin, he pokes fun at the American president, who was, indeed, rather a little accident of the political machine than a representativeAmerican, and he gives a long description of how he was lost for threedays in the mountains in the company of the only Japanese member, a lossthat seems to have caused no serious interruption of the work of thecouncil.... 

The Brissago conference has been written about time after time, asthough it were a gathering of the very flower of humanity. Perchedup there by the freak or wisdom of Leblanc, it had a certain Olympianquality, and the natural tendency of the human mind to elaborate sucha resemblance would have us give its members the likenesses of gods. It would be equally reasonable to compare it to one of those enforcedmeetings upon the mountain-tops that must have occurred in the openingphases of the Deluge. The strength of the council lay not in itself butin the circumstances that had quickened its intelligence, dispelled itsvanities, and emancipated it from traditional ambitions and antagonisms. It was stripped of the accumulation of centuries, a naked governmentwith all that freedom of action that nakedness affords. And its problemswere set before it with a plainness that was out of all comparison withthe complicated and perplexing intimations of the former time. 

Section 3

The world on which the council looked did indeed present a task quitesufficiently immense and altogether too urgent for any wanton indulgencein internal dissension. It may be interesting to sketch in a few phrasesthe 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 wasa 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 intoenormous areas of the land surface of the globe. There were vastmountain wildernesses, forest wildernesses, sandy deserts, and frozenlands. Men still clung closely to water and arable soil in temperate orsub-tropical climates, they lived abundantly only in river valleys, andall their great cities had grown upon large navigable rivers or closeto ports upon the sea. Over great areas even of this suitable landflies and mosquitoes, armed with infection, had so far defeated humaninvasion, and under their protection the virgin forests remaineduntouched. Indeed, the whole world even in its most crowded districtswas filthy with flies and swarming with needless insect life to anextent which is now almost incredible. A population map of the worldin 1950 would have followed seashore and river course so closely inits darker shading as to give an impression that homo sapiens was anamphibious animal. His roads and railways lay also along the lowercontours, only here and there to pierce some mountain barrier or reachsome holiday resort did they clamber above 3000 feet. And across theocean his traffic passed in definite lines; there were hundreds ofthousands of square miles of ocean no ship ever traversed except bymischance. 

Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet he had not yetpierced for five miles, and it was still not forty years since, witha tragic pertinacity, he had clambered to the poles of the earth. Thelimitless mineral wealth of the Arctic and Antarctic circles was stillburied beneath vast accumulations of immemorial ice, and the secretriches of the inner zones of the crust were untapped and indeedunsuspected. The higher mountain regions were known only to a sprinklingof guide-led climbers and the frequenters of a few gaunt hotels, and thevast rainless belts of land that lay across the continental masses, fromGobi to Sahara and along the backbone of America, with their perfectair, their daily baths of blazing sunshine, their nights of coolserenity and glowing stars, and their reservoirs of deep-lyingwater, were as yet only desolations of fear and death to the commonimagination. 

And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses ofpopulation which had gathered into the enormous dingy town centresof that period were dispossessed and scattered disastrously over thesurrounding rural areas. It was as if some brutal force, grown impatientat last at man's blindness, had with the deliberate intention of arearrangement of population upon more wholesome lines, shaken the world. The great industrial regions and the large cities that had escaped thebombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, in almost astragic plight as those that blazed, and the country-side was disorderedby a multitude of wandering and lawless strangers. In some parts of theworld famine raged, and in many regions there was plague.... The plainsof north India, which had become more and more dependent for the generalwelfare on the railways and that great system of irrigation canals whichthe malignant section of the patriots had destroyed, were in a state ofpeculiar distress, whole villages lay dead together, no man heeding, andthe very tigers and panthers that preyed upon the emaciated survivorscrawled back infected into the jungle to perish. Large areas of Chinawere a prey to brigand bands.... 

It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account ofthe explosion of the atomic bombs survives. There are, of course, innumerable allusions and partial records, and it is from these thatsubsequent 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 textureof soil. Barnet, who came within forty miles of Paris early in October, is concerned chiefly with his account of the social confusion of thecountry-side and the problems of his command, but he speaks of heapedcloud masses of steam. 'All along the sky to the south-west' and of ared glare beneath these at night. Parts of Paris were still burning, and numbers of people were camped in the fields even at this distancewatching over treasured heaps of salvaged loot. He speaks too ofthe distant rumbling of the explosion--'like trains going over ironbridges. '

Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the 'continuousreverberations, ' or of the 'thudding and hammering, ' or some suchphrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of steam, from which rainwould fall suddenly in torrents and amidst which lightning played. Drawing nearer to Paris an observer would have found the salvage campsincreasing in number and blocking up the villages, and large numbersof people, often starving and ailing, camping under improvised tentsbecause there was no place for them to go. The sky became more and moredensely overcast until at last it blotted out the light of day and leftnothing but a dull red glare 'extraordinarily depressing to the spirit. 'In this dull glare, great numbers of people were still living, clingingto their houses and in many cases subsisting in a state of partialfamine upon the produce in their gardens and the stores in the shops ofthe provision dealers. 

Coming in still closer, the investigator would have reached the policecordon, which was trying to check the desperate enterprise of those whowould return to their homes or rescue their more valuable possessionswithin the 'zone of imminent danger. '

That zone was rather arbitrarily defined. If our spectator could havegot permission to enter it, he would have entered also a zone of uproar, a zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange purplish-redlight, and quivering and swaying with the incessant explosion of theradio-active substance. Whole blocks of buildings were alight andburning fiercely, the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastlyand attenuated in comparison with the full-bodied crimson glare beyond. The shells of other edifices already burnt rose, pierced by rows ofwindow sockets against the red-lit mist. 

Every step farther would have been as dangerous as a descent within thecrater of an active volcano. These spinning, boiling bomb centres wouldshift or break unexpectedly into new regions, great fragments of earthor drain or masonry suddenly caught by a jet of disruptive force mightcome flying by the explorer's head, or the ground yawn a fiery gravebeneath his feet. Few who adventured into these areas of destructionand survived attempted any repetition of their experiences. There arestories of puffs of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting sometimesscores of miles from the bomb centre and killing and scorching all theyovertook. And the first conflagrations from the Paris centre spreadwestward half-way to the sea. 

Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of red-lit ruins had apeculiar dryness and a blistering quality, so that it set up a sorenessof the skin and lungs that was very difficult to heal.... 

Such was the last state of Paris, and such on a larger scale was thecondition of affairs in Chicago, and the same fate had overtaken Berlin, Moscow, Tokio, the eastern half of London, Toulon, Kiel, and two hundredand eighteen other centres of population or armament. Each was a flamingcentre of radiant destruction that only time could quench, that indeedin many instances time has still to quench. To this day, though indeedwith a constantly diminishing uproar and vigour, these explosionscontinue. In the map of nearly every country of the world three or fouror more red circles, a score of miles in diameter, mark the position ofthe dying atomic bombs and the death areas that men have been forced toabandon around them. Within these areas perished museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of masterpieces, and a vast accumulationof human achievement, whose charred remains lie buried, a legacy ofcurious material that only future generations may hope to examine.... 

Section 4

The state of mind of the dispossessed urban population which swarmed andperished so abundantly over the country-side during the dark days of theautumnal months that followed the Last War, was one of blank despair. Barnet gives sketch after sketch of groups of these people, camped amongthe vineyards of Champagne, as he saw them during his period of servicewith the army of pacification. 

There was, for example, that 'man-milliner' who came out from a fieldbeside the road that rises up eastward out of Epernay, and asked howthings were going in Paris. He was, says Barnet, a round-faced man, dressed very neatly in black--so neatly that it was amazing to discoverhe was living close at hand in a tent made of carpets--and he had 'anurbane 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 waysidesubmitted. 

'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 exileand waiting. My wife and my little boy suffer extremely. There is a lackof amenity. And the season advances. I say nothing of the expense anddifficulty in obtaining provisions. . . . When does Monsieur think thatsomething will be done to render Paris--possible?'

Barnet considered his interlocutor. 

'I'm told, ' said Barnet, 'that Paris is not likely to be possible againfor several generations. '

'Oh! but this is preposterous! Consider, Monsieur! What are people likeourselves to do in the meanwhile? I am a costumier. All my connectionsand interests, above all my style, demand Paris. . . . '

Barnet considered the sky, from which a light rain was beginning tofall, 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 someplague perhaps. '

'All that, ' said Barnet, accepting for the first time facts that hadlain 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 thedistinguished delicacy of my wife, a refined helplessness, a peculiardependent charm. Like some slender tropical creeper--with great whiteflowers.... 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, Iam 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 willinsist. '

'On Paris?'

'On Paris. '

'Monsieur, you might as well hope to go down the Maelstrom and resumebusiness 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 arein error.... I asked merely for information.... '

'When last I saw him, ' said Barnet, 'he was standing under the signpostat the crest of the hill, gazing wistfully, yet it seemed to me a littledoubtfully, now towards Paris, and altogether heedless of a drizzlingrain that was wetting him through and through.... '

Section 5

This effect of chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly apprehendeddeepens 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 incompetentnomads to realise that an age had ended, that the old help and guidanceexisted no longer, that times would not mend again, however patientlythey held out. They were still in many cases looking to Paris when thefirst snowflakes of that pitiless January came swirling about them. Thestory grows grimmer.... 

If it is less monstrously tragic after Barnet's return to England, itis, if anything, harder. England was a spectacle of fear-embitteredhouseholders, hiding food, crushing out robbery, driving the starvingwanderers from every faltering place upon the roads lest they shoulddie inconveniently and reproachfully on the doorsteps of those who hadfailed to urge them onward.... 

The remnants of the British troops left France finally in March, afterurgent representations from the provisional government at Orleans thatthey could be supported no longer. They seem to have been a fairlywell-behaved, but highly parasitic force throughout, though Barnet isclearly of opinion that they did much to suppress sporadic brigandageand maintain social order. He came home to a famine-stricken country, and his picture of the England of that spring is one of miserablepatience and desperate expedients. The country was suffering much morethan France, because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on whichit had hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, andboiled nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid off. Onthe way thither they saw four men hanging from the telegraph posts bythe roadside, who had been hung for stealing swedes. The labour refugesof Kent, he discovered, were feeding their crowds of casual wanderers onbread into which clay and sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there was ashortage of even such fare as that. He himself struck across country toWinchester, fearing to approach the bomb-poisoned district round London, and at Winchester he had the luck to be taken on as one of the wirelessassistants at the central station and given regular rations. The stationstood in a commanding position on the chalk hill that overlooks the townfrom the east.... 

Thence he must have assisted in the transmission of the endless ciphermessages that preceded the gathering at Brissago, and there it was thatthe Brissago proclamation of the end of the war and the establishment ofa world government came under his hands. 

He was feeling ill and apathetic that day, and he did not realise whatit was he was transcribing. He did it mechanically, as a part of histedious duty. 

Afterwards there came a rush of messages arising out of the declarationthat strained him very much, and in the evening when he was relieved, heate his scanty supper and then went out upon the little balcony beforethe station, to smoke and rest his brains after this sudden and as yetinexplicable press of duty. It was a very beautiful, still evening. Hefell 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 whatenormous issues had been under my hands for the past four hours. ButI became incredulous after my first stimulation. "This is some sort ofBunkum, " I said very sagely. 

'My colleague was more hopeful. "It means an end to bomb-throwing anddestruction, " he said. "It means that presently corn will come fromAmerica. "

'"Who is going to send corn when there is no more value in money?" Iasked. 

'Suddenly we were startled by a clashing from the town below. Thecathedral bells, which had been silent ever since I had come into thedistrict, were beginning, with a sort of rheumatic difficulty, to ring. Presently they warmed a little to the work, and we realised what wasgoing on. They were ringing a peal. We listened with an unbelievingastonishment 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 endshis story. 

Section 6

From the first the new government handled affairs with a certaingreatness of spirit. Indeed, it was inevitable that they should actgreatly. 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 tosecure it universally from any fresh outbreak of atomic destruction, and they had to ensure a permanent and universal pacification. Onthis capacity to grasp and wield the whole round globe their existencedepended. There was no scope for any further performance. 

So soon as the seizure of the existing supplies of atomic ammunition andthe apparatus for synthesising Carolinum was assured, the disbanding orsocial utilisation of the various masses of troops still under arms hadto 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 vastaccumulations of provision that was immovable only because of thebreakdown of the monetary and credit systems. These had to be broughtinto the famine districts very speedily if entire depopulation was tobe avoided, and their transportation and the revival of communicationsgenerally absorbed a certain proportion of the soldiery and more ableunemployed. The task of housing assumed gigantic dimensions, and frombuilding camps the housing committee of the council speedily passed toconstructions of a more permanent type. They found far less frictionthan might have been expected in turning the loose population on theirhands to these things. People were extraordinarily tamed by that year ofsuffering and death; they were disillusioned of their traditions, bereftof once obstinate prejudices; they felt foreign in a strange world, and ready to follow any confident leadership. The orders of the newgovernment came with the best of all credentials, rations. The peopleeverywhere were as easy to control, one of the old labour experts whohad survived until the new time witnesses, 'as gangs of emigrant workersin a new land. ' And now it was that the social possibilities of theatomic energy began to appear. The new machinery that had come intoexistence before the last wars increased and multiplied, and the councilfound itself not only with millions of hands at its disposal but withpower and apparatus that made its first conceptions of the work it hadto do seem pitifully timid. The camps that were planned in iron and dealwere built in stone and brass; the roads that were to have been mereiron tracks became spacious ways that insisted upon architecture; thecultivations of foodstuffs that were to have supplied emergency rations, were presently, with synthesisers, fertilisers, actinic light, andscientific direction, in excess of every human need. 

The government had begun with the idea of temporarily reconstituting thesocial and economic system that had prevailed before the first comingof the atomic engine, because it was to this system that the ideas andhabits of the great mass of the world's dispossessed populationwas adapted. Subsequent rearrangement it had hoped to leave to itssuccessors--whoever they might be. But this, it became more and moremanifest, was absolutely impossible. As well might the council haveproposed a revival of slavery. The capitalist system had already beensmashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless gold and energy; it fellto pieces at the first endeavour to stand it up again. Already beforethe war half of the industrial class had been out of work, the attemptto put them back into wages employment on the old lines was futile fromthe outset--the absolute shattering of the currency system alone wouldhave been sufficient to prevent that, and it was necessary therefore totake over the housing, feeding, and clothing of this worldwide multitudewithout exacting any return in labour whatever. In a little while themere absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people everywherebecame an evident social danger, and the government was obliged toresort to such devices as simple decorative work in wood and stone, themanufacture of hand-woven textiles, fruit-growing, flower-growing, andlandscape gardening on a grand scale to keep the less adaptable out ofmischief, and of paying wages to the younger adults for attendance atschools that would equip them to use the new atomic machinery.... Soquite insensibly the council drifted into a complete reorganisation ofurban and industrial life, and indeed of the entire social system. 

Ideas that are unhampered by political intrigue or financialconsiderations have a sweeping way with them, and before a year wasout the records of the council show clearly that it was rising to itsenormous opportunity, and partly through its own direct control andpartly through a series of specific committees, it was planning a newcommon social order for the entire population of the earth. 'There canbe no real social stability or any general human happiness whilelarge areas of the world and large classes of people are in a phase ofcivilisation different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now tohave great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally acceptedsocial purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the rest. ' So thecouncil expressed its conception of the problem it had to solve. Thepeasant, the field-worker, and all barbaric cultivators were at an'economic disadvantage' to the more mobile and educated classes, and thelogic of the situation compelled the council to take up systematicallythe supersession of this stratum by a more efficient organisation ofproduction. It developed a scheme for the progressive establishmentthroughout the world of the 'modern system' in agriculture, a systemthat should give the full advantages of a civilised life to everyagricultural worker, and this replacement has been going on right upto the present day. The central idea of the modern system is thesubstitution of cultivating guilds for the individual cultivator, andfor cottage and village life altogether. These guilds are associationsof men and women who take over areas of arable or pasture land, and makethemselves responsible for a certain average produce. They are bodiessmall enough as a rule to be run on a strictly democratic basis, andlarge enough to supply all the labour, except for a certain assistancefrom townspeople during the harvest, needed upon the land farmed. Theyhave watchers' bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but theease and the costlessness of modern locomotion enables them to maintaina group of residences in the nearest town with a common dining-room andclub house, and usually also a guild house in the national or provincialcapital. Already this system has abolished a distinctively 'rustic'population throughout vast areas of the old world, where it hasprevailed immemorially. That shy, unstimulated life of the lonely hovel, the narrow scandals and petty spites and persecutions of the smallvillage, 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 humanexperience. In a little while it will be gone altogether. In thenineteenth century it had already ceased to be a necessary human state, and only the absence of any collective intelligence and an imagined needfor tough and unintelligent soldiers and for a prolific class at a lowlevel, prevented its systematic replacement at that time.... 

And while this settlement of the country was in progress, the urbancamps of the first phase of the council's activities were rapidlydeveloping, partly through the inherent forces of the situation andpartly through the council's direction, into a modern type of town.... 

Section 7

It is characteristic of the manner in which large enterprises forcedthemselves upon the Brissago council, that it was not until the endof the first year of their administration and then only with extremereluctance that they would take up the manifest need for a lingua francafor the world. They seem to have given little attention to the varioustheoretical universal languages which were proposed to them. They wishedto give as little trouble to hasty and simple people as possible, andthe world-wide alstribution of English gave them a bias for it from thebeginning. The extreme simplicity of its grammar was also in its favour. 

It was not without some sacrifices that the English-speakingpeoples were permitted the satisfaction of hearing their speechused universally. The language was shorn of a number of grammaticalpeculiarities, the distinctive forms for the subjunctive mood forexample and most of its irregular plurals were abolished; its spellingwas systematised and adapted to the vowel sounds in use upon thecontinent of Europe, and a process of incorporating foreign nouns andverbs commenced that speedily reached enormous proportions. Withinten years from the establishment of the World Republic the New EnglishDictionary had swelled to include a vocabulary of 250, 000 words, anda man of 1900 would have found considerable difficulty in reading anordinary newspaper. On the other hand, the men of the new time couldstill appreciate the older English literature.... Certain minor actsof uniformity accompanied this larger one. The idea of a commonunderstanding and a general simplification of intercourse once it wasaccepted led very naturally to the universal establishment of the metricsystem of weights and measures, and to the disappearance of the variousmakeshift calendars that had hitherto confused chronology. The year wasdivided into thirteen months of four weeks each, and New Year's Dayand Leap Year's Day were made holidays, and did not count at all inthe ordinary week. So the weeks and the months were brought intocorrespondence. And moreover, as the king put it to Firmin, it wasdecided to 'nail down Easter. ' . . . In these matters, as in so manymatters, the new civilisation came as a simplification of ancientcomplications; the history of the calendar throughout the world is ahistory of inadequate adjustments, of attempts to fix seed-time andmidwinter that go back into the very beginning of human society; andthis final rectification had a symbolic value quite beyond its practicalconvenience. But the council would have no rash nor harsh innovations, no strange names for the months, and no alteration in the numbering ofthe years. 

The world had already been put upon one universal monetary basis. Forsome months after the accession of the council, the world's affairs hadbeen carried on without any sound currency at all. Over great regionsmoney was still in use, but with the most extravagant variations inprice and the most disconcerting fluctuations of public confidence. Theancient rarity of gold upon which the entire system rested was gone. Gold was now a waste product in the release of atomic energy, and itwas plain that no metal could be the basis of the monetary systemagain. Henceforth all coins must be token coins. Yet the whole world wasaccustomed to metallic money, and a vast proportion of existinghuman relationships had grown up upon a cash basis, and were almostinconceivable without that convenient liquidating factor. It seemedabsolutely necessary to the life of the social organisation to have somesort of currency, and the council had therefore to discover some realvalue upon which to rest it. Various such apparently stable values asland and hours of work were considered. Ultimately the government, which was now in possession of most of the supplies of energy-releasingmaterial, fixed a certain number of units of energy as the value of agold sovereign, declared a sovereign to be worth exactly twenty marks, twenty-five francs, five dollars, and so forth, with the other currentunits of the world, and undertook, under various qualifications andconditions, to deliver energy upon demand as payment for every sovereignpresented. On the whole, this worked satisfactorily. They saved theface of the pound sterling. Coin was rehabilitated, and after a phaseof price fluctuations, began to settle down to definite equivalents anduses again, with names and everyday values familiar to the common run ofpeople.... 

Section 8

As the Brissago council came to realise that what it had supposed to betemporary camps of refugees were rapidly developing into great towns ofa new type, and that it was remoulding the world in spite of itself, it decided to place this work of redistributing the non-agriculturalpopulation in the hands of a compactor and better qualified specialcommittee. That committee is now, far more than the council of anyother of its delegated committees, the active government of the world. Developed from an almost invisible germ of 'town-planning' that cameobscurely into existence in Europe or America (the question is still indispute) somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, its work, the continual active planning and replanning of the world asa place of human habitation, is now so to speak the collective materialactivity of the race. The spontaneous, disorderly spreadings andrecessions of populations, as aimless and mechanical as the tricklingof spilt water, which was the substance of history for endless years, giving rise here to congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, andeverywhere to a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best onlypicturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power of therace to aid them, into every available region of the earth. Theircities are no longer tethered to running water and the proximityof cultivation, their plans are no longer affected by strategicconsiderations or thoughts of social insecurity. The aeroplane andthe nearly costless mobile car have abolished trade routes; a commonlanguage and a universal law have abolished a thousand restraininginconveniences, and so an astonishing dispersal of habitations hasbegun. One may live anywhere. And so it is that our cities now are truesocial gatherings, each with a character of its own and distinctiveinterests of its own, and most of them with a common occupation. Theylie out in the former deserts, these long wasted sun-baths of the race, they tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote islands, and baskon broad lagoons. For a time the whole tendency of mankind was to desertthe river valleys in which the race had been cradled for half a millionyears, but now that the War against Flies has been waged so successfullythat this pestilential branch of life is nearly extinct, they arereturning thither with a renewed appetite for gardens laced bywatercourses, for pleasant living amidst islands and houseboats andbridges, and for nocturnal lanterns reflected by the sea. 

Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and more abuilder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceases to be a cultivatorof the soil the returns of the Redistribution Committee showed. Everyyear the work of our scientific laboratories increases the productivityand simplifies the labour of those who work upon the soil, and the foodnow of the whole world is produced by less than one per cent. Of itspopulation, a percentage which still tends to decrease. Far fewer peopleare needed upon the land than training and proclivity dispose towardsit, and as a consequence of this excess of human attention, the gardenside of life, the creation of groves and lawns and vast regions ofbeautiful flowers, has expanded enormously and continues to expand. For, as agricultural method intensifies and the quota is raised, one farmassociation after another, availing itself of the 1975 regulations, elects to produce a public garden and pleasaunce in the place of itsformer fields, and the area of freedom and beauty is increased. And thechemists' triumphs of synthesis, which could now give us an entirelyartificial food, remain largely in abeyance because it is so much morepleasant and interesting to eat natural produce and to grow such thingsupon the soil. Each year adds to the variety of our fruits and thedelightfulness of our flowers. 

Section 9

The early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain recrudescenceof political adventure. There was, it is rather curious to note, norevival of separatism after the face of King Ferdinand Charles hadvanished from the sight of men, but in a number of countries, as thefirst urgent physical needs were met, there appeared a variety ofpersonalities having this in common, that they sought to revivepolitical trouble and clamber by its aid to positions of importance andsatisfaction. In no case did they speak in the name of kings, and it isclear that monarchy must have been far gone in obsolescence before thetwentieth century began, but they made appeals to the large survivalsof nationalist and racial feeling that were everywhere to be found, theyalleged with considerable justice that the council was overriding racialand national customs and disregarding religious rules. The great plainof India was particularly prolific in such agitators. The revival ofnewspapers, which had largely ceased during the terrible year becauseof the dislocation of the coinage, gave a vehicle and a method oforganisation to these complaints. At first the council disregardedthis developing opposition, and then it recognised it with an entirelydevastating frankness. 

Never, of course, had there been so provisional a government. It was ofan extravagant illegality. It was, indeed, hardly more than a club, aclub of about a hundred persons. At the outset there were ninety-three, and these were increased afterwards by the issue of invitations whichmore than balanced its deaths, to as many at one time as one hundredand nineteen. Always its constitution has been miscellaneous. At no timewere these invitations issued with an admission that they recognised aright. The old institution or monarchy had come out unexpectedly well inthe light of the new regime. Nine of the original members of thefirst government were crowned heads who had resigned their separatesovereignty, and at no time afterwards did the number of its royalmembers sink below six. In their case there was perhaps a kind ofattenuated claim to rule, but except for them and the still moreinfinitesimal pretensions of one or two ax-presidents of republics, nomember of the council had even the shade of a right to his participationin its power. It was natural, therefore, that its opponents should finda common ground in a clamour for representative government, and buildhigh hopes upon a return, to parliamentary institutions. 

The council decided to give them everything they wanted, but in aform that suited ill with their aspirations. It became at one stroke arepresentative body. It became, indeed, magnificently representative. Itbecame so representative that the politicians were drowned in a delugeof 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 thesame day by means of a simple modification of the world post. Membershipof the government, it was decided, must be for life, save in theexceptional case of a recall; but the elections, which were heldquinquenially, were arranged to add fifty members on each occasion. Themethod of proportional representation with one transferable vote wasadopted, and the voter might also write upon his voting paper in aspecially marked space, the name of any of his representatives that hewished to recall. A ruler was recallable by as many votes as the quotaby which he had been elected, and the original members by as many votesin any constituency as the returning quotas in the first election. 

Upon these conditions the council submitted itself very cheerfully tothe suffrages of the world. None of its members were recalled, and itsfifty new associates, which included twenty-seven which it had seen fitto recommend, were of an altogether too miscellaneous quality to disturbthe broad trend of its policy. Its freedom from rules or formalitiesprevented any obstructive proceedings, and when one of the two newlyarrived Home Rule members for India sought for information how to bringin a bill, they learnt simply that bills were not brought in. They askedfor the speaker, and were privileged to hear much ripe wisdom fromthe ex-king Egbert, who was now consciously among the seniors of thegathering. 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 constructionas for the preservation of its accomplished work from the dramaticinstincts of the politician. 

The life of the race becomes indeed more and more independent of theformal government. The council, in its opening phase, was heroic inspirit; 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 ofinquiry, freedom of criticism, free communications, a common basis ofeducation and understanding, and freedom from economic oppression. Withthat its creative task was accomplished. It became more and more anestablished security and less and less an active intervention. There isnothing in our time to correspond with the continual petty making andentangling of laws in an atmosphere of contention that is perhaps themost perplexing aspect of constitutional history in the nineteenthcentury. In that age they seem to have been perpetually making laws whenwe should alter regulations. The work of change which we delegate tothese scientific committees of specific general direction which havethe special knowledge needed, and which are themselves dominated bythe broad intellectual process of the community, was in those daysinextricably mixed up with legislation. They fought over the details; weshould as soon think of fighting over the arrangement of the parts ofa machine. We know nowadays that such things go on best within laws, aslife goes on between earth and sky. And so it is that government gathersnow for a day or so in each year under the sunshine of Brissago whenSaint Bruno's lilies are in flower, and does little more than bless thework of its committees. And even these committees are less originativeand more expressive of the general thought than they were at first. Itbecomes difficult to mark out the particular directive personalitiesof the world. Continually we are less personal. Every good thoughtcontributes now, and every able brain falls within that informal anddispersed kingship which gathers together into one purpose the energiesof the race. 

Section 10

It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human existence inwhich 'politics, ' that is to say a partisan interference with the rulingsanities of the world, will be the dominant interest among serious men. We seem to have entered upon an entirely new phase in history in whichcontention as distinguished from rivalry, has almost abruptly ceased tobe the usual occupation, and has become at most a subdued and hiddenand discredited thing. Contentious professions cease to be an honourableemployment for men. The peace between nations is also a peace betweenindividuals. We live in a world that comes of age. Man the warrior, manthe lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity;the grave dreamers, man the curious learner, and man the creativeartist, come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of existence by aless ignoble adventure. 

There is no natural life of man. He is, and always has been, a sheathof varied and even incompatible possibilities, a palimpsest of inheriteddispositions. It was the habit of many writers in the early twentiethcentury to speak of competition and the narrow, private life of tradeand saving and suspicious isolation as though such things were in someexceptional way proper to the human constitution, and as though opennessof mind and a preference for achievement over possession were abnormaland rather unsubstantial qualities. How wrong that was the historyof the decades immediately following the establishment of the worldrepublic witnesses. Once the world was released from the hardeninginsecurities of a needless struggle for life that was collectivelyplanless and individually absorbing, it became apparent that there wasin the vast mass of people a long, smothered passion to make things. Theworld broke out into making, and at first mainly into aestheticmaking. This phase of history, which has been not inaptly termed the'Efflorescence, ' is still, to a large extent, with us. The majorityof our population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity inthe world lies no longer with necessities but with their elaboration, decoration, and refinement. There has been an evident change in thequality of this making during recent years. It becomes more purposefulthan it was, losing something of its first elegance and prettiness andgaining in intensity; but that is a change rather of hue than of nature. That comes with a deepening philosophy and a sounder education. For thefirst joyous exercises of fancy we perceive now the deliberation of amore constructive imagination. There is a natural order in these things, and art comes before science as the satisfaction of more elemental needsmust come before art, and as play and pleasure come in a human lifebefore the development of a settled purpose.... 

For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work must havestruggled in man against the limitations imposed upon him by his socialineptitude. It was a long smouldering fire that flamed out at lastin all these things. The evidence of a pathetic, perpetually thwartedurgency to make something, is one of the most touching aspects of therelics and records of our immediate ancestors. There exists still in thedeath area about the London bombs, a region of deserted small homes thatfurnish the most illuminating comment on the old state of affairs. These homes are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat, hideouslyproportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects quite filthy, only people in complete despair of anything better could have livedin them, but to each is attached a ridiculous little rectangle of landcalled 'the garden, ' containing usually a prop for drying clothes anda loathsome box of offal, the dustbin, full of egg-shells, cinders, andsuch-like refuse. Now that one may go about this region in comparitivesecurity--for the London radiations have dwindled to inconsiderableproportions--it is possible to trace in nearly every one ofthese gardens some effort to make. Here it is a poor little planksummer-house, here it is a 'fountain' of bricks and oyster-shells, herea 'rockery, ' here a 'workshop. ' And in the houses everywhere thereare pitiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble drawings. Theseefforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of blindfoldedmen, they are only one shade less harrowing to a sympathetic observerthan the scratchings one finds upon the walls of the old prisons, butthere they are, witnessing to the poor buried instincts that struggledup towards the light. That god of joyous expression our poor fathersignorantly sought, our freedom has declared to us.... 

In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to possessa little property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled by others, an'independence' as the English used to put it. And what made this desirefor freedom and prosperity so strong, was very evidently the dream ofself-expression, of doing something with it, of playing with it, ofmaking a personal delightfulness, a distinctiveness. Property was nevermore than a means to an end, nor avarice more than a perversion. Menowned in order to do freely. Now that every one has his own apartmentsand his own privacy secure, this disposition to own has found itsrelease in a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they mayleave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a rowof carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they givethemselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in phenomenaas once men gave themselves to the accumulation of riches. The work thatwas once the whole substance of social existence--for most men spent alltheir lives in earning a living--is now no more than was the burden uponone of those old climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on theirbacks in order that they might ascend mountains. It matters little tothe easy charities of our emancipated time that most people who havemade their labour contribution produce neither new beauty nor newwisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant activities andenjoyments 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 appearancesof human life which is going on about us, a change as rapid and aswonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after thebarbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral and mental changes atleast as unprecedented. It is not as if old things were going outof life and new things coming in, it is rather that the alteredcircumstances of men are making an appeal to elements in his naturethat have hitherto been suppressed, and checking tendencies that havehitherto been over-stimulated and over-developed. He has not so muchgrown and altered his essential being as turned new aspects to thelight. Such turnings round into a new attitude the world has seen on aless extensive scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenththeir descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men. Therewas not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth century thatseemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that had not been guiltyof them within the previous two centuries. The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in any European country before theyears of the last wars was in a different world of thought and feelingfrom that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive, and uncharitableexistence of the respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there wereno real differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds;their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and habits ofmind. And turning to more individual instances the constantly observeddifference between one portion of a life and another consequent upona religious conversion, were a standing example of the versatilepossibilities of human nature. 

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities andbusinesses and economic relations shook them also out of their oldestablished habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs andprejudices that came down to them from the past. To borrow a word fromthe old-fashioned chemists, men were made nascent; they were releasedfrom old ties; for good or evil they were ready for new associations. The council carried them forward for good; perhaps if his bombs hadreached their destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried themback to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a harderone than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic bombs had been aprofound one, and for a while the cunning side of the human animalwas overpowered by its sincere realisation of the vital necessity forreconstruction. The litigious and trading spirits cowered together, scared at their own consequences; men thought twice before they soughtmean advantages in the face of the unusual eagerness to realise newaspirations, and when at last the weeds revived again and 'claims' beganto sprout, they sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed, of laws that pointed to the future instead of the past, and underthe blazing sunshine of a transforming world. A new literature, a newinterpretation of history were springing into existence, a new teachingwas already in the schools, a new faith in the young. The worthy manwho forestalled the building of a research city for the English uponthe Sussex downs by buying up a series of estates, was dispossessedand laughed out of court when he made his demand for some preposterouscompensation; the owner of the discredited Dass patents makes his lastappearance upon the scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor ofa paper called The Cry for Justice, in which he duns the world for ahundred million pounds. That was the ingenuous Dass's idea of justice, that he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually because hehad annexed the selvage of one of Holsten's discoveries. Dass cameat last to believe quite firmly in his right, and he died a victim ofconspiracy mania in a private hospital at Nice. Both of these menwould probably have ended their days enormously wealthy, and of courseennobled in the England of the opening twentieth century, and it is justthis novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age. 

The new government early discovered the need of a universal educationto fit men to the great conceptions of its universal rule. It made nowrangling attacks on the local, racial, and sectarian forms of religiousprofession that at that time divided the earth into a patchwork ofhatreds and distrusts; it left these organisations to make their peacewith God in their own time; but it proclaimed as if it were a meresecular truth that sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had tobe shown to all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all around theworld, and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and theconsequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was taught not asa sentiment but as a matter of fact that the salvation of the world fromwaste and contention was the common duty and occupation of all men andwomen. These things which are now the elementary commonplaces of humanintercourse seemed to the councillors of Brissago, when first they daredto proclaim them, marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched bydoubt, that flushed the cheek and fired the eye. 

The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the hands ofa committee of men and women, which did its work during the next fewdecades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness. This educationalcommittee was, and is, the correlative upon the mental and spiritualside of the redistribution committee. And prominent upon it, and indeedfor a time quite dominating it, was a Russian named Karenin, who wassingular in being a congenital cripple. His body was bent so that hewalked with difficulty, suffered much pain as he grew older, and hadat last to undergo two operations. The second killed him. Alreadymalformation, which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle agesso that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature ofthe human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world. It had acurious effect upon Karenin's colleagues; their feeling towards him wasmingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that it needed usage ratherthan reason to overcome. He had a strong face, with little bright browneyes rather deeply sunken and a large resolute thin-lipped mouth. Hisskin was very yellow and wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at alltimes an impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven himbecause of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust throughhis 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 ofuniversal education. That general memorandum to the teachers which isthe key-note of the modern educational system, was probably entirely hiswork. 

'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it, ' he wrote. 'That is thedevice upon the seal of this document, and the starting point of allwe have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything but a plainstatement of fact. It is the basis for your work. You have to teachself-forgetfulness, and everything else that you have to teach iscontributory and subordinate to that end. Education is the releaseof man from self. You have to widen the horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their curiosity and their creative impulses, andcultivate and enlarge their sympathies. That is what you are for. Underyour guidance and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, theyhave to shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of theuniverse. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened outuntil they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose. And thisthat 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 lonelinessof desire, that brooding preoccupation with self and egotisticalrelationships, 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 forthe first time to see them clearly. From the perspectives of a new ageone can look back upon the great and widening stream of literature witha complete understanding. Things link up that seemed disconnected, andthings that were once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be butfactors in the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of thesincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuriesfalls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one sees it as ahuge tissue of variations upon one theme, the conflict of human egotismand personal passion and narrow imaginations on the one hand, againstthe growing sense of wider necessities and a possible, more spaciouslife. 

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 beatsagainst human contrariety and takes refuge at last in a forced andinconclusive contentment with little things. Candide was but one ofthe pioneers of a literature of uneasy complaint that was presentlyan innumerable multitude of books. The novels more particularly of thenineteenth century, if one excludes the mere story-tellers from ourconsideration, witness to this uneasy realisation of changes that callfor effort and of the lack of that effort. In a thousand aspects, now tragically, now comically, now with a funny affectation of divinedetachment, a countless host of witnesses tell their story of livesfretting between dreams and limitations. Now one laughs, now oneweeps, now one reads with a blank astonishment at this huge and almostunpremeditated record of how the growing human spirit, now warily, noweagerly, now furiously, and always, as it seems, unsuccessfully, triedto adapt itself to the maddening misfit of its patched and ancientgarments. And always in these books as one draws nearer to the heartof the matter there comes a disconcerting evasion. It was the fantasticconvention of the time that a writer should not touch upon religion. To do so was to rouse the jealous fury of the great multitude ofprofessional religious teachers. It was permitted to state the discord, but it was forbidden to glance at any possible reconciliation. Religionwas the privilege of the pulpit.... 

It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It wasignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in thediscussion of business questions, it played a trivial and apologeticpart in public affairs. And this was done not out of contempt butrespect. The hold of the old religious organisations upon men's respectwas still enormous, so enormous that there seemed to be a quality ofirreverence in applying religion to the developments of every day. Thisstrange suspension of religion lasted over into the beginnings of thenew age. It was the clear vision of Marcus Karenin much more than anyother contemporary influence which brought it back into the textureof human life. He saw religion without hallucinations, withoutsuperstitious reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food andair, as land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of theRepublic. He saw that indeed it had already percolated away from thetemples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought to imprisonit, that it was already at work anonymously and obscurely in theuniversal acceptance of the greater state. He gave it clearerexpression, rephrased it to the lights and perspectives of the newdawn.... 

But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of thetimes it becomes evident as one reads them in their chronological order, so far as that is now ascertainable, that as one comes to the latternineteenth and the earlier twentieth century the writers are muchmore acutely aware of secular change than their predecessors were. Theearlier novelists tried to show 'life as it is, ' the latter showedlife as it changes. More and more of their characters are engaged inadaptation to change or suffering from the effects of world changes. Andas we come up to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of theeveryday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is continuallymore manifest. Barnet's book, which has served us so well, is frankly apicture of the world coming about like a ship that sails into the wind. Our later novelists give a vast gallery of individual conflicts in whichold habits and customs, limited ideas, ungenerous temperaments, andinnate obsessions are pitted against this great opening out of life thathas happened to us. They tell us of the feelings of old people who havebeen wrenched away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had tomake peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are stillstrange to them. They give us the discord between the opening egotismsof youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing social life. They tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to capture and crippleour souls, of romantic failures and tragical misconceptions of the trendof the world, of the spirit of adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how these serve the universal drift. And all their stories leadin the end either to happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster orsalvation. The clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the morecertainly do these novels tell of the possibility of salvation for allthe world. For any road in life leads to religion for those upon it whowill follow it far enough.... 

It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former timethat it should be an open question as it is to-day whether the worldis wholly Christian or not Christian at all. But assuredly we havethe spirit, and as surely have we left many temporary forms behind. Christianity was the first expression of world religion, the firstcomplete repudiation of tribalism and war and disputation. That it fellpresently into the ways of more ancient rituals cannot alter that. The common sense of mankind has toiled through two thousand years ofchastening experience to find at last how sound a meaning attaches tothe familiar phrases of the Christian faith. The scientific thinkeras he widens out to the moral problems of the collective life, comesinevitably upon the words of Christ, and as inevitably does theChristian, as his thought grows clearer, arrive at the worldrepublic. As for the claims of the sects, as for the use of a name andsuccessions, we live in a time that has shaken itself free from suchclaims and consistencies. 

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN

Section 1

The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the newstation for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above theSutlej Gorge, where it comes down out of Thibet. 

It is a place of such wildness and beauty as no other scenery in theworld affords. The granite terrace which runs round the four sidesof the low block of laboratories looks out in every direction uponmountains. Far below in the hidden depths of a shadowy blue cleft, theriver pours down in its tumultuous passage to the swarming plains ofIndia. No sound of its roaring haste comes up to those serenities. Beyond that blue gulf, in which whole forests of giant deodars seem nomore than small patches of moss, rise vast precipices of many-colouredrock, fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles. These are the northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and snowwhich clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the culminatingsummits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest. Here are cliffs ofwhich 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 inlandseas on which the tumbled boulders lie so thickly that strange littleflowers can bloom among them under the untempered sunshine. To thenorthward, and blocking out any vision of the uplands of Thibet, risesthat citadel of porcelain, that gothic pile, the Lio Porgyul, walls, towers, and peaks, a clear twelve thousand feet of veined and splinteredrock above the river. And beyond it and eastward and westward rise peaksbehind peaks, against the dark blue Himalayan sky. Far away below to thesouth the clouds of the Indian rains pile up abruptly and are stayed byan invisible hand. 

Hither it was that with a dreamlike swiftness Karenin flew high overthe irrigations of Rajputana and the towers and cupolas of the ultimateDelhi; and the little group of buildings, albeit the southward walldropped nearly five hundred feet, seemed to him as he soared down to itlike a toy lost among these mountain wildernesses. No road came up tothis place; it was reached only by flight. 

His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted by hissecretary clambered down through the wing fabric and made his way to theofficials who came out to receive him. 

In this place, beyond infections and noise and any distractions, surgeryhad made for itself a house of research and a healing fastness. Thebuilding itself would have seemed very wonderful to eyes accustomed tothe flimsy architecture of an age when power was precious. It was madeof granite, already a little roughened on the outside by frost, butpolished within and of a tremendous solidity. And in a honeycomb ofsubtly lit apartments, were the spotless research benches, the operatingtables, the instruments of brass, and fine glass and platinum and gold. Men and women came from all parts of the world for study or experimentalresearch. They wore a common uniform of white and ate at long tablestogether, but the patients lived in an upper part of the buildings, andwere cared for by nurses and skilled attendants.... 

The first man to greet Karenin was Ciana, the scientific director of theinstitution. Beside him was Rachel Borken, the chief organiser. 'You aretired?' 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. ButI 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 Iwould like to see a bit of this place and talk to some of your peoplebefore 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.... Andit's a bother, this illness and having to come down to oneself. Thisdoorway and the row of windows is well done; the gray granite and justthe 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, whowas 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. Theexamination had been made, and Karenin knew what was before him. He wastired but serene. 

'So I shall die, ' he said, 'unless you operate?'

Fowler assented. 'And then, ' said Karenin, smiling, 'probably I shalldie. '

'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 shallbe 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'tyou, Fowler, couldn't you drug me and patch me instead of allthis--vivisection? A few days of drugged and active life--and then theend?'

Fowler thought. 'We are not sure enough yet to do things like that, ' hesaid. 

'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 isuncertainty--inaccuracy. My body works doubtfully, it is not even surethat it will die or live. I suppose the time is not far off when suchbodies as mine will no longer be born into the world. '

'You see, ' said Fowler, after a little pause, 'it is necessary thatspirits such as yours should be born into the world. '

'I suppose, ' said Karenin, 'that my spirit has had its use. But if youthink 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--allthis. If I could have moved more freely and lived a larger life inhealth I could have done more. But some day perhaps you will be able toput a body that is wrong altogether right again. Your science is onlybeginning. It's a subtler thing than physics and chemistry, and it takeslonger to produce its miracles. And meanwhile a few more of us must diein patience. '

'Fine work is being done and much of it, ' said Fowler. 'I can say asmuch because I have nothing to do with it. I can understand a lesson, appreciate the discoveries of abler men and use my hands, but thoseothers, Pigou, Masterton, Lie, and the others, they are clearing theground fast for the knowledge to come. Have you had time to follow theirwork?'

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 atpresent 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 isin itself a very big work, and it is only now that we are getting itproperly done. But already we are feeling the benefit of that. Since itceased to be a paid employment and became a devotion we have had onlythose people who obeyed the call of an aptitude at work upon thesethings. Here--I must show you it to-day, because it will interestyou--we have our copy of the encyclopaedic index--every week sheets aretaken out and replaced by fresh sheets with new results that are broughtto us by the aeroplanes of the Research Department. It is an index ofknowledge that grows continually, an index that becomes continuallytruer. There was never anything like it before. '

'When I came into the education committee, ' said Karenin, 'that indexof human knowledge seemed an impossible thing. Research had produceda chaotic mountain of results, in a hundred languages and a thousanddifferent types of publication. . . . ' He smiled at his memories. 'Howwe 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 goaway--down there. One has to. At least I have to. There is a sort ofgrayness comes over all this, one feels hungry for life, real, personalpassionate life, love-making, eating and drinking for the fun ofthe thing, jostling crowds, having adventures, laughter--above alllaughter----'

'Yes, ' said Karenin understandingly. 

'And then one day, suddenly one thinks of these high mountainsagain.... '

'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 exasperationof abnormality. It will be good when you have nobody alive whose bodycannot live the wholesome everyday life, whose spirit cannot come upinto these high places as it wills. '

'We shall manage that soon, ' said Fowler. 

'For endless generations man has struggled upward against theindignities of his body--and the indignities of his soul. Pains, incapacities, vile fears, black moods, despairs. How well I've knownthem. They've taken more time than all your holidays. It is true, is itnot, 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 hehas fully learnt the truth of that, that he can take hold of himself tobe neither beast nor cripple. Now that he overcomes his servitude tohis body, he can for the first time think of living the full life of hisbody.... 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 thebrutes 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 Kareninsuddenly, 'when will you operate?'

'The day after to-morrow, ' said Fowler. 'For a day I want you to drinkand 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 carryyou in a litter. And to-morrow you shall lie out upon the terrace. Ourmountains here are the most beautiful in the world.... '

Section 3

The next morning Karenin got up early and watched the sun rise overthe mountains, and breakfasted lightly, and then young Gardener, hissecretary, came to consult him upon the spending of his day. Would hecare to see people? Or was this gnawing pain within him too much topermit him to do that?

'I'd like to talk, ' said Karenin. 'There must be all sorts oflively-minded people here. Let them come and gossip with me. It willdistract me--and I can't tell you how interesting it makes everythingthat 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 atall 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 ammost afraid of is that last rag of life. I may just go on--a scarredsalvage of suffering stuff. And then--all the things I have hidden andkept down or discounted or set right afterwards will get the better ofme. I shall be peevish. I may lose my grip upon my own egotism. It'snever been a very firm grip. No, no, Gardener, don't say that! You knowbetter, you've had glimpses of it. Suppose I came through on the otherside of this affair, belittled, vain, and spiteful, using the prestige Ihave got among men by my good work in the past just to serve some smallinvalid purpose.... '

He was silent for a time, watching the mists among the distantprecipices change to clouds of light, and drift and dissolve before thesearching rays of the sunrise. 

'Yes, ' he said at last, 'I am afraid of these anaesthetics and these fagends of life. It's life we are all afraid of. Death!--nobody minds justdeath. Fowler is clever--but some day surgery will know its duty betterand not be so anxious just to save something . . . Provided only thatit quivers. I've tried to hold my end up properly and do my work. AfterFowler has done with me I am certain I shall be unfit for work--and whatelse 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 ofvitality.... I know it for the splendid thing it is--I who have beena diseased creature from the beginning. I know it well enough not toconfuse it with its husks. Remember that, Gardener, if presently myheart fails me and I despair, and if I go through a little phase of painand ingratitude and dark forgetfulness before the end.... Don't believewhat I may say at the last.... If the fabric is good enough the selvagedoesn't matter. It can't matter. So long as you are alive you are justthe moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all your lifefrom the first moment to the last.... '

Section 4

Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to him, andhe could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a long time withhim and talked chiefly of women in the world, and with her was a girlnamed Edith Haydon who was already very well known as a cytologist. Andseveral of the younger men who were working in the place and a patientnamed Kahn, a poet, and Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spentsome time with him. The talk wandered from point to point and cameback upon itself, and became now earnest and now trivial as the chancesuggestions determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notesof things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again theoutlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt about manyof the principal things in life. 

'Our age, ' he said, 'has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We havebeen preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama that wasplayed out and growing tiresome.... If I could but sit out the first fewscenes of the new spectacle.... 

'How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as I am ailing witha growth of unmeaning things. It was entangled, feverish, confused. Itwas in sore need of release, and I suppose that nothing less than theviolence of those bombs could have released it and made it a healthyworld again. I suppose they were necessary. Just as everything turnsto evil in a fevered body so everything seemed turning to evil in thoselast years of the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete organisationsseizing upon all the new fine things that science was giving to theworld, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the churches andsects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat powers and limitlesspossibilities and turning them to evil uses. And they would not sufferopen speech, they would not permit of education, they would let no onebe educated to the needs of the new time.... You who are younger cannotimagine the mixture of desperate hope and protesting despair in which wewho could believe in the possibilities of science lived in those yearsbefore atomic energy came.... 

'It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would notunderstand, but that those who did understand lacked the power of realbelief. They said the things, they saw the things, and the things meantnothing to them.... 

'I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how ourfathers bore themselves towards science. They hated it. They fearedit. They permitted a few scientific men to exist and work--a pitifulhandful.... "Don't find out anything about us, " they said to them;"don't inflict vision upon us, spare our little ways of life from thefearful shaft of understanding. But do tricks for us, little limitedtricks. Give us cheap lighting. And cure us of certain disagreeablethings, cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our colds andrelieve us after repletion.... " We have changed all that, Gardener. Science is no longer our servant. We know it for something greater thanour little individual selves. It is the awakening mind of the race, andin a little while----In a little while----I wish indeed I could watchfor that little while, now that the curtain has risen.... 

'While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs inLondon, ' he said. 'Then they are going to repair the ruins and make itall 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 whichmy father went after his expulsion from Russia.... That London of mymemories seems to me like a place in another world. For you youngerpeople 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, theysay; and most of the bridges and large areas of dock. Westminster, whichheld most of the government offices, suffered badly from the small bombthat destroyed the Parliament, there are very few traces of the oldthoroughfare of Whitehall or the Government region thereabout, but thereare plentiful drawings to scale of its buildings, and the great hole inthe east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor district and verylike the north and the south. . . . It will be possible to reconstructmost of it. . . . It is wanted. Already it becomes difficult to recallthe 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 remembereverybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They were ill. They were sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious about money andeverybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate a queer mixture offoods, either too much or too little, and at odd hours. One sees how illthey were by their advertisements. All this new region of London theyare opening up now is plastered with advertisements of pills. Everybodymust have been taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the Strandthey have found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble andunburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill andtabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying age. Theyare equally strange to us. People's skins must have been in a vilestate. Very few people were properly washed; they carried the filth ofmonths on their clothes. All the clothes they wore were old clothes; ourway of pulping our clothes again after a week or so of wear would haveseemed fantastic to them. Their clothing hardly bears thinking about. And the congestion of them! Everybody was jostling against everybody inthose awful towns. In an uproar. People were run over and crushed bythe hundred; every year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed ordisabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it was worse; people used tofall dead for want of air in the crowded ways. The irritation of London, internal and external, must have been maddening. It was a maddenedworld. It is like thinking of a sick child. One has the same effect offeverish 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 keenabout even a sick child--and something touching. But so much of theold times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly stupid, obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very opposite to beingfresh and young. 

'I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero ofnineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of bloodand iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man. Indeed, thatis what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who ever became great. Ilooked at his portraits, a heavy, almost froggish face, with projectingeyes and a thick moustache to hide a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing butGermany, Germany emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his classin Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to ideas;his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a bumpkin's elaboratecunning. And he was the most influential man in the world, in the wholeworld, no man ever left so deep a mark on it, because everywhere therewere gross men to resonate to the heavy notes he emitted. He trampled onten thousand lovely things, and a kind of malice in these louts madeit pleasant to them to see him trample. No--he was no child; the dull, national aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness. Childhood ispromise. 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 ofhis sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool's "blood and iron"passed all round the earth. Until the atomic bombs burnt our way tofreedom again. . . . '

'One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium, ' said one ofthe young men. 

'From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a hundredthousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but war. '

'Were there no sane men in those days, ' asked the young man, 'to standagainst that idolatry?'

'In a state of despair, ' said Edith Haydon. 

'He is so far off--and there are men alive still who were alive whenBismarck died!' . . . Said the young man.... 

Section 5

'And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck, ' said Karenin, followinghis own thoughts. 'You see, men belong to their own age; we stand upona common stock of thought and we fancy we stand upon the ground. I meta pleasant man the other day, a Maori, whose great-grandfather was acannibal. It chanced he had a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and thetwo were marvellously alike. One felt that a little juggling with timeand either might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in astupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one. The worldalso has its moods. Think of the mental food of Bismarck's childhood;the humiliations of Napoleon's victories, the crowded, crowning victoryof the Battle of the Nations.... Everybody in those days, wise orfoolish, believed that the division of the world under a multitude ofgovernments was inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands ofyears more. It WAS inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who haddenied that inevitability publicly would have been counted--oh! a SILLYfellow. Old Bismarck was only just a little--forcible, on the lines ofthe accepted ideas. That is all. He thought that since there had tobe national governments he would make one that was strong at home andinvincible abroad. Because he had fed with a kind of rough appetite uponwhat we can see now were very stupid ideas, that does not make hima stupid man. We've had advantages; we've had unity and collectivismblasted into our brains. Where should we be now but for the grace ofscience? I should have been an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden memberof 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 youngpeople gibed at each other across the smiling old administrator, andthen 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--thatcivilisation was very near disaster when the atomic bombs camebanging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and no inducedradio-activity, the world would have--smashed--much as it did. Onlyinstead of its being a smash that opened a way to better things, itmight have been a smash without a recovery. It is part of my businessto understand economics, and from that point of view the century beforeHolsten was just a hundred years' crescendo of waste. Only the extremeindividualism of that period, only its utter want of any collectiveunderstanding or purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used upmaterial--insanely. They had got through three-quarters of all the coalin the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they had swept awaytheir forests, and they were running short of tin and copper. Theirwheat areas were getting weary and populous, and many of the big townshad so lowered the water level of their available hills that theysuffered a drought every summer. The whole system was rushing towardsbankruptcy. And they were spending every year vaster and vasteramounts of power and energy upon military preparations, and continuallyexpanding the debt of industry to capital. The system was alreadystaggering when Holsten began his researches. So far as the world ingeneral 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 therewas a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, see the gulfbeneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at large thatany research at all was in progress. And as I say, sir, if that lineof escape hadn't opened, before now there might have been a crash, revolution, panic, social disintegration, famine, and--it isconceivable--complete disorder. . . . The rails might have rusted on thedisused railways by now, the telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big liners dropped into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, desertedcities become the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We mighthave been brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you maysmile, but that had happened before in human history. The world is stillstudded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric bandsmade their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of Hadrian became afortress that warred across the ruins of Rome against the Colosseum.... Had all that possibility of reaction ended so certainly in 1940? Is itall 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 youunderrate the available intelligence in those early decades of thetwentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that intelligencedidn't tell--but it was there. And I question your hypothesis. I doubtif that discovery could have been delayed. There is a kind of inevitablelogic now in the progress of research. For a hundred years and morethought and science have been going their own way regardless of thecommon events of life. You see--they have got loose. If there had beenno Holsten there would have been some similar man. If atomic energy hadnot come in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Romethe march of science had scarcely begun.... Nineveh, Babylon, Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments inassociation that made a security, a breathing-space, in which inquirywas born. Man had to experiment before he found out the way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly begun.... The politicsand dignities and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wereonly the last phoenix blaze of the former civilisation flaring up aboutthe beginnings of the new. Which we serve.... 'Man lives in the dawn forever, ' said Karenin. 'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and doesbut gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of ours, whichwould have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago, is already thecommonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream of the possibilitiesin the mind of man that now gather to a head beneath the shelter of itspeace, these great mountains here seem but little things.... '

Section 6

About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept amonghis artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he awoke andsome tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small difficulty inconnection with the Moravian schools in the Labrador country and inGreenland that Gardener knew would interest him. He remained alone fora little while after that, and then the two women came to him again. Afterwards Edwards and Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell uponlove and the place of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks ofIndia lay under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell fullupon the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vastsplinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild rushof snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a wet threadinto the gulfs below, and cease.... 

Section 7

For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet, talkedof passionate love. He said that passionate, personal love had been theabiding desire of humanity since ever humanity had begun, and nowonly was it becoming a possible experience. It had been a dream thatgeneration after generation had pursued, that always men had lost on theverge of attainment. To most of those who had sought it obstinately ithad brought tragedy. Now, lifted above sordid distresses, men and womenmight hope for realised and triumphant love. This age was the Dawn ofLove.... 

Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these things. Against that continued silence Kahn's voice presently seemed to beat andfail. He had begun by addressing Karenin, but presently he was includingEdith 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 sortof thing. I know that there is a vast release of love-making in theworld. This great wave of decoration and elaboration that has gone aboutthe world, this Efflorescence, has of course laid hold of that. I knowthat when you say that the world is set free, you interpret that tomean that the world is set free for love-making. Down there, --underthe clouds, the lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, yourhalf-mystical songs, in which you represent this old hard worlddissolving into a luminous haze of love--sexual love.... I don't thinkyou are right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, andyou see life--ardently--with the eyes of youth. But the power that hasbrought man into these high places under this blue-veiled blackness ofthe sky and which beckons us on towards the immense and awful future ofour 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 havehad to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles that perfectfreedom and almost limitless power will put to the soul of our race. Ican see now, all over the world, a beautiful ecstasy of waste; "Let ussing and rejoice and be lovely and wonderful. " . . . The orgy isonly beginning, Kahn.... It was inevitable--but it is not the end ofmankind.... 

'Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of timethat life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it forgot itselfas it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts, its moments, wereborn and wondered and played and desired and hungered and grew wearyand died. Incalculable successions of vision, visions of sunlit jungle, river wilderness, wild forest, eager desire, beating hearts, soaringwings and creeping terror flamed hotly and then were as though theyhad never been. Life was an uneasiness across which lights playedand vanished. And then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were aquestion and hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory thatdies not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind, a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to thestars.... 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 theseelementals, 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 iswhat you mean, Kahn. '

Karenin shook his head. 'You cannot stay at the roots and climb thetree, ' 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 literatureand art and sentiment and all our emotional forms have been almostaltogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights and hopes, they haveall turned on that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but lifelengthens out now and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself. Poetswho used to die at thirty live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn! Thereare endless years yet for you--and all full of learning.... We carry anexcessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to freeourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it. We have learnt in athousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex, which in theold barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our dying, is now likea hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through human life. Youpoets, 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 worththinking about, you will be satisfied, and then you will come up here tothe greater things. The old religions and their new offsets want still, I see, to suppress all these things. Let them suppress. If they cansuppress. In their own people. Either road will bring you here at lastto the eternal search for knowledge and the great adventure of power. '

'But incidentally, ' said Rachel Borken; 'incidentally you have half ofhumanity, you have womankind, very much specialised for--for this loveand 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 anecessary phase? Quite apart from reproduction the love of the sexesis necessary. Isn't it love, sexual love, which has released theimagination? Without that stir, without that impulse to go out fromourselves, to be reckless of ourselves and wonderful, would our lives beanything more than the contentment of the stalled ox?'

'The key that opens the door, ' said Karenin, 'is not the goal of thejourney. '

'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 youmen? Let us speak of this question now. It is a thing constantly in mythoughts, Karenin. What do you think of us? You who must have thought somuch of these perplexities. '

Karenin seemed to weigh his words. He spoke very deliberately. 'I do notcare a rap about your future--as women. I do not care a rap about thefuture of men--as males. I want to destroy these peculiar futures. Icare for your future as intelligences, as parts of and contributionto the universal mind of the race. Humanity is not only naturallyover-specialised in these matters, but all its institutions, itscustoms, everything, exaggerate, intensify this difference. I want tounspecialise women. No new idea. Plato wanted exactly that. I do notwant to go on as we go now, emphasising this natural difference; I donot deny it, but I want to reduce it and overcome it. '

'And--we remain women, ' said Rachel Borken. 'Need you remain thinking ofyourselves as women?'

'It is forced upon us, ' said Edith Haydon. 

'I do not think a woman becomes less of a woman because she dresses andworks like a man, ' said Edwards. 'You women here, I mean you scientificwomen, wear white clothing like the men, twist up your hair in thesimplest fashion, go about your work as though there was only one sex inthe 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 forexcitement and display, whose only thoughts are of lovers, whoexaggerate 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 forHeaven's sake be as much woman as you wish, ' said Karenin. 'When I askyou to unspecialise, I am thinking not of the abolition of sex, but theabolition of the irksome, restricting, obstructive obsession with sex. It may be true that sex made society, that the first society was thesex-cemented family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations, the first laws sexual taboos. Until a few years ago morality meantproper sexual behaviour. Up to within a few years of us the chiefinterest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman andher children and the chief concern of a woman was to get a man to dothat. That was the drama, that was life. And the jealousy of thesedemands was the master motive in the world. You said, Kahn, a littlewhile ago that sexual love was the key that let one out from thesolitude of self, but I tell you that so far it has only done so inorder to lock us all up again in a solitude of two.... All that may havebeen necessary but it is necessary no longer. All that has changedand changes still very swiftly. Your future, Rachel, AS WOMEN, is adiminishing 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 thansex in this. Apart from sex we are different from you. We take uplife differently. Forget we are--females, Karenin, and still we are adifferent sort of human being with a different use. In some things weare amazingly secondary. Here am I in this place because of my trick ofmanagement, and Edith is here because of her patient, subtle hands. Thatdoes not alter the fact that nearly the whole body of science is manmade; that does not alter the fact that men do so predominatingly makehistory, that you could nearly write a complete history of the worldwithout mentioning a woman's name. And on the other hand we have agift of devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly lovingbeautiful things, a care for life and a peculiar keen close eye forbehaviour. You know men are blind beside us in these last matters. Youknow they are restless--and fitful. We have a steadfastness. We maynever draw the broad outlines nor discover the new paths, but in thefuture isn't there a confirming and sustaining and supplying role forus? As important, perhaps, as yours? Equally important. We hold theworld up, Karenin, though you may have raised it. '

'You know very well, Rachel, that I believe as you believe. I am notthinking of the abolition of woman. But I do want to abolish--theheroine, the sexual heroine. I want to abolish the woman whose supportis jealousy and whose gift possession. I want to abolish the woman whocan be won as a prize or locked up as a delicious treasure. And awaydown there the heroine flares like a divinity. '

'In America, ' said Edwards, 'men are fighting duels over the praises ofwomen and holding tournaments before Queens of Beauty. '

'I saw a beautiful girl in Lahore, ' said Kahn, 'she sat under a goldencanopy like a goddess, and three fine men, armed and dressed like theancient paintings, sat on steps below her to show their devotion. Andthey 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 specialisedfor sex than the whole being of woman. What woman would do a thing likethat? 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, ' saidKarenin. 'It is you poets, Kahn, with your love songs which turn thesweet fellowship of comrades into this woman-centred excitement. Butthere is something in women, in many women, which responds to theseprovocations; they succumb to a peculiarly self-cultivating egotism. They become the subjects of their own artistry. They develop andelaborate themselves as scarcely any man would ever do. They LOOK forgolden canopies. And even when they seem to react against that, they maydo it still. I have been reading in the old papers of the movementsto emancipate women that were going on before the discovery of atomicforce. These things which began with a desire to escape from thelimitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed assertion of sex, and women more heroines than ever. Helen of Holloway was at last asbig a nuisance in her way as Helen of Troy, and so long as you thinkof yourselves as women'--he held out a finger at Rachel and smiledgently--'instead of thinking of yourselves as intelligent beings, youwill be in danger of--Helenism. To think of yourselves as women isto think of yourselves in relation to men. You can't escape thatconsequence. You have to learn to think of yourselves--for our sakes andyour own sakes--in relation to the sun and stars. You have to cease tobe our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon our adventures. ... ' Hewaved his hand towards the dark sky above the mountain crests. 

Section 8

'These questions are the next questions to which research will bring usanswers, ' said Karenin. 'While we sit here and talk idly and inexactlyof what is needed and what may be, there are hundreds of keen-wittedmen and women who are working these things out, dispassionately andcertainly, for the love of knowledge. The next sciences to yieldgreat harvests now will be psychology and neural physiology. Theseperplexities of the situation between man and woman and the trouble withthe obstinacy of egotism, these are temporary troubles, the issue ofour own times. Suddenly all these differences that seem so fixed willdissolve, all these incompatibles will run together, and we shall go onto mould our bodies and our bodily feelings and personal reactions asboldly as we begin now to carve mountains and set the seas in theirplaces and change the currents of the wind. '

'It is the next wave, ' said Fowler, who had come out upon the terraceand seated himself silently behind Karenin's chair. 

'Of course, in the old days, ' said Edwards, 'men were tied to their cityor 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'spower of self-modification. 

'There is none, ' said Fowler, walking forward and sitting down upon theparapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his face. 'There is noabsolute limit to either knowledge or power.... I hope you do not tireyourself talking. '

'I am interested, ' said Karenin. 'I suppose in a little while men willcease to be tired. I suppose in a little time you will give us somethingthat will hurry away the fatigue products and restore our jaded tissuesalmost at once. This old machine may be made to run without slacking orcessation. '

'That is possible, Karenin. But there is much to learn. '

'And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don't you thinkthere will be some way of saving these?'

Fowler nodded assent. 

'And then sleep again. When man with his blazing lights made an end tonight in his towns and houses--it is only a hundred years or so agothat that was done--then it followed he would presently resent his eighthours of uselessness. Shan't we presently take a tabloid or lie in somefield of force that will enable us to do with an hour or so of slumberand rise refreshed again?'

'Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction. '

'And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the systemthat come with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen andlengthen the years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youthand the contractions of senility. Man who used to weaken and die ashis teeth decayed now looks forward to a continually lengthening, continually fuller term of years. And all those parts of him that oncegathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd, treacherouscorners of his body, you know better and better how to deal with. You carve his body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred. Thepsychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and remove badcomplexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures and broaden ideas. So that we are becoming more and more capable of transmitting what wehave learnt and preserving it for the race. The race, the racial wisdom, science, gather power continually to subdue the individual man to itsown end. Is that not so?'

Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of newwork that was in progress in India and Russia. 'And how is it withheredity?' asked Karenin. 

Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged bythe genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the laws ofinheritance and how the sex of children and the complexions and many ofthe parental qualities could be determined. 

'He can actually DO----?'

'It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph, ' said Fowler, 'butto-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 sciencegetting the power for us to end that old dispute for ever. If woman istoo much for us, we'll reduce her to a minority, and if we do not likeany type of men and women, we'll have no more of it. These old bodies, these old animal limitations, all this earthly inheritance of grossinevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled cocoonfrom an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these things I feellike that--like a wet, crawling new moth that still fears to spread itswings. Because where do these things take us?'

'Beyond humanity, ' said Kahn. 

'No, ' said Karenin. 'We can still keep our feet upon the earth that madeus. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round planet is no longerchained to us like the ball of a galley slave.... 

'In a little while men who will know how to bear the strangegravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar gasesand all the fearful strangenesses of space will be venturing out fromthis earth. This ball will be no longer enough for us; our spirit willreach out.... Cannot you see how that little argosy will go glitteringup into the sky, twinkling and glittering smaller and smaller until theblue swallows it up. They may succeed out there; they may perish, butother 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 upupon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better watchthe sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming of theafterglow. They were joined by two of the surgeons from the laboratoriesbelow, and presently by a nurse who brought Karenin refreshment in athin glass cup. It was a cloudless, windless evening under the deep bluesky, and far away to the north glittered two biplanes on the way to theobservatories on Everest, two hundred miles distant over the precipicesto the east. The little group of people watched them pass over themountains and vanish into the blue, and then for a time they talked ofthe work that the observatory was doing. From that they passed to thewhole process of research about the world, and so Karenin's thoughtsreturned again to the mind of the world and the great future that wasopening upon man's imagination. He asked the surgeons many questionsupon the detailed possibilities of their science, and he was keenlyinterested and excited by the things they told him. And as they talkedthe sun touched the mountains, and became very swiftly a blazing andindented hemisphere of liquid flame and sank. 

Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of incandescence, andshaded 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 sointerested as Man to-day that I have nearly forgotten Marcus Karenin. Marcus Karenin must go under your knife to-morrow, Fowler, and veryprobably Marcus Karenin will die. ' He raised his slightly shrivelledhand. 'It does not matter, Fowler. It scarcely matters even to me. Forindeed is it Karenin who has been sitting here and talking; is it notrather a common mind, Fowler, that has played about between us? You andI and all of us have added thought to thought, but the thread is neitheryou nor me. What is true we all have; when the individual has altogetherbrought himself to the test and winnowing of expression, then theindividual is done. I feel as though I had already been emptied out ofthat little vessel, that Marcus Karenin, which in my youth held me sotightly and completely. Your beauty, dear Edith, and your broad brow, dear Rachel, and you, Fowler, with your firm and skilful hands, are nowalmost as much to me as this hand that beats the arm of my chair. And aslittle me. And the spirit that desires to know, the spirit that resolvesto do, that spirit that lives and has talked in us to-day, lived inAthens, lived in Florence, lives on, I know, for ever.... 

'And you, old Sun, with your sword of flame searing these poor eyesof Marcus for the last time of all, beware of me! You think I die--andindeed I am only taking off one more coat to get at you. I havethreatened you for ten thousand years, and soon I warn you I shall becoming. When I am altogether stripped and my disguises thrown away. Verysoon now, old Sun, I shall launch myself at you, and I shall reach youand I shall put my foot on your spotted face and tug you about by yourfiery locks. One step I shall take to the moon, and then I shall leapat you. I've talked to you before, old Sun, I've talked to you a milliontimes, and now I am beginning to remember. Yes--long ago, long ago, before I had stripped off a few thousand generations, dust nowand forgotten, I was a hairy savage and I pointed my hand at youand--clearly I remember it!--I saw you in a net. Have you forgottenthat, old Sun? . . . 

'Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the individualthat have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts intoscience and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you slinkdown behind the mountains from me, well may you cower.... '

Section 10

Karenin desired that he might dream alone for a little while before hereturned to the cell in which he was to sleep. He was given relief for apain that began to trouble him and wrapped warmly about with furs, fora great coldness was creeping over all things, and so they left him, andhe sat for a long time watching the afterglow give place to the darknessof night. 

It seemed to those who had to watch over him unobtrusively lest heshould 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 burningcressets of the Indian stars, that even the moonrise cannot altogetherquench, began their vigil. The moon rose behind the towering screen ofdark precipices to the east, and long before it emerged above these, itsslanting beams had filled the deep gorges below with luminous mist andturned the towers and pinnacles of Lio Porgyul to a magic dreamcastle ofradiance and wonder.... 

Came a great uprush of ghostly light above the black rim of rocks, andthen like a bubble that is blown and detaches itself the moon floatedoff clear into the unfathomable dark sky.... 

And then Karenin stood up. He walked a few paces along the terrace andremained for a time gazing up at that great silver disc, that silveryshield 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 sleptpeacefully till the morning. And early in the morning they came to himand the anaesthetic was given him and the operation performed. 

It was altogether successful, but Karenin was weak and he had to lievery still; and about seven days later a blood clot detached itself fromthe healing scar and travelled to his heart, and he died in an instantin the night.