initial commit of ebook 1059HEADmain

9 files changed, 30833 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/1059-0.txt b/old/1059-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..09a6920
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1059-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7234 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The World Set Free, by Herbert George Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The World Set Free
+       A Story of Mankind
+
+Author: Herbert George Wells
+
+Release Date: October, 1997 [eBook #1059]
+[Most recently updated: November 24, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Charles Keller and David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD SET FREE ***
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+The World Set Free
+
+by H.G. Wells
+
+
+We Are All Things That Make And Pass,
+Striving Upon A Hidden Mission,
+Out To The Open Sea.
+
+TO
+Frederick Soddy’s
+‘Interpretation Of Radium’
+This Story,
+Which Owes Long Passages
+To The Eleventh Chapter Of That Book,
+Acknowledges And Inscribes Itself
+
+
+Contents
+
+ PREFACE
+ 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
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+_The World Set Free_ was written in 1913 and published early in 1914,
+and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility,
+stories which all turn on the possible developments in the future of
+some contemporary force or group of forces. _The World Set Free_ was
+written under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent
+person in the world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of
+averting it, but few of us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how
+near the crash was to us. The reader will be amused to find that here
+it is put off until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the
+reason for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a
+prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to be
+rather a slow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of reality, for
+example, beat the forecast in _Anticipations_ by about twenty years or
+so. I suppose a desire not to shock the sceptical reader’s sense of use
+and wont and perhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have
+something to do with this dating forward of one’s main events, but in
+the particular case of _The World Set Free_ there was, I think, another
+motive in holding the Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist
+to get well forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy.
+1956—or for that matter 2056—may be none too late for that crowning
+revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this procrastination
+of over forty years, the guess at the opening phase of the war was
+fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of the Central Empires, the
+opening campaign through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the
+British Expeditionary Force were all justified before the book had been
+published six months. And the opening section of Chapter the Second
+remains now, after the reality has happened, a fairly adequate
+diagnosis of the essentials of the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter
+the Second, Section 2), on which the writer may congratulate himself,
+is the forecast that under modern conditions it would be quite
+impossible for any great general to emerge to supremacy and concentrate
+the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. There could be no
+Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the scientific corps
+muttering, ‘These old fools,’ exactly as it is here foretold.
+
+These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far
+outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of interest
+now; the thesis that because of the development of scientific
+knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are
+no longer possible in the world, that to attempt to keep on with the
+old system is to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to
+destroy our race altogether. The remaining interest of this book now is
+the sustained validity of this thesis and the discussion of the
+possible ending of war on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic
+of sanity to break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of
+mankind. I have represented the native common sense of the French mind
+and of the English mind—for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be
+‘God’s Englishman’—leading mankind towards a bold and resolute effort
+of salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the school book
+footnotes say, compare to-day’s newspaper. Instead of a frank and
+honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman meeting German and
+Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences and in their disaster,
+upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in Geneva at the other end of
+Switzerland a poor little League of (Allied) Nations (excluding the
+United States, Russia, and most of the ‘subject peoples’ of the world),
+meeting obscurely amidst a world-wide disregard to make impotent
+gestures at the leading problems of the debacle. Either the disaster
+has not been vast enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict
+the necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion.
+Just as the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity and
+thought that increase would go on for ever, so now it would seem the
+world is growing accustomed to a steady glide towards social
+disintegration, and thinks that that too can go on continually and
+never come to a final bump. So soon do use and wont establish
+themselves, and the most flaming and thunderous of lessons pale into
+disregard.
+
+The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question whether
+it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of creative sanity in
+mankind, to avert this steady glide to destruction, is now one of the
+most urgent in the world. It is clear that the writer is
+temperamentally disposed to hope that there is such a possibility. But
+he has to confess that he sees few signs of any such breadth of
+understanding and steadfastness of will as an effectual effort to turn
+the rush of human affairs demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old
+institutions carries us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is
+there any plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as
+something overriding any national and patriotic consideration, and that
+is in the working class movement throughout the world. And labour
+internationalism is closely bound up with conceptions of a profound
+social revolution. If world peace is to be attained through labour
+internationalism, it will have to be attained at the price of the
+completest social and economic reconstruction and by passing through a
+phase of revolution that will certainly be violent, that may be very
+bloody, which may be prolonged through a long period, and may in the
+end fail to achieve anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the
+fact remains that it is in the labour class, and the labour class
+alone, that any conception of a world rule and a world peace has so far
+appeared. The dream of _The World Set Free_, a dream of highly educated
+and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily setting
+themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has thus far remained a
+dream.
+
+H. G. WELLS.
+
+EASTON GLEBE, DUNMOW, 1921.
+
+
+
+
+PRELUDE
+THE SUN SNARERS
+
+
+Section I
+
+The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external
+power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of
+his terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural strength
+and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning and the rough
+implement of stone. So he passed beyond the ape. From that he expands.
+Presently he added to himself the power of the horse and the ox, he
+borrowed the carrying strength of water and the driving force of the
+wind, he quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed
+first with copper and then with iron, increased and varied and became
+more elaborate and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made
+his way easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social
+relationships and increased his efficiency by the division of labour.
+He began to store up knowledge. Contrivance followed contrivance, each
+making it possible for a man to do more. Always down the lengthening
+record, save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more.... A
+quarter of a million years ago the utmost man was a savage, a being
+scarcely articulate, sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a
+rough-hewn flint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family
+groups, killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity
+declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would have
+sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical river
+valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his little herds, a
+male, a few females, a child or so.
+
+He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led. He fled
+the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the promise of sword
+and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of coal; he drank water muddy
+with the clay that would one day make cups of porcelain; he chewed the
+ear of wild wheat he had plucked and gazed with a dim speculation in
+his eyes at the birds that soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he
+became aware of the scent of another male and rose up roaring, his
+roars the formless precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great
+individualist, that original, he suffered none other than himself.
+
+So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor of
+all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly.
+
+Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened the
+tiger’s claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus to the
+swift grace of the horse, was at work upon him—is at work upon him
+still. The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him were killed
+soonest and oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker eye, the bigger
+brain, the better balanced body prevailed; age by age, the implements
+were a little better made, the man a little more delicately adjusted to
+his possibilities. He became more social; his herd grew larger; no
+longer did each man kill or drive out his growing sons; a system of
+taboos made them tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon
+even after he was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and the
+rest of mankind. (But they were forbidden to touch the women of the
+tribe, they had to go out and capture women for themselves, and each
+son fled from his stepmother and hid from her lest the anger of the Old
+Man should be roused. All the world over, even to this day, these
+ancient inevitable taboos can be traced.) And now instead of caves came
+huts and hovels, and the fire was better tended and there were
+wrappings and garments; and so aided, the creature spread into colder
+climates, carrying food with him, storing food—until sometimes the
+neglected grass-seed sprouted again and gave a first hint of
+agriculture.
+
+And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.
+
+Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts
+and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the
+squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. He
+scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued it and began
+pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the river brink between
+his fingers, and found a pleasure in its patternings and repetitions,
+shaped it into the form of vessels, and found that it would hold water.
+He watched the streaming river, and wondered from what bountiful breast
+this incessant water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that
+perhaps he might snare it and spear it as it went down to its
+resting-place amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to
+his brother that once indeed he had done so—at least that some one had
+done so—he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as daring, that
+one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith began fiction—pointing
+a way to achievement—and the august prophetic procession of tales.
+
+For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations that
+life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the ripening of that
+phase of human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chipped
+flint to the first implements of polished stone, was two or three
+thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by
+human standards, did humanity gather itself together out of the dim
+intimations of the beast. And that first glimmering of speculation,
+that first story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and
+flushed under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous
+listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most
+marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the mammoths,
+and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch the sun.
+
+Section 2
+
+That dream was but a moment in a man’s life, whose proper business it
+seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget after the manner
+of all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. About him, hidden
+from him by the thinnest of veils, were the untouched sources of Power,
+whose magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even to-day, Power
+that could make his every conceivable dream come real. But the feet of
+the race were in the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.
+
+At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food is
+abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his earlier
+jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less urgently, more
+social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a larger community. There
+began a division of labour, certain of the older men specialised in
+knowledge and direction, a strong man took the fatherly leadership in
+war, and priest and king began to develop their _rôles_ in the opening
+drama of man’s history. The priest’s solicitude was seed-time and
+harvest and fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a hundred
+river valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there were
+already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They
+flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the
+future, for as yet writing had still to begin.
+
+Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable wealth of
+Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed certain
+animals, he developed his primordially haphazard agriculture into a
+ritual, he added first one metal to his resources and then another,
+until he had copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and silver to
+supplement his stone, he hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddled
+down his river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made
+the first roads. But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and
+more, was the subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger
+societies. The history of man is not simply the conquest of external
+power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,
+that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands
+from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents association.
+From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the
+Peace of the World, man’s dealings were chiefly with himself and his
+fellow man, trading, bargaining, law-making, propitiating, enslaving,
+conquering, exterminating, and every little increment in Power, he
+turned at once and always turns to the purposes of this confused
+elaborate struggle to socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his
+fellow men into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of
+his instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone age
+was over he had become a political animal. He made astonishingly
+far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then of
+writing and making records, and with that his town communities began to
+stretch out to dominion; in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and
+the great Chinese rivers, the first empires and the first written laws
+had their beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers
+and knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which
+had been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of
+pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The
+history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the
+Roman Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last, aped
+Cæsar and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind.
+Measured by the duration of human life it is a vast space of time
+between that first dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the aeroplane,
+but by the scale that looks back to the makers of the eoliths, it is
+all of it a story of yesterday.
+
+Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this period of
+the warring states, while men’s minds were chiefly preoccupied by
+politics and mutual aggression, their progress in the acquirement of
+external Power was slow—rapid in comparison with the progress of the
+old stone age, but slow in comparison with this new age of systematic
+discovery in which we live. They did not very greatly alter the weapons
+and tactics of warfare, the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their
+knowledge of the habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of
+domestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when
+Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were inventions and
+changes, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out and
+then forgotten again; it was, on the whole, a progress, but it
+contained no steps; the peasant life was the same, there were already
+priests and lawyers and town craftsmen and territorial lords and
+rulers, doctors, wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China
+and Assyria and south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period,
+and they were doing much the same things and living much the same life
+as they were in Europe in A.D. 1500. The English excavators of the year
+A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and
+disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family correspondence
+that they could read with the completest sympathy. There were great
+religious and moral changes throughout the period, empires and
+republics replaced one another, Italy tried a vast experiment in
+slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again and again and failed and
+failed and was still to be tested again and rejected again in the New
+World; Christianity and Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more
+specialised cults, but essentially these were progressive adaptations
+of mankind to material conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever.
+The idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life
+would have been entirely strange to human thought through all that
+time.
+
+Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his
+opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the
+wars and processions, the castle building and cathedral building, the
+arts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the crusades
+and trading journeys of the middle ages. He no longer speculated with
+the untrammelled freedom of the stone-age savage; authoritative
+explanations of everything barred his path; but he speculated with a
+better brain, sat idle and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused
+upon the coin and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain
+leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found
+dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the
+assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols in
+the world about them, questioning the finality of scholastic wisdom.
+Through all the ages of history there were men to whom this whisper had
+come of hidden things about them. They could no longer lead ordinary
+lives nor content themselves with the common things of this world once
+they had heard this voice. And mostly they believed not only that all
+this world was as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at,
+but that these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by
+chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among rare
+and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd
+utilisable thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied
+discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day laughed
+at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and ill-treated them,
+or was seized with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of
+them, or with covetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the
+greater part heeded them not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him
+who had first dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of
+his blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly, was
+the snare that will some day catch the sun.
+
+Section 3
+
+Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of
+Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His common-place
+books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations of the
+methods of the early aviators. Dürer was his parallel and Roger
+Bacon—whom the Franciscans silenced—of his kindred. Such a man again in
+an earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam
+nineteen hundred years before it was first brought into use. And
+earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the
+legendary Daedalus of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history
+whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers
+appeared. And half the alchemists were of their tribe.
+
+When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might have
+supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive engine. But
+they could see nothing of the sort. They were not yet beginning to
+think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all too poor to make such
+engines even had they thought of them. For a time they could not make
+instruments sound enough to stand this new force even for so rough a
+purpose as hurling a missile. Their first guns had barrels of coopered
+timber, and the world waited for more than five hundred years before
+the explosive engine came.
+
+Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before the
+world could use their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious
+purposes. If man in general was not still as absolutely blind to the
+unconquered energies about him as his paleolithic precursor, he was at
+best purblind.
+
+Section 4
+
+The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the
+verge of discovery, before they began to influence human lives.
+
+There were no doubt many such devices as Hero’s toys devised and
+forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed that
+coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand before it
+dawned upon men that here was something more than a curiosity. And it
+is to be remarked that the first recorded suggestion for the use of
+steam was in war; there is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is
+proposed to fire shot out of corked iron bottles full of heated water.
+The mining of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale
+than men had ever done before, the steam pumping engine, the
+steam-engine and the steam-boat, followed one another in an order that
+had a kind of logical necessity. It is the most interesting and
+instructive chapter in the history of the human intelligence, the
+history of steam from its beginning as a fact in human consciousness to
+the perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the
+utilisation of intra-molecular power. Nearly every human being must
+have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands of years; the
+women in particular were always heating water, boiling it, seeing it
+boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with its fury; millions of
+people at different times must have watched steam pitching rocks out of
+volcanoes like cricket balls and blowing pumice into foam, and yet you
+may search the whole human record through, letters, books,
+inscriptions, pictures, for any glimmer of a realisation that here was
+force, here was strength to borrow and use.... Then suddenly man woke
+up to it, the railways spread like a network over the globe, the ever
+enlarging iron steamships began their staggering fight against wind and
+wave.
+
+Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning of
+the Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the Warring
+States.
+
+But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this novelty.
+They would not recognise, they were not able to recognise that anything
+fundamental had happened to their immemorial necessities. They called
+the steam-engine the ‘iron horse’ and pretended that they had made the
+most partial of substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production
+were visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,
+population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and
+concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city centres,
+food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a scale that made
+the one sole precedent, the corn ships of imperial Rome, a petty
+incident; and a huge migration of peoples between Europe and Western
+Asia and America was in Progress, and—nobody seems to have realised
+that something new had come into human life, a strange swirl different
+altogether from any previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the
+swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of
+accumulating water and eddying inactivity....
+
+The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit
+at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from
+Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New
+Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance
+at the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinise the prices
+current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa,
+Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten (in the
+place of his father’s eight) that he thought the world changed very
+little. They must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old
+school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few
+scraps of Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and
+all would be well with them....
+
+Section 5
+
+Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be
+studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the
+exploitation of steam. To electricity also, in spite of its provocative
+nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly blind for incalculable
+ages. Could anything be more emphatic than the appeal of electricity
+for attention? It thundered at man’s ears, it signalled to him in
+blinding flashes, occasionally it killed him, and he could not see it
+as a thing that concerned him enough to merit study. It came into the
+house with the cat on any dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever
+he stroked her fur. It rotted his metals when he put them together....
+There is no single record that any one questioned why the cat’s fur
+crackles or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the
+sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have done his very
+successful best not to think about it at all; until this new spirit of
+the Seeker turned itself to these things.
+
+How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant,
+before the speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It was
+Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth’s court physician, who first puzzled his
+brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so
+began the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this
+universal presence. And even then the science of electricity remained a
+mere little group of curious facts for nearly two hundred years,
+connected perhaps with magnetism—a mere guess that—perhaps with the
+lightning. Frogs’ legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron
+railings and twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them.
+Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert
+before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities
+into the life of the common man.... Then suddenly, in the half-century
+between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took over
+traction, it ousted every other form of household heating, abolished
+distance with the perfected wireless telephone and the
+telephotograph....
+
+Section 6
+
+And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and
+invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific revolution
+had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice against a
+scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One writer upon these
+subjects gives a funny little domestic conversation that happened, he
+says, in the year 1898, within ten years, that is to say, of the time
+when the first aviators were fairly on the wing. He tells us how he sat
+at his desk in his study and conversed with his little boy.
+
+His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak very
+seriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy he did not
+want to do it too harshly.
+
+This is what happened.
+
+‘I wish, Daddy,’ he said, coming to his point, ‘that you wouldn’t write
+all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot me.’
+
+‘Yes!’ said his father.
+
+‘And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots me.’
+
+‘But there is going to be flying—quite soon.’
+
+The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that.
+‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t write about it.’
+
+‘You’ll fly—lots of times—before you die,’ the father assured him.
+
+The little boy looked unhappy.
+
+The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a blurred
+and under-developed photograph. ‘Come and look at this,’ he said.
+
+The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream and a
+meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black, pencil-like
+object with flat wings on either side of it. It was the first record of
+the first apparatus heavier than air that ever maintained itself in the
+air by mechanical force. Across the margin was written: ‘Here we go up,
+up, up—from S. P. Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.’
+
+The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son.
+‘Well?’ he said.
+
+‘That,’ said the schoolboy, after reflection, ‘is only a model.’
+
+‘Model to-day, man to-morrow.’
+
+The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he
+believed quite firmly to be omniscience. ‘But old Broomie,’ he said,
+‘he told all the boys in his class only yesterday, “no man will ever
+fly.” No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on the
+wing would ever believe anything of the sort....’
+
+Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father’s
+reminiscences.
+
+Section 7
+
+At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages in
+the literature of that time witness, it was thought that the fact that
+man had at last had successful and profitable dealings with the steam
+that scalded him and the electricity that flashed and banged about the
+sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a culminating exercise of his
+intelligence and his intellectual courage. The air of ‘Nunc Dimittis’
+sounds in same of these writings. ‘The great things are discovered,’
+wrote Gerald Brown in his summary of the nineteenth century. ‘For us
+there remains little but the working out of detail.’ The spirit of the
+seeker was still rare in the world; education was unskilled,
+unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people even
+then could have realised that Science was still but the flimsiest of
+trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No one seems to have
+been afraid of science and its possibilities. Yet now where there had
+been but a score or so of seekers, there were many thousands, and for
+one needle of speculation that had been probing the curtain of
+appearances in 1800, there were now hundreds. And already Chemistry,
+which had been content with her atoms and molecules for the better part
+of a century, was preparing herself for that vast next stride that was
+to revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom.
+
+One realises how crude was the science of that time when one considers
+the case of the composition of air. This was determined by that strange
+genius and recluse, that man of mystery, that disembowelled
+intelligence, Henry Cavendish, towards the end of the eighteenth
+century. So far as he was concerned the work was admirably done. He
+separated all the known ingredients of the air with a precision
+altogether remarkable; he even put it upon record that he had some
+doubt about the purity of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years
+his determination was repeated by chemists all the world over, his
+apparatus was treasured in London, he became, as they used to say,
+‘classic,’ and always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of
+his experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen
+(and with a little helium and traces of other substances, and indeed
+all the hints that might have led to the new departures of the
+twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped unobserved
+through the professorial fingers that repeated his procedure.
+
+Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to the
+very dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was still
+rather a procession of happy accidents than an orderly conquest of
+nature?
+
+Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the world.
+Even the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere handful who grew
+up to feel wonder and curiosity about the secrets of nature in the
+nineteenth century, there were now, at the beginning of the twentieth,
+myriads escaping from the limitations of intellectual routine and the
+habitual life, in Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in
+China, and all about the world.
+
+It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be called
+by a whole generation of scientific men, ‘the greatest of European
+chemists,’ were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico, between Fiesole
+and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he was already
+distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a savage appetite to
+understand. He had been particularly attracted by the mystery of
+phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness to every other source of
+light. He was to tell afterwards in his reminiscences how he watched
+the fireflies drifting and glowing among the dark trees in the garden
+of the villa under the warm blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and
+kept them in cages, dissected them, first studying the general anatomy
+of insects very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the
+effect of various gases and varying temperature upon their light. Then
+the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir William
+Crookes, a toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium particles
+impinge upon sulphide of zinc and make it luminous, induced him to
+associate the two sets of phenomena. It was a happy association for his
+inquiries. It was a rare and fortunate thing, too, that any one with
+the mathematical gift should have been taken by these curiosities.
+
+Section 8
+
+And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at Fiesole, a
+certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a course of
+afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in Edinburgh. They
+were lectures that had attracted a very considerable amount of
+attention. He gave them in a small lecture-theatre that had become more
+and more congested as his course proceeded. At his concluding
+discussion it was crowded right up to the ceiling at the back, and
+there people were standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so
+fascinating did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular,
+a chuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging his
+knee with great sand-red hands and drinking in every word, eyes aglow,
+cheeks flushed, and ears burning.
+
+‘And so,’ said the professor, ‘we see that this Radium, which seemed at
+first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all that was most
+established and fundamental in the constitution of matter, is really at
+one with the rest of the elements. It does noticeably and forcibly what
+probably all the other elements are doing with an imperceptible
+slowness. It is like the single voice crying aloud that betrays the
+silent breathing multitude in the darkness. Radium is an element that
+is breaking up and flying to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doing
+that at less perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is; thorium—the stuff
+of this incandescent gas mantle—certainly is; actinium. I feel that we
+are but beginning the list. And we know now that the atom, that once we
+thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible and final
+and—lifeless—lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy. That is
+the most wonderful thing about all this work. A little while ago we
+thought of the atoms as we thought of bricks, as solid building
+material, as substantial matter, as unit masses of lifeless stuff, and
+behold! these bricks are boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the
+intensest force. This little bottle contains about a pint of uranium
+oxide; that is to say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It
+is worth about a pound. And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in
+the atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as we
+could get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a word, in
+one instant I could suddenly release that energy here and now it would
+blow us and everything about us to fragments; if I could turn it into
+the machinery that lights this city, it could keep Edinburgh brightly
+lit for a week. But at present no man knows, no man has an inkling of
+how this little lump of stuff can be made to hasten the release of its
+store. It does release it, as a burn trickles. Slowly the uranium
+changes into radium, the radium changes into a gas called the radium
+emanation, and that again to what we call radium A, and so the process
+goes on, giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach the
+last stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead.
+But we cannot hasten it.’
+
+‘I take ye, man,’ whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red hands
+tightening like a vice upon his knee. ‘I take ye, man. Go on! Oh, go
+on!’
+
+The professor went on after a little pause. ‘Why is the change
+gradual?’ he asked. ‘Why does only a minute fraction of the radium
+disintegrate in any particular second? Why does it dole itself out so
+slowly and so exactly? Why does not all the uranium change to radium
+and all the radium change to the next lowest thing at once? Why this
+decay by driblets; why not a decay _en masse?_ . . . Suppose presently
+we find it is possible to quicken that decay?’
+
+The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful inevitable idea
+was coming. He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed in his seat
+with excitement. ‘Why not?’ he echoed, ‘why not?’
+
+The professor lifted his forefinger.
+
+‘Given that knowledge,’ he said, ‘mark what we should be able to do! We
+should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium; not only
+should we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in
+his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of
+battleships, or drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but
+we should also have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the
+process of disintegration in all the other elements, where decay is
+still so slow as to escape our finest measurements. Every scrap of
+solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of
+concentrated force. Do you realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these
+things would mean for us?’
+
+The scrub head nodded. ‘Oh! go on. Go on.’
+
+‘It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to
+the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the
+brute. We stand to-day towards radio-activity as our ancestor stood
+towards fire before he had learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a
+strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the
+volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is
+that we know radio-activity to-day. This—this is the dawn of a new day
+in human living. At the climax of that civilisation which had its
+beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just
+when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be
+borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover
+suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilisation. The energy we
+need for our very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so
+grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all
+about us. We cannot pick that lock at present, but——’
+
+He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to hear
+him.
+
+‘——we will.’
+
+He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.
+
+‘And then,’ he said....
+
+‘Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to
+live on the bare surplus of Nature’s energies will cease to be the lot
+of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilisation to the
+beginning of the next. I have no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to
+express the vision of man’s material destiny that opens out before me.
+I see the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer
+wildernesses of ice, the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of
+man reach out among the stars....’
+
+He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an actor or
+orator might have envied.
+
+The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,
+sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for dispersal.
+More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass of figures became
+a bright confusion of movement. Some of the people signalled to
+friends, some crowded down towards the platform to examine the
+lecturer’s apparatus and make notes of his diagrams. But the
+chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair wanted no such detailed
+frittering away of the thoughts that had inspired him. He wanted to be
+alone with them; he elbowed his way out almost fiercely, he made
+himself as angular and bony as a cow, fearing lest some one should
+speak to him, lest some one should invade his glowing sphere of
+enthusiasm.
+
+He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who sees
+visions. He had arms disproportionately long, and ridiculous big feet.
+
+He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of
+commonness, of everyday life.
+
+He made his way to the top of Arthur’s Seat, and there he sat for a
+long time in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that ever and
+again he whispered to himself some precious phrase that had stuck in
+his mind.
+
+‘If,’ he whispered, ‘if only we could pick that lock....’
+
+The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn of its
+beams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks of cloud
+that would presently engulf it.
+
+‘Eh!’ said the youngster. ‘Eh!’
+
+He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the red sun
+was there before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without
+intelligence, and then with a gathering recognition. Into his mind came
+a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a Stone Age
+savage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two hundred thousand
+years ago.
+
+‘Ye auld thing,’ he said—and his eyes were shining, and he made a kind
+of grabbing gesture with his hand; ‘ye auld red thing.... We’ll have ye
+_yet_.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
+
+
+Section I
+
+The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as
+Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth
+century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements
+and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful
+combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon as the
+year 1933. From the first detection of radio-activity to its first
+subjugation to human purpose measured little more than a quarter of a
+century. For twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties
+prevented any striking practical application of his success, but the
+essential thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human
+progress was crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in
+a minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into a
+heavy gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its turn in
+the course of seven days, and it was only after another year’s work
+that he was able to show practically that the last result of this rapid
+release of energy was gold. But the thing was done—at the cost of a
+blistered chest and an injured finger, and from the moment when the
+invisible speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy,
+Holsten knew that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and
+dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power. He recorded as
+much in the strange diary biography he left the world, a diary that was
+up to that particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations,
+and which suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human
+record of sensations and emotions that all humanity might understand.
+
+He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true, but
+none the less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four hours
+following the demonstration of the correctness of his intricate tracery
+of computations and guesses. ‘I thought I should not sleep,’ he
+writes—the words he omitted are supplied in brackets—(on account of)
+‘pain in (the) hand and chest and (the) wonder of what I had done....
+Slept like a child.’
+
+He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing to
+do, he was living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he decided to
+go up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he was a little boy
+as a breezy playground. He went up by the underground tube that was
+then the recognised means of travel from one part of London to another,
+and walked up Heath Street from the tube station to the open heath. He
+found it a gully of planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of
+house-wreckers. The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow,
+steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it
+commodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of
+Neo-Georgian æstheticism. Such is the illogical quality of humanity
+that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard under the seat of
+current civilisation, saw these changes with regret. He had come up
+Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had known the windows of all the
+little shops, spent hours in the vanished cinematograph theatre, and
+marvelled at the high-flung early Georgian houses upon the westward
+bank of that old gully of a thoroughfare; he felt strange with all
+these familiar things gone. He escaped at last with a feeling of relief
+from this choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged
+upon the old familiar scene about the White Stone Pond. That, at least,
+was very much as it used to be.
+
+There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right of
+him; the reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble, the
+white-fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its portico still
+stood out at the angle of the ways, and the blue view to Harrow Hill
+and Harrow spire, a view of hills and trees and shining waters and
+wind-driven cloud shadows, was like the opening of a great window to
+the ascending Londoner. All that was very reassuring. There was the
+same strolling crowd, the same perpetual miracle of motors dodging
+through it harmlessly, escaping headlong into the country from the
+Sabbatical stuffiness behind and below them. There was a band still, a
+women’s suffrage meeting—for the suffrage women had won their way back
+to the tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace again—socialist
+orators, politicians, a band, and the same wild uproar of dogs, frantic
+with the gladness of their one blessed weekly release from the back
+yard and the chain. And away along the road to the Spaniards strolled a
+vast multitude, saying, as ever, that the view of London was
+exceptionally clear that day.
+
+Young Holsten’s face was white. He walked with that uneasy affectation
+of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and an
+under-exercised body. He hesitated at the White Stone Pond whether to
+go to the left of it or the right, and again at the fork of the roads.
+He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and every now and then he would
+get in the way of people on the footpath or be jostled by them because
+of the uncertainty of his movements. He felt, he confesses, ‘inadequate
+to ordinary existence.’ He seemed to himself to be something inhuman
+and mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous,
+fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to lead—a week
+of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading—and he had
+launched something that would disorganise the entire fabric that held
+their contentments and ambitions and satisfactions together. ‘Felt like
+an imbecile who has presented a box full of loaded revolvers to a
+Crêche,’ he notes.
+
+He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history now
+knows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and Holsten
+walked together and Holsten was sufficiently pale and jumpy for Lawson
+to tell him he overworked and needed a holiday. They sat down at a
+little table outside the County Council house of Golders Hill Park and
+sent one of the waiters to the Bull and Bush for a couple of bottles of
+beer, no doubt at Lawson’s suggestion. The beer warmed Holsten’s rather
+dehumanised system. He began to tell Lawson as clearly as he could to
+what his great discovery amounted. Lawson feigned attention, but indeed
+he had neither the knowledge nor the imagination to understand. ‘In the
+end, before many years are out, this must eventually change war,
+transit, lighting, building, and every sort of manufacture, even
+agriculture, every material human concern——’
+
+Then Holsten stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. ‘Damn that
+dog!’ cried Lawson. ‘Look at it now. Hi! Here! _Phewoo-phewoo-phewoo!_
+Come _here, Bobs!_ Come _here!_’
+
+The young scientific man, with his bandaged hand, sat at the green
+table, too tired to convey the wonder of the thing he had sought so
+long, his friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and the Sunday people
+drifted about them through the spring sunshine. For a moment or so
+Holsten stared at Lawson in astonishment, for he had been too intent
+upon what he had been saying to realise how little Lawson had attended.
+
+Then he remarked, ‘_Well!_’ and smiled faintly, and—finished the
+tankard of beer before him.
+
+Lawson sat down again. ‘One must look after one’s dog,’ he said, with a
+note of apology. ‘What was it you were telling me?’
+
+Section 2
+
+In the evening Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint Paul’s
+Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the evening
+service. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some odd way of the
+fireflies at Fiesole. Then he walked back through the evening lights to
+Westminster. He was oppressed, he was indeed scared, by his sense of
+the immense consequences of his discovery. He had a vague idea that
+night that he ought not to publish his results, that they were
+premature, that some secret association of wise men should take care of
+his work and hand it on from generation to generation until the world
+was riper for its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the
+thousands of people he passed had really awakened to the fact of
+change, they trusted the world for what it was, not to alter too
+rapidly, to respect their trusts, their assurances, their habits, their
+little accustomed traffics and hard-won positions.
+
+He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging,
+brightly-lit masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He sat down
+on a seat and became aware of the talk of the two people next to him.
+It was the talk of a young couple evidently on the eve of marriage. The
+man was congratulating himself on having regular employment at last;
+‘they like me,’ he said, ‘and I like the job. If I work up—in’r dozen
+years or so I ought to be gettin’ somethin’ pretty comfortable. That’s
+the plain sense of it, Hetty. There ain’t no reason whatsoever why we
+shouldn’t get along very decently—very decently indeed.’
+
+The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed! So it
+struck upon Holsten’s mind. He added in his diary, ‘I had a sense of
+all this globe as that....’
+
+By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this populated
+world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and villages, its high
+roads and the inns beside them, its gardens and farms and upland
+pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships coming along the great
+circles of the ocean, its time-tables and appointments and payments and
+dues as it were one unified and progressive spectacle. Sometimes such
+visions came to him; his mind, accustomed to great generalisations and
+yet acutely sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively
+than the minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming
+sphere moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately
+swiftness on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living
+progress that altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little
+deadened him to that incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal
+circling. He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities
+and recurrencies of the human routine. The remoter past of wandering
+savagery, the inevitable changes of to-morrow were veiled, and he saw
+only day and night, seed-time and harvest, loving and begetting, births
+and deaths, walks in the summer sunlight and tales by the winter
+fireside, the ancient sequence of hope and acts and age perennially
+renewed, eddying on for ever and ever, save that now the impious hand
+of research was raised to overthrow this drowsy, gently humming,
+habitual, sunlit spinning-top of man’s existence....
+
+For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions, famine
+and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the bitter wind,
+failure and insufficiency and retrocession. He saw all mankind in terms
+of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat beside him, who schemed their
+inglorious outlook and improbable contentments. ‘I had a sense of all
+this globe as that.’
+
+His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a time
+in vain. He reassured himself against the invasion of this
+disconcerting idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a loose
+wanderer from the flock returning with evil gifts from his sustained
+unnatural excursions amidst the darknesses and phosphorescences beneath
+the fair surfaces of life. Man had not been always thus; the instincts
+and desires of the little home, the little plot, was not all his
+nature; also he was an adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting
+curiosity, an insatiable desire. For a few thousand generations indeed
+he had tilled the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers,
+grinding his corn and trampling the October winepress, yet not for so
+long but that he was still full of restless stirrings.
+
+‘If there have been home and routine and the field,’ thought Holsten,
+‘there have also been wonder and the sea.’
+
+He turned his head and looked up over the back of the seat at the great
+hotels above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow and colour
+and stir of feasting. Might his gift to mankind mean simply more of
+that? . . .
+
+He got up and walked out of the garden, surveyed a passing tram-car,
+laden with warm light, against the deep blues of evening, dripping and
+trailing long skirts of shining reflection; he crossed the Embankment
+and stood for a time watching the dark river and turning ever and again
+to the lit buildings and bridges. His mind began to scheme conceivable
+replacements of all those clustering arrangements....
+
+‘It has begun,’ he writes in the diary in which these things are
+recorded. ‘It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot
+foresee. I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in the
+armoury of Change. If I were to burn all these papers, before a score
+of years had passed, some other man would be doing this. . .
+
+Section 3
+
+Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominating
+every other source of power, but for some years yet a vast network of
+difficulties in detail and application kept the new discovery from any
+effective invasion of ordinary life. The path from the laboratory to
+the workshop is sometimes a tortuous one; electro-magnetic radiations
+were known and demonstrated for twenty years before Marconi made them
+practically available, and in the same way it was twenty years before
+induced radio-activity could be brought to practical utilisation. The
+thing, of course, was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time of
+its discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but
+with very little realisation of the huge economic revolution that
+impended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the
+production of gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon
+unprofitable lines of the alchemist’s dreams; there was a considerable
+amount of discussion and expectation in that more intelligent section
+of the educated publics of the various civilised countries which
+followed scientific development; but for the most part the world went
+about its business—as the inhabitants of those Swiss villages which
+live under the perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go
+about their business—just as though the possible was impossible, as
+though the inevitable was postponed for ever because it was delayed.
+
+It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought induced
+radio-activity into the sphere of industrial production, and its first
+general use was to replace the steam-engine in electrical generating
+stations. Hard upon the appearance of this came the Dass-Tata
+engine—the invention of two among the brilliant galaxy of Bengali
+inventors the modernisation of Indian thought was producing at this
+time—which was used chiefly for automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes,
+and such-like, mobile purposes. The American Kemp engine, differing
+widely in principle but equally practicable, and the Krupp-Erlanger
+came hard upon the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic
+replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress all
+about the habitable globe. Small wonder was this when the cost, even of
+these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is compared with that
+of the power they superseded. Allowing for lubrication the Dass-Tata
+engine, once it was started cost a penny to run thirty-seven miles, and
+added only nine and quarter pounds to the weight of the carriage it
+drove. It made the heavy alcohol-driven automobile of the time
+ridiculous in appearance as well as preposterously costly. For many
+years the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had been
+clambering to levels that made even the revival of the draft horse seem
+a practicable possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this
+stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world’s
+roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful armoured monsters
+that had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for four awful
+decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways
+thronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel.
+At the same time a new impetus was given to aviation by the relatively
+enormous power for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible
+to add Redmayne’s ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the
+vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force of the
+aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found themselves
+possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover or ascend or
+descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly through the air.
+The last dread of flying vanished. As the journalists of the time
+phrased it, this was the epoch of the Leap into the Air. The new atomic
+aeroplane became indeed a mania; every one of means was frantic to
+possess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free from the dust
+and danger of the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty
+thousand of these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and
+soared humming softly into the sky.
+
+And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded
+industrialism. The railways paid enormous premiums for priority in the
+delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was embarked upon
+so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous explosions due to
+inexperienced handling of the new power, and the revolutionary
+cheapening of both materials and electricity made the entire
+reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter merely dependent upon a
+reorganisation of the methods of the builder and the house-furnisher.
+Viewed from the side of the new power and from the point of view of
+those who financed and manufactured the new engines and material it
+required the age of the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing
+prosperity. Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividends of
+five or six hundred per cent. and enormous fortunes were made and
+fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new
+developments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the fact
+that in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one of the
+recoverable waste products was gold—the former disintegrated dust of
+bismuth and the latter dust of lead—and that this new supply of gold
+led quite naturally to a rise in prices throughout the world.
+
+This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding
+flight of happy and fortunate rich people—every great city was as if a
+crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing—was the bright side of the
+opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that
+brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a
+vast development of production there was also a huge destruction of
+values. These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering
+new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of
+dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were
+indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out
+when the world sinks towards twilight and the night. Between these high
+lights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were
+manifestly doomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount
+of capital invested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal
+miners, steel workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or
+under-skilled labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung
+out of employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the
+rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values at
+every centre of population, the value of existing house property had
+become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all
+the securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping
+and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of
+feverish panic;—this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were the
+black and monstrous under-consequences of the Leap into the Air.
+
+There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out into
+Threadneedle Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran. ‘The Steel
+Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,’ he shouted. ‘The State
+Railways are going to scrap all their engines. Everything’s going to be
+scrapped—everything. Come and scrap the mint, you fellows, come and
+scrap the mint!’
+
+In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of America
+quadrupled any previous record. There was an enormous increase also in
+violent crime throughout the world. The thing had come upon an
+unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human society was to be
+smashed by its own magnificent gains.
+
+For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been no
+attempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations this flood
+of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs. The world in
+these days was not really governed at all, in the sense in which
+government came to be understood in subsequent years. Government was a
+treaty, not a design; it was forensic, conservative, disputatious,
+unseeing, unthinking, uncreative; throughout the world, except where
+the vestiges of absolutism still sheltered the court favourite and the
+trusted servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of
+lawyers, who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained caste.
+Their professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation
+of the fantastically naïve electoral methods by which they clambered to
+power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously
+unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of
+every generosity. Government was an obstructive business of energetic
+fractions, progress went on outside of and in spite of public
+activities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needs
+so clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively established as to
+invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very
+existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.
+
+The world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty,
+in the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything
+necessary to satisfy human needs and everything necessary to realise
+such will and purpose as existed then in human hearts was already at
+hand, one has still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion,
+conflict, and incoherent suffering. There was no scheme for the
+distribution of this vast new wealth that had come at last within the
+reach of men; there was no clear conception that any such distribution
+was possible. As one attempts a comprehensive view of those opening
+years of the new age, as one measures it against the latent achievement
+that later years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the
+blindness, the narrowness, the insensate unimaginative individualism of
+the pre-atomic time. Under this tremendous dawn of power and freedom,
+under a sky ablaze with promise, in the very presence of science
+standing like some bountiful goddess over all the squat darknesses of
+human life, holding patiently in her strong arms, until men chose to
+take them, security, plenty, the solution of riddles, the key of the
+bravest adventures, in her very presence, and with the earnest of her
+gifts in court, the world was to witness such things as the squalid
+spectacle of the Dass-Tata patent litigation.
+
+There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room, during
+the exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading counsel of the day
+argued and shouted over a miserable little matter of more royalties or
+less and whether the Dass-Tata company might not bar the
+Holsten-Roberts’ methods of utilising the new power. The Dass-Tata
+people were indeed making a strenuous attempt to secure a world
+monopoly in atomic engineering. The judge, after the manner of those
+times, sat raised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown and a
+foolish huge wig, the counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and
+queer black gowns over their usual costume, wigs and gowns that were
+held to be necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean wooden benches
+stirred and whispered artful-looking solicitors, busily scribbling
+reporters, the parties to the case, expert witnesses, interested
+people, and a jostling confusion of subpoenaed persons, briefless young
+barristers (forming a style on the most esteemed and truculent
+examples) and casual eccentric spectators who preferred this pit of
+iniquity to the free sunlight outside. Every one was damply hot, the
+examining King’s Counsel wiped the perspiration from his huge,
+clean-shaven upper lip; and into this atmosphere of grasping contention
+and human exhalations the daylight filtered through a window that was
+manifestly dirty. The jury sat in a double pew to the left of the
+judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs that have fallen into an
+ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the would-be omnivorous Dass,
+under cross-examination....
+
+Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon as
+they appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a basis for
+further work, and to that confiding disposition and one happy flash of
+adaptive invention the alert Dass owed his claim....
+
+But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching,
+patenting, pre-empting, monopolising this or that feature of the new
+development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to the
+purposes of their little lusts and avarice. That trial is just one of
+innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the face of the world
+festered with patent legislation. It chanced, however, to have one
+oddly dramatic feature in the fact that Holsten, after being kept
+waiting about the court for two days as a beggar might have waited at a
+rich man’s door, after being bullied by ushers and watched by
+policemen, was called as a witness, rather severely handled by counsel,
+and told not to ‘quibble’ by the judge when he was trying to be
+absolutely explicit.
+
+The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, and sneered at Holsten’s
+astonishment round the corner of his monstrous wig. Holsten was a great
+man, was he? Well, in a law-court great men were put in their places.
+
+‘We want to know has the plaintiff added anything to this or hasn’t
+he?’ said the judge, ‘we don’t want to have your views whether Sir
+Philip Dass’s improvements were merely superficial adaptations or
+whether they were implicit in your paper. No doubt—after the manner of
+inventors—you think most things that were ever likely to be discovered
+are implicit in your papers. No doubt also you think too that most
+subsequent additions and modifications are merely superficial.
+Inventors have a way of thinking that. The law isn’t concerned with
+that sort of thing. The law has nothing to do with the vanity of
+inventors. The law is concerned with the question whether these patent
+rights have the novelty the plantiff claims for them. What that
+admission may or may not stop, and all these other things you are
+saying in your overflowing zeal to answer more than the questions
+addressed to you—none of these things have anything whatever to do with
+the case in hand. It is a matter of constant astonishment to me in this
+court to see how you scientific men, with all your extraordinary claims
+to precision and veracity, wander and wander so soon as you get into
+the witness-box. I know no more unsatisfactory class of witness. The
+plain and simple question is, has Sir Philip Dass made any real
+addition to existing knowledge and methods in this matter or has he
+not? We don’t want to know whether they were large or small additions
+nor what the consequences of your admission may be. That you will leave
+to us.’
+
+Holsten was silent.
+
+‘Surely?’ said the judge, almost pityingly.
+
+‘No, he hasn’t,’ said Holsten, perceiving that for once in his life he
+must disregard infinitesimals.
+
+‘Ah!’ said the judge, ‘now why couldn’t you say that when counsel put
+the question? . . .’
+
+An entry in Holsten’s diary-autobiography, dated five days later, runs:
+‘Still amazed. The law is the most dangerous thing in this country. It
+is hundreds of years old. It hasn’t an idea. The oldest of old bottles
+and this new wine, the most explosive wine. Something will overtake
+them.’
+
+Section 4
+
+There was a certain truth in Holsten’s assertion that the law was
+‘hundreds of years old.’ It was, in relation to current thought and
+widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the material
+and methods of life had been changing rapidly and were now changing
+still more rapidly, the law-courts and the legislatures of the world
+were struggling desperately to meet modern demands with devices and
+procedures, conceptions of rights and property and authority and
+obligation that dated from the rude compromises of relatively barbaric
+times. The horse-hair wigs and antic dresses of the British judges,
+their musty courts and overbearing manners, were indeed only the
+outward and visible intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal
+and political organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century
+was indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong,
+that now fettered the governing body that once it had protected.
+
+Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and outspoken publication that in
+the field of natural science had been the beginning of the conquest of
+nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth and nineteenth
+centuries preparing the spirit of the new world within the degenerating
+body of the old. The idea of a greater subordination of individual
+interests and established institutions to the collective future, is
+traceable more and more clearly in the literature of those times, and
+movement after movement fretted itself away in criticism of and
+opposition to first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and
+political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley, with
+no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established rulers of the
+world as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas and suggestions that
+was known as Socialism, and more particularly its international side,
+feeble as it was in creative proposals or any method of transition,
+still witnesses to the growth of a conception of a modernised system of
+inter-relationships that should supplant the existing tangle of
+proprietary legal ideas.
+
+The word ‘Sociology’ was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular writer
+upon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the middle of the
+nineteenth century, but the idea of a state, planned as an
+electric-traction system is planned, without reference to pre-existing
+apparatus, upon scientific lines, did not take a very strong hold upon
+the popular imagination of the world until the twentieth century. Then,
+the growing impatience of the American people with the monstrous and
+socially paralysing party systems that had sprung out of their absurd
+electoral arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called
+the ‘Modern State’ movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in
+America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the thought of
+bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property, employment,
+education, and government, than had ever been contemplated before. No
+doubt these Modern State ideas were very largely the reflection upon
+social and political thought of the vast revolution in material things
+that had been in progress for two hundred years, but for a long time
+they seemed to be having no more influence upon existing institutions
+than the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the
+time of the death of the latter. They were fermenting in men’s minds,
+and it needed only just such social and political stresses as the
+coming of the atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward
+abruptly into crude and startling realisation.
+
+Section 5
+
+Frederick Barnet’s _Wander Jahre_ is one of those autobiographical
+novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of the
+twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understand
+Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literal
+sense. It is indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back to the
+_Wilhelm Meister_ of Goethe, a century and a half earlier.
+
+Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history of his
+life and ideas between his nineteenth and his twenty-third birthdays.
+He was neither a very original nor a very brilliant man, but he had a
+trick of circumstantial writing; and though no authentic portrait was
+to survive for the information of posterity, he betrays by a score of
+casual phrases that he was short, sturdy, inclined to be plump, with a
+‘rather blobby’ face, and full, rather projecting blue eyes. He
+belonged until the financial _débâcle_ of 1956 to the class of fairly
+prosperous people, he was a student in London, he aeroplaned to Italy
+and then had a pedestrian tour from Genoa to Rome, crossed in the air
+to Greece and Egypt, and came back over the Balkans and Germany. His
+family fortunes, which were largely invested in bank shares, coal
+mines, and house property, were destroyed. Reduced to penury, he sought
+to earn a living. He suffered great hardship, and was then caught up by
+the war and had a year of soldiering, first as an officer in the
+English infantry and then in the army of pacification. His book tells
+all these things so simply and at the same time so explicitly, that it
+remains, as it were, an eye by which future generations may have at
+least one man’s vision of the years of the Great Change.
+
+And he was, he tells us, a ‘Modern State’ man ‘by instinct’ from the
+beginning. He breathed in these ideas in the class rooms and
+laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, a long and
+delicately beautiful facade, along the South Bank of the Thames
+opposite the ancient dignity of Somerset House. Such thought was
+interwoven with the very fabric of that pioneer school in the
+educational renascence in England. After the customary exchange years
+in Heidelberg and Paris, he went into the classical school of London
+University. The older so-called ‘classical’ education of the British
+pedagogues, probably the most paralysing, ineffective, and foolish
+routine that ever wasted human life, had already been swept out of this
+great institution in favour of modern methods; and he learnt Greek and
+Latin as well as he had learnt German, Spanish, and French, so that he
+wrote and spoke them freely, and used them with an unconscious ease in
+his study of the foundation civilisations of the European system to
+which they were the key. (This change was still so recent that he
+mentions an encounter in Rome with an ‘Oxford don’ who ‘spoke Latin
+with a Wiltshire accent and manifest discomfort, wrote Greek letters
+with his tongue out, and seemed to think a Greek sentence a charm when
+it was a quotation and an impropriety when it wasn’t.’)
+
+Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam engines upon the English
+railways and the gradual cleansing of the London atmosphere as the
+smoke-creating sea-coal fires gave place to electric heating. The
+building of laboratories at Kensington was still in progress, and he
+took part in the students’ riots that delayed the removal of the Albert
+Memorial. He carried a banner with ‘We like Funny Statuary’ on one
+side, and on the other ‘Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should our
+Great Departed Stand in the Rain?’ He learnt the rather athletic
+aviation of those days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he
+was fined for flying over the new prison for political libellers at
+Wormwood Scrubs, ‘in a manner calculated to exhilarate the prisoners
+while at exercise.’ That was the time of the attempted suppression of
+any criticism of the public judicature and the place was crowded with
+journalists who had ventured to call attention to the dementia of Chief
+Justice Abrahams. Barnet was not a very good aviator, he confesses he
+was always a little afraid of his machine—there was excellent reason
+for every one to be afraid of those clumsy early types—and he never
+attempted steep descents or very high flying. He also, he records,
+owned one of those oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity
+and extravagant filthiness still astonish the visitors to the museum of
+machinery at South Kensington. He mentions running over a dog and
+complains of the ruinous price of ‘spatchcocks’ in Surrey.
+‘Spatchcocks,’ it seems, was a slang term for crushed hens.
+
+He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military service to
+a minimum, and his want of any special scientific or technical
+qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that handicapped his
+aviation indicated the infantry of the line as his sphere of training.
+That was the most generalised form of soldiering. The development of
+the theory of war had been for some decades but little assisted by any
+practical experience. What fighting had occurred in recent years, had
+been fighting in minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaric
+soldiers and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and the
+great powers of the world were content for the most part to maintain
+armies that sustained in their broader organisation the traditions of
+the European wars of thirty and forty years before. There was the
+infantry arm to which Barnet belonged and which was supposed to fight
+on foot with a rifle and be the main portion of the army. There were
+cavalry forces (horse soldiers), having a ratio to the infantry that
+had been determined by the experiences of the Franco-German war in
+1871. There was also artillery, and for some unexplained reason much of
+this was still drawn by horses; though there were also in all the
+European armies a small number of motor-guns with wheels so constructed
+that they could go over broken ground. In addition there were large
+developments of the engineering arm, concerned with motor transport,
+motor-bicycle scouting, aviation, and the like.
+
+No first-class intelligence had been sought to specialise in and work
+out the problem of warfare with the new appliances and under modern
+conditions, but a succession of able jurists, Lord Haldane, Chief
+Justice Briggs, and that very able King’s Counsel, Philbrick, had
+reconstructed the army frequently and thoroughly and placed it at last,
+with the adoption of national service, upon a footing that would have
+seemed very imposing to the public of 1900. At any moment the British
+Empire could now put a million and a quarter of arguable soldiers upon
+the board of Welt-Politik. The traditions of Japan and the Central
+European armies were more princely and less forensic; the Chinese still
+refused resolutely to become a military power, and maintained a small
+standing army upon the American model that was said, so far as it went,
+to be highly efficient, and Russia, secured by a stringent
+administration against internal criticism, had scarcely altered the
+design of a uniform or the organisation of a battery since the opening
+decades of the century. Barnet’s opinion of his military training was
+manifestly a poor one, his Modern State ideas disposed him to regard it
+as a bore, and his common sense condemned it as useless. Moreover, his
+habit of body made him peculiarly sensitive to the fatigues and
+hardships of service.
+
+‘For three days in succession we turned out before dawn and—for no
+earthly reason—without breakfast,’ he relates. ‘I suppose that is to
+show us that when the Day comes the first thing will be to get us
+thoroughly uncomfortable and rotten. We then proceeded to Kriegspiel,
+according to the mysterious ideas of those in authority over us. On the
+last day we spent three hours under a hot if early sun getting over
+eight miles of country to a point we could have reached in a motor
+omnibus in nine minutes and a half—I did it the next day in that—and
+then we made a massed attack upon entrenchments that could have shot us
+all about three times over if only the umpires had let them. Then came
+a little bayonet exercise, but I doubt if I am sufficiently a barbarian
+to stick this long knife into anything living. Anyhow in this battle I
+shouldn’t have had a chance. Assuming that by some miracle I hadn’t
+been shot three times over, I was far too hot and blown when I got up
+to the entrenchments even to lift my beastly rifle. It was those others
+would have begun the sticking....
+
+‘For a time we were watched by two hostile aeroplanes; then our own
+came up and asked them not to, and—the practice of aerial warfare still
+being unknown—they very politely desisted and went away and did dives
+and circles of the most charming description over the Fox Hills.’
+
+All Barnet’s accounts of his military training were written in the same
+half-contemptuous, half-protesting tone. He was of opinion that his
+chances of participating in any real warfare were very slight, and
+that, if after all he should participate, it was bound to be so
+entirely different from these peace manœuvres that his only course as a
+rational man would be to keep as observantly out of danger as he could
+until he had learnt the tricks and possibilities of the new conditions.
+He states this quite frankly. Never was a man more free from sham
+heroics.
+
+Section 6
+
+Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest of
+masculine youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that for some
+time he failed to connect the rush of wonderful new possibilities with
+the financial troubles of his family. ‘I knew my father was worried,’
+he admits. That cast the smallest of shadows upon his delighted
+departure for Italy and Greece and Egypt with three congenial
+companions in one of the new atomic models. They flew over the Channel
+Isles and Touraine, he mentions, and circled about Mont Blanc—‘These
+new helicopters, we found,’ he notes, ‘had abolished all the danger and
+strain of sudden drops to which the old-time aeroplanes were
+liable’—and then he went on by way of Pisa, Paestum, Ghirgenti, and
+Athens, to visit the pyramids by moonlight, flying thither from Cairo,
+and to follow the Nile up to Khartum. Even by later standards, it must
+have been a very gleeful holiday for a young man, and it made the
+tragedy of his next experiences all the darker. A week after his return
+his father, who was a widower, announced himself ruined, and committed
+suicide by means of an unscheduled opiate.
+
+At one blow Barnet found himself flung out of the possessing, spending,
+enjoying class to which he belonged, penniless and with no calling by
+which he could earn a living. He tried teaching and some journalism,
+but in a little while he found himself on the underside of a world in
+which he had always reckoned to live in the sunshine. For innumerable
+men such an experience has meant mental and spiritual destruction, but
+Barnet, in spite of his bodily gravitation towards comfort, showed
+himself when put to the test, of the more valiant modern quality. He
+was saturated with the creative stoicism of the heroic times that were
+already dawning, and he took his difficulties and discomforts stoutly
+as his appointed material, and turned them to expression.
+
+Indeed, in his book, he thanks fortune for them. ‘I might have lived
+and died,’ he says, ‘in that neat fool’s paradise of secure lavishness
+above there. I might never have realised the gathering wrath and sorrow
+of the ousted and exasperated masses. In the days of my own prosperity
+things had seemed to me to be very well arranged.’ Now from his new
+point of view he was to find they were not arranged at all; that
+government was a compromise of aggressions and powers and lassitudes,
+and law a convention between interests, and that the poor and the weak,
+though they had many negligent masters, had few friends.
+
+‘I had thought things were looked after,’ he wrote. ‘It was with a kind
+of amazement that I tramped the roads and starved—and found that no one
+in particular cared.’
+
+He was turned out of his lodging in a backward part of London.
+
+‘It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady—she was a needy widow,
+poor soul, and I was already in her debt—to keep an old box for me in
+which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and the like. She lived in
+great fear of the Public Health and Morality Inspectors, because she
+was sometimes too poor to pay the customary tip to them, but at last
+she consented to put it in a dark tiled place under the stairs, and
+then I went forth into the world—to seek first the luck of a meal and
+then shelter.’
+
+He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in which a
+year or so ago he had been numbered among the spenders.
+
+London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of visible
+smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine, had already
+ceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the Victorian time; it
+had been, and indeed was, constantly being rebuilt, and its main
+streets were already beginning to take on those characteristics that
+distinguished them throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.
+The insanitary horse and the plebeian bicycle had been banished from
+the roadway, which was now of a resilient, glass-like surface,
+spotlessly clean; and the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow
+vestige of the ancient footpath on either side of the track and
+forbidden at the risk of a fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway.
+People descended from their automobiles upon this pavement and went
+through the lower shops to the lifts and stairs to the new ways for
+pedestrians, the Rows, that ran along the front of the houses at the
+level of the first story, and, being joined by frequent bridges, gave
+the newer parts of London a curiously Venetian appearance. In some
+streets there were upper and even third-story Rows. For most of the day
+and all night the shop windows were lit by electric light, and many
+establishments had made, as it were, canals of public footpaths through
+their premises in order to increase their window space.
+
+Barnet made his way along this night-scene rather apprehensively since
+the police had power to challenge and demand the Labour Card of any
+indigent-looking person, and if the record failed to show he was in
+employment, dismiss him to the traffic pavement below.
+
+But there was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet’s
+appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too, had
+other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to reach the
+galleries about Leicester Square—that great focus of London life and
+pleasure.
+
+He gives a vivid description of the scene that evening. In the centre
+was a garden raised on arches lit by festoons of lights and connected
+with the Rows by eight graceful bridges, beneath which hummed the
+interlacing streams of motor traffic, pulsating as the current
+alternated between east and west and north and south. Above rose great
+frontages of intricate rather than beautiful reinforced porcelain,
+studded with lights, barred by bold illuminated advertisements, and
+glowing with reflections. There were the two historical music halls of
+this place, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal
+players revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shakespeare’s plays,
+and four other great houses of refreshment and entertainment whose
+pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night. The south
+side of the square was in dark contrast to the others; it was still
+being rebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars surmounted by the frozen
+gestures of monstrous cranes rose over the excavated sites of vanished
+Victorian buildings.
+
+This framework attracted Barnet’s attention for a time to the exclusion
+of other interests. It was absolutely still, it had a dead rigidity, a
+stricken inaction, no one was at work upon it and all its machinery was
+quiet; but the constructor’s globes of vacuum light filled its every
+interstice with a quivering green moonshine and showed alert but
+motionless—soldier sentinels!
+
+He asked a passing stroller, and was told that the men had struck that
+day against the use of an atomic riveter that would have doubled the
+individual efficiency and halved the number of steel workers.
+
+‘Shouldn’t wonder if they didn’t get chucking bombs,’ said Barnet’s
+informant, hovered for a moment, and then went on his way to the
+Alhambra music hall.
+
+Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at the
+corners of the square. Something very sensational had been flashed upon
+the transparencies. Forgetting for a moment his penniless condition, he
+made his way over a bridge to buy a paper, for in those days the
+papers, which were printed upon thin sheets of metallic foil, were sold
+at determinate points by specially licensed purveyors. Half over, he
+stopped short at a change in the traffic below; and was astonished to
+see that the police signals were restricting vehicles to the half
+roadway. When presently he got within sight of the transparencies that
+had replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read of the Great
+March of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the West
+End, and so without expenditure he was able to understand what was
+coming.
+
+He watched, and his book describes this procession which the police had
+considered it unwise to prevent and which had been spontaneously
+organised in imitation of the Unemployed Processions of earlier times.
+He had expected a mob but there was a kind of sullen discipline about
+the procession when at last it arrived. What seemed for a time an
+unending column of men marched wearily, marched with a kind of
+implacable futility, along the roadway underneath him. He was, he says,
+moved to join them, but instead he remained watching. They were a
+dingy, shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part
+incapable of any but obsolete and superseded types of labour. They bore
+a few banners with the time-honoured inscription: ‘Work, not Charity,’
+but otherwise their ranks were unadorned.
+
+They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was nothing
+truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no definite
+objective they were just marching and showing themselves in the more
+prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of that great mass of
+unskilled cheap labour which the now still cheaper mechanical powers
+had superseded for evermore. They were being ‘scrapped’—as horses had
+been ‘scrapped.’
+
+Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened by his
+own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt nothing but
+despair at the sight; what should be done, what could be done for this
+gathering surplus of humanity? They were so manifestly useless—and
+incapable—and pitiful.
+
+What were they asking for?
+
+They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had foreseen——
+
+It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous shambling
+enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the unexpected, an appeal
+to those others who, more fortunate, seemed wiser and more powerful,
+for something—for _intelligence_. This mute mass, weary footed, rank
+following rank, protested its persuasion that some of these others must
+have foreseen these dislocations—that anyhow they ought to have
+foreseen—and arranged.
+
+That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so dumbly
+to assert.
+
+‘Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened room,’
+he says. ‘These men were praying to their fellow creatures as once they
+prayed to God! The last thing that men will realise about anything is
+that it is inanimate. They had transferred their animation to mankind.
+They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was
+careless or malignant.... It had only to be aroused to be
+conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion.... And I saw, too, that
+as yet _there was no such intelligence_. The world waits for
+intelligence. That intelligence has still to be made, that will for
+good and order has still to be gathered together, out of scraps of
+impulse and wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine and
+creative in our souls, into a common purpose. It’s something still to
+come....’
+
+It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that this not
+very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might well have been
+altogether occupied with the problem of his own individual necessities,
+should be able to stand there and generalise about the needs of the
+race.
+
+But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time there was
+already dawning the light of a new era. The spirit of humanity was
+escaping, even then it was escaping, from its extreme imprisonment in
+individuals. Salvation from the bitter intensities of self, which had
+been a conscious religious end for thousands of years, which men had
+sought in mortifications, in the wilderness, in meditation, and by
+innumerable strange paths, was coming at last with the effect of
+naturalness into the talk of men, into the books they read, into their
+unconscious gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and
+everyday acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the
+spirit of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of
+those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very threat
+of hell and torment had failed to drive them. And this young man,
+homeless and without provision even for the immediate hours, in the
+presence of social disorganisation, distress, and perplexity, in a
+blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasure that blotted out the stars,
+could think as he tells us he thought.
+
+‘I saw life plain,’ he wrote. ‘I saw the gigantic task before us, and
+the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable difficulty filled
+me with exaltation. I saw that we have still to discover government,
+that we have still to discover education, which is the necessary
+reciprocal of government, and that all this—in which my own little
+speck of a life was so manifestly overwhelmed—this and its yesterday in
+Greece and Rome and Egypt were nothing, the mere first dust swirls of
+the beginning, the movements and dim murmurings of a sleeper who will
+presently be awake....’
+
+Section 7
+
+And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his descent
+from this ecstatic vision of reality.
+
+‘Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold and a
+little hungry.’
+
+He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood upon
+the Thames Embankment. He made his way through the galleries of the
+booksellers and the National Gallery, which had been open continuously
+day and night to all decently dressed people now for more than twelve
+years, and across the rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the
+hotel colonnade to the Embankment. He had long known of these admirable
+offices, which had swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all the
+casual indigent from the London streets, and he believed that he would,
+as a matter of course, be able to procure a ticket for food and a
+night’s lodgings and some indication of possible employment.
+
+But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he got
+to the Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested and
+besieged by a large and rather unruly crowd. He hovered for a time on
+the outskirts of the waiting multitude, perplexed and dismayed, and
+then he became aware of a movement, a purposive trickling away of
+people, up through the arches of the great buildings that had arisen
+when all the railway stations were removed to the south side of the
+river, and so to the covered ways of the Strand. And here, in the open
+glare of midnight, he found unemployed men begging, and not only
+begging, but begging with astonishing assurance, from the people who
+were emerging from the small theatres and other such places of
+entertainment which abounded in that thoroughfare.
+
+This was an altogether unexampled thing. There had been no begging in
+London streets for a quarter of a century. But that night the police
+were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with the destitute who were
+invading those well-kept quarters of the town. They had become stonily
+blind to anything but manifest disorder.
+
+Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask; indeed
+his bearing must have been more valiant than his circumstances, for
+twice he says that he was begged from. Near the Trafalgar Square
+gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and blackened eyebrows, who was
+walking alone, spoke to him with a peculiar friendliness.
+
+‘I’m starving,’ he said to her abruptly.
+
+‘Oh! poor dear!’ she said; and with the impulsive generosity of her
+kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his hand....
+
+It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey, might
+under the repressive social legislation of those times, have brought
+Barnet within reach of the prison lash. But he took it, he confesses,
+and thanked her as well as he was able, and went off very gladly to get
+food.
+
+Section 8
+
+A day or so later—and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon the
+roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social disorganisation and
+police embarrassment—he wandered out into the open country. He speaks
+of the roads of that plutocratic age as being ‘fenced with barbed wire
+against unpropertied people,’ of the high-walled gardens and trespass
+warnings that kept him to the dusty narrowness of the public ways. In
+the air, happy rich people were flying, heedless of the misfortunes
+about them, as he himself had been flying two years ago, and along the
+road swept the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. One was
+rarely out of earshot of its whistles and gongs and siren cries even in
+the field paths or over the open downs. The officials of the labour
+exchanges were everywhere overworked and infuriated, the casual wards
+were so crowded that the surplus wanderers slept in ranks under sheds
+or in the open air, and since giving to wayfarers had been made a
+punishable offence there was no longer friendship or help for a man
+from the rare foot passenger or the wayside cottage....
+
+‘I wasn’t angry,’ said Barnet. ‘I saw an immense selfishness, a
+monstrous disregard for anything but pleasure and possession in all
+those people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how certainly
+if the richest had changed places with the poorest, that things would
+have been the same. What else can happen when men use science and every
+new thing that science gives, and all their available intelligence and
+energy to manufacture wealth and appliances, and leave government and
+education to the rustling traditions of hundreds of years ago? Those
+traditions come from the dark ages when there was really not enough for
+every one, when life was a fierce struggle that might be masked but
+could not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce
+dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony between
+material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and the poor grew
+savage and every added power that came to men made the rich richer and
+the poor less necessary and less free. The men I met in the casual
+wards and the relief offices were all smouldering for revolt, talking
+of justice and injustice and revenge. I saw no hope in that talk, nor
+in anything but patience....’
+
+But he did not mean a passive patience. He meant that the method of
+social reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual
+rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled aspects
+was solved. ‘I tried to talk to those discontented men,’ he wrote, ‘but
+it was hard for them to see things as I saw them. When I talked of
+patience and the larger scheme, they answered, “But then we shall all
+be dead”—and I could not make them see, what is so simple to my own
+mind, that that did not affect the question. Men who think in lifetimes
+are of no use to statesmanship.’
+
+He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and
+a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in the market-place at
+Bishop’s Stortford announcing a ‘Grave International Situation’ did not
+excite him very much. There had been so many grave international
+situations in recent years.
+
+This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly attacking
+the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to the help of the
+Slavs.
+
+But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the vagrants in
+the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master that all
+serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the morrow to their
+mobilisation centres. The country was on the eve of war. He was to go
+back through London to Surrey. His first feeling, he records, was one
+of extreme relief that his days of ‘hopeless battering at the underside
+of civilisation’ were at an end. Here was something definite to do,
+something definitely provided for. But his relief was greatly modified
+when he found that the mobilisation arrangements had been made so
+hastily and carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at the
+improvised depôt at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink but
+a cup of cold water. The depôt was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one
+was free to leave it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+THE LAST WAR
+
+
+Section I
+
+Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order, it is
+difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow, the motives
+that plunged mankind into the war that fills the histories of the
+middle decades of the twentieth century.
+
+It must always be remembered that the political structure of the world
+at that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the collective
+intelligence. That is the central fact of that history. For two hundred
+years there had been no great changes in political or legal methods and
+pretensions, the utmost change had been a certain shifting of
+boundaries and slight readjustment of procedure, while in nearly every
+other aspect of life there had been fundamental revolutions, gigantic
+releases, and an enormous enlargement of scope and outlook. The
+absurdities of courts and the indignities of representative
+parliamentary government, coupled with the opening of vast fields of
+opportunity in other directions, had withdrawn the best intelligences
+more and more from public affairs. The ostensible governments of the
+world in the twentieth century were following in the wake of the
+ostensible religions. They were ceasing to command the services of any
+but second-rate men. After the middle of the eighteenth century there
+are no more great ecclesiastics upon the world’s memory, after the
+opening of the twentieth no more statesmen. Everywhere one finds an
+energetic, ambitious, short-sighted, common-place type in the seats of
+authority, blind to the new possibilities and litigiously reliant upon
+the traditions of the past.
+
+Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the
+boundaries of the various ‘sovereign states,’ and the conception of a
+general predominance in human affairs on the part of some one
+particular state. The memory of the empires of Rome and Alexander
+squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human imagination—it
+bored into the human brain like some grisly parasite and filled it with
+disordered thoughts and violent impulses. For more than a century the
+French system exhausted its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and
+then the infection passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the
+heart and centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later
+ages were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this
+obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the infinite
+knowingness of the political writer, the cunning refusals to accept
+plain facts, the strategic devices, the tactical manœuvres, the records
+of mobilisations and counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible
+almost as soon as it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new
+age their state craftsmen sat with their historical candles burning,
+and, in spite of strange, new reflections and unfamiliar lights and
+shadows, still wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps of Europe
+and the world.
+
+It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions of
+men and women outside the world of these specialists sympathised and
+agreed with their portentous activities. One school of psychologists
+inclined to minimise this participation, but the balance of evidence
+goes to show that there were massive responses to these suggestions of
+the belligerent schemer. Primitive man had been a fiercely combative
+animal; innumerable generations had passed their lives in tribal
+warfare, and the weight of tradition, the example of history, the
+ideals of loyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the
+incitements of the international mischief-maker. The political ideas of
+the common man were picked up haphazard, there was practically nothing
+in such education as he was given that was ever intended to fit him for
+citizenship as such (that conception only appeared, indeed, with the
+development of Modern State ideas), and it was therefore a
+comparatively easy matter to fill his vacant mind with the sounds and
+fury of exasperated suspicion and national aggression.
+
+For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily patriotic
+when presently his battalion came up from the depôt to London, to
+entrain for the French frontier. He tells of children and women and
+lads and old men cheering and shouting, of the streets and rows hung
+with the flags of the Allied Powers, of a real enthusiasm even among
+the destitute and unemployed. The Labour Bureaux were now partially
+transformed into enrolment offices, and were centres of hotly patriotic
+excitement. At every convenient place upon the line on either side of
+the Channel Tunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the feeling
+in the regiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by grim
+anticipations, was none the less warlike.
+
+But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of minds without
+established ideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it was
+with himself, a natural response to collective movement, and to martial
+sounds and colours, and the exhilarating challenge of vague dangers.
+And people had been so long oppressed by the threat of and preparation
+for war that its arrival came with an effect of positive relief.
+
+Section 2
+
+The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the lower
+Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct from the
+various British depôts to the points in the Ardennes where they were
+intended to entrench themselves.
+
+Most of the documents bearing upon the campaign were destroyed during
+the war, from the first the scheme of the Allies seems to have been
+confused, but it is highly probable that the formation of an aerial
+park in this region, from which attacks could be made upon the vast
+industrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a flanking raid through
+Holland upon the German naval establishments at the mouth of the Elbe,
+were integral parts of the original project. Nothing of this was known
+to such pawns in the game as Barnet and his company, whose business it
+was to do what they were told by the mysterious intelligences at the
+direction of things in Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff had
+also been transferred. From first to last these directing intelligences
+remained mysterious to the body of the army, veiled under the name of
+‘Orders.’ There was no Napoleon, no Cæsar to embody enthusiasm. Barnet
+says, ‘We talked of Them. _They_ are sending us up into Luxembourg.
+_They_ are going to turn the Central European right.’
+
+Behind the veil of this vagueness the little group of more or less
+worthy men which constituted Headquarters was beginning to realise the
+enormity of the thing it was supposed to control....
+
+In the great hall of the War Control, whose windows looked out across
+the Seine to the Trocadero and the palaces of the western quarter, a
+series of big-scale relief maps were laid out upon tables to display
+the whole seat of war, and the staff-officers of the control were
+continually busy shifting the little blocks which represented the
+contending troops, as the reports and intelligence came drifting in to
+the various telegraphic bureaux in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller
+apartments there were maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for
+example, the reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav
+commanders were recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps,
+as upon chessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard
+and the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world supremacy
+against the Central European powers. Very probably he had a definite
+idea of his game; very probably he had a coherent and admirable plan.
+
+But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new
+strategy of aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy that
+Holsten had opened for mankind. While he planned entrenchments and
+invasions and a frontier war, the Central European generalship was
+striking at the eyes and the brain. And while, with a certain diffident
+hesitation, he developed his gambit that night upon the lines laid down
+by Napoleon and Moltke, his own scientific corps in a state of mutinous
+activity was preparing a blow for Berlin. ‘These old fools!’ was the
+key in which the scientific corps was thinking.
+
+The War Control in Paris, on the night of July the second, was an
+impressive display of the paraphernalia of scientific military
+organisation, as the first half of the twentieth century understood it.
+To one human being at least the consulting commanders had the likeness
+of world-wielding gods.
+
+She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute, and
+she had been engaged in relay with other similar women to take down
+orders in duplicate and hand them over to the junior officers in
+attendance, to be forwarded and filed. There had come a lull, and she
+had been sent out from the dictating room to take the air upon the
+terrace before the great hall and to eat such scanty refreshment as she
+had brought with her until her services were required again.
+
+From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view not only
+of the wide sweep of the river below her, and all the eastward side of
+Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to Saint Cloud, great blocks and masses
+of black or pale darkness with pink and golden flashes of illumination
+and endless interlacing bands of dotted lights under a still and
+starless sky, but also the whole spacious interior of the great hall
+with its slender pillars and gracious arching and clustering lamps was
+visible to her. There, over a wilderness of tables, lay the huge maps,
+done on so large a scale that one might fancy them small countries; the
+messengers and attendants went and came perpetually, altering, moving
+the little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of men, and the
+great commander and his two consultants stood amidst all these things
+and near where the fighting was nearest, scheming, directing. They had
+but to breathe a word and presently away there, in the world of
+reality, the punctual myriads moved. Men rose up and went forward and
+died. The fate of nations lay behind the eyes of these three men.
+Indeed they were like gods.
+
+Most godlike of the three was Dubois. It was for him to decide; the
+others at most might suggest. Her woman’s soul went out to this grave,
+handsome, still, old man, in a passion of instinctive worship.
+
+Once she had taken words of instruction from him direct. She had
+awaited them in an ecstasy of happiness—and fear. For her exaltation
+was made terrible by the dread that some error might dishonour her....
+
+She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating
+minuteness of an impassioned woman’s observation.
+
+He said little, she remarked. He looked but little at the maps. The
+tall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm of ideas,
+conflicting ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting of the little
+red, blue, black, and yellow pieces on the board, and wanted to draw
+the commander’s attention to this and that. Dubois listened, nodded,
+emitted a word and became still again, brooding like the national
+eagle.
+
+His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she could
+not see his eyes; his moustache overhung the mouth from which those
+words of decision came. Viard, too, said little; he was a dark man with
+a drooping head and melancholy, watchful eyes. He was more intent upon
+the French right, which was feeling its way now through Alsace to the
+Rhine. He was, she knew, an old colleague of Dubois; he knew him
+better, she decided, he trusted him more than this unfamiliar
+Englishman....
+
+Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in profile;
+these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered years ago. To seem
+to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse to hurry—itself a
+confession of miscalculation; by attention to these simple rules,
+Dubois had built up a steady reputation from the days when he had been
+a promising junior officer, a still, almost abstracted young man,
+deliberate but ready. Even then men had looked at him and said: ‘He
+will go far.’ Through fifty years of peace he had never once been found
+wanting, and at manœuvres his impassive persistence had perplexed and
+hypnotised and defeated many a more actively intelligent man. Deep in
+his soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery about the modern
+art of warfare, the key to his career. And this discovery was that
+_nobody knew_, that to act therefore was to blunder, that to talk was
+to confess; and that the man who acted slowly and steadfastly and above
+all silently, had the best chance of winning through. Meanwhile one fed
+the men. Now by this same strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious
+unknowns of the Central European command. Delhi might talk of a great
+flank march through Holland, with all the British submarines and
+hydroplanes and torpedo craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it;
+Viard might crave for brilliance with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes,
+and ski-men among the Swiss mountains, and a sudden swoop upon Vienna;
+the thing was to listen—and wait for the other side to begin
+experimenting. It was all experimenting. And meanwhile he remained in
+profile, with an air of assurance—like a man who sits in an automobile
+after the chauffeur has had his directions.
+
+And every one about him was the stronger and surer for that quiet face,
+that air of knowledge and unruffled confidence. The clustering lights
+threw a score of shadows of him upon the maps, great bunches of him,
+versions of a commanding presence, lighter or darker, dominated the
+field, and pointed in every direction. Those shadows symbolised his
+control. When a messenger came from the wireless room to shift this or
+that piece in the game, to replace under amended reports one Central
+European regiment by a score, to draw back or thrust out or distribute
+this or that force of the Allies, the Marshal would turn his head and
+seem not to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who
+approves a pupil’s self-correction. ‘Yes, that’s better.’
+
+How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how wonderful it
+all was. This was the brain of the western world, this was Olympus with
+the warring earth at its feet. And he was guiding France, France so
+long a resentful exile from imperialism, back to her old predominance.
+
+It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be
+privileged to participate....
+
+It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal
+devotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact, punctual. She
+must control herself....
+
+She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when the
+war would be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this harshness,
+this armour would be put aside and the gods might unbend. Her eyelids
+drooped....
+
+She roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night
+outside was no longer still. That there was an excitement down below on
+the bridge and a running in the street and a flickering of searchlights
+among the clouds from some high place away beyond the Trocadero. And
+then the excitement came surging up past her and invaded the hall
+within.
+
+One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of the
+room, gesticulating and shouting something.
+
+And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn’t
+understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed machinery
+and cables of the ways beneath, were beating—as pulses beat. And about
+her blew something like a wind—a wind that was dismay.
+
+Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child might
+look towards its mother.
+
+He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but that
+was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand gauntly
+gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too manifestly
+disposed to drag him towards the great door that opened on the terrace.
+And Viard was hurrying towards the huge windows and doing so in the
+strangest of attitudes, bent forward and with eyes upturned.
+
+Something up there?
+
+And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.
+
+The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against the
+masonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping down through
+the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two of them, there had
+already started curling trails of red....
+
+Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through moments
+that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl down towards
+her.
+
+She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but
+a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing
+sound. Every other light had gone out about her and against this glare
+hung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of
+cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass. She
+had an impression of a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a
+maddened living thing that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly
+amidst a chaos of falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the
+earth furiously, that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing
+rabbit....
+
+She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.
+
+She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that a
+little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She tried to
+raise herself and found her leg was very painful. She was not clear
+whether it was night or day nor where she was; she made a second
+effort, wincing and groaning, and turned over and got into a sitting
+position and looked about her.
+
+Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of a vast
+uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing had been
+destroyed.
+
+At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous experience.
+
+She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world, a
+world of heaped broken things. And it was lit—and somehow this was more
+familiar to her mind than any other fact about her—by a flickering,
+purplish-crimson light. Then close to her, rising above a confusion of
+_débris_, she recognised the Trocadero; it was changed, something had
+gone from it, but its outline was unmistakable. It stood out against a
+streaming, whirling uprush of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled
+Paris and the Seine and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful,
+luminous organisation of the War Control....
+
+She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she lay,
+and examined her surroundings with an increasing understanding....
+
+The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the river.
+Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water, from which
+these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps of vapour came
+into circling existence a foot or so from its mirror-surface. Near at
+hand and reflected exactly in the water was the upper part of a
+familiar-looking stone pillar. On the side of her away from the water
+the heaped ruins rose steeply in a confused slope up to a glaring
+crest. Above and reflecting this glare towered pillowed masses of steam
+rolling swiftly upward to the zenith. It was from this crest that the
+livid glow that lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind
+connected this mound with the vanished buildings of the War Control.
+
+‘_Mais!_’ she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite
+motionless for a time, crouching close to the warm earth.
+
+Then presently this dim, broken human thing began to look about it
+again. She began to feel the need of fellowship. She wanted to
+question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate her experience. And her
+foot hurt her atrociously. There ought to be an ambulance. A little
+gust of querulous criticisms blew across her mind. This surely was a
+disaster! Always after a disaster there should be ambulances and
+helpers moving about....
+
+She craned her head. There was something there. But everything was so
+still!
+
+‘_Monsieur!_’ she cried. Her ears, she noted, felt queer, and she began
+to suspect that all was not well with them.
+
+It was terribly lonely in this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps this
+man—if it was a man, for it was difficult to see—might for all his
+stillness be merely insensible. He might have been stunned....
+
+The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a moment
+every little detail was distinct. It was Marshal Dubois. He was lying
+against a huge slab of the war map. To it there stuck and from it there
+dangled little wooden objects, the symbols of infantry and cavalry and
+guns, as they were disposed upon the frontier. He did not seem to be
+aware of this at his back, he had an effect of inattention, not
+indifferent attention, but as if he were thinking....
+
+She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was evident
+he frowned. He frowned slightly, he had an air of not wanting to be
+disturbed. His face still bore that expression of assured confidence,
+that conviction that if things were left to him France might obey in
+security....
+
+She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer. A
+strange surmise made her eyes dilate. With a painful wrench she pulled
+herself up so that she could see completely over the intervening lumps
+of smashed-up masonry. Her hand touched something wet, and after one
+convulsive movement she became rigid.
+
+It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head and
+shoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness and a pool
+of shining black....
+
+And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled, and a
+rush of hot water came pouring over her. Then it seemed to her that she
+was dragged downward....
+
+Section 3
+
+When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and the
+black hair close-cropped _en brosse_, who was in charge of the French
+special scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster to the War
+Control, he was so wanting in imagination in any sphere but his own,
+that he laughed. Small matter to him that Paris was burning. His mother
+and father and sister lived at Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had
+ever had, and it was poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen. He
+slapped his second-in-command on the shoulder. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘there’s
+nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them
+tit-for-tat.... Strategy and reasons of state—they’re over.... Come
+along, my boy, and we’ll just show these old women what we can do when
+they let us have our heads.’
+
+He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the
+courtyard of the chateau in which he had been installed and shouted for
+his automobile. Things would have to move quickly because there was
+scarcely an hour and a half before dawn. He looked at the sky and noted
+with satisfaction a heavy bank of clouds athwart the pallid east.
+
+He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and
+aeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck away in
+barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods. A hawk could not have
+discovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun. But that
+night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was handy and quite
+prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not a couple of miles
+away; he was going to Berlin with that and just one other man. Two men
+would be enough for what he meant to do....
+
+He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts
+science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of destruction,
+and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic type....
+
+He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming face.
+He smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great pleasures.
+There was an exotic richness, a chuckling flavour, about the voice in
+which he gave his orders, and he pointed his remarks with the long
+finger of a hand that was hairy and exceptionally big.
+
+‘We’ll give them tit-for-tat,’ he said. ‘We’ll give them tit-for-tat.
+No time to lose, boys....’
+
+And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and Saxony
+the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancing
+sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow
+to the heart of the Central European hosts.
+
+It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above the
+banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to plunge at
+once into their wet obscurities should some hostile flier range into
+vision. The tense young steersman divided his attention between the
+guiding stars above and the level, tumbled surfaces of the vapour
+strata that hid the world below. Over great spaces those banks lay as
+even as a frozen lava-flow and almost as still, and then they were rent
+by ragged areas of translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim
+patches of the land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw
+quite distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps
+and signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid
+through a boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill. But if
+the world was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through that vapour
+floor came the deep roar of trains, the whistles of horns of
+motor-cars, a sound of rifle fire away to the south, and as he drew
+near his destination the crowing of cocks....
+
+The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at first
+starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to east as the
+dawn came on. The Milky Way was invisible in the blue, and the lesser
+stars vanished. The face of the adventurer at the steering-wheel,
+darkly visible ever and again by the oval greenish glow of the compass
+face, had something of that firm beauty which all concentrated purpose
+gives, and something of the happiness of an idiot child that has at
+last got hold of the matches. His companion, a less imaginative type,
+sat with his legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which
+contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs
+that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had
+ever seen in action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential substance, had
+been tested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel
+chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the thought of great destruction
+slumbering in the black spheres between his legs, and a keen resolve to
+follow out very exactly the instructions that had been given him, the
+man’s mind was a blank. His aquiline profile against the starlight
+expressed nothing but a profound gloom.
+
+The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital was
+approached.
+
+So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by no
+aeroplanes at all. The frontier scouts they must have passed in the
+night; probably these were mostly under the clouds; the world was wide
+and they had had luck in not coming close to any soaring sentinel.
+Their machine was painted a pale gray, that lay almost invisibly over
+the cloud levels below. But now the east was flushing with the near
+ascent of the sun, Berlin was but a score of miles ahead, and the luck
+of the Frenchmen held. By imperceptible degrees the clouds below
+dissolved....
+
+Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering light and
+with all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was Berlin. The
+left finger of the steersman verified roads and open spaces below upon
+the mica-covered square of map that was fastened by his wheel. There in
+a series of lake-like expansions was the Havel away to the right; over
+by those forests must be Spandau; there the river split about the
+Potsdam island; and right ahead was Charlottenburg cleft by a great
+thoroughfare that fell like an indicating beam of light straight to the
+imperial headquarters. There, plain enough, was the Thiergarten; beyond
+rose the imperial palace, and to the right those tall buildings, those
+clustering, beflagged, bemasted roofs, must be the offices in which the
+Central European staff was housed. It was all coldly clear and
+colourless in the dawn.
+
+He looked up suddenly as a humming sound grew out of nothing and became
+swiftly louder. Nearly overhead a German aeroplane was circling down
+from an immense height to challenge him. He made a gesture with his
+left arm to the gloomy man behind and then gripped his little wheel
+with both hands, crouched over it, and twisted his neck to look upward.
+He was attentive, tightly strung, but quite contemptuous of their
+ability to hurt him. No German alive, he was assured, could outfly him,
+or indeed any one of the best Frenchmen. He imagined they might strike
+at him as a hawk strikes, but they were men coming down out of the
+bitter cold up there, in a hungry, spiritless, morning mood; they came
+slanting down like a sword swung by a lazy man, and not so rapidly but
+that he was able to slip away from under them and get between them and
+Berlin. They began challenging him in German with a megaphone when they
+were still perhaps a mile away. The words came to him, rolled up into a
+mere blob of hoarse sound. Then, gathering alarm from his grim silence,
+they gave chase and swept down, a hundred yards above him perhaps, and
+a couple of hundred behind. They were beginning to understand what he
+was. He ceased to watch them and concentrated himself on the city
+ahead, and for a time the two aeroplanes raced....
+
+A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one was
+tearing paper. A second followed. Something tapped the machine.
+
+It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces below
+rushed widening out nearer and nearer to them. ‘Ready!’ said the
+steersman.
+
+The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the
+bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it
+against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter. Between
+its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he bent his head
+until his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in order to let the air
+in upon the inducive. Sure of its accessibility, he craned his neck
+over the side of the aeroplane and judged his pace and distance. Then
+very quickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over
+the side.
+
+‘Round,’ he whispered inaudibly.
+
+The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a descending
+column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a whirlwind. Both the
+aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks, hurled high and sideways and
+the steersman, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, fought in great
+banking curves for a balance. The gaunt man clung tight with hand and
+knees; his nostrils dilated, his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly
+strapped....
+
+When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater
+of a small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle a
+shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and poured up smoke and flame
+towards them like an accusation. They were too high to distinguish
+people clearly, or mark the bomb’s effect upon the building until
+suddenly the facade tottered and crumbled before the flare as sugar
+dissolves in water. The man stared for a moment, showed all his long
+teeth, and then staggered into the cramped standing position his straps
+permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down after its
+fellow.
+
+The explosion came this time more directly underneath the aeroplane and
+shot it upward edgeways. The bomb box tipped to the point of
+disgorgement, and the bomb-thrower was pitched forward upon the third
+bomb with his face close to its celluloid stud. He clutched its
+handles, and with a sudden gust of determination that the thing should
+not escape him, bit its stud. Before he could hurl it over, the
+monoplane was slipping sideways. Everything was falling sideways.
+Instinctively he gave himself up to gripping, his body holding the bomb
+in its place.
+
+Then that bomb had exploded also, and steersman, thrower, and aeroplane
+were just flying rags and splinters of metal and drops of moisture in
+the air, and a third column of fire rushed eddying down upon the doomed
+buildings below....
+
+Section 4
+
+Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing
+explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only
+explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely
+to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst
+upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them.
+Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the
+outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a
+case of membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by
+which the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and
+admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up
+radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This
+liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a
+blazing continual explosion. The Central European bombs were the same,
+except that they were larger and had a more complicated arrangement for
+animating the inducive.
+
+Always before in the development of warfare the shells and rockets
+fired had been but momentarily explosive, they had gone off in an
+instant once for all, and if there was nothing living or valuable
+within reach of the concussion and the flying fragments then they were
+spent and over. But Carolinum, which belonged to the β-Group of
+Hyslop’s so-called ‘suspended degenerator’ elements, once its
+degenerative process had been induced, continued a furious radiation of
+energy and nothing could arrest it. Of all Hyslop’s artificial
+elements, Carolinum was the most heavily stored with energy and the
+most dangerous to make and handle. To this day it remains the most
+potent degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists
+called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it poured
+out half of the huge store of energy in its great molecules in the
+space of seventeen days, the next seventeen days’ emission was a half
+of that first period’s outpouring, and so on. As with all radio-active
+substances this Carolinum, though every seventeen days its power is
+halved, though constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is
+never entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb
+fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with radiant
+matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.
+
+What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the inducive
+oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum began to
+degenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of
+the bomb. A moment or so after its explosion began it was still mainly
+an inert sphere exploding superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus
+wrapped in flame and thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes
+fell in this state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and,
+melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There,
+as more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread itself
+out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of what became
+very speedily a miniature active volcano. The Carolinum, unable to
+disperse, freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling confusion of
+molten soil and superheated steam, and so remained spinning furiously
+and maintaining an eruption that lasted for years or months or weeks
+according to the size of the bomb employed and the chances of its
+dispersal. Once launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and
+uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from the
+crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent vapour and
+fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinum,
+and each a centre of scorching and blistering energy, were flung high
+and far.
+
+Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate
+explosive that was to give the ‘decisive touch’ to war....
+
+Section 5
+
+A recent historical writer has described the world of that time as one
+that ‘believed in established words and was invincibly blind to the
+obvious in things.’ Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been
+more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the
+rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they
+did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in
+their fumbling hands. Yet the broad facts must have glared upon any
+intelligent mind. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
+the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually
+increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a
+blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no
+increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive
+defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by
+this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was
+becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it
+was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before
+the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could
+carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck
+half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the
+children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as the
+Americans used to phrase it, ‘fooled around’ with the paraphernalia and
+pretensions of war.
+
+It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce between
+the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand, and the world
+of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men of a later time can
+hope to understand this preposterous state of affairs. Social
+organisation was still in the barbaric stage. There were already great
+numbers of actively intelligent men and much private and commercial
+civilisation, but the community, as a whole, was aimless, untrained and
+unorganised to the pitch of imbecility. Collective civilisation, the
+‘Modern State,’ was still in the womb of the future....
+
+Section 6
+
+But let us return to Frederick Barnet’s _Wander Jahre_ and its account
+of the experiences of a common man during the war time. While these
+terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were happening in Paris
+and Berlin, Barnet and his company were industriously entrenching
+themselves in Belgian Luxembourg.
+
+He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day’s journey through
+the north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid phrases. The
+country was browned by a warm summer, the trees a little touched with
+autumnal colour, and the wheat already golden. When they stopped for an
+hour at Hirson, men and women with tricolour badges upon the platform
+distributed cakes and glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and
+there was much cheerfulness. ‘Such good, cool beer it was,’ he wrote.
+‘I had had nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom.’
+
+A number of monoplanes, ‘like giant swallows,’ he notes, were scouting
+in the pink evening sky.
+
+Barnet’s battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place called
+Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to Jemelle. Here
+they detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the railway—trains and stores
+were passing along it all night—and next morning he marched eastward
+through a cold, overcast dawn, and a morning, first cloudy and then
+blazing, over a large spacious country-side interspersed by forest
+towards Arlon.
+
+There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked entrenchments
+and hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton that were designed
+to check and delay any advance from the east upon the fortified line of
+the Meuse. They had their orders, and for two days they worked without
+either a sight of the enemy or any suspicion of the disaster that had
+abruptly decapitated the armies of Europe, and turned the west of Paris
+and the centre of Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction of
+Pompeii.
+
+And the news, when it did come, came attenuated. ‘We heard there had
+been mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,’ Barnet relates; ‘but
+it didn’t seem to follow that “They” weren’t still somewhere
+elaborating their plans and issuing orders. When the enemy began to
+emerge from the woods in front of us, we cheered and blazed away, and
+didn’t trouble much more about anything but the battle in hand. If now
+and then one cocked up an eye into the sky to see what was happening
+there, the rip of a bullet soon brought one down to the horizontal
+again....
+
+That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of country
+between Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It was
+essentially a rifle and infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do not seem
+to have taken any decisive share in the actual fighting for some days,
+though no doubt they effected the strategy from the first by preventing
+surprise movements. They were aeroplanes with atomic engines, but they
+were not provided with atomic bombs, which were manifestly unsuitable
+for field use, nor indeed had they any very effective kind of bomb. And
+though they manœuvred against each other, and there was rifle shooting
+at them and between them, there was little actual aerial fighting.
+Either the airmen were indisposed to fight or the commanders on both
+sides preferred to reserve these machines for scouting....
+
+After a day or so of digging and scheming, Barnet found himself in the
+forefront of a battle. He had made his section of rifle pits chiefly
+along a line of deep dry ditch that gave a means of
+inter-communication, he had had the earth scattered over the adjacent
+field, and he had masked his preparations with tussocks of corn and
+poppy. The hostile advance came blindly and unsuspiciously across the
+fields below and would have been very cruelly handled indeed, if some
+one away to the right had not opened fire too soon.
+
+‘It was a queer thrill when these fellows came into sight,’ he
+confesses; ‘and not a bit like manœuvres. They halted for a time on the
+edge of the wood and then came forward in an open line. They kept
+walking nearer to us and not looking at us, but away to the right of
+us. Even when they began to be hit, and their officers’ whistles woke
+them up, they didn’t seem to see us. One or two halted to fire, and
+then they all went back towards the wood again. They went slowly at
+first, looking round at us, then the shelter of the wood seemed to draw
+them, and they trotted. I fired rather mechanically and missed, then I
+fired again, and then I became earnest to hit something, made sure of
+my sighting, and aimed very carefully at a blue back that was dodging
+about in the corn. At first I couldn’t satisfy myself and didn’t shoot,
+his movements were so spasmodic and uncertain; then I think he came to
+a ditch or some such obstacle and halted for a moment. “_Got_ you,” I
+whispered, and pulled the trigger.
+
+‘I had the strangest sensations about that man. In the first instance,
+when I felt that I had hit him I was irradiated with joy and pride....
+
+‘I sent him spinning. He jumped and threw up his arms....
+
+‘Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping
+about. Suddenly I felt sick. I hadn’t killed him....
+
+‘In some way he was disabled and smashed up and yet able to struggle
+about. I began to think....
+
+‘For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn. Either
+he was calling out or some one was shouting to him....
+
+‘Then he jumped up—he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with one
+last effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still and never
+moved again.
+
+‘He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him dead. I
+had been wanting to do so for some time....’
+
+The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made for
+themselves in the woods below. A man was hit in the pit next to Barnet,
+and began cursing and crying out in a violent rage. Barnet crawled
+along the ditch to him and found him in great pain, covered with blood,
+frantic with indignation, and with the half of his right hand smashed
+to a pulp. ‘Look at this,’ he kept repeating, hugging it and then
+extending it. ‘Damned foolery! Damned foolery! My right hand, sir! My
+right hand!’
+
+For some time Barnet could do nothing with him. The man was consumed by
+his tortured realisation of the evil silliness of war, the realisation
+which had come upon him in a flash with the bullet that had destroyed
+his skill and use as an artificer for ever. He was looking at the
+vestiges with a horror that made him impenetrable to any other idea. At
+last the poor wretch let Barnet tie up his bleeding stump and help him
+along the ditch that conducted him deviously out of range....
+
+When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water, and
+all day long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst. For food
+they had chocolate and bread.
+
+‘At first,’ he says, ‘I was extraordinarily excited by my baptism of
+fire. Then as the heat of the day came on I experienced an enormous
+tedium and discomfort. The flies became extremely troublesome, and my
+little grave of a rifle pit was invaded by ants. I could not get up or
+move about, for some one in the trees had got a mark on me. I kept
+thinking of the dead Prussian down among the corn, and of the bitter
+outcries of my own man. Damned foolery! It _was_ damned foolery. But
+who was to blame? How had we got to this? . . .
+
+‘Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with dynamite
+bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and suddenly dived
+down over beyond the trees.
+
+‘“From Holland to the Alps this day,” I thought, “there must be
+crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to
+inflict irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic to
+the pitch of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall wake up.”
+. . .
+
+‘Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. “Presently mankind will
+wake up.”
+
+‘I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were among
+these hundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in rebellion against
+all these ancient traditions of flag and empire. Weren’t we, perhaps,
+already in the throes of the last crisis, in that darkest moment of a
+nightmare’s horror before the sleeper will endure no more of it—and
+wakes?
+
+‘I don’t know how my speculations ended. I think they were not so much
+ended as distracted by the distant thudding of the guns that were
+opening fire at long range upon Namur.’
+
+Section 7
+
+But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of
+modern warfare. So far he had taken part only in a little shooting. The
+bayonet attack by which the advanced line was broken was made at a
+place called Croix Rouge, more than twenty miles away, and that night
+under cover of the darkness the rifle pits were abandoned and he got
+his company away without further loss.
+
+His regiment fell back unpressed behind the fortified lines between
+Namur and Sedan, entrained at a station called Mettet, and was sent
+northward by Antwerp and Rotterdam to Haarlem. Hence they marched into
+North Holland. It was only after the march into Holland that he began
+to realise the monstrous and catastrophic nature of the struggle in
+which he was playing his undistinguished part.
+
+He describes very pleasantly the journey through the hills and open
+land of Brabant, the repeated crossing of arms of the Rhine, and the
+change from the undulating scenery of Belgium to the flat, rich
+meadows, the sunlit dyke roads, and the countless windmills of the
+Dutch levels. In those days there was unbroken land from Alkmaar and
+Leiden to the Dollart. Three great provinces, South Holland, North
+Holland, and Zuiderzeeland, reclaimed at various times between the
+early tenth century and 1945 and all many feet below the level of the
+waves outside the dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern
+sun and sustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of
+laws and custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a
+perpetual defence against the beleaguering sea. For more than two
+hundred and fifty miles from Walcheren to Friesland stretched a line of
+embankments and pumping stations that was the admiration of the world.
+
+If some curious god had chosen to watch the course of events in those
+northern provinces while that flanking march of the British was in
+progress, he would have found a convenient and appropriate seat for his
+observation upon one of the great cumulus clouds that were drifting
+slowly across the blue sky during all these eventful days before the
+great catastrophe. For that was the quality of the weather, hot and
+clear, with something of a breeze, and underfoot dry and a little
+inclined to be dusty. This watching god would have looked down upon
+broad stretches of sunlit green, sunlit save for the creeping patches
+of shadow cast by the clouds, upon sky-reflecting meres, fringed and
+divided up by masses of willow and large areas of silvery weeds, upon
+white roads lying bare to the sun and upon a tracery of blue canals.
+The pastures were alive with cattle, the roads had a busy traffic, of
+beasts and bicycles and gaily coloured peasants’ automobiles, the hues
+of the innumerable motor barges in the canal vied with the eventfulness
+of the roadways; and everywhere in solitary steadings, amidst ricks and
+barns, in groups by the wayside, in straggling villages, each with its
+fine old church, or in compact towns laced with canals and abounding in
+bridges and clipped trees, were human habitations.
+
+The people of this country-side were not belligerents. The interests
+and sympathies alike of Holland had been so divided that to the end she
+remained undecided and passive in the struggle of the world powers. And
+everywhere along the roads taken by the marching armies clustered
+groups and crowds of impartially observant spectators, women and
+children in peculiar white caps and old-fashioned sabots, and elderly,
+clean-shaven men quietly thoughtful over their long pipes. They had no
+fear of their invaders; the days when ‘soldiering’ meant bands of
+licentious looters had long since passed away....
+
+That watcher among the clouds would have seen a great distribution of
+khaki-uniformed men and khaki-painted material over the whole of the
+sunken area of Holland. He would have marked the long trains, packed
+with men or piled with great guns and war material, creeping slowly,
+alert for train-wreckers, along the north-going lines; he would have
+seen the Scheldt and Rhine choked with shipping, and pouring out still
+more men and still more material; he would have noticed halts and
+provisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling caterpillars of
+cavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons, the huge beetles of great
+guns, crawling under the poplars along the dykes and roads northward,
+along ways lined by the neutral, unmolested, ambiguously observant
+Dutch. All the barges and shipping upon the canals had been
+requisitioned for transport. In that clear, bright, warm weather, it
+would all have looked from above like some extravagant festival of
+animated toys.
+
+As the sun sank westward the spectacle must have become a little
+indistinct because of a golden haze; everything must have become warmer
+and more glowing, and because of the lengthening of the shadows more
+manifestly in relief. The shadows of the tall churches grew longer and
+longer, until they touched the horizon and mingled in the universal
+shadow; and then, slow, and soft, and wrapping the world in fold after
+fold of deepening blue, came the night—the night at first obscurely
+simple, and then with faint points here and there, and then jewelled in
+darkling splendour with a hundred thousand lights. Out of that mingling
+of darkness and ambiguous glares the noise of an unceasing activity
+would have arisen, the louder and plainer now because there was no
+longer any distraction of sight.
+
+It may be that watcher drifting in the pellucid gulf beneath the stars
+watched all through the night; it may be that he dozed. But if he gave
+way to so natural a proclivity, assuredly on the fourth night of the
+great flank march he was aroused, for that was the night of the battle
+in the air that decided the fate of Holland. The aeroplanes were
+fighting at last, and suddenly about him, above and below, with cries
+and uproar rushing out of the four quarters of heaven, striking,
+plunging, oversetting, soaring to the zenith and dropping to the
+ground, they came to assail or defend the myriads below.
+
+Secretly the Central European power had gathered his flying machines
+together, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a handful of ten
+thousand knives over the low country. And amidst that swarming flight
+were five that drove headlong for the sea walls of Holland, carrying
+atomic bombs. From north and west and south, the allied aeroplanes rose
+in response and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that war
+in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and
+fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth.
+Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy
+pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of
+chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this
+headlong swoop to death?
+
+And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped and
+locked and dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and the stars,
+came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and first one and
+then a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged hungrily down upon
+the Dutchmen’s dykes and struck between land and sea and flared up
+again in enormous columns of glare and crimsoned smoke and steam.
+
+And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires and
+trees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea, tumbled
+with anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood....
+
+Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous crying and
+a flurry of alarm bells....
+
+The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky, like
+things that suddenly know themselves to be wicked....
+
+Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might quench,
+the waves came roaring in upon the land....
+
+Section 8
+
+‘We had cursed our luck,’ says Barnet, ‘that we could not get to our
+quarters at Alkmaar that night. There, we were told, were provisions,
+tobacco, and everything for which we craved. But the main canal from
+Zaandam and Amsterdam was hopelessly jammed with craft, and we were
+glad of a chance opening that enabled us to get out of the main column
+and lie up in a kind of little harbour very much neglected and
+weedgrown before a deserted house. We broke into this and found some
+herrings in a barrel, a heap of cheeses, and stone bottles of gin in
+the cellar; and with this I cheered my starving men. We made fires and
+toasted the cheese and grilled our herrings. None of us had slept for
+nearly forty hours, and I determined to stay in this refuge until dawn
+and then if the traffic was still choked leave the barge and march the
+rest of the way into Alkmaar.
+
+‘This place we had got into was perhaps a hundred yards from the canal
+and underneath a little brick bridge we could see the flotilla still,
+and hear the voices of the soldiers. Presently five or six other barges
+came through and lay up in the mere near by us, and with two of these,
+full of men of the Antrim regiment, I shared my find of provisions. In
+return we got tobacco. A large expanse of water spread to the westward
+of us and beyond were a cluster of roofs and one or two church towers.
+The barge was rather cramped for so many men, and I let several squads,
+thirty or forty perhaps altogether, bivouac on the bank. I did not let
+them go into the house on account of the furniture, and I left a note
+of indebtedness for the food we had taken. We were particularly glad of
+our tobacco and fires, because of the numerous mosquitoes that rose
+about us.
+
+‘The gate of the house from which we had provisioned ourselves was
+adorned with the legend, _Vreugde bij Vrede_, “Joy with Peace,” and it
+bore every mark of the busy retirement of a comfort-loving proprietor.
+I went along his garden, which was gay and delightful with big bushes
+of rose and sweet brier, to a quaint little summer-house, and there I
+sat and watched the men in groups cooking and squatting along the bank.
+The sun was setting in a nearly cloudless sky.
+
+‘For the last two weeks I had been a wholly occupied man, intent only
+upon obeying the orders that came down to me. All through this time I
+had been working to the very limit of my mental and physical faculties,
+and my only moments of rest had been devoted to snatches of sleep. Now
+came this rare, unexpected interlude, and I could look detachedly upon
+what I was doing and feel something of its infinite wonderfulness. I
+was irradiated with affection for the men of my company and with
+admiration at their cheerful acquiescence in the subordination and
+needs of our positions. I watched their proceedings and heard their
+pleasant voices. How willing those men were! How ready to accept
+leadership and forget themselves in collective ends! I thought how
+manfully they had gone through all the strains and toil of the last two
+weeks, how they had toughened and shaken down to comradeship together,
+and how much sweetness there is after all in our foolish human blood.
+For they were just one casual sample of the species—their patience and
+readiness lay, as the energy of the atom had lain, still waiting to be
+properly utilised. Again it came to me with overpowering force that the
+supreme need of our race is leading, that the supreme task is to
+discover leading, to forget oneself in realising the collective purpose
+of the race. Once more I saw life plain....’
+
+Very characteristic is that of the ‘rather too corpulent’ young
+officer, who was afterwards to set it all down in the _Wander Jahre_.
+Very characteristic, too, it is of the change in men’s hearts that was
+even then preparing a new phase of human history.
+
+He goes on to write of the escape from individuality in science and
+service, and of his discovery of this ‘salvation.’ All that was then,
+no doubt, very moving and original; now it seems only the most obvious
+commonplace of human life.
+
+The glow of the sunset faded, the twilight deepened into night. The
+fires burnt the brighter, and some Irishmen away across the mere
+started singing. But Barnet’s men were too weary for that sort of
+thing, and soon the bank and the barge were heaped with sleeping forms.
+
+‘I alone seemed unable to sleep. I suppose I was over-weary, and after
+a little feverish slumber by the tiller of the barge I sat up, awake
+and uneasy....
+
+‘That night Holland seemed all sky. There was just a little black lower
+rim to things, a steeple, perhaps, or a line of poplars, and then the
+great hemisphere swept over us. As at first the sky was empty. Yet my
+uneasiness referred itself in some vague way to the sky.
+
+‘And now I was melancholy. I found something strangely sorrowful and
+submissive in the sleepers all about me, those men who had marched so
+far, who had left all the established texture of their lives behind
+them to come upon this mad campaign, this campaign that signified
+nothing and consumed everything, this mere fever of fighting. I saw how
+little and feeble is the life of man, a thing of chances,
+preposterously unable to find the will to realise even the most timid
+of its dreams. And I wondered if always it would be so, if man was a
+doomed animal who would never to the last days of his time take hold of
+fate and change it to his will. Always, it may be, he will remain
+kindly but jealous, desirous but discursive, able and unwisely
+impulsive, until Saturn who begot him shall devour him in his turn....
+
+‘I was roused from these thoughts by the sudden realisation of the
+presence of a squadron of aeroplanes far away to the north-east and
+very high. They looked like little black dashes against the midnight
+blue. I remember that I looked up at them at first rather idly—as one
+might notice a flight of birds. Then I perceived that they were only
+the extreme wing of a great fleet that was advancing in a long line
+very swiftly from the direction of the frontier and my attention
+tightened.
+
+‘Directly I saw that fleet I was astonished not to have seen it before.
+
+‘I stood up softly, undesirous of disturbing my companions, but with my
+heart beating now rather more rapidly with surprise and excitement. I
+strained my ears for any sound of guns along our front. Almost
+instinctively I turned about for protection to the south and west, and
+peered; and then I saw coming as fast and much nearer to me, as if they
+had sprung out of the darkness, three banks of aeroplanes; a group of
+squadrons very high, a main body at a height perhaps of one or two
+thousand feet, and a doubtful number flying low and very indistinct.
+The middle ones were so thick they kept putting out groups of stars.
+And I realised that after all there was to be fighting in the air.
+
+‘There was something extraordinarily strange in this swift, noiseless
+convergence of nearly invisible combatants above the sleeping hosts.
+Every one about me was still unconscious; there was no sign as yet of
+any agitation among the shipping on the main canal, whose whole course,
+dotted with unsuspicious lights and fringed with fires, must have been
+clearly perceptible from above. Then a long way off towards Alkmaar I
+heard bugles, and after that shots, and then a wild clamour of bells. I
+determined to let my men sleep on for as long as they could....
+
+‘The battle was joined with the swiftness of dreaming. I do not think
+it can have been five minutes from the moment when I first became aware
+of the Central European air fleet to the contact of the two forces. I
+saw it quite plainly in silhouette against the luminous blue of the
+northern sky. The allied aeroplanes—they were mostly French—came
+pouring down like a fierce shower upon the middle of the Central
+European fleet. They looked exactly like a coarser sort of rain. There
+was a crackling sound—the first sound I heard—it reminded one of the
+Aurora Borealis, and I supposed it was an interchange of rifle shots.
+There were flashes like summer lightning; and then all the sky became a
+whirling confusion of battle that was still largely noiseless. Some of
+the Central European aeroplanes were certainly charged and overset;
+others seemed to collapse and fall and then flare out with so bright a
+light that it took the edge off one’s vision and made the rest of the
+battle disappear as though it had been snatched back out of sight.
+
+‘And then, while I still peered and tried to shade these flames from my
+eyes with my hand, and while the men about me were beginning to stir,
+the atomic bombs were thrown at the dykes. They made a mighty thunder
+in the air, and fell like Lucifer in the picture, leaving a flaring
+trail in the sky. The night, which had been pellucid and detailed and
+eventful, seemed to vanish, to be replaced abruptly by a black
+background to these tremendous pillars of fire....
+
+‘Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was
+filled with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds....
+
+‘There was something discontinuous in this impact. At one moment I was
+a lonely watcher in a sleeping world; the next saw every one about me
+afoot, the whole world awake and amazed....
+
+‘And then the wind had struck me a buffet, taken my helmet and swept
+aside the summerhouse of _Vreugde bij Vrede_, as a scythe sweeps away
+grass. I saw the bombs fall, and then watched a great crimson flare
+leap responsive to each impact, and mountainous masses of red-lit steam
+and flying fragments clamber up towards the zenith. Against the glare I
+saw the country-side for miles standing black and clear, churches,
+trees, chimneys. And suddenly I understood. The Central Europeans had
+burst the dykes. Those flares meant the bursting of the dykes, and in a
+little while the sea-water would be upon us....’
+
+He goes on to tell with a certain prolixity of the steps he took—and
+all things considered they were very intelligent steps—to meet this
+amazing crisis. He got his men aboard and hailed the adjacent barges;
+he got the man who acted as barge engineer at his post and the engines
+working, he cast loose from his moorings. Then he bethought himself of
+food, and contrived to land five men, get in a few dozen cheeses, and
+ship his men again before the inundation reached them.
+
+He is reasonably proud of this piece of coolness. His idea was to take
+the wave head-on and with his engines full speed ahead. And all the
+while he was thanking heaven he was not in the jam of traffic in the
+main canal. He rather, I think, overestimated the probable rush of
+waters; he dreaded being swept away, he explains, and smashed against
+houses and trees.
+
+He does not give any estimate of the time it took between the bursting
+of the dykes and the arrival of the waters, but it was probably an
+interval of about twenty minutes or half an hour. He was working now in
+darkness—save for the light of his lantern—and in a great wind. He hung
+out head and stern lights....
+
+Whirling torrents of steam were pouring up from the advancing waters,
+which had rushed, it must be remembered, through nearly incandescent
+gaps in the sea defences, and this vast uprush of vapour soon veiled
+the flaring centres of explosion altogether.
+
+‘The waters came at last, an advancing cascade. It was like a broad
+roller sweeping across the country. They came with a deep, roaring
+sound. I had expected a Niagara, but the total fall of the front could
+not have been much more than twelve feet. Our barge hesitated for a
+moment, took a dose over her bows, and then lifted. I signalled for
+full speed ahead and brought her head upstream, and held on like grim
+death to keep her there.
+
+‘There was a wind about as strong as the flood, and I found we were
+pounding against every conceivable buoyant object that had been between
+us and the sea. The only light in the world now came from our lamps,
+the steam became impenetrable at a score of yards from the boat, and
+the roar of the wind and water cut us off from all remoter sounds. The
+black, shining waters swirled by, coming into the light of our lamps
+out of an ebony blackness and vanishing again into impenetrable black.
+And on the waters came shapes, came things that flashed upon us for a
+moment, now a half-submerged boat, now a cow, now a huge fragment of a
+house’s timberings, now a muddle of packing-cases and scaffolding. The
+things clapped into sight like something shown by the opening of a
+shutter, and then bumped shatteringly against us or rushed by us. Once
+I saw very clearly a man’s white face....
+
+‘All the while a group of labouring, half-submerged trees remained
+ahead of us, drawing very slowly nearer. I steered a course to avoid
+them. They seemed to gesticulate a frantic despair against the black
+steam clouds behind. Once a great branch detached itself and tore
+shuddering by me. We did, on the whole, make headway. The last I saw of
+_Vreugde bij Vrede_ before the night swallowed it, was almost dead
+astern of us....’
+
+Section 9
+
+Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had been badly
+strained, and his men were pumping or baling in relays. He had got
+about a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose boat had capsized near
+him, and he had three other boats in tow. He was afloat, and somewhere
+between Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but he could not tell where. It was a
+day that was still half night. Gray waters stretched in every direction
+under a dark gray sky, and out of the waves rose the upper parts of
+houses, in many cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the
+upper third of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted
+a dimly seen flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned,
+furniture, rafts, timbering, and miscellaneous objects.
+
+The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there did a
+dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box or chair or
+such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was not till the
+Thursday that the dead came to the surface in any quantity. The view
+was bounded on every side by a gray mist that closed overhead in a gray
+canopy. The air cleared in the afternoon, and then, far away to the
+west under great banks of steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of
+the atomic bombs came visible across the waste of water.
+
+They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London sunsets.
+‘They sat upon the sea,’ says Barnet, ‘like frayed-out waterlilies of
+flame.’
+
+Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the track
+of the canal, in helping people who were adrift, in picking up derelict
+boats, and in taking people out of imperilled houses. He found other
+military barges similarly employed, and it was only as the day wore on
+and the immediate appeals for aid were satisfied that he thought of
+food and drink for his men, and what course he had better pursue. They
+had a little cheese, but no water. ‘Orders,’ that mysterious direction,
+had at last altogether disappeared. He perceived he had now to act upon
+his own responsibility.
+
+‘One’s sense was of a destruction so far-reaching and of a world so
+altered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and expect to
+find things as they had been before the war began. I sat on the
+quarter-deck with Mylius my engineer and Kemp and two others of the
+non-commissioned officers, and we consulted upon our line of action. We
+were foodless and aimless. We agreed that our fighting value was
+extremely small, and that our first duty was to get ourselves in touch
+with food and instructions again. Whatever plan of campaign had
+directed our movements was manifestly smashed to bits. Mylius was of
+opinion that we could take a line westward and get back to England
+across the North Sea. He calculated that with such a motor barge as
+ours it would be possible to reach the Yorkshire coast within
+four-and-twenty hours. But this idea I overruled because of the
+shortness of our provisions, and more particularly because of our
+urgent need of water.
+
+‘Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their demands did
+much to exasperate our thirst. I decided that if we went away to the
+south we should reach hilly country, or at least country that was not
+submerged, and then we should be able to land, find some stream, drink,
+and get supplies and news. Many of the barges adrift in the haze about
+us were filled with British soldiers and had floated up from the Nord
+See Canal, but none of them were any better informed than ourselves of
+the course of events. “Orders” had, in fact, vanished out of the sky.
+
+‘“Orders” made a temporary reappearance late that evening in the form
+of a megaphone hail from a British torpedo boat, announcing a truce,
+and giving the welcome information that food and water were being
+hurried down the Rhine and were to be found on the barge flotilla lying
+over the old Rhine above Leiden.’...
+
+We will not follow Barnet, however, in the description of his strange
+overland voyage among trees and houses and churches by Zaandam and
+between Haarlem and Amsterdam, to Leiden. It was a voyage in a red-lit
+mist, in a world of steamy silhouette, full of strange voices and
+perplexity, and with every other sensation dominated by a feverish
+thirst. ‘We sat,’ he says, ‘in a little huddled group, saying very
+little, and the men forward were mere knots of silent endurance. Our
+only continuing sound was the persistent mewing of a cat one of the men
+had rescued from a floating hayrick near Zaandam. We kept a southward
+course by a watch-chain compass Mylius had produced....
+
+‘I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army, nor had
+we any strong sense of the war as the dominating fact about us. Our
+mental setting had far more of the effect of a huge natural
+catastrophe. The atomic bombs had dwarfed the international issues to
+complete insignificance. When our minds wandered from the
+preoccupations of our immediate needs, we speculated upon the
+possibility of stopping the use of these frightful explosives before
+the world was utterly destroyed. For to us it seemed quite plain that
+these bombs and the still greater power of destruction of which they
+were the precursors might quite easily shatter every relationship and
+institution of mankind.
+
+‘“What will they be doing,” asked Mylius, “what will they be doing?
+It’s plain we’ve got to put an end to war. It’s plain things have to be
+run some way. _This_—all this—is impossible.”
+
+‘I made no immediate answer. Something—I cannot think what—had brought
+back to me the figure of that man I had seen wounded on the very first
+day of actual fighting. I saw again his angry, tearful eyes, and that
+poor, dripping, bloody mess that had been a skilful human hand five
+minutes before, thrust out in indignant protest. “Damned foolery,” he
+had stormed and sobbed, “damned foolery. My right hand, sir! My _right_
+hand. . . .”
+
+‘My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me. “I think we are
+too—too silly,” I said to Mylius, “ever to stop war. If we’d had the
+sense to do it, we should have done it before this. I think this——” I
+pointed to the gaunt black outline of a smashed windmill that stuck up,
+ridiculous and ugly, above the blood-lit waters—“this is the end.”’
+
+Section 10
+
+But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and his
+barge-load of hungry and starving men.
+
+For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if civilisation
+had come to a final collapse. These crowning buds upon the tradition
+that Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered, opened and flared ‘like
+waterlilies of flame’ over nations destroyed, over churches smashed or
+submerged, towns ruined, fields lost to mankind for ever, and a million
+weltering bodies. Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would the
+flames of war still burn amidst the ruins?
+
+Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance in
+their answers to that question. Already once in the history of mankind,
+in America, before its discovery by the whites, an organised
+civilisation had given way to a mere cult of warfare, specialised and
+cruel, and it seemed for a time to many a thoughtful man as if the
+whole world was but to repeat on a larger scale this ascendancy of the
+warrior, this triumph of the destructive instincts of the race.
+
+The subsequent chapters of Barnet’s narrative do but supply body to
+this tragic possibility. He gives a series of vignettes of
+civilisation, shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found the
+Belgian hills swarming with refugees and desolated by cholera; the
+vestiges of the contending armies keeping order under a truce, without
+actual battles, but with the cautious hostility of habit, and a great
+absence of plan everywhere.
+
+Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were rumours
+of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoy
+and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes. There was the report of
+an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and Japanese, and of some huge
+revolutionary outbreak in America. The weather was stormier than men
+had ever known it in those regions, with much thunder and lightning and
+wild cloud-bursts of rain....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+THE ENDING OF WAR
+
+
+Section 1
+
+On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding two long
+stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to Bellinzona, and
+southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is very
+beautiful in springtime with a great multitude of wild flowers. More
+particularly is this so in early June, when the slender asphodel Saint
+Bruno’s lily, with its spike of white blossom, is in flower. To the
+westward of this delightful shelf there is a deep and densely wooded
+trench, a great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of which
+arise great precipices very high and wild. Above the asphodel fields
+the mountains climb in rocky slopes to solitudes of stone and sunlight
+that curve round and join that wall of cliffs in one common skyline.
+This desolate and austere background contrasts very vividly with the
+glowing serenity of the great lake below, with the spacious view of
+fertile hills and roads and villages and islands to south and east, and
+with the hotly golden rice flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And
+because it was a remote and insignificant place, far away out of the
+crowding tragedies of that year of disaster, away from burning cities
+and starving multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was
+here that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest,
+if possible, before it was too late, the _débâcle_ of civilisation.
+Here, brought together by the indefatigable energy of that impassioned
+humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at Washington, the chief
+Powers of the world were to meet in a last desperate conference to
+‘save humanity.’
+
+Leblanc was one of those ingenuous men whose lot would have been
+insignificant in any period of security, but who have been caught up to
+an immortal _rôle_ in history by the sudden simplification of human
+affairs through some tragical crisis, to the measure of their
+simplicity. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln, and such was Garibaldi. And
+Leblanc, with his transparent childish innocence, his entire
+self-forgetfulness, came into this confusion of distrust and intricate
+disaster with an invincible appeal for the manifest sanities of the
+situation. His voice, when he spoke, was ‘full of remonstrance.’ He was
+a little bald, spectacled man, inspired by that intellectual idealism
+which has been one of the peculiar gifts of France to humanity. He was
+possessed of one clear persuasion, that war must end, and that the only
+way to end war was to have but one government for mankind. He brushed
+aside all other considerations. At the very outbreak of the war, so
+soon as the two capitals of the belligerents had been wrecked, he went
+to the president in the White House with this proposal. He made it as
+if it was a matter of course. He was fortunate to be in Washington and
+in touch with that gigantic childishness which was the characteristic
+of the American imagination. For the Americans also were among the
+simple peoples by whom the world was saved. He won over the American
+president and the American government to his general ideas; at any rate
+they supported him sufficiently to give him a standing with the more
+sceptical European governments, and with this backing he set to work—it
+seemed the most fantastic of enterprises—to bring together all the
+rulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable letters, he
+sent messages, he went desperate journeys, he enlisted whatever support
+he could find; no one was too humble for an ally or too obstinate for
+his advances; through the terrible autumn of the last wars this
+persistent little visionary in spectacles must have seemed rather like
+a hopeful canary twittering during a thunderstorm. And no accumulation
+of disasters daunted his conviction that they could be ended.
+
+For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of
+destruction. Power after Power about the armed globe sought to
+anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium of
+panic, in order to use their bombs first. China and Japan had assailed
+Russia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had attacked Japan,
+India was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit of fire spouting death
+and flame; the redoubtable King of the Balkans was mobilising. It must
+have seemed plain at last to every one in those days that the world was
+slipping headlong to anarchy. By the spring of 1959 from nearly two
+hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the
+unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy
+fabric of the world’s credit had vanished, industry was completely
+disorganised and every city, every thickly populated area was starving
+or trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the capital cities of
+the world were burning; millions of people had already perished, and
+over great areas government was at an end. Humanity has been compared
+by one contemporary writer to a sleeper who handles matches in his
+sleep and wakes to find himself in flames.
+
+For many months it was an open question whether there was to be found
+throughout all the race the will and intelligence to face these new
+conditions and make even an attempt to arrest the downfall of the
+social order. For a time the war spirit defeated every effort to rally
+the forces of preservation and construction. Leblanc seemed to be
+protesting against earthquakes, and as likely to find a spirit of
+reason in the crater of Etna. Even though the shattered official
+governments now clamoured for peace, bands of irreconcilables and
+invincible patriots, usurpers, adventurers, and political desperadoes,
+were everywhere in possession of the simple apparatus for the
+disengagement of atomic energy and the initiation of new centres of
+destruction. The stuff exercised an irresistible fascination upon a
+certain type of mind. Why should any one give in while he can still
+destroy his enemies? Surrender? While there is still a chance of
+blowing them to dust? The power of destruction which had once been the
+ultimate privilege of government was now the only power left in the
+world—and it was everywhere. There were few thoughtful men during that
+phase of blazing waste who did not pass through such moods of despair
+as Barnet describes, and declare with him: ‘This is the end....’
+
+And all the while Leblanc was going to and fro with glittering glasses
+and an inexhaustible persuasiveness, urging the manifest reasonableness
+of his view upon ears that ceased presently to be inattentive. Never at
+any time did he betray a doubt that all this chaotic conflict would
+end. No nurse during a nursery uproar was ever so certain of the
+inevitable ultimate peace. From being treated as an amiable dreamer he
+came by insensible degrees to be regarded as an extravagant
+possibility. Then he began to seem even practicable. The people who
+listened to him in 1958 with a smiling impatience, were eager before
+1959 was four months old to know just exactly what he thought might be
+done. He answered with the patience of a philosopher and the lucidity
+of a Frenchman. He began to receive responses of a more and more
+hopeful type. He came across the Atlantic to Italy, and there he
+gathered in the promises for this congress. He chose those high meadows
+above Brissago for the reasons we have stated. ‘We must get away,’ he
+said, ‘from old associations.’ He set to work requisitioning material
+for his conference with an assurance that was justified by the replies.
+With a slight incredulity the conference which was to begin a new order
+in the world, gathered itself together. Leblanc summoned it without
+arrogance, he controlled it by virtue of an infinite humility. Men
+appeared upon those upland slopes with the apparatus for wireless
+telegraphy; others followed with tents and provisions; a little cable
+was flung down to a convenient point upon the Locarno road below.
+Leblanc arrived, sedulously directing every detail that would affect
+the tone of the assembly. He might have been a courier in advance
+rather than the originator of the gathering. And then there arrived,
+some by the cable, most by aeroplane, a few in other fashions, the men
+who had been called together to confer upon the state of the world. It
+was to be a conference without a name. Nine monarchs, the presidents of
+four republics, a number of ministers and ambassadors, powerful
+journalists, and such-like prominent and influential men, took part in
+it. There were even scientific men; and that world-famous old man,
+Holsten, came with the others to contribute his amateur statecraft to
+the desperate problem of the age. Only Leblanc would have dared so to
+summon figure heads and powers and intelligence, or have had the
+courage to hope for their agreement....
+
+Section 2
+
+And one at least of those who were called to this conference of
+governments came to it on foot. This was King Egbert, the young king of
+the most venerable kingdom in Europe. He was a rebel, and had always
+been of deliberate choice a rebel against the magnificence of his
+position. He affected long pedestrian tours and a disposition to sleep
+in the open air. He came now over the Pass of Sta Maria Maggiore and by
+boat up the lake to Brissago; thence he walked up the mountain, a
+pleasant path set with oaks and sweet chestnut. For provision on the
+walk, for he did not want to hurry, he carried with him a pocketful of
+bread and cheese. A certain small retinue that was necessary to his
+comfort and dignity upon occasions of state he sent on by the cable
+car, and with him walked his private secretary, Firmin, a man who had
+thrown up the Professorship of World Politics in the London School of
+Sociology, Economics, and Political Science, to take up these duties.
+Firmin was a man of strong rather than rapid thought, he had
+anticipated great influence in this new position, and after some years
+he was still only beginning to apprehend how largely his function was
+to listen. Originally he had been something of a thinker upon
+international politics, an authority upon tariffs and strategy, and a
+valued contributor to various of the higher organs of public opinion,
+but the atomic bombs had taken him by surprise, and he had still to
+recover completely from his pre-atomic opinions and the silencing
+effect of those sustained explosives.
+
+The king’s freedom from the trammels of etiquette was very complete. In
+theory—and he abounded in theory—his manners were purely democratic. It
+was by sheer habit and inadvertency that he permitted Firmin, who had
+discovered a rucksack in a small shop in the town below, to carry both
+bottles of beer. The king had never, as a matter of fact, carried
+anything for himself in his life, and he had never noted that he did
+not do so.
+
+‘We will have nobody with us,’ he said, ‘at all. We will be perfectly
+simple.’
+
+So Firmin carried the beer.
+
+As they walked up—it was the king made the pace rather than Firmin—they
+talked of the conference before them, and Firmin, with a certain want
+of assurance that would have surprised him in himself in the days of
+his Professorship, sought to define the policy of his companion. ‘In
+its broader form, sir,’ said Firmin; ‘I admit a certain plausibility in
+this project of Leblanc’s, but I feel that although it may be advisable
+to set up some sort of general control for International affairs—a sort
+of Hague Court with extended powers—that is no reason whatever for
+losing sight of the principles of national and imperial autonomy.’
+
+‘Firmin,’ said the king, ‘I am going to set my brother kings a good
+example.’
+
+Firmin intimated a curiosity that veiled a dread.
+
+‘By chucking all that nonsense,’ said the king.
+
+He quickened his pace as Firmin, who was already a little out of
+breath, betrayed a disposition to reply.
+
+‘I am going to chuck all that nonsense,’ said the king, as Firmin
+prepared to speak. ‘I am going to fling my royalty and empire on the
+table—and declare at once I don’t mean to haggle. It’s haggling—about
+rights—has been the devil in human affairs, for—always. I am going to
+stop this nonsense.’
+
+Firmin halted abruptly. ‘But, sir!’ he cried.
+
+The king stopped six yards ahead of him and looked back at his
+adviser’s perspiring visage.
+
+‘Do you really think, Firmin, that I am here as—as an infernal
+politician to put my crown and my flag and my claims and so forth in
+the way of peace? That little Frenchman is right. You know he is right
+as well as I do. Those things are over. We—we kings and rulers and
+representatives have been at the very heart of the mischief. Of course
+we imply separation, and of course separation means the threat of war,
+and of course the threat of war means the accumulation of more and more
+atomic bombs. The old game’s up. But, I say, we mustn’t stand here, you
+know. The world waits. Don’t you think the old game’s up, Firmin?’
+
+Firmin adjusted a strap, passed a hand over his wet forehead, and
+followed earnestly. ‘I admit, sir,’ he said to a receding back, ‘that
+there has to be some sort of hegemony, some sort of Amphictyonic
+council——’
+
+‘There’s got to be one simple government for all the world,’ said the
+king over his shoulder.
+
+‘But as for a reckless, unqualified abandonment, sir——’
+
+‘_Bang!_’ cried the king.
+
+Firmin made no answer to this interruption. But a faint shadow of
+annoyance passed across his heated features.
+
+‘Yesterday,’ said the king, by way of explanation, ‘the Japanese very
+nearly got San Francisco.’
+
+‘I hadn’t heard, sir.’
+
+‘The Americans ran the Japanese aeroplane down into the sea and there
+the bomb got busted.’
+
+‘Under the sea, sir?’
+
+‘Yes. Submarine volcano. The steam is in sight of the Californian
+coast. It was as near as that. And with things like this happening, you
+want me to go up this hill and haggle. Consider the effect of that upon
+my imperial cousin—and all the others!’
+
+‘_He_ will haggle, sir.’
+
+‘Not a bit of it,’ said the king.
+
+‘But, sir.’
+
+‘Leblanc won’t let him.’
+
+Firmin halted abruptly and gave a vicious pull at the offending strap.
+‘Sir, he will listen to his advisers,’ he said, in a tone that in some
+subtle way seemed to implicate his master with the trouble of the
+knapsack.
+
+The king considered him.
+
+‘We will go just a little higher,’ he said. ‘I want to find this
+unoccupied village they spoke of, and then we will drink that beer. It
+can’t be far. We will drink the beer and throw away the bottles. And
+then, Firmin, I shall ask you to look at things in a more generous
+light.... Because, you know, you must....’
+
+He turned about and for some time the only sound they made was the
+noise of their boots upon the loose stones of the way and the irregular
+breathing of Firmin.
+
+At length, as it seemed to Firmin, or quite soon, as it seemed to the
+king, the gradient of the path diminished, the way widened out, and
+they found themselves in a very beautiful place indeed. It was one of
+those upland clusters of sheds and houses that are still to be found in
+the mountains of North Italy, buildings that were used only in the high
+summer, and which it was the custom to leave locked up and deserted
+through all the winter and spring, and up to the middle of June. The
+buildings were of a soft-toned gray stone, buried in rich green grass,
+shadowed by chestnut trees and lit by an extraordinary blaze of yellow
+broom. Never had the king seen broom so glorious; he shouted at the
+light of it, for it seemed to give out more sunlight even than it
+received; he sat down impulsively on a lichenous stone, tugged out his
+bread and cheese, and bade Firmin thrust the beer into the shaded weeds
+to cool.
+
+‘The things people miss, Firmin,’ he said, ‘who go up into the air in
+ships!’
+
+Firmin looked around him with an ungenial eye. ‘You see it at its best,
+sir,’ he said, ‘before the peasants come here again and make it
+filthy.’
+
+‘It would be beautiful anyhow,’ said the king.
+
+‘Superficially, sir,’ said Firmin. ‘But it stands for a social order
+that is fast vanishing away. Indeed, judging by the grass between the
+stones and in the huts, I am inclined to doubt if it is in use even
+now.’
+
+‘I suppose,’ said the king, ‘they would come up immediately the hay on
+this flower meadow is cut. It would be those slow, creamy-coloured
+beasts, I expect, one sees on the roads below, and swarthy girls with
+red handkerchiefs over their black hair.... It is wonderful to think
+how long that beautiful old life lasted. In the Roman times and long
+ages before ever the rumour of the Romans had come into these parts,
+men drove their cattle up into these places as the summer came on....
+How haunted is this place! There have been quarrels here, hopes,
+children have played here and lived to be old crones and old gaffers,
+and died, and so it has gone on for thousands of lives. Lovers,
+innumerable lovers, have caressed amidst this golden broom....’
+
+He meditated over a busy mouthful of bread and cheese.
+
+‘We ought to have brought a tankard for that beer,’ he said.
+
+Firmin produced a folding aluminium cup, and the king was pleased to
+drink.
+
+‘I wish, sir,’ said Firmin suddenly, ‘I could induce you at least to
+delay your decision——’
+
+‘It’s no good talking, Firmin,’ said the king. ‘My mind’s as clear as
+daylight.’
+
+‘Sire,’ protested Firmin, with his voice full of bread and cheese and
+genuine emotion, ‘have you no respect for your kingship?’
+
+The king paused before he answered with unwonted gravity. ‘It’s just
+because I have, Firmin, that I won’t be a puppet in this game of
+international politics.’ He regarded his companion for a moment and
+then remarked: ‘Kingship!—what do _you_ know of kingship, Firmin?
+
+‘Yes,’ cried the king to his astonished counsellor. ‘For the first time
+in my life I am going to be a king. I am going to lead, and lead by my
+own authority. For a dozen generations my family has been a set of
+dummies in the hands of their advisers. Advisers! Now I am going to be
+a real king—and I am going to—to abolish, dispose of, finish, the crown
+to which I have been a slave. But what a world of paralysing shams this
+roaring stuff has ended! The rigid old world is in the melting-pot
+again, and I, who seemed to be no more than the stuffing inside a regal
+robe, I am a king among kings. I have to play my part at the head of
+things and put an end to blood and fire and idiot disorder.’
+
+‘But, sir,’ protested Firmin.
+
+‘This man Leblanc is right. The whole world has got to be a Republic,
+one and indivisible. You know that, and my duty is to make that easy. A
+king should lead his people; you want me to stick on their backs like
+some Old Man of the Sea. To-day must be a sacrament of kings. Our trust
+for mankind is done with and ended. We must part our robes among them,
+we must part our kingship among them, and say to them all, now the king
+in every one must rule the world.... Have you no sense of the
+magnificence of this occasion? You want me, Firmin, you want me to go
+up there and haggle like a damned little solicitor for some price, some
+compensation, some qualification....’
+
+Firmin shrugged his shoulders and assumed an expression of despair.
+Meanwhile, he conveyed, one must eat.
+
+For a time neither spoke, and the king ate and turned over in his mind
+the phrases of the speech he intended to make to the conference. By
+virtue of the antiquity of his crown he was to preside, and he intended
+to make his presidency memorable. Reassured of his eloquence, he
+considered the despondent and sulky Firmin for a space.
+
+‘Firmin,’ he said, ‘you have idealised kingship.’
+
+‘It has been my dream, sir,’ said Firmin sorrowfully, ‘to serve.’
+
+‘At the levers, Firmin,’ said the king.
+
+‘You are pleased to be unjust,’ said Firmin, deeply hurt.
+
+‘I am pleased to be getting out of it,’ said the king.
+
+‘Oh, Firmin,’ he went on, ‘have you no thought for me? Will you never
+realise that I am not only flesh and blood but an imagination—with its
+rights. I am a king in revolt against that fetter they put upon my
+head. I am a king awake. My reverend grandparents never in all their
+august lives had a waking moment. They loved the job that you, you
+advisers, gave them; they never had a doubt of it. It was like giving a
+doll to a woman who ought to have a child. They delighted in
+processions and opening things and being read addresses to, and
+visiting triplets and nonagenarians and all that sort of thing.
+Incredibly. They used to keep albums of cuttings from all the
+illustrated papers showing them at it, and if the press-cutting parcels
+grew thin they were worried. It was all that ever worried them. But
+there is something atavistic in me; I hark back to unconstitutional
+monarchs. They christened me too retrogressively, I think. I wanted to
+get things done. I was bored. I might have fallen into vice, most
+intelligent and energetic princes do, but the palace precautions were
+unusually thorough. I was brought up in the purest court the world has
+ever seen.... Alertly pure.... So I read books, Firmin, and went about
+asking questions. The thing was bound to happen to one of us sooner or
+later. Perhaps, too, very likely I’m not vicious. I don’t think I am.’
+
+He reflected. ‘No,’ he said.
+
+Firmin cleared his throat. ‘I don’t think you are, sir,’ he said. ‘You
+prefer——’
+
+He stopped short. He had been going to say ‘talking.’ He substituted
+‘ideas.’
+
+‘That world of royalty!’ the king went on. ‘In a little while no one
+will understand it any more. It will become a riddle....
+
+‘Among other things, it was a world of perpetual best clothes.
+Everything was in its best clothes for us, and usually wearing bunting.
+With a cinema watching to see we took it properly. If you are a king,
+Firmin, and you go and look at a regiment, it instantly stops whatever
+it is doing, changes into full uniform and presents arms. When my
+august parents went in a train the coal in the tender used to be
+whitened. It did, Firmin, and if coal had been white instead of black I
+have no doubt the authorities would have blackened it. That was the
+spirit of our treatment. People were always walking about with their
+faces to us. One never saw anything in profile. One got an impression
+of a world that was insanely focused on ourselves. And when I began to
+poke my little questions into the Lord Chancellor and the archbishop
+and all the rest of them, about what I should see if people turned
+round, the general effect I produced was that I wasn’t by any means
+displaying the Royal Tact they had expected of me....’
+
+He meditated for a time.
+
+‘And yet, you know, there is something in the kingship, Firmin. It
+stiffened up my august little grandfather. It gave my grandmother a
+kind of awkward dignity even when she was cross—and she was very often
+cross. They both had a profound sense of responsibility. My poor
+father’s health was wretched during his brief career; nobody outside
+the circle knows just how he screwed himself up to things. “My people
+expect it,” he used to say of this tiresome duty or that. Most of the
+things they made him do were silly—it was part of a bad tradition, but
+there was nothing silly in the way he set about them.... The spirit of
+kingship is a fine thing, Firmin; I feel it in my bones; I do not know
+what I might not be if I were not a king. I could die for my people,
+Firmin, and you couldn’t. No, don’t say you could die for me, because I
+know better. Don’t think I forget my kingship, Firmin, don’t imagine
+that. I am a king, a kingly king, by right divine. The fact that I am
+also a chattering young man makes not the slightest difference to that.
+But the proper text-book for kings, Firmin, is none of the court
+memoirs and Welt-Politik books you would have me read; it is old
+Fraser’s _Golden Bough_. Have you read that, Firmin?’
+
+Firmin had. ‘Those were the authentic kings. In the end they were cut
+up and a bit given to everybody. They sprinkled the nations—with
+Kingship.’
+
+Firmin turned himself round and faced his royal master.
+
+‘What do you intend to do, sir?’ he asked. ‘If you will not listen to
+me, what do you propose to do this afternoon?’
+
+The king flicked crumbs from his coat.
+
+‘Manifestly war has to stop for ever, Firmin. Manifestly this can only
+be done by putting all the world under one government. Our crowns and
+flags are in the way. Manifestly they must go.’
+
+‘Yes, sir,’ interrupted Firmin, ‘but _what_ government? I don’t see
+what government you get by a universal abdication!’
+
+‘Well,’ said the king, with his hands about his knees, ‘_We_ shall be
+the government.’
+
+‘The conference?’ exclaimed Firmin.
+
+‘Who else?’ asked the king simply.
+
+‘It’s perfectly simple,’ he added to Firmin’s tremendous silence.
+
+‘But,’ cried Firmin, ‘you must have sanctions! Will there be no form of
+election, for example?’
+
+‘Why should there be?’ asked the king, with intelligent curiosity.
+
+‘The consent of the governed.’
+
+‘Firmin, we are just going to lay down our differences and take over
+government. Without any election at all. Without any sanction. The
+governed will show their consent by silence. If any effective
+opposition arises we shall ask it to come in and help. The true
+sanction of kingship is the grip upon the sceptre. We aren’t going to
+worry people to vote for us. I’m certain the mass of men does not want
+to be bothered with such things.... We’ll contrive a way for any one
+interested to join in. That’s quite enough in the way of democracy.
+Perhaps later—when things don’t matter.... We shall govern all right,
+Firmin. Government only becomes difficult when the lawyers get hold of
+it, and since these troubles began the lawyers are shy. Indeed, come to
+think of it, I wonder where all the lawyers are.... Where are they? A
+lot, of course, were bagged, some of the worst ones, when they blew up
+my legislature. You never knew the late Lord Chancellor....
+
+‘Necessities bury rights. And create them. Lawyers live on dead rights
+disinterred.... We’ve done with that way of living. We won’t have more
+law than a code can cover and beyond that government will be free....
+
+‘Before the sun sets to-day, Firmin, trust me, we shall have made our
+abdications, all of us, and declared the World Republic, supreme and
+indivisible. I wonder what my august grandmother would have made of it!
+All my rights! . . . And then we shall go on governing. What else is
+there to do? All over the world we shall declare that there is no
+longer mine or thine, but ours. China, the United States, two-thirds of
+Europe, will certainly fall in and obey. They will have to do so. What
+else can they do? Their official rulers are here with us. They won’t be
+able to get together any sort of idea of not obeying us.... Then we
+shall declare that every sort of property is held in trust for the
+Republic....’
+
+‘But, sir!’ cried Firmin, suddenly enlightened. ‘Has this been arranged
+already?’
+
+‘My dear Firmin, do you think we have come here, all of us, to talk at
+large? The talking has been done for half a century. Talking and
+writing. We are here to set the new thing, the simple, obvious,
+necessary thing, going.’
+
+He stood up.
+
+Firmin, forgetting the habits of a score of years, remained seated.
+
+‘_Well_,’ he said at last. ‘And I have known nothing!’
+
+The king smiled very cheerfully. He liked these talks with Firmin.
+
+Section 3
+
+That conference upon the Brissago meadows was one of the most
+heterogeneous collections of prominent people that has ever met
+together. Principalities and powers, stripped and shattered until all
+their pride and mystery were gone, met in a marvellous new humility.
+Here were kings and emperors whose capitals were lakes of flaming
+destruction, statesmen whose countries had become chaos, scared
+politicians and financial potentates. Here were leaders of thought and
+learned investigators dragged reluctantly to the control of affairs.
+Altogether there were ninety-three of them, Leblanc’s conception of the
+head men of the world. They had all come to the realisation of the
+simple truths that the indefatigable Leblanc had hammered into them;
+and, drawing his resources from the King of Italy, he had provisioned
+his conference with a generous simplicity quite in accordance with the
+rest of his character, and so at last was able to make his astonishing
+and entirely rational appeal. He had appointed King Egbert the
+president, he believed in this young man so firmly that he completely
+dominated him, and he spoke himself as a secretary might speak from the
+president’s left hand, and evidently did not realise himself that he
+was telling them all exactly what they had to do. He imagined he was
+merely recapitulating the obvious features of the situation for their
+convenience. He was dressed in ill-fitting white silk clothes, and he
+consulted a dingy little packet of notes as he spoke. They put him out.
+He explained that he had never spoken from notes before, but that this
+occasion was exceptional.
+
+And then King Egbert spoke as he was expected to speak, and Leblanc’s
+spectacles moistened at that flow of generous sentiment, most amiably
+and lightly expressed. ‘We haven’t to stand on ceremony,’ said the
+king, ‘we have to govern the world. We have always pretended to govern
+the world and here is our opportunity.’
+
+‘Of course,’ whispered Leblanc, nodding his head rapidly, ‘of course.’
+
+‘The world has been smashed up, and we have to put it on its wheels
+again,’ said King Egbert. ‘And it is the simple common sense of this
+crisis for all to help and none to seek advantage. Is that our tone or
+not?’
+
+The gathering was too old and seasoned and miscellaneous for any great
+displays of enthusiasm, but that was its tone, and with an astonishment
+that somehow became exhilarating it began to resign, repudiate, and
+declare its intentions. Firmin, taking notes behind his master, heard
+everything that had been foretold among the yellow broom, come true.
+With a queer feeling that he was dreaming, he assisted at the
+proclamation of the World State, and saw the message taken out to the
+wireless operators to be throbbed all round the habitable globe. ‘And
+next,’ said King Egbert, with a cheerful excitement in his voice, ‘we
+have to get every atom of Carolinum and all the plant for making it,
+into our control....’
+
+Firmin was not alone in his incredulity. Not a man there who was not a
+very amiable, reasonable, benevolent creature at bottom; some had been
+born to power and some had happened upon it, some had struggled to get
+it, not clearly knowing what it was and what it implied, but none was
+irreconcilably set upon its retention at the price of cosmic disaster.
+Their minds had been prepared by circumstances and sedulously
+cultivated by Leblanc; and now they took the broad obvious road along
+which King Egbert was leading them, with a mingled conviction of
+strangeness and necessity. Things went very smoothly; the King of Italy
+explained the arrangements that had been made for the protection of the
+camp from any fantastic attack; a couple of thousand of aeroplanes,
+each carrying a sharpshooter, guarded them, and there was an excellent
+system of relays, and at night all the sky would be searched by scores
+of lights, and the admirable Leblanc gave luminous reasons for their
+camping just where they were and going on with their administrative
+duties forthwith. He knew of this place, because he had happened upon
+it when holiday-making with Madame Leblanc twenty years and more ago.
+‘There is very simple fare at present,’ he explained, ‘on account of
+the disturbed state of the countries about us. But we have excellent
+fresh milk, good red wine, beef, bread, salad, and lemons.... In a few
+days I hope to place things in the hands of a more efficient
+caterer....’
+
+The members of the new world government dined at three long tables on
+trestles, and down the middle of these tables Leblanc, in spite of the
+barrenness of his menu, had contrived to have a great multitude of
+beautiful roses. There was similar accommodation for the secretaries
+and attendants at a lower level down the mountain. The assembly dined
+as it had debated, in the open air, and over the dark crags to the west
+the glowing June sunset shone upon the banquet. There was no precedency
+now among the ninety-three, and King Egbert found himself between a
+pleasant little Japanese stranger in spectacles and his cousin of
+Central Europe, and opposite a great Bengali leader and the President
+of the United States of America. Beyond the Japanese was Holsten, the
+old chemist, and Leblanc was a little way down the other side.
+
+The king was still cheerfully talkative and abounded in ideas. He fell
+presently into an amiable controversy with the American, who seemed to
+feel a lack of impressiveness in the occasion.
+
+It was ever the Transatlantic tendency, due, no doubt, to the necessity
+of handling public questions in a bulky and striking manner, to
+over-emphasise and over-accentuate, and the president was touched by
+his national failing. He suggested now that there should be a new era,
+starting from that day as the first day of the first year.
+
+The king demurred.
+
+‘From this day forth, sir, man enters upon his heritage,’ said the
+American.
+
+‘Man,’ said the king, ‘is always entering upon his heritage. You
+Americans have a peculiar weakness for anniversaries—if you will
+forgive me saying so. Yes—I accuse you of a lust for dramatic effect.
+Everything is happening always, but you want to say this or this is the
+real instant in time and subordinate all the others to it.’
+
+The American said something about an epoch-making day.
+
+‘But surely,’ said the king, ‘you don’t want us to condemn all humanity
+to a world-wide annual Fourth of July for ever and ever more. On
+account of this harmless necessary day of declarations. No conceivable
+day could ever deserve that. Ah! you do not know, as I do, the
+devastations of the memorable. My poor grandparents were—_rubricated_.
+The worst of these huge celebrations is that they break up the
+dignified succession of one’s contemporary emotions. They interrupt.
+They set back. Suddenly out come the flags and fireworks, and the old
+enthusiasms are furbished up—and it’s sheer destruction of the proper
+thing that ought to be going on. Sufficient unto the day is the
+celebration thereof. Let the dead past bury its dead. You see, in
+regard to the calendar, I am for democracy and you are for aristocracy.
+All things I hold, are august, and have a right to be lived through on
+their merits. No day should be sacrificed on the grave of departed
+events. What do you think of it, Wilhelm?’
+
+‘For the noble, yes, all days should be noble.’
+
+‘Exactly my position,’ said the king, and felt pleased at what he had
+been saying.
+
+And then, since the American pressed his idea, the king contrived to
+shift the talk from the question of celebrating the epoch they were
+making to the question of the probabilities that lay ahead. Here every
+one became diffident. They could see the world unified and at peace,
+but what detail was to follow from that unification they seemed
+indisposed to discuss. This diffidence struck the king as remarkable.
+He plunged upon the possibilities of science. All the huge expenditure
+that had hitherto gone into unproductive naval and military
+preparations, must now, he declared, place research upon a new footing.
+‘Where one man worked we will have a thousand.’ He appealed to Holsten.
+‘We have only begun to peep into these possibilities,’ he said. ‘You at
+any rate have sounded the vaults of the treasure house.’
+
+‘They are unfathomable,’ smiled Holsten.
+
+‘Man,’ said the American, with a manifest resolve to justify and
+reinstate himself after the flickering contradictions of the king,
+‘Man, I say, is only beginning to enter upon his heritage.’
+
+‘Tell us some of the things you believe we shall presently learn, give
+us an idea of the things we may presently do,’ said the king to
+Holsten.
+
+Holsten opened out the vistas....
+
+‘Science,’ the king cried presently, ‘is the new king of the world.’
+
+‘_Our_ view,’ said the president, ‘is that sovereignty resides with the
+people.’
+
+‘No!’ said the king, ‘the sovereign is a being more subtle than that.
+And less arithmetical. Neither my family nor your emancipated people.
+It is something that floats about us, and above us, and through us. It
+is that common impersonal will and sense of necessity of which Science
+is the best understood and most typical aspect. It is the mind of the
+race. It is that which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to
+its demands....’
+
+He paused and glanced down the table at Leblanc, and then re-opened at
+his former antagonist.
+
+‘There is a disposition,’ said the king, ‘to regard this gathering as
+if it were actually doing what it appears to be doing, as if we
+ninety-odd men of our own free will and wisdom were unifying the world.
+There is a temptation to consider ourselves exceptionally fine fellows,
+and masterful men, and all the rest of it. We are not. I doubt if we
+should average out as anything abler than any other casually selected
+body of ninety-odd men. We are no creators, we are consequences, we are
+salvagers—or salvagees. The thing to-day is not ourselves but the wind
+of conviction that has blown us hither....’
+
+The American had to confess he could hardly agree with the king’s
+estimate of their average.
+
+‘Holsten, perhaps, and one or two others, might lift us a little,’ the
+king conceded. ‘But the rest of us?’
+
+His eyes flitted once more towards Leblanc.
+
+‘Look at Leblanc,’ he said. ‘He’s just a simple soul. There are
+hundreds and thousands like him. I admit, a certain dexterity, a
+certain lucidity, but there is not a country town in France where there
+is not a Leblanc or so to be found about two o’clock in its principal
+café. It’s just that he isn’t complicated or Super-Mannish, or any of
+those things that has made all he has done possible. But in happier
+times, don’t you think, Wilhelm, he would have remained just what his
+father was, a successful _épicier_, very clean, very accurate, very
+honest. And on holidays he would have gone out with Madame Leblanc and
+her knitting in a punt with a jar of something gentle and have sat
+under a large reasonable green-lined umbrella and fished very neatly
+and successfully for gudgeon....’
+
+The president and the Japanese prince in spectacles protested together.
+
+‘If I do him an injustice,’ said the king, ‘it is only because I want
+to elucidate my argument. I want to make it clear how small are men and
+days, and how great is man in comparison....’
+
+Section 4
+
+So it was King Egbert talked at Brissago after they had proclaimed the
+unity of the world. Every evening after that the assembly dined
+together and talked at their ease and grew accustomed to each other and
+sharpened each other’s ideas, and every day they worked together, and
+really for a time believed that they were inventing a new government
+for the world. They discussed a constitution. But there were matters
+needing attention too urgently to wait for any constitution. They
+attended to these incidentally. The constitution it was that waited. It
+was presently found convenient to keep the constitution waiting
+indefinitely as King Egbert had foreseen, and meanwhile, with an
+increasing self-confidence, that council went on governing....
+
+On this first evening of all the council’s gatherings, after King
+Egbert had talked for a long time and drunken and praised very
+abundantly the simple red wine of the country that Leblanc had procured
+for them, he gathered about him a group of congenial spirits and fell
+into a discourse upon simplicity, praising it above all things and
+declaring that the ultimate aim of art, religion, philosophy, and
+science alike was to simplify. He instanced himself as a devotee to
+simplicity. And Leblanc he instanced as a crowning instance of the
+splendour of this quality. Upon that they all agreed.
+
+When at last the company about the tables broke up, the king found
+himself brimming over with a peculiar affection and admiration for
+Leblanc, he made his way to him and drew him aside and broached what he
+declared was a small matter. There was, he said, a certain order in his
+gift that, unlike all other orders and decorations in the world, had
+never been corrupted. It was reserved for elderly men of supreme
+distinction, the acuteness of whose gifts was already touched to
+mellowness, and it had included the greatest names of every age so far
+as the advisers of his family had been able to ascertain them. At
+present, the king admitted, these matters of stars and badges were
+rather obscured by more urgent affairs, for his own part he had never
+set any value upon them at all, but a time might come when they would
+be at least interesting, and in short he wished to confer the Order of
+Merit upon Leblanc. His sole motive in doing so, he added, was his
+strong desire to signalise his personal esteem. He laid his hand upon
+the Frenchman’s shoulder as he said these things, with an almost
+brotherly affection. Leblanc received this proposal with a modest
+confusion that greatly enhanced the king’s opinion of his admirable
+simplicity. He pointed out that eager as he was to snatch at the
+proffered distinction, it might at the present stage appear invidious,
+and he therefore suggested that the conferring of it should be
+postponed until it could be made the crown and conclusion of his
+services. The king was unable to shake this resolution, and the two men
+parted with expressions of mutual esteem.
+
+The king then summoned Firmin in order to make a short note of a number
+of things that he had said during the day. But after about twenty
+minutes’ work the sweet sleepiness of the mountain air overcame him,
+and he dismissed Firmin and went to bed and fell asleep at once, and
+slept with extreme satisfaction. He had had an active, agreeable day.
+
+Section 5
+
+The establishment of the new order that was thus so humanly begun, was,
+if one measures it by the standard of any preceding age, a rapid
+progress. The fighting spirit of the world was exhausted. Only here or
+there did fierceness linger. For long decades the combative side in
+human affairs had been monstrously exaggerated by the accidents of
+political separation. This now became luminously plain. An enormous
+proportion of the force that sustained armaments had been nothing more
+aggressive than the fear of war and warlike neighbours. It is doubtful
+if any large section of the men actually enlisted for fighting ever at
+any time really hungered and thirsted for bloodshed and danger. That
+kind of appetite was probably never very strong in the species after
+the savage stage was past. The army was a profession, in which killing
+had become a disagreeable possibility rather than an eventful
+certainty. If one reads the old newspapers and periodicals of that
+time, which did so much to keep militarism alive, one finds very little
+about glory and adventure and a constant harping on the
+disagreeableness of invasion and subjugation. In one word, militarism
+was funk. The belligerent resolution of the armed Europe of the
+twentieth century was the resolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to
+plunge. And now that its weapons were exploding in its hands, Europe
+was only too eager to drop them, and abandon this fancied refuge of
+violence.
+
+For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness; nearly all
+the clever people who had hitherto sustained the ancient belligerent
+separations had now been brought to realise the need for simplicity of
+attitude and openness of mind; and in this atmosphere of moral
+renascence, there was little attempt to get negotiable advantages out
+of resistance to the new order. Human beings are foolish enough no
+doubt, but few have stopped to haggle in a fire-escape. The council had
+its way with them. The band of ‘patriots’ who seized the laboratories
+and arsenal just outside Osaka and tried to rouse Japan to revolt
+against inclusion in the Republic of Mankind, found they had
+miscalculated the national pride and met the swift vengeance of their
+own countrymen. That fight in the arsenal was a vivid incident in this
+closing chapter of the history of war. To the last the ‘patriots’ were
+undecided whether, in the event of a defeat, they would explode their
+supply of atomic bombs or not. They were fighting with swords outside
+the iridium doors, and the moderates of their number were at bay and on
+the verge of destruction, only ten, indeed, remained unwounded, when
+the republicans burst in to the rescue....
+
+Section 6
+
+One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in the new
+rule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism, the ‘Slavic
+Fox,’ the King of the Balkans. He debated and delayed his submissions.
+He showed an extraordinary combination of cunning and temerity in his
+evasion of the repeated summonses from Brissago. He affected ill-health
+and a great preoccupation with his new official mistress, for his
+semi-barbaric court was arranged on the best romantic models. His
+tactics were ably seconded by Doctor Pestovitch, his chief minister.
+Failing to establish his claims to complete independence, King
+Ferdinand Charles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be treated as
+a protected state. Finally he professed an unconvincing submission, and
+put a mass of obstacles in the way of the transfer of his national
+officials to the new government. In these things he was
+enthusiastically supported by his subjects, still for the most part an
+illiterate peasantry, passionately if confusedly patriotic, and so far
+with no practical knowledge of the effect of atomic bombs. More
+particularly he retained control of all the Balkan aeroplanes.
+
+For once the extreme _naïveté_ of Leblanc seems to have been mitigated
+by duplicity. He went on with the general pacification of the world as
+if the Balkan submission was made in absolute good faith, and he
+announced the disbandment of the force of aeroplanes that hitherto
+guarded the council at Brissago upon the approaching fifteenth of July.
+But instead he doubled the number upon duty on that eventful day, and
+made various arrangements for their disposition. He consulted certain
+experts, and when he took King Egbert into his confidence there was
+something in his neat and explicit foresight that brought back to that
+ex-monarch’s mind his half-forgotten fantasy of Leblanc as a fisherman
+under a green umbrella.
+
+About five o’clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one of the
+outer sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring unobtrusively
+over the lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted and hailed a strange
+aeroplane that was flying westward, and, failing to get a satisfactory
+reply, set its wireless apparatus talking and gave chase. A swarm of
+consorts appeared very promptly over the westward mountains, and before
+the unknown aeroplane had sighted Como, it had a dozen eager attendants
+closing in upon it. Its driver seems to have hesitated, dropped down
+among the mountains, and then turned southward in flight, only to find
+an intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows. He then went round
+into the eye of the rising sun, and passed within a hundred yards of
+his original pursuer.
+
+The sharpshooter therein opened fire at once, and showed an intelligent
+grasp of the situation by disabling the passenger first. The man at the
+wheel must have heard his companion cry out behind him, but he was too
+intent on getting away to waste even a glance behind. Twice after that
+he must have heard shots. He let his engine go, he crouched down, and
+for twenty minutes he must have steered in the continual expectation of
+a bullet. It never came, and when at last he glanced round, three great
+planes were close upon him, and his companion, thrice hit, lay dead
+across his bombs. His followers manifestly did not mean either to upset
+or shoot him, but inexorably they drove him down, down. At last he was
+curving and flying a hundred yards or less over the level fields of
+rice and maize. Ahead of him and dark against the morning sunrise was a
+village with a very tall and slender campanile and a line of cable
+bearing metal standards that he could not clear. He stopped his engine
+abruptly and dropped flat. He may have hoped to get at the bombs when
+he came down, but his pitiless pursuers drove right over him and shot
+him as he fell.
+
+Three other aeroplanes curved down and came to rest amidst grass close
+by the smashed machine. Their passengers descended, and ran, holding
+their light rifles in their hands towards the _débris_ and the two dead
+men. The coffin-shaped box that had occupied the centre of the machine
+had broken, and three black objects, each with two handles like the
+ears of a pitcher, lay peacefully amidst the litter.
+
+These objects were so tremendously important in the eyes of their
+captors that they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and
+broken amidst the wreckage as they might have disregarded dead frogs by
+a country pathway.
+
+‘By God,’ cried the first. ‘Here they are!’
+
+‘And unbroken!’ said the second.
+
+‘I’ve never seen the things before,’ said the first.
+
+‘Bigger than I thought,’ said the second.
+
+The third comer arrived. He stared for a moment at the bombs and then
+turned his eyes to the dead man with a crushed chest who lay in a muddy
+place among the green stems under the centre of the machine.
+
+‘One can take no risks,’ he said, with a faint suggestion of apology.
+
+The other two now also turned to the victims. ‘We must signal,’ said
+the first man. A shadow passed between them and the sun, and they
+looked up to see the aeroplane that had fired the last shot. ‘Shall we
+signal?’ came a megaphone hail.
+
+‘Three bombs,’ they answered together.
+
+‘Where do they come from?’ asked the megaphone.
+
+The three sharpshooters looked at each other and then moved towards the
+dead men. One of them had an idea. ‘Signal that first,’ he said, ‘while
+we look.’ They were joined by their aviators for the search, and all
+six men began a hunt that was necessarily brutal in its haste, for some
+indication of identity. They examined the men’s pockets, their
+bloodstained clothes, the machine, the framework. They turned the
+bodies over and flung them aside. There was not a tattoo mark....
+Everything was elaborately free of any indication of its origin.
+
+‘We can’t find out!’ they called at last.
+
+‘Not a sign?’
+
+‘Not a sign.’
+
+‘I’m coming down,’ said the man overhead....
+
+Section 7
+
+The Slavic fox stood upon a metal balcony in his picturesque Art
+Nouveau palace that gave upon the precipice that overhung his bright
+little capital, and beside him stood Pestovitch, grizzled and cunning,
+and now full of an ill-suppressed excitement. Behind them the window
+opened into a large room, richly decorated in aluminium and crimson
+enamel, across which the king, as he glanced ever and again over his
+shoulder with a gesture of inquiry, could see through the two open
+doors of a little azure walled antechamber the wireless operator in the
+turret working at his incessant transcription. Two pompously uniformed
+messengers waited listlessly in this apartment. The room was furnished
+with a stately dignity, and had in the middle of it a big green
+baize-covered table with the massive white metal inkpots and antiquated
+sandboxes natural to a new but romantic monarchy. It was the king’s
+council chamber and about it now, in attitudes of suspended intrigue,
+stood the half-dozen ministers who constituted his cabinet. They had
+been summoned for twelve o’clock, but still at half-past twelve the
+king loitered in the balcony and seemed to be waiting for some news
+that did not come.
+
+The king and his minister had talked at first in whispers; they had
+fallen silent, for they found little now to express except a vague
+anxiety. Away there on the mountain side were the white metal roofs of
+the long farm buildings beneath which the bomb factory and the bombs
+were hidden. (The chemist who had made all these for the king had died
+suddenly after the declaration of Brissago.) Nobody knew of that store
+of mischief now but the king and his adviser and three heavily faithful
+attendants; the aviators who waited now in the midday blaze with their
+bomb-carrying machines and their passenger bomb-throwers in the
+exercising grounds of the motor-cyclist barracks below were still in
+ignorance of the position of the ammunition they were presently to take
+up. It was time they started if the scheme was to work as Pestovitch
+had planned it. It was a magnificent plan. It aimed at no less than the
+Empire of the World. The government of idealists and professors away
+there at Brissago was to be blown to fragments, and then east, west,
+north, and south those aeroplanes would go swarming over a world that
+had disarmed itself, to proclaim Ferdinand Charles, the new Cæsar, the
+Master, Lord of the Earth. It was a magnificent plan. But the tension
+of this waiting for news of the success of the first blow
+was—considerable.
+
+The Slavic fox was of a pallid fairness, he had a remarkably long nose,
+a thick, short moustache, and small blue eyes that were a little too
+near together to be pleasant. It was his habit to worry his moustache
+with short, nervous tugs whenever his restless mind troubled him, and
+now this motion was becoming so incessant that it irked Pestovitch
+beyond the limits of endurance.
+
+‘I will go,’ said the minister, ‘and see what the trouble is with the
+wireless. They give us nothing, good or bad.’
+
+Left to himself, the king could worry his moustache without stint; he
+leant his elbows forward on the balcony and gave both of his long white
+hands to the work, so that he looked like a pale dog gnawing a bone.
+Suppose they caught his men, what should he do? Suppose they caught his
+men?
+
+The clocks in the light gold-capped belfries of the town below
+presently intimated the half-hour after midday.
+
+Of course, he and Pestovitch had thought it out. Even if they had
+caught those men, they were pledged to secrecy.... Probably they would
+be killed in the catching.... One could deny anyhow, deny and deny.
+
+And then he became aware of half a dozen little shining specks very
+high in the blue.... Pestovitch came out to him presently. ‘The
+government messages, sire, have all dropped into cipher,’ he said. ‘I
+have set a man——’
+
+‘_look!_’ interrupted the king, and pointed upward with a long, lean
+finger.
+
+Pestovitch followed that indication and then glanced for one
+questioning moment at the white face before him.
+
+‘We have to face it out, sire,’ he said.
+
+For some moments they watched the steep spirals of the descending
+messengers, and then they began a hasty consultation....
+
+They decided that to be holding a council upon the details of an
+ultimate surrender to Brissago was as innocent-looking a thing as the
+king could well be doing, and so, when at last the ex-king Egbert, whom
+the council had sent as its envoy, arrived upon the scene, he
+discovered the king almost theatrically posed at the head of his
+councillors in the midst of his court. The door upon the wireless
+operators was shut.
+
+The ex-king from Brissago came like a draught through the curtains and
+attendants that gave a wide margin to King Ferdinand’s state, and the
+familiar confidence of his manner belied a certain hardness in his eye.
+Firmin trotted behind him, and no one else was with him. And as
+Ferdinand Charles rose to greet him, there came into the heart of the
+Balkan king again that same chilly feeling that he had felt upon the
+balcony—and it passed at the careless gestures of his guest. For surely
+any one might outwit this foolish talker who, for a mere idea and at
+the command of a little French rationalist in spectacles, had thrown
+away the most ancient crown in all the world.
+
+One must deny, deny....
+
+And then slowly and quite tiresomely he realised that there was nothing
+to deny. His visitor, with an amiable ease, went on talking about
+everything in debate between himself and Brissago except——.
+
+Could it be that they had been delayed? Could it be that they had had
+to drop for repairs and were still uncaptured? Could it be that even
+now while this fool babbled, they were over there among the mountains
+heaving their deadly charge over the side of the aeroplane?
+
+Strange hopes began to lift the tail of the Slavic fox again.
+
+What was the man saying? One must talk to him anyhow until one knew. At
+any moment the little brass door behind him might open with the news of
+Brissago blown to atoms. Then it would be a delightful relief to the
+present tension to arrest this chatterer forthwith. He might be killed
+perhaps. What?
+
+The king was repeating his observation. ‘They have a ridiculous fancy
+that your confidence is based on the possession of atomic bombs.’
+
+King Ferdinand Charles pulled himself together. He protested.
+
+‘Oh, quite so,’ said the ex-king, ‘quite so.’
+
+‘What grounds?’ The ex-king permitted himself a gesture and the ghost
+of a chuckle—why the devil should he chuckle? ‘Practically none,’ he
+said. ‘But of course with these things one has to be so careful.’
+
+And then again for an instant something—like the faintest shadow of
+derision—gleamed out of the envoy’s eyes and recalled that chilly
+feeling to King Ferdinand’s spine.
+
+Some kindred depression had come to Pestovitch, who had been watching
+the drawn intensity of Firmin’s face. He came to the help of his
+master, who, he feared, might protest too much.
+
+‘A search!’ cried the king. ‘An embargo on our aeroplanes.’
+
+‘Only a temporary expedient,’ said the ex-king Egbert, ‘while the
+search is going on.’
+
+The king appealed to his council.
+
+‘The people will never permit it, sire,’ said a bustling little man in
+a gorgeous uniform.
+
+‘You’ll have to make ‘em,’ said the ex-king, genially addressing all
+the councillors.
+
+King Ferdinand glanced at the closed brass door through which no news
+would come.
+
+‘When would you want to have this search?’
+
+The ex-king was radiant. ‘We couldn’t possibly do it until the day
+after to-morrow,’ he said.
+
+‘Just the capital?’
+
+‘Where else?’ asked the ex-king, still more cheerfully.
+
+‘For my own part,’ said the ex-king confidentially, ‘I think the whole
+business ridiculous. Who would be such a fool as to hide atomic bombs?
+Nobody. Certain hanging if he’s caught—certain, and almost certain
+blowing up if he isn’t. But nowadays I have to take orders like the
+rest of the world. And here I am.’
+
+The king thought he had never met such detestable geniality. He glanced
+at Pestovitch, who nodded almost imperceptibly. It was well, anyhow, to
+have a fool to deal with. They might have sent a diplomatist. ‘Of
+course,’ said the king, ‘I recognise the overpowering force—and a kind
+of logic—in these orders from Brissago.’
+
+‘I knew you would,’ said the ex-king, with an air of relief, ‘and so
+let us arrange——’
+
+They arranged with a certain informality. No Balkan aeroplane was to
+adventure into the air until the search was concluded, and meanwhile
+the fleets of the world government would soar and circle in the sky.
+The towns were to be placarded with offers of reward to any one who
+would help in the discovery of atomic bombs....
+
+‘You will sign that,’ said the ex-king.
+
+‘Why?’
+
+‘To show that we aren’t in any way hostile to you.’
+
+Pestovitch nodded ‘yes’ to his master.
+
+‘And then, you see,’ said the ex-king in that easy way of his, ‘we’ll
+have a lot of men here, borrow help from your police, and run through
+all your things. And then everything will be over. Meanwhile, if I may
+be your guest....’ When presently Pestovitch was alone with the king
+again, he found him in a state of jangling emotions. His spirit was
+tossing like a wind-whipped sea. One moment he was exalted and full of
+contempt for ‘that ass’ and his search; the next he was down in a pit
+of dread. ‘They will find them, Pestovitch, and then he’ll hang us.’
+
+‘Hang us?’
+
+The king put his long nose into his councillor’s face. ‘That grinning
+brute _wants_ to hang us,’ he said. ‘And hang us he will, if we give
+him a shadow of a chance.’
+
+‘But all their Modern State Civilisation!’
+
+‘Do you think there’s any pity in that crew of Godless, Vivisecting
+Prigs?’ cried this last king of romance. ‘Do you think, Pestovitch,
+they understand anything of a high ambition or a splendid dream? Do you
+think that our gallant and sublime adventure has any appeal to them?
+Here am I, the last and greatest and most romantic of the Cæsars, and
+do you think they will miss the chance of hanging me like a dog if they
+can, killing me like a rat in a hole? And that renegade! He who was
+once an anointed king! . . .
+
+‘I hate that sort of eye that laughs and keeps hard,’ said the king.
+
+‘I won’t sit still here and be caught like a fascinated rabbit,’ said
+the king in conclusion. ‘We must shift those bombs.’
+
+‘Risk it,’ said Pestovitch. ‘Leave them alone.’
+
+‘No,’ said the king. ‘Shift them near the frontier. Then while they
+watch us here—they will always watch us here now—we can buy an
+aeroplane abroad, and pick them up....’
+
+The king was in a feverish, irritable mood all that evening, but he
+made his plans nevertheless with infinite cunning. They must get the
+bombs away; there must be a couple of atomic hay lorries, the bombs
+could be hidden under the hay.... Pestovitch went and came, instructing
+trusty servants, planning and replanning.... The king and the ex-king
+talked very pleasantly of a number of subjects. All the while at the
+back of King Ferdinand Charles’s mind fretted the mystery of his
+vanished aeroplane. There came no news of its capture, and no news of
+its success. At any moment all that power at the back of his visitor
+might crumble away and vanish....
+
+It was past midnight, when the king, in a cloak and slouch hat that
+might equally have served a small farmer, or any respectable
+middle-class man, slipped out from an inconspicuous service gate on the
+eastward side of his palace into the thickly wooded gardens that sloped
+in a series of terraces down to the town. Pestovitch and his
+guard-valet Peter, both wrapped about in a similar disguise, came out
+among the laurels that bordered the pathway and joined him. It was a
+clear, warm night, but the stars seemed unusually little and remote
+because of the aeroplanes, each trailing a searchlight, that drove
+hither and thither across the blue. One great beam seemed to rest on
+the king for a moment as he came out of the palace; then instantly and
+reassuringly it had swept away. But while they were still in the palace
+gardens another found them and looked at them.
+
+‘They see us,’ cried the king.
+
+‘They make nothing of us,’ said Pestovitch.
+
+The king glanced up and met a calm, round eye of light, that seemed to
+wink at him and vanish, leaving him blinded....
+
+The three men went on their way. Near the little gate in the garden
+railings that Pestovitch had caused to be unlocked, the king paused
+under the shadow of an ilex and looked back at the place. It was very
+high and narrow, a twentieth-century rendering of mediaevalism,
+mediaevalism in steel and bronze and sham stone and opaque glass.
+Against the sky it splashed a confusion of pinnacles. High up in the
+eastward wing were the windows of the apartments of the ex-king Egbert.
+One of them was brightly lit now, and against the light a little black
+figure stood very still and looked out upon the night.
+
+The king snarled.
+
+‘He little knows how we slip through his fingers,’ said Pestovitch.
+
+And as he spoke they saw the ex-king stretch out his arms slowly, like
+one who yawns, knuckle his eyes and turn inward—no doubt to his bed.
+
+Down through the ancient winding back streets of his capital hurried
+the king, and at an appointed corner a shabby atomic-automobile waited
+for the three. It was a hackney carriage of the lowest grade, with
+dinted metal panels and deflated cushions. The driver was one of the
+ordinary drivers of the capital, but beside him sat the young secretary
+of Pestovitch, who knew the way to the farm where the bombs were
+hidden.
+
+The automobile made its way through the narrow streets of the old town,
+which were still lit and uneasy—for the fleet of airships overhead had
+kept the cafés open and people abroad—over the great new bridge, and so
+by straggling outskirts to the country. And all through his capital the
+king who hoped to outdo Cæsar, sat back and was very still, and no one
+spoke. And as they got out into the dark country they became aware of
+the searchlights wandering over the country-side like the uneasy ghosts
+of giants. The king sat forward and looked at these flitting
+whitenesses, and every now and then peered up to see the flying ships
+overhead.
+
+‘I don’t like them,’ said the king.
+
+Presently one of these patches of moonlight came to rest about them and
+seemed to be following their automobile. The king drew back.
+
+‘The things are confoundedly noiseless,’ said the king. ‘It’s like
+being stalked by lean white cats.’
+
+He peered again. ‘That fellow is watching us,’ he said.
+
+And then suddenly he gave way to panic. ‘Pestovitch,’ he said,
+clutching his minister’s arm, ‘they are watching us. I’m not going
+through with this. They are watching us. I’m going back.’
+
+Pestovitch remonstrated. ‘Tell him to go back,’ said the king, and
+tried to open the window. For a few moments there was a grim struggle
+in the automobile; a gripping of wrists and a blow. ‘I can’t go through
+with it,’ repeated the king, ‘I can’t go through with it.’
+
+‘But they’ll hang us,’ said Pestovitch.
+
+‘Not if we were to give up now. Not if we were to surrender the bombs.
+It is you who brought me into this....’
+
+At last Pestovitch compromised. There was an inn perhaps half a mile
+from the farm. They could alight there and the king could get brandy,
+and rest his nerves for a time. And if he still thought fit to go back
+he could go back.
+
+‘See,’ said Pestovitch, ‘the light has gone again.’
+
+The king peered up. ‘I believe he’s following us without a light,’ said
+the king.
+
+In the little old dirty inn the king hung doubtful for a time, and was
+for going back and throwing himself on the mercy of the council. ‘If
+there is a council,’ said Pestovitch. ‘By this time your bombs may have
+settled it.
+
+‘But if so, these infernal aeroplanes would go.’
+
+‘They may not know yet.’
+
+‘But, Pestovitch, why couldn’t you do all this without me?’
+
+Pestovitch made no answer for a moment. ‘I was for leaving the bombs in
+their place,’ he said at last, and went to the window. About their
+conveyance shone a circle of bright light. Pestovitch had a brilliant
+idea. ‘I will send my secretary out to make a kind of dispute with the
+driver. Something that will make them watch up above there. Meanwhile
+you and I and Peter will go out by the back way and up by the hedges to
+the farm....’
+
+It was worthy of his subtle reputation and it answered passing well.
+
+In ten minutes they were tumbling over the wall of the farm-yard, wet,
+muddy, and breathless, but unobserved. But as they ran towards the
+barns the king gave vent to something between a groan and a curse, and
+all about them shone the light—and passed.
+
+But had it passed at once or lingered for just a second?
+
+‘They didn’t see us,’ said Peter.
+
+‘I don’t think they saw us,’ said the king, and stared as the light
+went swooping up the mountain side, hung for a second about a hayrick,
+and then came pouring back.
+
+‘In the barn!’ cried the king.
+
+He bruised his shin against something, and then all three men were
+inside the huge steel-girdered barn in which stood the two motor hay
+lorries that were to take the bombs away. Kurt and Abel, the two
+brothers of Peter, had brought the lorries thither in daylight. They
+had the upper half of the loads of hay thrown off, ready to cover the
+bombs, so soon as the king should show the hiding-place. ‘There’s a
+sort of pit here,’ said the king. ‘Don’t light another lantern. This
+key of mine releases a ring....’
+
+For a time scarcely a word was spoken in the darkness of the barn.
+There was the sound of a slab being lifted and then of feet descending
+a ladder into a pit. Then whispering and then heavy breathing as Kurt
+came struggling up with the first of the hidden bombs.
+
+‘We shall do it yet,’ said the king. And then he gasped. ‘Curse that
+light. Why in the name of Heaven didn’t we shut the barn door?’ For the
+great door stood wide open and all the empty, lifeless yard outside and
+the door and six feet of the floor of the barn were in the blue glare
+of an inquiring searchlight.
+
+‘Shut the door, Peter,’ said Pestovitch.
+
+‘No,’ cried the king, too late, as Peter went forward into the light.
+‘Don’t show yourself!’ cried the king. Kurt made a step forward and
+plucked his brother back. For a time all five men stood still. It
+seemed that light would never go and then abruptly it was turned off,
+leaving them blinded. ‘Now,’ said the king uneasily, ‘now shut the
+door.’
+
+‘Not completely,’ cried Pestovitch. ‘Leave a chink for us to go out
+by....’
+
+It was hot work shifting those bombs, and the king worked for a time
+like a common man. Kurt and Abel carried the great things up and Peter
+brought them to the carts, and the king and Pestovitch helped him to
+place them among the hay. They made as little noise as they could....
+
+‘Ssh!’ cried the king. ‘What’s that?’
+
+But Kurt and Abel did not hear, and came blundering up the ladder with
+the last of the load.
+
+‘Ssh!’ Peter ran forward to them with a whispered remonstrance. Now
+they were still.
+
+The barn door opened a little wider, and against the dim blue light
+outside they saw the black shape of a man.
+
+‘Any one here?’ he asked, speaking with an Italian accent.
+
+The king broke into a cold perspiration. Then Pestovitch answered:
+‘Only a poor farmer loading hay,’ he said, and picked up a huge hay
+fork and went forward softly.
+
+‘You load your hay at a very bad time and in a very bad light,’ said
+the man at the door, peering in. ‘Have you no electric light here?’
+
+Then suddenly he turned on an electric torch, and as he did so
+Pestovitch sprang forward. ‘Get out of my barn!’ he cried, and drove
+the fork full at the intruder’s chest. He had a vague idea that so he
+might stab the man to silence. But the man shouted loudly as the prongs
+pierced him and drove him backward, and instantly there was a sound of
+feet running across the yard.
+
+‘Bombs,’ cried the man upon the ground, struggling with the prongs in
+his hand, and as Pestovitch staggered forward into view with the force
+of his own thrust, he was shot through the body by one of the two
+new-comers.
+
+The man on the ground was badly hurt but plucky. ‘Bombs,’ he repeated,
+and struggled up into a kneeling position and held his electric torch
+full upon the face of the king. ‘Shoot them,’ he cried, coughing and
+spitting blood, so that the halo of light round the king’s head danced
+about.
+
+For a moment in that shivering circle of light the two men saw the king
+kneeling up in the cart and Peter on the barn floor beside him. The old
+fox looked at them sideways—snared, a white-faced evil thing. And then,
+as with a faltering suicidal heroism, he leant forward over the bomb
+before him, they fired together and shot him through the head.
+
+The upper part of his face seemed to vanish.
+
+‘Shoot them,’ cried the man who had been stabbed. ‘Shoot them all!’
+
+And then his light went out, and he rolled over with a groan at the
+feet of his comrades.
+
+But each carried a light of his own, and in another moment everything
+in the barn was visible again. They shot Peter even as he held up his
+hands in sign of surrender.
+
+Kurt and Abel at the head of the ladder hesitated for a moment, and
+then plunged backward into the pit. ‘If we don’t kill them,’ said one
+of the sharpshooters, ‘they’ll blow us to rags. They’ve gone down that
+hatchway. Come! . . .
+
+‘Here they are. Hands up! I say. Hold your light while I shoot....’
+
+Section 8
+
+It was still quite dark when his valet and Firmin came together and
+told the ex-king Egbert that the business was settled.
+
+He started up into a sitting position on the side of his bed.
+
+‘Did he go out?’ asked the ex-king.
+
+‘He is dead,’ said Firmin. ‘He was shot.’
+
+The ex-king reflected. ‘That’s about the best thing that could have
+happened,’ he said. ‘Where are the bombs? In that farm-house on the
+opposite hill-side! Why! the place is in sight! Let us go. I’ll dress.
+Is there any one in the place, Firmin, to get us a cup of coffee?’
+
+Through the hungry twilight of the dawn the ex-king’s automobile
+carried him to the farm-house where the last rebel king was lying among
+his bombs. The rim of the sky flashed, the east grew bright, and the
+sun was just rising over the hills when King Egbert reached the
+farm-yard. There he found the hay lorries drawn out from the barn with
+the dreadful bombs still packed upon them. A couple of score of
+aviators held the yard, and outside a few peasants stood in a little
+group and stared, ignorant as yet of what had happened. Against the
+stone wall of the farm-yard five bodies were lying neatly side by side,
+and Pestovitch had an expression of surprise on his face and the king
+was chiefly identifiable by his long white hands and his blonde
+moustache. The wounded aeronaut had been carried down to the inn. And
+after the ex-king had given directions in what manner the bombs were to
+be taken to the new special laboratories above Zurich, where they could
+be unpacked in an atmosphere of chlorine, he turned to these five still
+shapes.
+
+Their five pairs of feet stuck out with a curious stiff unanimity....
+
+‘What else was there to do?’ he said in answer to some internal
+protest.
+
+‘I wonder, Firmin, if there are any more of them?’
+
+‘Bombs, sir?’ asked Firmin.
+
+‘No, such kings....
+
+‘The pitiful folly of it!’ said the ex-king, following his thoughts.
+‘Firmin, as an ex-professor of International Politics, I think it falls
+to you to bury them. There? . . . No, don’t put them near the well.
+People will have to drink from that well. Bury them over there, some
+way off in the field.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+THE NEW PHASE
+
+
+Section 1
+
+The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we may
+view it now from the clarifying standpoint of things accomplished, was
+in its broad issues a simple one. Essentially it was to place social
+organisation upon the new footing that the swift, accelerated advance
+of human knowledge had rendered necessary. The council was gathered
+together with the haste of a salvage expedition, and it was confronted
+with wreckage; but the wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only
+possibilities of the case were either the relapse of mankind to the
+agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the
+acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order. The
+old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy, particularism, and
+belligerency, were incompatible with the monstrous destructive power of
+the new appliances the inhuman logic of science had produced. The
+equilibrium could be restored only by civilisation destroying itself
+down to a level at which modern apparatus could no longer be produced,
+or by human nature adapting itself in its institutions to the new
+conditions. It was for the latter alternative that the assembly
+existed.
+
+Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The sudden
+development of atomic science did but precipitate and render rapid and
+dramatic a clash between the new and the customary that had been
+gathering since ever the first flint was chipped or the first fire
+built together. From the day when man contrived himself a tool and
+suffered another male to draw near him, he ceased to be altogether a
+thing of instinct and untroubled convictions. From that day forth a
+widening breach can be traced between his egotistical passions and the
+social need. Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead,
+and his passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and
+the tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter and
+wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their development.
+He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite tamed to the home.
+Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest to keep him within the
+bounds of the plough-life and the beast-tending. Slowly a vast system
+of traditional imperatives superposed itself upon his instincts,
+imperatives that were admirably fitted to make him that cultivator,
+that cattle-mincer, who was for twice ten thousand years the normal
+man.
+
+And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his tilling
+came civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural surplus. It
+appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed boats out upon the
+rivers and presently invaded the seas, and within its primitive courts,
+within temples grown rich and leisurely and amidst the gathering medley
+of the seaport towns rose speculation and philosophy and science, and
+the beginning of the new order that has at last established itself as
+human life. Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then with an
+accumulating velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole
+did not seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand. For
+a time men took up and used these new things and the new powers
+inadvertently as they came to him, recking nothing of the consequences.
+For endless generations change led him very gently. But when he had
+been led far enough, change quickened the pace. It was with a series of
+shocks that he realised at last that he was living the old life less
+and less and a new life more and more.
+
+Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between the
+old way of living and the new were intense. They were far intenser than
+they had been even at the collapse of the Roman imperial system. On the
+one hand was the ancient life of the family and the small community and
+the petty industry, on the other was a new life on a larger scale, with
+remoter horizons and a strange sense of purpose. Already it was growing
+clear that men must live on one side or the other. One could not have
+little tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the same market,
+sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and arrows
+and aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or illiterate peasant
+industries and power-driven factories in the same world. And still less
+it was possible that one could have the ideas and ambitions and greed
+and jealousy of peasants equipped with the vast appliances of the new
+age. If there had been no atomic bombs to bring together most of the
+directing intelligence of the world to that hasty conference at
+Brissago, there would still have been, extended over great areas and a
+considerable space of time perhaps, a less formal conference of
+responsible and understanding people upon the perplexities of this
+world-wide opposition. If the work of Holsten had been spread over
+centuries and imparted to the world by imperceptible degrees, it would
+nevertheless have made it necessary for men to take counsel upon and
+set a plan for the future. Indeed already there had been accumulating
+for a hundred years before the crisis a literature of foresight; there
+was a whole mass of ‘Modern State’ scheming available for the
+conference to go upon. These bombs did but accentuate and dramatise an
+already developing problem.
+
+Section 2
+
+This assembly was no leap of exceptional minds and super-intelligences
+into the control of affairs. It was teachable, its members trailed
+ideas with them to the gathering, but these were the consequences of
+the ‘moral shock’ the bombs had given humanity, and there is no reason
+for supposing its individual personalities were greatly above the
+average. It would be possible to cite a thousand instances of error and
+inefficiency in its proceedings due to the forgetfulness, irritability,
+or fatigue of its members. It experimented considerably and blundered
+often. Excepting Holsten, whose gift was highly specialised, it is
+questionable whether there was a single man of the first order of human
+quality in the gathering. But it had a modest fear of itself, and a
+consequent directness that gave it a general distinction. There was, of
+course, a noble simplicity about Leblanc, but even of him it may be
+asked whether he was not rather good and honest-minded than in the
+fuller sense great.
+
+The ex-king had wisdom and a certain romantic dash, he was a man among
+thousands, even if he was not a man among millions, but his memoirs,
+and indeed his decision to write memoirs, give the quality of himself
+and his associates. The book makes admirable but astonishing reading.
+Therein he takes the great work the council was doing for granted as a
+little child takes God. It is as if he had no sense of it at all. He
+tells amusing trivialities about his cousin Wilhelm and his secretary
+Firmin, he pokes fun at the American president, who was, indeed, rather
+a little accident of the political machine than a representative
+American, and he gives a long description of how he was lost for three
+days in the mountains in the company of the only Japanese member, a
+loss that seems to have caused no serious interruption of the work of
+the council....
+
+The Brissago conference has been written about time after time, as
+though it were a gathering of the very flower of humanity. Perched up
+there by the freak or wisdom of Leblanc, it had a certain Olympian
+quality, and the natural tendency of the human mind to elaborate such a
+resemblance would have us give its members the likenesses of gods. It
+would be equally reasonable to compare it to one of those enforced
+meetings upon the mountain-tops that must have occurred in the opening
+phases of the Deluge. The strength of the council lay not in itself but
+in the circumstances that had quickened its intelligence, dispelled its
+vanities, and emancipated it from traditional ambitions and
+antagonisms. It was stripped of the accumulation of centuries, a naked
+government with all that freedom of action that nakedness affords. And
+its problems were set before it with a plainness that was out of all
+comparison with the complicated and perplexing intimations of the
+former time.
+
+The world on which the council looked did indeed present a task quite
+sufficiently immense and altogether too urgent for any wanton
+indulgence in internal dissension. It may be interesting to sketch in a
+few phrases the condition of mankind at the close of the period of
+warring states, in the year of crisis that followed the release of
+atomic power. It was a world extraordinarily limited when one measures
+it by later standards, and it was now in a state of the direst
+confusion and distress.
+
+It must be remembered that at this time men had still to spread into
+enormous areas of the land surface of the globe. There were vast
+mountain wildernesses, forest wildernesses, sandy deserts, and frozen
+lands. Men still clung closely to water and arable soil in temperate or
+sub-tropical climates, they lived abundantly only in river valleys, and
+all their great cities had grown upon large navigable rivers or close
+to ports upon the sea. Over great areas even of this suitable land
+flies and mosquitoes, armed with infection, had so far defeated human
+invasion, and under their protection the virgin forests remained
+untouched. Indeed, the whole world even in its most crowded districts
+was filthy with flies and swarming with needless insect life to an
+extent which is now almost incredible. A population map of the world in
+1950 would have followed seashore and river course so closely in its
+darker shading as to give an impression that _homo sapiens_ was an
+amphibious animal. His roads and railways lay also along the lower
+contours, only here and there to pierce some mountain barrier or reach
+some holiday resort did they clamber above 3000 feet. And across the
+ocean his traffic passed in definite lines; there were hundreds of
+thousands of square miles of ocean no ship ever traversed except by
+mischance.
+
+Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet he had not yet
+pierced for five miles, and it was still not forty years since, with a
+tragic pertinacity, he had clambered to the poles of the earth. The
+limitless mineral wealth of the Arctic and Antarctic circles was still
+buried beneath vast accumulations of immemorial ice, and the secret
+riches of the inner zones of the crust were untapped and indeed
+unsuspected. The higher mountain regions were known only to a
+sprinkling of guide-led climbers and the frequenters of a few gaunt
+hotels, and the vast rainless belts of land that lay across the
+continental masses, from Gobi to Sahara and along the backbone of
+America, with their perfect air, their daily baths of blazing sunshine,
+their nights of cool serenity and glowing stars, and their reservoirs
+of deep-lying water, were as yet only desolations of fear and death to
+the common imagination.
+
+And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of
+population which had gathered into the enormous dingy town centres of
+that period were dispossessed and scattered disastrously over the
+surrounding rural areas. It was as if some brutal force, grown
+impatient at last at man’s blindness, had with the deliberate intention
+of a rearrangement of population upon more wholesome lines, shaken the
+world. The great industrial regions and the large cities that had
+escaped the bombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, in
+almost as tragic plight as those that blazed, and the country-side was
+disordered by a multitude of wandering and lawless strangers. In some
+parts of the world famine raged, and in many regions there was
+plague.... The plains of north India, which had become more and more
+dependent for the general welfare on the railways and that great system
+of irrigation canals which the malignant section of the patriots had
+destroyed, were in a state of peculiar distress, whole villages lay
+dead together, no man heeding, and the very tigers and panthers that
+preyed upon the emaciated survivors crawled back infected into the
+jungle to perish. Large areas of China were a prey to brigand bands....
+
+It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of the
+explosion of the atomic bombs survives. There are, of course,
+innumerable allusions and partial records, and it is from these that
+subsequent ages must piece together the image of these devastations.
+
+The phenomena, it must be remembered, changed greatly from day to day,
+and even from hour to hour, as the exploding bomb shifted its position,
+threw off fragments or came into contact with water or a fresh texture
+of soil. Barnet, who came within forty miles of Paris early in October,
+is concerned chiefly with his account of the social confusion of the
+country-side and the problems of his command, but he speaks of heaped
+cloud masses of steam. ‘All along the sky to the south-west’ and of a
+red glare beneath these at night. Parts of Paris were still burning,
+and numbers of people were camped in the fields even at this distance
+watching over treasured heaps of salvaged loot. He speaks too of the
+distant rumbling of the explosion—‘like trains going over iron
+bridges.’
+
+Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the ‘continuous
+reverberations,’ or of the ‘thudding and hammering,’ or some such
+phrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of steam, from which rain
+would fall suddenly in torrents and amidst which lightning played.
+Drawing nearer to Paris an observer would have found the salvage camps
+increasing in number and blocking up the villages, and large numbers of
+people, often starving and ailing, camping under improvised tents
+because there was no place for them to go. The sky became more and more
+densely overcast until at last it blotted out the light of day and left
+nothing but a dull red glare ‘extraordinarily depressing to the
+spirit.’ In this dull glare, great numbers of people were still living,
+clinging to their houses and in many cases subsisting in a state of
+partial famine upon the produce in their gardens and the stores in the
+shops of the provision dealers.
+
+Coming in still closer, the investigator would have reached the police
+cordon, which was trying to check the desperate enterprise of those who
+would return to their homes or rescue their more valuable possessions
+within the ‘zone of imminent danger.’
+
+That zone was rather arbitrarily defined. If our spectator could have
+got permission to enter it, he would have entered also a zone of
+uproar, a zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange purplish-red
+light, and quivering and swaying with the incessant explosion of the
+radio-active substance. Whole blocks of buildings were alight and
+burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly
+and attenuated in comparison with the full-bodied crimson glare beyond.
+The shells of other edifices already burnt rose, pierced by rows of
+window sockets against the red-lit mist.
+
+Every step farther would have been as dangerous as a descent within the
+crater of an active volcano. These spinning, boiling bomb centres would
+shift or break unexpectedly into new regions, great fragments of earth
+or drain or masonry suddenly caught by a jet of disruptive force might
+come flying by the explorer’s head, or the ground yawn a fiery grave
+beneath his feet. Few who adventured into these areas of destruction
+and survived attempted any repetition of their experiences. There are
+stories of puffs of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting sometimes
+scores of miles from the bomb centre and killing and scorching all they
+overtook. And the first conflagrations from the Paris centre spread
+westward half-way to the sea.
+
+Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of red-lit ruins had a
+peculiar dryness and a blistering quality, so that it set up a soreness
+of the skin and lungs that was very difficult to heal....
+
+Such was the last state of Paris, and such on a larger scale was the
+condition of affairs in Chicago, and the same fate had overtaken
+Berlin, Moscow, Tokio, the eastern half of London, Toulon, Kiel, and
+two hundred and eighteen other centres of population or armament. Each
+was a flaming centre of radiant destruction that only time could
+quench, that indeed in many instances time has still to quench. To this
+day, though indeed with a constantly diminishing uproar and vigour,
+these explosions continue. In the map of nearly every country of the
+world three or four or more red circles, a score of miles in diameter,
+mark the position of the dying atomic bombs and the death areas that
+men have been forced to abandon around them. Within these areas
+perished museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of
+masterpieces, and a vast accumulation of human achievement, whose
+charred remains lie buried, a legacy of curious material that only
+future generations may hope to examine....
+
+Section 3
+
+The state of mind of the dispossessed urban population which swarmed
+and perished so abundantly over the country-side during the dark days
+of the autumnal months that followed the Last War, was one of blank
+despair. Barnet gives sketch after sketch of groups of these people,
+camped among the vineyards of Champagne, as he saw them during his
+period of service with the army of pacification.
+
+There was, for example, that ‘man-milliner’ who came out from a field
+beside the road that rises up eastward out of Epernay, and asked how
+things were going in Paris. He was, says Barnet, a round-faced man,
+dressed very neatly in black—so neatly that it was amazing to discover
+he was living close at hand in a tent made of carpets—and he had ‘an
+urbane but insistent manner,’ a carefully trimmed moustache and beard,
+expressive eyebrows, and hair very neatly brushed.
+
+‘No one goes into Paris,’ said Barnet.
+
+‘But, Monsieur, that is very unenterprising,’ the man by the wayside
+submitted.
+
+‘The danger is too great. The radiations eat into people’s skins.’
+
+The eyebrows protested. ‘But is nothing to be done?’
+
+‘Nothing can be done.’
+
+‘But, Monsieur, it is extraordinarily inconvenient, this living in
+exile and waiting. My wife and my little boy suffer extremely. There is
+a lack of amenity. And the season advances. I say nothing of the
+expense and difficulty in obtaining provisions.... When does Monsieur
+think that something will be done to render Paris—possible?’
+
+Barnet considered his interlocutor.
+
+‘I’m told,’ said Barnet, ‘that Paris is not likely to be possible again
+for several generations.’
+
+‘Oh! but this is preposterous! Consider, Monsieur! What are people like
+ourselves to do in the meanwhile? I am a costumier. All my connections
+and interests, above all my style, demand Paris....’
+
+Barnet considered the sky, from which a light rain was beginning to
+fall, the wide fields about them from which the harvest had been taken,
+the trimmed poplars by the wayside.
+
+‘Naturally,’ he agreed, ‘you want to go to Paris. But Paris is over.’
+
+‘Over!’
+
+‘Finished.’
+
+‘But then, Monsieur—what is to become—of _me?_’
+
+Barnet turned his face westward, whither the white road led.
+
+‘Where else, for example, may I hope to find—opportunity?’
+
+Barnet made no reply.
+
+‘Perhaps on the Riviera. Or at some such place as Homburg. Or some
+place perhaps.’
+
+‘All that,’ said Barnet, accepting for the first time facts that had
+lain evident in his mind for weeks; ‘all that must be over, too.’
+
+There was a pause. Then the voice beside him broke out. ‘But, Monsieur,
+it is impossible! It leaves—nothing.’
+
+‘No. Not very much.’
+
+‘One cannot suddenly begin to grow potatoes!’
+
+‘It would be good if Monsieur could bring himself——’
+
+‘To the life of a peasant! And my wife——You do not know the
+distinguished delicacy of my wife, a refined helplessness, a peculiar
+dependent charm. Like some slender tropical creeper—with great white
+flowers.... But all this is foolish talk. It is impossible that Paris,
+which has survived so many misfortunes, should not presently revive.’
+
+‘I do not think it will ever revive. Paris is finished. London, too, I
+am told—Berlin. All the great capitals were stricken....’
+
+‘But——! Monsieur must permit me to differ.’
+
+‘It is so.’
+
+‘It is impossible. Civilisations do not end in this manner. Mankind
+will insist.’
+
+‘On Paris?’
+
+‘On Paris.’
+
+‘Monsieur, you might as well hope to go down the Maelstrom and resume
+business there.’
+
+‘I am content, Monsieur, with my own faith.’
+
+‘The winter comes on. Would not Monsieur be wiser to seek a house?’
+
+‘Farther from Paris? No, Monsieur. But it is not possible, Monsieur,
+what you say, and you are under a tremendous mistake.... Indeed you are
+in error.... I asked merely for information....’
+
+‘When last I saw him,’ said Barnet, ‘he was standing under the signpost
+at the crest of the hill, gazing wistfully, yet it seemed to me a
+little doubtfully, now towards Paris, and altogether heedless of a
+drizzling rain that was wetting him through and through....’
+
+Section 4
+
+This effect of chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly apprehended
+deepens as Barnet’s record passes on to tell of the approach of winter.
+It was too much for the great mass of those unwilling and incompetent
+nomads to realise that an age had ended, that the old help and guidance
+existed no longer, that times would not mend again, however patiently
+they held out. They were still in many cases looking to Paris when the
+first snowflakes of that pitiless January came swirling about them. The
+story grows grimmer....
+
+If it is less monstrously tragic after Barnet’s return to England, it
+is, if anything, harder. England was a spectacle of fear-embittered
+householders, hiding food, crushing out robbery, driving the starving
+wanderers from every faltering place upon the roads lest they should
+die inconveniently and reproachfully on the doorsteps of those who had
+failed to urge them onward....
+
+The remnants of the British troops left France finally in March, after
+urgent representations from the provisional government at Orleans that
+they could be supported no longer. They seem to have been a fairly
+well-behaved, but highly parasitic force throughout, though Barnet is
+clearly of opinion that they did much to suppress sporadic brigandage
+and maintain social order. He came home to a famine-stricken country,
+and his picture of the England of that spring is one of miserable
+patience and desperate expedients. The country was suffering much more
+than France, because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on which
+it had hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, and
+boiled nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid off. On
+the way thither they saw four men hanging from the telegraph posts by
+the roadside, who had been hung for stealing swedes. The labour refuges
+of Kent, he discovered, were feeding their crowds of casual wanderers
+on bread into which clay and sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there
+was a shortage of even such fare as that. He himself struck across
+country to Winchester, fearing to approach the bomb-poisoned district
+round London, and at Winchester he had the luck to be taken on as one
+of the wireless assistants at the central station and given regular
+rations. The station stood in a commanding position on the chalk hill
+that overlooks the town from the east....
+
+Thence he must have assisted in the transmission of the endless cipher
+messages that preceded the gathering at Brissago, and there it was that
+the Brissago proclamation of the end of the war and the establishment
+of a world government came under his hands.
+
+He was feeling ill and apathetic that day, and he did not realise what
+it was he was transcribing. He did it mechanically, as a part of his
+tedious duty.
+
+Afterwards there came a rush of messages arising out of the declaration
+that strained him very much, and in the evening when he was relieved,
+he ate his scanty supper and then went out upon the little balcony
+before the station, to smoke and rest his brains after this sudden and
+as yet inexplicable press of duty. It was a very beautiful, still
+evening. He fell talking to a fellow operator, and for the first time,
+he declares, ‘I began to understand what it was all about. I began to
+see just what enormous issues had been under my hands for the past four
+hours. But I became incredulous after my first stimulation. “This is
+some sort of Bunkum,” I said very sagely.
+
+‘My colleague was more hopeful. “It means an end to bomb-throwing and
+destruction,” he said. “It means that presently corn will come from
+America.”
+
+‘“Who is going to send corn when there is no more value in money?” I
+asked.
+
+‘Suddenly we were startled by a clashing from the town below. The
+cathedral bells, which had been silent ever since I had come into the
+district, were beginning, with a sort of rheumatic difficulty, to ring.
+Presently they warmed a little to the work, and we realised what was
+going on. They were ringing a peal. We listened with an unbelieving
+astonishment and looking into each other’s yellow faces.
+
+‘“They mean it,” said my colleague.
+
+‘“But what can they do now?” I asked. “Everything is broken down....”’
+
+And on that sentence, with an unexpected artistry, Barnet abruptly ends
+his story.
+
+Section 5
+
+From the first the new government handled affairs with a certain
+greatness of spirit. Indeed, it was inevitable that they should act
+greatly. From the first they had to see the round globe as one problem;
+it was impossible any longer to deal with it piece by piece. They had
+to secure it universally from any fresh outbreak of atomic destruction,
+and they had to ensure a permanent and universal pacification. On this
+capacity to grasp and wield the whole round globe their existence
+depended. There was no scope for any further performance.
+
+So soon as the seizure of the existing supplies of atomic ammunition
+and the apparatus for synthesising Carolinum was assured, the
+disbanding or social utilisation of the various masses of troops still
+under arms had to be arranged, the salvation of the year’s harvests,
+and the feeding, housing, and employment of the drifting millions of
+homeless people. In Canada, in South America, and Asiatic Russia there
+were vast accumulations of provision that was immovable only because of
+the breakdown of the monetary and credit systems. These had to be
+brought into the famine districts very speedily if entire depopulation
+was to be avoided, and their transportation and the revival of
+communications generally absorbed a certain proportion of the soldiery
+and more able unemployed. The task of housing assumed gigantic
+dimensions, and from building camps the housing committee of the
+council speedily passed to constructions of a more permanent type. They
+found far less friction than might have been expected in turning the
+loose population on their hands to these things. People were
+extraordinarily tamed by that year of suffering and death; they were
+disillusioned of their traditions, bereft of once obstinate prejudices;
+they felt foreign in a strange world, and ready to follow any confident
+leadership. The orders of the new government came with the best of all
+credentials, rations. The people everywhere were as easy to control,
+one of the old labour experts who had survived until the new time
+witnesses, ‘as gangs of emigrant workers in a new land.’ And now it was
+that the social possibilities of the atomic energy began to appear. The
+new machinery that had come into existence before the last wars
+increased and multiplied, and the council found itself not only with
+millions of hands at its disposal but with power and apparatus that
+made its first conceptions of the work it had to do seem pitifully
+timid. The camps that were planned in iron and deal were built in stone
+and brass; the roads that were to have been mere iron tracks became
+spacious ways that insisted upon architecture; the cultivations of
+foodstuffs that were to have supplied emergency rations, were
+presently, with synthesisers, fertilisers, actinic light, and
+scientific direction, in excess of every human need.
+
+The government had begun with the idea of temporarily reconstituting
+the social and economic system that had prevailed before the first
+coming of the atomic engine, because it was to this system that the
+ideas and habits of the great mass of the world’s dispossessed
+population was adapted. Subsequent rearrangement it had hoped to leave
+to its successors—whoever they might be. But this, it became more and
+more manifest, was absolutely impossible. As well might the council
+have proposed a revival of slavery. The capitalist system had already
+been smashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless gold and energy;
+it fell to pieces at the first endeavour to stand it up again. Already
+before the war half of the industrial class had been out of work, the
+attempt to put them back into wages employment on the old lines was
+futile from the outset—the absolute shattering of the currency system
+alone would have been sufficient to prevent that, and it was necessary
+therefore to take over the housing, feeding, and clothing of this
+worldwide multitude without exacting any return in labour whatever. In
+a little while the mere absence of occupation for so great a multitude
+of people everywhere became an evident social danger, and the
+government was obliged to resort to such devices as simple decorative
+work in wood and stone, the manufacture of hand-woven textiles,
+fruit-growing, flower-growing, and landscape gardening on a grand scale
+to keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying wages to the
+younger adults for attendance at schools that would equip them to use
+the new atomic machinery.... So quite insensibly the council drifted
+into a complete reorganisation of urban and industrial life, and indeed
+of the entire social system.
+
+Ideas that are unhampered by political intrigue or financial
+considerations have a sweeping way with them, and before a year was out
+the records of the council show clearly that it was rising to its
+enormous opportunity, and partly through its own direct control and
+partly through a series of specific committees, it was planning a new
+common social order for the entire population of the earth. ‘There can
+be no real social stability or any general human happiness while large
+areas of the world and large classes of people are in a phase of
+civilisation different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now
+to have great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally
+accepted social purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the rest.’ So
+the council expressed its conception of the problem it had to solve.
+The peasant, the field-worker, and all barbaric cultivators were at an
+‘economic disadvantage’ to the more mobile and educated classes, and
+the logic of the situation compelled the council to take up
+systematically the supersession of this stratum by a more efficient
+organisation of production. It developed a scheme for the progressive
+establishment throughout the world of the ‘modern system’ in
+agriculture, a system that should give the full advantages of a
+civilised life to every agricultural worker, and this replacement has
+been going on right up to the present day. The central idea of the
+modern system is the substitution of cultivating guilds for the
+individual cultivator, and for cottage and village life altogether.
+These guilds are associations of men and women who take over areas of
+arable or pasture land, and make themselves responsible for a certain
+average produce. They are bodies small enough as a rule to be run on a
+strictly democratic basis, and large enough to supply all the labour,
+except for a certain assistance from townspeople during the harvest,
+needed upon the land farmed. They have watchers’ bungalows or chalets
+on the ground cultivated, but the ease and the costlessness of modern
+locomotion enables them to maintain a group of residences in the
+nearest town with a common dining-room and club house, and usually also
+a guild house in the national or provincial capital. Already this
+system has abolished a distinctively ‘rustic’ population throughout
+vast areas of the old world, where it has prevailed immemorially. That
+shy, unstimulated life of the lonely hovel, the narrow scandals and
+petty spites and persecutions of the small village, that hoarding, half
+inanimate existence away from books, thought, or social participation
+and in constant contact with cattle, pigs, poultry, and their
+excrement, is passing away out of human experience. In a little while
+it will be gone altogether. In the nineteenth century it had already
+ceased to be a necessary human state, and only the absence of any
+collective intelligence and an imagined need for tough and
+unintelligent soldiers and for a prolific class at a low level,
+prevented its systematic replacement at that time....
+
+And while this settlement of the country was in progress, the urban
+camps of the first phase of the council’s activities were rapidly
+developing, partly through the inherent forces of the situation and
+partly through the council’s direction, into a modern type of town....
+
+Section 6
+
+It is characteristic of the manner in which large enterprises forced
+themselves upon the Brissago council, that it was not until the end of
+the first year of their administration and then only with extreme
+reluctance that they would take up the manifest need for a _lingua
+franca_ for the world. They seem to have given little attention to the
+various theoretical universal languages which were proposed to them.
+They wished to give as little trouble to hasty and simple people as
+possible, and the world-wide distribution of English gave them a bias
+for it from the beginning. The extreme simplicity of its grammar was
+also in its favour.
+
+It was not without some sacrifices that the English-speaking peoples
+were permitted the satisfaction of hearing their speech used
+universally. The language was shorn of a number of grammatical
+peculiarities, the distinctive forms for the subjunctive mood for
+example and most of its irregular plurals were abolished; its spelling
+was systematised and adapted to the vowel sounds in use upon the
+continent of Europe, and a process of incorporating foreign nouns and
+verbs commenced that speedily reached enormous proportions. Within ten
+years from the establishment of the World Republic the New English
+Dictionary had swelled to include a vocabulary of 250,000 words, and a
+man of 1900 would have found considerable difficulty in reading an
+ordinary newspaper. On the other hand, the men of the new time could
+still appreciate the older English literature.... Certain minor acts of
+uniformity accompanied this larger one. The idea of a common
+understanding and a general simplification of intercourse once it was
+accepted led very naturally to the universal establishment of the
+metric system of weights and measures, and to the disappearance of the
+various makeshift calendars that had hitherto confused chronology. The
+year was divided into thirteen months of four weeks each, and New
+Year’s Day and Leap Year’s Day were made holidays, and did not count at
+all in the ordinary week. So the weeks and the months were brought into
+correspondence. And moreover, as the king put it to Firmin, it was
+decided to ‘nail down Easter.’ . . . In these matters, as in so many
+matters, the new civilisation came as a simplification of ancient
+complications; the history of the calendar throughout the world is a
+history of inadequate adjustments, of attempts to fix seed-time and
+midwinter that go back into the very beginning of human society; and
+this final rectification had a symbolic value quite beyond its
+practical convenience. But the council would have no rash nor harsh
+innovations, no strange names for the months, and no alteration in the
+numbering of the years.
+
+The world had already been put upon one universal monetary basis. For
+some months after the accession of the council, the world’s affairs had
+been carried on without any sound currency at all. Over great regions
+money was still in use, but with the most extravagant variations in
+price and the most disconcerting fluctuations of public confidence. The
+ancient rarity of gold upon which the entire system rested was gone.
+Gold was now a waste product in the release of atomic energy, and it
+was plain that no metal could be the basis of the monetary system
+again. Henceforth all coins must be token coins. Yet the whole world
+was accustomed to metallic money, and a vast proportion of existing
+human relationships had grown up upon a cash basis, and were almost
+inconceivable without that convenient liquidating factor. It seemed
+absolutely necessary to the life of the social organisation to have
+some sort of currency, and the council had therefore to discover some
+real value upon which to rest it. Various such apparently stable values
+as land and hours of work were considered. Ultimately the government,
+which was now in possession of most of the supplies of energy-releasing
+material, fixed a certain number of units of energy as the value of a
+gold sovereign, declared a sovereign to be worth exactly twenty marks,
+twenty-five francs, five dollars, and so forth, with the other current
+units of the world, and undertook, under various qualifications and
+conditions, to deliver energy upon demand as payment for every
+sovereign presented. On the whole, this worked satisfactorily. They
+saved the face of the pound sterling. Coin was rehabilitated, and after
+a phase of price fluctuations, began to settle down to definite
+equivalents and uses again, with names and everyday values familiar to
+the common run of people....
+
+Section 7
+
+As the Brissago council came to realise that what it had supposed to be
+temporary camps of refugees were rapidly developing into great towns of
+a new type, and that it was remoulding the world in spite of itself, it
+decided to place this work of redistributing the non-agricultural
+population in the hands of a compactor and better qualified special
+committee. That committee is now, far more than the council of any
+other of its delegated committees, the active government of the world.
+Developed from an almost invisible germ of ‘town-planning’ that came
+obscurely into existence in Europe or America (the question is still in
+dispute) somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth century,
+its work, the continual active planning and replanning of the world as
+a place of human habitation, is now so to speak the collective material
+activity of the race. The spontaneous, disorderly spreadings and
+recessions of populations, as aimless and mechanical as the trickling
+of spilt water, which was the substance of history for endless years,
+giving rise here to congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and
+everywhere to a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only
+picturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power of the
+race to aid them, into every available region of the earth. Their
+cities are no longer tethered to running water and the proximity of
+cultivation, their plans are no longer affected by strategic
+considerations or thoughts of social insecurity. The aeroplane and the
+nearly costless mobile car have abolished trade routes; a common
+language and a universal law have abolished a thousand restraining
+inconveniences, and so an astonishing dispersal of habitations has
+begun. One may live anywhere. And so it is that our cities now are true
+social gatherings, each with a character of its own and distinctive
+interests of its own, and most of them with a common occupation. They
+lie out in the former deserts, these long wasted sun-baths of the race,
+they tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote islands, and bask
+on broad lagoons. For a time the whole tendency of mankind was to
+desert the river valleys in which the race had been cradled for half a
+million years, but now that the War against Flies has been waged so
+successfully that this pestilential branch of life is nearly extinct,
+they are returning thither with a renewed appetite for gardens laced by
+watercourses, for pleasant living amidst islands and houseboats and
+bridges, and for nocturnal lanterns reflected by the sea.
+
+Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and more a
+builder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceases to be a
+cultivator of the soil the returns of the Redistribution Committee
+showed. Every year the work of our scientific laboratories increases
+the productivity and simplifies the labour of those who work upon the
+soil, and the food now of the whole world is produced by less than one
+per cent. of its population, a percentage which still tends to
+decrease. Far fewer people are needed upon the land than training and
+proclivity dispose towards it, and as a consequence of this excess of
+human attention, the garden side of life, the creation of groves and
+lawns and vast regions of beautiful flowers, has expanded enormously
+and continues to expand. For, as agricultural method intensifies and
+the quota is raised, one farm association after another, availing
+itself of the 1975 regulations, elects to produce a public garden and
+pleasaunce in the place of its former fields, and the area of freedom
+and beauty is increased. And the chemists’ triumphs of synthesis, which
+could now give us an entirely artificial food, remain largely in
+abeyance because it is so much more pleasant and interesting to eat
+natural produce and to grow such things upon the soil. Each year adds
+to the variety of our fruits and the delightfulness of our flowers.
+
+Section 8
+
+The early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain recrudescence
+of political adventure. There was, it is rather curious to note, no
+revival of separatism after the face of King Ferdinand Charles had
+vanished from the sight of men, but in a number of countries, as the
+first urgent physical needs were met, there appeared a variety of
+personalities having this in common, that they sought to revive
+political trouble and clamber by its aid to positions of importance and
+satisfaction. In no case did they speak in the name of kings, and it is
+clear that monarchy must have been far gone in obsolescence before the
+twentieth century began, but they made appeals to the large survivals
+of nationalist and racial feeling that were everywhere to be found,
+they alleged with considerable justice that the council was overriding
+racial and national customs and disregarding religious rules. The great
+plain of India was particularly prolific in such agitators. The revival
+of newspapers, which had largely ceased during the terrible year
+because of the dislocation of the coinage, gave a vehicle and a method
+of organisation to these complaints. At first the council disregarded
+this developing opposition, and then it recognised it with an entirely
+devastating frankness.
+
+Never, of course, had there been so provisional a government. It was of
+an extravagant illegality. It was, indeed, hardly more than a club, a
+club of about a hundred persons. At the outset there were ninety-three,
+and these were increased afterwards by the issue of invitations which
+more than balanced its deaths, to as many at one time as one hundred
+and nineteen. Always its constitution has been miscellaneous. At no
+time were these invitations issued with an admission that they
+recognised a right. The old institution or monarchy had come out
+unexpectedly well in the light of the new _régime_. Nine of the
+original members of the first government were crowned heads who had
+resigned their separate sovereignty, and at no time afterwards did the
+number of its royal members sink below six. In their case there was
+perhaps a kind of attenuated claim to rule, but except for them and the
+still more infinitesimal pretensions of one or two ex-presidents of
+republics, no member of the council had even the shade of a right to
+his participation in its power. It was natural, therefore, that its
+opponents should find a common ground in a clamour for representative
+government, and build high hopes upon a return, to parliamentary
+institutions.
+
+The council decided to give them everything they wanted, but in a form
+that suited ill with their aspirations. It became at one stroke a
+representative body. It became, indeed, magnificently representative.
+It became so representative that the politicians were drowned in a
+deluge of votes. Every adult of either sex from pole to pole was given
+a vote, and the world was divided into ten constituencies, which voted
+on the same day by means of a simple modification of the world post.
+Membership of the government, it was decided, must be for life, save in
+the exceptional case of a recall; but the elections, which were held
+quinquennially, were arranged to add fifty members on each occasion.
+The method of proportional representation with one transferable vote
+was adopted, and the voter might also write upon his voting paper in a
+specially marked space, the name of any of his representatives that he
+wished to recall. A ruler was recallable by as many votes as the quota
+by which he had been elected, and the original members by as many votes
+in any constituency as the returning quotas in the first election.
+
+Upon these conditions the council submitted itself very cheerfully to
+the suffrages of the world. None of its members were recalled, and its
+fifty new associates, which included twenty-seven which it had seen fit
+to recommend, were of an altogether too miscellaneous quality to
+disturb the broad trend of its policy. Its freedom from rules or
+formalities prevented any obstructive proceedings, and when one of the
+two newly arrived Home Rule members for India sought for information
+how to bring in a bill, they learnt simply that bills were not brought
+in. They asked for the speaker, and were privileged to hear much ripe
+wisdom from the ex-king Egbert, who was now consciously among the
+seniors of the gathering. Thereafter they were baffled men....
+
+But already by that time the work of the council was drawing to an end.
+It was concerned not so much for the continuation of its construction
+as for the preservation of its accomplished work from the dramatic
+instincts of the politician.
+
+The life of the race becomes indeed more and more independent of the
+formal government. The council, in its opening phase, was heroic in
+spirit; a dragon-slaying body, it slashed out of existence a vast,
+knotted tangle of obsolete ideas and clumsy and jealous
+proprietorships; it secured by a noble system of institutional
+precautions, freedom of inquiry, freedom of criticism, free
+communications, a common basis of education and understanding, and
+freedom from economic oppression. With that its creative task was
+accomplished. It became more and more an established security and less
+and less an active intervention. There is nothing in our time to
+correspond with the continual petty making and entangling of laws in an
+atmosphere of contention that is perhaps the most perplexing aspect of
+constitutional history in the nineteenth century. In that age they seem
+to have been perpetually making laws when we should alter regulations.
+The work of change which we delegate to these scientific committees of
+specific general direction which have the special knowledge needed, and
+which are themselves dominated by the broad intellectual process of the
+community, was in those days inextricably mixed up with legislation.
+They fought over the details; we should as soon think of fighting over
+the arrangement of the parts of a machine. We know nowadays that such
+things go on best within laws, as life goes on between earth and sky.
+And so it is that government gathers now for a day or so in each year
+under the sunshine of Brissago when Saint Bruno’s lilies are in flower,
+and does little more than bless the work of its committees. And even
+these committees are less originative and more expressive of the
+general thought than they were at first. It becomes difficult to mark
+out the particular directive personalities of the world. Continually we
+are less personal. Every good thought contributes now, and every able
+brain falls within that informal and dispersed kingship which gathers
+together into one purpose the energies of the race.
+
+Section 9
+
+It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human existence in
+which ‘politics,’ that is to say a partisan interference with the
+ruling sanities of the world, will be the dominant interest among
+serious men. We seem to have entered upon an entirely new phase in
+history in which contention as distinguished from rivalry, has almost
+abruptly ceased to be the usual occupation, and has become at most a
+subdued and hidden and discredited thing. Contentious professions cease
+to be an honourable employment for men. The peace between nations is
+also a peace between individuals. We live in a world that comes of age.
+Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of life,
+pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the curious learner, and
+man the creative artist, come forward to replace these barbaric aspects
+of existence by a less ignoble adventure.
+
+There is no natural life of man. He is, and always has been, a sheath
+of varied and even incompatible possibilities, a palimpsest of
+inherited dispositions. It was the habit of many writers in the early
+twentieth century to speak of competition and the narrow, private life
+of trade and saving and suspicious isolation as though such things were
+in some exceptional way proper to the human constitution, and as though
+openness of mind and a preference for achievement over possession were
+abnormal and rather unsubstantial qualities. How wrong that was the
+history of the decades immediately following the establishment of the
+world republic witnesses. Once the world was released from the
+hardening insecurities of a needless struggle for life that was
+collectively planless and individually absorbing, it became apparent
+that there was in the vast mass of people a long, smothered passion to
+make things. The world broke out into making, and at first mainly into
+æsthetic making. This phase of history, which has been not inaptly
+termed the ‘Efflorescence,’ is still, to a large extent, with us. The
+majority of our population consists of artists, and the bulk of
+activity in the world lies no longer with necessities but with their
+elaboration, decoration, and refinement. There has been an evident
+change in the quality of this making during recent years. It becomes
+more purposeful than it was, losing something of its first elegance and
+prettiness and gaining in intensity; but that is a change rather of hue
+than of nature. That comes with a deepening philosophy and a sounder
+education. For the first joyous exercises of fancy we perceive now the
+deliberation of a more constructive imagination. There is a natural
+order in these things, and art comes before science as the satisfaction
+of more elemental needs must come before art, and as play and pleasure
+come in a human life before the development of a settled purpose....
+
+For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work must
+have struggled in man against the limitations imposed upon him by his
+social ineptitude. It was a long smouldering fire that flamed out at
+last in all these things. The evidence of a pathetic, perpetually
+thwarted urgency to make something, is one of the most touching aspects
+of the relics and records of our immediate ancestors. There exists
+still in the death area about the London bombs, a region of deserted
+small homes that furnish the most illuminating comment on the old state
+of affairs. These homes are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat,
+hideously proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects
+quite filthy, only people in complete despair of anything better could
+have lived in them, but to each is attached a ridiculous little
+rectangle of land called ‘the garden,’ containing usually a prop for
+drying clothes and a loathsome box of offal, the dustbin, full of
+egg-shells, cinders, and such-like refuse. Now that one may go about
+this region in comparative security—for the London radiations have
+dwindled to inconsiderable proportions—it is possible to trace in
+nearly every one of these gardens some effort to make. Here it is a
+poor little plank summer-house, here it is a ‘fountain’ of bricks and
+oyster-shells, here a ‘rockery,’ here a ‘workshop.’ And in the houses
+everywhere there are pitiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble
+drawings. These efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings
+of blindfolded men, they are only one shade less harrowing to a
+sympathetic observer than the scratchings one finds upon the walls of
+the old prisons, but there they are, witnessing to the poor buried
+instincts that struggled up towards the light. That god of joyous
+expression our poor fathers ignorantly sought, our freedom has declared
+to us....
+
+In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to possess
+a little property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled by others, an
+‘independence’ as the English used to put it. And what made this desire
+for freedom and prosperity so strong, was very evidently the dream of
+self-expression, of doing something with it, of playing with it, of
+making a personal delightfulness, a distinctiveness. Property was never
+more than a means to an end, nor avarice more than a perversion. Men
+owned in order to do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments
+and his own privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its
+release in a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may
+leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row of
+carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they give
+themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in phenomena
+as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of riches. The work
+that was once the whole substance of social existence—for most men
+spent all their lives in earning a living—is now no more than was the
+burden upon one of those old climbers who carried knapsacks of
+provisions on their backs in order that they might ascend mountains. It
+matters little to the easy charities of our emancipated time that most
+people who have made their labour contribution produce neither new
+beauty nor new wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant
+activities and enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They
+help, it may be, by reception and reverberation, and they hinder
+nothing. ...
+
+Section 10
+
+Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and appearances
+of human life which is going on about us, a change as rapid and as
+wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after the
+barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral and mental changes at
+least as unprecedented. It is not as if old things were going out of
+life and new things coming in, it is rather that the altered
+circumstances of men are making an appeal to elements in his nature
+that have hitherto been suppressed, and checking tendencies that have
+hitherto been over-stimulated and over-developed. He has not so much
+grown and altered his essential being as turned new aspects to the
+light. Such turnings round into a new attitude the world has seen on a
+less extensive scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth
+century, for example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the
+nineteenth their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable
+men. There was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth
+century that seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that had not
+been guilty of them within the previous two centuries. The free, frank,
+kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in any European country
+before the years of the last wars was in a different world of thought
+and feeling from that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive, and
+uncharitable existence of the respectable poor, or the constant
+personal violence, the squalor and naïve passions of the lowest
+stratum. Yet there were no real differences of blood and inherent
+quality between these worlds; their differences were all in
+circumstances, suggestion, and habits of mind. And turning to more
+individual instances the constantly observed difference between one
+portion of a life and another consequent upon a religious conversion,
+were a standing example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.
+
+The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and
+businesses and economic relations shook them also out of their old
+established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and
+prejudices that came down to them from the past. To borrow a word from
+the old-fashioned chemists, men were made nascent; they were released
+from old ties; for good or evil they were ready for new associations.
+The council carried them forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had
+reached their destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried
+them back to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a
+harder one than the council’s. The moral shock of the atomic bombs had
+been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side of the human
+animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of the vital
+necessity for reconstruction. The litigious and trading spirits cowered
+together, scared at their own consequences; men thought twice before
+they sought mean advantages in the face of the unusual eagerness to
+realise new aspirations, and when at last the weeds revived again and
+‘claims’ began to sprout, they sprouted upon the stony soil of
+law-courts reformed, of laws that pointed to the future instead of the
+past, and under the blazing sunshine of a transforming world. A new
+literature, a new interpretation of history were springing into
+existence, a new teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in
+the young. The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research
+city for the English upon the Sussex downs by buying up a series of
+estates, was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made his
+demand for some preposterous compensation; the owner of the discredited
+Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the scroll of history as
+the insolvent proprietor of a paper called _The Cry for Justice_, in
+which he duns the world for a hundred million pounds. That was the
+ingenuous Dass’s idea of justice, that he ought to be paid about five
+million pounds annually because he had annexed the selvage of one of
+Holsten’s discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his
+right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private hospital
+at Nice. Both of these men would probably have ended their days
+enormously wealthy, and of course ennobled in the England of the
+opening twentieth century, and it is just this novelty of their fates
+that marks the quality of the new age.
+
+The new government early discovered the need of a universal education
+to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal rule. It made no
+wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and sectarian forms of
+religious profession that at that time divided the earth into a
+patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it left these organisations to make
+their peace with God in their own time; but it proclaimed as if it were
+a mere secular truth that sacrifice was expected from all, that respect
+had to be shown to all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all
+around the world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of
+war and the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was
+taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the salvation of
+the world from waste and contention was the common duty and occupation
+of all men and women. These things which are now the elementary
+commonplaces of human intercourse seemed to the councillors of
+Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim them, marvellously daring
+discoveries, not untouched by doubt, that flushed the cheek and fired
+the eye.
+
+The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the hands of
+a committee of men and women, which did its work during the next few
+decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness. This educational
+committee was, and is, the correlative upon the mental and spiritual
+side of the redistribution committee. And prominent upon it, and indeed
+for a time quite dominating it, was a Russian named Karenin, who was
+singular in being a congenital cripple. His body was bent so that he
+walked with difficulty, suffered much pain as he grew older, and had at
+last to undergo two operations. The second killed him. Already
+malformation, which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle
+ages so that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature
+of the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world. It
+had a curious effect upon Karenin’s colleagues; their feeling towards
+him was mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that it needed
+usage rather than reason to overcome. He had a strong face, with little
+bright brown eyes rather deeply sunken and a large resolute thin-lipped
+mouth. His skin was very yellow and wrinkled, and his hair iron gray.
+He was at all times an impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this
+was forgiven him because of the hot wire of suffering that was
+manifestly thrust through his being. At the end of his life his
+personal prestige was very great. To him far more than to any
+contemporary is it due that self-abnegation, self-identification with
+the world spirit, was made the basis of universal education. That
+general memorandum to the teachers which is the key-note of the modern
+educational system, was probably entirely his work.
+
+‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,’ he wrote. ‘That is the
+device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point of all we
+have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything but a plain
+statement of fact. It is the basis for your work. You have to teach
+self-forgetfulness, and everything else that you have to teach is
+contributory and subordinate to that end. Education is the release of
+man from self. You have to widen the horizons of your children,
+encourage and intensify their curiosity and their creative impulses,
+and cultivate and enlarge their sympathies. That is what you are for.
+Under your guidance and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them,
+they have to shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities,
+and passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the
+universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened out
+until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose. And this
+that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously yourselves.
+Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill, every sort of service,
+love: these are the means of salvation from that narrow loneliness of
+desire, that brooding preoccupation with self and egotistical
+relationships, which is hell for the individual, treason to the race,
+and exile from God....’
+
+Section 11
+
+As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one begins
+for the first time to see them clearly. From the perspectives of a new
+age one can look back upon the great and widening stream of literature
+with a complete understanding. Things link up that seemed disconnected,
+and things that were once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be
+but factors in the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of
+the sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth
+centuries falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one sees
+it as a huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the conflict of human
+egotism and personal passion and narrow imaginations on the one hand,
+against the growing sense of wider necessities and a possible, more
+spacious life.
+
+That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire’s
+_Candide_, for example, in which the desire for justice as well as
+happiness beats against human contrariety and takes refuge at last in a
+forced and inconclusive contentment with little things. _Candide_ was
+but one of the pioneers of a literature of uneasy complaint that was
+presently an innumerable multitude of books. The novels more
+particularly of the nineteenth century, if one excludes the mere
+story-tellers from our consideration, witness to this uneasy
+realisation of changes that call for effort and of the lack of that
+effort. In a thousand aspects, now tragically, now comically, now with
+a funny affectation of divine detachment, a countless host of witnesses
+tell their story of lives fretting between dreams and limitations. Now
+one laughs, now one weeps, now one reads with a blank astonishment at
+this huge and almost unpremeditated record of how the growing human
+spirit, now warily, now eagerly, now furiously, and always, as it
+seems, unsuccessfully, tried to adapt itself to the maddening misfit of
+its patched and ancient garments. And always in these books as one
+draws nearer to the heart of the matter there comes a disconcerting
+evasion. It was the fantastic convention of the time that a writer
+should not touch upon religion. To do so was to rouse the jealous fury
+of the great multitude of professional religious teachers. It was
+permitted to state the discord, but it was forbidden to glance at any
+possible reconciliation. Religion was the privilege of the pulpit....
+
+It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It was
+ignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the
+discussion of business questions, it played a trivial and apologetic
+part in public affairs. And this was done not out of contempt but
+respect. The hold of the old religious organisations upon men’s respect
+was still enormous, so enormous that there seemed to be a quality of
+irreverence in applying religion to the developments of every day. This
+strange suspension of religion lasted over into the beginnings of the
+new age. It was the clear vision of Marcus Karenin much more than any
+other contemporary influence which brought it back into the texture of
+human life. He saw religion without hallucinations, without
+superstitious reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and
+air, as land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the
+Republic. He saw that indeed it had already percolated away from the
+temples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought to imprison
+it, that it was already at work anonymously and obscurely in the
+universal acceptance of the greater state. He gave it clearer
+expression, rephrased it to the lights and perspectives of the new
+dawn....
+
+But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of the
+times it becomes evident as one reads them in their chronological
+order, so far as that is now ascertainable, that as one comes to the
+latter nineteenth and the earlier twentieth century the writers are
+much more acutely aware of secular change than their predecessors were.
+The earlier novelists tried to show ‘life as it is,’ the latter showed
+life as it changes. More and more of their characters are engaged in
+adaptation to change or suffering from the effects of world changes.
+And as we come up to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception
+of the everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is
+continually more manifest. Barnet’s book, which has served us so well,
+is frankly a picture of the world coming about like a ship that sails
+into the wind. Our later novelists give a vast gallery of individual
+conflicts in which old habits and customs, limited ideas, ungenerous
+temperaments, and innate obsessions are pitted against this great
+opening out of life that has happened to us. They tell us of the
+feelings of old people who have been wrenched away from familiar
+surroundings, and how they have had to make peace with uncomfortable
+comforts and conveniences that are still strange to them. They give us
+the discord between the opening egotisms of youths and the ill-defined
+limitations of a changing social life. They tell of the universal
+struggle of jealousy to capture and cripple our souls, of romantic
+failures and tragical misconceptions of the trend of the world, of the
+spirit of adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how these serve
+the universal drift. And all their stories lead in the end either to
+happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster or salvation. The
+clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more certainly do
+these novels tell of the possibility of salvation for all the world.
+For any road in life leads to religion for those upon it who will
+follow it far enough....
+
+It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former time that
+it should be an open question as it is to-day whether the world is
+wholly Christian or not Christian at all. But assuredly we have the
+spirit, and as surely have we left many temporary forms behind.
+Christianity was the first expression of world religion, the first
+complete repudiation of tribalism and war and disputation. That it fell
+presently into the ways of more ancient rituals cannot alter that. The
+common sense of mankind has toiled through two thousand years of
+chastening experience to find at last how sound a meaning attaches to
+the familiar phrases of the Christian faith. The scientific thinker as
+he widens out to the moral problems of the collective life, comes
+inevitably upon the words of Christ, and as inevitably does the
+Christian, as his thought grows clearer, arrive at the world republic.
+As for the claims of the sects, as for the use of a name and
+successions, we live in a time that has shaken itself free from such
+claims and consistencies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH
+THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
+
+
+Section 1
+
+The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new
+station for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above the
+Sutlej Gorge, where it comes down out of Thibet.
+
+It is a place of such wildness and beauty as no other scenery in the
+world affords. The granite terrace which runs round the four sides of
+the low block of laboratories looks out in every direction upon
+mountains. Far below in the hidden depths of a shadowy blue cleft, the
+river pours down in its tumultuous passage to the swarming plains of
+India. No sound of its roaring haste comes up to those serenities.
+Beyond that blue gulf, in which whole forests of giant deodars seem no
+more than small patches of moss, rise vast precipices of many-coloured
+rock, fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles.
+These are the northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and snow
+which clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the
+culminating summits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest. Here are
+cliffs of which no other land can show the like, and deep chasms in
+which Mt. Blanc might be plunged and hidden. Here are icefields as big
+as inland seas on which the tumbled boulders lie so thickly that
+strange little flowers can bloom among them under the untempered
+sunshine. To the northward, and blocking out any vision of the uplands
+of Thibet, rises that citadel of porcelain, that gothic pile, the Lio
+Porgyul, walls, towers, and peaks, a clear twelve thousand feet of
+veined and splintered rock above the river. And beyond it and eastward
+and westward rise peaks behind peaks, against the dark blue Himalayan
+sky. Far away below to the south the clouds of the Indian rains pile up
+abruptly and are stayed by an invisible hand.
+
+Hither it was that with a dreamlike swiftness Karenin flew high over
+the irrigations of Rajputana and the towers and cupolas of the ultimate
+Delhi; and the little group of buildings, albeit the southward wall
+dropped nearly five hundred feet, seemed to him as he soared down to it
+like a toy lost among these mountain wildernesses. No road came up to
+this place; it was reached only by flight.
+
+His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted by his
+secretary clambered down through the wing fabric and made his way to
+the officials who came out to receive him.
+
+In this place, beyond infections and noise and any distractions,
+surgery had made for itself a house of research and a healing fastness.
+The building itself would have seemed very wonderful to eyes accustomed
+to the flimsy architecture of an age when power was precious. It was
+made of granite, already a little roughened on the outside by frost,
+but polished within and of a tremendous solidity. And in a honeycomb of
+subtly lit apartments, were the spotless research benches, the
+operating tables, the instruments of brass, and fine glass and platinum
+and gold. Men and women came from all parts of the world for study or
+experimental research. They wore a common uniform of white and ate at
+long tables together, but the patients lived in an upper part of the
+buildings, and were cared for by nurses and skilled attendants....
+
+The first man to greet Karenin was Ciana, the scientific director of
+the institution. Beside him was Rachel Borken, the chief organiser.
+‘You are tired?’ she asked, and old Karenin shook his head.
+
+‘Cramped,’ he said. ‘I have wanted to visit such a place as this.’
+
+He spoke as if he had no other business with them.
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+‘How many scientific people have you got here now?’ he asked.
+
+‘Just three hundred and ninety-two,’ said Rachel Borken.
+
+‘And the patients and attendants and so on?’
+
+‘Two thousand and thirty.’
+
+‘I shall be a patient,’ said Karenin. ‘I shall have to be a patient.
+But I should like to see things first. Presently I will be a patient.’
+
+‘You will come to my rooms?’ suggested Ciana.
+
+‘And then I must talk to this doctor of yours,’ said Karenin. ‘But I
+would like to see a bit of this place and talk to some of your people
+before it comes to that.’
+
+He winced and moved forward.
+
+‘I have left most of my work in order,’ he said.
+
+‘You have been working hard up to now?’ asked Rachel Borken.
+
+‘Yes. And now I have nothing more to do—and it seems strange.... And
+it’s a bother, this illness and having to come down to oneself. This
+doorway and the row of windows is well done; the gray granite and just
+the line of gold, and then those mountains beyond through that arch.
+It’s very well done....’
+
+Section 2
+
+Karenin lay on the bed with a soft white rug about him, and Fowler, who
+was to be his surgeon sat on the edge of the bed and talked to him. An
+assistant was seated quietly in the shadow behind the bed. The
+examination had been made, and Karenin knew what was before him. He was
+tired but serene.
+
+‘So I shall die,’ he said, ‘unless you operate?’
+
+Fowler assented. ‘And then,’ said Karenin, smiling, ‘probably I shall
+die.’
+
+‘Not certainly.’
+
+‘Even if I do not die; shall I be able to work?’
+
+‘There is just a chance....’
+
+‘So firstly I shall probably die, and if I do not, then perhaps I shall
+be a useless invalid?’
+
+‘I think if you live, you may be able to go on—as you do now.’
+
+‘Well, then, I suppose I must take the risk of it. Yet couldn’t you,
+Fowler, couldn’t you drug me and patch me instead of all
+this—vivisection? A few days of drugged and active life—and then the
+end?’
+
+Fowler thought. ‘We are not sure enough yet to do things like that,’ he
+said.
+
+‘But a day is coming when you will be certain.’
+
+Fowler nodded.
+
+‘You make me feel as though I was the last of deformity—Deformity is
+uncertainty—inaccuracy. My body works doubtfully, it is not even sure
+that it will die or live. I suppose the time is not far off when such
+bodies as mine will no longer be born into the world.’
+
+‘You see,’ said Fowler, after a little pause, ‘it is necessary that
+spirits such as yours should be born into the world.’
+
+‘I suppose,’ said Karenin, ‘that my spirit has had its use. But if you
+think that is because my body is as it is I think you are mistaken.
+There is no peculiar virtue in defect. I have always chafed against—all
+this. If I could have moved more freely and lived a larger life in
+health I could have done more. But some day perhaps you will be able to
+put a body that is wrong altogether right again. Your science is only
+beginning. It’s a subtler thing than physics and chemistry, and it
+takes longer to produce its miracles. And meanwhile a few more of us
+must die in patience.’
+
+‘Fine work is being done and much of it,’ said Fowler. ‘I can say as
+much because I have nothing to do with it. I can understand a lesson,
+appreciate the discoveries of abler men and use my hands, but those
+others, Pigou, Masterton, Lie, and the others, they are clearing the
+ground fast for the knowledge to come. Have you had time to follow
+their work?’
+
+Karenin shook his head. ‘But I can imagine the scope of it,’ he said.
+
+‘We have so many men working now,’ said Fowler. ‘I suppose at present
+there must be at least a thousand thinking hard, observing,
+experimenting, for one who did so in nineteen hundred.’
+
+‘Not counting those who keep the records?’
+
+‘Not counting those. Of course, the present indexing of research is in
+itself a very big work, and it is only now that we are getting it
+properly done. But already we are feeling the benefit of that. Since it
+ceased to be a paid employment and became a devotion we have had only
+those people who obeyed the call of an aptitude at work upon these
+things. Here—I must show you it to-day, because it will interest you—we
+have our copy of the encyclopaedic index—every week sheets are taken
+out and replaced by fresh sheets with new results that are brought to
+us by the aeroplanes of the Research Department. It is an index of
+knowledge that grows continually, an index that becomes continually
+truer. There was never anything like it before.’
+
+‘When I came into the education committee,’ said Karenin, ‘that index
+of human knowledge seemed an impossible thing. Research had produced a
+chaotic mountain of results, in a hundred languages and a thousand
+different types of publication....’ He smiled at his memories. ‘How we
+groaned at the job!’
+
+‘Already the ordering of that chaos is nearly done. You shall see.’
+
+‘I have been so busy with my own work——Yes, I shall be glad to see.’
+
+The patient regarded the surgeon for a time with interested eyes.
+
+‘You work here always?’ he asked abruptly.
+
+‘No,’ said Fowler.
+
+‘But mostly you work here?’
+
+‘I have worked about seven years out of the past ten. At times I go
+away—down there. One has to. At least I have to. There is a sort of
+grayness comes over all this, one feels hungry for life, real, personal
+passionate life, love-making, eating and drinking for the fun of the
+thing, jostling crowds, having adventures, laughter—above all
+laughter——’
+
+‘Yes,’ said Karenin understandingly.
+
+‘And then one day, suddenly one thinks of these high mountains
+again....’
+
+‘That is how I would have lived, if it had not been for my—defects,’
+said Karenin. ‘Nobody knows but those who have borne it the
+exasperation of abnormality. It will be good when you have nobody alive
+whose body cannot live the wholesome everyday life, whose spirit cannot
+come up into these high places as it wills.’
+
+‘We shall manage that soon,’ said Fowler.
+
+‘For endless generations man has struggled upward against the
+indignities of his body—and the indignities of his soul. Pains,
+incapacities, vile fears, black moods, despairs. How well I’ve known
+them. They’ve taken more time than all your holidays. It is true, is it
+not, that every man is something of a cripple and something of a beast?
+I’ve dipped a little deeper than most; that’s all. It’s only now when
+he has fully learnt the truth of that, that he can take hold of himself
+to be neither beast nor cripple. Now that he overcomes his servitude to
+his body, he can for the first time think of living the full life of
+his body.... Before another generation dies you’ll have the thing in
+hand. You’ll do as you please with the old Adam and all the vestiges
+from the brutes and reptiles that lurk in his body and spirit. Isn’t
+that so?’
+
+‘You put it boldly,’ said Fowler.
+
+Karenin laughed cheerfully at his caution.... ‘When,’ asked Karenin
+suddenly, ‘when will you operate?’
+
+‘The day after to-morrow,’ said Fowler. ‘For a day I want you to drink
+and eat as I shall prescribe. And you may think and talk as you
+please.’
+
+‘I should like to see this place.’
+
+‘You shall go through it this afternoon. I will have two men carry you
+in a litter. And to-morrow you shall lie out upon the terrace. Our
+mountains here are the most beautiful in the world....’
+
+Section 3
+
+The next morning Karenin got up early and watched the sun rise over the
+mountains, and breakfasted lightly, and then young Gardener, his
+secretary, came to consult him upon the spending of his day. Would he
+care to see people? Or was this gnawing pain within him too much to
+permit him to do that?
+
+‘I’d like to talk,’ said Karenin. ‘There must be all sorts of
+lively-minded people here. Let them come and gossip with me. It will
+distract me—and I can’t tell you how interesting it makes everything
+that is going on to have seen the dawn of one’s own last day.’
+
+‘Your last day!’
+
+‘Fowler will kill me.’
+
+‘But he thinks not.’
+
+‘Fowler will kill me. If he does not he will not leave very much of me.
+So that this is my last day anyhow, the days afterwards if they come at
+all to me, will be refuse. I know....’
+
+Gardener was about to speak when Karenin went on again.
+
+‘I hope he kills me, Gardener. Don’t be—old-fashioned. The thing I am
+most afraid of is that last rag of life. I may just go on—a scarred
+salvage of suffering stuff. And then—all the things I have hidden and
+kept down or discounted or set right afterwards will get the better of
+me. I shall be peevish. I may lose my grip upon my own egotism. It’s
+never been a very firm grip. No, no, Gardener, don’t say that! You know
+better, you’ve had glimpses of it. Suppose I came through on the other
+side of this affair, belittled, vain, and spiteful, using the prestige
+I have got among men by my good work in the past just to serve some
+small invalid purpose....’
+
+He was silent for a time, watching the mists among the distant
+precipices change to clouds of light, and drift and dissolve before the
+searching rays of the sunrise.
+
+‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘I am afraid of these anæsthetics and these fag
+ends of life. It’s life we are all afraid of. Death!—nobody minds just
+death. Fowler is clever—but some day surgery will know its duty better
+and not be so anxious just to save something . . . provided only that
+it quivers. I’ve tried to hold my end up properly and do my work. After
+Fowler has done with me I am certain I shall be unfit for work—and what
+else is there for me? . . . I know I shall not be fit for work....
+
+‘I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing thread of
+vitality.... I know it for the splendid thing it is—I who have been a
+diseased creature from the beginning. I know it well enough not to
+confuse it with its husks. Remember that, Gardener, if presently my
+heart fails me and I despair, and if I go through a little phase of
+pain and ingratitude and dark forgetfulness before the end.... Don’t
+believe what I may say at the last.... If the fabric is good enough the
+selvage doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. So long as you are alive you
+are just the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all
+your life from the first moment to the last....’
+
+Section 4
+
+Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to him, and
+he could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a long time with
+him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and with her was a girl
+named Edith Haydon who was already very well known as a cytologist. And
+several of the younger men who were working in the place and a patient
+named Kahn, a poet, and Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent
+some time with him. The talk wandered from point to point and came back
+upon itself, and became now earnest and now trivial as the chance
+suggestions determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notes
+of things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again the
+outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt about
+many of the principal things in life.
+
+‘Our age,’ he said, ‘has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We have
+been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama that was
+played out and growing tiresome.... If I could but sit out the first
+few scenes of the new spectacle....
+
+‘How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as I am ailing with
+a growth of unmeaning things. It was entangled, feverish, confused. It
+was in sore need of release, and I suppose that nothing less than the
+violence of those bombs could have released it and made it a healthy
+world again. I suppose they were necessary. Just as everything turns to
+evil in a fevered body so everything seemed turning to evil in those
+last years of the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete
+organisations seizing upon all the new fine things that science was
+giving to the world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the
+churches and sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat powers and
+limitless possibilities and turning them to evil uses. And they would
+not suffer open speech, they would not permit of education, they would
+let no one be educated to the needs of the new time.... You who are
+younger cannot imagine the mixture of desperate hope and protesting
+despair in which we who could believe in the possibilities of science
+lived in those years before atomic energy came....
+
+‘It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would not
+understand, but that those who did understand lacked the power of real
+belief. They said the things, they saw the things, and the things meant
+nothing to them....
+
+‘I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how our
+fathers bore themselves towards science. They hated it. They feared it.
+They permitted a few scientific men to exist and work—a pitiful
+handful.... “Don’t find out anything about us,” they said to them;
+“don’t inflict vision upon us, spare our little ways of life from the
+fearful shaft of understanding. But do tricks for us, little limited
+tricks. Give us cheap lighting. And cure us of certain disagreeable
+things, cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our colds and
+relieve us after repletion....” We have changed all that, Gardener.
+Science is no longer our servant. We know it for something greater than
+our little individual selves. It is the awakening mind of the race, and
+in a little while——In a little while——I wish indeed I could watch for
+that little while, now that the curtain has risen....
+
+‘While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs in
+London,’ he said. ‘Then they are going to repair the ruins and make it
+all as like as possible to its former condition before the bombs fell.
+Perhaps they will dig out the old house in St John’s Wood to which my
+father went after his expulsion from Russia.... That London of my
+memories seems to me like a place in another world. For you younger
+people it must seem like a place that could never have existed.’
+
+‘Is there much left standing?’ asked Edith Haydon.
+
+‘Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and north-west,
+they say; and most of the bridges and large areas of dock. Westminster,
+which held most of the government offices, suffered badly from the
+small bomb that destroyed the Parliament, there are very few traces of
+the old thoroughfare of Whitehall or the Government region thereabout,
+but there are plentiful drawings to scale of its buildings, and the
+great hole in the east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor
+district and very like the north and the south.... It will be possible
+to reconstruct most of it.... It is wanted. Already it becomes
+difficult to recall the old time—even for us who saw it.’
+
+‘It seems very distant to me,’ said the girl.
+
+‘It was an unwholesome world,’ reflected Karenin. ‘I seem to remember
+everybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They were ill. They
+were sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious about money and
+everybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate a queer mixture of
+foods, either too much or too little, and at odd hours. One sees how
+ill they were by their advertisements. All this new region of London
+they are opening up now is plastered with advertisements of pills.
+Everybody must have been taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the
+Strand they have found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling
+rubble and unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of
+pill and tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying
+age. They are equally strange to us. People’s skins must have been in a
+vile state. Very few people were properly washed; they carried the
+filth of months on their clothes. All the clothes they wore were old
+clothes; our way of pulping our clothes again after a week or so of
+wear would have seemed fantastic to them. Their clothing hardly bears
+thinking about. And the congestion of them! Everybody was jostling
+against everybody in those awful towns. In an uproar. People were run
+over and crushed by the hundred; every year in London the cars and
+omnibuses alone killed or disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it
+was worse; people used to fall dead for want of air in the crowded
+ways. The irritation of London, internal and external, must have been
+maddening. It was a maddened world. It is like thinking of a sick
+child. One has the same effect of feverish urgencies and acute
+irrational disappointments.
+
+‘All history,’ he said, ‘is a record of a childhood....
+
+‘And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and keen
+about even a sick child—and something touching. But so much of the old
+times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly stupid,
+obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very opposite to being
+fresh and young.
+
+‘I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of
+nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of blood
+and iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man. Indeed, that is
+what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who ever became great. I
+looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost froggish face, with projecting
+eyes and a thick moustache to hide a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing
+but Germany, Germany emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his
+class in Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to
+ideas; his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a bumpkin’s
+elaborate cunning. And he was the most influential man in the world, in
+the whole world, no man ever left so deep a mark on it, because
+everywhere there were gross men to resonate to the heavy notes he
+emitted. He trampled on ten thousand lovely things, and a kind of
+malice in these louts made it pleasant to them to see him trample.
+No—he was no child; the dull, national aggressiveness he stood for, no
+childishness. Childhood is promise. He was survival.
+
+‘All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education, art,
+happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the clatter of
+his sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool’s “blood and iron”
+passed all round the earth. Until the atomic bombs burnt our way to
+freedom again....’
+
+‘One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium,’ said one of
+the young men.
+
+‘From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a hundred
+thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but war.’
+
+‘Were there no sane men in those days,’ asked the young man, ‘to stand
+against that idolatry?’
+
+‘In a state of despair,’ said Edith Haydon.
+
+‘He is so far off—and there are men alive still who were alive when
+Bismarck died!’ . . . said the young man....
+
+Section 5
+
+‘And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck,’ said Karenin, following
+his own thoughts. ‘You see, men belong to their own age; we stand upon
+a common stock of thought and we fancy we stand upon the ground. I met
+a pleasant man the other day, a Maori, whose great-grandfather was a
+cannibal. It chanced he had a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the
+two were marvellously alike. One felt that a little juggling with time
+and either might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a
+stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one. The
+world also has its moods. Think of the mental food of Bismarck’s
+childhood; the humiliations of Napoleon’s victories, the crowded,
+crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations.... Everybody in those
+days, wise or foolish, believed that the division of the world under a
+multitude of governments was inevitable, and that it was going on for
+thousands of years more. It _was_ inevitable until it was impossible.
+Any one who had denied that inevitability publicly would have been
+counted—oh! a _silly_ fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a
+little—forcible, on the lines of the accepted ideas. That is all. He
+thought that since there had to be national governments he would make
+one that was strong at home and invincible abroad. Because he had fed
+with a kind of rough appetite upon what we can see now were very stupid
+ideas, that does not make him a stupid man. We’ve had advantages; we’ve
+had unity and collectivism blasted into our brains. Where should we be
+now but for the grace of science? I should have been an embittered,
+spiteful, downtrodden member of the Russian Intelligenza, a
+conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin. You, my dear, would have been
+breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.’
+
+‘_Never_,’ said Edith stoutly....
+
+For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the young
+people gibed at each other across the smiling old administrator, and
+then presently one of the young scientific men gave things a new turn.
+He spoke like one who was full to the brim.
+
+‘You know, sir, I’ve a fancy—it is hard to prove such things—that
+civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic bombs came banging
+into it, that if there had been no Holsten and no induced
+radio-activity, the world would have—smashed—much as it did. Only
+instead of its being a smash that opened a way to better things, it
+might have been a smash without a recovery. It is part of my business
+to understand economics, and from that point of view the century before
+Holsten was just a hundred years’ crescendo of waste. Only the extreme
+individualism of that period, only its utter want of any collective
+understanding or purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used up
+material—insanely. They had got through three-quarters of all the coal
+in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they had swept away
+their forests, and they were running short of tin and copper. Their
+wheat areas were getting weary and populous, and many of the big towns
+had so lowered the water level of their available hills that they
+suffered a drought every summer. The whole system was rushing towards
+bankruptcy. And they were spending every year vaster and vaster amounts
+of power and energy upon military preparations, and continually
+expanding the debt of industry to capital. The system was already
+staggering when Holsten began his researches. So far as the world in
+general went there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry.
+They had no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that
+there was a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, see the
+gulf beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at large
+that any research at all was in progress. And as I say, sir, if that
+line of escape hadn’t opened, before now there might have been a crash,
+revolution, panic, social disintegration, famine, and—it is
+conceivable—complete disorder.... The rails might have rusted on the
+disused railways by now, the telephone poles have rotted and fallen,
+the big liners dropped into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt,
+deserted cities become the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers.
+We might have been brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah,
+you may smile, but that had happened before in human history. The world
+is still studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric
+bands made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of Hadrian
+became a fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome against the
+Colosseum.... Had all that possibility of reaction ended so certainly
+in 1940? Is it all so very far away even now?’
+
+‘It seems far enough away now,’ said Edith Haydon.
+
+‘But forty years ago?’
+
+‘No,’ said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, ‘I think you
+underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of the
+twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that intelligence
+didn’t tell—but it was there. And I question your hypothesis. I doubt
+if that discovery could have been delayed. There is a kind of
+inevitable logic now in the progress of research. For a hundred years
+and more thought and science have been going their own way regardless
+of the common events of life. You see—_they have got loose_. If there
+had been no Holsten there would have been some similar man. If atomic
+energy had not come in one year it would have come in another. In
+decadent Rome the march of science had scarcely begun.... Nineveh,
+Babylon, Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough
+experiments in association that made a security, a breathing-space, in
+which inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the
+way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly begun....
+The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth
+centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the former civilisation
+flaring up about the beginnings of the new. Which we serve.... ‘Man
+lives in the dawn for ever,’ said Karenin. ‘Life is beginning and
+nothing else but beginning. It begins everlastingly. Each step seems
+vaster than the last, and does but gather us together for the nest.
+This Modern State of ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a
+hundred years ago, is already the commonplace of life. But as I sit
+here and dream of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather
+to a head beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here
+seem but little things....’
+
+Section 6
+
+About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept among
+his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he awoke and some
+tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small difficulty in
+connection with the Moravian schools in the Labrador country and in
+Greenland that Gardener knew would interest him. He remained alone for
+a little while after that, and then the two women came to him again.
+Afterwards Edwards and Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon
+love and the place of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of
+India lay under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full
+upon the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast
+splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild rush
+of snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a wet thread
+into the gulfs below, and cease....
+
+Section 7
+
+For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet, talked
+of passionate love. He said that passionate, personal love had been the
+abiding desire of humanity since ever humanity had begun, and now only
+was it becoming a possible experience. It had been a dream that
+generation after generation had pursued, that always men had lost on
+the verge of attainment. To most of those who had sought it obstinately
+it had brought tragedy. Now, lifted above sordid distresses, men and
+women might hope for realised and triumphant love. This age was the
+Dawn of Love....
+
+Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these things.
+Against that continued silence Kahn’s voice presently seemed to beat
+and fail. He had begun by addressing Karenin, but presently he was
+including Edith Haydon and Rachel Borken in his appeal. Rachel listened
+silently; Edith watched Karenin and very deliberately avoided Kahn’s
+eyes.
+
+‘I know,’ said Karenin at last, ‘that many people are saying this sort
+of thing. I know that there is a vast release of love-making in the
+world. This great wave of decoration and elaboration that has gone
+about the world, this Efflorescence, has of course laid hold of that. I
+know that when you say that the world is set free, you interpret that
+to mean that the world is set free for love-making. Down there,—under
+the clouds, the lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your
+half-mystical songs, in which you represent this old hard world
+dissolving into a luminous haze of love—sexual love.... I don’t think
+you are right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, and
+you see life—ardently—with the eyes of youth. But the power that has
+brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled blackness of
+the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense and awful future of
+our race, is riper and deeper and greater than any such emotions....
+
+‘All through my life—it has been a necessary part of my work—I have had
+to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles that perfect
+freedom and almost limitless power will put to the soul of our race. I
+can see now, all over the world, a beautiful ecstasy of waste; “Let us
+sing and rejoice and be lovely and wonderful.” . . . The orgy is only
+beginning, Kahn.... It was inevitable—but it is not the end of
+mankind....
+
+‘Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of time
+that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it forgot
+itself as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts, its moments,
+were born and wondered and played and desired and hungered and grew
+weary and died. Incalculable successions of vision, visions of sunlit
+jungle, river wilderness, wild forest, eager desire, beating hearts,
+soaring wings and creeping terror flamed hotly and then were as though
+they had never been. Life was an uneasiness across which lights played
+and vanished. And then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a
+question and hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that
+dies not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind,
+a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to the
+stars.... Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of, this sex,
+are but the elementals of life out of which we have arisen. All these
+elementals, I grant you, have to be provided for, dealt with,
+satisfied, but all these things have to be left behind.’
+
+‘But Love,’ said Kahn.
+
+‘I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons. And that is
+what you mean, Kahn.’
+
+Karenin shook his head. ‘You cannot stay at the roots and climb the
+tree,’ he said....
+
+‘No,’ he said after a pause, ‘this sexual excitement, this love story,
+is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far literature
+and art and sentiment and all our emotional forms have been almost
+altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights and hopes, they have
+all turned on that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but life
+lengthens out now and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself. Poets
+who used to die at thirty live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn!
+There are endless years yet for you—and all full of learning.... We
+carry an excessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we
+have to free ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it. We have
+learnt in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex,
+which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our
+dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through
+human life. You poets, you young people want to turn it to delight.
+Turn it to delight. That may be one way out. In a little while, if you
+have any brains worth thinking about, you will be satisfied, and then
+you will come up here to the greater things. The old religions and
+their new offsets want still, I see, to suppress all these things. Let
+them suppress. If they can suppress. In their own people. Either road
+will bring you here at last to the eternal search for knowledge and the
+great adventure of power.’
+
+‘But incidentally,’ said Rachel Borken; ‘incidentally you have half of
+humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised for—for this love
+and reproduction that is so much less needed than it was.’
+
+‘Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction,’ said Karenin.
+
+‘But the women carry the heavier burden.’
+
+‘Not in their imaginations,’ said Edwards.
+
+‘And surely,’ said Kahn, ‘when you speak of love as a phase—isn’t it a
+necessary phase? Quite apart from reproduction the love of the sexes is
+necessary. Isn’t it love, sexual love, which has released the
+imagination? Without that stir, without that impulse to go out from
+ourselves, to be reckless of ourselves and wonderful, would our lives
+be anything more than the contentment of the stalled ox?’
+
+‘The key that opens the door,’ said Karenin, ‘is not the goal of the
+journey.’
+
+‘But women!’ cried Rachel. ‘Here we are! What is our future—as women?
+Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the imagination for you
+men? Let us speak of this question now. It is a thing constantly in my
+thoughts, Karenin. What do you think of us? You who must have thought
+so much of these perplexities.’
+
+Karenin seemed to weigh his words. He spoke very deliberately. ‘I do
+not care a rap about your future—as women. I do not care a rap about
+the future of men—as males. I want to destroy these peculiar futures. I
+care for your future as intelligences, as parts of and contribution to
+the universal mind of the race. Humanity is not only naturally
+over-specialised in these matters, but all its institutions, its
+customs, everything, exaggerate, intensify this difference. I want to
+unspecialise women. No new idea. Plato wanted exactly that. I do not
+want to go on as we go now, emphasising this natural difference; I do
+not deny it, but I want to reduce it and overcome it.’
+
+‘And—we remain women,’ said Rachel Borken. ‘Need you remain thinking of
+yourselves as women?’
+
+‘It is forced upon us,’ said Edith Haydon.
+
+‘I do not think a woman becomes less of a woman because she dresses and
+works like a man,’ said Edwards. ‘You women here, I mean you scientific
+women, wear white clothing like the men, twist up your hair in the
+simplest fashion, go about your work as though there was only one sex
+in the world. You are just as much women, even if you are not so
+feminine, as the fine ladies down below there in the plains who dress
+for excitement and display, whose only thoughts are of lovers, who
+exaggerate every difference.... Indeed we love you more.’
+
+‘But we go about our work,’ said Edith Haydon.
+
+‘So does it matter?’ asked Rachel.
+
+‘If you go about your work and if the men go about their work then for
+Heaven’s sake be as much woman as you wish,’ said Karenin. ‘When I ask
+you to unspecialise, I am thinking not of the abolition of sex, but the
+abolition of the irksome, restricting, obstructive obsession with sex.
+It may be true that sex made society, that the first society was the
+sex-cemented family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations,
+the first laws sexual taboos. Until a few years ago morality meant
+proper sexual behaviour. Up to within a few years of us the chief
+interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and
+her children and the chief concern of a woman was to get a man to do
+that. That was the drama, that was life. And the jealousy of these
+demands was the master motive in the world. You said, Kahn, a little
+while ago that sexual love was the key that let one out from the
+solitude of self, but I tell you that so far it has only done so in
+order to lock us all up again in a solitude of two.... All that may
+have been necessary but it is necessary no longer. All that has changed
+and changes still very swiftly. Your future, Rachel, _as women_, is a
+diminishing future.’
+
+‘Karenin?’ asked Rachel, ‘do you mean that women are to become men?’
+
+‘Men and women have to become human beings.’
+
+‘You would abolish women? But, Karenin, listen! There is more than sex
+in this. Apart from sex we are different from you. We take up life
+differently. Forget we are—females, Karenin, and still we are a
+different sort of human being with a different use. In some things we
+are amazingly secondary. Here am I in this place because of my trick of
+management, and Edith is here because of her patient, subtle hands.
+That does not alter the fact that nearly the whole body of science is
+man made; that does not alter the fact that men do so predominatingly
+make history, that you could nearly write a complete history of the
+world without mentioning a woman’s name. And on the other hand we have
+a gift of devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly
+loving beautiful things, a care for life and a peculiar keen close eye
+for behaviour. You know men are blind beside us in these last matters.
+You know they are restless—and fitful. We have a steadfastness. We may
+never draw the broad outlines nor discover the new paths, but in the
+future isn’t there a confirming and sustaining and supplying _rôle_ for
+us? As important, perhaps, as yours? Equally important. We hold the
+world up, Karenin, though you may have raised it.’
+
+‘You know very well, Rachel, that I believe as you believe. I am not
+thinking of the abolition of woman. But I do want to abolish—the
+heroine, the sexual heroine. I want to abolish the woman whose support
+is jealousy and whose gift possession. I want to abolish the woman who
+can be won as a prize or locked up as a delicious treasure. And away
+down there the heroine flares like a divinity.’
+
+‘In America,’ said Edwards, ‘men are fighting duels over the praises of
+women and holding tournaments before Queens of Beauty.’
+
+‘I saw a beautiful girl in Lahore,’ said Kahn, ‘she sat under a golden
+canopy like a goddess, and three fine men, armed and dressed like the
+ancient paintings, sat on steps below her to show their devotion. And
+they wanted only her permission to fight for her.’
+
+‘That is the men’s doing,’ said Edith Haydon.
+
+‘I _said_,’ cried Edwards, ‘that man’s imagination was more specialised
+for sex than the whole being of woman. What woman would do a thing like
+that? Women do but submit to it or take advantage of it.’
+
+‘There is no evil between men and women that is not a common evil,’
+said Karenin. ‘It is you poets, Kahn, with your love songs which turn
+the sweet fellowship of comrades into this woman-centred excitement.
+But there is something in women, in many women, which responds to these
+provocations; they succumb to a peculiarly self-cultivating egotism.
+They become the subjects of their own artistry. They develop and
+elaborate themselves as scarcely any man would ever do. They _look_ for
+golden canopies. And even when they seem to react against that, they
+may do it still. I have been reading in the old papers of the movements
+to emancipate women that were going on before the discovery of atomic
+force. These things which began with a desire to escape from the
+limitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed assertion of
+sex, and women more heroines than ever. Helen of Holloway was at last
+as big a nuisance in her way as Helen of Troy, and so long as you think
+of yourselves as women’—he held out a finger at Rachel and smiled
+gently—‘instead of thinking of yourselves as intelligent beings, you
+will be in danger of—Helenism. To think of yourselves as women is to
+think of yourselves in relation to men. You can’t escape that
+consequence. You have to learn to think of yourselves—for our sakes and
+your own sakes—in relation to the sun and stars. You have to cease to
+be our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon our adventures. ...’ He
+waved his hand towards the dark sky above the mountain crests.
+
+Section 8
+
+‘These questions are the next questions to which research will bring us
+answers,’ said Karenin. ‘While we sit here and talk idly and inexactly
+of what is needed and what may be, there are hundreds of keen-witted
+men and women who are working these things out, dispassionately and
+certainly, for the love of knowledge. The next sciences to yield great
+harvests now will be psychology and neural physiology. These
+perplexities of the situation between man and woman and the trouble
+with the obstinacy of egotism, these are temporary troubles, the issue
+of our own times. Suddenly all these differences that seem so fixed
+will dissolve, all these incompatibles will run together, and we shall
+go on to mould our bodies and our bodily feelings and personal
+reactions as boldly as we begin now to carve mountains and set the seas
+in their places and change the currents of the wind.’
+
+‘It is the next wave,’ said Fowler, who had come out upon the terrace
+and seated himself silently behind Karenin’s chair.
+
+‘Of course, in the old days,’ said Edwards, ‘men were tied to their
+city or their country, tied to the homes they owned or the work they
+did....’
+
+‘I do not see,’ said Karenin, ‘that there is any final limit to man’s
+power of self-modification.
+
+‘There is none,’ said Fowler, walking forward and sitting down upon the
+parapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his face. ‘There is no
+absolute limit to either knowledge or power.... I hope you do not tire
+yourself talking.’
+
+‘I am interested,’ said Karenin. ‘I suppose in a little while men will
+cease to be tired. I suppose in a little time you will give us
+something that will hurry away the fatigue products and restore our
+jaded tissues almost at once. This old machine may be made to run
+without slacking or cessation.’
+
+‘That is possible, Karenin. But there is much to learn.’
+
+‘And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don’t you
+think there will be some way of saving these?’
+
+Fowler nodded assent.
+
+‘And then sleep again. When man with his blazing lights made an end to
+night in his towns and houses—it is only a hundred years or so ago that
+that was done—then it followed he would presently resent his eight
+hours of uselessness. Shan’t we presently take a tabloid or lie in some
+field of force that will enable us to do with an hour or so of slumber
+and rise refreshed again?’
+
+‘Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction.’
+
+‘And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the system
+that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen and
+lengthen the years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youth
+and the contractions of senility. Man who used to weaken and die as his
+teeth decayed now looks forward to a continually lengthening,
+continually fuller term of years. And all those parts of him that once
+gathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd,
+treacherous corners of his body, you know better and better how to deal
+with. You carve his body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred.
+The psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and remove
+bad complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures and broaden
+ideas. So that we are becoming more and more capable of transmitting
+what we have learnt and preserving it for the race. The race, the
+racial wisdom, science, gather power continually to subdue the
+individual man to its own end. Is that not so?’
+
+Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of new
+work that was in progress in India and Russia. ‘And how is it with
+heredity?’ asked Karenin.
+
+Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged by the
+genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the laws of
+inheritance and how the sex of children and the complexions and many of
+the parental qualities could be determined.
+
+‘He can actually _do_——?’
+
+‘It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,’ said Fowler,
+‘but to-morrow it will be practicable.’
+
+‘You see,’ cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and Edith,
+‘while we have been theorising about men and women, here is science
+getting the power for us to end that old dispute for ever. If woman is
+too much for us, we’ll reduce her to a minority, and if we do not like
+any type of men and women, we’ll have no more of it. These old bodies,
+these old animal limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross
+inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled cocoon
+from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these things I feel
+like that—like a wet, crawling new moth that still fears to spread its
+wings. Because where do these things take us?’
+
+‘Beyond humanity,’ said Kahn.
+
+‘No,’ said Karenin. ‘We can still keep our feet upon the earth that
+made us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round planet is no
+longer chained to us like the ball of a galley slave....
+
+‘In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange
+gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar gases
+and all the fearful strangenesses of space will be venturing out from
+this earth. This ball will be no longer enough for us; our spirit will
+reach out.... Cannot you see how that little argosy will go glittering
+up into the sky, twinkling and glittering smaller and smaller until the
+blue swallows it up. They may succeed out there; they may perish, but
+other men will follow them....
+
+‘It is as if a great window opened,’ said Karenin.
+
+Section 9
+
+As the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went up
+upon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better watch the
+sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming of the
+afterglow. They were joined by two of the surgeons from the
+laboratories below, and presently by a nurse who brought Karenin
+refreshment in a thin glass cup. It was a cloudless, windless evening
+under the deep blue sky, and far away to the north glittered two
+biplanes on the way to the observatories on Everest, two hundred miles
+distant over the precipices to the east. The little group of people
+watched them pass over the mountains and vanish into the blue, and then
+for a time they talked of the work that the observatory was doing. From
+that they passed to the whole process of research about the world, and
+so Karenin’s thoughts returned again to the mind of the world and the
+great future that was opening upon man’s imagination. He asked the
+surgeons many questions upon the detailed possibilities of their
+science, and he was keenly interested and excited by the things they
+told him. And as they talked the sun touched the mountains, and became
+very swiftly a blazing and indented hemisphere of liquid flame and
+sank.
+
+Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of incandescence, and
+shaded his eyes and became silent.
+
+Presently he gave a little start.
+
+‘What?’ asked Rachel Borken.
+
+‘I had forgotten,’ he said.
+
+‘What had you forgotten?’
+
+‘I had forgotten about the operation to-morrow. I have been so
+interested as Man to-day that I have nearly forgotten Marcus Karenin.
+Marcus Karenin must go under your knife to-morrow, Fowler, and very
+probably Marcus Karenin will die.’ He raised his slightly shrivelled
+hand. ‘It does not matter, Fowler. It scarcely matters even to me. For
+indeed is it Karenin who has been sitting here and talking; is it not
+rather a common mind, Fowler, that has played about between us? You and
+I and all of us have added thought to thought, but the thread is
+neither you nor me. What is true we all have; when the individual has
+altogether brought himself to the test and winnowing of expression,
+then the individual is done. I feel as though I had already been
+emptied out of that little vessel, that Marcus Karenin, which in my
+youth held me so tightly and completely. Your beauty, dear Edith, and
+your broad brow, dear Rachel, and you, Fowler, with your firm and
+skilful hands, are now almost as much to me as this hand that beats the
+arm of my chair. And as little me. And the spirit that desires to know,
+the spirit that resolves to do, that spirit that lives and has talked
+in us to-day, lived in Athens, lived in Florence, lives on, I know, for
+ever....
+
+‘And you, old Sun, with your sword of flame searing these poor eyes of
+Marcus for the last time of all, beware of me! You think I die—and
+indeed I am only taking off one more coat to get at you. I have
+threatened you for ten thousand years, and soon I warn you I shall be
+coming. When I am altogether stripped and my disguises thrown away.
+Very soon now, old Sun, I shall launch myself at you, and I shall reach
+you and I shall put my foot on your spotted face and tug you about by
+your fiery locks. One step I shall take to the moon, and then I shall
+leap at you. I’ve talked to you before, old Sun, I’ve talked to you a
+million times, and now I am beginning to remember. Yes—long ago, long
+ago, before I had stripped off a few thousand generations, dust now and
+forgotten, I was a hairy savage and I pointed my hand at you
+and—clearly I remember it!—I saw you in a net. Have you forgotten that,
+old Sun? . . .
+
+‘Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the individual
+that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into
+science and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you slink
+down behind the mountains from me, well may you cower....’
+
+Section 10
+
+Karenin desired that he might dream alone for a little while before he
+returned to the cell in which he was to sleep. He was given relief for
+a pain that began to trouble him and wrapped warmly about with furs,
+for a great coldness was creeping over all things, and so they left
+him, and he sat for a long time watching the afterglow give place to
+the darkness of night.
+
+It seemed to those who had to watch over him unobtrusively lest he
+should be in want of any attention, that he mused very deeply.
+
+The white and purple peaks against the golden sky sank down into cold,
+blue remoteness, glowed out again and faded again, and the burning
+cressets of the Indian stars, that even the moonrise cannot altogether
+quench, began their vigil. The moon rose behind the towering screen of
+dark precipices to the east, and long before it emerged above these,
+its slanting beams had filled the deep gorges below with luminous mist
+and turned the towers and pinnacles of Lio Porgyul to a magic
+dreamcastle of radiance and wonder....
+
+Came a great uprush of ghostly light above the black rim of rocks, and
+then like a bubble that is blown and detaches itself the moon floated
+off clear into the unfathomable dark sky....
+
+And then Karenin stood up. He walked a few paces along the terrace and
+remained for a time gazing up at that great silver disc, that silvery
+shield that must needs be man’s first conquest in outer space....
+
+Presently he turned about and stood with his hands folded behind him,
+looking at the northward stars....
+
+At length he went to his own cell. He lay down there and slept
+peacefully till the morning. And early in the morning they came to him
+and the anæsthetic was given him and the operation performed.
+
+It was altogether successful, but Karenin was weak and he had to lie
+very still; and about seven days later a blood clot detached itself
+from the healing scar and travelled to his heart, and he died in an
+instant in the night.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD SET FREE ***
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the
+United States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
+the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
+of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
+copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
+easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
+of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
+Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away--you may
+do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
+by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
+license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country other than the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
+  you are located before using this eBook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm website
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that:
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
+the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
+forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
+Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
+to date contact information can be found at the Foundation's website
+and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without
+widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This website includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
diff --git a/old/1059-0.zip b/old/1059-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a6c6d08
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1059-0.zip
diff --git a/old/1059-h.zip b/old/1059-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b9ef1d6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1059-h.zip
diff --git a/old/1059-h/1059-h.htm b/old/1059-h/1059-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a59700a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1059-h/1059-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,8738 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The World Set Free, by Herbert George Wells</title>
+<link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
+<style type="text/css">
+
+body { margin-left: 20%;
+       margin-right: 20%;
+       text-align: justify; }
+
+h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 {text-align: center; font-style: normal; font-weight:
+normal; line-height: 1.5; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;}
+
+h1 {font-size: 300%;
+    margin-top: 0.6em;
+    margin-bottom: 0.6em;
+    letter-spacing: 0.12em;
+    word-spacing: 0.2em;
+    text-indent: 0em;}
+h2 {font-size: 150%; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1em;}
+h3 {font-size: 130%; margin-top: 2em;}
+h4 {font-size: 120%;}
+h5 {font-size: 110%;}
+
+.no-break {page-break-before: avoid;} /* for epubs */
+
+div.chapter {page-break-before: always; margin-top: 4em;}
+
+hr {width: 80%; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 2em;}
+
+p {text-indent: 1em;
+   margin-top: 0.25em;
+   margin-bottom: 0.25em; }
+
+p.letter {text-indent: 0%;
+          margin-left: 10%;
+          margin-right: 10%;
+          margin-top: 1em;
+          margin-bottom: 1em; }
+
+p.center  {text-align: center;
+           text-indent: 0em;
+           margin-top: 1em;
+           margin-bottom: 1em; }
+
+p.right {text-align: right;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+         margin-top: 1em;
+         margin-bottom: 1em; }
+
+div.fig { display:block;
+          margin:0 auto;
+          text-align:center;
+          margin-top: 1em;
+          margin-bottom: 1em;}
+
+a:link {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+a:visited {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+a:hover {color:red}
+
+</style>
+
+</head>
+
+<body>
+
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The World Set Free, by Herbert George Wells</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The World Set Free<br />
+  A Story of Mankind</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Herbert George Wells</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: October, 1997 [eBook #1059]<br />
+[Most recently updated: November 24, 2022]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Charles Keller and David Widger</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD SET FREE ***</div>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:55%;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="[Illustration]" />
+</div>
+
+<h1>The World Set Free</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by H.G. Wells</h2>
+
+<p class="letter">
+We Are All Things That Make And Pass,<br/>
+Striving Upon A Hidden Mission,<br/>
+Out To The Open Sea.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+TO<br/>
+Frederick Soddy&rsquo;s<br/>
+&lsquo;Interpretation Of Radium&rsquo;<br/>
+This Story,<br/>
+Which Owes Long Passages<br/>
+To The Eleventh Chapter Of That Book,<br/>
+Acknowledges And Inscribes Itself
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#pref01">PREFACE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#pref02">PRELUDE. THE SUN SNARERS</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">CHAPTER THE FIRST. THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">CHAPTER THE SECOND. THE LAST WAR</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">CHAPTER THE THIRD. THE ENDING OF WAR</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04">CHAPTER THE FOURTH. THE NEW PHASE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05">CHAPTER THE FIFTH. THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="pref01"></a>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p>
+<i>The World Set Free</i> was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, and
+it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories which
+all turn on the possible developments in the future of some contemporary force
+or group of forces. <i>The World Set Free</i> was written under the immediate
+shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent person in the world felt that
+disaster was impending and knew no way of averting it, but few of us realised
+in the earlier half of 1914 how near the crash was to us. The reader will be
+amused to find that here it is put off until the year 1956. He may naturally
+want to know the reason for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As
+a prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to be rather a
+slow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of reality, for example, beat the
+forecast in <i>Anticipations</i> by about twenty years or so. I suppose a
+desire not to shock the sceptical reader&rsquo;s sense of use and wont and
+perhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have something to do with this
+dating forward of one&rsquo;s main events, but in the particular case of <i>The
+World Set Free</i> there was, I think, another motive in holding the Great War
+back, and that was to allow the chemist to get well forward with his discovery
+of the release of atomic energy. 1956&mdash;or for that matter 2056&mdash;may
+be none too late for that crowning revolution in human potentialities. And
+apart from this procrastination of over forty years, the guess at the opening
+phase of the war was fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of the Central
+Empires, the opening campaign through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the
+British Expeditionary Force were all justified before the book had been
+published six months. And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains
+now, after the reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the
+essentials of the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second, Section 2), on
+which the writer may congratulate himself, is the forecast that under modern
+conditions it would be quite impossible for any great general to emerge to
+supremacy and concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. There
+could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the scientific corps
+muttering, &lsquo;These old fools,&rsquo; exactly as it is here foretold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far outnumber
+the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of interest now; the thesis that
+because of the development of scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states
+and separate sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world, that to
+attempt to keep on with the old system is to heap disaster upon disaster for
+mankind and perhaps to destroy our race altogether. The remaining interest of
+this book now is the sustained validity of this thesis and the discussion of
+the possible ending of war on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of
+sanity to break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind. I
+have represented the native common sense of the French mind and of the English
+mind&mdash;for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be &lsquo;God&rsquo;s
+Englishman&rsquo;&mdash;leading mankind towards a bold and resolute effort of
+salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the school book footnotes say,
+compare to-day&rsquo;s newspaper. Instead of a frank and honourable gathering
+of leading men, Englishman meeting German and Frenchman Russian, brothers in
+their offences and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in
+Geneva at the other end of Switzerland a poor little League of (Allied) Nations
+(excluding the United States, Russia, and most of the &lsquo;subject
+peoples&rsquo; of the world), meeting obscurely amidst a world-wide disregard
+to make impotent gestures at the leading problems of the debacle. Either the
+disaster has not been vast enough yet or it has not been swift enough to
+inflict the necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion.
+Just as the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity and thought that
+increase would go on for ever, so now it would seem the world is growing
+accustomed to a steady glide towards social disintegration, and thinks that
+that too can go on continually and never come to a final bump. So soon do use
+and wont establish themselves, and the most flaming and thunderous of lessons
+pale into disregard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question whether it is
+still possible to bring about an outbreak of creative sanity in mankind, to
+avert this steady glide to destruction, is now one of the most urgent in the
+world. It is clear that the writer is temperamentally disposed to hope that
+there is such a possibility. But he has to confess that he sees few signs of
+any such breadth of understanding and steadfastness of will as an effectual
+effort to turn the rush of human affairs demands. The inertia of dead ideas and
+old institutions carries us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is
+there any plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as something
+overriding any national and patriotic consideration, and that is in the working
+class movement throughout the world. And labour internationalism is closely
+bound up with conceptions of a profound social revolution. If world peace is to
+be attained through labour internationalism, it will have to be attained at the
+price of the completest social and economic reconstruction and by passing
+through a phase of revolution that will certainly be violent, that may be very
+bloody, which may be prolonged through a long period, and may in the end fail
+to achieve anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains that
+it is in the labour class, and the labour class alone, that any conception of a
+world rule and a world peace has so far appeared. The dream of <i>The World Set
+Free</i>, a dream of highly educated and highly favoured leading and ruling
+men, voluntarily setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has
+thus far remained a dream.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+H. G. WELLS.
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+E<small>ASTON</small> G<small>LEBE</small>, D<small>UNMOW</small>, 1921.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="pref02"></a>PRELUDE<br/>
+THE SUN SNARERS</h2>
+
+<h3>Section I</h3>
+
+<p>
+The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man
+is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of his terrestrial
+career we find him supplementing the natural strength and bodily weapons of a
+beast by the heat of burning and the rough implement of stone. So he passed
+beyond the ape. From that he expands. Presently he added to himself the power
+of the horse and the ox, he borrowed the carrying strength of water and the
+driving force of the wind, he quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple
+tools, pointed first with copper and then with iron, increased and varied and
+became more elaborate and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made
+his way easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social relationships and
+increased his efficiency by the division of labour. He began to store up
+knowledge. Contrivance followed contrivance, each making it possible for a man
+to do more. Always down the lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and
+again, he is doing more.... A quarter of a million years ago the utmost man was
+a savage, a being scarcely articulate, sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed
+with a rough-hewn flint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family
+groups, killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity
+declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would have sought
+him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical river valleys would you
+have found the squatting lairs of his little herds, a male, a few females, a
+child or so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led. He fled the
+cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the promise of sword and spear;
+he froze to death upon a ledge of coal; he drank water muddy with the clay that
+would one day make cups of porcelain; he chewed the ear of wild wheat he had
+plucked and gazed with a dim speculation in his eyes at the birds that soared
+beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became aware of the scent of another male and
+rose up roaring, his roars the formless precursors of moral admonitions. For he
+was a great individualist, that original, he suffered none other than himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor of all of
+us, fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened the tiger&rsquo;s
+claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus to the swift grace of the
+horse, was at work upon him&mdash;is at work upon him still. The clumsier and
+more stupidly fierce among him were killed soonest and oftenest; the finer
+hand, the quicker eye, the bigger brain, the better balanced body prevailed;
+age by age, the implements were a little better made, the man a little more
+delicately adjusted to his possibilities. He became more social; his herd grew
+larger; no longer did each man kill or drive out his growing sons; a system of
+taboos made them tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon even
+after he was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and the rest of
+mankind. (But they were forbidden to touch the women of the tribe, they had to
+go out and capture women for themselves, and each son fled from his stepmother
+and hid from her lest the anger of the Old Man should be roused. All the world
+over, even to this day, these ancient inevitable taboos can be traced.) And now
+instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was better tended and there
+were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the creature spread into colder
+climates, carrying food with him, storing food&mdash;until sometimes the
+neglected grass-seed sprouted again and gave a first hint of agriculture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts and his
+fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the squatting-place and dim
+stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. He scratched upon a bone and found
+resemblance and pursued it and began pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay
+of the river brink between his fingers, and found a pleasure in its patternings
+and repetitions, shaped it into the form of vessels, and found that it would
+hold water. He watched the streaming river, and wondered from what bountiful
+breast this incessant water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps
+he might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place amidst the
+distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once indeed he
+had done so&mdash;at least that some one had done so&mdash;he mixed that
+perhaps with another dream almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had been
+beset; and therewith began fiction&mdash;pointing a way to
+achievement&mdash;and the august prophetic procession of tales.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations that life of
+our fathers went on. From the beginning to the ripening of that phase of human
+life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chipped flint to the first
+implements of polished stone, was two or three thousand centuries, ten or
+fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by human standards, did humanity
+gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the beast. And that first
+glimmering of speculation, that first story of achievement, that story-teller
+bright-eyed and flushed under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping,
+incredulous listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most
+marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the mammoths, and it
+began the setting of that snare that shall catch the sun.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 2</h3>
+
+<p>
+That dream was but a moment in a man&rsquo;s life, whose proper business it
+seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget after the manner of all
+that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. About him, hidden from him by the
+thinnest of veils, were the untouched sources of Power, whose magnitude we
+scarcely do more than suspect even to-day, Power that could make his every
+conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the race were in the way of it,
+though he died blindly unknowing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food is abundant
+and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his earlier jealousies,
+becoming, as necessity persecuted him less urgently, more social and tolerant
+and amenable, achieved a larger community. There began a division of labour,
+certain of the older men specialised in knowledge and direction, a strong man
+took the fatherly leadership in war, and priest and king began to develop their
+<i>rôles</i> in the opening drama of man&rsquo;s history. The priest&rsquo;s
+solicitude was seed-time and harvest and fertility, and the king ruled peace
+and war. In a hundred river valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth
+there were already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They
+flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the future, for as
+yet writing had still to begin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable wealth of Power
+that offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed certain animals, he
+developed his primordially haphazard agriculture into a ritual, he added first
+one metal to his resources and then another, until he had copper and tin and
+iron and lead and gold and silver to supplement his stone, he hewed and carved
+wood, made pottery, paddled down his river until he came to the sea, discovered
+the wheel and made the first roads. But his chief activity for a hundred
+centuries and more, was the subjugation of himself and others to larger and
+larger societies. The history of man is not simply the conquest of external
+power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses, that
+self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands from taking
+his inheritance. The ape in us still resents association. From the dawn of the
+age of polished stone to the achievement of the Peace of the World, man&rsquo;s
+dealings were chiefly with himself and his fellow man, trading, bargaining,
+law-making, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating, and every
+little increment in Power, he turned at once and always turns to the purposes
+of this confused elaborate struggle to socialise. To incorporate and comprehend
+his fellow men into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of his
+instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone age was over he
+had become a political animal. He made astonishingly far-reaching discoveries
+within himself, first of counting and then of writing and making records, and
+with that his town communities began to stretch out to dominion; in the valleys
+of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the great Chinese rivers, the first empires and
+the first written laws had their beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and
+rule as soldiers and knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean
+which had been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of
+pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The history of
+Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the Roman Empire. Every
+ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last, aped Cæsar and called himself
+Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind. Measured by the duration of human
+life it is a vast space of time between that first dynasty in Egypt and the
+coming of the aeroplane, but by the scale that looks back to the makers of the
+eoliths, it is all of it a story of yesterday.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this period of the
+warring states, while men&rsquo;s minds were chiefly preoccupied by politics
+and mutual aggression, their progress in the acquirement of external Power was
+slow&mdash;rapid in comparison with the progress of the old stone age, but slow
+in comparison with this new age of systematic discovery in which we live. They
+did not very greatly alter the weapons and tactics of warfare, the methods of
+agriculture, seamanship, their knowledge of the habitable globe, or the devices
+and utensils of domestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and the
+days when Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were inventions
+and changes, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out and then
+forgotten again; it was, on the whole, a progress, but it contained no steps;
+the peasant life was the same, there were already priests and lawyers and town
+craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers, doctors, wise women, soldiers and
+sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and south-eastern Europe at the
+beginning of that period, and they were doing much the same things and living
+much the same life as they were in Europe in A.D. 1500. The English excavators
+of the year A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and
+disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family correspondence that
+they could read with the completest sympathy. There were great religious and
+moral changes throughout the period, empires and republics replaced one
+another, Italy tried a vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery was tried
+again and again and failed and failed and was still to be tested again and
+rejected again in the New World; Christianity and Mohammedanism swept away a
+thousand more specialised cults, but essentially these were progressive
+adaptations of mankind to material conditions that must have seemed fixed for
+ever. The idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life
+would have been entirely strange to human thought through all that time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his opportunity
+amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the wars and
+processions, the castle building and cathedral building, the arts and loves,
+the small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of
+the middle ages. He no longer speculated with the untrammelled freedom of the
+stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of everything barred his path; but
+he speculated with a better brain, sat idle and gazed at circling stars in the
+sky and mused upon the coin and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a
+certain leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found
+dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the assurances
+of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols in the world about
+them, questioning the finality of scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages of
+history there were men to whom this whisper had come of hidden things about
+them. They could no longer lead ordinary lives nor content themselves with the
+common things of this world once they had heard this voice. And mostly they
+believed not only that all this world was as it were a painted curtain before
+things unguessed at, but that these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come
+to men by chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among rare
+and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd utilisable
+thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied discovery, sometimes
+pretending to find. The world of every day laughed at these eccentric beings,
+or found them annoying and ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made
+saints and sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and entertained
+them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them not at all. Yet they were
+of the blood of him who had first dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of
+them was of his blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly,
+was the snare that will some day catch the sun.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 3</h3>
+
+<p>
+Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of Sforza in
+Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His common-place books are full of
+prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations of the methods of the early
+aviators. Dürer was his parallel and Roger Bacon&mdash;whom the Franciscans
+silenced&mdash;of his kindred. Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of
+Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years before it was
+first brought into use. And earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still
+earlier the legendary Daedalus of Cnossos. All up and down the record of
+history whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers
+appeared. And half the alchemists were of their tribe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might have supposed
+that men would have gone at once to the explosive engine. But they could see
+nothing of the sort. They were not yet beginning to think of seeing things;
+their metallurgy was all too poor to make such engines even had they thought of
+them. For a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this new
+force even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile. Their first guns had
+barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited for more than five hundred
+years before the explosive engine came.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before the world
+could use their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious purposes. If
+man in general was not still as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies
+about him as his paleolithic precursor, he was at best purblind.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 4</h3>
+
+<p>
+The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the verge of
+discovery, before they began to influence human lives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were no doubt many such devices as Hero&rsquo;s toys devised and
+forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed that coal
+should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand before it dawned upon
+men that here was something more than a curiosity. And it is to be remarked
+that the first recorded suggestion for the use of steam was in war; there is an
+Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of corked iron
+bottles full of heated water. The mining of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron
+upon a larger scale than men had ever done before, the steam pumping engine,
+the steam-engine and the steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had
+a kind of logical necessity. It is the most interesting and instructive chapter
+in the history of the human intelligence, the history of steam from its
+beginning as a fact in human consciousness to the perfection of the great
+turbine engines that preceded the utilisation of intra-molecular power. Nearly
+every human being must have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands
+of years; the women in particular were always heating water, boiling it, seeing
+it boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with its fury; millions of
+people at different times must have watched steam pitching rocks out of
+volcanoes like cricket balls and blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may
+search the whole human record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures,
+for any glimmer of a realisation that here was force, here was strength to
+borrow and use.... Then suddenly man woke up to it, the railways spread like a
+network over the globe, the ever enlarging iron steamships began their
+staggering fight against wind and wave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning of the Age of
+Energy that was to close the long history of the Warring States.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this novelty. They
+would not recognise, they were not able to recognise that anything fundamental
+had happened to their immemorial necessities. They called the steam-engine the
+&lsquo;iron horse&rsquo; and pretended that they had made the most partial of
+substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production were visibly
+revolutionising the conditions of industrial production, population was
+streaming steadily in from the country-side and concentrating in hitherto
+unthought-of masses about a few city centres, food was coming to them over
+enormous distances upon a scale that made the one sole precedent, the corn
+ships of imperial Rome, a petty incident; and a huge migration of peoples
+between Europe and Western Asia and America was in Progress, and&mdash;nobody
+seems to have realised that something new had come into human life, a strange
+swirl different altogether from any previous circling and mutation, a swirl
+like the swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of
+accumulating water and eddying inactivity....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit at his
+breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, devour
+an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his
+breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all
+the world, scrutinise the prices current of his geographically distributed
+investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two children he had
+begotten (in the place of his father&rsquo;s eight) that he thought the world
+changed very little. They must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old
+school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of
+Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all would be well
+with them....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 5</h3>
+
+<p>
+Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be studied,
+invaded the common life of men a few decades after the exploitation of steam.
+To electricity also, in spite of its provocative nearness all about him,
+mankind had been utterly blind for incalculable ages. Could anything be more
+emphatic than the appeal of electricity for attention? It thundered at
+man&rsquo;s ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes, occasionally it
+killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that concerned him enough to
+merit study. It came into the house with the cat on any dry day and crackled
+insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur. It rotted his metals when he put
+them together.... There is no single record that any one questioned why the
+cat&rsquo;s fur crackles or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day,
+before the sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have done his very
+successful best not to think about it at all; until this new spirit of the
+Seeker turned itself to these things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant, before the
+speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It was Gilbert, Queen
+Elizabeth&rsquo;s court physician, who first puzzled his brains with rubbed
+amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of
+the human mind to the existence of this universal presence. And even then the
+science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious facts for nearly
+two hundred years, connected perhaps with magnetism&mdash;a mere guess
+that&mdash;perhaps with the lightning. Frogs&rsquo; legs must have hung by
+copper hooks from iron railings and twitched upon countless occasions before
+Galvani saw them. Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after
+Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities
+into the life of the common man.... Then suddenly, in the half-century between
+1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took over traction, it ousted
+every other form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected
+wireless telephone and the telephotograph....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 6</h3>
+
+<p>
+And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and invention for
+at least a hundred years after the scientific revolution had begun. Each new
+thing made its way into practice against a scepticism that amounted at times to
+hostility. One writer upon these subjects gives a funny little domestic
+conversation that happened, he says, in the year 1898, within ten years, that
+is to say, of the time when the first aviators were fairly on the wing. He
+tells us how he sat at his desk in his study and conversed with his little boy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak very seriously
+to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy he did not want to do it too
+harshly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is what happened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I wish, Daddy,&rsquo; he said, coming to his point, &lsquo;that you
+wouldn&rsquo;t write all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot me.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Yes!&rsquo; said his father.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots me.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But there is going to be flying&mdash;quite soon.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that.
+&lsquo;Anyhow,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;I wish you wouldn&rsquo;t write about
+it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You&rsquo;ll fly&mdash;lots of times&mdash;before you die,&rsquo; the
+father assured him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little boy looked unhappy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a blurred and
+under-developed photograph. &lsquo;Come and look at this,&rsquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream and a meadow
+beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black, pencil-like object with flat
+wings on either side of it. It was the first record of the first apparatus
+heavier than air that ever maintained itself in the air by mechanical force.
+Across the margin was written: &lsquo;Here we go up, up, up&mdash;from S. P.
+Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son.
+&lsquo;Well?&rsquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;That,&rsquo; said the schoolboy, after reflection, &lsquo;is only a
+model.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Model to-day, man to-morrow.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he believed
+quite firmly to be omniscience. &lsquo;But old Broomie,&rsquo; he said,
+&lsquo;he told all the boys in his class only yesterday, &ldquo;no man will
+ever fly.&rdquo; No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on the
+wing would ever believe anything of the sort....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father&rsquo;s
+reminiscences.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 7</h3>
+
+<p>
+At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages in the
+literature of that time witness, it was thought that the fact that man had at
+last had successful and profitable dealings with the steam that scalded him and
+the electricity that flashed and banged about the sky at him, was an amazing
+and perhaps a culminating exercise of his intelligence and his intellectual
+courage. The air of &lsquo;Nunc Dimittis&rsquo; sounds in same of these
+writings. &lsquo;The great things are discovered,&rsquo; wrote Gerald Brown in
+his summary of the nineteenth century. &lsquo;For us there remains little but
+the working out of detail.&rsquo; The spirit of the seeker was still rare in
+the world; education was unskilled, unstimulating, scholarly, and but little
+valued, and few people even then could have realised that Science was still but
+the flimsiest of trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No one seems
+to have been afraid of science and its possibilities. Yet now where there had
+been but a score or so of seekers, there were many thousands, and for one
+needle of speculation that had been probing the curtain of appearances in 1800,
+there were now hundreds. And already Chemistry, which had been content with her
+atoms and molecules for the better part of a century, was preparing herself for
+that vast next stride that was to revolutionise the whole life of man from top
+to bottom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One realises how crude was the science of that time when one considers the case
+of the composition of air. This was determined by that strange genius and
+recluse, that man of mystery, that disembowelled intelligence, Henry Cavendish,
+towards the end of the eighteenth century. So far as he was concerned the work
+was admirably done. He separated all the known ingredients of the air with a
+precision altogether remarkable; he even put it upon record that he had some
+doubt about the purity of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years his
+determination was repeated by chemists all the world over, his apparatus was
+treasured in London, he became, as they used to say, &lsquo;classic,&rsquo; and
+always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his experiment, that sly
+element argon was hiding among the nitrogen (and with a little helium and
+traces of other substances, and indeed all the hints that might have led to the
+new departures of the twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped
+unobserved through the professorial fingers that repeated his procedure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to the very dawn
+of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was still rather a procession of
+happy accidents than an orderly conquest of nature?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the world. Even the
+schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere handful who grew up to feel
+wonder and curiosity about the secrets of nature in the nineteenth century,
+there were now, at the beginning of the twentieth, myriads escaping from the
+limitations of intellectual routine and the habitual life, in Europe, in
+America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and all about the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be called by a
+whole generation of scientific men, &lsquo;the greatest of European
+chemists,&rsquo; were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico, between Fiesole
+and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he was already distinguished as a
+mathematician and possessed by a savage appetite to understand. He had been
+particularly attracted by the mystery of phosphorescence and its apparent
+unrelatedness to every other source of light. He was to tell afterwards in his
+reminiscences how he watched the fireflies drifting and glowing among the dark
+trees in the garden of the villa under the warm blue night sky of Italy; how he
+caught and kept them in cages, dissected them, first studying the general
+anatomy of insects very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the
+effect of various gases and varying temperature upon their light. Then the
+chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir William Crookes, a
+toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium particles impinge upon sulphide
+of zinc and make it luminous, induced him to associate the two sets of
+phenomena. It was a happy association for his inquiries. It was a rare and
+fortunate thing, too, that any one with the mathematical gift should have been
+taken by these curiosities.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 8</h3>
+
+<p>
+And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at Fiesole, a certain
+professor of physics named Rufus was giving a course of afternoon lectures upon
+Radium and Radio-Activity in Edinburgh. They were lectures that had attracted a
+very considerable amount of attention. He gave them in a small lecture-theatre
+that had become more and more congested as his course proceeded. At his
+concluding discussion it was crowded right up to the ceiling at the back, and
+there people were standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so
+fascinating did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular, a
+chuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging his knee with
+great sand-red hands and drinking in every word, eyes aglow, cheeks flushed,
+and ears burning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And so,&rsquo; said the professor, &lsquo;we see that this Radium, which
+seemed at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all that was most
+established and fundamental in the constitution of matter, is really at one
+with the rest of the elements. It does noticeably and forcibly what probably
+all the other elements are doing with an imperceptible slowness. It is like the
+single voice crying aloud that betrays the silent breathing multitude in the
+darkness. Radium is an element that is breaking up and flying to pieces. But
+perhaps all elements are doing that at less perceptible rates. Uranium
+certainly is; thorium&mdash;the stuff of this incandescent gas
+mantle&mdash;certainly is; actinium. I feel that we are but beginning the list.
+And we know now that the atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and
+indivisible and final and&mdash;lifeless&mdash;lifeless, is really a reservoir
+of immense energy. That is the most wonderful thing about all this work. A
+little while ago we thought of the atoms as we thought of bricks, as solid
+building material, as substantial matter, as unit masses of lifeless stuff, and
+behold! these bricks are boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the intensest
+force. This little bottle contains about a pint of uranium oxide; that is to
+say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It is worth about a pound.
+And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in the atoms in this bottle there
+slumbers at least as much energy as we could get by burning a hundred and sixty
+tons of coal. If at a word, in one instant I could suddenly release that energy
+here and now it would blow us and everything about us to fragments; if I could
+turn it into the machinery that lights this city, it could keep Edinburgh
+brightly lit for a week. But at present no man knows, no man has an inkling of
+how this little lump of stuff can be made to hasten the release of its store.
+It does release it, as a burn trickles. Slowly the uranium changes into radium,
+the radium changes into a gas called the radium emanation, and that again to
+what we call radium A, and so the process goes on, giving out energy at every
+stage, until at last we reach the last stage of all, which is, so far as we can
+tell at present, lead. But we cannot hasten it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I take ye, man,&rsquo; whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red
+hands tightening like a vice upon his knee. &lsquo;I take ye, man. Go on! Oh,
+go on!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The professor went on after a little pause. &lsquo;Why is the change
+gradual?&rsquo; he asked. &lsquo;Why does only a minute fraction of the radium
+disintegrate in any particular second? Why does it dole itself out so slowly
+and so exactly? Why does not all the uranium change to radium and all the
+radium change to the next lowest thing at once? Why this decay by driblets; why
+not a decay <i>en masse?</i> . . . Suppose presently we find it is possible to
+quicken that decay?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful inevitable idea was
+coming. He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed in his seat with
+excitement. &lsquo;Why not?&rsquo; he echoed, &lsquo;why not?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The professor lifted his forefinger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Given that knowledge,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;mark what we should be able
+to do! We should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium; not only
+should we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in his hand
+the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of battleships, or drive
+one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but we should also have a clue
+that would enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all
+the other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our finest
+measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the world would become an
+available reservoir of concentrated force. Do you realise, ladies and
+gentlemen, what these things would mean for us?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The scrub head nodded. &lsquo;Oh! go on. Go on.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to
+the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the brute. We
+stand to-day towards radio-activity as our ancestor stood towards fire before
+he had learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a strange thing utterly
+beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano, a red destruction that
+poured through the forest. So it is that we know radio-activity to-day.
+This&mdash;this is the dawn of a new day in human living. At the climax of that
+civilisation which had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick
+of the savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs
+cannot be borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover
+suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilisation. The energy we need
+for our very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly,
+is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. We cannot
+pick that lock at present, but&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to hear him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;&mdash;&mdash;we will.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And then,&rsquo; he said....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to
+live on the bare surplus of Nature&rsquo;s energies will cease to be the lot of
+Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilisation to the beginning of
+the next. I have no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of
+man&rsquo;s material destiny that opens out before me. I see the desert
+continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice, the whole
+world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out among the
+stars....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an actor or orator
+might have envied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds, sighed,
+became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for dispersal. More light was
+turned on and what had been a dim mass of figures became a bright confusion of
+movement. Some of the people signalled to friends, some crowded down towards
+the platform to examine the lecturer&rsquo;s apparatus and make notes of his
+diagrams. But the chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair wanted no such
+detailed frittering away of the thoughts that had inspired him. He wanted to be
+alone with them; he elbowed his way out almost fiercely, he made himself as
+angular and bony as a cow, fearing lest some one should speak to him, lest some
+one should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who sees visions. He
+had arms disproportionately long, and ridiculous big feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of commonness,
+of everyday life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He made his way to the top of Arthur&rsquo;s Seat, and there he sat for a long
+time in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that ever and again he
+whispered to himself some precious phrase that had stuck in his mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;If,&rsquo; he whispered, &lsquo;if only we could pick that
+lock....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn of its beams,
+a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks of cloud that would
+presently engulf it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Eh!&rsquo; said the youngster. &lsquo;Eh!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the red sun was there
+before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without intelligence, and then with
+a gathering recognition. Into his mind came a strange echo of that ancestral
+fancy, that fancy of a Stone Age savage, dead and scattered bones among the
+drift two hundred thousand years ago.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Ye auld thing,&rsquo; he said&mdash;and his eyes were shining, and he
+made a kind of grabbing gesture with his hand; &lsquo;ye auld red thing....
+We&rsquo;ll have ye <i>yet</i>.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>CHAPTER THE FIRST<br/>
+THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY</h2>
+
+<h3>Section I</h3>
+
+<p>
+The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as Ramsay,
+Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth century, the
+problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements and so tapping the
+internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful combination of induction,
+intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon as the year 1933. From the first
+detection of radio-activity to its first subjugation to human purpose measured
+little more than a quarter of a century. For twenty years after that, indeed,
+minor difficulties prevented any striking practical application of his success,
+but the essential thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human
+progress was crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in a minute
+particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into a heavy gas of
+extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its turn in the course of seven
+days, and it was only after another year&rsquo;s work that he was able to show
+practically that the last result of this rapid release of energy was gold. But
+the thing was done&mdash;at the cost of a blistered chest and an injured
+finger, and from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed into
+riving and rending energy, Holsten knew that he had opened a way for mankind,
+however narrow and dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power. He
+recorded as much in the strange diary biography he left the world, a diary that
+was up to that particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations, and
+which suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human record of
+sensations and emotions that all humanity might understand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true, but none the
+less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four hours following the
+demonstration of the correctness of his intricate tracery of computations and
+guesses. &lsquo;I thought I should not sleep,&rsquo; he writes&mdash;the words
+he omitted are supplied in brackets&mdash;(on account of) &lsquo;pain in (the)
+hand and chest and (the) wonder of what I had done.... Slept like a
+child.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing to do, he was
+living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he decided to go up to Hampstead
+Heath, which he had known when he was a little boy as a breezy playground. He
+went up by the underground tube that was then the recognised means of travel
+from one part of London to another, and walked up Heath Street from the tube
+station to the open heath. He found it a gully of planks and scaffoldings
+between the hoardings of house-wreckers. The spirit of the times had seized
+upon that narrow, steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making
+it commodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of
+Neo-Georgian æstheticism. Such is the illogical quality of humanity that
+Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard under the seat of current
+civilisation, saw these changes with regret. He had come up Heath Street
+perhaps a thousand times, had known the windows of all the little shops, spent
+hours in the vanished cinematograph theatre, and marvelled at the high-flung
+early Georgian houses upon the westward bank of that old gully of a
+thoroughfare; he felt strange with all these familiar things gone. He escaped
+at last with a feeling of relief from this choked alley of trenches and holes
+and cranes, and emerged upon the old familiar scene about the White Stone Pond.
+That, at least, was very much as it used to be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right of him; the
+reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble, the white-fronted inn with
+the clustering flowers above its portico still stood out at the angle of the
+ways, and the blue view to Harrow Hill and Harrow spire, a view of hills and
+trees and shining waters and wind-driven cloud shadows, was like the opening of
+a great window to the ascending Londoner. All that was very reassuring. There
+was the same strolling crowd, the same perpetual miracle of motors dodging
+through it harmlessly, escaping headlong into the country from the Sabbatical
+stuffiness behind and below them. There was a band still, a women&rsquo;s
+suffrage meeting&mdash;for the suffrage women had won their way back to the
+tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace again&mdash;socialist orators,
+politicians, a band, and the same wild uproar of dogs, frantic with the
+gladness of their one blessed weekly release from the back yard and the chain.
+And away along the road to the Spaniards strolled a vast multitude, saying, as
+ever, that the view of London was exceptionally clear that day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Young Holsten&rsquo;s face was white. He walked with that uneasy affectation of
+ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and an under-exercised body. He
+hesitated at the White Stone Pond whether to go to the left of it or the right,
+and again at the fork of the roads. He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and
+every now and then he would get in the way of people on the footpath or be
+jostled by them because of the uncertainty of his movements. He felt, he
+confesses, &lsquo;inadequate to ordinary existence.&rsquo; He seemed to himself
+to be something inhuman and mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly
+prosperous, fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to
+lead&mdash;a week of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild
+promenading&mdash;and he had launched something that would disorganise the
+entire fabric that held their contentments and ambitions and satisfactions
+together. &lsquo;Felt like an imbecile who has presented a box full of loaded
+revolvers to a Crêche,&rsquo; he notes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history now knows only
+that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and Holsten walked together and
+Holsten was sufficiently pale and jumpy for Lawson to tell him he overworked
+and needed a holiday. They sat down at a little table outside the County
+Council house of Golders Hill Park and sent one of the waiters to the Bull and
+Bush for a couple of bottles of beer, no doubt at Lawson&rsquo;s suggestion.
+The beer warmed Holsten&rsquo;s rather dehumanised system. He began to tell
+Lawson as clearly as he could to what his great discovery amounted. Lawson
+feigned attention, but indeed he had neither the knowledge nor the imagination
+to understand. &lsquo;In the end, before many years are out, this must
+eventually change war, transit, lighting, building, and every sort of
+manufacture, even agriculture, every material human
+concern&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then Holsten stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. &lsquo;Damn that
+dog!&rsquo; cried Lawson. &lsquo;Look at it now. Hi! Here!
+<i>Phewoo-phewoo-phewoo!</i> Come <i>here, Bobs!</i> Come <i>here!</i>&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young scientific man, with his bandaged hand, sat at the green table, too
+tired to convey the wonder of the thing he had sought so long, his friend
+whistled and bawled for his dog, and the Sunday people drifted about them
+through the spring sunshine. For a moment or so Holsten stared at Lawson in
+astonishment, for he had been too intent upon what he had been saying to
+realise how little Lawson had attended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he remarked, &lsquo;<i>Well!</i>&rsquo; and smiled faintly,
+and&mdash;finished the tankard of beer before him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lawson sat down again. &lsquo;One must look after one&rsquo;s dog,&rsquo; he
+said, with a note of apology. &lsquo;What was it you were telling me?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 2</h3>
+
+<p>
+In the evening Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint Paul&rsquo;s
+Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the evening service.
+The candles upon the altar reminded him in some odd way of the fireflies at
+Fiesole. Then he walked back through the evening lights to Westminster. He was
+oppressed, he was indeed scared, by his sense of the immense consequences of
+his discovery. He had a vague idea that night that he ought not to publish his
+results, that they were premature, that some secret association of wise men
+should take care of his work and hand it on from generation to generation until
+the world was riper for its practical application. He felt that nobody in all
+the thousands of people he passed had really awakened to the fact of change,
+they trusted the world for what it was, not to alter too rapidly, to respect
+their trusts, their assurances, their habits, their little accustomed traffics
+and hard-won positions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging, brightly-lit masses
+of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He sat down on a seat and became aware
+of the talk of the two people next to him. It was the talk of a young couple
+evidently on the eve of marriage. The man was congratulating himself on having
+regular employment at last; &lsquo;they like me,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;and I
+like the job. If I work up&mdash;in&rsquo;r dozen years or so I ought to be
+gettin&rsquo; somethin&rsquo; pretty comfortable. That&rsquo;s the plain sense
+of it, Hetty. There ain&rsquo;t no reason whatsoever why we shouldn&rsquo;t get
+along very decently&mdash;very decently indeed.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed! So it struck
+upon Holsten&rsquo;s mind. He added in his diary, &lsquo;I had a sense of all
+this globe as that....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this populated world as
+a whole, of all its cities and towns and villages, its high roads and the inns
+beside them, its gardens and farms and upland pastures, its boatmen and
+sailors, its ships coming along the great circles of the ocean, its time-tables
+and appointments and payments and dues as it were one unified and progressive
+spectacle. Sometimes such visions came to him; his mind, accustomed to great
+generalisations and yet acutely sensitive to detail, saw things far more
+comprehensively than the minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the
+teeming sphere moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately
+swiftness on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living progress that
+altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little deadened him to that
+incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal circling. He lapsed to the
+commoner persuasion of the great fixities and recurrencies of the human
+routine. The remoter past of wandering savagery, the inevitable changes of
+to-morrow were veiled, and he saw only day and night, seed-time and harvest,
+loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks in the summer sunlight and tales
+by the winter fireside, the ancient sequence of hope and acts and age
+perennially renewed, eddying on for ever and ever, save that now the impious
+hand of research was raised to overthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual,
+sunlit spinning-top of man&rsquo;s existence....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions, famine and
+pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the bitter wind, failure and
+insufficiency and retrocession. He saw all mankind in terms of the humble
+Sunday couple upon the seat beside him, who schemed their inglorious outlook
+and improbable contentments. &lsquo;I had a sense of all this globe as
+that.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a time in vain.
+He reassured himself against the invasion of this disconcerting idea that he
+was something strange and inhuman, a loose wanderer from the flock returning
+with evil gifts from his sustained unnatural excursions amidst the darknesses
+and phosphorescences beneath the fair surfaces of life. Man had not been always
+thus; the instincts and desires of the little home, the little plot, was not
+all his nature; also he was an adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting
+curiosity, an insatiable desire. For a few thousand generations indeed he had
+tilled the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers, grinding his
+corn and trampling the October winepress, yet not for so long but that he was
+still full of restless stirrings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;If there have been home and routine and the field,&rsquo; thought
+Holsten, &lsquo;there have also been wonder and the sea.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned his head and looked up over the back of the seat at the great hotels
+above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow and colour and stir of
+feasting. Might his gift to mankind mean simply more of that? . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He got up and walked out of the garden, surveyed a passing tram-car, laden with
+warm light, against the deep blues of evening, dripping and trailing long
+skirts of shining reflection; he crossed the Embankment and stood for a time
+watching the dark river and turning ever and again to the lit buildings and
+bridges. His mind began to scheme conceivable replacements of all those
+clustering arrangements....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It has begun,&rsquo; he writes in the diary in which these things are
+recorded. &lsquo;It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot
+foresee. I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in the armoury of
+Change. If I were to burn all these papers, before a score of years had passed,
+some other man would be doing this. . .
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 3</h3>
+
+<p>
+Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominating every
+other source of power, but for some years yet a vast network of difficulties in
+detail and application kept the new discovery from any effective invasion of
+ordinary life. The path from the laboratory to the workshop is sometimes a
+tortuous one; electro-magnetic radiations were known and demonstrated for
+twenty years before Marconi made them practically available, and in the same
+way it was twenty years before induced radio-activity could be brought to
+practical utilisation. The thing, of course, was discussed very much, more
+perhaps at the time of its discovery than during the interval of technical
+adaptation, but with very little realisation of the huge economic revolution
+that impended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the
+production of gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon unprofitable
+lines of the alchemist&rsquo;s dreams; there was a considerable amount of
+discussion and expectation in that more intelligent section of the educated
+publics of the various civilised countries which followed scientific
+development; but for the most part the world went about its business&mdash;as
+the inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the perpetual threat
+of overhanging rocks and mountains go about their business&mdash;just as though
+the possible was impossible, as though the inevitable was postponed for ever
+because it was delayed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought induced
+radio-activity into the sphere of industrial production, and its first general
+use was to replace the steam-engine in electrical generating stations. Hard
+upon the appearance of this came the Dass-Tata engine&mdash;the invention of
+two among the brilliant galaxy of Bengali inventors the modernisation of Indian
+thought was producing at this time&mdash;which was used chiefly for
+automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes, and such-like, mobile purposes. The
+American Kemp engine, differing widely in principle but equally practicable,
+and the Krupp-Erlanger came hard upon the heels of this, and by the autumn of
+1954 a gigantic replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress
+all about the habitable globe. Small wonder was this when the cost, even of
+these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is compared with that of the
+power they superseded. Allowing for lubrication the Dass-Tata engine, once it
+was started cost a penny to run thirty-seven miles, and added only nine and
+quarter pounds to the weight of the carriage it drove. It made the heavy
+alcohol-driven automobile of the time ridiculous in appearance as well as
+preposterously costly. For many years the price of coal and every form of
+liquid fuel had been clambering to levels that made even the revival of the
+draft horse seem a practicable possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation
+of this stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the
+world&rsquo;s roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful armoured
+monsters that had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for four
+awful decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways
+thronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel. At the
+same time a new impetus was given to aviation by the relatively enormous power
+for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible to add
+Redmayne&rsquo;s ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the vertical
+propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force of the aeroplane
+without overweighting the machine, and men found themselves possessed of an
+instrument of flight that could hover or ascend or descend vertically and
+gently as well as rush wildly through the air. The last dread of flying
+vanished. As the journalists of the time phrased it, this was the epoch of the
+Leap into the Air. The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a mania; every one of
+means was frantic to possess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free
+from the dust and danger of the road, and in France alone in the year 1943
+thirty thousand of these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and
+soared humming softly into the sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded industrialism.
+The railways paid enormous premiums for priority in the delivery of atomic
+traction engines, atomic smelting was embarked upon so eagerly as to lead to a
+number of disastrous explosions due to inexperienced handling of the new power,
+and the revolutionary cheapening of both materials and electricity made the
+entire reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter merely dependent upon a
+reorganisation of the methods of the builder and the house-furnisher. Viewed
+from the side of the new power and from the point of view of those who financed
+and manufactured the new engines and material it required the age of the Leap
+into the Air was one of astonishing prosperity. Patent-holding companies were
+presently paying dividends of five or six hundred per cent. and enormous
+fortunes were made and fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the
+new developments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the fact that in
+both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one of the recoverable waste
+products was gold&mdash;the former disintegrated dust of bismuth and the latter
+dust of lead&mdash;and that this new supply of gold led quite naturally to a
+rise in prices throughout the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding flight of
+happy and fortunate rich people&mdash;every great city was as if a crawling
+ant-hill had suddenly taken wing&mdash;was the bright side of the opening phase
+of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering
+darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production
+there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring factories working
+night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the
+roads, these flights of dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the
+air, were indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam
+out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night. Between these high
+lights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly
+doomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested
+in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers upon the
+old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled labourers in innumerable
+occupations, were being flung out of employment by the superior efficiency of
+the new machinery, the rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high
+land values at every centre of population, the value of existing house property
+had become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all the
+securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping and sliding,
+banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of feverish
+panic;&mdash;this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were the black and
+monstrous under-consequences of the Leap into the Air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out into Threadneedle
+Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran. &lsquo;The Steel Trust is
+scrapping the whole of its plant,&rsquo; he shouted. &lsquo;The State Railways
+are going to scrap all their engines. Everything&rsquo;s going to be
+scrapped&mdash;everything. Come and scrap the mint, you fellows, come and scrap
+the mint!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of America quadrupled
+any previous record. There was an enormous increase also in violent crime
+throughout the world. The thing had come upon an unprepared humanity; it seemed
+as though human society was to be smashed by its own magnificent gains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been no attempt
+anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations this flood of inexpensive
+energy would produce in human affairs. The world in these days was not really
+governed at all, in the sense in which government came to be understood in
+subsequent years. Government was a treaty, not a design; it was forensic,
+conservative, disputatious, unseeing, unthinking, uncreative; throughout the
+world, except where the vestiges of absolutism still sheltered the court
+favourite and the trusted servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste
+of lawyers, who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained caste.
+Their professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation of the
+fantastically naïve electoral methods by which they clambered to power,
+conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously unimaginative,
+alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of every generosity.
+Government was an obstructive business of energetic fractions, progress went on
+outside of and in spite of public activities, and legislation was the last
+crippling recognition of needs so clamorous and imperative and facts so
+aggressively established as to invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges
+and threaten the very existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty, in the
+full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything necessary to satisfy
+human needs and everything necessary to realise such will and purpose as
+existed then in human hearts was already at hand, one has still to tell of
+hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict, and incoherent suffering. There
+was no scheme for the distribution of this vast new wealth that had come at
+last within the reach of men; there was no clear conception that any such
+distribution was possible. As one attempts a comprehensive view of those
+opening years of the new age, as one measures it against the latent achievement
+that later years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the blindness, the
+narrowness, the insensate unimaginative individualism of the pre-atomic time.
+Under this tremendous dawn of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with
+promise, in the very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess
+over all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patiently in her strong
+arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty, the solution of riddles,
+the key of the bravest adventures, in her very presence, and with the earnest
+of her gifts in court, the world was to witness such things as the squalid
+spectacle of the Dass-Tata patent litigation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room, during the
+exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading counsel of the day argued and
+shouted over a miserable little matter of more royalties or less and whether
+the Dass-Tata company might not bar the Holsten-Roberts&rsquo; methods of
+utilising the new power. The Dass-Tata people were indeed making a strenuous
+attempt to secure a world monopoly in atomic engineering. The judge, after the
+manner of those times, sat raised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown
+and a foolish huge wig, the counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and
+queer black gowns over their usual costume, wigs and gowns that were held to be
+necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean wooden benches stirred and
+whispered artful-looking solicitors, busily scribbling reporters, the parties
+to the case, expert witnesses, interested people, and a jostling confusion of
+subpoenaed persons, briefless young barristers (forming a style on the most
+esteemed and truculent examples) and casual eccentric spectators who preferred
+this pit of iniquity to the free sunlight outside. Every one was damply hot,
+the examining King&rsquo;s Counsel wiped the perspiration from his huge,
+clean-shaven upper lip; and into this atmosphere of grasping contention and
+human exhalations the daylight filtered through a window that was manifestly
+dirty. The jury sat in a double pew to the left of the judge, looking as
+uncomfortable as frogs that have fallen into an ash-pit, and in the witness-box
+lied the would-be omnivorous Dass, under cross-examination....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon as they
+appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a basis for further
+work, and to that confiding disposition and one happy flash of adaptive
+invention the alert Dass owed his claim....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching, patenting,
+pre-empting, monopolising this or that feature of the new development, seeking
+to subdue this gigantic winged power to the purposes of their little lusts and
+avarice. That trial is just one of innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a
+time the face of the world festered with patent legislation. It chanced,
+however, to have one oddly dramatic feature in the fact that Holsten, after
+being kept waiting about the court for two days as a beggar might have waited
+at a rich man&rsquo;s door, after being bullied by ushers and watched by
+policemen, was called as a witness, rather severely handled by counsel, and
+told not to &lsquo;quibble&rsquo; by the judge when he was trying to be
+absolutely explicit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, and sneered at Holsten&rsquo;s
+astonishment round the corner of his monstrous wig. Holsten was a great man,
+was he? Well, in a law-court great men were put in their places.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;We want to know has the plaintiff added anything to this or hasn&rsquo;t
+he?&rsquo; said the judge, &lsquo;we don&rsquo;t want to have your views
+whether Sir Philip Dass&rsquo;s improvements were merely superficial
+adaptations or whether they were implicit in your paper. No doubt&mdash;after
+the manner of inventors&mdash;you think most things that were ever likely to be
+discovered are implicit in your papers. No doubt also you think too that most
+subsequent additions and modifications are merely superficial. Inventors have a
+way of thinking that. The law isn&rsquo;t concerned with that sort of thing.
+The law has nothing to do with the vanity of inventors. The law is concerned
+with the question whether these patent rights have the novelty the plantiff
+claims for them. What that admission may or may not stop, and all these other
+things you are saying in your overflowing zeal to answer more than the
+questions addressed to you&mdash;none of these things have anything whatever to
+do with the case in hand. It is a matter of constant astonishment to me in this
+court to see how you scientific men, with all your extraordinary claims to
+precision and veracity, wander and wander so soon as you get into the
+witness-box. I know no more unsatisfactory class of witness. The plain and
+simple question is, has Sir Philip Dass made any real addition to existing
+knowledge and methods in this matter or has he not? We don&rsquo;t want to know
+whether they were large or small additions nor what the consequences of your
+admission may be. That you will leave to us.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Holsten was silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Surely?&rsquo; said the judge, almost pityingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;No, he hasn&rsquo;t,&rsquo; said Holsten, perceiving that for once in
+his life he must disregard infinitesimals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Ah!&rsquo; said the judge, &lsquo;now why couldn&rsquo;t you say that
+when counsel put the question? . . .&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An entry in Holsten&rsquo;s diary-autobiography, dated five days later, runs:
+&lsquo;Still amazed. The law is the most dangerous thing in this country. It is
+hundreds of years old. It hasn&rsquo;t an idea. The oldest of old bottles and
+this new wine, the most explosive wine. Something will overtake them.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 4</h3>
+
+<p>
+There was a certain truth in Holsten&rsquo;s assertion that the law was
+&lsquo;hundreds of years old.&rsquo; It was, in relation to current thought and
+widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the material and
+methods of life had been changing rapidly and were now changing still more
+rapidly, the law-courts and the legislatures of the world were struggling
+desperately to meet modern demands with devices and procedures, conceptions of
+rights and property and authority and obligation that dated from the rude
+compromises of relatively barbaric times. The horse-hair wigs and antic dresses
+of the British judges, their musty courts and overbearing manners, were indeed
+only the outward and visible intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal
+and political organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century was
+indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong, that now
+fettered the governing body that once it had protected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and outspoken publication that in the
+field of natural science had been the beginning of the conquest of nature, was
+at work throughout all the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries preparing the
+spirit of the new world within the degenerating body of the old. The idea of a
+greater subordination of individual interests and established institutions to
+the collective future, is traceable more and more clearly in the literature of
+those times, and movement after movement fretted itself away in criticism of
+and opposition to first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and
+political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley, with no scrap
+of alternative, is denouncing the established rulers of the world as Anarchs,
+and the entire system of ideas and suggestions that was known as Socialism, and
+more particularly its international side, feeble as it was in creative
+proposals or any method of transition, still witnesses to the growth of a
+conception of a modernised system of inter-relationships that should supplant
+the existing tangle of proprietary legal ideas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The word &lsquo;Sociology&rsquo; was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular
+writer upon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the middle of the
+nineteenth century, but the idea of a state, planned as an electric-traction
+system is planned, without reference to pre-existing apparatus, upon scientific
+lines, did not take a very strong hold upon the popular imagination of the
+world until the twentieth century. Then, the growing impatience of the American
+people with the monstrous and socially paralysing party systems that had sprung
+out of their absurd electoral arrangements, led to the appearance of what came
+to be called the &lsquo;Modern State&rsquo; movement, and a galaxy of brilliant
+writers, in America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the thought
+of bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property, employment,
+education, and government, than had ever been contemplated before. No doubt
+these Modern State ideas were very largely the reflection upon social and
+political thought of the vast revolution in material things that had been in
+progress for two hundred years, but for a long time they seemed to be having no
+more influence upon existing institutions than the writings of Rousseau and
+Voltaire seemed to have had at the time of the death of the latter. They were
+fermenting in men&rsquo;s minds, and it needed only just such social and
+political stresses as the coming of the atomic mechanisms brought about, to
+thrust them forward abruptly into crude and startling realisation.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 5</h3>
+
+<p>
+Frederick Barnet&rsquo;s <i>Wander Jahre</i> is one of those autobiographical
+novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of the
+twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understand Wander
+Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literal sense. It is
+indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back to the <i>Wilhelm Meister</i>
+of Goethe, a century and a half earlier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history of his life
+and ideas between his nineteenth and his twenty-third birthdays. He was neither
+a very original nor a very brilliant man, but he had a trick of circumstantial
+writing; and though no authentic portrait was to survive for the information of
+posterity, he betrays by a score of casual phrases that he was short, sturdy,
+inclined to be plump, with a &lsquo;rather blobby&rsquo; face, and full, rather
+projecting blue eyes. He belonged until the financial <i>débâcle</i> of 1956 to
+the class of fairly prosperous people, he was a student in London, he
+aeroplaned to Italy and then had a pedestrian tour from Genoa to Rome, crossed
+in the air to Greece and Egypt, and came back over the Balkans and Germany. His
+family fortunes, which were largely invested in bank shares, coal mines, and
+house property, were destroyed. Reduced to penury, he sought to earn a living.
+He suffered great hardship, and was then caught up by the war and had a year of
+soldiering, first as an officer in the English infantry and then in the army of
+pacification. His book tells all these things so simply and at the same time so
+explicitly, that it remains, as it were, an eye by which future generations may
+have at least one man&rsquo;s vision of the years of the Great Change.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he was, he tells us, a &lsquo;Modern State&rsquo; man &lsquo;by
+instinct&rsquo; from the beginning. He breathed in these ideas in the class
+rooms and laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, a long and
+delicately beautiful facade, along the South Bank of the Thames opposite the
+ancient dignity of Somerset House. Such thought was interwoven with the very
+fabric of that pioneer school in the educational renascence in England. After
+the customary exchange years in Heidelberg and Paris, he went into the
+classical school of London University. The older so-called
+&lsquo;classical&rsquo; education of the British pedagogues, probably the most
+paralysing, ineffective, and foolish routine that ever wasted human life, had
+already been swept out of this great institution in favour of modern methods;
+and he learnt Greek and Latin as well as he had learnt German, Spanish, and
+French, so that he wrote and spoke them freely, and used them with an
+unconscious ease in his study of the foundation civilisations of the European
+system to which they were the key. (This change was still so recent that he
+mentions an encounter in Rome with an &lsquo;Oxford don&rsquo; who &lsquo;spoke
+Latin with a Wiltshire accent and manifest discomfort, wrote Greek letters with
+his tongue out, and seemed to think a Greek sentence a charm when it was a
+quotation and an impropriety when it wasn&rsquo;t.&rsquo;)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam engines upon the English railways
+and the gradual cleansing of the London atmosphere as the smoke-creating
+sea-coal fires gave place to electric heating. The building of laboratories at
+Kensington was still in progress, and he took part in the students&rsquo; riots
+that delayed the removal of the Albert Memorial. He carried a banner with
+&lsquo;We like Funny Statuary&rsquo; on one side, and on the other &lsquo;Seats
+and Canopies for Statues, Why should our Great Departed Stand in the
+Rain?&rsquo; He learnt the rather athletic aviation of those days at the
+University grounds at Sydenham, and he was fined for flying over the new prison
+for political libellers at Wormwood Scrubs, &lsquo;in a manner calculated to
+exhilarate the prisoners while at exercise.&rsquo; That was the time of the
+attempted suppression of any criticism of the public judicature and the place
+was crowded with journalists who had ventured to call attention to the dementia
+of Chief Justice Abrahams. Barnet was not a very good aviator, he confesses he
+was always a little afraid of his machine&mdash;there was excellent reason for
+every one to be afraid of those clumsy early types&mdash;and he never attempted
+steep descents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned one of those
+oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity and extravagant filthiness
+still astonish the visitors to the museum of machinery at South Kensington. He
+mentions running over a dog and complains of the ruinous price of
+&lsquo;spatchcocks&rsquo; in Surrey. &lsquo;Spatchcocks,&rsquo; it seems, was a
+slang term for crushed hens.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military service to a
+minimum, and his want of any special scientific or technical qualification and
+a certain precocious corpulence that handicapped his aviation indicated the
+infantry of the line as his sphere of training. That was the most generalised
+form of soldiering. The development of the theory of war had been for some
+decades but little assisted by any practical experience. What fighting had
+occurred in recent years, had been fighting in minor or uncivilised states,
+with peasant or barbaric soldiers and with but a small equipment of modern
+contrivances, and the great powers of the world were content for the most part
+to maintain armies that sustained in their broader organisation the traditions
+of the European wars of thirty and forty years before. There was the infantry
+arm to which Barnet belonged and which was supposed to fight on foot with a
+rifle and be the main portion of the army. There were cavalry forces (horse
+soldiers), having a ratio to the infantry that had been determined by the
+experiences of the Franco-German war in 1871. There was also artillery, and for
+some unexplained reason much of this was still drawn by horses; though there
+were also in all the European armies a small number of motor-guns with wheels
+so constructed that they could go over broken ground. In addition there were
+large developments of the engineering arm, concerned with motor transport,
+motor-bicycle scouting, aviation, and the like.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No first-class intelligence had been sought to specialise in and work out the
+problem of warfare with the new appliances and under modern conditions, but a
+succession of able jurists, Lord Haldane, Chief Justice Briggs, and that very
+able King&rsquo;s Counsel, Philbrick, had reconstructed the army frequently and
+thoroughly and placed it at last, with the adoption of national service, upon a
+footing that would have seemed very imposing to the public of 1900. At any
+moment the British Empire could now put a million and a quarter of arguable
+soldiers upon the board of Welt-Politik. The traditions of Japan and the
+Central European armies were more princely and less forensic; the Chinese still
+refused resolutely to become a military power, and maintained a small standing
+army upon the American model that was said, so far as it went, to be highly
+efficient, and Russia, secured by a stringent administration against internal
+criticism, had scarcely altered the design of a uniform or the organisation of
+a battery since the opening decades of the century. Barnet&rsquo;s opinion of
+his military training was manifestly a poor one, his Modern State ideas
+disposed him to regard it as a bore, and his common sense condemned it as
+useless. Moreover, his habit of body made him peculiarly sensitive to the
+fatigues and hardships of service.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;For three days in succession we turned out before dawn and&mdash;for no
+earthly reason&mdash;without breakfast,&rsquo; he relates. &lsquo;I suppose
+that is to show us that when the Day comes the first thing will be to get us
+thoroughly uncomfortable and rotten. We then proceeded to Kriegspiel, according
+to the mysterious ideas of those in authority over us. On the last day we spent
+three hours under a hot if early sun getting over eight miles of country to a
+point we could have reached in a motor omnibus in nine minutes and a
+half&mdash;I did it the next day in that&mdash;and then we made a massed attack
+upon entrenchments that could have shot us all about three times over if only
+the umpires had let them. Then came a little bayonet exercise, but I doubt if I
+am sufficiently a barbarian to stick this long knife into anything living.
+Anyhow in this battle I shouldn&rsquo;t have had a chance. Assuming that by
+some miracle I hadn&rsquo;t been shot three times over, I was far too hot and
+blown when I got up to the entrenchments even to lift my beastly rifle. It was
+those others would have begun the sticking....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;For a time we were watched by two hostile aeroplanes; then our own came
+up and asked them not to, and&mdash;the practice of aerial warfare still being
+unknown&mdash;they very politely desisted and went away and did dives and
+circles of the most charming description over the Fox Hills.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All Barnet&rsquo;s accounts of his military training were written in the same
+half-contemptuous, half-protesting tone. He was of opinion that his chances of
+participating in any real warfare were very slight, and that, if after all he
+should participate, it was bound to be so entirely different from these peace
+manœuvres that his only course as a rational man would be to keep as
+observantly out of danger as he could until he had learnt the tricks and
+possibilities of the new conditions. He states this quite frankly. Never was a
+man more free from sham heroics.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 6</h3>
+
+<p>
+Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest of masculine
+youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that for some time he failed to
+connect the rush of wonderful new possibilities with the financial troubles of
+his family. &lsquo;I knew my father was worried,&rsquo; he admits. That cast
+the smallest of shadows upon his delighted departure for Italy and Greece and
+Egypt with three congenial companions in one of the new atomic models. They
+flew over the Channel Isles and Touraine, he mentions, and circled about Mont
+Blanc&mdash;&lsquo;These new helicopters, we found,&rsquo; he notes, &lsquo;had
+abolished all the danger and strain of sudden drops to which the old-time
+aeroplanes were liable&rsquo;&mdash;and then he went on by way of Pisa,
+Paestum, Ghirgenti, and Athens, to visit the pyramids by moonlight, flying
+thither from Cairo, and to follow the Nile up to Khartum. Even by later
+standards, it must have been a very gleeful holiday for a young man, and it
+made the tragedy of his next experiences all the darker. A week after his
+return his father, who was a widower, announced himself ruined, and committed
+suicide by means of an unscheduled opiate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At one blow Barnet found himself flung out of the possessing, spending,
+enjoying class to which he belonged, penniless and with no calling by which he
+could earn a living. He tried teaching and some journalism, but in a little
+while he found himself on the underside of a world in which he had always
+reckoned to live in the sunshine. For innumerable men such an experience has
+meant mental and spiritual destruction, but Barnet, in spite of his bodily
+gravitation towards comfort, showed himself when put to the test, of the more
+valiant modern quality. He was saturated with the creative stoicism of the
+heroic times that were already dawning, and he took his difficulties and
+discomforts stoutly as his appointed material, and turned them to expression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Indeed, in his book, he thanks fortune for them. &lsquo;I might have lived and
+died,&rsquo; he says, &lsquo;in that neat fool&rsquo;s paradise of secure
+lavishness above there. I might never have realised the gathering wrath and
+sorrow of the ousted and exasperated masses. In the days of my own prosperity
+things had seemed to me to be very well arranged.&rsquo; Now from his new point
+of view he was to find they were not arranged at all; that government was a
+compromise of aggressions and powers and lassitudes, and law a convention
+between interests, and that the poor and the weak, though they had many
+negligent masters, had few friends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I had thought things were looked after,&rsquo; he wrote. &lsquo;It was
+with a kind of amazement that I tramped the roads and starved&mdash;and found
+that no one in particular cared.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was turned out of his lodging in a backward part of London.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady&mdash;she was a needy
+widow, poor soul, and I was already in her debt&mdash;to keep an old box for me
+in which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and the like. She lived in
+great fear of the Public Health and Morality Inspectors, because she was
+sometimes too poor to pay the customary tip to them, but at last she consented
+to put it in a dark tiled place under the stairs, and then I went forth into
+the world&mdash;to seek first the luck of a meal and then shelter.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in which a year or
+so ago he had been numbered among the spenders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of visible smoke
+with or without excuse was punishable by a fine, had already ceased to be the
+sombre smoke-darkened city of the Victorian time; it had been, and indeed was,
+constantly being rebuilt, and its main streets were already beginning to take
+on those characteristics that distinguished them throughout the latter half of
+the twentieth century. The insanitary horse and the plebeian bicycle had been
+banished from the roadway, which was now of a resilient, glass-like surface,
+spotlessly clean; and the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow vestige of
+the ancient footpath on either side of the track and forbidden at the risk of a
+fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway. People descended from their
+automobiles upon this pavement and went through the lower shops to the lifts
+and stairs to the new ways for pedestrians, the Rows, that ran along the front
+of the houses at the level of the first story, and, being joined by frequent
+bridges, gave the newer parts of London a curiously Venetian appearance. In
+some streets there were upper and even third-story Rows. For most of the day
+and all night the shop windows were lit by electric light, and many
+establishments had made, as it were, canals of public footpaths through their
+premises in order to increase their window space.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barnet made his way along this night-scene rather apprehensively since the
+police had power to challenge and demand the Labour Card of any
+indigent-looking person, and if the record failed to show he was in employment,
+dismiss him to the traffic pavement below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet&rsquo;s
+appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too, had other
+things to think of that night, and he was permitted to reach the galleries
+about Leicester Square&mdash;that great focus of London life and pleasure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He gives a vivid description of the scene that evening. In the centre was a
+garden raised on arches lit by festoons of lights and connected with the Rows
+by eight graceful bridges, beneath which hummed the interlacing streams of
+motor traffic, pulsating as the current alternated between east and west and
+north and south. Above rose great frontages of intricate rather than beautiful
+reinforced porcelain, studded with lights, barred by bold illuminated
+advertisements, and glowing with reflections. There were the two historical
+music halls of this place, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the
+municipal players revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+plays, and four other great houses of refreshment and entertainment whose
+pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night. The south side of
+the square was in dark contrast to the others; it was still being rebuilt, and
+a lattice of steel bars surmounted by the frozen gestures of monstrous cranes
+rose over the excavated sites of vanished Victorian buildings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This framework attracted Barnet&rsquo;s attention for a time to the exclusion
+of other interests. It was absolutely still, it had a dead rigidity, a stricken
+inaction, no one was at work upon it and all its machinery was quiet; but the
+constructor&rsquo;s globes of vacuum light filled its every interstice with a
+quivering green moonshine and showed alert but motionless&mdash;soldier
+sentinels!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He asked a passing stroller, and was told that the men had struck that day
+against the use of an atomic riveter that would have doubled the individual
+efficiency and halved the number of steel workers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Shouldn&rsquo;t wonder if they didn&rsquo;t get chucking bombs,&rsquo;
+said Barnet&rsquo;s informant, hovered for a moment, and then went on his way
+to the Alhambra music hall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at the corners of
+the square. Something very sensational had been flashed upon the
+transparencies. Forgetting for a moment his penniless condition, he made his
+way over a bridge to buy a paper, for in those days the papers, which were
+printed upon thin sheets of metallic foil, were sold at determinate points by
+specially licensed purveyors. Half over, he stopped short at a change in the
+traffic below; and was astonished to see that the police signals were
+restricting vehicles to the half roadway. When presently he got within sight of
+the transparencies that had replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read
+of the Great March of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the
+West End, and so without expenditure he was able to understand what was coming.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He watched, and his book describes this procession which the police had
+considered it unwise to prevent and which had been spontaneously organised in
+imitation of the Unemployed Processions of earlier times. He had expected a mob
+but there was a kind of sullen discipline about the procession when at last it
+arrived. What seemed for a time an unending column of men marched wearily,
+marched with a kind of implacable futility, along the roadway underneath him.
+He was, he says, moved to join them, but instead he remained watching. They
+were a dingy, shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part
+incapable of any but obsolete and superseded types of labour. They bore a few
+banners with the time-honoured inscription: &lsquo;Work, not Charity,&rsquo;
+but otherwise their ranks were unadorned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was nothing truculent
+nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no definite objective they were just
+marching and showing themselves in the more prosperous parts of London. They
+were a sample of that great mass of unskilled cheap labour which the now still
+cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for evermore. They were being
+&lsquo;scrapped&rsquo;&mdash;as horses had been &lsquo;scrapped.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened by his own
+precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt nothing but despair at the
+sight; what should be done, what could be done for this gathering surplus of
+humanity? They were so manifestly useless&mdash;and incapable&mdash;and
+pitiful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What were they asking for?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had foreseen&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous shambling enigma
+below meant. It was an appeal against the unexpected, an appeal to those others
+who, more fortunate, seemed wiser and more powerful, for something&mdash;for
+<i>intelligence</i>. This mute mass, weary footed, rank following rank,
+protested its persuasion that some of these others must have foreseen these
+dislocations&mdash;that anyhow they ought to have foreseen&mdash;and arranged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so dumbly to
+assert.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened
+room,&rsquo; he says. &lsquo;These men were praying to their fellow creatures
+as once they prayed to God! The last thing that men will realise about anything
+is that it is inanimate. They had transferred their animation to mankind. They
+still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or
+malignant.... It had only to be aroused to be conscience-stricken, to be moved
+to exertion.... And I saw, too, that as yet <i>there was no such
+intelligence</i>. The world waits for intelligence. That intelligence has still
+to be made, that will for good and order has still to be gathered together, out
+of scraps of impulse and wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine
+and creative in our souls, into a common purpose. It&rsquo;s something still to
+come....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that this not very
+heroical young man who, in any previous age, might well have been altogether
+occupied with the problem of his own individual necessities, should be able to
+stand there and generalise about the needs of the race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time there was already
+dawning the light of a new era. The spirit of humanity was escaping, even then
+it was escaping, from its extreme imprisonment in individuals. Salvation from
+the bitter intensities of self, which had been a conscious religious end for
+thousands of years, which men had sought in mortifications, in the wilderness,
+in meditation, and by innumerable strange paths, was coming at last with the
+effect of naturalness into the talk of men, into the books they read, into
+their unconscious gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and
+everyday acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the spirit of
+the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of those ancient and
+instinctive preoccupations from which the very threat of hell and torment had
+failed to drive them. And this young man, homeless and without provision even
+for the immediate hours, in the presence of social disorganisation, distress,
+and perplexity, in a blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasure that blotted
+out the stars, could think as he tells us he thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I saw life plain,&rsquo; he wrote. &lsquo;I saw the gigantic task before
+us, and the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable difficulty filled
+me with exaltation. I saw that we have still to discover government, that we
+have still to discover education, which is the necessary reciprocal of
+government, and that all this&mdash;in which my own little speck of a life was
+so manifestly overwhelmed&mdash;this and its yesterday in Greece and Rome and
+Egypt were nothing, the mere first dust swirls of the beginning, the movements
+and dim murmurings of a sleeper who will presently be awake....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 7</h3>
+
+<p>
+And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his descent from this
+ecstatic vision of reality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold and a
+little hungry.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood upon the
+Thames Embankment. He made his way through the galleries of the booksellers and
+the National Gallery, which had been open continuously day and night to all
+decently dressed people now for more than twelve years, and across the
+rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the hotel colonnade to the
+Embankment. He had long known of these admirable offices, which had swept the
+last beggars and matchsellers and all the casual indigent from the London
+streets, and he believed that he would, as a matter of course, be able to
+procure a ticket for food and a night&rsquo;s lodgings and some indication of
+possible employment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he got to the
+Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested and besieged by a large
+and rather unruly crowd. He hovered for a time on the outskirts of the waiting
+multitude, perplexed and dismayed, and then he became aware of a movement, a
+purposive trickling away of people, up through the arches of the great
+buildings that had arisen when all the railway stations were removed to the
+south side of the river, and so to the covered ways of the Strand. And here, in
+the open glare of midnight, he found unemployed men begging, and not only
+begging, but begging with astonishing assurance, from the people who were
+emerging from the small theatres and other such places of entertainment which
+abounded in that thoroughfare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was an altogether unexampled thing. There had been no begging in London
+streets for a quarter of a century. But that night the police were evidently
+unwilling or unable to cope with the destitute who were invading those
+well-kept quarters of the town. They had become stonily blind to anything but
+manifest disorder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask; indeed his
+bearing must have been more valiant than his circumstances, for twice he says
+that he was begged from. Near the Trafalgar Square gardens, a girl with
+reddened cheeks and blackened eyebrows, who was walking alone, spoke to him
+with a peculiar friendliness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;m starving,&rsquo; he said to her abruptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Oh! poor dear!&rsquo; she said; and with the impulsive generosity of her
+kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his hand....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey, might under the
+repressive social legislation of those times, have brought Barnet within reach
+of the prison lash. But he took it, he confesses, and thanked her as well as he
+was able, and went off very gladly to get food.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 8</h3>
+
+<p>
+A day or so later&mdash;and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon the
+roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social disorganisation and police
+embarrassment&mdash;he wandered out into the open country. He speaks of the
+roads of that plutocratic age as being &lsquo;fenced with barbed wire against
+unpropertied people,&rsquo; of the high-walled gardens and trespass warnings
+that kept him to the dusty narrowness of the public ways. In the air, happy
+rich people were flying, heedless of the misfortunes about them, as he himself
+had been flying two years ago, and along the road swept the new traffic, light
+and swift and wonderful. One was rarely out of earshot of its whistles and
+gongs and siren cries even in the field paths or over the open downs. The
+officials of the labour exchanges were everywhere overworked and infuriated,
+the casual wards were so crowded that the surplus wanderers slept in ranks
+under sheds or in the open air, and since giving to wayfarers had been made a
+punishable offence there was no longer friendship or help for a man from the
+rare foot passenger or the wayside cottage....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I wasn&rsquo;t angry,&rsquo; said Barnet. &lsquo;I saw an immense
+selfishness, a monstrous disregard for anything but pleasure and possession in
+all those people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how certainly if
+the richest had changed places with the poorest, that things would have been
+the same. What else can happen when men use science and every new thing that
+science gives, and all their available intelligence and energy to manufacture
+wealth and appliances, and leave government and education to the rustling
+traditions of hundreds of years ago? Those traditions come from the dark ages
+when there was really not enough for every one, when life was a fierce struggle
+that might be masked but could not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing,
+this fierce dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony between
+material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and the poor grew savage
+and every added power that came to men made the rich richer and the poor less
+necessary and less free. The men I met in the casual wards and the relief
+offices were all smouldering for revolt, talking of justice and injustice and
+revenge. I saw no hope in that talk, nor in anything but patience....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he did not mean a passive patience. He meant that the method of social
+reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual rearrangement was possible
+until this riddle in all its tangled aspects was solved. &lsquo;I tried to talk
+to those discontented men,&rsquo; he wrote, &lsquo;but it was hard for them to
+see things as I saw them. When I talked of patience and the larger scheme, they
+answered, &ldquo;But then we shall all be dead&rdquo;&mdash;and I could not
+make them see, what is so simple to my own mind, that that did not affect the
+question. Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to statesmanship.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and a chance
+sight of the transparency of a kiosk in the market-place at Bishop&rsquo;s
+Stortford announcing a &lsquo;Grave International Situation&rsquo; did not
+excite him very much. There had been so many grave international situations in
+recent years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly attacking the
+Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to the help of the Slavs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the vagrants in the
+casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master that all serviceable trained
+men were to be sent back on the morrow to their mobilisation centres. The
+country was on the eve of war. He was to go back through London to Surrey. His
+first feeling, he records, was one of extreme relief that his days of
+&lsquo;hopeless battering at the underside of civilisation&rsquo; were at an
+end. Here was something definite to do, something definitely provided for. But
+his relief was greatly modified when he found that the mobilisation
+arrangements had been made so hastily and carelessly that for nearly thirty-six
+hours at the improvised depôt at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink
+but a cup of cold water. The depôt was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one was
+free to leave it.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>CHAPTER THE SECOND<br/>
+THE LAST WAR</h2>
+
+<h3>Section I</h3>
+
+<p>
+Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order, it is
+difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow, the motives that
+plunged mankind into the war that fills the histories of the middle decades of
+the twentieth century.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It must always be remembered that the political structure of the world at that
+time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the collective intelligence. That is
+the central fact of that history. For two hundred years there had been no great
+changes in political or legal methods and pretensions, the utmost change had
+been a certain shifting of boundaries and slight readjustment of procedure,
+while in nearly every other aspect of life there had been fundamental
+revolutions, gigantic releases, and an enormous enlargement of scope and
+outlook. The absurdities of courts and the indignities of representative
+parliamentary government, coupled with the opening of vast fields of
+opportunity in other directions, had withdrawn the best intelligences more and
+more from public affairs. The ostensible governments of the world in the
+twentieth century were following in the wake of the ostensible religions. They
+were ceasing to command the services of any but second-rate men. After the
+middle of the eighteenth century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the
+world&rsquo;s memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen.
+Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted, common-place type
+in the seats of authority, blind to the new possibilities and litigiously
+reliant upon the traditions of the past.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the boundaries of
+the various &lsquo;sovereign states,&rsquo; and the conception of a general
+predominance in human affairs on the part of some one particular state. The
+memory of the empires of Rome and Alexander squatted, an unlaid carnivorous
+ghost, in the human imagination&mdash;it bored into the human brain like some
+grisly parasite and filled it with disordered thoughts and violent impulses.
+For more than a century the French system exhausted its vitality in belligerent
+convulsions, and then the infection passed to the German-speaking peoples who
+were the heart and centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later
+ages were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this obsession,
+the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the infinite knowingness of the
+political writer, the cunning refusals to accept plain facts, the strategic
+devices, the tactical manœuvres, the records of mobilisations and
+counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible almost as soon as it ceased to
+happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their state craftsmen sat with
+their historical candles burning, and, in spite of strange, new reflections and
+unfamiliar lights and shadows, still wrangling and planning to rearrange the
+maps of Europe and the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions of men and
+women outside the world of these specialists sympathised and agreed with their
+portentous activities. One school of psychologists inclined to minimise this
+participation, but the balance of evidence goes to show that there were massive
+responses to these suggestions of the belligerent schemer. Primitive man had
+been a fiercely combative animal; innumerable generations had passed their
+lives in tribal warfare, and the weight of tradition, the example of history,
+the ideals of loyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the incitements
+of the international mischief-maker. The political ideas of the common man were
+picked up haphazard, there was practically nothing in such education as he was
+given that was ever intended to fit him for citizenship as such (that
+conception only appeared, indeed, with the development of Modern State ideas),
+and it was therefore a comparatively easy matter to fill his vacant mind with
+the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion and national aggression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily patriotic when
+presently his battalion came up from the depôt to London, to entrain for the
+French frontier. He tells of children and women and lads and old men cheering
+and shouting, of the streets and rows hung with the flags of the Allied Powers,
+of a real enthusiasm even among the destitute and unemployed. The Labour
+Bureaux were now partially transformed into enrolment offices, and were centres
+of hotly patriotic excitement. At every convenient place upon the line on
+either side of the Channel Tunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the
+feeling in the regiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by grim
+anticipations, was none the less warlike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of minds without established ideas;
+it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it was with himself, a natural
+response to collective movement, and to martial sounds and colours, and the
+exhilarating challenge of vague dangers. And people had been so long oppressed
+by the threat of and preparation for war that its arrival came with an effect
+of positive relief.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 2</h3>
+
+<p>
+The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the lower Meuse to
+the English, and the troop-trains were run direct from the various British
+depôts to the points in the Ardennes where they were intended to entrench
+themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most of the documents bearing upon the campaign were destroyed during the war,
+from the first the scheme of the Allies seems to have been confused, but it is
+highly probable that the formation of an aerial park in this region, from which
+attacks could be made upon the vast industrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a
+flanking raid through Holland upon the German naval establishments at the mouth
+of the Elbe, were integral parts of the original project. Nothing of this was
+known to such pawns in the game as Barnet and his company, whose business it
+was to do what they were told by the mysterious intelligences at the direction
+of things in Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff had also been
+transferred. From first to last these directing intelligences remained
+mysterious to the body of the army, veiled under the name of
+&lsquo;Orders.&rsquo; There was no Napoleon, no Cæsar to embody enthusiasm.
+Barnet says, &lsquo;We talked of Them. <i>They</i> are sending us up into
+Luxembourg. <i>They</i> are going to turn the Central European right.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Behind the veil of this vagueness the little group of more or less worthy men
+which constituted Headquarters was beginning to realise the enormity of the
+thing it was supposed to control....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the great hall of the War Control, whose windows looked out across the Seine
+to the Trocadero and the palaces of the western quarter, a series of big-scale
+relief maps were laid out upon tables to display the whole seat of war, and the
+staff-officers of the control were continually busy shifting the little blocks
+which represented the contending troops, as the reports and intelligence came
+drifting in to the various telegraphic bureaux in the adjacent rooms. In other
+smaller apartments there were maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for
+example, the reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav commanders were
+recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps, as upon chessboards,
+Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard and the Earl of Delhi, was
+to play the great game for world supremacy against the Central European powers.
+Very probably he had a definite idea of his game; very probably he had a
+coherent and admirable plan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new strategy of
+aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy that Holsten had opened for
+mankind. While he planned entrenchments and invasions and a frontier war, the
+Central European generalship was striking at the eyes and the brain. And while,
+with a certain diffident hesitation, he developed his gambit that night upon
+the lines laid down by Napoleon and Moltke, his own scientific corps in a state
+of mutinous activity was preparing a blow for Berlin. &lsquo;These old
+fools!&rsquo; was the key in which the scientific corps was thinking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The War Control in Paris, on the night of July the second, was an impressive
+display of the paraphernalia of scientific military organisation, as the first
+half of the twentieth century understood it. To one human being at least the
+consulting commanders had the likeness of world-wielding gods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute, and she had
+been engaged in relay with other similar women to take down orders in duplicate
+and hand them over to the junior officers in attendance, to be forwarded and
+filed. There had come a lull, and she had been sent out from the dictating room
+to take the air upon the terrace before the great hall and to eat such scanty
+refreshment as she had brought with her until her services were required again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view not only of the
+wide sweep of the river below her, and all the eastward side of Paris from the
+Arc de Triomphe to Saint Cloud, great blocks and masses of black or pale
+darkness with pink and golden flashes of illumination and endless interlacing
+bands of dotted lights under a still and starless sky, but also the whole
+spacious interior of the great hall with its slender pillars and gracious
+arching and clustering lamps was visible to her. There, over a wilderness of
+tables, lay the huge maps, done on so large a scale that one might fancy them
+small countries; the messengers and attendants went and came perpetually,
+altering, moving the little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of
+men, and the great commander and his two consultants stood amidst all these
+things and near where the fighting was nearest, scheming, directing. They had
+but to breathe a word and presently away there, in the world of reality, the
+punctual myriads moved. Men rose up and went forward and died. The fate of
+nations lay behind the eyes of these three men. Indeed they were like gods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most godlike of the three was Dubois. It was for him to decide; the others at
+most might suggest. Her woman&rsquo;s soul went out to this grave, handsome,
+still, old man, in a passion of instinctive worship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once she had taken words of instruction from him direct. She had awaited them
+in an ecstasy of happiness&mdash;and fear. For her exaltation was made terrible
+by the dread that some error might dishonour her....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating minuteness of
+an impassioned woman&rsquo;s observation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said little, she remarked. He looked but little at the maps. The tall
+Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm of ideas, conflicting
+ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting of the little red, blue, black, and
+yellow pieces on the board, and wanted to draw the commander&rsquo;s attention
+to this and that. Dubois listened, nodded, emitted a word and became still
+again, brooding like the national eagle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she could not see
+his eyes; his moustache overhung the mouth from which those words of decision
+came. Viard, too, said little; he was a dark man with a drooping head and
+melancholy, watchful eyes. He was more intent upon the French right, which was
+feeling its way now through Alsace to the Rhine. He was, she knew, an old
+colleague of Dubois; he knew him better, she decided, he trusted him more than
+this unfamiliar Englishman....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in profile; these were
+the lessons that old Dubois had mastered years ago. To seem to know all, to
+betray no surprise, to refuse to hurry&mdash;itself a confession of
+miscalculation; by attention to these simple rules, Dubois had built up a
+steady reputation from the days when he had been a promising junior officer, a
+still, almost abstracted young man, deliberate but ready. Even then men had
+looked at him and said: &lsquo;He will go far.&rsquo; Through fifty years of
+peace he had never once been found wanting, and at manœuvres his impassive
+persistence had perplexed and hypnotised and defeated many a more actively
+intelligent man. Deep in his soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery
+about the modern art of warfare, the key to his career. And this discovery was
+that <i>nobody knew</i>, that to act therefore was to blunder, that to talk was
+to confess; and that the man who acted slowly and steadfastly and above all
+silently, had the best chance of winning through. Meanwhile one fed the men.
+Now by this same strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious unknowns of the
+Central European command. Delhi might talk of a great flank march through
+Holland, with all the British submarines and hydroplanes and torpedo craft
+pouring up the Rhine in support of it; Viard might crave for brilliance with
+the motor bicycles, aeroplanes, and ski-men among the Swiss mountains, and a
+sudden swoop upon Vienna; the thing was to listen&mdash;and wait for the other
+side to begin experimenting. It was all experimenting. And meanwhile he
+remained in profile, with an air of assurance&mdash;like a man who sits in an
+automobile after the chauffeur has had his directions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And every one about him was the stronger and surer for that quiet face, that
+air of knowledge and unruffled confidence. The clustering lights threw a score
+of shadows of him upon the maps, great bunches of him, versions of a commanding
+presence, lighter or darker, dominated the field, and pointed in every
+direction. Those shadows symbolised his control. When a messenger came from the
+wireless room to shift this or that piece in the game, to replace under amended
+reports one Central European regiment by a score, to draw back or thrust out or
+distribute this or that force of the Allies, the Marshal would turn his head
+and seem not to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who approves a
+pupil&rsquo;s self-correction. &lsquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s better.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how wonderful it all
+was. This was the brain of the western world, this was Olympus with the warring
+earth at its feet. And he was guiding France, France so long a resentful exile
+from imperialism, back to her old predominance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be privileged to
+participate....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal devotion, and
+to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact, punctual. She must control
+herself....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when the war would
+be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this harshness, this armour would
+be put aside and the gods might unbend. Her eyelids drooped....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night outside was no
+longer still. That there was an excitement down below on the bridge and a
+running in the street and a flickering of searchlights among the clouds from
+some high place away beyond the Trocadero. And then the excitement came surging
+up past her and invaded the hall within.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of the room,
+gesticulating and shouting something.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn&rsquo;t
+understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed machinery and cables
+of the ways beneath, were beating&mdash;as pulses beat. And about her blew
+something like a wind&mdash;a wind that was dismay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child might look
+towards its mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but that was
+natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand gauntly gesticulating, had
+taken him by the arm and was all too manifestly disposed to drag him towards
+the great door that opened on the terrace. And Viard was hurrying towards the
+huge windows and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent forward and with
+eyes upturned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something up there?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against the masonry and
+looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping down through the torn clouds,
+and from a point a little below two of them, there had already started curling
+trails of red....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through moments that
+seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl down towards her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but a
+crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing sound.
+Every other light had gone out about her and against this glare hung slanting
+walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly
+flight of huge angular sheets of glass. She had an impression of a great ball
+of crimson-purple fire like a maddened living thing that seemed to be whirling
+about very rapidly amidst a chaos of falling masonry, that seemed to be
+attacking the earth furiously, that seemed to be burrowing into it like a
+blazing rabbit....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that a little
+rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She tried to raise herself and
+found her leg was very painful. She was not clear whether it was night or day
+nor where she was; she made a second effort, wincing and groaning, and turned
+over and got into a sitting position and looked about her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of a vast uproar,
+but she did not realise this because her hearing had been destroyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous experience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world, a world of
+heaped broken things. And it was lit&mdash;and somehow this was more familiar
+to her mind than any other fact about her&mdash;by a flickering,
+purplish-crimson light. Then close to her, rising above a confusion of
+<i>débris</i>, she recognised the Trocadero; it was changed, something had gone
+from it, but its outline was unmistakable. It stood out against a streaming,
+whirling uprush of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled Paris and the
+Seine and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful, luminous organisation
+of the War Control....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she lay, and
+examined her surroundings with an increasing understanding....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the river. Quite
+close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water, from which these warm
+rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps of vapour came into circling
+existence a foot or so from its mirror-surface. Near at hand and reflected
+exactly in the water was the upper part of a familiar-looking stone pillar. On
+the side of her away from the water the heaped ruins rose steeply in a confused
+slope up to a glaring crest. Above and reflecting this glare towered pillowed
+masses of steam rolling swiftly upward to the zenith. It was from this crest
+that the livid glow that lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind
+connected this mound with the vanished buildings of the War Control.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;<i>Mais!</i>&rsquo; she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite
+motionless for a time, crouching close to the warm earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then presently this dim, broken human thing began to look about it again. She
+began to feel the need of fellowship. She wanted to question, wanted to speak,
+wanted to relate her experience. And her foot hurt her atrociously. There ought
+to be an ambulance. A little gust of querulous criticisms blew across her mind.
+This surely was a disaster! Always after a disaster there should be ambulances
+and helpers moving about....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She craned her head. There was something there. But everything was so still!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;<i>Monsieur!</i>&rsquo; she cried. Her ears, she noted, felt queer, and
+she began to suspect that all was not well with them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was terribly lonely in this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps this
+man&mdash;if it was a man, for it was difficult to see&mdash;might for all his
+stillness be merely insensible. He might have been stunned....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a moment every
+little detail was distinct. It was Marshal Dubois. He was lying against a huge
+slab of the war map. To it there stuck and from it there dangled little wooden
+objects, the symbols of infantry and cavalry and guns, as they were disposed
+upon the frontier. He did not seem to be aware of this at his back, he had an
+effect of inattention, not indifferent attention, but as if he were
+thinking....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was evident he
+frowned. He frowned slightly, he had an air of not wanting to be disturbed. His
+face still bore that expression of assured confidence, that conviction that if
+things were left to him France might obey in security....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer. A strange
+surmise made her eyes dilate. With a painful wrench she pulled herself up so
+that she could see completely over the intervening lumps of smashed-up masonry.
+Her hand touched something wet, and after one convulsive movement she became
+rigid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head and shoulders
+of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness and a pool of shining
+black....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled, and a rush of
+hot water came pouring over her. Then it seemed to her that she was dragged
+downward....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 3</h3>
+
+<p>
+When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and the black hair
+close-cropped <i>en brosse</i>, who was in charge of the French special
+scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster to the War Control, he was
+so wanting in imagination in any sphere but his own, that he laughed. Small
+matter to him that Paris was burning. His mother and father and sister lived at
+Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had ever had, and it was poor love-making
+then, was a girl in Rouen. He slapped his second-in-command on the shoulder.
+&lsquo;Now,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;there&rsquo;s nothing on earth to stop us
+going to Berlin and giving them tit-for-tat.... Strategy and reasons of
+state&mdash;they&rsquo;re over.... Come along, my boy, and we&rsquo;ll just
+show these old women what we can do when they let us have our heads.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the courtyard of
+the chateau in which he had been installed and shouted for his automobile.
+Things would have to move quickly because there was scarcely an hour and a half
+before dawn. He looked at the sky and noted with satisfaction a heavy bank of
+clouds athwart the pallid east.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and aeroplanes were
+scattered all over the country-side, stuck away in barns, covered with hay,
+hidden in woods. A hawk could not have discovered any of them without coming
+within reach of a gun. But that night he only wanted one of the machines, and
+it was handy and quite prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not a
+couple of miles away; he was going to Berlin with that and just one other man.
+Two men would be enough for what he meant to do....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts science was
+urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of destruction, and he was an
+adventurous rather than a sympathetic type....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming face. He
+smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great pleasures. There was an
+exotic richness, a chuckling flavour, about the voice in which he gave his
+orders, and he pointed his remarks with the long finger of a hand that was
+hairy and exceptionally big.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;We&rsquo;ll give them tit-for-tat,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;We&rsquo;ll
+give them tit-for-tat. No time to lose, boys....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and Saxony the
+swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancing sunbeam and
+its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow to the heart of the
+Central European hosts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above the banked
+darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to plunge at once into their
+wet obscurities should some hostile flier range into vision. The tense young
+steersman divided his attention between the guiding stars above and the level,
+tumbled surfaces of the vapour strata that hid the world below. Over great
+spaces those banks lay as even as a frozen lava-flow and almost as still, and
+then they were rent by ragged areas of translucency, pierced by clear chasms,
+so that dim patches of the land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he
+saw quite distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps and
+signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid through a boiling
+drift of smoke on the side of some great hill. But if the world was masked it
+was alive with sounds. Up through that vapour floor came the deep roar of
+trains, the whistles of horns of motor-cars, a sound of rifle fire away to the
+south, and as he drew near his destination the crowing of cocks....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at first starry and
+then paler with a light that crept from north to east as the dawn came on. The
+Milky Way was invisible in the blue, and the lesser stars vanished. The face of
+the adventurer at the steering-wheel, darkly visible ever and again by the oval
+greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm beauty which all
+concentrated purpose gives, and something of the happiness of an idiot child
+that has at last got hold of the matches. His companion, a less imaginative
+type, sat with his legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which
+contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would
+continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen in
+action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential substance, had been tested only in
+almost infinitesimal quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead. Beyond
+the thought of great destruction slumbering in the black spheres between his
+legs, and a keen resolve to follow out very exactly the instructions that had
+been given him, the man&rsquo;s mind was a blank. His aquiline profile against
+the starlight expressed nothing but a profound gloom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital was approached.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by no aeroplanes
+at all. The frontier scouts they must have passed in the night; probably these
+were mostly under the clouds; the world was wide and they had had luck in not
+coming close to any soaring sentinel. Their machine was painted a pale gray,
+that lay almost invisibly over the cloud levels below. But now the east was
+flushing with the near ascent of the sun, Berlin was but a score of miles
+ahead, and the luck of the Frenchmen held. By imperceptible degrees the clouds
+below dissolved....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering light and with all
+its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was Berlin. The left finger of the
+steersman verified roads and open spaces below upon the mica-covered square of
+map that was fastened by his wheel. There in a series of lake-like expansions
+was the Havel away to the right; over by those forests must be Spandau; there
+the river split about the Potsdam island; and right ahead was Charlottenburg
+cleft by a great thoroughfare that fell like an indicating beam of light
+straight to the imperial headquarters. There, plain enough, was the
+Thiergarten; beyond rose the imperial palace, and to the right those tall
+buildings, those clustering, beflagged, bemasted roofs, must be the offices in
+which the Central European staff was housed. It was all coldly clear and
+colourless in the dawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked up suddenly as a humming sound grew out of nothing and became swiftly
+louder. Nearly overhead a German aeroplane was circling down from an immense
+height to challenge him. He made a gesture with his left arm to the gloomy man
+behind and then gripped his little wheel with both hands, crouched over it, and
+twisted his neck to look upward. He was attentive, tightly strung, but quite
+contemptuous of their ability to hurt him. No German alive, he was assured,
+could outfly him, or indeed any one of the best Frenchmen. He imagined they
+might strike at him as a hawk strikes, but they were men coming down out of the
+bitter cold up there, in a hungry, spiritless, morning mood; they came slanting
+down like a sword swung by a lazy man, and not so rapidly but that he was able
+to slip away from under them and get between them and Berlin. They began
+challenging him in German with a megaphone when they were still perhaps a mile
+away. The words came to him, rolled up into a mere blob of hoarse sound. Then,
+gathering alarm from his grim silence, they gave chase and swept down, a
+hundred yards above him perhaps, and a couple of hundred behind. They were
+beginning to understand what he was. He ceased to watch them and concentrated
+himself on the city ahead, and for a time the two aeroplanes raced....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one was tearing
+paper. A second followed. Something tapped the machine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces below rushed
+widening out nearer and nearer to them. &lsquo;Ready!&rsquo; said the
+steersman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the bomb-thrower
+lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it against the side. It
+was a black sphere two feet in diameter. Between its handles was a little
+celluloid stud, and to this he bent his head until his lips touched it. Then he
+had to bite in order to let the air in upon the inducive. Sure of its
+accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane and judged his
+pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted
+the bomb over the side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Round,&rsquo; he whispered inaudibly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a descending column of
+blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were
+tossed like shuttlecocks, hurled high and sideways and the steersman, with
+gleaming eyes and set teeth, fought in great banking curves for a balance. The
+gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his nostrils dilated, his teeth
+biting his lips. He was firmly strapped....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater of a
+small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle a shuddering star
+of evil splendour spurted and poured up smoke and flame towards them like an
+accusation. They were too high to distinguish people clearly, or mark the
+bomb&rsquo;s effect upon the building until suddenly the facade tottered and
+crumbled before the flare as sugar dissolves in water. The man stared for a
+moment, showed all his long teeth, and then staggered into the cramped standing
+position his straps permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it
+down after its fellow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The explosion came this time more directly underneath the aeroplane and shot it
+upward edgeways. The bomb box tipped to the point of disgorgement, and the
+bomb-thrower was pitched forward upon the third bomb with his face close to its
+celluloid stud. He clutched its handles, and with a sudden gust of
+determination that the thing should not escape him, bit its stud. Before he
+could hurl it over, the monoplane was slipping sideways. Everything was falling
+sideways. Instinctively he gave himself up to gripping, his body holding the
+bomb in its place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then that bomb had exploded also, and steersman, thrower, and aeroplane were
+just flying rags and splinters of metal and drops of moisture in the air, and a
+third column of fire rushed eddying down upon the doomed buildings below....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 4</h3>
+
+<p>
+Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive;
+indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only explosives known
+were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely to their
+instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world
+that night were strange even to the men who used them. Those used by the Allies
+were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with unoxidised cydonator
+inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of membranium. A little celluloid stud
+between the handles by which the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be
+easily torn off and admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and
+set up radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This
+liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a blazing
+continual explosion. The Central European bombs were the same, except that they
+were larger and had a more complicated arrangement for animating the inducive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Always before in the development of warfare the shells and rockets fired had
+been but momentarily explosive, they had gone off in an instant once for all,
+and if there was nothing living or valuable within reach of the concussion and
+the flying fragments then they were spent and over. But Carolinum, which
+belonged to the &#946;-Group of Hyslop&rsquo;s so-called &lsquo;suspended
+degenerator&rsquo; elements, once its degenerative process had been induced,
+continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing could arrest it. Of all
+Hyslop&rsquo;s artificial elements, Carolinum was the most heavily stored with
+energy and the most dangerous to make and handle. To this day it remains the
+most potent degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists
+called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it poured out half
+of the huge store of energy in its great molecules in the space of seventeen
+days, the next seventeen days&rsquo; emission was a half of that first
+period&rsquo;s outpouring, and so on. As with all radio-active substances this
+Carolinum, though every seventeen days its power is halved, though constantly
+it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never entirely exhausted, and to
+this day the battle-fields and bomb fields of that frantic time in human
+history are sprinkled with radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the inducive oxidised
+and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum began to degenerate. This
+degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so
+after its explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding
+superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and thunder. Those
+that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this state, they reached the ground
+still mainly solid, and, melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into
+the earth. There, as more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb
+spread itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of what
+became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The Carolinum, unable to
+disperse, freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling confusion of molten
+soil and superheated steam, and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining
+an eruption that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of
+the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal. Once launched, the bomb was
+absolutely unapproachable and uncontrollable until its forces were nearly
+exhausted, and from the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy
+incandescent vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated
+with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and blistering energy, were
+flung high and far.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate explosive that
+was to give the &lsquo;decisive touch&rsquo; to war....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 5</h3>
+
+<p>
+A recent historical writer has described the world of that time as one that
+&lsquo;believed in established words and was invincibly blind to the obvious in
+things.&rsquo; Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious
+to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war
+was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see
+it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. Yet the broad facts
+must have glared upon any intelligent mind. All through the nineteenth and
+twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was
+continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict
+a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase
+whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive defence, armour,
+fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by this tremendous increase
+on the destructive side. Destruction was becoming so facile that any little
+body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of police
+and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common
+knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy
+sufficient to wreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of
+everybody; the children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as
+the Americans used to phrase it, &lsquo;fooled around&rsquo; with the
+paraphernalia and pretensions of war.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce between the
+scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand, and the world of the
+lawyer-politician on the other, that the men of a later time can hope to
+understand this preposterous state of affairs. Social organisation was still in
+the barbaric stage. There were already great numbers of actively intelligent
+men and much private and commercial civilisation, but the community, as a
+whole, was aimless, untrained and unorganised to the pitch of imbecility.
+Collective civilisation, the &lsquo;Modern State,&rsquo; was still in the womb
+of the future....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 6</h3>
+
+<p>
+But let us return to Frederick Barnet&rsquo;s <i>Wander Jahre</i> and its
+account of the experiences of a common man during the war time. While these
+terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were happening in Paris and
+Berlin, Barnet and his company were industriously entrenching themselves in
+Belgian Luxembourg.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day&rsquo;s journey through the
+north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid phrases. The country was
+browned by a warm summer, the trees a little touched with autumnal colour, and
+the wheat already golden. When they stopped for an hour at Hirson, men and
+women with tricolour badges upon the platform distributed cakes and glasses of
+beer to the thirsty soldiers, and there was much cheerfulness. &lsquo;Such
+good, cool beer it was,&rsquo; he wrote. &lsquo;I had had nothing to eat nor
+drink since Epsom.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A number of monoplanes, &lsquo;like giant swallows,&rsquo; he notes, were
+scouting in the pink evening sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barnet&rsquo;s battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place called
+Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to Jemelle. Here they
+detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the railway&mdash;trains and stores were
+passing along it all night&mdash;and next morning he marched eastward through
+a cold, overcast dawn, and a morning, first cloudy and then blazing, over a
+large spacious country-side interspersed by forest towards Arlon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked entrenchments and
+hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton that were designed to check and
+delay any advance from the east upon the fortified line of the Meuse. They had
+their orders, and for two days they worked without either a sight of the enemy
+or any suspicion of the disaster that had abruptly decapitated the armies of
+Europe, and turned the west of Paris and the centre of Berlin into blazing
+miniatures of the destruction of Pompeii.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the news, when it did come, came attenuated. &lsquo;We heard there had been
+mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,&rsquo; Barnet relates; &lsquo;but
+it didn&rsquo;t seem to follow that &ldquo;They&rdquo; weren&rsquo;t still
+somewhere elaborating their plans and issuing orders. When the enemy began to
+emerge from the woods in front of us, we cheered and blazed away, and
+didn&rsquo;t trouble much more about anything but the battle in hand. If now
+and then one cocked up an eye into the sky to see what was happening there, the
+rip of a bullet soon brought one down to the horizontal again....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of country between
+Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It was essentially a rifle and
+infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do not seem to have taken any decisive share
+in the actual fighting for some days, though no doubt they effected the
+strategy from the first by preventing surprise movements. They were aeroplanes
+with atomic engines, but they were not provided with atomic bombs, which were
+manifestly unsuitable for field use, nor indeed had they any very effective
+kind of bomb. And though they manœuvred against each other, and there was rifle
+shooting at them and between them, there was little actual aerial fighting.
+Either the airmen were indisposed to fight or the commanders on both sides
+preferred to reserve these machines for scouting....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a day or so of digging and scheming, Barnet found himself in the
+forefront of a battle. He had made his section of rifle pits chiefly along a
+line of deep dry ditch that gave a means of inter-communication, he had had the
+earth scattered over the adjacent field, and he had masked his preparations
+with tussocks of corn and poppy. The hostile advance came blindly and
+unsuspiciously across the fields below and would have been very cruelly handled
+indeed, if some one away to the right had not opened fire too soon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It was a queer thrill when these fellows came into sight,&rsquo; he
+confesses; &lsquo;and not a bit like manœuvres. They halted for a time on the
+edge of the wood and then came forward in an open line. They kept walking
+nearer to us and not looking at us, but away to the right of us. Even when they
+began to be hit, and their officers&rsquo; whistles woke them up, they
+didn&rsquo;t seem to see us. One or two halted to fire, and then they all went
+back towards the wood again. They went slowly at first, looking round at us,
+then the shelter of the wood seemed to draw them, and they trotted. I fired
+rather mechanically and missed, then I fired again, and then I became earnest
+to hit something, made sure of my sighting, and aimed very carefully at a blue
+back that was dodging about in the corn. At first I couldn&rsquo;t satisfy
+myself and didn&rsquo;t shoot, his movements were so spasmodic and uncertain;
+then I think he came to a ditch or some such obstacle and halted for a moment.
+&ldquo;<i>Got</i> you,&rdquo; I whispered, and pulled the trigger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;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....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I sent him spinning. He jumped and threw up his arms....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping about.
+Suddenly I felt sick. I hadn&rsquo;t killed him....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;In some way he was disabled and smashed up and yet able to struggle
+about. I began to think....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn. Either he
+was calling out or some one was shouting to him....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Then he jumped up&mdash;he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with
+one last effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still and never
+moved again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him dead. I had
+been wanting to do so for some time....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made for themselves
+in the woods below. A man was hit in the pit next to Barnet, and began cursing
+and crying out in a violent rage. Barnet crawled along the ditch to him and
+found him in great pain, covered with blood, frantic with indignation, and with
+the half of his right hand smashed to a pulp. &lsquo;Look at this,&rsquo; he
+kept repeating, hugging it and then extending it. &lsquo;Damned foolery! Damned
+foolery! My right hand, sir! My right hand!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For some time Barnet could do nothing with him. The man was consumed by his
+tortured realisation of the evil silliness of war, the realisation which had
+come upon him in a flash with the bullet that had destroyed his skill and use
+as an artificer for ever. He was looking at the vestiges with a horror that
+made him impenetrable to any other idea. At last the poor wretch let Barnet tie
+up his bleeding stump and help him along the ditch that conducted him deviously
+out of range....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water, and all day
+long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst. For food they had chocolate
+and bread.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;At first,&rsquo; he says, &lsquo;I was extraordinarily excited by my
+baptism of fire. Then as the heat of the day came on I experienced an enormous
+tedium and discomfort. The flies became extremely troublesome, and my little
+grave of a rifle pit was invaded by ants. I could not get up or move about, for
+some one in the trees had got a mark on me. I kept thinking of the dead
+Prussian down among the corn, and of the bitter outcries of my own man. Damned
+foolery! It <i>was</i> damned foolery. But who was to blame? How had we got to
+this? . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with dynamite
+bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and suddenly dived down over
+beyond the trees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;&ldquo;From Holland to the Alps this day,&rdquo; I thought, &ldquo;there
+must be crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to
+inflict irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic to the pitch
+of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall wake up.&rdquo; . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. &ldquo;Presently mankind will
+wake up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were among these
+hundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in rebellion against all these
+ancient traditions of flag and empire. Weren&rsquo;t we, perhaps, already in
+the throes of the last crisis, in that darkest moment of a nightmare&rsquo;s
+horror before the sleeper will endure no more of it&mdash;and wakes?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I don&rsquo;t know how my speculations ended. I think they were not so
+much ended as distracted by the distant thudding of the guns that were opening
+fire at long range upon Namur.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 7</h3>
+
+<p>
+But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of modern
+warfare. So far he had taken part only in a little shooting. The bayonet attack
+by which the advanced line was broken was made at a place called Croix Rouge,
+more than twenty miles away, and that night under cover of the darkness the
+rifle pits were abandoned and he got his company away without further loss.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His regiment fell back unpressed behind the fortified lines between Namur and
+Sedan, entrained at a station called Mettet, and was sent northward by Antwerp
+and Rotterdam to Haarlem. Hence they marched into North Holland. It was only
+after the march into Holland that he began to realise the monstrous and
+catastrophic nature of the struggle in which he was playing his undistinguished
+part.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He describes very pleasantly the journey through the hills and open land of
+Brabant, the repeated crossing of arms of the Rhine, and the change from the
+undulating scenery of Belgium to the flat, rich meadows, the sunlit dyke roads,
+and the countless windmills of the Dutch levels. In those days there was
+unbroken land from Alkmaar and Leiden to the Dollart. Three great provinces,
+South Holland, North Holland, and Zuiderzeeland, reclaimed at various times
+between the early tenth century and 1945 and all many feet below the level of
+the waves outside the dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern sun
+and sustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of laws and
+custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a perpetual defence
+against the beleaguering sea. For more than two hundred and fifty miles from
+Walcheren to Friesland stretched a line of embankments and pumping stations
+that was the admiration of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If some curious god had chosen to watch the course of events in those northern
+provinces while that flanking march of the British was in progress, he would
+have found a convenient and appropriate seat for his observation upon one of
+the great cumulus clouds that were drifting slowly across the blue sky during
+all these eventful days before the great catastrophe. For that was the quality
+of the weather, hot and clear, with something of a breeze, and underfoot dry
+and a little inclined to be dusty. This watching god would have looked down
+upon broad stretches of sunlit green, sunlit save for the creeping patches of
+shadow cast by the clouds, upon sky-reflecting meres, fringed and divided up by
+masses of willow and large areas of silvery weeds, upon white roads lying bare
+to the sun and upon a tracery of blue canals. The pastures were alive with
+cattle, the roads had a busy traffic, of beasts and bicycles and gaily coloured
+peasants&rsquo; automobiles, the hues of the innumerable motor barges in the
+canal vied with the eventfulness of the roadways; and everywhere in solitary
+steadings, amidst ricks and barns, in groups by the wayside, in straggling
+villages, each with its fine old church, or in compact towns laced with canals
+and abounding in bridges and clipped trees, were human habitations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The people of this country-side were not belligerents. The interests and
+sympathies alike of Holland had been so divided that to the end she remained
+undecided and passive in the struggle of the world powers. And everywhere along
+the roads taken by the marching armies clustered groups and crowds of
+impartially observant spectators, women and children in peculiar white caps and
+old-fashioned sabots, and elderly, clean-shaven men quietly thoughtful over
+their long pipes. They had no fear of their invaders; the days when
+&lsquo;soldiering&rsquo; meant bands of licentious looters had long since
+passed away....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That watcher among the clouds would have seen a great distribution of
+khaki-uniformed men and khaki-painted material over the whole of the sunken
+area of Holland. He would have marked the long trains, packed with men or piled
+with great guns and war material, creeping slowly, alert for train-wreckers,
+along the north-going lines; he would have seen the Scheldt and Rhine choked
+with shipping, and pouring out still more men and still more material; he would
+have noticed halts and provisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling
+caterpillars of cavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons, the huge beetles
+of great guns, crawling under the poplars along the dykes and roads northward,
+along ways lined by the neutral, unmolested, ambiguously observant Dutch. All
+the barges and shipping upon the canals had been requisitioned for transport.
+In that clear, bright, warm weather, it would all have looked from above like
+some extravagant festival of animated toys.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the sun sank westward the spectacle must have become a little indistinct
+because of a golden haze; everything must have become warmer and more glowing,
+and because of the lengthening of the shadows more manifestly in relief. The
+shadows of the tall churches grew longer and longer, until they touched the
+horizon and mingled in the universal shadow; and then, slow, and soft, and
+wrapping the world in fold after fold of deepening blue, came the
+night&mdash;the night at first obscurely simple, and then with faint points
+here and there, and then jewelled in darkling splendour with a hundred thousand
+lights. Out of that mingling of darkness and ambiguous glares the noise of an
+unceasing activity would have arisen, the louder and plainer now because there
+was no longer any distraction of sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It may be that watcher drifting in the pellucid gulf beneath the stars watched
+all through the night; it may be that he dozed. But if he gave way to so
+natural a proclivity, assuredly on the fourth night of the great flank march he
+was aroused, for that was the night of the battle in the air that decided the
+fate of Holland. The aeroplanes were fighting at last, and suddenly about him,
+above and below, with cries and uproar rushing out of the four quarters of
+heaven, striking, plunging, oversetting, soaring to the zenith and dropping to
+the ground, they came to assail or defend the myriads below.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Secretly the Central European power had gathered his flying machines together,
+and now he threw them as a giant might fling a handful of ten thousand knives
+over the low country. And amidst that swarming flight were five that drove
+headlong for the sea walls of Holland, carrying atomic bombs. From north and
+west and south, the allied aeroplanes rose in response and swept down upon this
+sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind
+that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the
+astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the
+heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of
+chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong
+swoop to death?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped and locked and
+dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and the stars, came a great wind
+and a crash louder than thunder, and first one and then a score of lengthening
+fiery serpents plunged hungrily down upon the Dutchmen&rsquo;s dykes and struck
+between land and sea and flared up again in enormous columns of glare and
+crimsoned smoke and steam.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires and trees,
+aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea, tumbled with anger,
+red-foaming like a sea of blood....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous crying and a
+flurry of alarm bells....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky, like things that
+suddenly know themselves to be wicked....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might quench, the waves
+came roaring in upon the land....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 8</h3>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;We had cursed our luck,&rsquo; says Barnet, &lsquo;that we could not get
+to our quarters at Alkmaar that night. There, we were told, were provisions,
+tobacco, and everything for which we craved. But the main canal from Zaandam
+and Amsterdam was hopelessly jammed with craft, and we were glad of a chance
+opening that enabled us to get out of the main column and lie up in a kind of
+little harbour very much neglected and weedgrown before a deserted house. We
+broke into this and found some herrings in a barrel, a heap of cheeses, and
+stone bottles of gin in the cellar; and with this I cheered my starving men. We
+made fires and toasted the cheese and grilled our herrings. None of us had
+slept for nearly forty hours, and I determined to stay in this refuge until
+dawn and then if the traffic was still choked leave the barge and march the
+rest of the way into Alkmaar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;This place we had got into was perhaps a hundred yards from the canal
+and underneath a little brick bridge we could see the flotilla still, and hear
+the voices of the soldiers. Presently five or six other barges came through and
+lay up in the mere near by us, and with two of these, full of men of the Antrim
+regiment, I shared my find of provisions. In return we got tobacco. A large
+expanse of water spread to the westward of us and beyond were a cluster of
+roofs and one or two church towers. The barge was rather cramped for so many
+men, and I let several squads, thirty or forty perhaps altogether, bivouac on
+the bank. I did not let them go into the house on account of the furniture, and
+I left a note of indebtedness for the food we had taken. We were particularly
+glad of our tobacco and fires, because of the numerous mosquitoes that rose
+about us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The gate of the house from which we had provisioned ourselves was
+adorned with the legend, <i>Vreugde bij Vrede</i>, &ldquo;Joy with
+Peace,&rdquo; and it bore every mark of the busy retirement of a comfort-loving
+proprietor. I went along his garden, which was gay and delightful with big
+bushes of rose and sweet brier, to a quaint little summer-house, and there I
+sat and watched the men in groups cooking and squatting along the bank. The sun
+was setting in a nearly cloudless sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;For the last two weeks I had been a wholly occupied man, intent only
+upon obeying the orders that came down to me. All through this time I had been
+working to the very limit of my mental and physical faculties, and my only
+moments of rest had been devoted to snatches of sleep. Now came this rare,
+unexpected interlude, and I could look detachedly upon what I was doing and
+feel something of its infinite wonderfulness. I was irradiated with affection
+for the men of my company and with admiration at their cheerful acquiescence in
+the subordination and needs of our positions. I watched their proceedings and
+heard their pleasant voices. How willing those men were! How ready to accept
+leadership and forget themselves in collective ends! I thought how manfully
+they had gone through all the strains and toil of the last two weeks, how they
+had toughened and shaken down to comradeship together, and how much sweetness
+there is after all in our foolish human blood. For they were just one casual
+sample of the species&mdash;their patience and readiness lay, as the energy of
+the atom had lain, still waiting to be properly utilised. Again it came to me
+with overpowering force that the supreme need of our race is leading, that the
+supreme task is to discover leading, to forget oneself in realising the
+collective purpose of the race. Once more I saw life plain....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Very characteristic is that of the &lsquo;rather too corpulent&rsquo; young
+officer, who was afterwards to set it all down in the <i>Wander Jahre</i>. Very
+characteristic, too, it is of the change in men&rsquo;s hearts that was even
+then preparing a new phase of human history.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He goes on to write of the escape from individuality in science and service,
+and of his discovery of this &lsquo;salvation.&rsquo; All that was then, no
+doubt, very moving and original; now it seems only the most obvious commonplace
+of human life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The glow of the sunset faded, the twilight deepened into night. The fires burnt
+the brighter, and some Irishmen away across the mere started singing. But
+Barnet&rsquo;s men were too weary for that sort of thing, and soon the bank and
+the barge were heaped with sleeping forms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I alone seemed unable to sleep. I suppose I was over-weary, and after a
+little feverish slumber by the tiller of the barge I sat up, awake and
+uneasy....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;That night Holland seemed all sky. There was just a little black lower
+rim to things, a steeple, perhaps, or a line of poplars, and then the great
+hemisphere swept over us. As at first the sky was empty. Yet my uneasiness
+referred itself in some vague way to the sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And now I was melancholy. I found something strangely sorrowful and
+submissive in the sleepers all about me, those men who had marched so far, who
+had left all the established texture of their lives behind them to come upon
+this mad campaign, this campaign that signified nothing and consumed
+everything, this mere fever of fighting. I saw how little and feeble is the
+life of man, a thing of chances, preposterously unable to find the will to
+realise even the most timid of its dreams. And I wondered if always it would be
+so, if man was a doomed animal who would never to the last days of his time
+take hold of fate and change it to his will. Always, it may be, he will remain
+kindly but jealous, desirous but discursive, able and unwisely impulsive, until
+Saturn who begot him shall devour him in his turn....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I was roused from these thoughts by the sudden realisation of the
+presence of a squadron of aeroplanes far away to the north-east and very high.
+They looked like little black dashes against the midnight blue. I remember that
+I looked up at them at first rather idly&mdash;as one might notice a flight of
+birds. Then I perceived that they were only the extreme wing of a great fleet
+that was advancing in a long line very swiftly from the direction of the
+frontier and my attention tightened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Directly I saw that fleet I was astonished not to have seen it before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I stood up softly, undesirous of disturbing my companions, but with my
+heart beating now rather more rapidly with surprise and excitement. I strained
+my ears for any sound of guns along our front. Almost instinctively I turned
+about for protection to the south and west, and peered; and then I saw coming
+as fast and much nearer to me, as if they had sprung out of the darkness, three
+banks of aeroplanes; a group of squadrons very high, a main body at a height
+perhaps of one or two thousand feet, and a doubtful number flying low and very
+indistinct. The middle ones were so thick they kept putting out groups of
+stars. And I realised that after all there was to be fighting in the air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;There was something extraordinarily strange in this swift, noiseless
+convergence of nearly invisible combatants above the sleeping hosts. Every one
+about me was still unconscious; there was no sign as yet of any agitation among
+the shipping on the main canal, whose whole course, dotted with unsuspicious
+lights and fringed with fires, must have been clearly perceptible from above.
+Then a long way off towards Alkmaar I heard bugles, and after that shots, and
+then a wild clamour of bells. I determined to let my men sleep on for as long
+as they could....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The battle was joined with the swiftness of dreaming. I do not think it
+can have been five minutes from the moment when I first became aware of the
+Central European air fleet to the contact of the two forces. I saw it quite
+plainly in silhouette against the luminous blue of the northern sky. The allied
+aeroplanes&mdash;they were mostly French&mdash;came pouring down like a fierce
+shower upon the middle of the Central European fleet. They looked exactly like
+a coarser sort of rain. There was a crackling sound&mdash;the first sound I
+heard&mdash;it reminded one of the Aurora Borealis, and I supposed it was an
+interchange of rifle shots. There were flashes like summer lightning; and then
+all the sky became a whirling confusion of battle that was still largely
+noiseless. Some of the Central European aeroplanes were certainly charged and
+overset; others seemed to collapse and fall and then flare out with so bright a
+light that it took the edge off one&rsquo;s vision and made the rest of the
+battle disappear as though it had been snatched back out of sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And then, while I still peered and tried to shade these flames from my
+eyes with my hand, and while the men about me were beginning to stir, the
+atomic bombs were thrown at the dykes. They made a mighty thunder in the air,
+and fell like Lucifer in the picture, leaving a flaring trail in the sky. The
+night, which had been pellucid and detailed and eventful, seemed to vanish, to
+be replaced abruptly by a black background to these tremendous pillars of
+fire....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was filled
+with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;There was something discontinuous in this impact. At one moment I was a
+lonely watcher in a sleeping world; the next saw every one about me afoot, the
+whole world awake and amazed....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And then the wind had struck me a buffet, taken my helmet and swept
+aside the summerhouse of <i>Vreugde bij Vrede</i>, as a scythe sweeps away
+grass. I saw the bombs fall, and then watched a great crimson flare leap
+responsive to each impact, and mountainous masses of red-lit steam and flying
+fragments clamber up towards the zenith. Against the glare I saw the
+country-side for miles standing black and clear, churches, trees, chimneys. And
+suddenly I understood. The Central Europeans had burst the dykes. Those flares
+meant the bursting of the dykes, and in a little while the sea-water would be
+upon us....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He goes on to tell with a certain prolixity of the steps he took&mdash;and all
+things considered they were very intelligent steps&mdash;to meet this amazing
+crisis. He got his men aboard and hailed the adjacent barges; he got the man
+who acted as barge engineer at his post and the engines working, he cast loose
+from his moorings. Then he bethought himself of food, and contrived to land
+five men, get in a few dozen cheeses, and ship his men again before the
+inundation reached them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He is reasonably proud of this piece of coolness. His idea was to take the wave
+head-on and with his engines full speed ahead. And all the while he was
+thanking heaven he was not in the jam of traffic in the main canal. He rather,
+I think, overestimated the probable rush of waters; he dreaded being swept
+away, he explains, and smashed against houses and trees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He does not give any estimate of the time it took between the bursting of the
+dykes and the arrival of the waters, but it was probably an interval of about
+twenty minutes or half an hour. He was working now in darkness&mdash;save for
+the light of his lantern&mdash;and in a great wind. He hung out head and stern
+lights....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whirling torrents of steam were pouring up from the advancing waters, which had
+rushed, it must be remembered, through nearly incandescent gaps in the sea
+defences, and this vast uprush of vapour soon veiled the flaring centres of
+explosion altogether.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The waters came at last, an advancing cascade. It was like a broad
+roller sweeping across the country. They came with a deep, roaring sound. I had
+expected a Niagara, but the total fall of the front could not have been much
+more than twelve feet. Our barge hesitated for a moment, took a dose over her
+bows, and then lifted. I signalled for full speed ahead and brought her head
+upstream, and held on like grim death to keep her there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;There was a wind about as strong as the flood, and I found we were
+pounding against every conceivable buoyant object that had been between us and
+the sea. The only light in the world now came from our lamps, the steam became
+impenetrable at a score of yards from the boat, and the roar of the wind and
+water cut us off from all remoter sounds. The black, shining waters swirled by,
+coming into the light of our lamps out of an ebony blackness and vanishing
+again into impenetrable black. And on the waters came shapes, came things that
+flashed upon us for a moment, now a half-submerged boat, now a cow, now a huge
+fragment of a house&rsquo;s timberings, now a muddle of packing-cases and
+scaffolding. The things clapped into sight like something shown by the opening
+of a shutter, and then bumped shatteringly against us or rushed by us. Once I
+saw very clearly a man&rsquo;s white face....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;All the while a group of labouring, half-submerged trees remained ahead
+of us, drawing very slowly nearer. I steered a course to avoid them. They
+seemed to gesticulate a frantic despair against the black steam clouds behind.
+Once a great branch detached itself and tore shuddering by me. We did, on the
+whole, make headway. The last I saw of <i>Vreugde bij Vrede</i> before the
+night swallowed it, was almost dead astern of us....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 9</h3>
+
+<p>
+Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had been badly
+strained, and his men were pumping or baling in relays. He had got about a
+dozen half-drowned people aboard whose boat had capsized near him, and he had
+three other boats in tow. He was afloat, and somewhere between Amsterdam and
+Alkmaar, but he could not tell where. It was a day that was still half night.
+Gray waters stretched in every direction under a dark gray sky, and out of the
+waves rose the upper parts of houses, in many cases ruined, the tops of trees,
+windmills, in fact the upper third of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it
+there drifted a dimly seen flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned,
+furniture, rafts, timbering, and miscellaneous objects.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there did a dead cow
+or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box or chair or such-like buoy
+hint at the hidden massacre. It was not till the Thursday that the dead came to
+the surface in any quantity. The view was bounded on every side by a gray mist
+that closed overhead in a gray canopy. The air cleared in the afternoon, and
+then, far away to the west under great banks of steam and dust, the flaming red
+eruption of the atomic bombs came visible across the waste of water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London sunsets. &lsquo;They
+sat upon the sea,&rsquo; says Barnet, &lsquo;like frayed-out waterlilies of
+flame.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the track of the
+canal, in helping people who were adrift, in picking up derelict boats, and in
+taking people out of imperilled houses. He found other military barges
+similarly employed, and it was only as the day wore on and the immediate
+appeals for aid were satisfied that he thought of food and drink for his men,
+and what course he had better pursue. They had a little cheese, but no water.
+&lsquo;Orders,&rsquo; that mysterious direction, had at last altogether
+disappeared. He perceived he had now to act upon his own responsibility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;One&rsquo;s sense was of a destruction so far-reaching and of a world so
+altered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and expect to find things
+as they had been before the war began. I sat on the quarter-deck with Mylius my
+engineer and Kemp and two others of the non-commissioned officers, and we
+consulted upon our line of action. We were foodless and aimless. We agreed that
+our fighting value was extremely small, and that our first duty was to get
+ourselves in touch with food and instructions again. Whatever plan of campaign
+had directed our movements was manifestly smashed to bits. Mylius was of
+opinion that we could take a line westward and get back to England across the
+North Sea. He calculated that with such a motor barge as ours it would be
+possible to reach the Yorkshire coast within four-and-twenty hours. But this
+idea I overruled because of the shortness of our provisions, and more
+particularly because of our urgent need of water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their demands did
+much to exasperate our thirst. I decided that if we went away to the south we
+should reach hilly country, or at least country that was not submerged, and
+then we should be able to land, find some stream, drink, and get supplies and
+news. Many of the barges adrift in the haze about us were filled with British
+soldiers and had floated up from the Nord See Canal, but none of them were any
+better informed than ourselves of the course of events. &ldquo;Orders&rdquo;
+had, in fact, vanished out of the sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;&ldquo;Orders&rdquo; made a temporary reappearance late that evening in
+the form of a megaphone hail from a British torpedo boat, announcing a truce,
+and giving the welcome information that food and water were being hurried down
+the Rhine and were to be found on the barge flotilla lying over the old Rhine
+above Leiden.&rsquo;...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We will not follow Barnet, however, in the description of his strange overland
+voyage among trees and houses and churches by Zaandam and between Haarlem and
+Amsterdam, to Leiden. It was a voyage in a red-lit mist, in a world of steamy
+silhouette, full of strange voices and perplexity, and with every other
+sensation dominated by a feverish thirst. &lsquo;We sat,&rsquo; he says,
+&lsquo;in a little huddled group, saying very little, and the men forward were
+mere knots of silent endurance. Our only continuing sound was the persistent
+mewing of a cat one of the men had rescued from a floating hayrick near
+Zaandam. We kept a southward course by a watch-chain compass Mylius had
+produced....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army, nor had we
+any strong sense of the war as the dominating fact about us. Our mental setting
+had far more of the effect of a huge natural catastrophe. The atomic bombs had
+dwarfed the international issues to complete insignificance. When our minds
+wandered from the preoccupations of our immediate needs, we speculated upon the
+possibility of stopping the use of these frightful explosives before the world
+was utterly destroyed. For to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the
+still greater power of destruction of which they were the precursors might
+quite easily shatter every relationship and institution of mankind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;&ldquo;What will they be doing,&rdquo; asked Mylius, &ldquo;what will
+they be doing? It&rsquo;s plain we&rsquo;ve got to put an end to war.
+It&rsquo;s plain things have to be run some way. <i>This</i>&mdash;all
+this&mdash;is impossible.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I made no immediate answer. Something&mdash;I cannot think
+what&mdash;had brought back to me the figure of that man I had seen wounded on
+the very first day of actual fighting. I saw again his angry, tearful eyes, and
+that poor, dripping, bloody mess that had been a skilful human hand five
+minutes before, thrust out in indignant protest. &ldquo;Damned foolery,&rdquo;
+he had stormed and sobbed, &ldquo;damned foolery. My right hand, sir! My
+<i>right</i> hand. . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me. &ldquo;I think we are
+too&mdash;too silly,&rdquo; I said to Mylius, &ldquo;ever to stop war. If
+we&rsquo;d had the sense to do it, we should have done it before this. I think
+this&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; I pointed to the gaunt black outline of a smashed
+windmill that stuck up, ridiculous and ugly, above the blood-lit
+waters&mdash;&ldquo;this is the end.&rdquo;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 10</h3>
+
+<p>
+But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and his barge-load
+of hungry and starving men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if civilisation had come
+to a final collapse. These crowning buds upon the tradition that Napoleon
+planted and Bismarck watered, opened and flared &lsquo;like waterlilies of
+flame&rsquo; over nations destroyed, over churches smashed or submerged, towns
+ruined, fields lost to mankind for ever, and a million weltering bodies. Was
+this lesson enough for mankind, or would the flames of war still burn amidst
+the ruins?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance in their
+answers to that question. Already once in the history of mankind, in America,
+before its discovery by the whites, an organised civilisation had given way to
+a mere cult of warfare, specialised and cruel, and it seemed for a time to many
+a thoughtful man as if the whole world was but to repeat on a larger scale this
+ascendancy of the warrior, this triumph of the destructive instincts of the
+race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The subsequent chapters of Barnet&rsquo;s narrative do but supply body to this
+tragic possibility. He gives a series of vignettes of civilisation, shattered,
+it seemed, almost irreparably. He found the Belgian hills swarming with
+refugees and desolated by cholera; the vestiges of the contending armies
+keeping order under a truce, without actual battles, but with the cautious
+hostility of habit, and a great absence of plan everywhere.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were rumours of
+cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoy and the
+forest region of the eastern Ardennes. There was the report of an attack upon
+Russia by the Chinese and Japanese, and of some huge revolutionary outbreak in
+America. The weather was stormier than men had ever known it in those regions,
+with much thunder and lightning and wild cloud-bursts of rain....
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap03"></a>CHAPTER THE THIRD<br/>
+THE ENDING OF WAR</h2>
+
+<h3>Section 1</h3>
+
+<p>
+On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding two long
+stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to Bellinzona, and southward to
+Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is very beautiful in springtime
+with a great multitude of wild flowers. More particularly is this so in early
+June, when the slender asphodel Saint Bruno&rsquo;s lily, with its spike of
+white blossom, is in flower. To the westward of this delightful shelf there is
+a deep and densely wooded trench, a great gulf of blue some mile or so in width
+out of which arise great precipices very high and wild. Above the asphodel
+fields the mountains climb in rocky slopes to solitudes of stone and sunlight
+that curve round and join that wall of cliffs in one common skyline. This
+desolate and austere background contrasts very vividly with the glowing
+serenity of the great lake below, with the spacious view of fertile hills and
+roads and villages and islands to south and east, and with the hotly golden
+rice flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And because it was a remote and
+insignificant place, far away out of the crowding tragedies of that year of
+disaster, away from burning cities and starving multitudes, bracing and
+tranquillising and hidden, it was here that there gathered the conference of
+rulers that was to arrest, if possible, before it was too late, the
+<i>débâcle</i> of civilisation. Here, brought together by the indefatigable
+energy of that impassioned humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at
+Washington, the chief Powers of the world were to meet in a last desperate
+conference to &lsquo;save humanity.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Leblanc was one of those ingenuous men whose lot would have been insignificant
+in any period of security, but who have been caught up to an immortal
+<i>rôle</i> in history by the sudden simplification of human affairs through
+some tragical crisis, to the measure of their simplicity. Such a man was
+Abraham Lincoln, and such was Garibaldi. And Leblanc, with his transparent
+childish innocence, his entire self-forgetfulness, came into this confusion of
+distrust and intricate disaster with an invincible appeal for the manifest
+sanities of the situation. His voice, when he spoke, was &lsquo;full of
+remonstrance.&rsquo; He was a little bald, spectacled man, inspired by that
+intellectual idealism which has been one of the peculiar gifts of France to
+humanity. He was possessed of one clear persuasion, that war must end, and that
+the only way to end war was to have but one government for mankind. He brushed
+aside all other considerations. At the very outbreak of the war, so soon as the
+two capitals of the belligerents had been wrecked, he went to the president in
+the White House with this proposal. He made it as if it was a matter of course.
+He was fortunate to be in Washington and in touch with that gigantic
+childishness which was the characteristic of the American imagination. For the
+Americans also were among the simple peoples by whom the world was saved. He
+won over the American president and the American government to his general
+ideas; at any rate they supported him sufficiently to give him a standing with
+the more sceptical European governments, and with this backing he set to
+work&mdash;it seemed the most fantastic of enterprises&mdash;to bring together
+all the rulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable letters, he
+sent messages, he went desperate journeys, he enlisted whatever support he
+could find; no one was too humble for an ally or too obstinate for his
+advances; through the terrible autumn of the last wars this persistent little
+visionary in spectacles must have seemed rather like a hopeful canary
+twittering during a thunderstorm. And no accumulation of disasters daunted his
+conviction that they could be ended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of destruction.
+Power after Power about the armed globe sought to anticipate attack by
+aggression. They went to war in a delirium of panic, in order to use their
+bombs first. China and Japan had assailed Russia and destroyed Moscow, the
+United States had attacked Japan, India was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a
+pit of fire spouting death and flame; the redoubtable King of the Balkans was
+mobilising. It must have seemed plain at last to every one in those days that
+the world was slipping headlong to anarchy. By the spring of 1959 from nearly
+two hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the
+unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy fabric of
+the world&rsquo;s credit had vanished, industry was completely disorganised and
+every city, every thickly populated area was starving or trembled on the verge
+of starvation. Most of the capital cities of the world were burning; millions
+of people had already perished, and over great areas government was at an end.
+Humanity has been compared by one contemporary writer to a sleeper who handles
+matches in his sleep and wakes to find himself in flames.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For many months it was an open question whether there was to be found
+throughout all the race the will and intelligence to face these new conditions
+and make even an attempt to arrest the downfall of the social order. For a time
+the war spirit defeated every effort to rally the forces of preservation and
+construction. Leblanc seemed to be protesting against earthquakes, and as
+likely to find a spirit of reason in the crater of Etna. Even though the
+shattered official governments now clamoured for peace, bands of
+irreconcilables and invincible patriots, usurpers, adventurers, and political
+desperadoes, were everywhere in possession of the simple apparatus for the
+disengagement of atomic energy and the initiation of new centres of
+destruction. The stuff exercised an irresistible fascination upon a certain
+type of mind. Why should any one give in while he can still destroy his
+enemies? Surrender? While there is still a chance of blowing them to dust? The
+power of destruction which had once been the ultimate privilege of government
+was now the only power left in the world&mdash;and it was everywhere. There
+were few thoughtful men during that phase of blazing waste who did not pass
+through such moods of despair as Barnet describes, and declare with him:
+&lsquo;This is the end....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all the while Leblanc was going to and fro with glittering glasses and an
+inexhaustible persuasiveness, urging the manifest reasonableness of his view
+upon ears that ceased presently to be inattentive. Never at any time did he
+betray a doubt that all this chaotic conflict would end. No nurse during a
+nursery uproar was ever so certain of the inevitable ultimate peace. From being
+treated as an amiable dreamer he came by insensible degrees to be regarded as
+an extravagant possibility. Then he began to seem even practicable. The people
+who listened to him in 1958 with a smiling impatience, were eager before 1959
+was four months old to know just exactly what he thought might be done. He
+answered with the patience of a philosopher and the lucidity of a Frenchman. He
+began to receive responses of a more and more hopeful type. He came across the
+Atlantic to Italy, and there he gathered in the promises for this congress. He
+chose those high meadows above Brissago for the reasons we have stated.
+&lsquo;We must get away,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;from old associations.&rsquo;
+He set to work requisitioning material for his conference with an assurance
+that was justified by the replies. With a slight incredulity the conference
+which was to begin a new order in the world, gathered itself together. Leblanc
+summoned it without arrogance, he controlled it by virtue of an infinite
+humility. Men appeared upon those upland slopes with the apparatus for wireless
+telegraphy; others followed with tents and provisions; a little cable was flung
+down to a convenient point upon the Locarno road below. Leblanc arrived,
+sedulously directing every detail that would affect the tone of the assembly.
+He might have been a courier in advance rather than the originator of the
+gathering. And then there arrived, some by the cable, most by aeroplane, a few
+in other fashions, the men who had been called together to confer upon the
+state of the world. It was to be a conference without a name. Nine monarchs,
+the presidents of four republics, a number of ministers and ambassadors,
+powerful journalists, and such-like prominent and influential men, took part in
+it. There were even scientific men; and that world-famous old man, Holsten,
+came with the others to contribute his amateur statecraft to the desperate
+problem of the age. Only Leblanc would have dared so to summon figure heads and
+powers and intelligence, or have had the courage to hope for their
+agreement....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 2</h3>
+
+<p>
+And one at least of those who were called to this conference of governments
+came to it on foot. This was King Egbert, the young king of the most venerable
+kingdom in Europe. He was a rebel, and had always been of deliberate choice a
+rebel against the magnificence of his position. He affected long pedestrian
+tours and a disposition to sleep in the open air. He came now over the Pass of
+Sta Maria Maggiore and by boat up the lake to Brissago; thence he walked up the
+mountain, a pleasant path set with oaks and sweet chestnut. For provision on
+the walk, for he did not want to hurry, he carried with him a pocketful of
+bread and cheese. A certain small retinue that was necessary to his comfort and
+dignity upon occasions of state he sent on by the cable car, and with him
+walked his private secretary, Firmin, a man who had thrown up the Professorship
+of World Politics in the London School of Sociology, Economics, and Political
+Science, to take up these duties. Firmin was a man of strong rather than rapid
+thought, he had anticipated great influence in this new position, and after
+some years he was still only beginning to apprehend how largely his function
+was to listen. Originally he had been something of a thinker upon international
+politics, an authority upon tariffs and strategy, and a valued contributor to
+various of the higher organs of public opinion, but the atomic bombs had taken
+him by surprise, and he had still to recover completely from his pre-atomic
+opinions and the silencing effect of those sustained explosives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king&rsquo;s freedom from the trammels of etiquette was very complete. In
+theory&mdash;and he abounded in theory&mdash;his manners were purely
+democratic. It was by sheer habit and inadvertency that he permitted Firmin,
+who had discovered a rucksack in a small shop in the town below, to carry both
+bottles of beer. The king had never, as a matter of fact, carried anything for
+himself in his life, and he had never noted that he did not do so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;We will have nobody with us,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;at all. We will be
+perfectly simple.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Firmin carried the beer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they walked up&mdash;it was the king made the pace rather than
+Firmin&mdash;they talked of the conference before them, and Firmin, with a
+certain want of assurance that would have surprised him in himself in the days
+of his Professorship, sought to define the policy of his companion. &lsquo;In
+its broader form, sir,&rsquo; said Firmin; &lsquo;I admit a certain
+plausibility in this project of Leblanc&rsquo;s, but I feel that although it
+may be advisable to set up some sort of general control for International
+affairs&mdash;a sort of Hague Court with extended powers&mdash;that is no
+reason whatever for losing sight of the principles of national and imperial
+autonomy.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Firmin,&rsquo; said the king, &lsquo;I am going to set my brother kings
+a good example.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin intimated a curiosity that veiled a dread.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;By chucking all that nonsense,&rsquo; said the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He quickened his pace as Firmin, who was already a little out of breath,
+betrayed a disposition to reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I am going to chuck all that nonsense,&rsquo; said the king, as Firmin
+prepared to speak. &lsquo;I am going to fling my royalty and empire on the
+table&mdash;and declare at once I don&rsquo;t mean to haggle. It&rsquo;s
+haggling&mdash;about rights&mdash;has been the devil in human affairs,
+for&mdash;always. I am going to stop this nonsense.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin halted abruptly. &lsquo;But, sir!&rsquo; he cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king stopped six yards ahead of him and looked back at his adviser&rsquo;s
+perspiring visage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Do you really think, Firmin, that I am here as&mdash;as an infernal
+politician to put my crown and my flag and my claims and so forth in the way of
+peace? That little Frenchman is right. You know he is right as well as I do.
+Those things are over. We&mdash;we kings and rulers and representatives have
+been at the very heart of the mischief. Of course we imply separation, and of
+course separation means the threat of war, and of course the threat of war
+means the accumulation of more and more atomic bombs. The old game&rsquo;s up.
+But, I say, we mustn&rsquo;t stand here, you know. The world waits. Don&rsquo;t
+you think the old game&rsquo;s up, Firmin?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin adjusted a strap, passed a hand over his wet forehead, and followed
+earnestly. &lsquo;I admit, sir,&rsquo; he said to a receding back, &lsquo;that
+there has to be some sort of hegemony, some sort of Amphictyonic
+council&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;There&rsquo;s got to be one simple government for all the world,&rsquo;
+said the king over his shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But as for a reckless, unqualified abandonment, sir&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;<i>Bang!</i>&rsquo; cried the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin made no answer to this interruption. But a faint shadow of annoyance
+passed across his heated features.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Yesterday,&rsquo; said the king, by way of explanation, &lsquo;the
+Japanese very nearly got San Francisco.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I hadn&rsquo;t heard, sir.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The Americans ran the Japanese aeroplane down into the sea and there the
+bomb got busted.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Under the sea, sir?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Yes. Submarine volcano. The steam is in sight of the Californian coast.
+It was as near as that. And with things like this happening, you want me to go
+up this hill and haggle. Consider the effect of that upon my imperial
+cousin&mdash;and all the others!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;<i>He</i> will haggle, sir.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Not a bit of it,&rsquo; said the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But, sir.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Leblanc won&rsquo;t let him.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin halted abruptly and gave a vicious pull at the offending strap.
+&lsquo;Sir, he will listen to his advisers,&rsquo; he said, in a tone that in
+some subtle way seemed to implicate his master with the trouble of the
+knapsack.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king considered him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;We will go just a little higher,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I want to find
+this unoccupied village they spoke of, and then we will drink that beer. It
+can&rsquo;t be far. We will drink the beer and throw away the bottles. And
+then, Firmin, I shall ask you to look at things in a more generous light....
+Because, you know, you must....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned about and for some time the only sound they made was the noise of
+their boots upon the loose stones of the way and the irregular breathing of
+Firmin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At length, as it seemed to Firmin, or quite soon, as it seemed to the king, the
+gradient of the path diminished, the way widened out, and they found themselves
+in a very beautiful place indeed. It was one of those upland clusters of sheds
+and houses that are still to be found in the mountains of North Italy,
+buildings that were used only in the high summer, and which it was the custom
+to leave locked up and deserted through all the winter and spring, and up to
+the middle of June. The buildings were of a soft-toned gray stone, buried in
+rich green grass, shadowed by chestnut trees and lit by an extraordinary blaze
+of yellow broom. Never had the king seen broom so glorious; he shouted at the
+light of it, for it seemed to give out more sunlight even than it received; he
+sat down impulsively on a lichenous stone, tugged out his bread and cheese, and
+bade Firmin thrust the beer into the shaded weeds to cool.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The things people miss, Firmin,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;who go up into
+the air in ships!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin looked around him with an ungenial eye. &lsquo;You see it at its best,
+sir,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;before the peasants come here again and make it
+filthy.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It would be beautiful anyhow,&rsquo; said the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Superficially, sir,&rsquo; said Firmin. &lsquo;But it stands for a
+social order that is fast vanishing away. Indeed, judging by the grass between
+the stones and in the huts, I am inclined to doubt if it is in use even
+now.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I suppose,&rsquo; said the king, &lsquo;they would come up immediately
+the hay on this flower meadow is cut. It would be those slow, creamy-coloured
+beasts, I expect, one sees on the roads below, and swarthy girls with red
+handkerchiefs over their black hair.... It is wonderful to think how long that
+beautiful old life lasted. In the Roman times and long ages before ever the
+rumour of the Romans had come into these parts, men drove their cattle up into
+these places as the summer came on.... How haunted is this place! There have
+been quarrels here, hopes, children have played here and lived to be old crones
+and old gaffers, and died, and so it has gone on for thousands of lives.
+Lovers, innumerable lovers, have caressed amidst this golden broom....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He meditated over a busy mouthful of bread and cheese.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;We ought to have brought a tankard for that beer,&rsquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin produced a folding aluminium cup, and the king was pleased to drink.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I wish, sir,&rsquo; said Firmin suddenly, &lsquo;I could induce you at
+least to delay your decision&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It&rsquo;s no good talking, Firmin,&rsquo; said the king. &lsquo;My
+mind&rsquo;s as clear as daylight.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Sire,&rsquo; protested Firmin, with his voice full of bread and cheese
+and genuine emotion, &lsquo;have you no respect for your kingship?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king paused before he answered with unwonted gravity. &lsquo;It&rsquo;s
+just because I have, Firmin, that I won&rsquo;t be a puppet in this game of
+international politics.&rsquo; He regarded his companion for a moment and then
+remarked: &lsquo;Kingship!&mdash;what do <i>you</i> know of kingship, Firmin?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; cried the king to his astonished counsellor. &lsquo;For the
+first time in my life I am going to be a king. I am going to lead, and lead by
+my own authority. For a dozen generations my family has been a set of dummies
+in the hands of their advisers. Advisers! Now I am going to be a real
+king&mdash;and I am going to&mdash;to abolish, dispose of, finish, the crown to
+which I have been a slave. But what a world of paralysing shams this roaring
+stuff has ended! The rigid old world is in the melting-pot again, and I, who
+seemed to be no more than the stuffing inside a regal robe, I am a king among
+kings. I have to play my part at the head of things and put an end to blood and
+fire and idiot disorder.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But, sir,&rsquo; protested Firmin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;This man Leblanc is right. The whole world has got to be a Republic, one
+and indivisible. You know that, and my duty is to make that easy. A king should
+lead his people; you want me to stick on their backs like some Old Man of the
+Sea. To-day must be a sacrament of kings. Our trust for mankind is done with
+and ended. We must part our robes among them, we must part our kingship among
+them, and say to them all, now the king in every one must rule the world....
+Have you no sense of the magnificence of this occasion? You want me, Firmin,
+you want me to go up there and haggle like a damned little solicitor for some
+price, some compensation, some qualification....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin shrugged his shoulders and assumed an expression of despair. Meanwhile,
+he conveyed, one must eat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a time neither spoke, and the king ate and turned over in his mind the
+phrases of the speech he intended to make to the conference. By virtue of the
+antiquity of his crown he was to preside, and he intended to make his
+presidency memorable. Reassured of his eloquence, he considered the despondent
+and sulky Firmin for a space.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Firmin,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;you have idealised kingship.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It has been my dream, sir,&rsquo; said Firmin sorrowfully, &lsquo;to
+serve.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;At the levers, Firmin,&rsquo; said the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You are pleased to be unjust,&rsquo; said Firmin, deeply hurt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I am pleased to be getting out of it,&rsquo; said the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Oh, Firmin,&rsquo; he went on, &lsquo;have you no thought for me? Will
+you never realise that I am not only flesh and blood but an
+imagination&mdash;with its rights. I am a king in revolt against that fetter
+they put upon my head. I am a king awake. My reverend grandparents never in all
+their august lives had a waking moment. They loved the job that you, you
+advisers, gave them; they never had a doubt of it. It was like giving a doll to
+a woman who ought to have a child. They delighted in processions and opening
+things and being read addresses to, and visiting triplets and nonagenarians and
+all that sort of thing. Incredibly. They used to keep albums of cuttings from
+all the illustrated papers showing them at it, and if the press-cutting parcels
+grew thin they were worried. It was all that ever worried them. But there is
+something atavistic in me; I hark back to unconstitutional monarchs. They
+christened me too retrogressively, I think. I wanted to get things done. I was
+bored. I might have fallen into vice, most intelligent and energetic princes
+do, but the palace precautions were unusually thorough. I was brought up in the
+purest court the world has ever seen.... Alertly pure.... So I read books,
+Firmin, and went about asking questions. The thing was bound to happen to one
+of us sooner or later. Perhaps, too, very likely I&rsquo;m not vicious. I
+don&rsquo;t think I am.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He reflected. &lsquo;No,&rsquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin cleared his throat. &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t think you are, sir,&rsquo; he
+said. &lsquo;You prefer&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stopped short. He had been going to say &lsquo;talking.&rsquo; He
+substituted &lsquo;ideas.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;That world of royalty!&rsquo; the king went on. &lsquo;In a little while
+no one will understand it any more. It will become a riddle....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Among other things, it was a world of perpetual best clothes. Everything
+was in its best clothes for us, and usually wearing bunting. With a cinema
+watching to see we took it properly. If you are a king, Firmin, and you go and
+look at a regiment, it instantly stops whatever it is doing, changes into full
+uniform and presents arms. When my august parents went in a train the coal in
+the tender used to be whitened. It did, Firmin, and if coal had been white
+instead of black I have no doubt the authorities would have blackened it. That
+was the spirit of our treatment. People were always walking about with their
+faces to us. One never saw anything in profile. One got an impression of a
+world that was insanely focused on ourselves. And when I began to poke my
+little questions into the Lord Chancellor and the archbishop and all the rest
+of them, about what I should see if people turned round, the general effect I
+produced was that I wasn&rsquo;t by any means displaying the Royal Tact they
+had expected of me....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He meditated for a time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And yet, you know, there is something in the kingship, Firmin. It
+stiffened up my august little grandfather. It gave my grandmother a kind of
+awkward dignity even when she was cross&mdash;and she was very often cross.
+They both had a profound sense of responsibility. My poor father&rsquo;s health
+was wretched during his brief career; nobody outside the circle knows just how
+he screwed himself up to things. &ldquo;My people expect it,&rdquo; he used to
+say of this tiresome duty or that. Most of the things they made him do were
+silly&mdash;it was part of a bad tradition, but there was nothing silly in the
+way he set about them.... The spirit of kingship is a fine thing, Firmin; I
+feel it in my bones; I do not know what I might not be if I were not a king. I
+could die for my people, Firmin, and you couldn&rsquo;t. No, don&rsquo;t say
+you could die for me, because I know better. Don&rsquo;t think I forget my
+kingship, Firmin, don&rsquo;t imagine that. I am a king, a kingly king, by
+right divine. The fact that I am also a chattering young man makes not the
+slightest difference to that. But the proper text-book for kings, Firmin, is
+none of the court memoirs and Welt-Politik books you would have me read; it is
+old Fraser&rsquo;s <i>Golden Bough</i>. Have you read that, Firmin?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin had. &lsquo;Those were the authentic kings. In the end they were cut up
+and a bit given to everybody. They sprinkled the nations&mdash;with
+Kingship.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin turned himself round and faced his royal master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;What do you intend to do, sir?&rsquo; he asked. &lsquo;If you will not
+listen to me, what do you propose to do this afternoon?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king flicked crumbs from his coat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Manifestly war has to stop for ever, Firmin. Manifestly this can only be
+done by putting all the world under one government. Our crowns and flags are in
+the way. Manifestly they must go.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Yes, sir,&rsquo; interrupted Firmin, &lsquo;but <i>what</i> government?
+I don&rsquo;t see what government you get by a universal abdication!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Well,&rsquo; said the king, with his hands about his knees,
+&lsquo;<i>We</i> shall be the government.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The conference?&rsquo; exclaimed Firmin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Who else?&rsquo; asked the king simply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It&rsquo;s perfectly simple,&rsquo; he added to Firmin&rsquo;s
+tremendous silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But,&rsquo; cried Firmin, &lsquo;you must have sanctions! Will there be
+no form of election, for example?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Why should there be?&rsquo; asked the king, with intelligent curiosity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The consent of the governed.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Firmin, we are just going to lay down our differences and take over
+government. Without any election at all. Without any sanction. The governed
+will show their consent by silence. If any effective opposition arises we shall
+ask it to come in and help. The true sanction of kingship is the grip upon the
+sceptre. We aren&rsquo;t going to worry people to vote for us. I&rsquo;m
+certain the mass of men does not want to be bothered with such things....
+We&rsquo;ll contrive a way for any one interested to join in. That&rsquo;s
+quite enough in the way of democracy. Perhaps later&mdash;when things
+don&rsquo;t matter.... We shall govern all right, Firmin. Government only
+becomes difficult when the lawyers get hold of it, and since these troubles
+began the lawyers are shy. Indeed, come to think of it, I wonder where all the
+lawyers are.... Where are they? A lot, of course, were bagged, some of the
+worst ones, when they blew up my legislature. You never knew the late Lord
+Chancellor....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Necessities bury rights. And create them. Lawyers live on dead rights
+disinterred.... We&rsquo;ve done with that way of living. We won&rsquo;t have
+more law than a code can cover and beyond that government will be free....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Before the sun sets to-day, Firmin, trust me, we shall have made our
+abdications, all of us, and declared the World Republic, supreme and
+indivisible. I wonder what my august grandmother would have made of it! All my
+rights! . . . And then we shall go on governing. What else is there to do? All
+over the world we shall declare that there is no longer mine or thine, but
+ours. China, the United States, two-thirds of Europe, will certainly fall in
+and obey. They will have to do so. What else can they do? Their official rulers
+are here with us. They won&rsquo;t be able to get together any sort of idea of
+not obeying us.... Then we shall declare that every sort of property is held in
+trust for the Republic....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But, sir!&rsquo; cried Firmin, suddenly enlightened. &lsquo;Has this
+been arranged already?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;My dear Firmin, do you think we have come here, all of us, to talk at
+large? The talking has been done for half a century. Talking and writing. We
+are here to set the new thing, the simple, obvious, necessary thing,
+going.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stood up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin, forgetting the habits of a score of years, remained seated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;<i>Well</i>,&rsquo; he said at last. &lsquo;And I have known
+nothing!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king smiled very cheerfully. He liked these talks with Firmin.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 3</h3>
+
+<p>
+That conference upon the Brissago meadows was one of the most heterogeneous
+collections of prominent people that has ever met together. Principalities and
+powers, stripped and shattered until all their pride and mystery were gone, met
+in a marvellous new humility. Here were kings and emperors whose capitals were
+lakes of flaming destruction, statesmen whose countries had become chaos,
+scared politicians and financial potentates. Here were leaders of thought and
+learned investigators dragged reluctantly to the control of affairs. Altogether
+there were ninety-three of them, Leblanc&rsquo;s conception of the head men of
+the world. They had all come to the realisation of the simple truths that the
+indefatigable Leblanc had hammered into them; and, drawing his resources from
+the King of Italy, he had provisioned his conference with a generous simplicity
+quite in accordance with the rest of his character, and so at last was able to
+make his astonishing and entirely rational appeal. He had appointed King Egbert
+the president, he believed in this young man so firmly that he completely
+dominated him, and he spoke himself as a secretary might speak from the
+president&rsquo;s left hand, and evidently did not realise himself that he was
+telling them all exactly what they had to do. He imagined he was merely
+recapitulating the obvious features of the situation for their convenience. He
+was dressed in ill-fitting white silk clothes, and he consulted a dingy little
+packet of notes as he spoke. They put him out. He explained that he had never
+spoken from notes before, but that this occasion was exceptional.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then King Egbert spoke as he was expected to speak, and Leblanc&rsquo;s
+spectacles moistened at that flow of generous sentiment, most amiably and
+lightly expressed. &lsquo;We haven&rsquo;t to stand on ceremony,&rsquo; said
+the king, &lsquo;we have to govern the world. We have always pretended to
+govern the world and here is our opportunity.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Of course,&rsquo; whispered Leblanc, nodding his head rapidly, &lsquo;of
+course.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The world has been smashed up, and we have to put it on its wheels
+again,&rsquo; said King Egbert. &lsquo;And it is the simple common sense of
+this crisis for all to help and none to seek advantage. Is that our tone or
+not?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gathering was too old and seasoned and miscellaneous for any great displays
+of enthusiasm, but that was its tone, and with an astonishment that somehow
+became exhilarating it began to resign, repudiate, and declare its intentions.
+Firmin, taking notes behind his master, heard everything that had been foretold
+among the yellow broom, come true. With a queer feeling that he was dreaming,
+he assisted at the proclamation of the World State, and saw the message taken
+out to the wireless operators to be throbbed all round the habitable globe.
+&lsquo;And next,&rsquo; said King Egbert, with a cheerful excitement in his
+voice, &lsquo;we have to get every atom of Carolinum and all the plant for
+making it, into our control....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Firmin was not alone in his incredulity. Not a man there who was not a very
+amiable, reasonable, benevolent creature at bottom; some had been born to power
+and some had happened upon it, some had struggled to get it, not clearly
+knowing what it was and what it implied, but none was irreconcilably set upon
+its retention at the price of cosmic disaster. Their minds had been prepared by
+circumstances and sedulously cultivated by Leblanc; and now they took the broad
+obvious road along which King Egbert was leading them, with a mingled
+conviction of strangeness and necessity. Things went very smoothly; the King of
+Italy explained the arrangements that had been made for the protection of the
+camp from any fantastic attack; a couple of thousand of aeroplanes, each
+carrying a sharpshooter, guarded them, and there was an excellent system of
+relays, and at night all the sky would be searched by scores of lights, and the
+admirable Leblanc gave luminous reasons for their camping just where they were
+and going on with their administrative duties forthwith. He knew of this place,
+because he had happened upon it when holiday-making with Madame Leblanc twenty
+years and more ago. &lsquo;There is very simple fare at present,&rsquo; he
+explained, &lsquo;on account of the disturbed state of the countries about us.
+But we have excellent fresh milk, good red wine, beef, bread, salad, and
+lemons.... In a few days I hope to place things in the hands of a more
+efficient caterer....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The members of the new world government dined at three long tables on trestles,
+and down the middle of these tables Leblanc, in spite of the barrenness of his
+menu, had contrived to have a great multitude of beautiful roses. There was
+similar accommodation for the secretaries and attendants at a lower level down
+the mountain. The assembly dined as it had debated, in the open air, and over
+the dark crags to the west the glowing June sunset shone upon the banquet.
+There was no precedency now among the ninety-three, and King Egbert found
+himself between a pleasant little Japanese stranger in spectacles and his
+cousin of Central Europe, and opposite a great Bengali leader and the President
+of the United States of America. Beyond the Japanese was Holsten, the old
+chemist, and Leblanc was a little way down the other side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king was still cheerfully talkative and abounded in ideas. He fell
+presently into an amiable controversy with the American, who seemed to feel a
+lack of impressiveness in the occasion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was ever the Transatlantic tendency, due, no doubt, to the necessity of
+handling public questions in a bulky and striking manner, to over-emphasise and
+over-accentuate, and the president was touched by his national failing. He
+suggested now that there should be a new era, starting from that day as the
+first day of the first year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king demurred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;From this day forth, sir, man enters upon his heritage,&rsquo; said the
+American.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Man,&rsquo; said the king, &lsquo;is always entering upon his heritage.
+You Americans have a peculiar weakness for anniversaries&mdash;if you will
+forgive me saying so. Yes&mdash;I accuse you of a lust for dramatic effect.
+Everything is happening always, but you want to say this or this is the real
+instant in time and subordinate all the others to it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The American said something about an epoch-making day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But surely,&rsquo; said the king, &lsquo;you don&rsquo;t want us to
+condemn all humanity to a world-wide annual Fourth of July for ever and ever
+more. On account of this harmless necessary day of declarations. No conceivable
+day could ever deserve that. Ah! you do not know, as I do, the devastations of
+the memorable. My poor grandparents were&mdash;<i>rubricated</i>. The worst of
+these huge celebrations is that they break up the dignified succession of
+one&rsquo;s contemporary emotions. They interrupt. They set back. Suddenly out
+come the flags and fireworks, and the old enthusiasms are furbished
+up&mdash;and it&rsquo;s sheer destruction of the proper thing that ought to be
+going on. Sufficient unto the day is the celebration thereof. Let the dead past
+bury its dead. You see, in regard to the calendar, I am for democracy and you
+are for aristocracy. All things I hold, are august, and have a right to be
+lived through on their merits. No day should be sacrificed on the grave of
+departed events. What do you think of it, Wilhelm?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;For the noble, yes, all days should be noble.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Exactly my position,&rsquo; said the king, and felt pleased at what he
+had been saying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, since the American pressed his idea, the king contrived to shift the
+talk from the question of celebrating the epoch they were making to the
+question of the probabilities that lay ahead. Here every one became diffident.
+They could see the world unified and at peace, but what detail was to follow
+from that unification they seemed indisposed to discuss. This diffidence struck
+the king as remarkable. He plunged upon the possibilities of science. All the
+huge expenditure that had hitherto gone into unproductive naval and military
+preparations, must now, he declared, place research upon a new footing.
+&lsquo;Where one man worked we will have a thousand.&rsquo; He appealed to
+Holsten. &lsquo;We have only begun to peep into these possibilities,&rsquo; he
+said. &lsquo;You at any rate have sounded the vaults of the treasure
+house.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;They are unfathomable,&rsquo; smiled Holsten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Man,&rsquo; said the American, with a manifest resolve to justify and
+reinstate himself after the flickering contradictions of the king, &lsquo;Man,
+I say, is only beginning to enter upon his heritage.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Tell us some of the things you believe we shall presently learn, give us
+an idea of the things we may presently do,&rsquo; said the king to Holsten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Holsten opened out the vistas....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Science,&rsquo; the king cried presently, &lsquo;is the new king of the
+world.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;<i>Our</i> view,&rsquo; said the president, &lsquo;is that sovereignty
+resides with the people.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;No!&rsquo; said the king, &lsquo;the sovereign is a being more subtle
+than that. And less arithmetical. Neither my family nor your emancipated
+people. It is something that floats about us, and above us, and through us. It
+is that common impersonal will and sense of necessity of which Science is the
+best understood and most typical aspect. It is the mind of the race. It is that
+which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to its demands....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused and glanced down the table at Leblanc, and then re-opened at his
+former antagonist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;There is a disposition,&rsquo; said the king, &lsquo;to regard this
+gathering as if it were actually doing what it appears to be doing, as if we
+ninety-odd men of our own free will and wisdom were unifying the world. There
+is a temptation to consider ourselves exceptionally fine fellows, and masterful
+men, and all the rest of it. We are not. I doubt if we should average out as
+anything abler than any other casually selected body of ninety-odd men. We are
+no creators, we are consequences, we are salvagers&mdash;or salvagees. The
+thing to-day is not ourselves but the wind of conviction that has blown us
+hither....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The American had to confess he could hardly agree with the king&rsquo;s
+estimate of their average.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Holsten, perhaps, and one or two others, might lift us a little,&rsquo;
+the king conceded. &lsquo;But the rest of us?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His eyes flitted once more towards Leblanc.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Look at Leblanc,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;He&rsquo;s just a simple soul.
+There are hundreds and thousands like him. I admit, a certain dexterity, a
+certain lucidity, but there is not a country town in France where there is not
+a Leblanc or so to be found about two o&rsquo;clock in its principal café.
+It&rsquo;s just that he isn&rsquo;t complicated or Super-Mannish, or any of
+those things that has made all he has done possible. But in happier times,
+don&rsquo;t you think, Wilhelm, he would have remained just what his father
+was, a successful <i>épicier</i>, very clean, very accurate, very honest. And
+on holidays he would have gone out with Madame Leblanc and her knitting in a
+punt with a jar of something gentle and have sat under a large reasonable
+green-lined umbrella and fished very neatly and successfully for
+gudgeon....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The president and the Japanese prince in spectacles protested together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;If I do him an injustice,&rsquo; said the king, &lsquo;it is only
+because I want to elucidate my argument. I want to make it clear how small are
+men and days, and how great is man in comparison....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 4</h3>
+
+<p>
+So it was King Egbert talked at Brissago after they had proclaimed the unity of
+the world. Every evening after that the assembly dined together and talked at
+their ease and grew accustomed to each other and sharpened each other&rsquo;s
+ideas, and every day they worked together, and really for a time believed that
+they were inventing a new government for the world. They discussed a
+constitution. But there were matters needing attention too urgently to wait for
+any constitution. They attended to these incidentally. The constitution it was
+that waited. It was presently found convenient to keep the constitution waiting
+indefinitely as King Egbert had foreseen, and meanwhile, with an increasing
+self-confidence, that council went on governing....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On this first evening of all the council&rsquo;s gatherings, after King Egbert
+had talked for a long time and drunken and praised very abundantly the simple
+red wine of the country that Leblanc had procured for them, he gathered about
+him a group of congenial spirits and fell into a discourse upon simplicity,
+praising it above all things and declaring that the ultimate aim of art,
+religion, philosophy, and science alike was to simplify. He instanced himself
+as a devotee to simplicity. And Leblanc he instanced as a crowning instance of
+the splendour of this quality. Upon that they all agreed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When at last the company about the tables broke up, the king found himself
+brimming over with a peculiar affection and admiration for Leblanc, he made his
+way to him and drew him aside and broached what he declared was a small matter.
+There was, he said, a certain order in his gift that, unlike all other orders
+and decorations in the world, had never been corrupted. It was reserved for
+elderly men of supreme distinction, the acuteness of whose gifts was already
+touched to mellowness, and it had included the greatest names of every age so
+far as the advisers of his family had been able to ascertain them. At present,
+the king admitted, these matters of stars and badges were rather obscured by
+more urgent affairs, for his own part he had never set any value upon them at
+all, but a time might come when they would be at least interesting, and in
+short he wished to confer the Order of Merit upon Leblanc. His sole motive in
+doing so, he added, was his strong desire to signalise his personal esteem. He
+laid his hand upon the Frenchman&rsquo;s shoulder as he said these things, with
+an almost brotherly affection. Leblanc received this proposal with a modest
+confusion that greatly enhanced the king&rsquo;s opinion of his admirable
+simplicity. He pointed out that eager as he was to snatch at the proffered
+distinction, it might at the present stage appear invidious, and he therefore
+suggested that the conferring of it should be postponed until it could be made
+the crown and conclusion of his services. The king was unable to shake this
+resolution, and the two men parted with expressions of mutual esteem.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king then summoned Firmin in order to make a short note of a number of
+things that he had said during the day. But after about twenty minutes&rsquo;
+work the sweet sleepiness of the mountain air overcame him, and he dismissed
+Firmin and went to bed and fell asleep at once, and slept with extreme
+satisfaction. He had had an active, agreeable day.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 5</h3>
+
+<p>
+The establishment of the new order that was thus so humanly begun, was, if one
+measures it by the standard of any preceding age, a rapid progress. The
+fighting spirit of the world was exhausted. Only here or there did fierceness
+linger. For long decades the combative side in human affairs had been
+monstrously exaggerated by the accidents of political separation. This now
+became luminously plain. An enormous proportion of the force that sustained
+armaments had been nothing more aggressive than the fear of war and warlike
+neighbours. It is doubtful if any large section of the men actually enlisted
+for fighting ever at any time really hungered and thirsted for bloodshed and
+danger. That kind of appetite was probably never very strong in the species
+after the savage stage was past. The army was a profession, in which killing
+had become a disagreeable possibility rather than an eventful certainty. If one
+reads the old newspapers and periodicals of that time, which did so much to
+keep militarism alive, one finds very little about glory and adventure and a
+constant harping on the disagreeableness of invasion and subjugation. In one
+word, militarism was funk. The belligerent resolution of the armed Europe of
+the twentieth century was the resolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to
+plunge. And now that its weapons were exploding in its hands, Europe was only
+too eager to drop them, and abandon this fancied refuge of violence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness; nearly all the
+clever people who had hitherto sustained the ancient belligerent separations
+had now been brought to realise the need for simplicity of attitude and
+openness of mind; and in this atmosphere of moral renascence, there was little
+attempt to get negotiable advantages out of resistance to the new order. Human
+beings are foolish enough no doubt, but few have stopped to haggle in a
+fire-escape. The council had its way with them. The band of
+&lsquo;patriots&rsquo; who seized the laboratories and arsenal just outside
+Osaka and tried to rouse Japan to revolt against inclusion in the Republic of
+Mankind, found they had miscalculated the national pride and met the swift
+vengeance of their own countrymen. That fight in the arsenal was a vivid
+incident in this closing chapter of the history of war. To the last the
+&lsquo;patriots&rsquo; were undecided whether, in the event of a defeat, they
+would explode their supply of atomic bombs or not. They were fighting with
+swords outside the iridium doors, and the moderates of their number were at bay
+and on the verge of destruction, only ten, indeed, remained unwounded, when the
+republicans burst in to the rescue....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 6</h3>
+
+<p>
+One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in the new rule,
+and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism, the &lsquo;Slavic
+Fox,&rsquo; the King of the Balkans. He debated and delayed his submissions. He
+showed an extraordinary combination of cunning and temerity in his evasion of
+the repeated summonses from Brissago. He affected ill-health and a great
+preoccupation with his new official mistress, for his semi-barbaric court was
+arranged on the best romantic models. His tactics were ably seconded by Doctor
+Pestovitch, his chief minister. Failing to establish his claims to complete
+independence, King Ferdinand Charles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be
+treated as a protected state. Finally he professed an unconvincing submission,
+and put a mass of obstacles in the way of the transfer of his national
+officials to the new government. In these things he was enthusiastically
+supported by his subjects, still for the most part an illiterate peasantry,
+passionately if confusedly patriotic, and so far with no practical knowledge of
+the effect of atomic bombs. More particularly he retained control of all the
+Balkan aeroplanes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For once the extreme <i>naïveté</i> of Leblanc seems to have been mitigated by
+duplicity. He went on with the general pacification of the world as if the
+Balkan submission was made in absolute good faith, and he announced the
+disbandment of the force of aeroplanes that hitherto guarded the council at
+Brissago upon the approaching fifteenth of July. But instead he doubled the
+number upon duty on that eventful day, and made various arrangements for their
+disposition. He consulted certain experts, and when he took King Egbert into
+his confidence there was something in his neat and explicit foresight that
+brought back to that ex-monarch&rsquo;s mind his half-forgotten fantasy of
+Leblanc as a fisherman under a green umbrella.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About five o&rsquo;clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one of the
+outer sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring unobtrusively over the
+lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted and hailed a strange aeroplane that was
+flying westward, and, failing to get a satisfactory reply, set its wireless
+apparatus talking and gave chase. A swarm of consorts appeared very promptly
+over the westward mountains, and before the unknown aeroplane had sighted Como,
+it had a dozen eager attendants closing in upon it. Its driver seems to have
+hesitated, dropped down among the mountains, and then turned southward in
+flight, only to find an intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows. He then
+went round into the eye of the rising sun, and passed within a hundred yards of
+his original pursuer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sharpshooter therein opened fire at once, and showed an intelligent grasp
+of the situation by disabling the passenger first. The man at the wheel must
+have heard his companion cry out behind him, but he was too intent on getting
+away to waste even a glance behind. Twice after that he must have heard shots.
+He let his engine go, he crouched down, and for twenty minutes he must have
+steered in the continual expectation of a bullet. It never came, and when at
+last he glanced round, three great planes were close upon him, and his
+companion, thrice hit, lay dead across his bombs. His followers manifestly did
+not mean either to upset or shoot him, but inexorably they drove him down,
+down. At last he was curving and flying a hundred yards or less over the level
+fields of rice and maize. Ahead of him and dark against the morning sunrise was
+a village with a very tall and slender campanile and a line of cable bearing
+metal standards that he could not clear. He stopped his engine abruptly and
+dropped flat. He may have hoped to get at the bombs when he came down, but his
+pitiless pursuers drove right over him and shot him as he fell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three other aeroplanes curved down and came to rest amidst grass close by the
+smashed machine. Their passengers descended, and ran, holding their light
+rifles in their hands towards the <i>débris</i> and the two dead men. The
+coffin-shaped box that had occupied the centre of the machine had broken, and
+three black objects, each with two handles like the ears of a pitcher, lay
+peacefully amidst the litter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These objects were so tremendously important in the eyes of their captors that
+they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and broken amidst the wreckage
+as they might have disregarded dead frogs by a country pathway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;By God,&rsquo; cried the first. &lsquo;Here they are!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And unbroken!&rsquo; said the second.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;ve never seen the things before,&rsquo; said the first.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Bigger than I thought,&rsquo; said the second.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The third comer arrived. He stared for a moment at the bombs and then turned
+his eyes to the dead man with a crushed chest who lay in a muddy place among
+the green stems under the centre of the machine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;One can take no risks,&rsquo; he said, with a faint suggestion of
+apology.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other two now also turned to the victims. &lsquo;We must signal,&rsquo;
+said the first man. A shadow passed between them and the sun, and they looked
+up to see the aeroplane that had fired the last shot. &lsquo;Shall we
+signal?&rsquo; came a megaphone hail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Three bombs,&rsquo; they answered together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Where do they come from?&rsquo; asked the megaphone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The three sharpshooters looked at each other and then moved towards the dead
+men. One of them had an idea. &lsquo;Signal that first,&rsquo; he said,
+&lsquo;while we look.&rsquo; They were joined by their aviators for the search,
+and all six men began a hunt that was necessarily brutal in its haste, for some
+indication of identity. They examined the men&rsquo;s pockets, their
+bloodstained clothes, the machine, the framework. They turned the bodies over
+and flung them aside. There was not a tattoo mark.... Everything was
+elaborately free of any indication of its origin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;We can&rsquo;t find out!&rsquo; they called at last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Not a sign?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Not a sign.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;m coming down,&rsquo; said the man overhead....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 7</h3>
+
+<p>
+The Slavic fox stood upon a metal balcony in his picturesque Art Nouveau palace
+that gave upon the precipice that overhung his bright little capital, and
+beside him stood Pestovitch, grizzled and cunning, and now full of an
+ill-suppressed excitement. Behind them the window opened into a large room,
+richly decorated in aluminium and crimson enamel, across which the king, as he
+glanced ever and again over his shoulder with a gesture of inquiry, could see
+through the two open doors of a little azure walled antechamber the wireless
+operator in the turret working at his incessant transcription. Two pompously
+uniformed messengers waited listlessly in this apartment. The room was
+furnished with a stately dignity, and had in the middle of it a big green
+baize-covered table with the massive white metal inkpots and antiquated
+sandboxes natural to a new but romantic monarchy. It was the king&rsquo;s
+council chamber and about it now, in attitudes of suspended intrigue, stood the
+half-dozen ministers who constituted his cabinet. They had been summoned for
+twelve o&rsquo;clock, but still at half-past twelve the king loitered in the
+balcony and seemed to be waiting for some news that did not come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king and his minister had talked at first in whispers; they had fallen
+silent, for they found little now to express except a vague anxiety. Away there
+on the mountain side were the white metal roofs of the long farm buildings
+beneath which the bomb factory and the bombs were hidden. (The chemist who had
+made all these for the king had died suddenly after the declaration of
+Brissago.) Nobody knew of that store of mischief now but the king and his
+adviser and three heavily faithful attendants; the aviators who waited now in
+the midday blaze with their bomb-carrying machines and their passenger
+bomb-throwers in the exercising grounds of the motor-cyclist barracks below
+were still in ignorance of the position of the ammunition they were presently
+to take up. It was time they started if the scheme was to work as Pestovitch
+had planned it. It was a magnificent plan. It aimed at no less than the Empire
+of the World. The government of idealists and professors away there at Brissago
+was to be blown to fragments, and then east, west, north, and south those
+aeroplanes would go swarming over a world that had disarmed itself, to proclaim
+Ferdinand Charles, the new Cæsar, the Master, Lord of the Earth. It was a
+magnificent plan. But the tension of this waiting for news of the success of
+the first blow was&mdash;considerable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Slavic fox was of a pallid fairness, he had a remarkably long nose, a
+thick, short moustache, and small blue eyes that were a little too near
+together to be pleasant. It was his habit to worry his moustache with short,
+nervous tugs whenever his restless mind troubled him, and now this motion was
+becoming so incessant that it irked Pestovitch beyond the limits of endurance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I will go,&rsquo; said the minister, &lsquo;and see what the trouble is
+with the wireless. They give us nothing, good or bad.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Left to himself, the king could worry his moustache without stint; he leant his
+elbows forward on the balcony and gave both of his long white hands to the
+work, so that he looked like a pale dog gnawing a bone. Suppose they caught his
+men, what should he do? Suppose they caught his men?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clocks in the light gold-capped belfries of the town below presently
+intimated the half-hour after midday.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course, he and Pestovitch had thought it out. Even if they had caught those
+men, they were pledged to secrecy.... Probably they would be killed in the
+catching.... One could deny anyhow, deny and deny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then he became aware of half a dozen little shining specks very high in the
+blue.... Pestovitch came out to him presently. &lsquo;The government messages,
+sire, have all dropped into cipher,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I have set a
+man&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;<i>look!</i>&rsquo; interrupted the king, and pointed upward with a
+long, lean finger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pestovitch followed that indication and then glanced for one questioning moment
+at the white face before him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;We have to face it out, sire,&rsquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For some moments they watched the steep spirals of the descending messengers,
+and then they began a hasty consultation....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They decided that to be holding a council upon the details of an ultimate
+surrender to Brissago was as innocent-looking a thing as the king could well be
+doing, and so, when at last the ex-king Egbert, whom the council had sent as
+its envoy, arrived upon the scene, he discovered the king almost theatrically
+posed at the head of his councillors in the midst of his court. The door upon
+the wireless operators was shut.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ex-king from Brissago came like a draught through the curtains and
+attendants that gave a wide margin to King Ferdinand&rsquo;s state, and the
+familiar confidence of his manner belied a certain hardness in his eye. Firmin
+trotted behind him, and no one else was with him. And as Ferdinand Charles rose
+to greet him, there came into the heart of the Balkan king again that same
+chilly feeling that he had felt upon the balcony&mdash;and it passed at the
+careless gestures of his guest. For surely any one might outwit this foolish
+talker who, for a mere idea and at the command of a little French rationalist
+in spectacles, had thrown away the most ancient crown in all the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One must deny, deny....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then slowly and quite tiresomely he realised that there was nothing to
+deny. His visitor, with an amiable ease, went on talking about everything in
+debate between himself and Brissago except&mdash;&mdash;.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Could it be that they had been delayed? Could it be that they had had to drop
+for repairs and were still uncaptured? Could it be that even now while this
+fool babbled, they were over there among the mountains heaving their deadly
+charge over the side of the aeroplane?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Strange hopes began to lift the tail of the Slavic fox again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What was the man saying? One must talk to him anyhow until one knew. At any
+moment the little brass door behind him might open with the news of Brissago
+blown to atoms. Then it would be a delightful relief to the present tension to
+arrest this chatterer forthwith. He might be killed perhaps. What?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king was repeating his observation. &lsquo;They have a ridiculous fancy
+that your confidence is based on the possession of atomic bombs.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+King Ferdinand Charles pulled himself together. He protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Oh, quite so,&rsquo; said the ex-king, &lsquo;quite so.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;What grounds?&rsquo; The ex-king permitted himself a gesture and the
+ghost of a chuckle&mdash;why the devil should he chuckle? &lsquo;Practically
+none,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;But of course with these things one has to be so
+careful.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then again for an instant something&mdash;like the faintest shadow of
+derision&mdash;gleamed out of the envoy&rsquo;s eyes and recalled that chilly
+feeling to King Ferdinand&rsquo;s spine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some kindred depression had come to Pestovitch, who had been watching the drawn
+intensity of Firmin&rsquo;s face. He came to the help of his master, who, he
+feared, might protest too much.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;A search!&rsquo; cried the king. &lsquo;An embargo on our
+aeroplanes.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Only a temporary expedient,&rsquo; said the ex-king Egbert, &lsquo;while
+the search is going on.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king appealed to his council.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The people will never permit it, sire,&rsquo; said a bustling little man
+in a gorgeous uniform.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You&rsquo;ll have to make &lsquo;em,&rsquo; said the ex-king, genially
+addressing all the councillors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+King Ferdinand glanced at the closed brass door through which no news would
+come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;When would you want to have this search?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ex-king was radiant. &lsquo;We couldn&rsquo;t possibly do it until the day
+after to-morrow,&rsquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Just the capital?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Where else?&rsquo; asked the ex-king, still more cheerfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;For my own part,&rsquo; said the ex-king confidentially, &lsquo;I think
+the whole business ridiculous. Who would be such a fool as to hide atomic
+bombs? Nobody. Certain hanging if he&rsquo;s caught&mdash;certain, and almost
+certain blowing up if he isn&rsquo;t. But nowadays I have to take orders like
+the rest of the world. And here I am.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king thought he had never met such detestable geniality. He glanced at
+Pestovitch, who nodded almost imperceptibly. It was well, anyhow, to have a
+fool to deal with. They might have sent a diplomatist. &lsquo;Of course,&rsquo;
+said the king, &lsquo;I recognise the overpowering force&mdash;and a kind of
+logic&mdash;in these orders from Brissago.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I knew you would,&rsquo; said the ex-king, with an air of relief,
+&lsquo;and so let us arrange&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They arranged with a certain informality. No Balkan aeroplane was to adventure
+into the air until the search was concluded, and meanwhile the fleets of the
+world government would soar and circle in the sky. The towns were to be
+placarded with offers of reward to any one who would help in the discovery of
+atomic bombs....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You will sign that,&rsquo; said the ex-king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Why?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;To show that we aren&rsquo;t in any way hostile to you.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pestovitch nodded &lsquo;yes&rsquo; to his master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And then, you see,&rsquo; said the ex-king in that easy way of his,
+&lsquo;we&rsquo;ll have a lot of men here, borrow help from your police, and
+run through all your things. And then everything will be over. Meanwhile, if I
+may be your guest....&rsquo; When presently Pestovitch was alone with the king
+again, he found him in a state of jangling emotions. His spirit was tossing
+like a wind-whipped sea. One moment he was exalted and full of contempt for
+&lsquo;that ass&rsquo; and his search; the next he was down in a pit of dread.
+&lsquo;They will find them, Pestovitch, and then he&rsquo;ll hang us.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Hang us?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king put his long nose into his councillor&rsquo;s face. &lsquo;That
+grinning brute <i>wants</i> to hang us,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;And hang us he
+will, if we give him a shadow of a chance.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But all their Modern State Civilisation!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Do you think there&rsquo;s any pity in that crew of Godless, Vivisecting
+Prigs?&rsquo; cried this last king of romance. &lsquo;Do you think, Pestovitch,
+they understand anything of a high ambition or a splendid dream? Do you think
+that our gallant and sublime adventure has any appeal to them? Here am I, the
+last and greatest and most romantic of the Cæsars, and do you think they will
+miss the chance of hanging me like a dog if they can, killing me like a rat in
+a hole? And that renegade! He who was once an anointed king! . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I hate that sort of eye that laughs and keeps hard,&rsquo; said the
+king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I won&rsquo;t sit still here and be caught like a fascinated
+rabbit,&rsquo; said the king in conclusion. &lsquo;We must shift those
+bombs.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Risk it,&rsquo; said Pestovitch. &lsquo;Leave them alone.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;No,&rsquo; said the king. &lsquo;Shift them near the frontier. Then
+while they watch us here&mdash;they will always watch us here now&mdash;we can
+buy an aeroplane abroad, and pick them up....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king was in a feverish, irritable mood all that evening, but he made his
+plans nevertheless with infinite cunning. They must get the bombs away; there
+must be a couple of atomic hay lorries, the bombs could be hidden under the
+hay.... Pestovitch went and came, instructing trusty servants, planning and
+replanning.... The king and the ex-king talked very pleasantly of a number of
+subjects. All the while at the back of King Ferdinand Charles&rsquo;s mind
+fretted the mystery of his vanished aeroplane. There came no news of its
+capture, and no news of its success. At any moment all that power at the back
+of his visitor might crumble away and vanish....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was past midnight, when the king, in a cloak and slouch hat that might
+equally have served a small farmer, or any respectable middle-class man,
+slipped out from an inconspicuous service gate on the eastward side of his
+palace into the thickly wooded gardens that sloped in a series of terraces down
+to the town. Pestovitch and his guard-valet Peter, both wrapped about in a
+similar disguise, came out among the laurels that bordered the pathway and
+joined him. It was a clear, warm night, but the stars seemed unusually little
+and remote because of the aeroplanes, each trailing a searchlight, that drove
+hither and thither across the blue. One great beam seemed to rest on the king
+for a moment as he came out of the palace; then instantly and reassuringly it
+had swept away. But while they were still in the palace gardens another found
+them and looked at them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;They see us,&rsquo; cried the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;They make nothing of us,&rsquo; said Pestovitch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king glanced up and met a calm, round eye of light, that seemed to wink at
+him and vanish, leaving him blinded....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The three men went on their way. Near the little gate in the garden railings
+that Pestovitch had caused to be unlocked, the king paused under the shadow of
+an ilex and looked back at the place. It was very high and narrow, a
+twentieth-century rendering of mediaevalism, mediaevalism in steel and bronze
+and sham stone and opaque glass. Against the sky it splashed a confusion of
+pinnacles. High up in the eastward wing were the windows of the apartments of
+the ex-king Egbert. One of them was brightly lit now, and against the light a
+little black figure stood very still and looked out upon the night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king snarled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;He little knows how we slip through his fingers,&rsquo; said Pestovitch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as he spoke they saw the ex-king stretch out his arms slowly, like one who
+yawns, knuckle his eyes and turn inward&mdash;no doubt to his bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Down through the ancient winding back streets of his capital hurried the king,
+and at an appointed corner a shabby atomic-automobile waited for the three. It
+was a hackney carriage of the lowest grade, with dinted metal panels and
+deflated cushions. The driver was one of the ordinary drivers of the capital,
+but beside him sat the young secretary of Pestovitch, who knew the way to the
+farm where the bombs were hidden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The automobile made its way through the narrow streets of the old town, which
+were still lit and uneasy&mdash;for the fleet of airships overhead had kept the
+cafés open and people abroad&mdash;over the great new bridge, and so by
+straggling outskirts to the country. And all through his capital the king who
+hoped to outdo Cæsar, sat back and was very still, and no one spoke. And as
+they got out into the dark country they became aware of the searchlights
+wandering over the country-side like the uneasy ghosts of giants. The king sat
+forward and looked at these flitting whitenesses, and every now and then peered
+up to see the flying ships overhead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I don&rsquo;t like them,&rsquo; said the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently one of these patches of moonlight came to rest about them and seemed
+to be following their automobile. The king drew back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The things are confoundedly noiseless,&rsquo; said the king.
+&lsquo;It&rsquo;s like being stalked by lean white cats.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He peered again. &lsquo;That fellow is watching us,&rsquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then suddenly he gave way to panic. &lsquo;Pestovitch,&rsquo; he said,
+clutching his minister&rsquo;s arm, &lsquo;they are watching us. I&rsquo;m not
+going through with this. They are watching us. I&rsquo;m going back.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pestovitch remonstrated. &lsquo;Tell him to go back,&rsquo; said the king, and
+tried to open the window. For a few moments there was a grim struggle in the
+automobile; a gripping of wrists and a blow. &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t go through
+with it,&rsquo; repeated the king, &lsquo;I can&rsquo;t go through with
+it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But they&rsquo;ll hang us,&rsquo; said Pestovitch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Not if we were to give up now. Not if we were to surrender the bombs. It
+is you who brought me into this....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last Pestovitch compromised. There was an inn perhaps half a mile from the
+farm. They could alight there and the king could get brandy, and rest his
+nerves for a time. And if he still thought fit to go back he could go back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;See,&rsquo; said Pestovitch, &lsquo;the light has gone again.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king peered up. &lsquo;I believe he&rsquo;s following us without a
+light,&rsquo; said the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the little old dirty inn the king hung doubtful for a time, and was for
+going back and throwing himself on the mercy of the council. &lsquo;If there is
+a council,&rsquo; said Pestovitch. &lsquo;By this time your bombs may have
+settled it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But if so, these infernal aeroplanes would go.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;They may not know yet.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But, Pestovitch, why couldn&rsquo;t you do all this without me?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pestovitch made no answer for a moment. &lsquo;I was for leaving the bombs in
+their place,&rsquo; he said at last, and went to the window. About their
+conveyance shone a circle of bright light. Pestovitch had a brilliant idea.
+&lsquo;I will send my secretary out to make a kind of dispute with the driver.
+Something that will make them watch up above there. Meanwhile you and I and
+Peter will go out by the back way and up by the hedges to the farm....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was worthy of his subtle reputation and it answered passing well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In ten minutes they were tumbling over the wall of the farm-yard, wet, muddy,
+and breathless, but unobserved. But as they ran towards the barns the king gave
+vent to something between a groan and a curse, and all about them shone the
+light&mdash;and passed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But had it passed at once or lingered for just a second?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;They didn&rsquo;t see us,&rsquo; said Peter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I don&rsquo;t think they saw us,&rsquo; said the king, and stared as the
+light went swooping up the mountain side, hung for a second about a hayrick,
+and then came pouring back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;In the barn!&rsquo; cried the king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He bruised his shin against something, and then all three men were inside the
+huge steel-girdered barn in which stood the two motor hay lorries that were to
+take the bombs away. Kurt and Abel, the two brothers of Peter, had brought the
+lorries thither in daylight. They had the upper half of the loads of hay thrown
+off, ready to cover the bombs, so soon as the king should show the
+hiding-place. &lsquo;There&rsquo;s a sort of pit here,&rsquo; said the king.
+&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t light another lantern. This key of mine releases a
+ring....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a time scarcely a word was spoken in the darkness of the barn. There was
+the sound of a slab being lifted and then of feet descending a ladder into a
+pit. Then whispering and then heavy breathing as Kurt came struggling up with
+the first of the hidden bombs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;We shall do it yet,&rsquo; said the king. And then he gasped.
+&lsquo;Curse that light. Why in the name of Heaven didn&rsquo;t we shut the
+barn door?&rsquo; For the great door stood wide open and all the empty,
+lifeless yard outside and the door and six feet of the floor of the barn were
+in the blue glare of an inquiring searchlight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Shut the door, Peter,&rsquo; said Pestovitch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;No,&rsquo; cried the king, too late, as Peter went forward into the
+light. &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t show yourself!&rsquo; cried the king. Kurt made a
+step forward and plucked his brother back. For a time all five men stood still.
+It seemed that light would never go and then abruptly it was turned off,
+leaving them blinded. &lsquo;Now,&rsquo; said the king uneasily, &lsquo;now
+shut the door.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Not completely,&rsquo; cried Pestovitch. &lsquo;Leave a chink for us to
+go out by....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was hot work shifting those bombs, and the king worked for a time like a
+common man. Kurt and Abel carried the great things up and Peter brought them to
+the carts, and the king and Pestovitch helped him to place them among the hay.
+They made as little noise as they could....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Ssh!&rsquo; cried the king. &lsquo;What&rsquo;s that?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Kurt and Abel did not hear, and came blundering up the ladder with the last
+of the load.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Ssh!&rsquo; Peter ran forward to them with a whispered remonstrance. Now
+they were still.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The barn door opened a little wider, and against the dim blue light outside
+they saw the black shape of a man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Any one here?&rsquo; he asked, speaking with an Italian accent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king broke into a cold perspiration. Then Pestovitch answered: &lsquo;Only
+a poor farmer loading hay,&rsquo; he said, and picked up a huge hay fork and
+went forward softly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You load your hay at a very bad time and in a very bad light,&rsquo;
+said the man at the door, peering in. &lsquo;Have you no electric light
+here?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then suddenly he turned on an electric torch, and as he did so Pestovitch
+sprang forward. &lsquo;Get out of my barn!&rsquo; he cried, and drove the fork
+full at the intruder&rsquo;s chest. He had a vague idea that so he might stab
+the man to silence. But the man shouted loudly as the prongs pierced him and
+drove him backward, and instantly there was a sound of feet running across the
+yard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Bombs,&rsquo; cried the man upon the ground, struggling with the prongs
+in his hand, and as Pestovitch staggered forward into view with the force of
+his own thrust, he was shot through the body by one of the two new-comers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man on the ground was badly hurt but plucky. &lsquo;Bombs,&rsquo; he
+repeated, and struggled up into a kneeling position and held his electric torch
+full upon the face of the king. &lsquo;Shoot them,&rsquo; he cried, coughing
+and spitting blood, so that the halo of light round the king&rsquo;s head
+danced about.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a moment in that shivering circle of light the two men saw the king
+kneeling up in the cart and Peter on the barn floor beside him. The old fox
+looked at them sideways&mdash;snared, a white-faced evil thing. And then, as
+with a faltering suicidal heroism, he leant forward over the bomb before him,
+they fired together and shot him through the head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The upper part of his face seemed to vanish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Shoot them,&rsquo; cried the man who had been stabbed. &lsquo;Shoot them
+all!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then his light went out, and he rolled over with a groan at the feet of his
+comrades.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But each carried a light of his own, and in another moment everything in the
+barn was visible again. They shot Peter even as he held up his hands in sign of
+surrender.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kurt and Abel at the head of the ladder hesitated for a moment, and then
+plunged backward into the pit. &lsquo;If we don&rsquo;t kill them,&rsquo; said
+one of the sharpshooters, &lsquo;they&rsquo;ll blow us to rags. They&rsquo;ve
+gone down that hatchway. Come! . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Here they are. Hands up! I say. Hold your light while I shoot....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 8</h3>
+
+<p>
+It was still quite dark when his valet and Firmin came together and told the
+ex-king Egbert that the business was settled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He started up into a sitting position on the side of his bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Did he go out?&rsquo; asked the ex-king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;He is dead,&rsquo; said Firmin. &lsquo;He was shot.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ex-king reflected. &lsquo;That&rsquo;s about the best thing that could have
+happened,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Where are the bombs? In that farm-house on the
+opposite hill-side! Why! the place is in sight! Let us go. I&rsquo;ll dress. Is
+there any one in the place, Firmin, to get us a cup of coffee?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through the hungry twilight of the dawn the ex-king&rsquo;s automobile carried
+him to the farm-house where the last rebel king was lying among his bombs. The
+rim of the sky flashed, the east grew bright, and the sun was just rising over
+the hills when King Egbert reached the farm-yard. There he found the hay
+lorries drawn out from the barn with the dreadful bombs still packed upon them.
+A couple of score of aviators held the yard, and outside a few peasants stood
+in a little group and stared, ignorant as yet of what had happened. Against the
+stone wall of the farm-yard five bodies were lying neatly side by side, and
+Pestovitch had an expression of surprise on his face and the king was chiefly
+identifiable by his long white hands and his blonde moustache. The wounded
+aeronaut had been carried down to the inn. And after the ex-king had given
+directions in what manner the bombs were to be taken to the new special
+laboratories above Zurich, where they could be unpacked in an atmosphere of
+chlorine, he turned to these five still shapes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their five pairs of feet stuck out with a curious stiff unanimity....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;What else was there to do?&rsquo; he said in answer to some internal
+protest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I wonder, Firmin, if there are any more of them?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Bombs, sir?&rsquo; asked Firmin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;No, such kings....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The pitiful folly of it!&rsquo; said the ex-king, following his
+thoughts. &lsquo;Firmin, as an ex-professor of International Politics, I think
+it falls to you to bury them. There? . . . No, don&rsquo;t put them near the
+well. People will have to drink from that well. Bury them over there, some way
+off in the field.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap04"></a>CHAPTER THE FOURTH<br/>
+THE NEW PHASE</h2>
+
+<h3>Section 1</h3>
+
+<p>
+The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we may view it now
+from the clarifying standpoint of things accomplished, was in its broad issues
+a simple one. Essentially it was to place social organisation upon the new
+footing that the swift, accelerated advance of human knowledge had rendered
+necessary. The council was gathered together with the haste of a salvage
+expedition, and it was confronted with wreckage; but the wreckage was
+irreparable wreckage, and the only possibilities of the case were either the
+relapse of mankind to the agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so
+painfully or the acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social
+order. The old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy, particularism,
+and belligerency, were incompatible with the monstrous destructive power of the
+new appliances the inhuman logic of science had produced. The equilibrium could
+be restored only by civilisation destroying itself down to a level at which
+modern apparatus could no longer be produced, or by human nature adapting
+itself in its institutions to the new conditions. It was for the latter
+alternative that the assembly existed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The sudden
+development of atomic science did but precipitate and render rapid and dramatic
+a clash between the new and the customary that had been gathering since ever
+the first flint was chipped or the first fire built together. From the day when
+man contrived himself a tool and suffered another male to draw near him, he
+ceased to be altogether a thing of instinct and untroubled convictions. From
+that day forth a widening breach can be traced between his egotistical passions
+and the social need. Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead,
+and his passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and the
+tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter and wanderer and
+wonderer in his imagination outstripped their development. He was never quite
+subdued to the soil nor quite tamed to the home. Everywhere it needed teaching
+and the priest to keep him within the bounds of the plough-life and the
+beast-tending. Slowly a vast system of traditional imperatives superposed
+itself upon his instincts, imperatives that were admirably fitted to make him
+that cultivator, that cattle-mincer, who was for twice ten thousand years the
+normal man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his tilling came
+civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural surplus. It appeared as trade
+and tracks and roads, it pushed boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded
+the seas, and within its primitive courts, within temples grown rich and
+leisurely and amidst the gathering medley of the seaport towns rose speculation
+and philosophy and science, and the beginning of the new order that has at last
+established itself as human life. Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then
+with an accumulating velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole
+did not seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand. For a time
+men took up and used these new things and the new powers inadvertently as they
+came to him, recking nothing of the consequences. For endless generations
+change led him very gently. But when he had been led far enough, change
+quickened the pace. It was with a series of shocks that he realised at last
+that he was living the old life less and less and a new life more and more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between the old way of
+living and the new were intense. They were far intenser than they had been even
+at the collapse of the Roman imperial system. On the one hand was the ancient
+life of the family and the small community and the petty industry, on the other
+was a new life on a larger scale, with remoter horizons and a strange sense of
+purpose. Already it was growing clear that men must live on one side or the
+other. One could not have little tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the
+same market, sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and
+arrows and aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or illiterate peasant
+industries and power-driven factories in the same world. And still less it was
+possible that one could have the ideas and ambitions and greed and jealousy of
+peasants equipped with the vast appliances of the new age. If there had been no
+atomic bombs to bring together most of the directing intelligence of the world
+to that hasty conference at Brissago, there would still have been, extended
+over great areas and a considerable space of time perhaps, a less formal
+conference of responsible and understanding people upon the perplexities of
+this world-wide opposition. If the work of Holsten had been spread over
+centuries and imparted to the world by imperceptible degrees, it would
+nevertheless have made it necessary for men to take counsel upon and set a plan
+for the future. Indeed already there had been accumulating for a hundred years
+before the crisis a literature of foresight; there was a whole mass of
+&lsquo;Modern State&rsquo; scheming available for the conference to go upon.
+These bombs did but accentuate and dramatise an already developing problem.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 2</h3>
+
+<p>
+This assembly was no leap of exceptional minds and super-intelligences into the
+control of affairs. It was teachable, its members trailed ideas with them to
+the gathering, but these were the consequences of the &lsquo;moral shock&rsquo;
+the bombs had given humanity, and there is no reason for supposing its
+individual personalities were greatly above the average. It would be possible
+to cite a thousand instances of error and inefficiency in its proceedings due
+to the forgetfulness, irritability, or fatigue of its members. It experimented
+considerably and blundered often. Excepting Holsten, whose gift was highly
+specialised, it is questionable whether there was a single man of the first
+order of human quality in the gathering. But it had a modest fear of itself,
+and a consequent directness that gave it a general distinction. There was, of
+course, a noble simplicity about Leblanc, but even of him it may be asked
+whether he was not rather good and honest-minded than in the fuller sense
+great.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ex-king had wisdom and a certain romantic dash, he was a man among
+thousands, even if he was not a man among millions, but his memoirs, and indeed
+his decision to write memoirs, give the quality of himself and his associates.
+The book makes admirable but astonishing reading. Therein he takes the great
+work the council was doing for granted as a little child takes God. It is as if
+he had no sense of it at all. He tells amusing trivialities about his cousin
+Wilhelm and his secretary Firmin, he pokes fun at the American president, who
+was, indeed, rather a little accident of the political machine than a
+representative American, and he gives a long description of how he was lost for
+three days in the mountains in the company of the only Japanese member, a loss
+that seems to have caused no serious interruption of the work of the
+council....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Brissago conference has been written about time after time, as though it
+were a gathering of the very flower of humanity. Perched up there by the freak
+or wisdom of Leblanc, it had a certain Olympian quality, and the natural
+tendency of the human mind to elaborate such a resemblance would have us give
+its members the likenesses of gods. It would be equally reasonable to compare
+it to one of those enforced meetings upon the mountain-tops that must have
+occurred in the opening phases of the Deluge. The strength of the council lay
+not in itself but in the circumstances that had quickened its intelligence,
+dispelled its vanities, and emancipated it from traditional ambitions and
+antagonisms. It was stripped of the accumulation of centuries, a naked
+government with all that freedom of action that nakedness affords. And its
+problems were set before it with a plainness that was out of all comparison
+with the complicated and perplexing intimations of the former time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The world on which the council looked did indeed present a task quite
+sufficiently immense and altogether too urgent for any wanton indulgence in
+internal dissension. It may be interesting to sketch in a few phrases the
+condition of mankind at the close of the period of warring states, in the year
+of crisis that followed the release of atomic power. It was a world
+extraordinarily limited when one measures it by later standards, and it was now
+in a state of the direst confusion and distress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It must be remembered that at this time men had still to spread into enormous
+areas of the land surface of the globe. There were vast mountain wildernesses,
+forest wildernesses, sandy deserts, and frozen lands. Men still clung closely
+to water and arable soil in temperate or sub-tropical climates, they lived
+abundantly only in river valleys, and all their great cities had grown upon
+large navigable rivers or close to ports upon the sea. Over great areas even of
+this suitable land flies and mosquitoes, armed with infection, had so far
+defeated human invasion, and under their protection the virgin forests remained
+untouched. Indeed, the whole world even in its most crowded districts was
+filthy with flies and swarming with needless insect life to an extent which is
+now almost incredible. A population map of the world in 1950 would have
+followed seashore and river course so closely in its darker shading as to give
+an impression that <i>homo sapiens</i> was an amphibious animal. His roads and
+railways lay also along the lower contours, only here and there to pierce some
+mountain barrier or reach some holiday resort did they clamber above 3000 feet.
+And across the ocean his traffic passed in definite lines; there were hundreds
+of thousands of square miles of ocean no ship ever traversed except by
+mischance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet he had not yet pierced for
+five miles, and it was still not forty years since, with a tragic pertinacity,
+he had clambered to the poles of the earth. The limitless mineral wealth of the
+Arctic and Antarctic circles was still buried beneath vast accumulations of
+immemorial ice, and the secret riches of the inner zones of the crust were
+untapped and indeed unsuspected. The higher mountain regions were known only to
+a sprinkling of guide-led climbers and the frequenters of a few gaunt hotels,
+and the vast rainless belts of land that lay across the continental masses,
+from Gobi to Sahara and along the backbone of America, with their perfect air,
+their daily baths of blazing sunshine, their nights of cool serenity and
+glowing stars, and their reservoirs of deep-lying water, were as yet only
+desolations of fear and death to the common imagination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of population
+which had gathered into the enormous dingy town centres of that period were
+dispossessed and scattered disastrously over the surrounding rural areas. It
+was as if some brutal force, grown impatient at last at man&rsquo;s blindness,
+had with the deliberate intention of a rearrangement of population upon more
+wholesome lines, shaken the world. The great industrial regions and the large
+cities that had escaped the bombs were, because of their complete economic
+collapse, in almost as tragic plight as those that blazed, and the country-side
+was disordered by a multitude of wandering and lawless strangers. In some parts
+of the world famine raged, and in many regions there was plague.... The plains
+of north India, which had become more and more dependent for the general
+welfare on the railways and that great system of irrigation canals which the
+malignant section of the patriots had destroyed, were in a state of peculiar
+distress, whole villages lay dead together, no man heeding, and the very tigers
+and panthers that preyed upon the emaciated survivors crawled back infected
+into the jungle to perish. Large areas of China were a prey to brigand
+bands....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of the explosion
+of the atomic bombs survives. There are, of course, innumerable allusions and
+partial records, and it is from these that subsequent ages must piece together
+the image of these devastations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The phenomena, it must be remembered, changed greatly from day to day, and even
+from hour to hour, as the exploding bomb shifted its position, threw off
+fragments or came into contact with water or a fresh texture of soil. Barnet,
+who came within forty miles of Paris early in October, is concerned chiefly
+with his account of the social confusion of the country-side and the problems
+of his command, but he speaks of heaped cloud masses of steam. &lsquo;All along
+the sky to the south-west&rsquo; and of a red glare beneath these at night.
+Parts of Paris were still burning, and numbers of people were camped in the
+fields even at this distance watching over treasured heaps of salvaged loot. He
+speaks too of the distant rumbling of the explosion&mdash;&lsquo;like trains
+going over iron bridges.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the &lsquo;continuous
+reverberations,&rsquo; or of the &lsquo;thudding and hammering,&rsquo; or some
+such phrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of steam, from which rain
+would fall suddenly in torrents and amidst which lightning played. Drawing
+nearer to Paris an observer would have found the salvage camps increasing in
+number and blocking up the villages, and large numbers of people, often
+starving and ailing, camping under improvised tents because there was no place
+for them to go. The sky became more and more densely overcast until at last it
+blotted out the light of day and left nothing but a dull red glare
+&lsquo;extraordinarily depressing to the spirit.&rsquo; In this dull glare,
+great numbers of people were still living, clinging to their houses and in many
+cases subsisting in a state of partial famine upon the produce in their gardens
+and the stores in the shops of the provision dealers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Coming in still closer, the investigator would have reached the police cordon,
+which was trying to check the desperate enterprise of those who would return to
+their homes or rescue their more valuable possessions within the &lsquo;zone of
+imminent danger.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That zone was rather arbitrarily defined. If our spectator could have got
+permission to enter it, he would have entered also a zone of uproar, a zone of
+perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange purplish-red light, and quivering and
+swaying with the incessant explosion of the radio-active substance. Whole
+blocks of buildings were alight and burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged
+flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in comparison with the
+full-bodied crimson glare beyond. The shells of other edifices already burnt
+rose, pierced by rows of window sockets against the red-lit mist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every step farther would have been as dangerous as a descent within the crater
+of an active volcano. These spinning, boiling bomb centres would shift or break
+unexpectedly into new regions, great fragments of earth or drain or masonry
+suddenly caught by a jet of disruptive force might come flying by the
+explorer&rsquo;s head, or the ground yawn a fiery grave beneath his feet. Few
+who adventured into these areas of destruction and survived attempted any
+repetition of their experiences. There are stories of puffs of luminous,
+radio-active vapour drifting sometimes scores of miles from the bomb centre and
+killing and scorching all they overtook. And the first conflagrations from the
+Paris centre spread westward half-way to the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of red-lit ruins had a peculiar
+dryness and a blistering quality, so that it set up a soreness of the skin and
+lungs that was very difficult to heal....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such was the last state of Paris, and such on a larger scale was the condition
+of affairs in Chicago, and the same fate had overtaken Berlin, Moscow, Tokio,
+the eastern half of London, Toulon, Kiel, and two hundred and eighteen other
+centres of population or armament. Each was a flaming centre of radiant
+destruction that only time could quench, that indeed in many instances time has
+still to quench. To this day, though indeed with a constantly diminishing
+uproar and vigour, these explosions continue. In the map of nearly every
+country of the world three or four or more red circles, a score of miles in
+diameter, mark the position of the dying atomic bombs and the death areas that
+men have been forced to abandon around them. Within these areas perished
+museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of masterpieces, and a vast
+accumulation of human achievement, whose charred remains lie buried, a legacy
+of curious material that only future generations may hope to examine....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 3</h3>
+
+<p>
+The state of mind of the dispossessed urban population which swarmed and
+perished so abundantly over the country-side during the dark days of the
+autumnal months that followed the Last War, was one of blank despair. Barnet
+gives sketch after sketch of groups of these people, camped among the vineyards
+of Champagne, as he saw them during his period of service with the army of
+pacification.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was, for example, that &lsquo;man-milliner&rsquo; who came out from a
+field beside the road that rises up eastward out of Epernay, and asked how
+things were going in Paris. He was, says Barnet, a round-faced man, dressed
+very neatly in black&mdash;so neatly that it was amazing to discover he was
+living close at hand in a tent made of carpets&mdash;and he had &lsquo;an
+urbane but insistent manner,&rsquo; a carefully trimmed moustache and beard,
+expressive eyebrows, and hair very neatly brushed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;No one goes into Paris,&rsquo; said Barnet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But, Monsieur, that is very unenterprising,&rsquo; the man by the
+wayside submitted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The danger is too great. The radiations eat into people&rsquo;s
+skins.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The eyebrows protested. &lsquo;But is nothing to be done?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Nothing can be done.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But, Monsieur, it is extraordinarily inconvenient, this living in exile
+and waiting. My wife and my little boy suffer extremely. There is a lack of
+amenity. And the season advances. I say nothing of the expense and difficulty
+in obtaining provisions.... When does Monsieur think that something will be
+done to render Paris&mdash;possible?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barnet considered his interlocutor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;m told,&rsquo; said Barnet, &lsquo;that Paris is not likely to
+be possible again for several generations.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Oh! but this is preposterous! Consider, Monsieur! What are people like
+ourselves to do in the meanwhile? I am a costumier. All my connections and
+interests, above all my style, demand Paris....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barnet considered the sky, from which a light rain was beginning to fall, the
+wide fields about them from which the harvest had been taken, the trimmed
+poplars by the wayside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Naturally,&rsquo; he agreed, &lsquo;you want to go to Paris. But Paris
+is over.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Over!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Finished.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But then, Monsieur&mdash;what is to become&mdash;of <i>me?</i>&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barnet turned his face westward, whither the white road led.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Where else, for example, may I hope to find&mdash;opportunity?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barnet made no reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Perhaps on the Riviera. Or at some such place as Homburg. Or some place
+perhaps.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;All that,&rsquo; said Barnet, accepting for the first time facts that
+had lain evident in his mind for weeks; &lsquo;all that must be over,
+too.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a pause. Then the voice beside him broke out. &lsquo;But, Monsieur,
+it is impossible! It leaves&mdash;nothing.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;No. Not very much.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;One cannot suddenly begin to grow potatoes!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It would be good if Monsieur could bring himself&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;To the life of a peasant! And my wife&mdash;&mdash;You do not know the
+distinguished delicacy of my wife, a refined helplessness, a peculiar dependent
+charm. Like some slender tropical creeper&mdash;with great white flowers....
+But all this is foolish talk. It is impossible that Paris, which has survived
+so many misfortunes, should not presently revive.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I do not think it will ever revive. Paris is finished. London, too, I am
+told&mdash;Berlin. All the great capitals were stricken....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But&mdash;&mdash;! Monsieur must permit me to differ.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It is so.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It is impossible. Civilisations do not end in this manner. Mankind will
+insist.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;On Paris?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;On Paris.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Monsieur, you might as well hope to go down the Maelstrom and resume
+business there.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I am content, Monsieur, with my own faith.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The winter comes on. Would not Monsieur be wiser to seek a house?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Farther from Paris? No, Monsieur. But it is not possible, Monsieur, what
+you say, and you are under a tremendous mistake.... Indeed you are in error....
+I asked merely for information....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;When last I saw him,&rsquo; said Barnet, &lsquo;he was standing under
+the signpost at the crest of the hill, gazing wistfully, yet it seemed to me a
+little doubtfully, now towards Paris, and altogether heedless of a drizzling
+rain that was wetting him through and through....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 4</h3>
+
+<p>
+This effect of chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly apprehended deepens
+as Barnet&rsquo;s record passes on to tell of the approach of winter. It was
+too much for the great mass of those unwilling and incompetent nomads to
+realise that an age had ended, that the old help and guidance existed no
+longer, that times would not mend again, however patiently they held out. They
+were still in many cases looking to Paris when the first snowflakes of that
+pitiless January came swirling about them. The story grows grimmer....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If it is less monstrously tragic after Barnet&rsquo;s return to England, it is,
+if anything, harder. England was a spectacle of fear-embittered householders,
+hiding food, crushing out robbery, driving the starving wanderers from every
+faltering place upon the roads lest they should die inconveniently and
+reproachfully on the doorsteps of those who had failed to urge them onward....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The remnants of the British troops left France finally in March, after urgent
+representations from the provisional government at Orleans that they could be
+supported no longer. They seem to have been a fairly well-behaved, but highly
+parasitic force throughout, though Barnet is clearly of opinion that they did
+much to suppress sporadic brigandage and maintain social order. He came home to
+a famine-stricken country, and his picture of the England of that spring is one
+of miserable patience and desperate expedients. The country was suffering much
+more than France, because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on which it
+had hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, and boiled
+nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid off. On the way
+thither they saw four men hanging from the telegraph posts by the roadside, who
+had been hung for stealing swedes. The labour refuges of Kent, he discovered,
+were feeding their crowds of casual wanderers on bread into which clay and
+sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there was a shortage of even such fare as
+that. He himself struck across country to Winchester, fearing to approach the
+bomb-poisoned district round London, and at Winchester he had the luck to be
+taken on as one of the wireless assistants at the central station and given
+regular rations. The station stood in a commanding position on the chalk hill
+that overlooks the town from the east....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thence he must have assisted in the transmission of the endless cipher messages
+that preceded the gathering at Brissago, and there it was that the Brissago
+proclamation of the end of the war and the establishment of a world government
+came under his hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was feeling ill and apathetic that day, and he did not realise what it was
+he was transcribing. He did it mechanically, as a part of his tedious duty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Afterwards there came a rush of messages arising out of the declaration that
+strained him very much, and in the evening when he was relieved, he ate his
+scanty supper and then went out upon the little balcony before the station, to
+smoke and rest his brains after this sudden and as yet inexplicable press of
+duty. It was a very beautiful, still evening. He fell talking to a fellow
+operator, and for the first time, he declares, &lsquo;I began to understand
+what it was all about. I began to see just what enormous issues had been under
+my hands for the past four hours. But I became incredulous after my first
+stimulation. &ldquo;This is some sort of Bunkum,&rdquo; I said very sagely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;My colleague was more hopeful. &ldquo;It means an end to bomb-throwing
+and destruction,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It means that presently corn will come
+from America.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;&ldquo;Who is going to send corn when there is no more value in
+money?&rdquo; I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Suddenly we were startled by a clashing from the town below. The
+cathedral bells, which had been silent ever since I had come into the district,
+were beginning, with a sort of rheumatic difficulty, to ring. Presently they
+warmed a little to the work, and we realised what was going on. They were
+ringing a peal. We listened with an unbelieving astonishment and looking into
+each other&rsquo;s yellow faces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;&ldquo;They mean it,&rdquo; said my colleague.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;&ldquo;But what can they do now?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;Everything is
+broken down....&rdquo;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And on that sentence, with an unexpected artistry, Barnet abruptly ends his
+story.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 5</h3>
+
+<p>
+From the first the new government handled affairs with a certain greatness of
+spirit. Indeed, it was inevitable that they should act greatly. From the first
+they had to see the round globe as one problem; it was impossible any longer to
+deal with it piece by piece. They had to secure it universally from any fresh
+outbreak of atomic destruction, and they had to ensure a permanent and
+universal pacification. On this capacity to grasp and wield the whole round
+globe their existence depended. There was no scope for any further performance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So soon as the seizure of the existing supplies of atomic ammunition and the
+apparatus for synthesising Carolinum was assured, the disbanding or social
+utilisation of the various masses of troops still under arms had to be
+arranged, the salvation of the year&rsquo;s harvests, and the feeding, housing,
+and employment of the drifting millions of homeless people. In Canada, in South
+America, and Asiatic Russia there were vast accumulations of provision that was
+immovable only because of the breakdown of the monetary and credit systems.
+These had to be brought into the famine districts very speedily if entire
+depopulation was to be avoided, and their transportation and the revival of
+communications generally absorbed a certain proportion of the soldiery and more
+able unemployed. The task of housing assumed gigantic dimensions, and from
+building camps the housing committee of the council speedily passed to
+constructions of a more permanent type. They found far less friction than might
+have been expected in turning the loose population on their hands to these
+things. People were extraordinarily tamed by that year of suffering and death;
+they were disillusioned of their traditions, bereft of once obstinate
+prejudices; they felt foreign in a strange world, and ready to follow any
+confident leadership. The orders of the new government came with the best of
+all credentials, rations. The people everywhere were as easy to control, one of
+the old labour experts who had survived until the new time witnesses, &lsquo;as
+gangs of emigrant workers in a new land.&rsquo; And now it was that the social
+possibilities of the atomic energy began to appear. The new machinery that had
+come into existence before the last wars increased and multiplied, and the
+council found itself not only with millions of hands at its disposal but with
+power and apparatus that made its first conceptions of the work it had to do
+seem pitifully timid. The camps that were planned in iron and deal were built
+in stone and brass; the roads that were to have been mere iron tracks became
+spacious ways that insisted upon architecture; the cultivations of foodstuffs
+that were to have supplied emergency rations, were presently, with
+synthesisers, fertilisers, actinic light, and scientific direction, in excess
+of every human need.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The government had begun with the idea of temporarily reconstituting the social
+and economic system that had prevailed before the first coming of the atomic
+engine, because it was to this system that the ideas and habits of the great
+mass of the world&rsquo;s dispossessed population was adapted. Subsequent
+rearrangement it had hoped to leave to its successors&mdash;whoever they might
+be. But this, it became more and more manifest, was absolutely impossible. As
+well might the council have proposed a revival of slavery. The capitalist
+system had already been smashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless gold
+and energy; it fell to pieces at the first endeavour to stand it up again.
+Already before the war half of the industrial class had been out of work, the
+attempt to put them back into wages employment on the old lines was futile from
+the outset&mdash;the absolute shattering of the currency system alone would
+have been sufficient to prevent that, and it was necessary therefore to take
+over the housing, feeding, and clothing of this worldwide multitude without
+exacting any return in labour whatever. In a little while the mere absence of
+occupation for so great a multitude of people everywhere became an evident
+social danger, and the government was obliged to resort to such devices as
+simple decorative work in wood and stone, the manufacture of hand-woven
+textiles, fruit-growing, flower-growing, and landscape gardening on a grand
+scale to keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying wages to the
+younger adults for attendance at schools that would equip them to use the new
+atomic machinery.... So quite insensibly the council drifted into a complete
+reorganisation of urban and industrial life, and indeed of the entire social
+system.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ideas that are unhampered by political intrigue or financial considerations
+have a sweeping way with them, and before a year was out the records of the
+council show clearly that it was rising to its enormous opportunity, and partly
+through its own direct control and partly through a series of specific
+committees, it was planning a new common social order for the entire population
+of the earth. &lsquo;There can be no real social stability or any general human
+happiness while large areas of the world and large classes of people are in a
+phase of civilisation different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now
+to have great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally accepted
+social purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the rest.&rsquo; So the
+council expressed its conception of the problem it had to solve. The peasant,
+the field-worker, and all barbaric cultivators were at an &lsquo;economic
+disadvantage&rsquo; to the more mobile and educated classes, and the logic of
+the situation compelled the council to take up systematically the supersession
+of this stratum by a more efficient organisation of production. It developed a
+scheme for the progressive establishment throughout the world of the
+&lsquo;modern system&rsquo; in agriculture, a system that should give the full
+advantages of a civilised life to every agricultural worker, and this
+replacement has been going on right up to the present day. The central idea of
+the modern system is the substitution of cultivating guilds for the individual
+cultivator, and for cottage and village life altogether. These guilds are
+associations of men and women who take over areas of arable or pasture land,
+and make themselves responsible for a certain average produce. They are bodies
+small enough as a rule to be run on a strictly democratic basis, and large
+enough to supply all the labour, except for a certain assistance from
+townspeople during the harvest, needed upon the land farmed. They have
+watchers&rsquo; bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but the ease and
+the costlessness of modern locomotion enables them to maintain a group of
+residences in the nearest town with a common dining-room and club house, and
+usually also a guild house in the national or provincial capital. Already this
+system has abolished a distinctively &lsquo;rustic&rsquo; population throughout
+vast areas of the old world, where it has prevailed immemorially. That shy,
+unstimulated life of the lonely hovel, the narrow scandals and petty spites and
+persecutions of the small village, that hoarding, half inanimate existence away
+from books, thought, or social participation and in constant contact with
+cattle, pigs, poultry, and their excrement, is passing away out of human
+experience. In a little while it will be gone altogether. In the nineteenth
+century it had already ceased to be a necessary human state, and only the
+absence of any collective intelligence and an imagined need for tough and
+unintelligent soldiers and for a prolific class at a low level, prevented its
+systematic replacement at that time....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And while this settlement of the country was in progress, the urban camps of
+the first phase of the council&rsquo;s activities were rapidly developing,
+partly through the inherent forces of the situation and partly through the
+council&rsquo;s direction, into a modern type of town....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 6</h3>
+
+<p>
+It is characteristic of the manner in which large enterprises forced themselves
+upon the Brissago council, that it was not until the end of the first year of
+their administration and then only with extreme reluctance that they would take
+up the manifest need for a <i>lingua franca</i> for the world. They seem to
+have given little attention to the various theoretical universal languages
+which were proposed to them. They wished to give as little trouble to hasty and
+simple people as possible, and the world-wide distribution of English gave them
+a bias for it from the beginning. The extreme simplicity of its grammar was
+also in its favour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not without some sacrifices that the English-speaking peoples were
+permitted the satisfaction of hearing their speech used universally. The
+language was shorn of a number of grammatical peculiarities, the distinctive
+forms for the subjunctive mood for example and most of its irregular plurals
+were abolished; its spelling was systematised and adapted to the vowel sounds
+in use upon the continent of Europe, and a process of incorporating foreign
+nouns and verbs commenced that speedily reached enormous proportions. Within
+ten years from the establishment of the World Republic the New English
+Dictionary had swelled to include a vocabulary of 250,000 words, and a man of
+1900 would have found considerable difficulty in reading an ordinary newspaper.
+On the other hand, the men of the new time could still appreciate the older
+English literature.... Certain minor acts of uniformity accompanied this larger
+one. The idea of a common understanding and a general simplification of
+intercourse once it was accepted led very naturally to the universal
+establishment of the metric system of weights and measures, and to the
+disappearance of the various makeshift calendars that had hitherto confused
+chronology. The year was divided into thirteen months of four weeks each, and
+New Year&rsquo;s Day and Leap Year&rsquo;s Day were made holidays, and did not
+count at all in the ordinary week. So the weeks and the months were brought
+into correspondence. And moreover, as the king put it to Firmin, it was decided
+to &lsquo;nail down Easter.&rsquo; . . . In these matters, as in so many
+matters, the new civilisation came as a simplification of ancient
+complications; the history of the calendar throughout the world is a history of
+inadequate adjustments, of attempts to fix seed-time and midwinter that go back
+into the very beginning of human society; and this final rectification had a
+symbolic value quite beyond its practical convenience. But the council would
+have no rash nor harsh innovations, no strange names for the months, and no
+alteration in the numbering of the years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The world had already been put upon one universal monetary basis. For some
+months after the accession of the council, the world&rsquo;s affairs had been
+carried on without any sound currency at all. Over great regions money was
+still in use, but with the most extravagant variations in price and the most
+disconcerting fluctuations of public confidence. The ancient rarity of gold
+upon which the entire system rested was gone. Gold was now a waste product in
+the release of atomic energy, and it was plain that no metal could be the basis
+of the monetary system again. Henceforth all coins must be token coins. Yet the
+whole world was accustomed to metallic money, and a vast proportion of existing
+human relationships had grown up upon a cash basis, and were almost
+inconceivable without that convenient liquidating factor. It seemed absolutely
+necessary to the life of the social organisation to have some sort of currency,
+and the council had therefore to discover some real value upon which to rest
+it. Various such apparently stable values as land and hours of work were
+considered. Ultimately the government, which was now in possession of most of
+the supplies of energy-releasing material, fixed a certain number of units of
+energy as the value of a gold sovereign, declared a sovereign to be worth
+exactly twenty marks, twenty-five francs, five dollars, and so forth, with the
+other current units of the world, and undertook, under various qualifications
+and conditions, to deliver energy upon demand as payment for every sovereign
+presented. On the whole, this worked satisfactorily. They saved the face of the
+pound sterling. Coin was rehabilitated, and after a phase of price
+fluctuations, began to settle down to definite equivalents and uses again, with
+names and everyday values familiar to the common run of people....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 7</h3>
+
+<p>
+As the Brissago council came to realise that what it had supposed to be
+temporary camps of refugees were rapidly developing into great towns of a new
+type, and that it was remoulding the world in spite of itself, it decided to
+place this work of redistributing the non-agricultural population in the hands
+of a compactor and better qualified special committee. That committee is now,
+far more than the council of any other of its delegated committees, the active
+government of the world. Developed from an almost invisible germ of
+&lsquo;town-planning&rsquo; that came obscurely into existence in Europe or
+America (the question is still in dispute) somewhere in the closing decades of
+the nineteenth century, its work, the continual active planning and replanning
+of the world as a place of human habitation, is now so to speak the collective
+material activity of the race. The spontaneous, disorderly spreadings and
+recessions of populations, as aimless and mechanical as the trickling of spilt
+water, which was the substance of history for endless years, giving rise here
+to congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and everywhere to a
+discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only picturesque, is at an
+end. Men spread now, with the whole power of the race to aid them, into every
+available region of the earth. Their cities are no longer tethered to running
+water and the proximity of cultivation, their plans are no longer affected by
+strategic considerations or thoughts of social insecurity. The aeroplane and
+the nearly costless mobile car have abolished trade routes; a common language
+and a universal law have abolished a thousand restraining inconveniences, and
+so an astonishing dispersal of habitations has begun. One may live anywhere.
+And so it is that our cities now are true social gatherings, each with a
+character of its own and distinctive interests of its own, and most of them
+with a common occupation. They lie out in the former deserts, these long wasted
+sun-baths of the race, they tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote
+islands, and bask on broad lagoons. For a time the whole tendency of mankind
+was to desert the river valleys in which the race had been cradled for half a
+million years, but now that the War against Flies has been waged so
+successfully that this pestilential branch of life is nearly extinct, they are
+returning thither with a renewed appetite for gardens laced by watercourses,
+for pleasant living amidst islands and houseboats and bridges, and for
+nocturnal lanterns reflected by the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and more a
+builder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceases to be a cultivator of the
+soil the returns of the Redistribution Committee showed. Every year the work of
+our scientific laboratories increases the productivity and simplifies the
+labour of those who work upon the soil, and the food now of the whole world is
+produced by less than one per cent. of its population, a percentage which still
+tends to decrease. Far fewer people are needed upon the land than training and
+proclivity dispose towards it, and as a consequence of this excess of human
+attention, the garden side of life, the creation of groves and lawns and vast
+regions of beautiful flowers, has expanded enormously and continues to expand.
+For, as agricultural method intensifies and the quota is raised, one farm
+association after another, availing itself of the 1975 regulations, elects to
+produce a public garden and pleasaunce in the place of its former fields, and
+the area of freedom and beauty is increased. And the chemists&rsquo; triumphs
+of synthesis, which could now give us an entirely artificial food, remain
+largely in abeyance because it is so much more pleasant and interesting to eat
+natural produce and to grow such things upon the soil. Each year adds to the
+variety of our fruits and the delightfulness of our flowers.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 8</h3>
+
+<p>
+The early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain recrudescence of
+political adventure. There was, it is rather curious to note, no revival of
+separatism after the face of King Ferdinand Charles had vanished from the sight
+of men, but in a number of countries, as the first urgent physical needs were
+met, there appeared a variety of personalities having this in common, that they
+sought to revive political trouble and clamber by its aid to positions of
+importance and satisfaction. In no case did they speak in the name of kings,
+and it is clear that monarchy must have been far gone in obsolescence before
+the twentieth century began, but they made appeals to the large survivals of
+nationalist and racial feeling that were everywhere to be found, they alleged
+with considerable justice that the council was overriding racial and national
+customs and disregarding religious rules. The great plain of India was
+particularly prolific in such agitators. The revival of newspapers, which had
+largely ceased during the terrible year because of the dislocation of the
+coinage, gave a vehicle and a method of organisation to these complaints. At
+first the council disregarded this developing opposition, and then it
+recognised it with an entirely devastating frankness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never, of course, had there been so provisional a government. It was of an
+extravagant illegality. It was, indeed, hardly more than a club, a club of
+about a hundred persons. At the outset there were ninety-three, and these were
+increased afterwards by the issue of invitations which more than balanced its
+deaths, to as many at one time as one hundred and nineteen. Always its
+constitution has been miscellaneous. At no time were these invitations issued
+with an admission that they recognised a right. The old institution or monarchy
+had come out unexpectedly well in the light of the new <i>régime</i>. Nine of
+the original members of the first government were crowned heads who had
+resigned their separate sovereignty, and at no time afterwards did the number
+of its royal members sink below six. In their case there was perhaps a kind of
+attenuated claim to rule, but except for them and the still more infinitesimal
+pretensions of one or two ex-presidents of republics, no member of the council
+had even the shade of a right to his participation in its power. It was
+natural, therefore, that its opponents should find a common ground in a clamour
+for representative government, and build high hopes upon a return, to
+parliamentary institutions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The council decided to give them everything they wanted, but in a form that
+suited ill with their aspirations. It became at one stroke a representative
+body. It became, indeed, magnificently representative. It became so
+representative that the politicians were drowned in a deluge of votes. Every
+adult of either sex from pole to pole was given a vote, and the world was
+divided into ten constituencies, which voted on the same day by means of a
+simple modification of the world post. Membership of the government, it was
+decided, must be for life, save in the exceptional case of a recall; but the
+elections, which were held quinquennially, were arranged to add fifty members
+on each occasion. The method of proportional representation with one
+transferable vote was adopted, and the voter might also write upon his voting
+paper in a specially marked space, the name of any of his representatives that
+he wished to recall. A ruler was recallable by as many votes as the quota by
+which he had been elected, and the original members by as many votes in any
+constituency as the returning quotas in the first election.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon these conditions the council submitted itself very cheerfully to the
+suffrages of the world. None of its members were recalled, and its fifty new
+associates, which included twenty-seven which it had seen fit to recommend,
+were of an altogether too miscellaneous quality to disturb the broad trend of
+its policy. Its freedom from rules or formalities prevented any obstructive
+proceedings, and when one of the two newly arrived Home Rule members for India
+sought for information how to bring in a bill, they learnt simply that bills
+were not brought in. They asked for the speaker, and were privileged to hear
+much ripe wisdom from the ex-king Egbert, who was now consciously among the
+seniors of the gathering. Thereafter they were baffled men....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But already by that time the work of the council was drawing to an end. It was
+concerned not so much for the continuation of its construction as for the
+preservation of its accomplished work from the dramatic instincts of the
+politician.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The life of the race becomes indeed more and more independent of the formal
+government. The council, in its opening phase, was heroic in spirit; a
+dragon-slaying body, it slashed out of existence a vast, knotted tangle of
+obsolete ideas and clumsy and jealous proprietorships; it secured by a noble
+system of institutional precautions, freedom of inquiry, freedom of criticism,
+free communications, a common basis of education and understanding, and freedom
+from economic oppression. With that its creative task was accomplished. It
+became more and more an established security and less and less an active
+intervention. There is nothing in our time to correspond with the continual
+petty making and entangling of laws in an atmosphere of contention that is
+perhaps the most perplexing aspect of constitutional history in the nineteenth
+century. In that age they seem to have been perpetually making laws when we
+should alter regulations. The work of change which we delegate to these
+scientific committees of specific general direction which have the special
+knowledge needed, and which are themselves dominated by the broad intellectual
+process of the community, was in those days inextricably mixed up with
+legislation. They fought over the details; we should as soon think of fighting
+over the arrangement of the parts of a machine. We know nowadays that such
+things go on best within laws, as life goes on between earth and sky. And so it
+is that government gathers now for a day or so in each year under the sunshine
+of Brissago when Saint Bruno&rsquo;s lilies are in flower, and does little more
+than bless the work of its committees. And even these committees are less
+originative and more expressive of the general thought than they were at first.
+It becomes difficult to mark out the particular directive personalities of the
+world. Continually we are less personal. Every good thought contributes now,
+and every able brain falls within that informal and dispersed kingship which
+gathers together into one purpose the energies of the race.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 9</h3>
+
+<p>
+It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human existence in which
+&lsquo;politics,&rsquo; that is to say a partisan interference with the ruling
+sanities of the world, will be the dominant interest among serious men. We seem
+to have entered upon an entirely new phase in history in which contention as
+distinguished from rivalry, has almost abruptly ceased to be the usual
+occupation, and has become at most a subdued and hidden and discredited thing.
+Contentious professions cease to be an honourable employment for men. The peace
+between nations is also a peace between individuals. We live in a world that
+comes of age. Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of
+life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the curious learner, and man
+the creative artist, come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of
+existence by a less ignoble adventure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is no natural life of man. He is, and always has been, a sheath of varied
+and even incompatible possibilities, a palimpsest of inherited dispositions. It
+was the habit of many writers in the early twentieth century to speak of
+competition and the narrow, private life of trade and saving and suspicious
+isolation as though such things were in some exceptional way proper to the
+human constitution, and as though openness of mind and a preference for
+achievement over possession were abnormal and rather unsubstantial qualities.
+How wrong that was the history of the decades immediately following the
+establishment of the world republic witnesses. Once the world was released from
+the hardening insecurities of a needless struggle for life that was
+collectively planless and individually absorbing, it became apparent that there
+was in the vast mass of people a long, smothered passion to make things. The
+world broke out into making, and at first mainly into æsthetic making. This
+phase of history, which has been not inaptly termed the
+&lsquo;Efflorescence,&rsquo; is still, to a large extent, with us. The majority
+of our population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in the world
+lies no longer with necessities but with their elaboration, decoration, and
+refinement. There has been an evident change in the quality of this making
+during recent years. It becomes more purposeful than it was, losing something
+of its first elegance and prettiness and gaining in intensity; but that is a
+change rather of hue than of nature. That comes with a deepening philosophy and
+a sounder education. For the first joyous exercises of fancy we perceive now
+the deliberation of a more constructive imagination. There is a natural order
+in these things, and art comes before science as the satisfaction of more
+elemental needs must come before art, and as play and pleasure come in a human
+life before the development of a settled purpose....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work must have
+struggled in man against the limitations imposed upon him by his social
+ineptitude. It was a long smouldering fire that flamed out at last in all these
+things. The evidence of a pathetic, perpetually thwarted urgency to make
+something, is one of the most touching aspects of the relics and records of our
+immediate ancestors. There exists still in the death area about the London
+bombs, a region of deserted small homes that furnish the most illuminating
+comment on the old state of affairs. These homes are entirely horrible,
+uniform, square, squat, hideously proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in
+some respects quite filthy, only people in complete despair of anything better
+could have lived in them, but to each is attached a ridiculous little rectangle
+of land called &lsquo;the garden,&rsquo; containing usually a prop for drying
+clothes and a loathsome box of offal, the dustbin, full of egg-shells, cinders,
+and such-like refuse. Now that one may go about this region in comparative
+security&mdash;for the London radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable
+proportions&mdash;it is possible to trace in nearly every one of these gardens
+some effort to make. Here it is a poor little plank summer-house, here it is a
+&lsquo;fountain&rsquo; of bricks and oyster-shells, here a
+&lsquo;rockery,&rsquo; here a &lsquo;workshop.&rsquo; And in the houses
+everywhere there are pitiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble
+drawings. These efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of
+blindfolded men, they are only one shade less harrowing to a sympathetic
+observer than the scratchings one finds upon the walls of the old prisons, but
+there they are, witnessing to the poor buried instincts that struggled up
+towards the light. That god of joyous expression our poor fathers ignorantly
+sought, our freedom has declared to us....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to possess a
+little property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled by others, an
+&lsquo;independence&rsquo; as the English used to put it. And what made this
+desire for freedom and prosperity so strong, was very evidently the dream of
+self-expression, of doing something with it, of playing with it, of making a
+personal delightfulness, a distinctiveness. Property was never more than a
+means to an end, nor avarice more than a perversion. Men owned in order to do
+freely. Now that every one has his own apartments and his own privacy secure,
+this disposition to own has found its release in a new direction. Men study and
+save and strive that they may leave behind them a series of panels in some
+public arcade, a row of carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or
+they give themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in
+phenomena as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of riches. The work
+that was once the whole substance of social existence&mdash;for most men spent
+all their lives in earning a living&mdash;is now no more than was the burden
+upon one of those old climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on their
+backs in order that they might ascend mountains. It matters little to the easy
+charities of our emancipated time that most people who have made their labour
+contribution produce neither new beauty nor new wisdom, but are simply busy
+about those pleasant activities and enjoyments that reassure them that they are
+alive. They help, it may be, by reception and reverberation, and they hinder
+nothing. ...
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 10</h3>
+
+<p>
+Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and appearances of human
+life which is going on about us, a change as rapid and as wonderful as the
+swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after the barbaric boyish years, is
+correlated with moral and mental changes at least as unprecedented. It is not
+as if old things were going out of life and new things coming in, it is rather
+that the altered circumstances of men are making an appeal to elements in his
+nature that have hitherto been suppressed, and checking tendencies that have
+hitherto been over-stimulated and over-developed. He has not so much grown and
+altered his essential being as turned new aspects to the light. Such turnings
+round into a new attitude the world has seen on a less extensive scale before.
+The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for example, were cruel and
+bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth their descendants were conspicuously
+trusty and honourable men. There was not a people in Western Europe in the
+early twentieth century that seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that
+had not been guilty of them within the previous two centuries. The free, frank,
+kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in any European country before
+the years of the last wars was in a different world of thought and feeling from
+that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the
+respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor and naïve
+passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real differences of blood and
+inherent quality between these worlds; their differences were all in
+circumstances, suggestion, and habits of mind. And turning to more individual
+instances the constantly observed difference between one portion of a life and
+another consequent upon a religious conversion, were a standing example of the
+versatile possibilities of human nature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and
+businesses and economic relations shook them also out of their old established
+habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came
+down to them from the past. To borrow a word from the old-fashioned chemists,
+men were made nascent; they were released from old ties; for good or evil they
+were ready for new associations. The council carried them forward for good;
+perhaps if his bombs had reached their destination King Ferdinand Charles might
+have carried them back to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have
+been a harder one than the council&rsquo;s. The moral shock of the atomic bombs
+had been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side of the human animal
+was overpowered by its sincere realisation of the vital necessity for
+reconstruction. The litigious and trading spirits cowered together, scared at
+their own consequences; men thought twice before they sought mean advantages in
+the face of the unusual eagerness to realise new aspirations, and when at last
+the weeds revived again and &lsquo;claims&rsquo; began to sprout, they sprouted
+upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed, of laws that pointed to the future
+instead of the past, and under the blazing sunshine of a transforming world. A
+new literature, a new interpretation of history were springing into existence,
+a new teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in the young. The worthy
+man who forestalled the building of a research city for the English upon the
+Sussex downs by buying up a series of estates, was dispossessed and laughed out
+of court when he made his demand for some preposterous compensation; the owner
+of the discredited Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the scroll of
+history as the insolvent proprietor of a paper called <i>The Cry for
+Justice</i>, in which he duns the world for a hundred million pounds. That was
+the ingenuous Dass&rsquo;s idea of justice, that he ought to be paid about five
+million pounds annually because he had annexed the selvage of one of
+Holsten&rsquo;s discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his
+right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private hospital at Nice.
+Both of these men would probably have ended their days enormously wealthy, and
+of course ennobled in the England of the opening twentieth century, and it is
+just this novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The new government early discovered the need of a universal education to fit
+men to the great conceptions of its universal rule. It made no wrangling
+attacks on the local, racial, and sectarian forms of religious profession that
+at that time divided the earth into a patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it
+left these organisations to make their peace with God in their own time; but it
+proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truth that sacrifice was expected from
+all, that respect had to be shown to all; it revived schools or set them up
+afresh all around the world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of
+war and the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was taught
+not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the salvation of the world from
+waste and contention was the common duty and occupation of all men and women.
+These things which are now the elementary commonplaces of human intercourse
+seemed to the councillors of Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim them,
+marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by doubt, that flushed the cheek
+and fired the eye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the hands of a
+committee of men and women, which did its work during the next few decades with
+remarkable breadth and effectiveness. This educational committee was, and is,
+the correlative upon the mental and spiritual side of the redistribution
+committee. And prominent upon it, and indeed for a time quite dominating it,
+was a Russian named Karenin, who was singular in being a congenital cripple.
+His body was bent so that he walked with difficulty, suffered much pain as he
+grew older, and had at last to undergo two operations. The second killed him.
+Already malformation, which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle
+ages so that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of the
+human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world. It had a curious
+effect upon Karenin&rsquo;s colleagues; their feeling towards him was mingled
+with pity and a sense of inhumanity that it needed usage rather than reason to
+overcome. He had a strong face, with little bright brown eyes rather deeply
+sunken and a large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His skin was very yellow and
+wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all times an impatient and
+sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven him because of the hot wire of
+suffering that was manifestly thrust through his being. At the end of his life
+his personal prestige was very great. To him far more than to any contemporary
+is it due that self-abnegation, self-identification with the world spirit, was
+made the basis of universal education. That general memorandum to the teachers
+which is the key-note of the modern educational system, was probably entirely
+his work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,&rsquo; he wrote.
+&lsquo;That is the device upon the seal of this document, and the starting
+point of all we have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything but a
+plain statement of fact. It is the basis for your work. You have to teach
+self-forgetfulness, and everything else that you have to teach is contributory
+and subordinate to that end. Education is the release of man from self. You
+have to widen the horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their
+curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge their
+sympathies. That is what you are for. Under your guidance and the suggestions
+you will bring to bear on them, they have to shed the old Adam of instinctive
+suspicions, hostilities, and passions, and to find themselves again in the
+great being of the universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be
+opened out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose. And this
+that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously yourselves. Philosophy,
+discovery, art, every sort of skill, every sort of service, love: these are the
+means of salvation from that narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding
+preoccupation with self and egotistical relationships, which is hell for the
+individual, treason to the race, and exile from God....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 11</h3>
+
+<p>
+As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one begins for the
+first time to see them clearly. From the perspectives of a new age one can look
+back upon the great and widening stream of literature with a complete
+understanding. Things link up that seemed disconnected, and things that were
+once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but factors in the statement
+of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of the sincerer writing of the
+eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries falls together now into an
+unanticipated unanimity; one sees it as a huge tissue of variations upon one
+theme, the conflict of human egotism and personal passion and narrow
+imaginations on the one hand, against the growing sense of wider necessities
+and a possible, more spacious life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire&rsquo;s
+<i>Candide</i>, for example, in which the desire for justice as well as
+happiness beats against human contrariety and takes refuge at last in a forced
+and inconclusive contentment with little things. <i>Candide</i> was but one of
+the pioneers of a literature of uneasy complaint that was presently an
+innumerable multitude of books. The novels more particularly of the nineteenth
+century, if one excludes the mere story-tellers from our consideration, witness
+to this uneasy realisation of changes that call for effort and of the lack of
+that effort. In a thousand aspects, now tragically, now comically, now with a
+funny affectation of divine detachment, a countless host of witnesses tell
+their story of lives fretting between dreams and limitations. Now one laughs,
+now one weeps, now one reads with a blank astonishment at this huge and almost
+unpremeditated record of how the growing human spirit, now warily, now eagerly,
+now furiously, and always, as it seems, unsuccessfully, tried to adapt itself
+to the maddening misfit of its patched and ancient garments. And always in
+these books as one draws nearer to the heart of the matter there comes a
+disconcerting evasion. It was the fantastic convention of the time that a
+writer should not touch upon religion. To do so was to rouse the jealous fury
+of the great multitude of professional religious teachers. It was permitted to
+state the discord, but it was forbidden to glance at any possible
+reconciliation. Religion was the privilege of the pulpit....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It was ignored by
+the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the discussion of business
+questions, it played a trivial and apologetic part in public affairs. And this
+was done not out of contempt but respect. The hold of the old religious
+organisations upon men&rsquo;s respect was still enormous, so enormous that
+there seemed to be a quality of irreverence in applying religion to the
+developments of every day. This strange suspension of religion lasted over into
+the beginnings of the new age. It was the clear vision of Marcus Karenin much
+more than any other contemporary influence which brought it back into the
+texture of human life. He saw religion without hallucinations, without
+superstitious reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and air, as
+land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the Republic. He saw
+that indeed it had already percolated away from the temples and hierarchies and
+symbols in which men had sought to imprison it, that it was already at work
+anonymously and obscurely in the universal acceptance of the greater state. He
+gave it clearer expression, rephrased it to the lights and perspectives of the
+new dawn....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of the times it
+becomes evident as one reads them in their chronological order, so far as that
+is now ascertainable, that as one comes to the latter nineteenth and the
+earlier twentieth century the writers are much more acutely aware of secular
+change than their predecessors were. The earlier novelists tried to show
+&lsquo;life as it is,&rsquo; the latter showed life as it changes. More and
+more of their characters are engaged in adaptation to change or suffering from
+the effects of world changes. And as we come up to the time of the Last Wars,
+this newer conception of the everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated
+development is continually more manifest. Barnet&rsquo;s book, which has served
+us so well, is frankly a picture of the world coming about like a ship that
+sails into the wind. Our later novelists give a vast gallery of individual
+conflicts in which old habits and customs, limited ideas, ungenerous
+temperaments, and innate obsessions are pitted against this great opening out
+of life that has happened to us. They tell us of the feelings of old people who
+have been wrenched away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to
+make peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still strange
+to them. They give us the discord between the opening egotisms of youths and
+the ill-defined limitations of a changing social life. They tell of the
+universal struggle of jealousy to capture and cripple our souls, of romantic
+failures and tragical misconceptions of the trend of the world, of the spirit
+of adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how these serve the universal
+drift. And all their stories lead in the end either to happiness missed or
+happiness won, to disaster or salvation. The clearer their vision and the
+subtler their art, the more certainly do these novels tell of the possibility
+of salvation for all the world. For any road in life leads to religion for
+those upon it who will follow it far enough....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former time that it
+should be an open question as it is to-day whether the world is wholly
+Christian or not Christian at all. But assuredly we have the spirit, and as
+surely have we left many temporary forms behind. Christianity was the first
+expression of world religion, the first complete repudiation of tribalism and
+war and disputation. That it fell presently into the ways of more ancient
+rituals cannot alter that. The common sense of mankind has toiled through two
+thousand years of chastening experience to find at last how sound a meaning
+attaches to the familiar phrases of the Christian faith. The scientific thinker
+as he widens out to the moral problems of the collective life, comes inevitably
+upon the words of Christ, and as inevitably does the Christian, as his thought
+grows clearer, arrive at the world republic. As for the claims of the sects, as
+for the use of a name and successions, we live in a time that has shaken itself
+free from such claims and consistencies.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap05"></a>CHAPTER THE FIFTH<br/>
+THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN</h2>
+
+<h3>Section 1</h3>
+
+<p>
+The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new station for
+surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above the Sutlej Gorge, where it
+comes down out of Thibet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is a place of such wildness and beauty as no other scenery in the world
+affords. The granite terrace which runs round the four sides of the low block
+of laboratories looks out in every direction upon mountains. Far below in the
+hidden depths of a shadowy blue cleft, the river pours down in its tumultuous
+passage to the swarming plains of India. No sound of its roaring haste comes up
+to those serenities. Beyond that blue gulf, in which whole forests of giant
+deodars seem no more than small patches of moss, rise vast precipices of
+many-coloured rock, fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into
+pinnacles. These are the northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and
+snow which clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the culminating
+summits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest. Here are cliffs of which no
+other land can show the like, and deep chasms in which Mt. Blanc might be
+plunged and hidden. Here are icefields as big as inland seas on which the
+tumbled boulders lie so thickly that strange little flowers can bloom among
+them under the untempered sunshine. To the northward, and blocking out any
+vision of the uplands of Thibet, rises that citadel of porcelain, that gothic
+pile, the Lio Porgyul, walls, towers, and peaks, a clear twelve thousand feet
+of veined and splintered rock above the river. And beyond it and eastward and
+westward rise peaks behind peaks, against the dark blue Himalayan sky. Far away
+below to the south the clouds of the Indian rains pile up abruptly and are
+stayed by an invisible hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hither it was that with a dreamlike swiftness Karenin flew high over the
+irrigations of Rajputana and the towers and cupolas of the ultimate Delhi; and
+the little group of buildings, albeit the southward wall dropped nearly five
+hundred feet, seemed to him as he soared down to it like a toy lost among these
+mountain wildernesses. No road came up to this place; it was reached only by
+flight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted by his
+secretary clambered down through the wing fabric and made his way to the
+officials who came out to receive him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this place, beyond infections and noise and any distractions, surgery had
+made for itself a house of research and a healing fastness. The building itself
+would have seemed very wonderful to eyes accustomed to the flimsy architecture
+of an age when power was precious. It was made of granite, already a little
+roughened on the outside by frost, but polished within and of a tremendous
+solidity. And in a honeycomb of subtly lit apartments, were the spotless
+research benches, the operating tables, the instruments of brass, and fine
+glass and platinum and gold. Men and women came from all parts of the world for
+study or experimental research. They wore a common uniform of white and ate at
+long tables together, but the patients lived in an upper part of the buildings,
+and were cared for by nurses and skilled attendants....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first man to greet Karenin was Ciana, the scientific director of the
+institution. Beside him was Rachel Borken, the chief organiser. &lsquo;You are
+tired?&rsquo; she asked, and old Karenin shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Cramped,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I have wanted to visit such a place as
+this.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He spoke as if he had no other business with them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a little pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;How many scientific people have you got here now?&rsquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Just three hundred and ninety-two,&rsquo; said Rachel Borken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And the patients and attendants and so on?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Two thousand and thirty.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I shall be a patient,&rsquo; said Karenin. &lsquo;I shall have to be a
+patient. But I should like to see things first. Presently I will be a
+patient.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You will come to my rooms?&rsquo; suggested Ciana.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And then I must talk to this doctor of yours,&rsquo; said Karenin.
+&lsquo;But I would like to see a bit of this place and talk to some of your
+people before it comes to that.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He winced and moved forward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I have left most of my work in order,&rsquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You have been working hard up to now?&rsquo; asked Rachel Borken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Yes. And now I have nothing more to do&mdash;and it seems strange....
+And it&rsquo;s a bother, this illness and having to come down to oneself. This
+doorway and the row of windows is well done; the gray granite and just the line
+of gold, and then those mountains beyond through that arch. It&rsquo;s very
+well done....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 2</h3>
+
+<p>
+Karenin lay on the bed with a soft white rug about him, and Fowler, who was to
+be his surgeon sat on the edge of the bed and talked to him. An assistant was
+seated quietly in the shadow behind the bed. The examination had been made, and
+Karenin knew what was before him. He was tired but serene.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;So I shall die,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;unless you operate?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fowler assented. &lsquo;And then,&rsquo; said Karenin, smiling, &lsquo;probably
+I shall die.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Not certainly.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Even if I do not die; shall I be able to work?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;There is just a chance....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;So firstly I shall probably die, and if I do not, then perhaps I shall
+be a useless invalid?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I think if you live, you may be able to go on&mdash;as you do
+now.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Well, then, I suppose I must take the risk of it. Yet couldn&rsquo;t
+you, Fowler, couldn&rsquo;t you drug me and patch me instead of all
+this&mdash;vivisection? A few days of drugged and active life&mdash;and then
+the end?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fowler thought. &lsquo;We are not sure enough yet to do things like
+that,&rsquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But a day is coming when you will be certain.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fowler nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You make me feel as though I was the last of deformity&mdash;Deformity
+is uncertainty&mdash;inaccuracy. My body works doubtfully, it is not even sure
+that it will die or live. I suppose the time is not far off when such bodies as
+mine will no longer be born into the world.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You see,&rsquo; said Fowler, after a little pause, &lsquo;it is
+necessary that spirits such as yours should be born into the world.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I suppose,&rsquo; said Karenin, &lsquo;that my spirit has had its use.
+But if you think that is because my body is as it is I think you are mistaken.
+There is no peculiar virtue in defect. I have always chafed against&mdash;all
+this. If I could have moved more freely and lived a larger life in health I
+could have done more. But some day perhaps you will be able to put a body that
+is wrong altogether right again. Your science is only beginning. It&rsquo;s a
+subtler thing than physics and chemistry, and it takes longer to produce its
+miracles. And meanwhile a few more of us must die in patience.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Fine work is being done and much of it,&rsquo; said Fowler. &lsquo;I can
+say as much because I have nothing to do with it. I can understand a lesson,
+appreciate the discoveries of abler men and use my hands, but those others,
+Pigou, Masterton, Lie, and the others, they are clearing the ground fast for
+the knowledge to come. Have you had time to follow their work?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Karenin shook his head. &lsquo;But I can imagine the scope of it,&rsquo; he
+said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;We have so many men working now,&rsquo; said Fowler. &lsquo;I suppose at
+present there must be at least a thousand thinking hard, observing,
+experimenting, for one who did so in nineteen hundred.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Not counting those who keep the records?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Not counting those. Of course, the present indexing of research is in
+itself a very big work, and it is only now that we are getting it properly
+done. But already we are feeling the benefit of that. Since it ceased to be a
+paid employment and became a devotion we have had only those people who obeyed
+the call of an aptitude at work upon these things. Here&mdash;I must show you
+it to-day, because it will interest you&mdash;we have our copy of the
+encyclopaedic index&mdash;every week sheets are taken out and replaced by fresh
+sheets with new results that are brought to us by the aeroplanes of the
+Research Department. It is an index of knowledge that grows continually, an
+index that becomes continually truer. There was never anything like it
+before.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;When I came into the education committee,&rsquo; said Karenin,
+&lsquo;that index of human knowledge seemed an impossible thing. Research had
+produced a chaotic mountain of results, in a hundred languages and a thousand
+different types of publication....&rsquo; He smiled at his memories. &lsquo;How
+we groaned at the job!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Already the ordering of that chaos is nearly done. You shall see.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I have been so busy with my own work&mdash;&mdash;Yes, I shall be glad
+to see.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The patient regarded the surgeon for a time with interested eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You work here always?&rsquo; he asked abruptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;No,&rsquo; said Fowler.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But mostly you work here?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I have worked about seven years out of the past ten. At times I go
+away&mdash;down there. One has to. At least I have to. There is a sort of
+grayness comes over all this, one feels hungry for life, real, personal
+passionate life, love-making, eating and drinking for the fun of the thing,
+jostling crowds, having adventures, laughter&mdash;above all
+laughter&mdash;&mdash;&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; said Karenin understandingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And then one day, suddenly one thinks of these high mountains
+again....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;That is how I would have lived, if it had not been for
+my&mdash;defects,&rsquo; said Karenin. &lsquo;Nobody knows but those who have
+borne it the exasperation of abnormality. It will be good when you have nobody
+alive whose body cannot live the wholesome everyday life, whose spirit cannot
+come up into these high places as it wills.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;We shall manage that soon,&rsquo; said Fowler.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;For endless generations man has struggled upward against the indignities
+of his body&mdash;and the indignities of his soul. Pains, incapacities, vile
+fears, black moods, despairs. How well I&rsquo;ve known them. They&rsquo;ve
+taken more time than all your holidays. It is true, is it not, that every man
+is something of a cripple and something of a beast? I&rsquo;ve dipped a little
+deeper than most; that&rsquo;s all. It&rsquo;s only now when he has fully
+learnt the truth of that, that he can take hold of himself to be neither beast
+nor cripple. Now that he overcomes his servitude to his body, he can for the
+first time think of living the full life of his body.... Before another
+generation dies you&rsquo;ll have the thing in hand. You&rsquo;ll do as you
+please with the old Adam and all the vestiges from the brutes and reptiles that
+lurk in his body and spirit. Isn&rsquo;t that so?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You put it boldly,&rsquo; said Fowler.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Karenin laughed cheerfully at his caution.... &lsquo;When,&rsquo; asked Karenin
+suddenly, &lsquo;when will you operate?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The day after to-morrow,&rsquo; said Fowler. &lsquo;For a day I want you
+to drink and eat as I shall prescribe. And you may think and talk as you
+please.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I should like to see this place.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You shall go through it this afternoon. I will have two men carry you in
+a litter. And to-morrow you shall lie out upon the terrace. Our mountains here
+are the most beautiful in the world....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 3</h3>
+
+<p>
+The next morning Karenin got up early and watched the sun rise over the
+mountains, and breakfasted lightly, and then young Gardener, his secretary,
+came to consult him upon the spending of his day. Would he care to see people?
+Or was this gnawing pain within him too much to permit him to do that?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;d like to talk,&rsquo; said Karenin. &lsquo;There must be all
+sorts of lively-minded people here. Let them come and gossip with me. It will
+distract me&mdash;and I can&rsquo;t tell you how interesting it makes
+everything that is going on to have seen the dawn of one&rsquo;s own last
+day.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Your last day!&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Fowler will kill me.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But he thinks not.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Fowler will kill me. If he does not he will not leave very much of me.
+So that this is my last day anyhow, the days afterwards if they come at all to
+me, will be refuse. I know....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gardener was about to speak when Karenin went on again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I hope he kills me, Gardener. Don&rsquo;t be&mdash;old-fashioned. The
+thing I am most afraid of is that last rag of life. I may just go on&mdash;a
+scarred salvage of suffering stuff. And then&mdash;all the things I have hidden
+and kept down or discounted or set right afterwards will get the better of me.
+I shall be peevish. I may lose my grip upon my own egotism. It&rsquo;s never
+been a very firm grip. No, no, Gardener, don&rsquo;t say that! You know better,
+you&rsquo;ve had glimpses of it. Suppose I came through on the other side of
+this affair, belittled, vain, and spiteful, using the prestige I have got among
+men by my good work in the past just to serve some small invalid
+purpose....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was silent for a time, watching the mists among the distant precipices
+change to clouds of light, and drift and dissolve before the searching rays of
+the sunrise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; he said at last, &lsquo;I am afraid of these anæsthetics and
+these fag ends of life. It&rsquo;s life we are all afraid of.
+Death!&mdash;nobody minds just death. Fowler is clever&mdash;but some day
+surgery will know its duty better and not be so anxious just to save something
+. . . provided only that it quivers. I&rsquo;ve tried to hold my end up
+properly and do my work. After Fowler has done with me I am certain I shall be
+unfit for work&mdash;and what else is there for me? . . . I know I shall not be
+fit for work....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing thread of
+vitality.... I know it for the splendid thing it is&mdash;I who have been a
+diseased creature from the beginning. I know it well enough not to confuse it
+with its husks. Remember that, Gardener, if presently my heart fails me and I
+despair, and if I go through a little phase of pain and ingratitude and dark
+forgetfulness before the end.... Don&rsquo;t believe what I may say at the
+last.... If the fabric is good enough the selvage doesn&rsquo;t matter. It
+can&rsquo;t matter. So long as you are alive you are just the moment, perhaps,
+but when you are dead then you are all your life from the first moment to the
+last....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 4</h3>
+
+<p>
+Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to him, and he
+could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a long time with him and
+talked chiefly of women in the world, and with her was a girl named Edith
+Haydon who was already very well known as a cytologist. And several of the
+younger men who were working in the place and a patient named Kahn, a poet, and
+Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent some time with him. The talk
+wandered from point to point and came back upon itself, and became now earnest
+and now trivial as the chance suggestions determined. But soon afterwards
+Gardener wrote down notes of things he remembered, and it is possible to put
+together again the outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and
+felt about many of the principal things in life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Our age,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;has been so far an age of
+scene-shifting. We have been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a
+drama that was played out and growing tiresome.... If I could but sit out the
+first few scenes of the new spectacle....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as I am ailing with a
+growth of unmeaning things. It was entangled, feverish, confused. It was in
+sore need of release, and I suppose that nothing less than the violence of
+those bombs could have released it and made it a healthy world again. I suppose
+they were necessary. Just as everything turns to evil in a fevered body so
+everything seemed turning to evil in those last years of the old time.
+Everywhere there were obsolete organisations seizing upon all the new fine
+things that science was giving to the world, nationalities, all sorts of
+political bodies, the churches and sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those
+treat powers and limitless possibilities and turning them to evil uses. And
+they would not suffer open speech, they would not permit of education, they
+would let no one be educated to the needs of the new time.... You who are
+younger cannot imagine the mixture of desperate hope and protesting despair in
+which we who could believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years
+before atomic energy came....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would not
+understand, but that those who did understand lacked the power of real belief.
+They said the things, they saw the things, and the things meant nothing to
+them....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how our
+fathers bore themselves towards science. They hated it. They feared it. They
+permitted a few scientific men to exist and work&mdash;a pitiful handful....
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t find out anything about us,&rdquo; they said to them;
+&ldquo;don&rsquo;t inflict vision upon us, spare our little ways of life from
+the fearful shaft of understanding. But do tricks for us, little limited
+tricks. Give us cheap lighting. And cure us of certain disagreeable things,
+cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our colds and relieve us after
+repletion....&rdquo; We have changed all that, Gardener. Science is no longer
+our servant. We know it for something greater than our little individual
+selves. It is the awakening mind of the race, and in a little
+while&mdash;&mdash;In a little while&mdash;&mdash;I wish indeed I could watch
+for that little while, now that the curtain has risen....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs in
+London,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Then they are going to repair the ruins and make
+it all as like as possible to its former condition before the bombs fell.
+Perhaps they will dig out the old house in St John&rsquo;s Wood to which my
+father went after his expulsion from Russia.... That London of my memories
+seems to me like a place in another world. For you younger people it must seem
+like a place that could never have existed.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Is there much left standing?&rsquo; asked Edith Haydon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and north-west, they
+say; and most of the bridges and large areas of dock. Westminster, which held
+most of the government offices, suffered badly from the small bomb that
+destroyed the Parliament, there are very few traces of the old thoroughfare of
+Whitehall or the Government region thereabout, but there are plentiful drawings
+to scale of its buildings, and the great hole in the east of London scarcely
+matters. That was a poor district and very like the north and the south.... It
+will be possible to reconstruct most of it.... It is wanted. Already it becomes
+difficult to recall the old time&mdash;even for us who saw it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It seems very distant to me,&rsquo; said the girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It was an unwholesome world,&rsquo; reflected Karenin. &lsquo;I seem to
+remember everybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They were ill. They
+were sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious about money and everybody was
+doing uncongenial things. They ate a queer mixture of foods, either too much or
+too little, and at odd hours. One sees how ill they were by their
+advertisements. All this new region of London they are opening up now is
+plastered with advertisements of pills. Everybody must have been taking pills.
+In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand they have found the luggage of a lady
+covered up by falling rubble and unburnt, and she was equipped with nine
+different sorts of pill and tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the
+weapon-carrying age. They are equally strange to us. People&rsquo;s skins must
+have been in a vile state. Very few people were properly washed; they carried
+the filth of months on their clothes. All the clothes they wore were old
+clothes; our way of pulping our clothes again after a week or so of wear would
+have seemed fantastic to them. Their clothing hardly bears thinking about. And
+the congestion of them! Everybody was jostling against everybody in those awful
+towns. In an uproar. People were run over and crushed by the hundred; every
+year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed or disabled twenty thousand
+people, in Paris it was worse; people used to fall dead for want of air in the
+crowded ways. The irritation of London, internal and external, must have been
+maddening. It was a maddened world. It is like thinking of a sick child. One
+has the same effect of feverish urgencies and acute irrational disappointments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;All history,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;is a record of a childhood....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and keen about
+even a sick child&mdash;and something touching. But so much of the old times
+makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly stupid, obstinately,
+outrageously stupid, which is the very opposite to being fresh and young.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of
+nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of blood and
+iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man. Indeed, that is what he
+was, the commonest, coarsest man, who ever became great. I looked at his
+portraits, a heavy, almost froggish face, with projecting eyes and a thick
+moustache to hide a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing but Germany, Germany
+emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his class in Germany; beyond that
+he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to ideas; his mind never rose for a
+recorded instant above a bumpkin&rsquo;s elaborate cunning. And he was the most
+influential man in the world, in the whole world, no man ever left so deep a
+mark on it, because everywhere there were gross men to resonate to the heavy
+notes he emitted. He trampled on ten thousand lovely things, and a kind of
+malice in these louts made it pleasant to them to see him trample. No&mdash;he
+was no child; the dull, national aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness.
+Childhood is promise. He was survival.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education, art,
+happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the clatter of his
+sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool&rsquo;s &ldquo;blood and
+iron&rdquo; passed all round the earth. Until the atomic bombs burnt our way to
+freedom again....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium,&rsquo; said one
+of the young men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a hundred
+thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but war.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Were there no sane men in those days,&rsquo; asked the young man,
+&lsquo;to stand against that idolatry?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;In a state of despair,&rsquo; said Edith Haydon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;He is so far off&mdash;and there are men alive still who were alive when
+Bismarck died!&rsquo; . . . said the young man....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 5</h3>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck,&rsquo; said Karenin,
+following his own thoughts. &lsquo;You see, men belong to their own age; we
+stand upon a common stock of thought and we fancy we stand upon the ground. I
+met a pleasant man the other day, a Maori, whose great-grandfather was a
+cannibal. It chanced he had a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the two were
+marvellously alike. One felt that a little juggling with time and either might
+have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a stupid age who might be
+gentle and splendid in a gracious one. The world also has its moods. Think of
+the mental food of Bismarck&rsquo;s childhood; the humiliations of
+Napoleon&rsquo;s victories, the crowded, crowning victory of the Battle of the
+Nations.... Everybody in those days, wise or foolish, believed that the
+division of the world under a multitude of governments was inevitable, and that
+it was going on for thousands of years more. It <i>was</i> inevitable until it
+was impossible. Any one who had denied that inevitability publicly would have
+been counted&mdash;oh! a <i>silly</i> fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a
+little&mdash;forcible, on the lines of the accepted ideas. That is all. He
+thought that since there had to be national governments he would make one that
+was strong at home and invincible abroad. Because he had fed with a kind of
+rough appetite upon what we can see now were very stupid ideas, that does not
+make him a stupid man. We&rsquo;ve had advantages; we&rsquo;ve had unity and
+collectivism blasted into our brains. Where should we be now but for the grace
+of science? I should have been an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden member of
+the Russian Intelligenza, a conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin. You, my
+dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;<i>Never</i>,&rsquo; said Edith stoutly....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the young people
+gibed at each other across the smiling old administrator, and then presently
+one of the young scientific men gave things a new turn. He spoke like one who
+was full to the brim.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You know, sir, I&rsquo;ve a fancy&mdash;it is hard to prove such
+things&mdash;that civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic bombs
+came banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and no induced
+radio-activity, the world would have&mdash;smashed&mdash;much as it did. Only
+instead of its being a smash that opened a way to better things, it might have
+been a smash without a recovery. It is part of my business to understand
+economics, and from that point of view the century before Holsten was just a
+hundred years&rsquo; crescendo of waste. Only the extreme individualism of that
+period, only its utter want of any collective understanding or purpose can
+explain that waste. Mankind used up material&mdash;insanely. They had got
+through three-quarters of all the coal in the planet, they had used up most of
+the oil, they had swept away their forests, and they were running short of tin
+and copper. Their wheat areas were getting weary and populous, and many of the
+big towns had so lowered the water level of their available hills that they
+suffered a drought every summer. The whole system was rushing towards
+bankruptcy. And they were spending every year vaster and vaster amounts of
+power and energy upon military preparations, and continually expanding the debt
+of industry to capital. The system was already staggering when Holsten began
+his researches. So far as the world in general went there was no sense of
+danger and no desire for inquiry. They had no belief that science could save
+them, nor any idea that there was a need to be saved. They could not, they
+would not, see the gulf beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind
+at large that any research at all was in progress. And as I say, sir, if that
+line of escape hadn&rsquo;t opened, before now there might have been a crash,
+revolution, panic, social disintegration, famine, and&mdash;it is
+conceivable&mdash;complete disorder.... The rails might have rusted on the
+disused railways by now, the telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big
+liners dropped into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted cities become
+the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We might have been brigands in a
+shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may smile, but that had happened before
+in human history. The world is still studded with the ruins of broken-down
+civilisations. Barbaric bands made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the
+tomb of Hadrian became a fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome against
+the Colosseum.... Had all that possibility of reaction ended so certainly in
+1940? Is it all so very far away even now?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It seems far enough away now,&rsquo; said Edith Haydon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But forty years ago?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;No,&rsquo; said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, &lsquo;I think
+you underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of the
+twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that intelligence
+didn&rsquo;t tell&mdash;but it was there. And I question your hypothesis. I
+doubt if that discovery could have been delayed. There is a kind of inevitable
+logic now in the progress of research. For a hundred years and more thought and
+science have been going their own way regardless of the common events of life.
+You see&mdash;<i>they have got loose</i>. If there had been no Holsten there
+would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had not come in one year it
+would have come in another. In decadent Rome the march of science had scarcely
+begun.... Nineveh, Babylon, Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first
+rough experiments in association that made a security, a breathing-space, in
+which inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the way to
+begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly begun.... The politics
+and dignities and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were only the
+last phoenix blaze of the former civilisation flaring up about the beginnings
+of the new. Which we serve.... &lsquo;Man lives in the dawn for ever,&rsquo;
+said Karenin. &lsquo;Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It
+begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and does but gather
+us together for the nest. This Modern State of ours, which would have been a
+Utopian marvel a hundred years ago, is already the commonplace of life. But as
+I sit here and dream of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather to
+a head beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here seem but
+little things....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 6</h3>
+
+<p>
+About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept among his
+artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he awoke and some tea was
+brought to him, and he attended to a small difficulty in connection with the
+Moravian schools in the Labrador country and in Greenland that Gardener knew
+would interest him. He remained alone for a little while after that, and then
+the two women came to him again. Afterwards Edwards and Kahn joined the group,
+and the talk fell upon love and the place of women in the renascent world. The
+cloudbanks of India lay under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell
+full upon the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast
+splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild rush of snow
+and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a wet thread into the gulfs
+below, and cease....
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 7</h3>
+
+<p>
+For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet, talked of
+passionate love. He said that passionate, personal love had been the abiding
+desire of humanity since ever humanity had begun, and now only was it becoming
+a possible experience. It had been a dream that generation after generation had
+pursued, that always men had lost on the verge of attainment. To most of those
+who had sought it obstinately it had brought tragedy. Now, lifted above sordid
+distresses, men and women might hope for realised and triumphant love. This age
+was the Dawn of Love....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these things. Against
+that continued silence Kahn&rsquo;s voice presently seemed to beat and fail. He
+had begun by addressing Karenin, but presently he was including Edith Haydon
+and Rachel Borken in his appeal. Rachel listened silently; Edith watched
+Karenin and very deliberately avoided Kahn&rsquo;s eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I know,&rsquo; said Karenin at last, &lsquo;that many people are saying
+this sort of thing. I know that there is a vast release of love-making in the
+world. This great wave of decoration and elaboration that has gone about the
+world, this Efflorescence, has of course laid hold of that. I know that when
+you say that the world is set free, you interpret that to mean that the world
+is set free for love-making. Down there,&mdash;under the clouds, the lovers
+foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical songs, in which you
+represent this old hard world dissolving into a luminous haze of
+love&mdash;sexual love.... I don&rsquo;t think you are right or true in that.
+You are a young, imaginative man, and you see life&mdash;ardently&mdash;with
+the eyes of youth. But the power that has brought man into these high places
+under this blue-veiled blackness of the sky and which beckons us on towards the
+immense and awful future of our race, is riper and deeper and greater than any
+such emotions....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;All through my life&mdash;it has been a necessary part of my
+work&mdash;I have had to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles
+that perfect freedom and almost limitless power will put to the soul of our
+race. I can see now, all over the world, a beautiful ecstasy of waste;
+&ldquo;Let us sing and rejoice and be lovely and wonderful.&rdquo; . . . The
+orgy is only beginning, Kahn.... It was inevitable&mdash;but it is not the end
+of mankind....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of time that
+life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it forgot itself as it
+dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts, its moments, were born and
+wondered and played and desired and hungered and grew weary and died.
+Incalculable successions of vision, visions of sunlit jungle, river wilderness,
+wild forest, eager desire, beating hearts, soaring wings and creeping terror
+flamed hotly and then were as though they had never been. Life was an
+uneasiness across which lights played and vanished. And then we came, man came,
+and opened eyes that were a question and hands that were a demand and began a
+mind and memory that dies not when men die, but lives and increases for ever,
+an over-mind, a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to
+the stars.... Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of, this sex, are
+but the elementals of life out of which we have arisen. All these elementals, I
+grant you, have to be provided for, dealt with, satisfied, but all these things
+have to be left behind.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But Love,&rsquo; said Kahn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons. And that is
+what you mean, Kahn.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Karenin shook his head. &lsquo;You cannot stay at the roots and climb the
+tree,&rsquo; he said....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;No,&rsquo; he said after a pause, &lsquo;this sexual excitement, this
+love story, is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far
+literature and art and sentiment and all our emotional forms have been almost
+altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights and hopes, they have all
+turned on that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but life lengthens
+out now and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself. Poets who used to die
+at thirty live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn! There are endless years yet
+for you&mdash;and all full of learning.... We carry an excessive burden of sex
+and sexual tradition still, and we have to free ourselves from it. We do free
+ourselves from it. We have learnt in a thousand different ways to hold back
+death, and this sex, which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to
+balance our dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges
+through human life. You poets, you young people want to turn it to delight.
+Turn it to delight. That may be one way out. In a little while, if you have any
+brains worth thinking about, you will be satisfied, and then you will come up
+here to the greater things. The old religions and their new offsets want still,
+I see, to suppress all these things. Let them suppress. If they can suppress.
+In their own people. Either road will bring you here at last to the eternal
+search for knowledge and the great adventure of power.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But incidentally,&rsquo; said Rachel Borken; &lsquo;incidentally you
+have half of humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised for&mdash;for
+this love and reproduction that is so much less needed than it was.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction,&rsquo; said
+Karenin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But the women carry the heavier burden.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Not in their imaginations,&rsquo; said Edwards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And surely,&rsquo; said Kahn, &lsquo;when you speak of love as a
+phase&mdash;isn&rsquo;t it a necessary phase? Quite apart from reproduction the
+love of the sexes is necessary. Isn&rsquo;t it love, sexual love, which has
+released the imagination? Without that stir, without that impulse to go out
+from ourselves, to be reckless of ourselves and wonderful, would our lives be
+anything more than the contentment of the stalled ox?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;The key that opens the door,&rsquo; said Karenin, &lsquo;is not the goal
+of the journey.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But women!&rsquo; cried Rachel. &lsquo;Here we are! What is our
+future&mdash;as women? Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the
+imagination for you men? Let us speak of this question now. It is a thing
+constantly in my thoughts, Karenin. What do you think of us? You who must have
+thought so much of these perplexities.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Karenin seemed to weigh his words. He spoke very deliberately. &lsquo;I do not
+care a rap about your future&mdash;as women. I do not care a rap about the
+future of men&mdash;as males. I want to destroy these peculiar futures. I care
+for your future as intelligences, as parts of and contribution to the universal
+mind of the race. Humanity is not only naturally over-specialised in these
+matters, but all its institutions, its customs, everything, exaggerate,
+intensify this difference. I want to unspecialise women. No new idea. Plato
+wanted exactly that. I do not want to go on as we go now, emphasising this
+natural difference; I do not deny it, but I want to reduce it and overcome
+it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And&mdash;we remain women,&rsquo; said Rachel Borken. &lsquo;Need you
+remain thinking of yourselves as women?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It is forced upon us,&rsquo; said Edith Haydon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I do not think a woman becomes less of a woman because she dresses and
+works like a man,&rsquo; said Edwards. &lsquo;You women here, I mean you
+scientific women, wear white clothing like the men, twist up your hair in the
+simplest fashion, go about your work as though there was only one sex in the
+world. You are just as much women, even if you are not so feminine, as the fine
+ladies down below there in the plains who dress for excitement and display,
+whose only thoughts are of lovers, who exaggerate every difference.... Indeed
+we love you more.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;But we go about our work,&rsquo; said Edith Haydon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;So does it matter?&rsquo; asked Rachel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;If you go about your work and if the men go about their work then for
+Heaven&rsquo;s sake be as much woman as you wish,&rsquo; said Karenin.
+&lsquo;When I ask you to unspecialise, I am thinking not of the abolition of
+sex, but the abolition of the irksome, restricting, obstructive obsession with
+sex. It may be true that sex made society, that the first society was the
+sex-cemented family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations, the
+first laws sexual taboos. Until a few years ago morality meant proper sexual
+behaviour. Up to within a few years of us the chief interest and motive of an
+ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and her children and the chief
+concern of a woman was to get a man to do that. That was the drama, that was
+life. And the jealousy of these demands was the master motive in the world. You
+said, Kahn, a little while ago that sexual love was the key that let one out
+from the solitude of self, but I tell you that so far it has only done so in
+order to lock us all up again in a solitude of two.... All that may have been
+necessary but it is necessary no longer. All that has changed and changes still
+very swiftly. Your future, Rachel, <i>as women</i>, is a diminishing
+future.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Karenin?&rsquo; asked Rachel, &lsquo;do you mean that women are to
+become men?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Men and women have to become human beings.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You would abolish women? But, Karenin, listen! There is more than sex in
+this. Apart from sex we are different from you. We take up life differently.
+Forget we are&mdash;females, Karenin, and still we are a different sort of
+human being with a different use. In some things we are amazingly secondary.
+Here am I in this place because of my trick of management, and Edith is here
+because of her patient, subtle hands. That does not alter the fact that nearly
+the whole body of science is man made; that does not alter the fact that men do
+so predominatingly make history, that you could nearly write a complete history
+of the world without mentioning a woman&rsquo;s name. And on the other hand we
+have a gift of devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly loving
+beautiful things, a care for life and a peculiar keen close eye for behaviour.
+You know men are blind beside us in these last matters. You know they are
+restless&mdash;and fitful. We have a steadfastness. We may never draw the broad
+outlines nor discover the new paths, but in the future isn&rsquo;t there a
+confirming and sustaining and supplying <i>rôle</i> for us? As important,
+perhaps, as yours? Equally important. We hold the world up, Karenin, though you
+may have raised it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You know very well, Rachel, that I believe as you believe. I am not
+thinking of the abolition of woman. But I do want to abolish&mdash;the heroine,
+the sexual heroine. I want to abolish the woman whose support is jealousy and
+whose gift possession. I want to abolish the woman who can be won as a prize or
+locked up as a delicious treasure. And away down there the heroine flares like
+a divinity.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;In America,&rsquo; said Edwards, &lsquo;men are fighting duels over the
+praises of women and holding tournaments before Queens of Beauty.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I saw a beautiful girl in Lahore,&rsquo; said Kahn, &lsquo;she sat under
+a golden canopy like a goddess, and three fine men, armed and dressed like the
+ancient paintings, sat on steps below her to show their devotion. And they
+wanted only her permission to fight for her.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;That is the men&rsquo;s doing,&rsquo; said Edith Haydon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I <i>said</i>,&rsquo; cried Edwards, &lsquo;that man&rsquo;s imagination
+was more specialised for sex than the whole being of woman. What woman would do
+a thing like that? Women do but submit to it or take advantage of it.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;There is no evil between men and women that is not a common evil,&rsquo;
+said Karenin. &lsquo;It is you poets, Kahn, with your love songs which turn the
+sweet fellowship of comrades into this woman-centred excitement. But there is
+something in women, in many women, which responds to these provocations; they
+succumb to a peculiarly self-cultivating egotism. They become the subjects of
+their own artistry. They develop and elaborate themselves as scarcely any man
+would ever do. They <i>look</i> for golden canopies. And even when they seem to
+react against that, they may do it still. I have been reading in the old papers
+of the movements to emancipate women that were going on before the discovery of
+atomic force. These things which began with a desire to escape from the
+limitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed assertion of sex, and
+women more heroines than ever. Helen of Holloway was at last as big a nuisance
+in her way as Helen of Troy, and so long as you think of yourselves as
+women&rsquo;&mdash;he held out a finger at Rachel and smiled
+gently&mdash;&lsquo;instead of thinking of yourselves as intelligent beings,
+you will be in danger of&mdash;Helenism. To think of yourselves as women is to
+think of yourselves in relation to men. You can&rsquo;t escape that
+consequence. You have to learn to think of yourselves&mdash;for our sakes and
+your own sakes&mdash;in relation to the sun and stars. You have to cease to be
+our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon our adventures. ...&rsquo; He
+waved his hand towards the dark sky above the mountain crests.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 8</h3>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;These questions are the next questions to which research will bring us
+answers,&rsquo; said Karenin. &lsquo;While we sit here and talk idly and
+inexactly of what is needed and what may be, there are hundreds of keen-witted
+men and women who are working these things out, dispassionately and certainly,
+for the love of knowledge. The next sciences to yield great harvests now will
+be psychology and neural physiology. These perplexities of the situation
+between man and woman and the trouble with the obstinacy of egotism, these are
+temporary troubles, the issue of our own times. Suddenly all these differences
+that seem so fixed will dissolve, all these incompatibles will run together,
+and we shall go on to mould our bodies and our bodily feelings and personal
+reactions as boldly as we begin now to carve mountains and set the seas in
+their places and change the currents of the wind.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It is the next wave,&rsquo; said Fowler, who had come out upon the
+terrace and seated himself silently behind Karenin&rsquo;s chair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Of course, in the old days,&rsquo; said Edwards, &lsquo;men were tied to
+their city or their country, tied to the homes they owned or the work they
+did....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I do not see,&rsquo; said Karenin, &lsquo;that there is any final limit
+to man&rsquo;s power of self-modification.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;There is none,&rsquo; said Fowler, walking forward and sitting down upon
+the parapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his face. &lsquo;There is
+no absolute limit to either knowledge or power.... I hope you do not tire
+yourself talking.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I am interested,&rsquo; said Karenin. &lsquo;I suppose in a little while
+men will cease to be tired. I suppose in a little time you will give us
+something that will hurry away the fatigue products and restore our jaded
+tissues almost at once. This old machine may be made to run without slacking or
+cessation.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;That is possible, Karenin. But there is much to learn.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don&rsquo;t you
+think there will be some way of saving these?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fowler nodded assent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And then sleep again. When man with his blazing lights made an end to
+night in his towns and houses&mdash;it is only a hundred years or so ago that
+that was done&mdash;then it followed he would presently resent his eight hours
+of uselessness. Shan&rsquo;t we presently take a tabloid or lie in some field
+of force that will enable us to do with an hour or so of slumber and rise
+refreshed again?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the system that
+come with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen and lengthen the
+years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youth and the contractions
+of senility. Man who used to weaken and die as his teeth decayed now looks
+forward to a continually lengthening, continually fuller term of years. And all
+those parts of him that once gathered evil against him, the vestigial
+structures and odd, treacherous corners of his body, you know better and better
+how to deal with. You carve his body about and leave it re-modelled and
+unscarred. The psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and
+remove bad complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures and broaden
+ideas. So that we are becoming more and more capable of transmitting what we
+have learnt and preserving it for the race. The race, the racial wisdom,
+science, gather power continually to subdue the individual man to its own end.
+Is that not so?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of new work that
+was in progress in India and Russia. &lsquo;And how is it with heredity?&rsquo;
+asked Karenin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged by the genius
+of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the laws of inheritance and how
+the sex of children and the complexions and many of the parental qualities
+could be determined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;He can actually <i>do</i>&mdash;&mdash;?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,&rsquo; said Fowler,
+&lsquo;but to-morrow it will be practicable.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;You see,&rsquo; cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and
+Edith, &lsquo;while we have been theorising about men and women, here is
+science getting the power for us to end that old dispute for ever. If woman is
+too much for us, we&rsquo;ll reduce her to a minority, and if we do not like
+any type of men and women, we&rsquo;ll have no more of it. These old bodies,
+these old animal limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross
+inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled cocoon from an
+imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these things I feel like
+that&mdash;like a wet, crawling new moth that still fears to spread its wings.
+Because where do these things take us?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Beyond humanity,&rsquo; said Kahn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;No,&rsquo; said Karenin. &lsquo;We can still keep our feet upon the
+earth that made us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round planet is no
+longer chained to us like the ball of a galley slave....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange
+gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar gases and all
+the fearful strangenesses of space will be venturing out from this earth. This
+ball will be no longer enough for us; our spirit will reach out.... Cannot you
+see how that little argosy will go glittering up into the sky, twinkling and
+glittering smaller and smaller until the blue swallows it up. They may succeed
+out there; they may perish, but other men will follow them....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;It is as if a great window opened,&rsquo; said Karenin.
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 9</h3>
+
+<p>
+As the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went up upon the
+roof of the buildings, so that they might the better watch the sunset and the
+flushing of the mountains and the coming of the afterglow. They were joined by
+two of the surgeons from the laboratories below, and presently by a nurse who
+brought Karenin refreshment in a thin glass cup. It was a cloudless, windless
+evening under the deep blue sky, and far away to the north glittered two
+biplanes on the way to the observatories on Everest, two hundred miles distant
+over the precipices to the east. The little group of people watched them pass
+over the mountains and vanish into the blue, and then for a time they talked of
+the work that the observatory was doing. From that they passed to the whole
+process of research about the world, and so Karenin&rsquo;s thoughts returned
+again to the mind of the world and the great future that was opening upon
+man&rsquo;s imagination. He asked the surgeons many questions upon the detailed
+possibilities of their science, and he was keenly interested and excited by the
+things they told him. And as they talked the sun touched the mountains, and
+became very swiftly a blazing and indented hemisphere of liquid flame and sank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of incandescence, and shaded
+his eyes and became silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently he gave a little start.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;What?&rsquo; asked Rachel Borken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I had forgotten,&rsquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;What had you forgotten?&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;I had forgotten about the operation to-morrow. I have been so interested
+as Man to-day that I have nearly forgotten Marcus Karenin. Marcus Karenin must
+go under your knife to-morrow, Fowler, and very probably Marcus Karenin will
+die.&rsquo; He raised his slightly shrivelled hand. &lsquo;It does not matter,
+Fowler. It scarcely matters even to me. For indeed is it Karenin who has been
+sitting here and talking; is it not rather a common mind, Fowler, that has
+played about between us? You and I and all of us have added thought to thought,
+but the thread is neither you nor me. What is true we all have; when the
+individual has altogether brought himself to the test and winnowing of
+expression, then the individual is done. I feel as though I had already been
+emptied out of that little vessel, that Marcus Karenin, which in my youth held
+me so tightly and completely. Your beauty, dear Edith, and your broad brow,
+dear Rachel, and you, Fowler, with your firm and skilful hands, are now almost
+as much to me as this hand that beats the arm of my chair. And as little me.
+And the spirit that desires to know, the spirit that resolves to do, that
+spirit that lives and has talked in us to-day, lived in Athens, lived in
+Florence, lives on, I know, for ever....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;And you, old Sun, with your sword of flame searing these poor eyes of
+Marcus for the last time of all, beware of me! You think I die&mdash;and indeed
+I am only taking off one more coat to get at you. I have threatened you for ten
+thousand years, and soon I warn you I shall be coming. When I am altogether
+stripped and my disguises thrown away. Very soon now, old Sun, I shall launch
+myself at you, and I shall reach you and I shall put my foot on your spotted
+face and tug you about by your fiery locks. One step I shall take to the moon,
+and then I shall leap at you. I&rsquo;ve talked to you before, old Sun,
+I&rsquo;ve talked to you a million times, and now I am beginning to remember.
+Yes&mdash;long ago, long ago, before I had stripped off a few thousand
+generations, dust now and forgotten, I was a hairy savage and I pointed my hand
+at you and&mdash;clearly I remember it!&mdash;I saw you in a net. Have you
+forgotten that, old Sun? . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&lsquo;Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the individual
+that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into science
+and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you slink down behind the
+mountains from me, well may you cower....&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<h3>Section 10</h3>
+
+<p>
+Karenin desired that he might dream alone for a little while before he returned
+to the cell in which he was to sleep. He was given relief for a pain that began
+to trouble him and wrapped warmly about with furs, for a great coldness was
+creeping over all things, and so they left him, and he sat for a long time
+watching the afterglow give place to the darkness of night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seemed to those who had to watch over him unobtrusively lest he should be in
+want of any attention, that he mused very deeply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The white and purple peaks against the golden sky sank down into cold, blue
+remoteness, glowed out again and faded again, and the burning cressets of the
+Indian stars, that even the moonrise cannot altogether quench, began their
+vigil. The moon rose behind the towering screen of dark precipices to the east,
+and long before it emerged above these, its slanting beams had filled the deep
+gorges below with luminous mist and turned the towers and pinnacles of Lio
+Porgyul to a magic dreamcastle of radiance and wonder....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came a great uprush of ghostly light above the black rim of rocks, and then
+like a bubble that is blown and detaches itself the moon floated off clear into
+the unfathomable dark sky....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then Karenin stood up. He walked a few paces along the terrace and remained
+for a time gazing up at that great silver disc, that silvery shield that must
+needs be man&rsquo;s first conquest in outer space....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently he turned about and stood with his hands folded behind him, looking
+at the northward stars....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At length he went to his own cell. He lay down there and slept peacefully till
+the morning. And early in the morning they came to him and the anæsthetic was
+given him and the operation performed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was altogether successful, but Karenin was weak and he had to lie very
+still; and about seven days later a blood clot detached itself from the healing
+scar and travelled to his heart, and he died in an instant in the night.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD SET FREE ***</div>
+<div style='text-align:left'>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Updated editions will replace the previous one&#8212;the old editions will
+be renamed.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG&#8482;
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
+the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
+of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
+copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
+easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
+of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
+Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away--you may
+do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
+by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
+license, especially commercial redistribution.
+</div>
+
+<div style='margin:0.83em 0; font-size:1.1em; text-align:center'>START: FULL LICENSE<br />
+<span style='font-size:smaller'>THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE<br />
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK</span>
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+To protect the Project Gutenberg&#8482; mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &#8220;Project
+Gutenberg&#8221;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
+or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.B. &#8220;Project Gutenberg&#8221; is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&#8220;the
+Foundation&#8221; or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg&#8482; mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg&#8482; License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg&#8482; work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country other than the United States.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg&#8482; License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg&#8482; work (any work
+on which the phrase &#8220;Project Gutenberg&#8221; appears, or with which the
+phrase &#8220;Project Gutenberg&#8221; is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+</div>
+
+<blockquote>
+  <div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+    other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+    whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+    of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+    at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+    are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
+    of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
+  </div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase &#8220;Project
+Gutenberg&#8221; associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg&#8482; License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg&#8482;.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; License.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg&#8482; work in a format
+other than &#8220;Plain Vanilla ASCII&#8221; or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg&#8482; website
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original &#8220;Plain
+Vanilla ASCII&#8221; or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg&#8482; License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg&#8482; works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works
+provided that:
+</div>
+
+<div style='margin-left:0.7em;'>
+    <div style='text-indent:-0.7em'>
+        &#8226; You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+        the use of Project Gutenberg&#8482; works calculated using the method
+        you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+        to the owner of the Project Gutenberg&#8482; trademark, but he has
+        agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+        Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+        within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+        legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+        payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+        Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+        Section 4, &#8220;Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+        Literary Archive Foundation.&#8221;
+    </div>
+
+    <div style='text-indent:-0.7em'>
+        &#8226; You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+        you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+        does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+        License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+        copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+        all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+        works.
+    </div>
+
+    <div style='text-indent:-0.7em'>
+        &#8226; You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+        any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+        electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+        receipt of the work.
+    </div>
+
+    <div style='text-indent:-0.7em'>
+        &#8226; You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+        distribution of Project Gutenberg&#8482; works.
+    </div>
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
+the Project Gutenberg&#8482; trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
+forth in Section 3 below.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain &#8220;Defects,&#8221; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &#8220;Right
+of Replacement or Refund&#8221; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you &#8216;AS-IS&#8217;, WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg&#8482; work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg&#8482; work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg&#8482;&#8217;s
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg&#8482; collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg&#8482; and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation&#8217;s EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state&#8217;s laws.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+The Foundation&#8217;s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
+Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
+to date contact information can be found at the Foundation&#8217;s website
+and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
+public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
+visit <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/donate/">www.gutenberg.org/donate</a>.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg&#8482; eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
+facility: <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This website includes information about Project Gutenberg&#8482;,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+</body>
+
+</html>
+
+
diff --git a/old/1059-h/images/cover.jpg b/old/1059-h/images/cover.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..96fbfe4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1059-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/old/old/1059.txt b/old/old/1059.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..61dd083
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/1059.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7181 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The World Set Free, by Herbert George Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The World Set Free
+
+Author: Herbert George Wells
+
+Release Date: February 11, 2006 [EBook #1059]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD SET FREE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+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 That
+Book, Acknowledges And Inscribes Itself
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+THE WORLD SET FREE was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, and
+it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories
+which all turn on the possible developments in the future of some
+contemporary force or group of forces. The World Set Free was written
+under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent person in
+the world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of averting
+it, but few of us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how near the
+crash was to us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is put
+off until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the reason for
+what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a prophet, the author
+must confess he has always been inclined to be rather a slow prophet.
+The war aeroplane in the world of reality, for example, beat the
+forecast in Anticipations by about twenty years or so. I suppose a
+desire not to shock the sceptical reader's sense of use and wont and
+perhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have something to do
+with this dating forward of one's main events, but in the particular
+case of The World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding
+the Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get well
+forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy. 1956--or for
+that matter 2056--may be none too late for that crowning revolution in
+human potentialities. And apart from this procrastination of over forty
+years, the guess at the opening phase of the war was fairly lucky; the
+forecast of an alliance of the Central Empires, the opening campaign
+through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the British Expeditionary
+Force were all justified before the book had been published six months.
+And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after the
+reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the essentials of
+the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second, Section 2), on which
+the writer may congratulate himself, is the forecast that under modern
+conditions it would be quite impossible for any great general to emerge
+to supremacy and concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either
+side. There could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the
+scientific corps muttering, 'These old fools,' exactly as it is here
+foretold.
+
+These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far
+outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of interest
+now; the thesis that because of the development of scientific knowledge,
+separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no longer
+possible in the world, that to attempt to keep on with the old system
+is to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy
+our race altogether. The remaining interest of this book now is the
+sustained validity of this thesis and the discussion of the possible
+ending of war on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity
+to break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind. I
+have represented the native common sense of the French mind and of
+the English mind--for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be 'God's
+Englishman'--leading mankind towards a bold and resolute effort of
+salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the school book
+footnotes say, compare to-day's newspaper. Instead of a frank and
+honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman meeting German and
+Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences and in their disaster,
+upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in Geneva at the other end of
+Switzerland a poor little League of (Allied) Nations (excluding the
+United States, Russia, and most of the 'subject peoples' of the world),
+meeting obscurely amidst a world-wide disregard to make impotent
+gestures at the leading problems of the debacle. Either the disaster has
+not been vast enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict the
+necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion. Just as
+the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity and thought that
+increase would go on for ever, so now it would seem the world is growing
+accustomed to a steady glide towards social disintegration, and thinks
+that that too can go on continually and never come to a final bump.
+So soon do use and wont establish themselves, and the most flaming and
+thunderous of lessons pale into disregard.
+
+The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question whether
+it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of creative sanity in
+mankind, to avert this steady glide to destruction, is now one of the
+most urgent in the world. It is clear that the writer is temperamentally
+disposed to hope that there is such a possibility. But he has to
+confess that he sees few signs of any such breadth of understanding and
+steadfastness of will as an effectual effort to turn the rush of human
+affairs demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old institutions carries
+us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is there any plain
+recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as something overriding
+any national and patriotic consideration, and that is in the working
+class movement throughout the world. And labour internationalism is
+closely bound up with conceptions of a profound social revolution. If
+world peace is to be attained through labour internationalism, it will
+have to be attained at the price of the completest social and economic
+reconstruction and by passing through a phase of revolution that will
+certainly be violent, that may be very bloody, which may be prolonged
+through a long period, and may in the end fail to achieve anything but
+social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is in the
+labour class, and the labour class alone, that any conception of a world
+rule and a world peace has so far appeared. The dream of The World Set
+Free, a dream of highly educated and highly favoured leading and ruling
+men, voluntarily setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world,
+has thus far remained a dream.
+
+H. G. WELLS.
+
+EASTON GLEBE, DUNMOW, 1921.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PRELUDE THE SUN SNARERS
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND THE LAST WAR
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD THE ENDING OF WAR
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH THE NEW PHASE
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
+
+
+
+
+PRELUDE
+
+THE SUN SNARERS
+
+Section 1
+
+THE history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external
+power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of his
+terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural strength and
+bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning and the rough implement
+of stone. So he passed beyond the ape. From that he expands. Presently
+he added to himself the power of the horse and the ox, he borrowed
+the carrying strength of water and the driving force of the wind, he
+quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first
+with copper and then with iron, increased and varied and became more
+elaborate and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made his
+way easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social relationships
+and increased his efficiency by the division of labour. He began to
+store up knowledge. Contrivance followed contrivance, each making it
+possible for a man to do more. Always down the lengthening record,
+save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more.... A quarter of
+a million years ago the utmost man was a savage, a being scarcely
+articulate, sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn
+flint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups,
+killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity
+declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would have
+sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical river
+valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his little herds, a
+male, a few females, a child or so.
+
+He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led. He fled
+the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the promise of sword
+and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of coal; he drank water muddy
+with the clay that would one day make cups of porcelain; he chewed the
+ear of wild wheat he had plucked and gazed with a dim speculation in his
+eyes at the birds that soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became
+aware of the scent of another male and rose up roaring, his roars
+the formless precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great
+individualist, that original, he suffered none other than himself.
+
+So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor of
+all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly.
+
+Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened the
+tiger's claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus to the swift
+grace of the horse, was at work upon him--is at work upon him still.
+The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him were killed soonest and
+oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker eye, the bigger brain, the better
+balanced body prevailed; age by age, the implements were a little better
+made, the man a little more delicately adjusted to his possibilities. He
+became more social; his herd grew larger; no longer did each man kill
+or drive out his growing sons; a system of taboos made them tolerable
+to him, and they revered him alive and soon even after he was dead, and
+were his allies against the beasts and the rest of mankind. (But they
+were forbidden to touch the women of the tribe, they had to go out and
+capture women for themselves, and each son fled from his stepmother and
+hid from her lest the anger of the Old Man should be roused. All the
+world over, even to this day, these ancient inevitable taboos can be
+traced.) And now instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was
+better tended and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the
+creature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him, storing
+food--until sometimes the neglected grass-seed sprouted again and gave a
+first hint of agriculture.
+
+And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.
+
+Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts and
+his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the squatting-place
+and dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. He scratched upon a bone
+and found resemblance and pursued it and began pictorial art, moulded
+the soft, warm clay of the river brink between his fingers, and found a
+pleasure in its patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of
+vessels, and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming
+river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant water
+came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it
+and spear it as it went down to its resting-place amidst the distant
+hills. Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once indeed he
+had done so--at least that some one had done so--he mixed that perhaps
+with another dream almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had been
+beset; and therewith began fiction--pointing a way to achievement--and
+the august prophetic procession of tales.
+
+For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations that
+life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the ripening of that
+phase of human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chipped
+flint to the first implements of polished stone, was two or three
+thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. So slowly,
+by human standards, did humanity gather itself together out of the dim
+intimations of the beast. And that first glimmering of speculation, that
+first story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed
+under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous
+listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most
+marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the mammoths,
+and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch the sun.
+
+Section 2
+
+That dream was but a moment in a man's life, whose proper business it
+seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget after the manner
+of all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. About him, hidden
+from him by the thinnest of veils, were the untouched sources of Power,
+whose magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even to-day, Power that
+could make his every conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the
+race were in the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.
+
+At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food is
+abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his earlier
+jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less urgently, more
+social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a larger community. There
+began a division of labour, certain of the older men specialised in
+knowledge and direction, a strong man took the fatherly leadership in
+war, and priest and king began to develop their roles in the opening
+drama of man's history. The priest's solicitude was seed-time and
+harvest and fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a hundred
+river valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there
+were already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They
+flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the future,
+for as yet writing had still to begin.
+
+Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable wealth
+of Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed certain
+animals, he developed his primordially haphazard agriculture into a
+ritual, he added first one metal to his resources and then another,
+until he had copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and silver to
+supplement his stone, he hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddled
+down his river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made
+the first roads. But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and
+more, was the subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger
+societies. The history of man is not simply the conquest of external
+power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,
+that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands
+from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents association.
+From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the
+Peace of the World, man's dealings were chiefly with himself and his
+fellow man, trading, bargaining, law-making, propitiating, enslaving,
+conquering, exterminating, and every little increment in Power, he
+turned at once and always turns to the purposes of this confused
+elaborate struggle to socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his
+fellow men into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of
+his instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone
+age was over he had become a political animal. He made astonishingly
+far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then of
+writing and making records, and with that his town communities began to
+stretch out to dominion; in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and
+the great Chinese rivers, the first empires and the first written laws
+had their beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers
+and knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which had
+been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of pirate
+polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The history
+of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the Roman
+Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last, aped Caesar
+and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind. Measured
+by the duration of human life it is a vast space of time between that
+first dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the aeroplane, but by the scale
+that looks back to the makers of the eoliths, it is all of it a story of
+yesterday.
+
+Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this period
+of the warring states, while men's minds were chiefly preoccupied by
+politics and mutual aggression, their progress in the acquirement of
+external Power was slow--rapid in comparison with the progress of the
+old stone age, but slow in comparison with this new age of systematic
+discovery in which we live. They did not very greatly alter the weapons
+and tactics of warfare, the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their
+knowledge of the habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of
+domestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when
+Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were inventions and
+changes, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out and
+then forgotten again; it was, on the whole, a progress, but it contained
+no steps; the peasant life was the same, there were already priests and
+lawyers and town craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers, doctors,
+wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and
+south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they were
+doing much the same things and living much the same life as they were in
+Europe in A.D. 1500. The English excavators of the year A.D. 1900
+could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and disinter legal
+documents, domestic accounts, and family correspondence that they could
+read with the completest sympathy. There were great religious and
+moral changes throughout the period, empires and republics replaced one
+another, Italy tried a vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery
+was tried again and again and failed and failed and was still to be
+tested again and rejected again in the New World; Christianity and
+Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults, but
+essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to
+material conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever. The idea of
+revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life would have been
+entirely strange to human thought through all that time.
+
+Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his
+opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the
+wars and processions, the castle building and cathedral building, the
+arts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the crusades
+and trading journeys of the middle ages. He no longer speculated
+with the untrammelled freedom of the stone-age savage; authoritative
+explanations of everything barred his path; but he speculated with a
+better brain, sat idle and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused
+upon the coin and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain
+leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found
+dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the
+assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols
+in the world about them, questioning the finality of scholastic wisdom.
+Through all the ages of history there were men to whom this whisper had
+come of hidden things about them. They could no longer lead ordinary
+lives nor content themselves with the common things of this world once
+they had heard this voice. And mostly they believed not only that all
+this world was as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at,
+but that these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by
+chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among rare and
+curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd utilisable
+thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied discovery, sometimes
+pretending to find. The world of every day laughed at these eccentric
+beings, or found them annoying and ill-treated them, or was seized
+with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with
+covetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part
+heeded them not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first
+dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his blood and
+descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly, was the snare that
+will some day catch the sun.
+
+Section 3
+
+Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of
+Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His common-place
+books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations of
+the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his parallel and Roger
+Bacon--whom the Franciscans silenced--of his kindred. Such a man again
+in an earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of
+steam nineteen hundred years before it was first brought into use.
+And earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the
+legendary Daedalus of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history
+whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers
+appeared. And half the alchemists were of their tribe.
+
+When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might have
+supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive engine. But
+they could see nothing of the sort. They were not yet beginning to think
+of seeing things; their metallurgy was all too poor to make such
+engines even had they thought of them. For a time they could not make
+instruments sound enough to stand this new force even for so rough a
+purpose as hurling a missile. Their first guns had barrels of coopered
+timber, and the world waited for more than five hundred years before the
+explosive engine came.
+
+Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before the
+world could use their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious
+purposes. If man in general was not still as absolutely blind to the
+unconquered energies about him as his paleolithic precursor, he was at
+best purblind.
+
+Section 4
+
+The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the
+verge of discovery, before they began to influence human lives.
+
+There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised and
+forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed that
+coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand before it
+dawned upon men that here was something more than a curiosity. And it is
+to be remarked that the first recorded suggestion for the use of steam
+was in war; there is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to
+fire shot out of corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining
+of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men had
+ever done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam-engine and the
+steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of logical
+necessity. It is the most interesting and instructive chapter in
+the history of the human intelligence, the history of steam from its
+beginning as a fact in human consciousness to the perfection of the
+great turbine engines that preceded the utilisation of intra-molecular
+power. Nearly every human being must have seen steam, seen it
+incuriously for many thousands of years; the women in particular were
+always heating water, boiling it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lids
+of vessels dance with its fury; millions of people at different times
+must have watched steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket
+balls and blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the whole
+human record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any
+glimmer of a realisation that here was force, here was strength to
+borrow and use.... Then suddenly man woke up to it, the railways spread
+like a network over the globe, the ever enlarging iron steamships began
+their staggering fight against wind and wave.
+
+Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning of the
+Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the Warring States.
+
+But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this novelty.
+They would not recognise, they were not able to recognise that anything
+fundamental had happened to their immemorial necessities. They called
+the steam-engine the 'iron horse' and pretended that they had made the
+most partial of substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production
+were visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,
+population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and
+concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city centres,
+food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a scale that
+made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of imperial Rome, a petty
+incident; and a huge migration of peoples between Europe and Western
+Asia and America was in Progress, and--nobody seems to have realised
+that something new had come into human life, a strange swirl different
+altogether from any previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the
+swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of
+accumulating water and eddying inactivity....
+
+The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit
+at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from
+Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New
+Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance at
+the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinise the prices current
+of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan,
+and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten (in the place of
+his father's eight) that he thought the world changed very little. They
+must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone
+to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of Horace and
+Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all would be well with
+them....
+
+Section 5
+
+Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be studied,
+invaded the common life of men a few decades after the exploitation of
+steam. To electricity also, in spite of its provocative nearness all
+about him, mankind had been utterly blind for incalculable ages. Could
+anything be more emphatic than the appeal of electricity for attention?
+It thundered at man's ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes,
+occasionally it killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that
+concerned him enough to merit study. It came into the house with the cat
+on any dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur.
+It rotted his metals when he put them together.... There is no single
+record that any one questioned why the cat's fur crackles or why hair
+is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the sixteenth century.
+For endless years man seems to have done his very successful best not to
+think about it at all; until this new spirit of the Seeker turned itself
+to these things.
+
+How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant,
+before the speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It was
+Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who first puzzled his brains
+with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so began
+the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this universal
+presence. And even then the science of electricity remained a mere
+little group of curious facts for nearly two hundred years, connected
+perhaps with magnetism--a mere guess that--perhaps with the lightning.
+Frogs' legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and
+twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them. Except
+for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert before
+electricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities into
+the life of the common man.... Then suddenly, in the half-century
+between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took over
+traction, it ousted every other form of household heating,
+abolished distance with the perfected wireless telephone and the
+telephotograph....
+
+Section 6
+
+And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and
+invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific revolution
+had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice against a
+scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One writer upon these
+subjects gives a funny little domestic conversation that happened, he
+says, in the year 1898, within ten years, that is to say, of the time
+when the first aviators were fairly on the wing. He tells us how he sat
+at his desk in his study and conversed with his little boy.
+
+His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak very
+seriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy he did not
+want to do it too harshly.
+
+This is what happened.
+
+'I wish, Daddy,' he said, coming to his point, 'that you wouldn't write
+all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot me.'
+
+'Yes!' said his father.
+
+'And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots me.'
+
+'But there is going to be flying--quite soon.'
+
+The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that.
+'Anyhow,' he said, 'I wish you wouldn't write about it.'
+
+'You'll fly--lots of times--before you die,' the father assured him.
+
+The little boy looked unhappy.
+
+The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a blurred and
+under-developed photograph. 'Come and look at this,' he said.
+
+The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream and
+a meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black, pencil-like
+object with flat wings on either side of it. It was the first record of
+the first apparatus heavier than air that ever maintained itself in the
+air by mechanical force. Across the margin was written: 'Here we go up,
+up, up--from S. P. Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.'
+
+The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son.
+'Well?' he said.
+
+'That,' said the schoolboy, after reflection, 'is only a model.'
+
+'Model to-day, man to-morrow.'
+
+The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he
+believed quite firmly to be omniscience. 'But old Broomie,' he said, 'he
+told all the boys in his class only yesterday, "no man will ever fly."
+No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would
+ever believe anything of the sort....'
+
+Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father's
+reminiscences.
+
+Section 7
+
+At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages in the
+literature of that time witness, it was thought that the fact that man
+had at last had successful and profitable dealings with the steam that
+scalded him and the electricity that flashed and banged about the sky
+at him, was an amazing and perhaps a culminating exercise of his
+intelligence and his intellectual courage. The air of 'Nunc Dimittis'
+sounds in same of these writings. 'The great things are discovered,'
+wrote Gerald Brown in his summary of the nineteenth century. 'For us
+there remains little but the working out of detail.' The spirit of
+the seeker was still rare in the world; education was unskilled,
+unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people even
+then could have realised that Science was still but the flimsiest of
+trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No one seems to have
+been afraid of science and its possibilities. Yet now where there had
+been but a score or so of seekers, there were many thousands, and
+for one needle of speculation that had been probing the curtain of
+appearances in 1800, there were now hundreds. And already Chemistry,
+which had been content with her atoms and molecules for the better part
+of a century, was preparing herself for that vast next stride that was
+to revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom.
+
+One realises how crude was the science of that time when one considers
+the case of the composition of air. This was determined by that
+strange genius and recluse, that man of mystery, that disembowelled
+intelligence, Henry Cavendish, towards the end of the eighteenth
+century. So far as he was concerned the work was admirably done.
+He separated all the known ingredients of the air with a precision
+altogether remarkable; he even put it upon record that he had some doubt
+about the purity of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years his
+determination was repeated by chemists all the world over, his apparatus
+was treasured in London, he became, as they used to say, 'classic,' and
+always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his experiment,
+that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen (and with a little
+helium and traces of other substances, and indeed all the hints
+that might have led to the new departures of the twentieth-century
+chemistry), and every time it slipped unobserved through the
+professorial fingers that repeated his procedure.
+
+Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to the
+very dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was still rather
+a procession of happy accidents than an orderly conquest of nature?
+
+Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the world. Even
+the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere handful who grew up to
+feel wonder and curiosity about the secrets of nature in the nineteenth
+century, there were now, at the beginning of the twentieth, myriads
+escaping from the limitations of intellectual routine and the habitual
+life, in Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and
+all about the world.
+
+It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be called
+by a whole generation of scientific men, 'the greatest of European
+chemists,' were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico, between Fiesole
+and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he was already distinguished
+as a mathematician and possessed by a savage appetite to understand. He
+had been particularly attracted by the mystery of phosphorescence and
+its apparent unrelatedness to every other source of light. He was
+to tell afterwards in his reminiscences how he watched the fireflies
+drifting and glowing among the dark trees in the garden of the villa
+under the warm blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept them in
+cages, dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects
+very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the effect of
+various gases and varying temperature upon their light. Then the chance
+present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir William Crookes, a
+toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium particles impinge upon
+sulphide of zinc and make it luminous, induced him to associate the two
+sets of phenomena. It was a happy association for his inquiries. It was
+a rare and fortunate thing, too, that any one with the mathematical gift
+should have been taken by these curiosities.
+
+Section 8
+
+And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at Fiesole,
+a certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a course of
+afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in Edinburgh.
+They were lectures that had attracted a very considerable amount of
+attention. He gave them in a small lecture-theatre that had become more
+and more congested as his course proceeded. At his concluding discussion
+it was crowded right up to the ceiling at the back, and there people
+were standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so fascinating
+did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular, a
+chuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging his
+knee with great sand-red hands and drinking in every word, eyes aglow,
+cheeks flushed, and ears burning.
+
+'And so,' said the professor, 'we see that this Radium, which seemed
+at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all that was most
+established and fundamental in the constitution of matter, is really at
+one with the rest of the elements. It does noticeably and forcibly
+what probably all the other elements are doing with an imperceptible
+slowness. It is like the single voice crying aloud that betrays the
+silent breathing multitude in the darkness. Radium is an element that
+is breaking up and flying to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doing
+that at less perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is; thorium--the stuff
+of this incandescent gas mantle--certainly is; actinium. I feel that we
+are but beginning the list. And we know now that the atom, that once
+we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible and final
+and--lifeless--lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy. That
+is the most wonderful thing about all this work. A little while ago
+we thought of the atoms as we thought of bricks, as solid building
+material, as substantial matter, as unit masses of lifeless stuff,
+and behold! these bricks are boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the
+intensest force. This little bottle contains about a pint of uranium
+oxide; that is to say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It
+is worth about a pound. And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in the
+atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as we could
+get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a word, in one
+instant I could suddenly release that energy here and now it would blow
+us and everything about us to fragments; if I could turn it into the
+machinery that lights this city, it could keep Edinburgh brightly lit
+for a week. But at present no man knows, no man has an inkling of how
+this little lump of stuff can be made to hasten the release of its
+store. It does release it, as a burn trickles. Slowly the uranium
+changes into radium, the radium changes into a gas called the radium
+emanation, and that again to what we call radium A, and so the process
+goes on, giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach the
+last stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead. But
+we cannot hasten it.'
+
+'I take ye, man,' whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red hands
+tightening like a vice upon his knee. 'I take ye, man. Go on! Oh, go
+on!'
+
+The professor went on after a little pause. 'Why is the change gradual?'
+he asked. 'Why does only a minute fraction of the radium disintegrate
+in any particular second? Why does it dole itself out so slowly and
+so exactly? Why does not all the uranium change to radium and all
+the radium change to the next lowest thing at once? Why this decay by
+driblets; why not a decay en masse? . . . Suppose presently we find it
+is possible to quicken that decay?'
+
+The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful inevitable idea was
+coming. He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed in his seat with
+excitement. 'Why not?' he echoed, 'why not?'
+
+The professor lifted his forefinger.
+
+'Given that knowledge,' he said, 'mark what we should be able to do! We
+should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium; not only should
+we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in his hand
+the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of battleships, or
+drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but we should also
+have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process of
+disintegration in all the other elements, where decay is still so slow
+as to escape our finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the
+world would become an available reservoir of concentrated force. Do you
+realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these things would mean for us?'
+
+The scrub head nodded. 'Oh! go on. Go on.'
+
+'It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to
+the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the
+brute. We stand to-day towards radio-activity as our ancestor stood
+towards fire before he had learnt to make it. He knew it then only as
+a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the
+volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that
+we know radio-activity to-day. This--this is the dawn of a new day in
+human living. At the climax of that civilisation which had its beginning
+in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just when it
+is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne
+indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly the
+possibility of an entirely new civilisation. The energy we need for our
+very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly,
+is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. We
+cannot pick that lock at present, but----'
+
+He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to hear
+him.
+
+'----we will.'
+
+He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.
+
+'And then,' he said....
+
+'Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to
+live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will cease to be the lot
+of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilisation to the
+beginning of the next. I have no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to
+express the vision of man's material destiny that opens out before me. I
+see the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses
+of ice, the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out
+among the stars....'
+
+He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an actor or
+orator might have envied.
+
+The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,
+sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for dispersal. More
+light was turned on and what had been a dim mass of figures became a
+bright confusion of movement. Some of the people signalled to friends,
+some crowded down towards the platform to examine the lecturer's
+apparatus and make notes of his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed lad
+with the scrub hair wanted no such detailed frittering away of the
+thoughts that had inspired him. He wanted to be alone with them; he
+elbowed his way out almost fiercely, he made himself as angular and
+bony as a cow, fearing lest some one should speak to him, lest some one
+should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm.
+
+He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who sees
+visions. He had arms disproportionately long, and ridiculous big feet.
+
+He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of
+commonness, of everyday life.
+
+He made his way to the top of Arthur's Seat, and there he sat for a long
+time in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that ever and again
+he whispered to himself some precious phrase that had stuck in his mind.
+
+'If,' he whispered, 'if only we could pick that lock....'
+
+The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn of its
+beams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks of cloud that
+would presently engulf it.
+
+'Eh!' said the youngster. 'Eh!'
+
+He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the red
+sun was there before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without
+intelligence, and then with a gathering recognition. Into his mind
+came a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a Stone Age
+savage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two hundred thousand
+years ago.
+
+'Ye auld thing,' he said--and his eyes were shining, and he made a kind
+of grabbing gesture with his hand; 'ye auld red thing.... We'll have ye
+YET.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
+
+Section 1
+
+The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as
+Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth
+century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements
+and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful
+combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon as
+the year 1933. From the first detection of radio-activity to its first
+subjugation to human purpose measured little more than a quarter of
+a century. For twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties
+prevented any striking practical application of his success, but the
+essential thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human
+progress was crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in a
+minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into a heavy
+gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its turn in the
+course of seven days, and it was only after another year's work that he
+was able to show practically that the last result of this rapid release
+of energy was gold. But the thing was done--at the cost of a blistered
+chest and an injured finger, and from the moment when the invisible
+speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy, Holsten knew
+that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might
+still be, to worlds of limitless power. He recorded as much in the
+strange diary biography he left the world, a diary that was up to that
+particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations, and which
+suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human record of
+sensations and emotions that all humanity might understand.
+
+He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true, but none
+the less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four hours following
+the demonstration of the correctness of his intricate tracery of
+computations and guesses. 'I thought I should not sleep,' he writes--the
+words he omitted are supplied in brackets--(on account of) 'pain in
+(the) hand and chest and (the) wonder of what I had done.... Slept like
+a child.'
+
+He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing to do,
+he was living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he decided to go
+up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he was a little boy as a
+breezy playground. He went up by the underground tube that was then
+the recognised means of travel from one part of London to another, and
+walked up Heath Street from the tube station to the open heath. He
+found it a gully of planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of
+house-wreckers. The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow,
+steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it
+commodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of
+Neo-Georgian aestheticism. Such is the illogical quality of humanity
+that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard under the seat
+of current civilisation, saw these changes with regret. He had come up
+Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had known the windows of all the
+little shops, spent hours in the vanished cinematograph theatre, and
+marvelled at the high-flung early Georgian houses upon the westward
+bank of that old gully of a thoroughfare; he felt strange with all these
+familiar things gone. He escaped at last with a feeling of relief from
+this choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged upon the
+old familiar scene about the White Stone Pond. That, at least, was very
+much as it used to be.
+
+There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right of
+him; the reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble, the
+white-fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its portico still
+stood out at the angle of the ways, and the blue view to Harrow Hill
+and Harrow spire, a view of hills and trees and shining waters and
+wind-driven cloud shadows, was like the opening of a great window to
+the ascending Londoner. All that was very reassuring. There was the same
+strolling crowd, the same perpetual miracle of motors dodging through
+it harmlessly, escaping headlong into the country from the Sabbatical
+stuffiness behind and below them. There was a band still, a women's
+suffrage meeting--for the suffrage women had won their way back to the
+tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace again--socialist orators,
+politicians, a band, and the same wild uproar of dogs, frantic with the
+gladness of their one blessed weekly release from the back yard and
+the chain. And away along the road to the Spaniards strolled a vast
+multitude, saying, as ever, that the view of London was exceptionally
+clear that day.
+
+Young Holsten's face was white. He walked with that uneasy affectation
+of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and an under-exercised
+body. He hesitated at the White Stone Pond whether to go to the left of
+it or the right, and again at the fork of the roads. He kept shifting
+his stick in his hand, and every now and then he would get in the way of
+people on the footpath or be jostled by them because of the uncertainty
+of his movements. He felt, he confesses, 'inadequate to ordinary
+existence.' He seemed to himself to be something inhuman and
+mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous, fairly
+happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to lead--a week of work
+and a Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading--and he had launched
+something that would disorganise the entire fabric that held their
+contentments and ambitions and satisfactions together. 'Felt like an
+imbecile who has presented a box full of loaded revolvers to a Creche,'
+he notes.
+
+He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history now
+knows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and Holsten
+walked together and Holsten was sufficiently pale and jumpy for Lawson
+to tell him he overworked and needed a holiday. They sat down at a
+little table outside the County Council house of Golders Hill Park and
+sent one of the waiters to the Bull and Bush for a couple of bottles of
+beer, no doubt at Lawson's suggestion. The beer warmed Holsten's rather
+dehumanised system. He began to tell Lawson as clearly as he could to
+what his great discovery amounted. Lawson feigned attention, but indeed
+he had neither the knowledge nor the imagination to understand. 'In
+the end, before many years are out, this must eventually change war,
+transit, lighting, building, and every sort of manufacture, even
+agriculture, every material human concern----'
+
+Then Holsten stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. 'Damn that
+dog!' cried Lawson. 'Look at it now. Hi! Here! Phewoo--phewoo phewoo!
+Come HERE, Bobs! Come HERE!'
+
+The young scientific man, with his bandaged hand, sat at the green
+table, too tired to convey the wonder of the thing he had sought so
+long, his friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and the Sunday people
+drifted about them through the spring sunshine. For a moment or so
+Holsten stared at Lawson in astonishment, for he had been too intent
+upon what he had been saying to realise how little Lawson had attended.
+
+Then he remarked, 'WELL!' and smiled faintly, and--finished the tankard
+of beer before him.
+
+Lawson sat down again. 'One must look after one's dog,' he said, with a
+note of apology. 'What was it you were telling me?'
+
+Section 2
+
+In the evening Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint Paul's
+Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the evening
+service. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some odd way of the
+fireflies at Fiesole. Then he walked back through the evening lights to
+Westminster. He was oppressed, he was indeed scared, by his sense of the
+immense consequences of his discovery. He had a vague idea that night
+that he ought not to publish his results, that they were premature, that
+some secret association of wise men should take care of his work and
+hand it on from generation to generation until the world was riper for
+its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the thousands of
+people he passed had really awakened to the fact of change, they trusted
+the world for what it was, not to alter too rapidly, to respect their
+trusts, their assurances, their habits, their little accustomed traffics
+and hard-won positions.
+
+He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging, brightly-lit
+masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He sat down on a seat and
+became aware of the talk of the two people next to him. It was the
+talk of a young couple evidently on the eve of marriage. The man was
+congratulating himself on having regular employment at last; 'they like
+me,' he said, 'and I like the job. If I work up--in'r dozen years or
+so I ought to be gettin' somethin' pretty comfortable. That's the plain
+sense of it, Hetty. There ain't no reason whatsoever why we shouldn't
+get along very decently--very decently indeed.'
+
+The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed! So it
+struck upon Holsten's mind. He added in his diary, 'I had a sense of all
+this globe as that....'
+
+By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this populated
+world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and villages, its high
+roads and the inns beside them, its gardens and farms and upland
+pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships coming along the great
+circles of the ocean, its time-tables and appointments and payments and
+dues as it were one unified and progressive spectacle. Sometimes such
+visions came to him; his mind, accustomed to great generalisations and
+yet acutely sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively
+than the minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming sphere
+moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately swiftness
+on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living progress that
+altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little deadened him to that
+incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal circling. He lapsed
+to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities and recurrencies of the
+human routine. The remoter past of wandering savagery, the inevitable
+changes of to-morrow were veiled, and he saw only day and night,
+seed-time and harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks
+in the summer sunlight and tales by the winter fireside, the ancient
+sequence of hope and acts and age perennially renewed, eddying on for
+ever and ever, save that now the impious hand of research was raised to
+overthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual, sunlit spinning-top of
+man's existence....
+
+For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions, famine
+and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the bitter wind,
+failure and insufficiency and retrocession. He saw all mankind in terms
+of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat beside him, who schemed their
+inglorious outlook and improbable contentments. 'I had a sense of all
+this globe as that.'
+
+His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a time
+in vain. He reassured himself against the invasion of this disconcerting
+idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a loose wanderer
+from the flock returning with evil gifts from his sustained unnatural
+excursions amidst the darknesses and phosphorescences beneath the
+fair surfaces of life. Man had not been always thus; the instincts and
+desires of the little home, the little plot, was not all his nature;
+also he was an adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting curiosity, an
+insatiable desire. For a few thousand generations indeed he had tilled
+the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers, grinding his
+corn and trampling the October winepress, yet not for so long but that
+he was still full of restless stirrings.
+
+'If there have been home and routine and the field,' thought Holsten,
+'there have also been wonder and the sea.'
+
+He turned his head and looked up over the back of the seat at the great
+hotels above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow and colour
+and stir of feasting. Might his gift to mankind mean simply more of
+that? . . .
+
+He got up and walked out of the garden, surveyed a passing tram-car,
+laden with warm light, against the deep blues of evening, dripping and
+trailing long skirts of shining reflection; he crossed the Embankment
+and stood for a time watching the dark river and turning ever and again
+to the lit buildings and bridges. His mind began to scheme conceivable
+replacements of all those clustering arrangements....
+
+'It has begun,' he writes in the diary in which these things are
+recorded. 'It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot
+foresee. I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in the
+armoury of Change. If I were to burn all these papers, before a score of
+years had passed, some other man would be doing this. . .
+
+Section 3
+
+Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominating
+every other source of power, but for some years yet a vast network of
+difficulties in detail and application kept the new discovery from any
+effective invasion of ordinary life. The path from the laboratory to the
+workshop is sometimes a tortuous one; electro-magnetic radiations
+were known and demonstrated for twenty years before Marconi made them
+practically available, and in the same way it was twenty years before
+induced radio-activity could be brought to practical utilisation. The
+thing, of course, was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time of
+its discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but with
+very little realisation of the huge economic revolution that impended.
+What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the production of
+gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon unprofitable lines of
+the alchemist's dreams; there was a considerable amount of discussion
+and expectation in that more intelligent section of the educated
+publics of the various civilised countries which followed scientific
+development; but for the most part the world went about its business--as
+the inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the perpetual
+threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go about their business--just
+as though the possible was impossible, as though the inevitable was
+postponed for ever because it was delayed.
+
+It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought induced
+radio-activity into the sphere of industrial production, and its first
+general use was to replace the steam-engine in electrical generating
+stations. Hard upon the appearance of this came the Dass-Tata
+engine--the invention of two among the brilliant galaxy of Bengali
+inventors the modernisation of Indian thought was producing at this
+time--which was used chiefly for automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes,
+and such-like, mobile purposes. The American Kemp engine, differing
+widely in principle but equally practicable, and the Krupp-Erlanger
+came hard upon the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic
+replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress all
+about the habitable globe. Small wonder was this when the cost, even of
+these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is compared with that
+of the power they superseded. Allowing for lubrication the Dass-Tata
+engine, once it was started cost a penny to run thirty-seven miles,
+and added only nine and quarter pounds to the weight of the carriage
+it drove. It made the heavy alcohol-driven automobile of the time
+ridiculous in appearance as well as preposterously costly. For
+many years the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had been
+clambering to levels that made even the revival of the draft horse seem
+a practicable possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this
+stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world's
+roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful armoured monsters
+that had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for four awful
+decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways
+thronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel.
+At the same time a new impetus was given to aviation by the relatively
+enormous power for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible
+to add Redmayne's ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the
+vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force of the
+aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found themselves
+possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover or ascend or
+descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly through the air.
+The last dread of flying vanished. As the journalists of the time
+phrased it, this was the epoch of the Leap into the Air. The new atomic
+aeroplane became indeed a mania; every one of means was frantic to
+possess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and
+danger of the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty thousand
+of these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared
+humming softly into the sky.
+
+And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded
+industrialism. The railways paid enormous premiums for priority in the
+delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was embarked
+upon so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous explosions due
+to inexperienced handling of the new power, and the revolutionary
+cheapening of both materials and electricity made the entire
+reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter merely dependent upon a
+reorganisation of the methods of the builder and the house-furnisher.
+Viewed from the side of the new power and from the point of view of
+those who financed and manufactured the new engines and material
+it required the age of the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing
+prosperity. Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividends
+of five or six hundred per cent. and enormous fortunes were made
+and fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new
+developments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the fact that
+in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one of the recoverable
+waste products was gold--the former disintegrated dust of bismuth and
+the latter dust of lead--and that this new supply of gold led quite
+naturally to a rise in prices throughout the world.
+
+This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding
+flight of happy and fortunate rich people--every great city was as if
+a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing--was the bright side of the
+opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightness
+was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vast
+development of production there was also a huge destruction of values.
+These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering
+new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of
+dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed
+no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when the
+world sinks towards twilight and the night. Between these high lights
+accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly
+doomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount of capital
+invested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel
+workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled
+labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of employment
+by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the rapid fall in
+the cost of transit was destroying high land values at every centre
+of population, the value of existing house property had become
+problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all the
+securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping
+and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of
+feverish panic;--this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were the
+black and monstrous under-consequences of the Leap into the Air.
+
+There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out into
+Threadneedle Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran. 'The Steel
+Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,' he shouted. 'The State
+Railways are going to scrap all their engines. Everything's going to
+be scrapped--everything. Come and scrap the mint, you fellows, come and
+scrap the mint!'
+
+In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of America
+quadrupled any previous record. There was an enormous increase also
+in violent crime throughout the world. The thing had come upon an
+unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human society was to be smashed
+by its own magnificent gains.
+
+For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been no
+attempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations this flood
+of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs. The world in these
+days was not really governed at all, in the sense in which government
+came to be understood in subsequent years. Government was a treaty,
+not a design; it was forensic, conservative, disputatious, unseeing,
+unthinking, uncreative; throughout the world, except where the vestiges
+of absolutism still sheltered the court favourite and the trusted
+servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers,
+who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained caste. Their
+professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation of the
+fantastically naive electoral methods by which they clambered to
+power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously
+unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of
+every generosity. Government was an obstructive business of energetic
+fractions, progress went on outside of and in spite of public
+activities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needs
+so clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively established as
+to invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very
+existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.
+
+The world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty, in
+the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything necessary
+to satisfy human needs and everything necessary to realise such will
+and purpose as existed then in human hearts was already at hand, one
+has still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict, and
+incoherent suffering. There was no scheme for the distribution of this
+vast new wealth that had come at last within the reach of men; there
+was no clear conception that any such distribution was possible. As one
+attempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of the new age,
+as one measures it against the latent achievement that later years have
+demonstrated, one begins to measure the blindness, the narrowness, the
+insensate unimaginative individualism of the pre-atomic time. Under this
+tremendous dawn of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise,
+in the very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess
+over all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patiently in
+her strong arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty, the
+solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in her very
+presence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court, the world was to
+witness such things as the squalid spectacle of the Dass-Tata patent
+litigation.
+
+There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room, during
+the exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading counsel of the day
+argued and shouted over a miserable little matter of more royalties
+or less and whether the Dass-Tata company might not bar the
+Holsten-Roberts' methods of utilising the new power. The Dass-Tata
+people were indeed making a strenuous attempt to secure a world monopoly
+in atomic engineering. The judge, after the manner of those times, sat
+raised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown and a foolish huge
+wig, the counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and queer black
+gowns over their usual costume, wigs and gowns that were held to be
+necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean wooden benches stirred and
+whispered artful-looking solicitors, busily scribbling reporters, the
+parties to the case, expert witnesses, interested people, and a jostling
+confusion of subpoenaed persons, briefless young barristers (forming a
+style on the most esteemed and truculent examples) and casual eccentric
+spectators who preferred this pit of iniquity to the free sunlight
+outside. Every one was damply hot, the examining King's Counsel wiped
+the perspiration from his huge, clean-shaven upper lip; and into this
+atmosphere of grasping contention and human exhalations the daylight
+filtered through a window that was manifestly dirty. The jury sat in a
+double pew to the left of the judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs
+that have fallen into an ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the
+would-be omnivorous Dass, under cross-examination....
+
+Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon as
+they appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a basis for
+further work, and to that confiding disposition and one happy flash of
+adaptive invention the alert Dass owed his claim....
+
+But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching,
+patenting, pre-empting, monopolising this or that feature of the
+new development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to the
+purposes of their little lusts and avarice. That trial is just one of
+innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the face of the world
+festered with patent legislation. It chanced, however, to have one oddly
+dramatic feature in the fact that Holsten, after being kept waiting
+about the court for two days as a beggar might have waited at a rich
+man's door, after being bullied by ushers and watched by policemen, was
+called as a witness, rather severely handled by counsel, and told not to
+'quibble' by the judge when he was trying to be absolutely explicit.
+
+The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, and sneered at Holsten's
+astonishment round the corner of his monstrous wig. Holsten was a great
+man, was he? Well, in a law-court great men were put in their places.
+
+'We want to know has the plaintiff added anything to this or hasn't he?'
+said the judge, 'we don't want to have your views whether Sir Philip
+Dass's improvements were merely superficial adaptations or whether
+they were implicit in your paper. No doubt--after the manner of
+inventors--you think most things that were ever likely to be discovered
+are implicit in your papers. No doubt also you think too that most
+subsequent additions and modifications are merely superficial. Inventors
+have a way of thinking that. The law isn't concerned with that sort of
+thing. The law has nothing to do with the vanity of inventors. The law
+is concerned with the question whether these patent rights have the
+novelty the plantiff claims for them. What that admission may or may not
+stop, and all these other things you are saying in your overflowing zeal
+to answer more than the questions addressed to you--none of these things
+have anything whatever to do with the case in hand. It is a matter of
+constant astonishment to me in this court to see how you scientific men,
+with all your extraordinary claims to precision and veracity, wander
+and wander so soon as you get into the witness-box. I know no more
+unsatisfactory class of witness. The plain and simple question is, has
+Sir Philip Dass made any real addition to existing knowledge and methods
+in this matter or has he not? We don't want to know whether they were
+large or small additions nor what the consequences of your admission may
+be. That you will leave to us.'
+
+Holsten was silent.
+
+'Surely?' said the judge, almost pityingly.
+
+'No, he hasn't,' said Holsten, perceiving that for once in his life he
+must disregard infinitesimals.
+
+'Ah!' said the judge, 'now why couldn't you say that when counsel put
+the question? . . .'
+
+An entry in Holsten's diary-autobiography, dated five days later, runs:
+'Still amazed. The law is the most dangerous thing in this country. It
+is hundreds of years old. It hasn't an idea. The oldest of old bottles
+and this new wine, the most explosive wine. Something will overtake
+them.'
+
+Section 4
+
+There was a certain truth in Holsten's assertion that the law was
+'hundreds of years old.' It was, in relation to current thought and
+widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the material
+and methods of life had been changing rapidly and were now changing
+still more rapidly, the law-courts and the legislatures of the world
+were struggling desperately to meet modern demands with devices and
+procedures, conceptions of rights and property and authority and
+obligation that dated from the rude compromises of relatively barbaric
+times. The horse-hair wigs and antic dresses of the British judges,
+their musty courts and overbearing manners, were indeed only the outward
+and visible intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal and
+political organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century was
+indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong, that
+now fettered the governing body that once it had protected.
+
+Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and outspoken publication that in
+the field of natural science had been the beginning of the conquest
+of nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth and nineteenth
+centuries preparing the spirit of the new world within the degenerating
+body of the old. The idea of a greater subordination of individual
+interests and established institutions to the collective future, is
+traceable more and more clearly in the literature of those times,
+and movement after movement fretted itself away in criticism of and
+opposition to first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and
+political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley, with
+no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established rulers of the
+world as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas and suggestions that
+was known as Socialism, and more particularly its international side,
+feeble as it was in creative proposals or any method of transition,
+still witnesses to the growth of a conception of a modernised system
+of inter-relationships that should supplant the existing tangle of
+proprietary legal ideas.
+
+The word 'Sociology' was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular writer
+upon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the middle of
+the nineteenth century, but the idea of a state, planned as an
+electric-traction system is planned, without reference to pre-existing
+apparatus, upon scientific lines, did not take a very strong hold upon
+the popular imagination of the world until the twentieth century. Then,
+the growing impatience of the American people with the monstrous and
+socially paralysing party systems that had sprung out of their absurd
+electoral arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called
+the 'Modern State' movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in
+America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the thought
+of bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property, employment,
+education, and government, than had ever been contemplated before. No
+doubt these Modern State ideas were very largely the reflection upon
+social and political thought of the vast revolution in material things
+that had been in progress for two hundred years, but for a long time
+they seemed to be having no more influence upon existing institutions
+than the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the
+time of the death of the latter. They were fermenting in men's minds,
+and it needed only just such social and political stresses as the coming
+of the atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward abruptly
+into crude and startling realisation.
+
+Section 5
+
+Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre is one of those autobiographical
+novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of the
+twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understand
+Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literal
+sense. It is indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back to the
+Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a century and a half earlier.
+
+Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history of his
+life and ideas between his nineteenth and his twenty-third birthdays. He
+was neither a very original nor a very brilliant man, but he had a
+trick of circumstantial writing; and though no authentic portrait was
+to survive for the information of posterity, he betrays by a score of
+casual phrases that he was short, sturdy, inclined to be plump, with a
+'rather blobby' face, and full, rather projecting blue eyes. He belonged
+until the financial debacle of 1956 to the class of fairly prosperous
+people, he was a student in London, he aeroplaned to Italy and then had
+a pedestrian tour from Genoa to Rome, crossed in the air to Greece and
+Egypt, and came back over the Balkans and Germany. His family fortunes,
+which were largely invested in bank shares, coal mines, and house
+property, were destroyed. Reduced to penury, he sought to earn a living.
+He suffered great hardship, and was then caught up by the war and had a
+year of soldiering, first as an officer in the English infantry and then
+in the army of pacification. His book tells all these things so simply
+and at the same time so explicitly, that it remains, as it were, an eye
+by which future generations may have at least one man's vision of the
+years of the Great Change.
+
+And he was, he tells us, a 'Modern State' man 'by instinct' from
+the beginning. He breathed in these ideas in the class rooms and
+laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, a long and
+delicately beautiful facade, along the South Bank of the Thames opposite
+the ancient dignity of Somerset House. Such thought was interwoven with
+the very fabric of that pioneer school in the educational renascence in
+England. After the customary exchange years in Heidelberg and Paris, he
+went into the classical school of London University. The older so-called
+'classical' education of the British pedagogues, probably the most
+paralysing, ineffective, and foolish routine that ever wasted human
+life, had already been swept out of this great institution in favour of
+modern methods; and he learnt Greek and Latin as well as he had learnt
+German, Spanish, and French, so that he wrote and spoke them freely,
+and used them with an unconscious ease in his study of the foundation
+civilisations of the European system to which they were the key. (This
+change was still so recent that he mentions an encounter in Rome with
+an 'Oxford don' who 'spoke Latin with a Wiltshire accent and manifest
+discomfort, wrote Greek letters with his tongue out, and seemed to think
+a Greek sentence a charm when it was a quotation and an impropriety when
+it wasn't.')
+
+Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam engines upon the English
+railways and the gradual cleansing of the London atmosphere as the
+smoke-creating sea-coal fires gave place to electric heating. The
+building of laboratories at Kensington was still in progress, and he
+took part in the students' riots that delayed the removal of the Albert
+Memorial. He carried a banner with 'We like Funny Statuary' on one side,
+and on the other 'Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should our Great
+Departed Stand in the Rain?' He learnt the rather athletic aviation of
+those days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he was fined for
+flying over the new prison for political libellers at Wormwood Scrubs,
+'in a manner calculated to exhilarate the prisoners while at exercise.'
+That was the time of the attempted suppression of any criticism of the
+public judicature and the place was crowded with journalists who had
+ventured to call attention to the dementia of Chief Justice Abrahams.
+Barnet was not a very good aviator, he confesses he was always a little
+afraid of his machine--there was excellent reason for every one to
+be afraid of those clumsy early types--and he never attempted steep
+descents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned one of those
+oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity and extravagant
+filthiness still astonish the visitors to the museum of machinery at
+South Kensington. He mentions running over a dog and complains of the
+ruinous price of 'spatchcocks' in Surrey. 'Spatchcocks,' it seems, was a
+slang term for crushed hens.
+
+He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military service to
+a minimum, and his want of any special scientific or technical
+qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that handicapped his
+aviation indicated the infantry of the line as his sphere of training.
+That was the most generalised form of soldiering. The development of
+the theory of war had been for some decades but little assisted by any
+practical experience. What fighting had occurred in recent years, had
+been fighting in minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaric
+soldiers and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and the
+great powers of the world were content for the most part to maintain
+armies that sustained in their broader organisation the traditions
+of the European wars of thirty and forty years before. There was the
+infantry arm to which Barnet belonged and which was supposed to fight
+on foot with a rifle and be the main portion of the army. There were
+cavalry forces (horse soldiers), having a ratio to the infantry that
+had been determined by the experiences of the Franco-German war in 1871.
+There was also artillery, and for some unexplained reason much of this
+was still drawn by horses; though there were also in all the European
+armies a small number of motor-guns with wheels so constructed that they
+could go over broken ground. In addition there were large developments
+of the engineering arm, concerned with motor transport, motor-bicycle
+scouting, aviation, and the like.
+
+No first-class intelligence had been sought to specialise in and work
+out the problem of warfare with the new appliances and under modern
+conditions, but a succession of able jurists, Lord Haldane, Chief
+Justice Briggs, and that very able King's Counsel, Philbrick, had
+reconstructed the army frequently and thoroughly and placed it at last,
+with the adoption of national service, upon a footing that would have
+seemed very imposing to the public of 1900. At any moment the British
+Empire could now put a million and a quarter of arguable soldiers upon
+the board of Welt-Politik. The traditions of Japan and the Central
+European armies were more princely and less forensic; the Chinese still
+refused resolutely to become a military power, and maintained a small
+standing army upon the American model that was said, so far as it
+went, to be highly efficient, and Russia, secured by a stringent
+administration against internal criticism, had scarcely altered the
+design of a uniform or the organisation of a battery since the opening
+decades of the century. Barnet's opinion of his military training was
+manifestly a poor one, his Modern State ideas disposed him to regard it
+as a bore, and his common sense condemned it as useless. Moreover,
+his habit of body made him peculiarly sensitive to the fatigues and
+hardships of service.
+
+'For three days in succession we turned out before dawn and--for no
+earthly reason--without breakfast,' he relates. 'I suppose that is
+to show us that when the Day comes the first thing will be to get us
+thoroughly uncomfortable and rotten. We then proceeded to Kriegspiel,
+according to the mysterious ideas of those in authority over us. On
+the last day we spent three hours under a hot if early sun getting
+over eight miles of country to a point we could have reached in a motor
+omnibus in nine minutes and a half--I did it the next day in that--and
+then we made a massed attack upon entrenchments that could have shot us
+all about three times over if only the umpires had let them. Then came a
+little bayonet exercise, but I doubt if I am sufficiently a barbarian
+to stick this long knife into anything living. Anyhow in this battle I
+shouldn't have had a chance. Assuming that by some miracle I hadn't been
+shot three times over, I was far too hot and blown when I got up to the
+entrenchments even to lift my beastly rifle. It was those others would
+have begun the sticking....
+
+'For a time we were watched by two hostile aeroplanes; then our own
+came up and asked them not to, and--the practice of aerial warfare still
+being unknown--they very politely desisted and went away and did dives
+and circles of the most charming description over the Fox Hills.'
+
+All Barnet's accounts of his military training were written in the same
+half-contemptuous, half-protesting tone. He was of opinion that his
+chances of participating in any real warfare were very slight, and
+that, if after all he should participate, it was bound to be so entirely
+different from these peace manoeuvres that his only course as a rational
+man would be to keep as observantly out of danger as he could until he
+had learnt the tricks and possibilities of the new conditions. He states
+this quite frankly. Never was a man more free from sham heroics.
+
+Section 6
+
+Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest of
+masculine youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that for some
+time he failed to connect the rush of wonderful new possibilities with
+the financial troubles of his family. 'I knew my father was worried,' he
+admits. That cast the smallest of shadows upon his delighted departure
+for Italy and Greece and Egypt with three congenial companions in one of
+the new atomic models. They flew over the Channel Isles and Touraine,
+he mentions, and circled about Mont Blanc--'These new helicopters, we
+found,' he notes, 'had abolished all the danger and strain of sudden
+drops to which the old-time aeroplanes were liable'--and then he went on
+by way of Pisa, Paestum, Ghirgenti, and Athens, to visit the pyramids
+by moonlight, flying thither from Cairo, and to follow the Nile up
+to Khartum. Even by later standards, it must have been a very gleeful
+holiday for a young man, and it made the tragedy of his next experiences
+all the darker. A week after his return his father, who was a widower,
+announced himself ruined, and committed suicide by means of an
+unscheduled opiate.
+
+At one blow Barnet found himself flung out of the possessing, spending,
+enjoying class to which he belonged, penniless and with no calling by
+which he could earn a living. He tried teaching and some journalism, but
+in a little while he found himself on the underside of a world in which
+he had always reckoned to live in the sunshine. For innumerable men such
+an experience has meant mental and spiritual destruction, but Barnet, in
+spite of his bodily gravitation towards comfort, showed himself when put
+to the test, of the more valiant modern quality. He was saturated with
+the creative stoicism of the heroic times that were already dawning,
+and he took his difficulties and discomforts stoutly as his appointed
+material, and turned them to expression.
+
+Indeed, in his book, he thanks fortune for them. 'I might have lived and
+died,' he says, 'in that neat fool's paradise of secure lavishness above
+there. I might never have realised the gathering wrath and sorrow of the
+ousted and exasperated masses. In the days of my own prosperity things
+had seemed to me to be very well arranged.' Now from his new point of
+view he was to find they were not arranged at all; that government was
+a compromise of aggressions and powers and lassitudes, and law a
+convention between interests, and that the poor and the weak, though
+they had many negligent masters, had few friends.
+
+'I had thought things were looked after,' he wrote. 'It was with a kind
+of amazement that I tramped the roads and starved--and found that no one
+in particular cared.'
+
+He was turned out of his lodging in a backward part of London.
+
+'It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady--she was a needy widow,
+poor soul, and I was already in her debt--to keep an old box for me in
+which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and the like. She lived in
+great fear of the Public Health and Morality Inspectors, because she
+was sometimes too poor to pay the customary tip to them, but at last she
+consented to put it in a dark tiled place under the stairs, and then
+I went forth into the world--to seek first the luck of a meal and then
+shelter.'
+
+He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in which a
+year or so ago he had been numbered among the spenders.
+
+London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of visible
+smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine, had already
+ceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the Victorian time; it
+had been, and indeed was, constantly being rebuilt, and its main
+streets were already beginning to take on those characteristics that
+distinguished them throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.
+The insanitary horse and the plebeian bicycle had been banished from the
+roadway, which was now of a resilient, glass-like surface, spotlessly
+clean; and the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow vestige of the
+ancient footpath on either side of the track and forbidden at the risk
+of a fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway. People descended from
+their automobiles upon this pavement and went through the lower shops to
+the lifts and stairs to the new ways for pedestrians, the Rows, that
+ran along the front of the houses at the level of the first story,
+and, being joined by frequent bridges, gave the newer parts of London a
+curiously Venetian appearance. In some streets there were upper and even
+third-story Rows. For most of the day and all night the shop windows
+were lit by electric light, and many establishments had made, as it
+were, canals of public footpaths through their premises in order to
+increase their window space.
+
+Barnet made his way along this night-scene rather apprehensively since
+the police had power to challenge and demand the Labour Card of any
+indigent-looking person, and if the record failed to show he was in
+employment, dismiss him to the traffic pavement below.
+
+But there was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet's
+appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too, had
+other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to reach the
+galleries about Leicester Square--that great focus of London life and
+pleasure.
+
+He gives a vivid description of the scene that evening. In the centre
+was a garden raised on arches lit by festoons of lights and connected
+with the Rows by eight graceful bridges, beneath which hummed the
+interlacing streams of motor traffic, pulsating as the current
+alternated between east and west and north and south. Above rose great
+frontages of intricate rather than beautiful reinforced porcelain,
+studded with lights, barred by bold illuminated advertisements, and
+glowing with reflections. There were the two historical music halls of
+this place, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal
+players revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shakespeare's plays,
+and four other great houses of refreshment and entertainment whose
+pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night. The south
+side of the square was in dark contrast to the others; it was still
+being rebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars surmounted by the frozen
+gestures of monstrous cranes rose over the excavated sites of vanished
+Victorian buildings.
+
+This framework attracted Barnet's attention for a time to the exclusion
+of other interests. It was absolutely still, it had a dead rigidity, a
+stricken inaction, no one was at work upon it and all its machinery was
+quiet; but the constructor's globes of vacuum light filled its every
+interstice with a quivering green moonshine and showed alert but
+motionless--soldier sentinels!
+
+He asked a passing stroller, and was told that the men had struck that
+day against the use of an atomic riveter that would have doubled the
+individual efficiency and halved the number of steel workers.
+
+'Shouldn't wonder if they didn't get chucking bombs,' said Barnet's
+informant, hovered for a moment, and then went on his way to the
+Alhambra music hall.
+
+Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at the
+corners of the square. Something very sensational had been flashed upon
+the transparencies. Forgetting for a moment his penniless condition, he
+made his way over a bridge to buy a paper, for in those days the papers,
+which were printed upon thin sheets of metallic foil, were sold at
+determinate points by specially licensed purveyors. Half over, he
+stopped short at a change in the traffic below; and was astonished
+to see that the police signals were restricting vehicles to the half
+roadway. When presently he got within sight of the transparencies that
+had replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read of the Great March
+of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the West End, and
+so without expenditure he was able to understand what was coming.
+
+He watched, and his book describes this procession which the police
+had considered it unwise to prevent and which had been spontaneously
+organised in imitation of the Unemployed Processions of earlier times.
+He had expected a mob but there was a kind of sullen discipline about
+the procession when at last it arrived. What seemed for a time
+an unending column of men marched wearily, marched with a kind of
+implacable futility, along the roadway underneath him. He was, he says,
+moved to join them, but instead he remained watching. They were a dingy,
+shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part incapable of
+any but obsolete and superseded types of labour. They bore a few banners
+with the time-honoured inscription: 'Work, not Charity,' but otherwise
+their ranks were unadorned.
+
+They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was nothing
+truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no definite
+objective they were just marching and showing themselves in the more
+prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of that great mass of
+unskilled cheap labour which the now still cheaper mechanical powers had
+superseded for evermore. They were being 'scrapped'--as horses had been
+'scrapped.'
+
+Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened by
+his own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt nothing but
+despair at the sight; what should be done, what could be done for this
+gathering surplus of humanity? They were so manifestly useless--and
+incapable--and pitiful.
+
+What were they asking for?
+
+They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had foreseen----
+
+It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous shambling
+enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the unexpected, an appeal
+to those others who, more fortunate, seemed wiser and more powerful,
+for something--for INTELLIGENCE. This mute mass, weary footed, rank
+following rank, protested its persuasion that some of these others
+must have foreseen these dislocations--that anyhow they ought to have
+foreseen--and arranged.
+
+That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so dumbly
+to assert.
+
+'Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened room,'
+he says. 'These men were praying to their fellow creatures as once they
+prayed to God! The last thing that men will realise about anything is
+that it is inanimate. They had transferred their animation to mankind.
+They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it
+was careless or malignant.... It had only to be aroused to be
+conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion.... And I saw, too, that
+as yet THERE WAS NO SUCH INTELLIGENCE. The world waits for intelligence.
+That intelligence has still to be made, that will for good and order has
+still to be gathered together, out of scraps of impulse and wandering
+seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine and creative in our souls,
+into a common purpose. It's something still to come....'
+
+It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that this not
+very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might well have been
+altogether occupied with the problem of his own individual necessities,
+should be able to stand there and generalise about the needs of the
+race.
+
+But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time there
+was already dawning the light of a new era. The spirit of humanity was
+escaping, even then it was escaping, from its extreme imprisonment in
+individuals. Salvation from the bitter intensities of self, which had
+been a conscious religious end for thousands of years, which men had
+sought in mortifications, in the wilderness, in meditation, and by
+innumerable strange paths, was coming at last with the effect of
+naturalness into the talk of men, into the books they read, into their
+unconscious gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and
+everyday acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the
+spirit of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of
+those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very threat
+of hell and torment had failed to drive them. And this young man,
+homeless and without provision even for the immediate hours, in the
+presence of social disorganisation, distress, and perplexity, in a
+blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasure that blotted out the stars,
+could think as he tells us he thought.
+
+'I saw life plain,' he wrote. 'I saw the gigantic task before us, and
+the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable difficulty filled
+me with exaltation. I saw that we have still to discover government,
+that we have still to discover education, which is the necessary
+reciprocal of government, and that all this--in which my own little
+speck of a life was so manifestly overwhelmed--this and its yesterday
+in Greece and Rome and Egypt were nothing, the mere first dust swirls
+of the beginning, the movements and dim murmurings of a sleeper who will
+presently be awake....'
+
+Section 7
+
+And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his descent
+from this ecstatic vision of reality.
+
+'Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold and a
+little hungry.'
+
+He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood upon
+the Thames Embankment. He made his way through the galleries of the
+booksellers and the National Gallery, which had been open continuously
+day and night to all decently dressed people now for more than twelve
+years, and across the rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the
+hotel colonnade to the Embankment. He had long known of these admirable
+offices, which had swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all the
+casual indigent from the London streets, and he believed that he would,
+as a matter of course, be able to procure a ticket for food and a
+night's lodgings and some indication of possible employment.
+
+But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he got to
+the Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested and besieged by
+a large and rather unruly crowd. He hovered for a time on the outskirts
+of the waiting multitude, perplexed and dismayed, and then he became
+aware of a movement, a purposive trickling away of people, up through
+the arches of the great buildings that had arisen when all the railway
+stations were removed to the south side of the river, and so to the
+covered ways of the Strand. And here, in the open glare of midnight,
+he found unemployed men begging, and not only begging, but begging with
+astonishing assurance, from the people who were emerging from the small
+theatres and other such places of entertainment which abounded in that
+thoroughfare.
+
+This was an altogether unexampled thing. There had been no begging in
+London streets for a quarter of a century. But that night the police
+were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with the destitute who were
+invading those well-kept quarters of the town. They had become stonily
+blind to anything but manifest disorder.
+
+Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask; indeed
+his bearing must have been more valiant than his circumstances, for
+twice he says that he was begged from. Near the Trafalgar Square
+gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and blackened eyebrows, who was
+walking alone, spoke to him with a peculiar friendliness.
+
+'I'm starving,' he said to her abruptly.
+
+'Oh! poor dear!' she said; and with the impulsive generosity of her
+kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his hand....
+
+It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey, might under
+the repressive social legislation of those times, have brought Barnet
+within reach of the prison lash. But he took it, he confesses, and
+thanked her as well as he was able, and went off very gladly to get
+food.
+
+Section 8
+
+A day or so later--and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon the
+roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social disorganisation and
+police embarrassment--he wandered out into the open country. He speaks
+of the roads of that plutocratic age as being 'fenced with barbed wire
+against unpropertied people,' of the high-walled gardens and trespass
+warnings that kept him to the dusty narrowness of the public ways. In
+the air, happy rich people were flying, heedless of the misfortunes
+about them, as he himself had been flying two years ago, and along
+the road swept the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. One was
+rarely out of earshot of its whistles and gongs and siren cries even
+in the field paths or over the open downs. The officials of the labour
+exchanges were everywhere overworked and infuriated, the casual wards
+were so crowded that the surplus wanderers slept in ranks under sheds
+or in the open air, and since giving to wayfarers had been made a
+punishable offence there was no longer friendship or help for a man from
+the rare foot passenger or the wayside cottage....
+
+'I wasn't angry,' said Barnet. 'I saw an immense selfishness, a
+monstrous disregard for anything but pleasure and possession in all
+those people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how certainly
+if the richest had changed places with the poorest, that things would
+have been the same. What else can happen when men use science and every
+new thing that science gives, and all their available intelligence and
+energy to manufacture wealth and appliances, and leave government and
+education to the rustling traditions of hundreds of years ago? Those
+traditions come from the dark ages when there was really not enough
+for every one, when life was a fierce struggle that might be masked
+but could not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce
+dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony between
+material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and the poor grew
+savage and every added power that came to men made the rich richer and
+the poor less necessary and less free. The men I met in the casual
+wards and the relief offices were all smouldering for revolt, talking
+of justice and injustice and revenge. I saw no hope in that talk, nor in
+anything but patience....'
+
+But he did not mean a passive patience. He meant that the method
+of social reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual
+rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled aspects
+was solved. 'I tried to talk to those discontented men,' he wrote,
+'but it was hard for them to see things as I saw them. When I talked of
+patience and the larger scheme, they answered, "But then we shall all be
+dead"--and I could not make them see, what is so simple to my own mind,
+that that did not affect the question. Men who think in lifetimes are of
+no use to statesmanship.'
+
+He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and
+a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in the market-place at
+Bishop's Stortford announcing a 'Grave International Situation' did
+not excite him very much. There had been so many grave international
+situations in recent years.
+
+This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly attacking
+the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to the help of the
+Slavs.
+
+But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the vagrants
+in the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master that all
+serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the morrow to their
+mobilisation centres. The country was on the eve of war. He was to go
+back through London to Surrey. His first feeling, he records, was one of
+extreme relief that his days of 'hopeless battering at the underside
+of civilisation' were at an end. Here was something definite to do,
+something definitely provided for. But his relief was greatly modified
+when he found that the mobilisation arrangements had been made
+so hastily and carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at the
+improvised depot at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink but
+a cup of cold water. The depot was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one
+was free to leave it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+THE LAST WAR
+
+Section 1
+
+Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order, it is
+difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow, the motives
+that plunged mankind into the war that fills the histories of the middle
+decades of the twentieth century.
+
+It must always be remembered that the political structure of the world
+at that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the collective
+intelligence. That is the central fact of that history. For two hundred
+years there had been no great changes in political or legal methods and
+pretensions, the utmost change had been a certain shifting of boundaries
+and slight readjustment of procedure, while in nearly every other aspect
+of life there had been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, and
+an enormous enlargement of scope and outlook. The absurdities of courts
+and the indignities of representative parliamentary government, coupled
+with the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other directions, had
+withdrawn the best intelligences more and more from public affairs.
+The ostensible governments of the world in the twentieth century were
+following in the wake of the ostensible religions. They were ceasing to
+command the services of any but second-rate men. After the middle of
+the eighteenth century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the
+world's memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen.
+Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted,
+common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new
+possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the past.
+
+Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the
+boundaries of the various 'sovereign states,' and the conception of a
+general predominance in human affairs on the part of some one particular
+state. The memory of the empires of Rome and Alexander squatted, an
+unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human imagination--it bored into the
+human brain like some grisly parasite and filled it with disordered
+thoughts and violent impulses. For more than a century the French
+system exhausted its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then the
+infection passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart and
+centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later ages were
+to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this obsession, the
+intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the infinite knowingness of
+the political writer, the cunning refusals to accept plain facts, the
+strategic devices, the tactical manoeuvres, the records of mobilisations
+and counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible almost as soon as
+it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their state
+craftsmen sat with their historical candles burning, and, in spite
+of strange, new reflections and unfamiliar lights and shadows, still
+wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps of Europe and the world.
+
+It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions of men
+and women outside the world of these specialists sympathised and agreed
+with their portentous activities. One school of psychologists inclined
+to minimise this participation, but the balance of evidence goes to
+show that there were massive responses to these suggestions of the
+belligerent schemer. Primitive man had been a fiercely combative animal;
+innumerable generations had passed their lives in tribal warfare, and
+the weight of tradition, the example of history, the ideals of
+loyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the incitements of the
+international mischief-maker. The political ideas of the common man were
+picked up haphazard, there was practically nothing in such education as
+he was given that was ever intended to fit him for citizenship as such
+(that conception only appeared, indeed, with the development of Modern
+State ideas), and it was therefore a comparatively easy matter to fill
+his vacant mind with the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion and
+national aggression.
+
+For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily patriotic when
+presently his battalion came up from the depot to London, to entrain for
+the French frontier. He tells of children and women and lads and old men
+cheering and shouting, of the streets and rows hung with the flags of
+the Allied Powers, of a real enthusiasm even among the destitute and
+unemployed. The Labour Bureaux were now partially transformed into
+enrolment offices, and were centres of hotly patriotic excitement.
+At every convenient place upon the line on either side of the Channel
+Tunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the feeling in the
+regiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by grim anticipations, was
+none the less warlike.
+
+But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of minds without established
+ideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it was with himself,
+a natural response to collective movement, and to martial sounds and
+colours, and the exhilarating challenge of vague dangers. And people had
+been so long oppressed by the threat of and preparation for war that its
+arrival came with an effect of positive relief.
+
+Section 2
+
+The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the lower
+Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct from the
+various British depots to the points in the Ardennes where they were
+intended to entrench themselves.
+
+Most of the documents bearing upon the campaign were destroyed during
+the war, from the first the scheme of the Allies seems to have been
+confused, but it is highly probable that the formation of an aerial
+park in this region, from which attacks could be made upon the vast
+industrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a flanking raid through Holland
+upon the German naval establishments at the mouth of the Elbe, were
+integral parts of the original project. Nothing of this was known to
+such pawns in the game as Barnet and his company, whose business it
+was to do what they were told by the mysterious intelligences at the
+direction of things in Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff had
+also been transferred. From first to last these directing intelligences
+remained mysterious to the body of the army, veiled under the name of
+'Orders.' There was no Napoleon, no Caesar to embody enthusiasm. Barnet
+says, 'We talked of Them. THEY are sending us up into Luxembourg. THEY
+are going to turn the Central European right.'
+
+Behind the veil of this vagueness the little group of more or less
+worthy men which constituted Headquarters was beginning to realise the
+enormity of the thing it was supposed to control....
+
+In the great hall of the War Control, whose windows looked out across
+the Seine to the Trocadero and the palaces of the western quarter, a
+series of big-scale relief maps were laid out upon tables to display
+the whole seat of war, and the staff-officers of the control were
+continually busy shifting the little blocks which represented the
+contending troops, as the reports and intelligence came drifting in to
+the various telegraphic bureaux in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller
+apartments there were maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for
+example, the reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav commanders
+were recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps, as upon
+chessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard and the
+Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world supremacy against
+the Central European powers. Very probably he had a definite idea of his
+game; very probably he had a coherent and admirable plan.
+
+But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new strategy
+of aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy that Holsten had
+opened for mankind. While he planned entrenchments and invasions and a
+frontier war, the Central European generalship was striking at the
+eyes and the brain. And while, with a certain diffident hesitation, he
+developed his gambit that night upon the lines laid down by Napoleon
+and Moltke, his own scientific corps in a state of mutinous activity was
+preparing a blow for Berlin. 'These old fools!' was the key in which the
+scientific corps was thinking.
+
+The War Control in Paris, on the night of July the second, was
+an impressive display of the paraphernalia of scientific military
+organisation, as the first half of the twentieth century understood it.
+To one human being at least the consulting commanders had the likeness
+of world-wielding gods.
+
+She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute, and
+she had been engaged in relay with other similar women to take down
+orders in duplicate and hand them over to the junior officers in
+attendance, to be forwarded and filed. There had come a lull, and she
+had been sent out from the dictating room to take the air upon the
+terrace before the great hall and to eat such scanty refreshment as she
+had brought with her until her services were required again.
+
+From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view not only
+of the wide sweep of the river below her, and all the eastward side of
+Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to Saint Cloud, great blocks and masses
+of black or pale darkness with pink and golden flashes of illumination
+and endless interlacing bands of dotted lights under a still and
+starless sky, but also the whole spacious interior of the great hall
+with its slender pillars and gracious arching and clustering lamps was
+visible to her. There, over a wilderness of tables, lay the huge maps,
+done on so large a scale that one might fancy them small countries; the
+messengers and attendants went and came perpetually, altering, moving
+the little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of men, and the
+great commander and his two consultants stood amidst all these things
+and near where the fighting was nearest, scheming, directing. They had
+but to breathe a word and presently away there, in the world of reality,
+the punctual myriads moved. Men rose up and went forward and died. The
+fate of nations lay behind the eyes of these three men. Indeed they were
+like gods.
+
+Most godlike of the three was Dubois. It was for him to decide; the
+others at most might suggest. Her woman's soul went out to this grave,
+handsome, still, old man, in a passion of instinctive worship.
+
+Once she had taken words of instruction from him direct. She had awaited
+them in an ecstasy of happiness--and fear. For her exaltation was made
+terrible by the dread that some error might dishonour her....
+
+She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating
+minuteness of an impassioned woman's observation.
+
+He said little, she remarked. He looked but little at the maps. The
+tall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm of ideas,
+conflicting ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting of the little
+red, blue, black, and yellow pieces on the board, and wanted to draw the
+commander's attention to this and that. Dubois listened, nodded, emitted
+a word and became still again, brooding like the national eagle.
+
+His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she could
+not see his eyes; his moustache overhung the mouth from which those
+words of decision came. Viard, too, said little; he was a dark man with
+a drooping head and melancholy, watchful eyes. He was more intent upon
+the French right, which was feeling its way now through Alsace to the
+Rhine. He was, she knew, an old colleague of Dubois; he knew him better,
+she decided, he trusted him more than this unfamiliar Englishman....
+
+Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in profile;
+these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered years ago. To
+seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse to hurry--itself a
+confession of miscalculation; by attention to these simple rules,
+Dubois had built up a steady reputation from the days when he had been
+a promising junior officer, a still, almost abstracted young man,
+deliberate but ready. Even then men had looked at him and said: 'He
+will go far.' Through fifty years of peace he had never once been found
+wanting, and at manoeuvres his impassive persistence had perplexed and
+hypnotised and defeated many a more actively intelligent man. Deep in
+his soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery about the modern
+art of warfare, the key to his career. And this discovery was that
+NOBODY KNEW, that to act therefore was to blunder, that to talk was to
+confess; and that the man who acted slowly and steadfastly and above all
+silently, had the best chance of winning through. Meanwhile one fed
+the men. Now by this same strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious
+unknowns of the Central European command. Delhi might talk of a great
+flank march through Holland, with all the British submarines and
+hydroplanes and torpedo craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it;
+Viard might crave for brilliance with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes,
+and ski-men among the Swiss mountains, and a sudden swoop upon
+Vienna; the thing was to listen--and wait for the other side to begin
+experimenting. It was all experimenting. And meanwhile he remained in
+profile, with an air of assurance--like a man who sits in an automobile
+after the chauffeur has had his directions.
+
+And every one about him was the stronger and surer for that quiet face,
+that air of knowledge and unruffled confidence. The clustering lights
+threw a score of shadows of him upon the maps, great bunches of him,
+versions of a commanding presence, lighter or darker, dominated the
+field, and pointed in every direction. Those shadows symbolised his
+control. When a messenger came from the wireless room to shift this or
+that piece in the game, to replace under amended reports one Central
+European regiment by a score, to draw back or thrust out or distribute
+this or that force of the Allies, the Marshal would turn his head and
+seem not to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who approves
+a pupil's self-correction. 'Yes, that's better.'
+
+How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how wonderful it
+all was. This was the brain of the western world, this was Olympus with
+the warring earth at its feet. And he was guiding France, France so long
+a resentful exile from imperialism, back to her old predominance.
+
+It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be
+privileged to participate....
+
+It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal
+devotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact, punctual. She
+must control herself....
+
+She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when the war
+would be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this harshness,
+this armour would be put aside and the gods might unbend. Her eyelids
+drooped....
+
+She roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night outside
+was no longer still. That there was an excitement down below on the
+bridge and a running in the street and a flickering of searchlights
+among the clouds from some high place away beyond the Trocadero. And
+then the excitement came surging up past her and invaded the hall
+within.
+
+One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of the
+room, gesticulating and shouting something.
+
+And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn't
+understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed machinery and
+cables of the ways beneath, were beating--as pulses beat. And about her
+blew something like a wind--a wind that was dismay.
+
+Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child might
+look towards its mother.
+
+He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but that
+was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand gauntly
+gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too manifestly
+disposed to drag him towards the great door that opened on the terrace.
+And Viard was hurrying towards the huge windows and doing so in the
+strangest of attitudes, bent forward and with eyes upturned.
+
+Something up there?
+
+And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.
+
+The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against the
+masonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping down through
+the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two of them, there had
+already started curling trails of red....
+
+Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through moments
+that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl down towards
+her.
+
+She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but
+a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing
+sound. Every other light had gone out about her and against this glare
+hung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of
+cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass. She
+had an impression of a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddened
+living thing that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst
+a chaos of falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earth
+furiously, that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing rabbit....
+
+She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.
+
+She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that a
+little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She tried to
+raise herself and found her leg was very painful. She was not clear
+whether it was night or day nor where she was; she made a second effort,
+wincing and groaning, and turned over and got into a sitting position
+and looked about her.
+
+Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of a
+vast uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing had been
+destroyed.
+
+At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous experience.
+
+She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world, a
+world of heaped broken things. And it was lit--and somehow this was more
+familiar to her mind than any other fact about her--by a flickering,
+purplish-crimson light. Then close to her, rising above a confusion of
+debris, she recognised the Trocadero; it was changed, something had
+gone from it, but its outline was unmistakable. It stood out against a
+streaming, whirling uprush of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled
+Paris and the Seine and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful,
+luminous organisation of the War Control....
+
+She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she lay,
+and examined her surroundings with an increasing understanding....
+
+The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the river.
+Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water, from which
+these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps of vapour came
+into circling existence a foot or so from its mirror-surface. Near
+at hand and reflected exactly in the water was the upper part of a
+familiar-looking stone pillar. On the side of her away from the water
+the heaped ruins rose steeply in a confused slope up to a glaring crest.
+Above and reflecting this glare towered pillowed masses of steam rolling
+swiftly upward to the zenith. It was from this crest that the livid glow
+that lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind connected
+this mound with the vanished buildings of the War Control.
+
+'Mais!' she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite motionless
+for a time, crouching close to the warm earth.
+
+Then presently this dim, broken human thing began to look about it
+again. She began to feel the need of fellowship. She wanted to question,
+wanted to speak, wanted to relate her experience. And her foot hurt her
+atrociously. There ought to be an ambulance. A little gust of querulous
+criticisms blew across her mind. This surely was a disaster! Always
+after a disaster there should be ambulances and helpers moving about....
+
+She craned her head. There was something there. But everything was so
+still!
+
+'Monsieur!' she cried. Her ears, she noted, felt queer, and she began to
+suspect that all was not well with them.
+
+It was terribly lonely in this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps this
+man--if it was a man, for it was difficult to see--might for all his
+stillness be merely insensible. He might have been stunned....
+
+The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a moment
+every little detail was distinct. It was Marshal Dubois. He was lying
+against a huge slab of the war map. To it there stuck and from it there
+dangled little wooden objects, the symbols of infantry and cavalry and
+guns, as they were disposed upon the frontier. He did not seem to
+be aware of this at his back, he had an effect of inattention, not
+indifferent attention, but as if he were thinking....
+
+She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was evident
+he frowned. He frowned slightly, he had an air of not wanting to be
+disturbed. His face still bore that expression of assured confidence,
+that conviction that if things were left to him France might obey in
+security....
+
+She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer. A
+strange surmise made her eyes dilate. With a painful wrench she pulled
+herself up so that she could see completely over the intervening lumps
+of smashed-up masonry. Her hand touched something wet, and after one
+convulsive movement she became rigid.
+
+It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head and
+shoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness and a pool
+of shining black....
+
+And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled, and a
+rush of hot water came pouring over her. Then it seemed to her that she
+was dragged downward....
+
+Section 3
+
+When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and the black
+hair close-cropped en brosse, who was in charge of the French special
+scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster to the War Control,
+he was so wanting in imagination in any sphere but his own, that he
+laughed. Small matter to him that Paris was burning. His mother and
+father and sister lived at Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had ever
+had, and it was poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen. He slapped
+his second-in-command on the shoulder. 'Now,' he said, 'there's nothing
+on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them tit-for-tat....
+Strategy and reasons of state--they're over.... Come along, my boy, and
+we'll just show these old women what we can do when they let us have our
+heads.'
+
+He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the
+courtyard of the chateau in which he had been installed and shouted
+for his automobile. Things would have to move quickly because there was
+scarcely an hour and a half before dawn. He looked at the sky and noted
+with satisfaction a heavy bank of clouds athwart the pallid east.
+
+He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and
+aeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck away
+in barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods. A hawk could not have
+discovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun. But that
+night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was handy and quite
+prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not a couple of miles away;
+he was going to Berlin with that and just one other man. Two men would
+be enough for what he meant to do....
+
+He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts
+science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of destruction,
+and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic type....
+
+He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming face.
+He smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great pleasures.
+There was an exotic richness, a chuckling flavour, about the voice
+in which he gave his orders, and he pointed his remarks with the long
+finger of a hand that was hairy and exceptionally big.
+
+'We'll give them tit-for-tat,' he said. 'We'll give them tit-for-tat. No
+time to lose, boys....'
+
+And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and Saxony
+the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancing
+sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow to
+the heart of the Central European hosts.
+
+It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above the
+banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to plunge at once
+into their wet obscurities should some hostile flier range into vision.
+The tense young steersman divided his attention between the guiding
+stars above and the level, tumbled surfaces of the vapour strata that
+hid the world below. Over great spaces those banks lay as even as a
+frozen lava-flow and almost as still, and then they were rent by ragged
+areas of translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim patches
+of the land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw quite
+distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps and
+signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid through a
+boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill. But if the world
+was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through that vapour floor came
+the deep roar of trains, the whistles of horns of motor-cars, a sound
+of rifle fire away to the south, and as he drew near his destination the
+crowing of cocks....
+
+The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at first
+starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to east as the
+dawn came on. The Milky Way was invisible in the blue, and the lesser
+stars vanished. The face of the adventurer at the steering-wheel, darkly
+visible ever and again by the oval greenish glow of the compass face,
+had something of that firm beauty which all concentrated purpose gives,
+and something of the happiness of an idiot child that has at last got
+hold of the matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with
+his legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained
+in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would
+continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen
+in action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential substance, had been
+tested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel chambers
+embedded in lead. Beyond the thought of great destruction slumbering
+in the black spheres between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out
+very exactly the instructions that had been given him, the man's mind
+was a blank. His aquiline profile against the starlight expressed
+nothing but a profound gloom.
+
+The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital was
+approached.
+
+So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by no
+aeroplanes at all. The frontier scouts they must have passed in the
+night; probably these were mostly under the clouds; the world was wide
+and they had had luck in not coming close to any soaring sentinel. Their
+machine was painted a pale gray, that lay almost invisibly over the
+cloud levels below. But now the east was flushing with the near ascent
+of the sun, Berlin was but a score of miles ahead, and the luck of the
+Frenchmen held. By imperceptible degrees the clouds below dissolved....
+
+Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering light and
+with all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was Berlin. The left
+finger of the steersman verified roads and open spaces below upon the
+mica-covered square of map that was fastened by his wheel. There in a
+series of lake-like expansions was the Havel away to the right; over by
+those forests must be Spandau; there the river split about the Potsdam
+island; and right ahead was Charlottenburg cleft by a great thoroughfare
+that fell like an indicating beam of light straight to the imperial
+headquarters. There, plain enough, was the Thiergarten; beyond rose
+the imperial palace, and to the right those tall buildings, those
+clustering, beflagged, bemasted roofs, must be the offices in which
+the Central European staff was housed. It was all coldly clear and
+colourless in the dawn.
+
+He looked up suddenly as a humming sound grew out of nothing and became
+swiftly louder. Nearly overhead a German aeroplane was circling down
+from an immense height to challenge him. He made a gesture with his left
+arm to the gloomy man behind and then gripped his little wheel with both
+hands, crouched over it, and twisted his neck to look upward. He was
+attentive, tightly strung, but quite contemptuous of their ability to
+hurt him. No German alive, he was assured, could outfly him, or indeed
+any one of the best Frenchmen. He imagined they might strike at him as
+a hawk strikes, but they were men coming down out of the bitter cold up
+there, in a hungry, spiritless, morning mood; they came slanting down
+like a sword swung by a lazy man, and not so rapidly but that he was
+able to slip away from under them and get between them and Berlin. They
+began challenging him in German with a megaphone when they were still
+perhaps a mile away. The words came to him, rolled up into a mere blob
+of hoarse sound. Then, gathering alarm from his grim silence, they gave
+chase and swept down, a hundred yards above him perhaps, and a couple of
+hundred behind. They were beginning to understand what he was. He ceased
+to watch them and concentrated himself on the city ahead, and for a time
+the two aeroplanes raced....
+
+A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one was
+tearing paper. A second followed. Something tapped the machine.
+
+It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces below
+rushed widening out nearer and nearer to them. 'Ready!' said the
+steersman.
+
+The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the
+bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it
+against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter. Between
+its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he bent his head
+until his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in order to let the air
+in upon the inducive. Sure of its accessibility, he craned his neck over
+the side of the aeroplane and judged his pace and distance. Then very
+quickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the
+side.
+
+'Round,' he whispered inaudibly.
+
+The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a descending
+column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a whirlwind. Both the
+aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks, hurled high and sideways and
+the steersman, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, fought in great banking
+curves for a balance. The gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his
+nostrils dilated, his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped....
+
+When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater
+of a small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle a
+shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and poured up smoke and flame
+towards them like an accusation. They were too high to distinguish
+people clearly, or mark the bomb's effect upon the building until
+suddenly the facade tottered and crumbled before the flare as sugar
+dissolves in water. The man stared for a moment, showed all his long
+teeth, and then staggered into the cramped standing position his straps
+permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down after its
+fellow.
+
+The explosion came this time more directly underneath the aeroplane
+and shot it upward edgeways. The bomb box tipped to the point of
+disgorgement, and the bomb-thrower was pitched forward upon the third
+bomb with his face close to its celluloid stud. He clutched its handles,
+and with a sudden gust of determination that the thing should not escape
+him, bit its stud. Before he could hurl it over, the monoplane was
+slipping sideways. Everything was falling sideways. Instinctively he
+gave himself up to gripping, his body holding the bomb in its place.
+
+Then that bomb had exploded also, and steersman, thrower, and aeroplane
+were just flying rags and splinters of metal and drops of moisture in
+the air, and a third column of fire rushed eddying down upon the doomed
+buildings below....
+
+Section 4
+
+Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing
+explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only
+explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely
+to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst
+upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them.
+Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the
+outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a
+case of membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by which
+the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and
+admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up
+radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This
+liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a
+blazing continual explosion. The Central European bombs were the same,
+except that they were larger and had a more complicated arrangement for
+animating the inducive.
+
+Always before in the development of warfare the shells and rockets fired
+had been but momentarily explosive, they had gone off in an instant once
+for all, and if there was nothing living or valuable within reach of the
+concussion and the flying fragments then they were spent and over.
+But Carolinum, which belonged to the beta group of Hyslop's so-called
+'suspended degenerator' elements, once its degenerative process had
+been induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing could
+arrest it. Of all Hyslop's artificial elements, Carolinum was the most
+heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to make and handle. To
+this day it remains the most potent degenerator known. What the earlier
+twentieth-century chemists called its half period was seventeen days;
+that is to say, it poured out half of the huge store of energy in its
+great molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen days'
+emission was a half of that first period's outpouring, and so on. As
+with all radio-active substances this Carolinum, though every seventeen
+days its power is halved, though constantly it diminishes towards
+the imperceptible, is never entirely exhausted, and to this day the
+battle-fields and bomb fields of that frantic time in human history are
+sprinkled with radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.
+
+What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the inducive
+oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum began to
+degenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of
+the bomb. A moment or so after its explosion began it was still mainly
+an inert sphere exploding superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus
+wrapped in flame and thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes
+fell in this state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and,
+melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, as
+more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread itself out
+into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of what became very
+speedily a miniature active volcano. The Carolinum, unable to disperse,
+freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling confusion of molten
+soil and superheated steam, and so remained spinning furiously and
+maintaining an eruption that lasted for years or months or weeks
+according to the size of the bomb employed and the chances of its
+dispersal. Once launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and
+uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from the
+crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent vapour and
+fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinum,
+and each a centre of scorching and blistering energy, were flung high
+and far.
+
+Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate
+explosive that was to give the 'decisive touch' to war....
+
+Section 5
+
+A recent historical writer has described the world of that time as one
+that 'believed in established words and was invincibly blind to the
+obvious in things.' Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been
+more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the
+rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they
+did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in
+their fumbling hands. Yet the broad facts must have glared upon any
+intelligent mind. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
+the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually
+increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a
+blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was
+no increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive
+defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered
+by this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was
+becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it
+was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before
+the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could
+carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to
+wreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody;
+the children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as the
+Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the paraphernalia and
+pretensions of war.
+
+It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce between
+the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand, and the world
+of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men of a later time
+can hope to understand this preposterous state of affairs. Social
+organisation was still in the barbaric stage. There were already great
+numbers of actively intelligent men and much private and commercial
+civilisation, but the community, as a whole, was aimless, untrained and
+unorganised to the pitch of imbecility. Collective civilisation, the
+'Modern State,' was still in the womb of the future....
+
+Section 6
+
+But let us return to Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre and its account
+of the experiences of a common man during the war time. While these
+terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were happening in Paris
+and Berlin, Barnet and his company were industriously entrenching
+themselves in Belgian Luxembourg.
+
+He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day's journey through the
+north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid phrases. The country
+was browned by a warm summer, the trees a little touched with autumnal
+colour, and the wheat already golden. When they stopped for an hour
+at Hirson, men and women with tricolour badges upon the platform
+distributed cakes and glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and there
+was much cheerfulness. 'Such good, cool beer it was,' he wrote. 'I had
+had nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom.'
+
+A number of monoplanes, 'like giant swallows,' he notes, were scouting
+in the pink evening sky.
+
+Barnet's battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place called
+Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to Jemelle. Here
+they detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the railway--trains and stores
+were passing along it all night--and next morning he: marched eastward
+through a cold, overcast dawn, and a morning, first cloudy and then
+blazing, over a large spacious country-side interspersed by forest
+towards Arlon.
+
+There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked entrenchments
+and hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton that were designed to
+check and delay any advance from the east upon the fortified line of
+the Meuse. They had their orders, and for two days they worked without
+either a sight of the enemy or any suspicion of the disaster that had
+abruptly decapitated the armies of Europe, and turned the west of Paris
+and the centre of Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction of
+Pompeii.
+
+And the news, when it did come, came attenuated. 'We heard there had
+been mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,' Barnet relates; 'but
+it didn't seem to follow that "They" weren't still somewhere elaborating
+their plans and issuing orders. When the enemy began to emerge from the
+woods in front of us, we cheered and blazed away, and didn't trouble
+much more about anything but the battle in hand. If now and then one
+cocked up an eye into the sky to see what was happening there, the rip
+of a bullet soon brought one down to the horizontal again....
+
+That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of country
+between Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It was essentially
+a rifle and infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do not seem to have taken
+any decisive share in the actual fighting for some days, though no
+doubt they effected the strategy from the first by preventing surprise
+movements. They were aeroplanes with atomic engines, but they were not
+provided with atomic bombs, which were manifestly unsuitable for field
+use, nor indeed had they any very effective kind of bomb. And though
+they manoeuvred against each other, and there was rifle shooting at them
+and between them, there was little actual aerial fighting. Either
+the airmen were indisposed to fight or the commanders on both sides
+preferred to reserve these machines for scouting....
+
+After a day or so of digging and scheming, Barnet found himself in the
+forefront of a battle. He had made his section of rifle pits chiefly
+along a line of deep dry ditch that gave a means of inter-communication,
+he had had the earth scattered over the adjacent field, and he had
+masked his preparations with tussocks of corn and poppy. The hostile
+advance came blindly and unsuspiciously across the fields below and
+would have been very cruelly handled indeed, if some one away to the
+right had not opened fire too soon.
+
+'It was a queer thrill when these fellows came into sight,' he
+confesses; 'and not a bit like manoeuvres. They halted for a time on
+the edge of the wood and then came forward in an open line. They kept
+walking nearer to us and not looking at us, but away to the right of us.
+Even when they began to be hit, and their officers' whistles woke them
+up, they didn't seem to see us. One or two halted to fire, and then they
+all went back towards the wood again. They went slowly at first, looking
+round at us, then the shelter of the wood seemed to draw them, and they
+trotted. I fired rather mechanically and missed, then I fired again, and
+then I became earnest to hit something, made sure of my sighting, and
+aimed very carefully at a blue back that was dodging about in the corn.
+At first I couldn't satisfy myself and didn't shoot, his movements were
+so spasmodic and uncertain; then I think he came to a ditch or some such
+obstacle and halted for a moment. "GOT you," I whispered, and pulled the
+trigger.
+
+'I had the strangest sensations about that man. In the first instance,
+when I felt that I had hit him I was irradiated with joy and pride....
+
+'I sent him spinning. He jumped and threw up his arms....
+
+'Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping about.
+Suddenly I felt sick. I hadn't killed him....
+
+'In some way he was disabled and smashed up and yet able to struggle
+about. I began to think....
+
+'For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn. Either he
+was calling out or some one was shouting to him....
+
+'Then he jumped up--he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with one
+last effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still and never
+moved again.
+
+'He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him dead. I
+had been wanting to do so for some time....'
+
+The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made for
+themselves in the woods below. A man was hit in the pit next to Barnet,
+and began cursing and crying out in a violent rage. Barnet crawled
+along the ditch to him and found him in great pain, covered with blood,
+frantic with indignation, and with the half of his right hand smashed to
+a pulp. 'Look at this,' he kept repeating, hugging it and then extending
+it. 'Damned foolery! Damned foolery! My right hand, sir! My right hand!'
+
+For some time Barnet could do nothing with him. The man was consumed by
+his tortured realisation of the evil silliness of war, the realisation
+which had come upon him in a flash with the bullet that had destroyed
+his skill and use as an artificer for ever. He was looking at the
+vestiges with a horror that made him impenetrable to any other idea. At
+last the poor wretch let Barnet tie up his bleeding stump and help him
+along the ditch that conducted him deviously out of range....
+
+When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water, and all
+day long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst. For food they
+had chocolate and bread.
+
+'At first,' he says, 'I was extraordinarily excited by my baptism of
+fire. Then as the heat of the day came on I experienced an enormous
+tedium and discomfort. The flies became extremely troublesome, and my
+little grave of a rifle pit was invaded by ants. I could not get up
+or move about, for some one in the trees had got a mark on me. I kept
+thinking of the dead Prussian down among the corn, and of the bitter
+outcries of my own man. Damned foolery! It WAS damned foolery. But who
+was to blame? How had we got to this? . . .
+
+'Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with dynamite
+bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and suddenly dived down
+over beyond the trees.
+
+'"From Holland to the Alps this day," I thought, "there must be
+crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to inflict
+irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic to the pitch
+of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall wake up." . . .
+
+'Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. "Presently mankind will wake
+up."
+
+'I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were among these
+hundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in rebellion against all these
+ancient traditions of flag and empire. Weren't we, perhaps, already in
+the throes of the last crisis, in that darkest moment of a nightmare's
+horror before the sleeper will endure no more of it--and wakes?
+
+'I don't know how my speculations ended. I think they were not so
+much ended as distracted by the distant thudding of the guns that were
+opening fire at long range upon Namur.'
+
+Section 7
+
+But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of modern
+warfare. So far he had taken part only in a little shooting. The bayonet
+attack by which the advanced line was broken was made at a place called
+Croix Rouge, more than twenty miles away, and that night under cover of
+the darkness the rifle pits were abandoned and he got his company away
+without further loss.
+
+His regiment fell back unpressed behind the fortified lines between
+Namur and Sedan, entrained at a station called Mettet, and was sent
+northward by Antwerp and Rotterdam to Haarlem. Hence they marched into
+North Holland. It was only after the march into Holland that he began to
+realise the monstrous and catastrophic nature of the struggle in which
+he was playing his undistinguished part.
+
+He describes very pleasantly the journey through the hills and open land
+of Brabant, the repeated crossing of arms of the Rhine, and the change
+from the undulating scenery of Belgium to the flat, rich meadows, the
+sunlit dyke roads, and the countless windmills of the Dutch levels.
+In those days there was unbroken land from Alkmaar and Leiden to the
+Dollart. Three great provinces, South Holland, North Holland, and
+Zuiderzeeland, reclaimed at various times between the early tenth
+century and 1945 and all many feet below the level of the waves outside
+the dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern sun and
+sustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of laws
+and custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a perpetual
+defence against the beleaguering sea. For more than two hundred and
+fifty miles from Walcheren to Friesland stretched a line of embankments
+and pumping stations that was the admiration of the world.
+
+If some curious god had chosen to watch the course of events in those
+northern provinces while that flanking march of the British was in
+progress, he would have found a convenient and appropriate seat for
+his observation upon one of the great cumulus clouds that were drifting
+slowly across the blue sky during all these eventful days before the
+great catastrophe. For that was the quality of the weather, hot and
+clear, with something of a breeze, and underfoot dry and a little
+inclined to be dusty. This watching god would have looked down upon
+broad stretches of sunlit green, sunlit save for the creeping patches
+of shadow cast by the clouds, upon sky-reflecting meres, fringed and
+divided up by masses of willow and large areas of silvery weeds, upon
+white roads lying bare to the sun and upon a tracery of blue canals. The
+pastures were alive with cattle, the roads had a busy traffic, of beasts
+and bicycles and gaily coloured peasants' automobiles, the hues of the
+innumerable motor barges in the canal vied with the eventfulness of the
+roadways; and everywhere in solitary steadings, amidst ricks and barns,
+in groups by the wayside, in straggling villages, each with its fine old
+church, or in compact towns laced with canals and abounding in bridges
+and clipped trees, were human habitations.
+
+The people of this country-side were not belligerents. The interests
+and sympathies alike of Holland had been so divided that to the end she
+remained undecided and passive in the struggle of the world powers. And
+everywhere along the roads taken by the marching armies clustered groups
+and crowds of impartially observant spectators, women and children in
+peculiar white caps and old-fashioned sabots, and elderly, clean-shaven
+men quietly thoughtful over their long pipes. They had no fear of their
+invaders; the days when 'soldiering' meant bands of licentious looters
+had long since passed away....
+
+That watcher among the clouds would have seen a great distribution of
+khaki-uniformed men and khaki-painted material over the whole of the
+sunken area of Holland. He would have marked the long trains, packed
+with men or piled with great guns and war material, creeping slowly,
+alert for train-wreckers, along the north-going lines; he would have
+seen the Scheldt and Rhine choked with shipping, and pouring out still
+more men and still more material; he would have noticed halts and
+provisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling caterpillars of
+cavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons, the huge beetles of great
+guns, crawling under the poplars along the dykes and roads northward,
+along ways lined by the neutral, unmolested, ambiguously observant
+Dutch. All the barges and shipping upon the canals had been
+requisitioned for transport. In that clear, bright, warm weather, it
+would all have looked from above like some extravagant festival of
+animated toys.
+
+As the sun sank westward the spectacle must have become a little
+indistinct because of a golden haze; everything must have become warmer
+and more glowing, and because of the lengthening of the shadows more
+manifestly in relief. The shadows of the tall churches grew longer and
+longer, until they touched the horizon and mingled in the universal
+shadow; and then, slow, and soft, and wrapping the world in fold after
+fold of deepening blue, came the night--the night at first obscurely
+simple, and then with faint points here and there, and then jewelled in
+darkling splendour with a hundred thousand lights. Out of that mingling
+of darkness and ambiguous glares the noise of an unceasing activity
+would have arisen, the louder and plainer now because there was no
+longer any distraction of sight.
+
+It may be that watcher drifting in the pellucid gulf beneath the stars
+watched all through the night; it may be that he dozed. But if he gave
+way to so natural a proclivity, assuredly on the fourth night of the
+great flank march he was aroused, for that was the night of the battle
+in the air that decided the fate of Holland. The aeroplanes were
+fighting at last, and suddenly about him, above and below, with cries
+and uproar rushing out of the four quarters of heaven, striking,
+plunging, oversetting, soaring to the zenith and dropping to the ground,
+they came to assail or defend the myriads below.
+
+Secretly the Central European power had gathered his flying machines
+together, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a handful of ten
+thousand knives over the low country. And amidst that swarming flight
+were five that drove headlong for the sea walls of Holland, carrying
+atomic bombs. From north and west and south, the allied aeroplanes rose
+in response and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that war
+in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and
+fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth.
+Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy
+pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of
+chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this
+headlong swoop to death?
+
+And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped and
+locked and dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and the stars,
+came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and first one and
+then a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged hungrily down upon
+the Dutchmen's dykes and struck between land and sea and flared up again
+in enormous columns of glare and crimsoned smoke and steam.
+
+And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires and
+trees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea, tumbled with
+anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood....
+
+Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous crying and
+a flurry of alarm bells....
+
+The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky, like
+things that suddenly know themselves to be wicked....
+
+Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might quench,
+the waves came roaring in upon the land....
+
+Section 8
+
+'We had cursed our luck,' says Barnet, 'that we could not get to our
+quarters at Alkmaar that night. There, we were told, were provisions,
+tobacco, and everything for which we craved. But the main canal from
+Zaandam and Amsterdam was hopelessly jammed with craft, and we were glad
+of a chance opening that enabled us to get out of the main column and
+lie up in a kind of little harbour very much neglected and weedgrown
+before a deserted house. We broke into this and found some herrings in
+a barrel, a heap of cheeses, and stone bottles of gin in the cellar;
+and with this I cheered my starving men. We made fires and toasted the
+cheese and grilled our herrings. None of us had slept for nearly forty
+hours, and I determined to stay in this refuge until dawn and then if
+the traffic was still choked leave the barge and march the rest of the
+way into Alkmaar.
+
+'This place we had got into was perhaps a hundred yards from the canal
+and underneath a little brick bridge we could see the flotilla still,
+and hear the voices of the soldiers. Presently five or six other barges
+came through and lay up in the meer near by us, and with two of these,
+full of men of the Antrim regiment, I shared my find of provisions. In
+return we got tobacco. A large expanse of water spread to the westward
+of us and beyond were a cluster of roofs and one or two church towers.
+The barge was rather cramped for so many men, and I let several squads,
+thirty or forty perhaps altogether, bivouac on the bank. I did not let
+them go into the house on account of the furniture, and I left a note of
+indebtedness for the food we had taken. We were particularly glad of our
+tobacco and fires, because of the numerous mosquitoes that rose about
+us.
+
+'The gate of the house from which we had provisioned ourselves was
+adorned with the legend, Vreugde bij Vrede, "Joy with Peace," and it
+bore every mark of the busy retirement of a comfort-loving proprietor.
+I went along his garden, which was gay and delightful with big bushes of
+rose and sweet brier, to a quaint little summer-house, and there I sat
+and watched the men in groups cooking and squatting along the bank. The
+sun was setting in a nearly cloudless sky.
+
+'For the last two weeks I had been a wholly occupied man, intent only
+upon obeying the orders that came down to me. All through this time I
+had been working to the very limit of my mental and physical faculties,
+and my only moments of rest had been devoted to snatches of sleep. Now
+came this rare, unexpected interlude, and I could look detachedly upon
+what I was doing and feel something of its infinite wonderfulness. I was
+irradiated with affection for the men of my company and with admiration
+at their cheerful acquiescence in the subordination and needs of our
+positions. I watched their proceedings and heard their pleasant voices.
+How willing those men were! How ready to accept leadership and forget
+themselves in collective ends! I thought how manfully they had gone
+through all the strains and toil of the last two weeks, how they
+had toughened and shaken down to comradeship together, and how much
+sweetness there is after all in our foolish human blood. For they were
+just one casual sample of the species--their patience and readiness
+lay, as the energy of the atom had lain, still waiting to be properly
+utilised. Again it came to me with overpowering force that the supreme
+need of our race is leading, that the supreme task is to discover
+leading, to forget oneself in realising the collective purpose of the
+race. Once more I saw life plain....'
+
+Very characteristic is that of the 'rather too corpulent' young
+officer, who was afterwards to set it all down in the Wander Jahre. Very
+characteristic, too, it is of the change in men's hearts that was even
+then preparing a new phase of human history.
+
+He goes on to write of the escape from individuality in science and
+service, and of his discovery of this 'salvation.' All that was then,
+no doubt, very moving and original; now it seems only the most obvious
+commonplace of human life.
+
+The glow of the sunset faded, the twilight deepened into night. The
+fires burnt the brighter, and some Irishmen away across the meer started
+singing. But Barnet's men were too weary for that sort of thing, and
+soon the bank and the barge were heaped with sleeping forms.
+
+'I alone seemed unable to sleep. I suppose I was over-weary, and after
+a little feverish slumber by the tiller of the barge I sat up, awake and
+uneasy....
+
+'That night Holland seemed all sky. There was just a little black lower
+rim to things, a steeple, perhaps, or a line of poplars, and then the
+great hemisphere swept over us. As at first the sky was empty. Yet my
+uneasiness referred itself in some vague way to the sky.
+
+'And now I was melancholy. I found something strangely sorrowful and
+submissive in the sleepers all about me, those men who had marched so
+far, who had left all the established texture of their lives behind them
+to come upon this mad campaign, this campaign that signified nothing and
+consumed everything, this mere fever of fighting. I saw how little and
+feeble is the life of man, a thing of chances, preposterously unable
+to find the will to realise even the most timid of its dreams. And I
+wondered if always it would be so, if man was a doomed animal who would
+never to the last days of his time take hold of fate and change it to
+his will. Always, it may be, he will remain kindly but jealous, desirous
+but discursive, able and unwisely impulsive, until Saturn who begot him
+shall devour him in his turn....
+
+'I was roused from these thoughts by the sudden realisation of the
+presence of a squadron of aeroplanes far away to the north-east and very
+high. They looked like little black dashes against the midnight blue.
+I remember that I looked up at them at first rather idly--as one might
+notice a flight of birds. Then I perceived that they were only the
+extreme wing of a great fleet that was advancing in a long line very
+swiftly from the direction of the frontier and my attention tightened.
+
+'Directly I saw that fleet I was astonished not to have seen it before.
+
+'I stood up softly, undesirous of disturbing my companions, but with my
+heart beating now rather more rapidly with surprise and excitement.
+I strained my ears for any sound of guns along our front. Almost
+instinctively I turned about for protection to the south and west, and
+peered; and then I saw coming as fast and much nearer to me, as if they
+had sprung out of the darkness, three banks of aeroplanes; a group
+of squadrons very high, a main body at a height perhaps of one or two
+thousand feet, and a doubtful number flying low and very indistinct. The
+middle ones were so thick they kept putting out groups of stars. And I
+realised that after all there was to be fighting in the air.
+
+'There was something extraordinarily strange in this swift, noiseless
+convergence of nearly invisible combatants above the sleeping hosts.
+Every one about me was still unconscious; there was no sign as yet of
+any agitation among the shipping on the main canal, whose whole course,
+dotted with unsuspicious lights and fringed with fires, must have been
+clearly perceptible from above. Then a long way off towards Alkmaar I
+heard bugles, and after that shots, and then a wild clamour of bells. I
+determined to let my men sleep on for as long as they could....
+
+'The battle was joined with the swiftness of dreaming. I do not think it
+can have been five minutes from the moment when I first became aware of
+the Central European air fleet to the contact of the two forces. I saw
+it quite plainly in silhouette against the luminous blue of the northern
+sky. The allied aeroplanes--they were mostly French--came pouring down
+like a fierce shower upon the middle of the Central European fleet.
+They looked exactly like a coarser sort of rain. There was a crackling
+sound--the first sound I heard--it reminded one of the Aurora Borealis,
+and I supposed it was an interchange of rifle shots. There were flashes
+like summer lightning; and then all the sky became a whirling confusion
+of battle that was still largely noiseless. Some of the Central European
+aeroplanes were certainly charged and overset; others seemed to collapse
+and fall and then flare out with so bright a light that it took the edge
+off one's vision and made the rest of the battle disappear as though it
+had been snatched back out of sight.
+
+'And then, while I still peered and tried to shade these flames from my
+eyes with my hand, and while the men about me were beginning to stir,
+the atomic bombs were thrown at the dykes. They made a mighty thunder in
+the air, and fell like Lucifer in the picture, leaving a flaring
+trail in the sky. The night, which had been pellucid and detailed
+and eventful, seemed to vanish, to be replaced abruptly by a black
+background to these tremendous pillars of fire....
+
+'Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was filled
+with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds....
+
+'There was something discontinuous in this impact. At one moment I was
+a lonely watcher in a sleeping world; the next saw every one about me
+afoot, the whole world awake and amazed....
+
+'And then the wind had struck me a buffet, taken my helmet and swept
+aside the summerhouse of Vreugde bij Vrede, as a scythe sweeps away
+grass. I saw the bombs fall, and then watched a great crimson flare leap
+responsive to each impact, and mountainous masses of red-lit steam and
+flying fragments clamber up towards the zenith. Against the glare I saw
+the country-side for miles standing black and clear, churches, trees,
+chimneys. And suddenly I understood. The Central Europeans had burst
+the dykes. Those flares meant the bursting of the dykes, and in a little
+while the sea-water would be upon us....'
+
+He goes on to tell with a certain prolixity of the steps he took--and
+all things considered they were very intelligent steps--to meet this
+amazing crisis. He got his men aboard and hailed the adjacent barges;
+he got the man who acted as barge engineer at his post and the engines
+working, he cast loose from his moorings. Then he bethought himself of
+food, and contrived to land five men, get in a few dozen cheeses, and
+ship his men again before the inundation reached them.
+
+He is reasonably proud of this piece of coolness. His idea was to take
+the wave head-on and with his engines full speed ahead. And all the
+while he was thanking heaven he was not in the jam of traffic in the
+main canal. He rather, I think, overestimated the probable rush of
+waters; he dreaded being swept away, he explains, and smashed against
+houses and trees.
+
+He does not give any estimate of the time it took between the bursting
+of the dykes and the arrival of the waters, but it was probably an
+interval of about twenty minutes or half an hour. He was working now
+in darkness--save for the light of his lantern--and in a great wind. He
+hung out head and stern lights....
+
+Whirling torrents of steam were pouring up from the advancing waters,
+which had rushed, it must be remembered, through nearly incandescent
+gaps in the sea defences, and this vast uprush of vapour soon veiled the
+flaring centres of explosion altogether.
+
+'The waters came at last, an advancing cascade. It was like a broad
+roller sweeping across the country. They came with a deep, roaring
+sound. I had expected a Niagara, but the total fall of the front could
+not have been much more than twelve feet. Our barge hesitated for a
+moment, took a dose over her bows, and then lifted. I signalled for full
+speed ahead and brought her head upstream, and held on like grim death
+to keep her there.
+
+'There was a wind about as strong as the flood, and I found we were
+pounding against every conceivable buoyant object that had been between
+us and the sea. The only light in the world now came from our lamps,
+the steam became impenetrable at a score of yards from the boat, and
+the roar of the wind and water cut us off from all remoter sounds. The
+black, shining waters swirled by, coming into the light of our lamps out
+of an ebony blackness and vanishing again into impenetrable black.
+And on the waters came shapes, came things that flashed upon us for a
+moment, now a half-submerged boat, now a cow, now a huge fragment of a
+house's timberings, now a muddle of packing-cases and scaffolding.
+The things clapped into sight like something shown by the opening of a
+shutter, and then bumped shatteringly against us or rushed by us. Once I
+saw very clearly a man's white face....
+
+'All the while a group of labouring, half-submerged trees remained ahead
+of us, drawing very slowly nearer. I steered a course to avoid them.
+They seemed to gesticulate a frantic despair against the black steam
+clouds behind. Once a great branch detached itself and tore shuddering
+by me. We did, on the whole, make headway. The last I saw of Vreugde bij
+Vrede before the night swallowed it, was almost dead astern of us....'
+
+Section 9
+
+Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had been badly
+strained, and his men were pumping or baling in relays. He had got about
+a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose boat had capsized near him, and
+he had three other boats in tow. He was afloat, and somewhere between
+Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but he could not tell where. It was a day that
+was still half night. Gray waters stretched in every direction under a
+dark gray sky, and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, in
+many cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the upper third
+of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted a dimly seen
+flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned, furniture, rafts,
+timbering, and miscellaneous objects.
+
+The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there did a
+dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box or chair or
+such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was not till the Thursday
+that the dead came to the surface in any quantity. The view was bounded
+on every side by a gray mist that closed overhead in a gray canopy. The
+air cleared in the afternoon, and then, far away to the west under great
+banks of steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of the atomic bombs
+came visible across the waste of water.
+
+They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London sunsets. 'They
+sat upon the sea,' says Barnet, 'like frayed-out waterlilies of flame.'
+
+Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the track
+of the canal, in helping people who were adrift, in picking up derelict
+boats, and in taking people out of imperilled houses. He found other
+military barges similarly employed, and it was only as the day wore on
+and the immediate appeals for aid were satisfied that he thought of food
+and drink for his men, and what course he had better pursue. They had a
+little cheese, but no water. 'Orders,' that mysterious direction, had at
+last altogether disappeared. He perceived he had now to act upon his own
+responsibility.
+
+'One's sense was of a destruction so far-reaching and of a world so
+altered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and expect to find
+things as they had been before the war began. I sat on the quarter-deck
+with Mylius my engineer and Kemp and two others of the non-commissioned
+officers, and we consulted upon our line of action. We were foodless and
+aimless. We agreed that our fighting value was extremely small, and that
+our first duty was to get ourselves in touch with food and instructions
+again. Whatever plan of campaign had directed our movements was
+manifestly smashed to bits. Mylius was of opinion that we could take
+a line westward and get back to England across the North Sea. He
+calculated that with such a motor barge as ours it would be possible to
+reach the Yorkshire coast within four-and-twenty hours. But this idea
+I overruled because of the shortness of our provisions, and more
+particularly because of our urgent need of water.
+
+'Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their demands did
+much to exasperate our thirst. I decided that if we went away to the
+south we should reach hilly country, or at least country that was not
+submerged, and then we should be able to land, find some stream, drink,
+and get supplies and news. Many of the barges adrift in the haze about
+us were filled with British soldiers and had floated up from the Nord
+See Canal, but none of them were any better informed than ourselves of
+the course of events. "Orders" had, in fact, vanished out of the sky.
+
+'"Orders" made a temporary reappearance late that evening in the form
+of a megaphone hail from a British torpedo boat, announcing a truce, and
+giving the welcome information that food and water were being hurried
+down the Rhine and were to be found on the barge flotilla lying over the
+old Rhine above Leiden.'...
+
+We will not follow Barnet, however, in the description of his strange
+overland voyage among trees and houses and churches by Zaandam and
+between Haarlem and Amsterdam, to Leiden. It was a voyage in a red-lit
+mist, in a world of steamy silhouette, full of strange voices and
+perplexity, and with every other sensation dominated by a feverish
+thirst. 'We sat,' he says, 'in a little huddled group, saying very
+little, and the men forward were mere knots of silent endurance. Our
+only continuing sound was the persistent mewing of a cat one of the men
+had rescued from a floating hayrick near Zaandam. We kept a southward
+course by a watch-chain compass Mylius had produced....
+
+'I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army, nor had
+we any strong sense of the war as the dominating fact about us. Our
+mental setting had far more of the effect of a huge natural catastrophe.
+The atomic bombs had dwarfed the international issues to complete
+insignificance. When our minds wandered from the preoccupations of our
+immediate needs, we speculated upon the possibility of stopping the use
+of these frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed.
+For to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still greater
+power of destruction of which they were the precursors might quite
+easily shatter every relationship and institution of mankind.
+
+'"What will they be doing," asked Mylius, "what will they be doing?
+It's plain we've got to put an end to war. It's plain things have to be
+run some way. THIS--all this--is impossible."
+
+'I made no immediate answer. Something--I cannot think what--had brought
+back to me the figure of that man I had seen wounded on the very first
+day of actual fighting. I saw again his angry, tearful eyes, and that
+poor, dripping, bloody mess that had been a skilful human hand five
+minutes before, thrust out in indignant protest. "Damned foolery," he
+had stormed and sobbed, "damned foolery. My right hand, sir! My RIGHT
+hand...."
+
+'My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me. "I think we are
+too--too silly," I said to Mylius, "ever to stop war. If we'd had the
+sense to do it, we should have done it before this. I think this----" I
+pointed to the gaunt black outline of a smashed windmill that stuck up,
+ridiculous and ugly, above the blood-lit waters--"this is the end."'
+
+Section 10
+
+But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and his
+barge-load of hungry and starving men.
+
+For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if civilisation
+had come to a final collapse. These crowning buds upon the tradition
+that Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered, opened and flared 'like
+waterlilies of flame' over nations destroyed, over churches smashed or
+submerged, towns ruined, fields lost to mankind for ever, and a million
+weltering bodies. Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would the
+flames of war still burn amidst the ruins?
+
+Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance in
+their answers to that question. Already once in the history of
+mankind, in America, before its discovery by the whites, an organised
+civilisation had given way to a mere cult of warfare, specialised and
+cruel, and it seemed for a time to many a thoughtful man as if the
+whole world was but to repeat on a larger scale this ascendancy of the
+warrior, this triumph of the destructive instincts of the race.
+
+The subsequent chapters of Barnet's narrative do but supply body to
+this tragic possibility. He gives a series of vignettes of civilisation,
+shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found the Belgian hills
+swarming with refugees and desolated by cholera; the vestiges of the
+contending armies keeping order under a truce, without actual battles,
+but with the cautious hostility of habit, and a great absence of plan
+everywhere.
+
+Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were rumours
+of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoy
+and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes. There was the report
+of an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and Japanese, and of some huge
+revolutionary outbreak in America. The weather was stormier than men had
+ever known it in those regions, with much thunder and lightning and wild
+cloud-bursts of rain....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+THE ENDING OF WAR
+
+Section 1
+
+On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding two
+long stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to Bellinzona, and
+southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is very
+beautiful in springtime with a great multitude of wild flowers. More
+particularly is this so in early June, when the slender asphodel Saint
+Bruno's lily, with its spike of white blossom, is in flower. To the
+westward of this delightful shelf there is a deep and densely wooded
+trench, a great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of which
+arise great precipices very high and wild. Above the asphodel fields the
+mountains climb in rocky slopes to solitudes of stone and sunlight that
+curve round and join that wall of cliffs in one common skyline. This
+desolate and austere background contrasts very vividly with the glowing
+serenity of the great lake below, with the spacious view of fertile
+hills and roads and villages and islands to south and east, and with the
+hotly golden rice flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And because
+it was a remote and insignificant place, far away out of the crowding
+tragedies of that year of disaster, away from burning cities and
+starving multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was here
+that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest, if
+possible, before it was too late, the debacle of civilisation. Here,
+brought together by the indefatigable energy of that impassioned
+humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at Washington, the chief
+Powers of the world were to meet in a last desperate conference to 'save
+humanity.'
+
+Leblanc was one of those ingenuous men whose lot would have been
+insignificant in any period of security, but who have been caught up
+to an immortal role in history by the sudden simplification of
+human affairs through some tragical crisis, to the measure of their
+simplicity. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln, and such was Garibaldi.
+And Leblanc, with his transparent childish innocence, his entire
+self-forgetfulness, came into this confusion of distrust and intricate
+disaster with an invincible appeal for the manifest sanities of the
+situation. His voice, when he spoke, was 'full of remonstrance.' He was
+a little bald, spectacled man, inspired by that intellectual idealism
+which has been one of the peculiar gifts of France to humanity. He was
+possessed of one clear persuasion, that war must end, and that the only
+way to end war was to have but one government for mankind. He brushed
+aside all other considerations. At the very outbreak of the war, so soon
+as the two capitals of the belligerents had been wrecked, he went to the
+president in the White House with this proposal. He made it as if it was
+a matter of course. He was fortunate to be in Washington and in touch
+with that gigantic childishness which was the characteristic of the
+American imagination. For the Americans also were among the simple
+peoples by whom the world was saved. He won over the American president
+and the American government to his general ideas; at any rate they
+supported him sufficiently to give him a standing with the more
+sceptical European governments, and with this backing he set to work--it
+seemed the most fantastic of enterprises--to bring together all the
+rulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable letters, he
+sent messages, he went desperate journeys, he enlisted whatever support
+he could find; no one was too humble for an ally or too obstinate
+for his advances; through the terrible autumn of the last wars this
+persistent little visionary in spectacles must have seemed rather like a
+hopeful canary twittering during a thunderstorm. And no accumulation of
+disasters daunted his conviction that they could be ended.
+
+For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of
+destruction. Power after Power about the armed globe sought to
+anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium of
+panic, in order to use their bombs first. China and Japan had assailed
+Russia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had attacked Japan, India
+was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit of fire spouting death and
+flame; the redoubtable King of the Balkans was mobilising. It must
+have seemed plain at last to every one in those days that the world
+was slipping headlong to anarchy. By the spring of 1959 from nearly
+two hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the
+unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy
+fabric of the world's credit had vanished, industry was completely
+disorganised and every city, every thickly populated area was starving
+or trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the capital cities of
+the world were burning; millions of people had already perished, and
+over great areas government was at an end. Humanity has been compared
+by one contemporary writer to a sleeper who handles matches in his sleep
+and wakes to find himself in flames.
+
+For many months it was an open question whether there was to be found
+throughout all the race the will and intelligence to face these new
+conditions and make even an attempt to arrest the downfall of the social
+order. For a time the war spirit defeated every effort to rally the
+forces of preservation and construction. Leblanc seemed to be protesting
+against earthquakes, and as likely to find a spirit of reason in the
+crater of Etna. Even though the shattered official governments now
+clamoured for peace, bands of irreconcilables and invincible patriots,
+usurpers, adventurers, and political desperadoes, were everywhere in
+possession of the simple apparatus for the disengagement of atomic
+energy and the initiation of new centres of destruction. The stuff
+exercised an irresistible fascination upon a certain type of mind.
+Why should any one give in while he can still destroy his enemies?
+Surrender? While there is still a chance of blowing them to dust? The
+power of destruction which had once been the ultimate privilege
+of government was now the only power left in the world--and it was
+everywhere. There were few thoughtful men during that phase of
+blazing waste who did not pass through such moods of despair as Barnet
+describes, and declare with him: 'This is the end....'
+
+And all the while Leblanc was going to and fro with glittering glasses
+and an inexhaustible persuasiveness, urging the manifest reasonableness
+of his view upon ears that ceased presently to be inattentive. Never at
+any time did he betray a doubt that all this chaotic conflict would end.
+No nurse during a nursery uproar was ever so certain of the inevitable
+ultimate peace. From being treated as an amiable dreamer he came by
+insensible degrees to be regarded as an extravagant possibility. Then he
+began to seem even practicable. The people who listened to him in 1958
+with a smiling impatience, were eager before 1959 was four months old
+to know just exactly what he thought might be done. He answered with the
+patience of a philosopher and the lucidity of a Frenchman. He began to
+receive responses of a more and more hopeful type. He came across
+the Atlantic to Italy, and there he gathered in the promises for this
+congress. He chose those high meadows above Brissago for the reasons we
+have stated. 'We must get away,' he said, 'from old associations.' He
+set to work requisitioning material for his conference with an assurance
+that was justified by the replies. With a slight incredulity the
+conference which was to begin a new order in the world, gathered itself
+together. Leblanc summoned it without arrogance, he controlled it by
+virtue of an infinite humility. Men appeared upon those upland slopes
+with the apparatus for wireless telegraphy; others followed with tents
+and provisions; a little cable was flung down to a convenient point
+upon the Locarno road below. Leblanc arrived, sedulously directing every
+detail that would affect the tone of the assembly. He might have been a
+courier in advance rather than the originator of the gathering. And
+then there arrived, some by the cable, most by aeroplane, a few in other
+fashions, the men who had been called together to confer upon the state
+of the world. It was to be a conference without a name. Nine monarchs,
+the presidents of four republics, a number of ministers and ambassadors,
+powerful journalists, and such-like prominent and influential men, took
+part in it. There were even scientific men; and that world-famous old
+man, Holsten, came with the others to contribute his amateur statecraft
+to the desperate problem of the age. Only Leblanc would have dared so to
+summon figure heads and powers and intelligence, or have had the courage
+to hope for their agreement....
+
+Section 2
+
+And one at least of those who were called to this conference of
+governments came to it on foot. This was King Egbert, the young king
+of the most venerable kingdom in Europe. He was a rebel, and had always
+been of deliberate choice a rebel against the magnificence of his
+position. He affected long pedestrian tours and a disposition to sleep
+in the open air. He came now over the Pass of Sta Maria Maggiore and
+by boat up the lake to Brissago; thence he walked up the mountain, a
+pleasant path set with oaks and sweet chestnut. For provision on the
+walk, for he did not want to hurry, he carried with him a pocketful
+of bread and cheese. A certain small retinue that was necessary to his
+comfort and dignity upon occasions of state he sent on by the cable car,
+and with him walked his private secretary, Firmin, a man who had
+thrown up the Professorship of World Politics in the London School of
+Sociology, Economics, and Political Science, to take up these duties.
+Firmin was a man of strong rather than rapid thought, he had anticipated
+great influence in this new position, and after some years he was still
+only beginning to apprehend how largely his function was to listen.
+Originally he had been something of a thinker upon international
+politics, an authority upon tariffs and strategy, and a valued
+contributor to various of the higher organs of public opinion, but the
+atomic bombs had taken him by surprise, and he had still to recover
+completely from his pre-atomic opinions and the silencing effect of
+those sustained explosives.
+
+The king's freedom from the trammels of etiquette was very complete. In
+theory--and he abounded in theory--his manners were purely democratic.
+It was by sheer habit and inadvertency that he permitted Firmin, who had
+discovered a rucksack in a small shop in the town below, to carry
+both bottles of beer. The king had never, as a matter of fact, carried
+anything for himself in his life, and he had never noted that he did not
+do so.
+
+'We will have nobody with us,' he said, 'at all. We will be perfectly
+simple.'
+
+So Firmin carried the beer.
+
+As they walked up--it was the king made the pace rather than
+Firmin--they talked of the conference before them, and Firmin, with a
+certain want of assurance that would have surprised him in himself
+in the days of his Professorship, sought to define the policy of his
+companion. 'In its broader form, sir,' said Firmin; 'I admit a certain
+plausibility in this project of Leblanc's, but I feel that although
+it may be advisable to set up some sort of general control for
+International affairs--a sort of Hague Court with extended powers--that
+is no reason whatever for losing sight of the principles of national and
+imperial autonomy.'
+
+'Firmin,' said the king, 'I am going to set my brother kings a good
+example.'
+
+Firmin intimated a curiosity that veiled a dread.
+
+'By chucking all that nonsense,' said the king.
+
+He quickened his pace as Firmin, who was already a little out of breath,
+betrayed a disposition to reply.
+
+'I am going to chuck all that nonsense,' said the king, as Firmin
+prepared to speak. 'I am going to fling my royalty and empire on the
+table--and declare at once I don't mean to haggle. It's haggling--about
+rights--has been the devil in human affairs, for--always. I am going to
+stop this nonsense.'
+
+Firmin halted abruptly. 'But, sir!' he cried.
+
+The king stopped six yards ahead of him and looked back at his adviser's
+perspiring visage.
+
+'Do you really think, Firmin, that I am here as--as an infernal
+politician to put my crown and my flag and my claims and so forth in the
+way of peace? That little Frenchman is right. You know he is right
+as well as I do. Those things are over. We--we kings and rulers and
+representatives have been at the very heart of the mischief. Of course
+we imply separation, and of course separation means the threat of war,
+and of course the threat of war means the accumulation of more and more
+atomic bombs. The old game's up. But, I say, we mustn't stand here, you
+know. The world waits. Don't you think the old game's up, Firmin?'
+
+Firmin adjusted a strap, passed a hand over his wet forehead, and
+followed earnestly. 'I admit, sir,' he said to a receding back, 'that
+there has to be some sort of hegemony, some sort of Amphictyonic
+council----'
+
+'There's got to be one simple government for all the world,' said the
+king over his shoulder.
+
+'But as for a reckless, unqualified abandonment, sir----'
+
+'BANG!' cried the king.
+
+Firmin made no answer to this interruption. But a faint shadow of
+annoyance passed across his heated features.
+
+'Yesterday,' said the king, by way of explanation, 'the Japanese very
+nearly got San Francisco.'
+
+'I hadn't heard, sir.'
+
+'The Americans ran the Japanese aeroplane down into the sea and there
+the bomb got busted.'
+
+'Under the sea, sir?'
+
+'Yes. Submarine volcano. The steam is in sight of the Californian coast.
+It was as near as that. And with things like this happening, you want
+me to go up this hill and haggle. Consider the effect of that upon my
+imperial cousin--and all the others!'
+
+'HE will haggle, sir.'
+
+'Not a bit of it,' said the king.
+
+'But, sir.'
+
+'Leblanc won't let him.'
+
+Firmin halted abruptly and gave a vicious pull at the offending strap.
+'Sir, he will listen to his advisers,' he said, in a tone that in
+some subtle way seemed to implicate his master with the trouble of the
+knapsack.
+
+The king considered him.
+
+'We will go just a little higher,' he said. 'I want to find this
+unoccupied village they spoke of, and then we will drink that beer. It
+can't be far. We will drink the beer and throw away the bottles. And
+then, Firmin, I shall ask you to look at things in a more generous
+light.... Because, you know, you must....'
+
+He turned about and for some time the only sound they made was the
+noise of their boots upon the loose stones of the way and the irregular
+breathing of Firmin.
+
+At length, as it seemed to Firmin, or quite soon, as it seemed to the
+king, the gradient of the path diminished, the way widened out, and they
+found themselves in a very beautiful place indeed. It was one of those
+upland clusters of sheds and houses that are still to be found in the
+mountains of North Italy, buildings that were used only in the high
+summer, and which it was the custom to leave locked up and deserted
+through all the winter and spring, and up to the middle of June. The
+buildings were of a soft-toned gray stone, buried in rich green grass,
+shadowed by chestnut trees and lit by an extraordinary blaze of yellow
+broom. Never had the king seen broom so glorious; he shouted at the
+light of it, for it seemed to give out more sunlight even than it
+received; he sat down impulsively on a lichenous stone, tugged out his
+bread and cheese, and bade Firmin thrust the beer into the shaded weeds
+to cool.
+
+'The things people miss, Firmin,' he said, 'who go up into the air in
+ships!'
+
+Firmin looked around him with an ungenial eye. 'You see it at its best,
+sir,' he said, 'before the peasants come here again and make it filthy.'
+
+'It would be beautiful anyhow,' said the king.
+
+'Superficially, sir,' said Firmin. 'But it stands for a social order
+that is fast vanishing away. Indeed, judging by the grass between the
+stones and in the huts, I am inclined to doubt if it is in use even
+now.'
+
+'I suppose,' said the king, 'they would come up immediately the hay
+on this flower meadow is cut. It would be those slow, creamy-coloured
+beasts, I expect, one sees on the roads below, and swarthy girls with
+red handkerchiefs over their black hair.... It is wonderful to think how
+long that beautiful old life lasted. In the Roman times and long ages
+before ever the rumour of the Romans had come into these parts, men
+drove their cattle up into these places as the summer came on.... How
+haunted is this place! There have been quarrels here, hopes, children
+have played here and lived to be old crones and old gaffers, and died,
+and so it has gone on for thousands of lives. Lovers, innumerable
+lovers, have caressed amidst this golden broom....'
+
+He meditated over a busy mouthful of bread and cheese.
+
+'We ought to have brought a tankard for that beer,' he said.
+
+Firmin produced a folding aluminium cup, and the king was pleased to
+drink.
+
+'I wish, sir,' said Firmin suddenly, 'I could induce you at least to
+delay your decision----'
+
+'It's no good talking, Firmin,' said the king. 'My mind's as clear as
+daylight.'
+
+'Sire,' protested Firmin, with his voice full of bread and cheese and
+genuine emotion, 'have you no respect for your kingship?'
+
+The king paused before he answered with unwonted gravity. 'It's just
+because I have, Firmin, that I won't be a puppet in this game of
+international politics.' He regarded his companion for a moment and then
+remarked: 'Kingship!--what do YOU know of kingship, Firmin?
+
+'Yes,' cried the king to his astonished counsellor. 'For the first time
+in my life I am going to be a king. I am going to lead, and lead by
+my own authority. For a dozen generations my family has been a set of
+dummies in the hands of their advisers. Advisers! Now I am going to be a
+real king--and I am going to--to abolish, dispose of, finish, the crown
+to which I have been a slave. But what a world of paralysing shams
+this roaring stuff has ended! The rigid old world is in the melting-pot
+again, and I, who seemed to be no more than the stuffing inside a regal
+robe, I am a king among kings. I have to play my part at the head of
+things and put an end to blood and fire and idiot disorder.'
+
+'But, sir,' protested Firmin.
+
+'This man Leblanc is right. The whole world has got to be a Republic,
+one and indivisible. You know that, and my duty is to make that easy.
+A king should lead his people; you want me to stick on their backs like
+some Old Man of the Sea. To-day must be a sacrament of kings. Our trust
+for mankind is done with and ended. We must part our robes among them,
+we must part our kingship among them, and say to them all, now the
+king in every one must rule the world.... Have you no sense of the
+magnificence of this occasion? You want me, Firmin, you want me to go
+up there and haggle like a damned little solicitor for some price, some
+compensation, some qualification....'
+
+Firmin shrugged his shoulders and assumed an expression of despair.
+Meanwhile, he conveyed, one must eat.
+
+For a time neither spoke, and the king ate and turned over in his mind
+the phrases of the speech he intended to make to the conference. By
+virtue of the antiquity of his crown he was to preside, and he intended
+to make his presidency memorable. Reassured of his eloquence, he
+considered the despondent and sulky Firmin for a space.
+
+'Firmin,' he said, 'you have idealised kingship.'
+
+'It has been my dream, sir,' said Firmin sorrowfully, 'to serve.'
+
+'At the levers, Firmin,' said the king.
+
+'You are pleased to be unjust,' said Firmin, deeply hurt.
+
+'I am pleased to be getting out of it,' said the king.
+
+'Oh, Firmin,' he went on, 'have you no thought for me? Will you never
+realise that I am not only flesh and blood but an imagination--with its
+rights. I am a king in revolt against that fetter they put upon my head.
+I am a king awake. My reverend grandparents never in all their august
+lives had a waking moment. They loved the job that you, you advisers,
+gave them; they never had a doubt of it. It was like giving a doll to
+a woman who ought to have a child. They delighted in processions and
+opening things and being read addresses to, and visiting triplets and
+nonagenarians and all that sort of thing. Incredibly. They used to keep
+albums of cuttings from all the illustrated papers showing them at it,
+and if the press-cutting parcels grew thin they were worried. It was all
+that ever worried them. But there is something atavistic in me; I
+hark back to unconstitutional monarchs. They christened me too
+retrogressively, I think. I wanted to get things done. I was bored. I
+might have fallen into vice, most intelligent and energetic princes do,
+but the palace precautions were unusually thorough. I was brought up in
+the purest court the world has ever seen.... Alertly pure.... So I
+read books, Firmin, and went about asking questions. The thing was bound
+to happen to one of us sooner or later. Perhaps, too, very likely I'm
+not vicious. I don't think I am.'
+
+He reflected. 'No,' he said.
+
+Firmin cleared his throat. 'I don't think you are, sir,' he said. 'You
+prefer----'
+
+He stopped short. He had been going to say 'talking.' He substituted
+'ideas.'
+
+'That world of royalty!' the king went on. 'In a little while no one
+will understand it any more. It will become a riddle....
+
+'Among other things, it was a world of perpetual best clothes.
+Everything was in its best clothes for us, and usually wearing bunting.
+With a cinema watching to see we took it properly. If you are a king,
+Firmin, and you go and look at a regiment, it instantly stops whatever
+it is doing, changes into full uniform and presents arms. When my august
+parents went in a train the coal in the tender used to be whitened. It
+did, Firmin, and if coal had been white instead of black I have no doubt
+the authorities would have blackened it. That was the spirit of our
+treatment. People were always walking about with their faces to us. One
+never saw anything in profile. One got an impression of a world that
+was insanely focused on ourselves. And when I began to poke my little
+questions into the Lord Chancellor and the archbishop and all the rest
+of them, about what I should see if people turned round, the general
+effect I produced was that I wasn't by any means displaying the Royal
+Tact they had expected of me....'
+
+He meditated for a time.
+
+'And yet, you know, there is something in the kingship, Firmin. It
+stiffened up my august little grandfather. It gave my grandmother a
+kind of awkward dignity even when she was cross--and she was very
+often cross. They both had a profound sense of responsibility. My poor
+father's health was wretched during his brief career; nobody outside the
+circle knows just how he screwed himself up to things. "My people expect
+it," he used to say of this tiresome duty or that. Most of the things
+they made him do were silly--it was part of a bad tradition, but
+there was nothing silly in the way he set about them.... The spirit of
+kingship is a fine thing, Firmin; I feel it in my bones; I do not know
+what I might not be if I were not a king. I could die for my people,
+Firmin, and you couldn't. No, don't say you could die for me, because
+I know better. Don't think I forget my kingship, Firmin, don't imagine
+that. I am a king, a kingly king, by right divine. The fact that I am
+also a chattering young man makes not the slightest difference to that.
+But the proper text-book for kings, Firmin, is none of the court memoirs
+and Welt-Politik books you would have me read; it is old Fraser's Golden
+Bough. Have you read that, Firmin?'
+
+Firmin had. 'Those were the authentic kings. In the end they were cut
+up and a bit given to everybody. They sprinkled the nations--with
+Kingship.'
+
+Firmin turned himself round and faced his royal master.
+
+'What do you intend to do, sir?' he asked. 'If you will not listen to
+me, what do you propose to do this afternoon?'
+
+The king flicked crumbs from his coat.
+
+'Manifestly war has to stop for ever, Firmin. Manifestly this can only
+be done by putting all the world under one government. Our crowns and
+flags are in the way. Manifestly they must go.'
+
+'Yes, sir,' interrupted Firmin, 'but WHAT government? I don't see what
+government you get by a universal abdication!'
+
+'Well,' said the king, with his hands about his knees, 'WE shall be the
+government.'
+
+'The conference?' exclaimed Firmin.
+
+'Who else?' asked the king simply.
+
+'It's perfectly simple,' he added to Firmin's tremendous silence.
+
+'But,' cried Firmin, 'you must have sanctions! Will there be no form of
+election, for example?'
+
+'Why should there be?' asked the king, with intelligent curiosity.
+
+'The consent of the governed.'
+
+'Firmin, we are just going to lay down our differences and take over
+government. Without any election at all. Without any sanction. The
+governed will show their consent by silence. If any effective opposition
+arises we shall ask it to come in and help. The true sanction of
+kingship is the grip upon the sceptre. We aren't going to worry people
+to vote for us. I'm certain the mass of men does not want to be bothered
+with such things.... We'll contrive a way for any one interested to join
+in. That's quite enough in the way of democracy. Perhaps later--when
+things don't matter.... We shall govern all right, Firmin. Government
+only becomes difficult when the lawyers get hold of it, and since these
+troubles began the lawyers are shy. Indeed, come to think of it, I
+wonder where all the lawyers are.... Where are they? A lot, of course,
+were bagged, some of the worst ones, when they blew up my legislature.
+You never knew the late Lord Chancellor....
+
+'Necessities bury rights. And create them. Lawyers live on dead rights
+disinterred.... We've done with that way of living. We won't have more
+law than a code can cover and beyond that government will be free....
+
+'Before the sun sets to-day, Firmin, trust me, we shall have made our
+abdications, all of us, and declared the World Republic, supreme and
+indivisible. I wonder what my august grandmother would have made of it!
+All my rights! . . . And then we shall go on governing. What else is
+there to do? All over the world we shall declare that there is no longer
+mine or thine, but ours. China, the United States, two-thirds of Europe,
+will certainly fall in and obey. They will have to do so. What else can
+they do? Their official rulers are here with us. They won't be able
+to get together any sort of idea of not obeying us.... Then we
+shall declare that every sort of property is held in trust for the
+Republic....'
+
+'But, sir!' cried Firmin, suddenly enlightened. 'Has this been arranged
+already?'
+
+'My dear Firmin, do you think we have come here, all of us, to talk
+at large? The talking has been done for half a century. Talking
+and writing. We are here to set the new thing, the simple, obvious,
+necessary thing, going.'
+
+He stood up.
+
+Firmin, forgetting the habits of a score of years, remained seated.
+
+'WELL,' he said at last. 'And I have known nothing!'
+
+The king smiled very cheerfully. He liked these talks with Firmin.
+
+Section 3
+
+That conference upon the Brissago meadows was one of the most
+heterogeneous collections of prominent people that has ever met
+together. Principalities and powers, stripped and shattered until all
+their pride and mystery were gone, met in a marvellous new humility.
+Here were kings and emperors whose capitals were lakes of flaming
+destruction, statesmen whose countries had become chaos, scared
+politicians and financial potentates. Here were leaders of thought and
+learned investigators dragged reluctantly to the control of affairs.
+Altogether there were ninety-three of them, Leblanc's conception of
+the head men of the world. They had all come to the realisation of the
+simple truths that the indefatigable Leblanc had hammered into them;
+and, drawing his resources from the King of Italy, he had provisioned
+his conference with a generous simplicity quite in accordance with the
+rest of his character, and so at last was able to make his astonishing
+and entirely rational appeal. He had appointed King Egbert the
+president, he believed in this young man so firmly that he completely
+dominated him, and he spoke himself as a secretary might speak from the
+president's left hand, and evidently did not realise himself that he was
+telling them all exactly what they had to do. He imagined he was
+merely recapitulating the obvious features of the situation for their
+convenience. He was dressed in ill-fitting white silk clothes, and he
+consulted a dingy little packet of notes as he spoke. They put him out.
+He explained that he had never spoken from notes before, but that this
+occasion was exceptional.
+
+And then King Egbert spoke as he was expected to speak, and Leblanc's
+spectacles moistened at that flow of generous sentiment, most amiably
+and lightly expressed. 'We haven't to stand on ceremony,' said the king,
+'we have to govern the world. We have always pretended to govern the
+world and here is our opportunity.'
+
+'Of course,' whispered Leblanc, nodding his head rapidly, 'of course.'
+
+'The world has been smashed up, and we have to put it on its wheels
+again,' said King Egbert. 'And it is the simple common sense of this
+crisis for all to help and none to seek advantage. Is that our tone or
+not?'
+
+The gathering was too old and seasoned and miscellaneous for any great
+displays of enthusiasm, but that was its tone, and with an astonishment
+that somehow became exhilarating it began to resign, repudiate, and
+declare its intentions. Firmin, taking notes behind his master, heard
+everything that had been foretold among the yellow broom, come
+true. With a queer feeling that he was dreaming, he assisted at the
+proclamation of the World State, and saw the message taken out to the
+wireless operators to be throbbed all round the habitable globe. 'And
+next,' said King Egbert, with a cheerful excitement in his voice, 'we
+have to get every atom of Carolinum and all the plant for making it,
+into our control....'
+
+Firman was not alone in his incredulity. Not a man there who was not a
+very amiable, reasonable, benevolent creature at bottom; some had been
+born to power and some had happened upon it, some had struggled to get
+it, not clearly knowing what it was and what it implied, but none was
+irreconcilably set upon its retention at the price of cosmic disaster.
+Their minds had been prepared by circumstances and sedulously cultivated
+by Leblanc; and now they took the broad obvious road along which King
+Egbert was leading them, with a mingled conviction of strangeness and
+necessity. Things went very smoothly; the King of Italy explained the
+arrangements that had been made for the protection of the camp from any
+fantastic attack; a couple of thousand of aeroplanes, each carrying a
+sharpshooter, guarded them, and there was an excellent system of relays,
+and at night all the sky would be searched by scores of lights, and the
+admirable Leblanc gave luminous reasons for their camping just where
+they were and going on with their administrative duties forthwith. He
+knew of this place, because he had happened upon it when holiday-making
+with Madame Leblanc twenty years and more ago. 'There is very simple
+fare at present,' he explained, 'on account of the disturbed state of
+the countries about us. But we have excellent fresh milk, good red wine,
+beef, bread, salad, and lemons.... In a few days I hope to place
+things in the hands of a more efficient caterer....'
+
+The members of the new world government dined at three long tables on
+trestles, and down the middle of these tables Leblanc, in spite of
+the barrenness of his menu, had contrived to have a great multitude of
+beautiful roses. There was similar accommodation for the secretaries and
+attendants at a lower level down the mountain. The assembly dined as it
+had debated, in the open air, and over the dark crags to the west the
+glowing June sunset shone upon the banquet. There was no precedency now
+among the ninety-three, and King Egbert found himself between a pleasant
+little Japanese stranger in spectacles and his cousin of Central Europe,
+and opposite a great Bengali leader and the President of the United
+States of America. Beyond the Japanese was Holsten, the old chemist, and
+Leblanc was a little way down the other side.
+
+The king was still cheerfully talkative and abounded in ideas. He fell
+presently into an amiable controversy with the American, who seemed to
+feel a lack of impressiveness in the occasion.
+
+It was ever the Transatlantic tendency, due, no doubt, to the necessity
+of handling public questions in a bulky and striking manner, to
+over-emphasise and over-accentuate, and the president was touched by
+his national failing. He suggested now that there should be a new era,
+starting from that day as the first day of the first year.
+
+The king demurred.
+
+'From this day forth, sir, man enters upon his heritage,' said the
+American.
+
+'Man,' said the king, 'is always entering upon his heritage. You
+Americans have a peculiar weakness for anniversaries--if you will
+forgive me saying so. Yes--I accuse you of a lust for dramatic effect.
+Everything is happening always, but you want to say this or this is the
+real instant in time and subordinate all the others to it.'
+
+The American said something about an epoch-making day.
+
+'But surely,' said the king, 'you don't want us to condemn all humanity
+to a world-wide annual Fourth of July for ever and ever more. On account
+of this harmless necessary day of declarations. No conceivable day could
+ever deserve that. Ah! you do not know, as I do, the devastations of
+the memorable. My poor grandparents were--RUBRICATED. The worst of these
+huge celebrations is that they break up the dignified succession of
+one's contemporary emotions. They interrupt. They set back. Suddenly
+out come the flags and fireworks, and the old enthusiasms are furbished
+up--and it's sheer destruction of the proper thing that ought to be
+going on. Sufficient unto the day is the celebration thereof. Let the
+dead past bury its dead. You see, in regard to the calendar, I am for
+democracy and you are for aristocracy. All things I hold, are august,
+and have a right to be lived through on their merits. No day should be
+sacrificed on the grave of departed events. What do you think of it,
+Wilhelm?'
+
+'For the noble, yes, all days should be noble.'
+
+'Exactly my position,' said the king, and felt pleased at what he had
+been saying.
+
+And then, since the American pressed his idea, the king contrived to
+shift the talk from the question of celebrating the epoch they were
+making to the question of the probabilities that lay ahead. Here every
+one became diffident. They could see the world unified and at peace, but
+what detail was to follow from that unification they seemed indisposed
+to discuss. This diffidence struck the king as remarkable. He plunged
+upon the possibilities of science. All the huge expenditure that had
+hitherto gone into unproductive naval and military preparations, must
+now, he declared, place research upon a new footing. 'Where one man
+worked we will have a thousand.' He appealed to Holsten. 'We have only
+begun to peep into these possibilities,' he said. 'You at any rate have
+sounded the vaults of the treasure house.'
+
+'They are unfathomable,' smiled Holsten.
+
+'Man,' said the American, with a manifest resolve to justify and
+reinstate himself after the flickering contradictions of the king, 'Man,
+I say, is only beginning to enter upon his heritage.'
+
+'Tell us some of the things you believe we shall presently learn, give
+us an idea of the things we may presently do,' said the king to Holsten.
+
+Holsten opened out the vistas....
+
+'Science,' the king cried presently, 'is the new king of the world.'
+
+'OUR view,' said the president, 'is that sovereignty resides with the
+people.'
+
+'No!' said the king, 'the sovereign is a being more subtle than that.
+And less arithmetical. Neither my family nor your emancipated people. It
+is something that floats about us, and above us, and through us. It is
+that common impersonal will and sense of necessity of which Science is
+the best understood and most typical aspect. It is the mind of the race.
+It is that which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to its
+demands....'
+
+He paused and glanced down the table at Leblanc, and then re-opened at
+his former antagonist.
+
+'There is a disposition,' said the king, 'to regard this gathering as if
+it were actually doing what it appears to be doing, as if we ninety-odd
+men of our own free will and wisdom were unifying the world. There is
+a temptation to consider ourselves exceptionally fine fellows, and
+masterful men, and all the rest of it. We are not. I doubt if we should
+average out as anything abler than any other casually selected body
+of ninety-odd men. We are no creators, we are consequences, we are
+salvagers--or salvagees. The thing to-day is not ourselves but the wind
+of conviction that has blown us hither....'
+
+The American had to confess he could hardly agree with the king's
+estimate of their average.
+
+'Holsten, perhaps, and one or two others, might lift us a little,' the
+king conceded. 'But the rest of us?'
+
+His eyes flitted once more towards Leblanc.
+
+'Look at Leblanc,' he said. 'He's just a simple soul. There are
+hundreds and thousands like him. I admit, a certain dexterity, a certain
+lucidity, but there is not a country town in France where there is not a
+Leblanc or so to be found about two o'clock in its principal cafe. It's
+just that he isn't complicated or Super-Mannish, or any of those things
+that has made all he has done possible. But in happier times, don't
+you think, Wilhelm, he would have remained just what his father was,
+a successful epicier, very clean, very accurate, very honest. And on
+holidays he would have gone out with Madame Leblanc and her knitting
+in a punt with a jar of something gentle and have sat under a large
+reasonable green-lined umbrella and fished very neatly and successfully
+for gudgeon....'
+
+The president and the Japanese prince in spectacles protested together.
+
+'If I do him an injustice,' said the king, 'it is only because I want
+to elucidate my argument. I want to make it clear how small are men and
+days, and how great is man in comparison....'
+
+Section 4
+
+So it was King Egbert talked at Brissago after they had proclaimed the
+unity of the world. Every evening after that the assembly dined together
+and talked at their ease and grew accustomed to each other and sharpened
+each other's ideas, and every day they worked together, and really for
+a time believed that they were inventing a new government for the world.
+They discussed a constitution. But there were matters needing attention
+too urgently to wait for any constitution. They attended to these
+incidentally. The constitution it was that waited. It was presently
+found convenient to keep the constitution waiting indefinitely as King
+Egbert had foreseen, and meanwhile, with an increasing self-confidence,
+that council went on governing....
+
+On this first evening of all the council's gatherings, after King Egbert
+had talked for a long time and drunken and praised very abundantly the
+simple red wine of the country that Leblanc had procured for them,
+he fathered about him a group of congenial spirits and fell into a
+discourse upon simplicity, praising it above all things and declaring
+that the ultimate aim of art, religion, philosophy, and science alike
+was to simplify. He instanced himself as a devotee to simplicity. And
+Leblanc he instanced as a crowning instance of the splendour of this
+quality. Upon that they all agreed.
+
+When at last the company about the tables broke up, the king found
+himself brimming over with a peculiar affection and admiration for
+Leblanc, he made his way to him and drew him aside and broached what he
+declared was a small matter. There was, he said, a certain order in his
+gift that, unlike all other orders and decorations in the world,
+had never been corrupted. It was reserved for elderly men of supreme
+distinction, the acuteness of whose gifts was already touched to
+mellowness, and it had included the greatest names of every age so
+far as the advisers of his family had been able to ascertain them.
+At present, the king admitted, these matters of stars and badges were
+rather obscured by more urgent affairs, for his own part he had never
+set any value upon them at all, but a time might come when they would
+be at least interesting, and in short he wished to confer the Order
+of Merit upon Leblanc. His sole motive in doing so, he added, was his
+strong desire to signalise his personal esteem. He laid his hand
+upon the Frenchman's shoulder as he said these things, with an almost
+brotherly affection. Leblanc received this proposal with a modest
+confusion that greatly enhanced the king's opinion of his admirable
+simplicity. He pointed out that eager as he was to snatch at the
+proffered distinction, it might at the present stage appear invidious,
+and he therefore suggested that the conferring of it should be postponed
+until it could be made the crown and conclusion of his services. The
+king was unable to shake this resolution, and the two men parted with
+expressions of mutual esteem.
+
+The king then summoned Firmin in order to make a short note of a number
+of things that he had said during the day. But after about twenty
+minutes' work the sweet sleepiness of the mountain air overcame him, and
+he dismissed Firmin and went to bed and fell asleep at once, and slept
+with extreme satisfaction. He had had an active, agreeable day.
+
+Section 5
+
+The establishment of the new order that was thus so humanly begun,
+was, if one measures it by the standard of any preceding age, a rapid
+progress. The fighting spirit of the world was exhausted. Only here
+or there did fierceness linger. For long decades the combative side
+in human affairs had been monstrously exaggerated by the accidents of
+political separation. This now became luminously plain. An enormous
+proportion of the force that sustained armaments had been nothing more
+aggressive than the fear of war and warlike neighbours. It is doubtful
+if any large section of the men actually enlisted for fighting ever at
+any time really hungered and thirsted for bloodshed and danger. That
+kind of appetite was probably never very strong in the species after the
+savage stage was past. The army was a profession, in which killing had
+become a disagreeable possibility rather than an eventful certainty. If
+one reads the old newspapers and periodicals of that time, which did
+so much to keep militarism alive, one finds very little about glory and
+adventure and a constant harping on the disagreeableness of invasion
+and subjugation. In one word, militarism was funk. The belligerent
+resolution of the armed Europe of the twentieth century was the
+resolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to plunge. And now that its
+weapons were exploding in its hands, Europe was only too eager to drop
+them, and abandon this fancied refuge of violence.
+
+For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness; nearly all
+the clever people who had hitherto sustained the ancient belligerent
+separations had now been brought to realise the need for simplicity
+of attitude and openness of mind; and in this atmosphere of moral
+renascence, there was little attempt to get negotiable advantages out of
+resistance to the new order. Human beings are foolish enough no doubt,
+but few have stopped to haggle in a fire-escape. The council had its
+way with them. The band of 'patriots' who seized the laboratories and
+arsenal just outside Osaka and tried to rouse Japan to revolt against
+inclusion in the Republic of Mankind, found they had miscalculated the
+national pride and met the swift vengeance of their own countrymen. That
+fight in the arsenal was a vivid incident in this closing chapter of the
+history of war. To the last the 'patriots' were undecided whether, in
+the event of a defeat, they would explode their supply of atomic bombs
+or not. They were fighting with swords outside the iridium doors,
+and the moderates of their number were at bay and on the verge of
+destruction, only ten, indeed, remained unwounded, when the republicans
+burst in to the rescue....
+
+Section 6
+
+One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in the new
+rule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism, the 'Slavic
+Fox,' the King of the Balkans. He debated and delayed his submissions.
+He showed an extraordinary combination of cunning and temerity in his
+evasion of the repeated summonses from Brissago. He affected ill-health
+and a great preoccupation with his new official mistress, for his
+semi-barbaric court was arranged on the best romantic models. His
+tactics were ably seconded by Doctor Pestovitch, his chief minister.
+Failing to establish his claims to complete independence, King Ferdinand
+Charles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be treated as a
+protected state. Finally he professed an unconvincing submission, and
+put a mass of obstacles in the way of the transfer of his national
+officials to the new government. In these things he was enthusiastically
+supported by his subjects, still for the most part an illiterate
+peasantry, passionately if confusedly patriotic, and so far with no
+practical knowledge of the effect of atomic bombs. More particularly he
+retained control of all the Balkan aeroplanes.
+
+For once the extreme naivete of Leblanc seems to have been mitigated by
+duplicity. He went on with the general pacification of the world as if
+the Balkan submission was made in absolute good faith, and he announced
+the disbandment of the force of aeroplanes that hitherto guarded the
+council at Brissago upon the approaching fifteenth of July. But instead
+he doubled the number upon duty on that eventful day, and made various
+arrangements for their disposition. He consulted certain experts, and
+when he took King Egbert into his confidence there was something in his
+neat and explicit foresight that brought back to that ex-monarch's
+mind his half-forgotten fantasy of Leblanc as a fisherman under a green
+umbrella.
+
+About five o'clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one of the
+outer sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring unobtrusively
+over the lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted and hailed a strange
+aeroplane that was flying westward, and, failing to get a satisfactory
+reply, set its wireless apparatus talking and gave chase. A swarm of
+consorts appeared very promptly over the westward mountains, and before
+the unknown aeroplane had sighted Como, it had a dozen eager attendants
+closing in upon it. Its driver seems to have hesitated, dropped down
+among the mountains, and then turned southward in flight, only to find
+an intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows. He then went round
+into the eye of the rising sun, and passed within a hundred yards of his
+original pursuer.
+
+The sharpshooter therein opened fire at once, and showed an intelligent
+grasp of the situation by disabling the passenger first. The man at the
+wheel must have heard his companion cry out behind him, but he was too
+intent on getting away to waste even a glance behind. Twice after that
+he must have heard shots. He let his engine go, he crouched down, and
+for twenty minutes he must have steered in the continual expectation of
+a bullet. It never came, and when at last he glanced round, three great
+planes were close upon him, and his companion, thrice hit, lay dead
+across his bombs. His followers manifestly did not mean either to upset
+or shoot him, but inexorably they drove him down, down. At last he was
+curving and flying a hundred yards or less over the level fields of
+rice and maize. Ahead of him and dark against the morning sunrise was
+a village with a very tall and slender campanile and a line of cable
+bearing metal standards that he could not clear. He stopped his engine
+abruptly and dropped flat. He may have hoped to get at the bombs when he
+came down, but his pitiless pursuers drove right over him and shot him
+as he fell.
+
+Three other aeroplanes curved down and came to rest amidst grass close
+by the smashed machine. Their passengers descended, and ran, holding
+their light rifles in their hands towards the debris and the two dead
+men. The coffin-shaped box that had occupied the centre of the machine
+had broken, and three black objects, each with two handles like the ears
+of a pitcher, lay peacefully amidst the litter.
+
+These objects were so tremendously important in the eyes of their
+captors that they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and broken
+amidst the wreckage as they might have disregarded dead frogs by a
+country pathway.
+
+'By God,' cried the first. 'Here they are!'
+
+'And unbroken!' said the second.
+
+'I've never seen the things before,' said the first.
+
+'Bigger than I thought,' said the second.
+
+The third comer arrived. He stared for a moment at the bombs and then
+turned his eyes to the dead man with a crushed chest who lay in a muddy
+place among the green stems under the centre of the machine.
+
+'One can take no risks,' he said, with a faint suggestion of apology.
+
+The other two now also turned to the victims. 'We must signal,' said the
+first man. A shadow passed between them and the sun, and they looked up
+to see the aeroplane that had fired the last shot. 'Shall we signal?'
+came a megaphone hail.
+
+'Three bombs,' they answered together.
+
+'Where do they come from?' asked the megaphone.
+
+The three sharpshooters looked at each other and then moved towards the
+dead men. One of them had an idea. 'Signal that first,' he said, 'while
+we look.' They were joined by their aviators for the search, and all
+six men began a hunt that was necessarily brutal in its haste, for
+some indication of identity. They examined the men's pockets, their
+bloodstained clothes, the machine, the framework. They turned the bodies
+over and flung them aside. There was not a tattoo mark.... Everything
+was elaborately free of any indication of its origin.
+
+'We can't find out!' they called at last.
+
+'Not a sign?'
+
+'Not a sign.'
+
+'I'm coming down,' said the man overhead....
+
+Section 7
+
+The Slavic fox stood upon a metal balcony in his picturesque Art Nouveau
+palace that gave upon the precipice that overhung his bright little
+capital, and beside him stood Pestovitch, grizzled and cunning, and now
+full of an ill-suppressed excitement. Behind them the window opened into
+a large room, richly decorated in aluminium and crimson enamel, across
+which the king, as he glanced ever and again over his shoulder with a
+gesture of inquiry, could see through the two open doors of a little
+azure walled antechamber the wireless operator in the turret working at
+his incessant transcription. Two pompously uniformed messengers waited
+listlessly in this apartment. The room was furnished with a stately
+dignity, and had in the middle of it a big green baize-covered table
+with the massive white metal inkpots and antiquated sandboxes natural to
+a new but romantic monarchy. It was the king's council chamber and
+about it now, in attitudes of suspended intrigue, stood the half-dozen
+ministers who constituted his cabinet. They had been summoned for twelve
+o'clock, but still at half-past twelve the king loitered in the balcony
+and seemed to be waiting for some news that did not come.
+
+The king and his minister had talked at first in whispers; they had
+fallen silent, for they found little now to express except a vague
+anxiety. Away there on the mountain side were the white metal roofs of
+the long farm buildings beneath which the bomb factory and the bombs
+were hidden. (The chemist who had made all these for the king had died
+suddenly after the declaration of Brissago.) Nobody knew of that store
+of mischief now but the king and his adviser and three heavily faithful
+attendants; the aviators who waited now in the midday blaze with
+their bomb-carrying machines and their passenger bomb-throwers in the
+exercising grounds of the motor-cyclist barracks below were still in
+ignorance of the position of the ammunition they were presently to take
+up. It was time they started if the scheme was to work as Pestovitch
+had planned it. It was a magnificent plan. It aimed at no less than the
+Empire of the World. The government of idealists and professors away
+there at Brissago was to be blown to fragments, and then east, west,
+north, and south those aeroplanes would go swarming over a world that
+had disarmed itself, to proclaim Ferdinand Charles, the new Caesar, the
+Master, Lord of the Earth. It was a magnificent plan. But the tension
+of this waiting for news of the success of the first blow
+was--considerable.
+
+The Slavic fox was of a pallid fairness, he had a remarkably long nose,
+a thick, short moustache, and small blue eyes that were a little too
+near together to be pleasant. It was his habit to worry his moustache
+with short, nervous tugs whenever his restless mind troubled him, and
+now this motion was becoming so incessant that it irked Pestovitch
+beyond the limits of endurance.
+
+'I will go,' said the minister, 'and see what the trouble is with the
+wireless. They give us nothing, good or bad.'
+
+Left to himself, the king could worry his moustache without stint; he
+leant his elbows forward on the balcony and gave both of his long white
+hands to the work, so that he looked like a pale dog gnawing a bone.
+Suppose they caught his men, what should he do? Suppose they caught his
+men?
+
+The clocks in the light gold-capped belfries of the town below presently
+intimated the half-hour after midday.
+
+Of course, he and Pestovitch had thought it out. Even if they had caught
+those men, they were pledged to secrecy.... Probably they would be
+killed in the catching.... One could deny anyhow, deny and deny.
+
+And then he became aware of half a dozen little shining specks very high
+in the blue.... Pestovitch came out to him presently. 'The government
+messages, sire, have all dropped into cipher,' he said. 'I have set a
+man----'
+
+'LOOK!' interrupted the king, and pointed upward with a long, lean
+finger.
+
+Pestovitch followed that indication and then glanced for one questioning
+moment at the white face before him.
+
+'We have to face it out, sire,' he said.
+
+For some moments they watched the steep spirals of the descending
+messengers, and then they began a hasty consultation....
+
+They decided that to be holding a council upon the details of an
+ultimate surrender to Brissago was as innocent-looking a thing as the
+king could well be doing, and so, when at last the ex-king Egbert, whom
+the council had sent as its envoy, arrived upon the scene, he discovered
+the king almost theatrically posed at the head of his councillors in the
+midst of his court. The door upon the wireless operators was shut.
+
+The ex-king from Brissago came like a draught through the curtains and
+attendants that gave a wide margin to King Ferdinand's state, and the
+familiar confidence of his manner belied a certain hardness in his
+eye. Firmin trotted behind him, and no one else was with him. And as
+Ferdinand Charles rose to greet him, there came into the heart of the
+Balkan king again that same chilly feeling that he had felt upon the
+balcony--and it passed at the careless gestures of his guest. For surely
+any one might outwit this foolish talker who, for a mere idea and at the
+command of a little French rationalist in spectacles, had thrown away
+the most ancient crown in all the world.
+
+One must deny, deny....
+
+And then slowly and quite tiresomely he realised that there was nothing
+to deny. His visitor, with an amiable ease, went on talking about
+everything in debate between himself and Brissago except----.
+
+Could it be that they had been delayed? Could it be that they had had
+to drop for repairs and were still uncaptured? Could it be that even
+now while this fool babbled, they were over there among the mountains
+heaving their deadly charge over the side of the aeroplane?
+
+Strange hopes began to lift the tail of the Slavic fox again.
+
+What was the man saying? One must talk to him anyhow until one knew. At
+any moment the little brass door behind him might open with the news
+of Brissago blown to atoms. Then it would be a delightful relief to the
+present tension to arrest this chatterer forthwith. He might be killed
+perhaps. What?
+
+The king was repeating his observation. 'They have a ridiculous fancy
+that your confidence is based on the possession of atomic bombs.'
+
+King Ferdinand Charles pulled himself together. He protested.
+
+'Oh, quite so,' said the ex-king, 'quite so.'
+
+'What grounds?' The ex-king permitted himself a gesture and the ghost of
+a chuckle--why the devil should he chuckle? 'Practically none,' he said.
+'But of course with these things one has to be so careful.'
+
+And then again for an instant something--like the faintest shadow of
+derision--gleamed out of the envoy's eyes and recalled that chilly
+feeling to King Ferdinand's spine.
+
+Some kindred depression had come to Pestovitch, who had been watching
+the drawn intensity of Firmin's face. He came to the help of his master,
+who, he feared, might protest too much.
+
+'A search!' cried the king. 'An embargo on our aeroplanes.'
+
+'Only a temporary expedient,' said the ex-king Egbert, 'while the search
+is going on.'
+
+The king appealed to his council.
+
+'The people will never permit it, sire,' said a bustling little man in a
+gorgeous uniform.
+
+'You'll have to make 'em,' said the ex-king, genially addressing all the
+councillors.
+
+King Ferdinand glanced at the closed brass door through which no news
+would come.
+
+'When would you want to have this search?'
+
+The ex-king was radiant. 'We couldn't possibly do it until the day after
+to-morrow,' he said.
+
+'Just the capital?'
+
+'Where else?' asked the ex-king, still more cheerfully.
+
+'For my own part,' said the ex-king confidentially, 'I think the whole
+business ridiculous. Who would be such a fool as to hide atomic bombs?
+Nobody. Certain hanging if he's caught--certain, and almost certain
+blowing up if he isn't. But nowadays I have to take orders like the rest
+of the world. And here I am.'
+
+The king thought he had never met such detestable geniality. He glanced
+at Pestovitch, who nodded almost imperceptibly. It was well, anyhow,
+to have a fool to deal with. They might have sent a diplomatist. 'Of
+course,' said the king, 'I recognise the overpowering force--and a kind
+of logic--in these orders from Brissago.'
+
+'I knew you would,' said the ex-king, with an air of relief, 'and so let
+us arrange----'
+
+They arranged with a certain informality. No Balkan aeroplane was to
+adventure into the air until the search was concluded, and meanwhile
+the fleets of the world government would soar and circle in the sky. The
+towns were to be placarded with offers of reward to any one who would
+help in the discovery of atomic bombs....
+
+'You will sign that,' said the ex-king.
+
+'Why?'
+
+'To show that we aren't in any way hostile to you.'
+
+Pestovitch nodded 'yes' to his master.
+
+'And then, you see,' said the ex-king in that easy way of his, 'we'll
+have a lot of men here, borrow help from your police, and run through
+all your things. And then everything will be over. Meanwhile, if I may
+be your guest....' When presently Pestovitch was alone with the king
+again, he found him in a state of jangling emotions. His spirit was
+tossing like a wind-whipped sea. One moment he was exalted and full of
+contempt for 'that ass' and his search; the next he was down in a pit of
+dread. 'They will find them, Pestovitch, and then he'll hang us.'
+
+'Hang us?'
+
+The king put his long nose into his councillor's face. 'That grinning
+brute WANTS to hang us,' he said. 'And hang us he will, if we give him a
+shadow of a chance.'
+
+'But all their Modern State Civilisation!'
+
+'Do you think there's any pity in that crew of Godless, Vivisecting
+Prigs?' cried this last king of romance. 'Do you think, Pestovitch, they
+understand anything of a high ambition or a splendid dream? Do you think
+that our gallant and sublime adventure has any appeal to them? Here am
+I, the last and greatest and most romantic of the Caesars, and do you
+think they will miss the chance of hanging me like a dog if they can,
+killing me like a rat in a hole? And that renegade! He who was once an
+anointed king! . . .
+
+'I hate that sort of eye that laughs and keeps hard,' said the king.
+
+'I won't sit still here and be caught like a fascinated rabbit,' said
+the king in conclusion. 'We must shift those bombs.'
+
+'Risk it,' said Pestovitch. 'Leave them alone.'
+
+'No,' said the king. 'Shift them near the frontier. Then while they
+watch us here--they will always watch us here now--we can buy an
+aeroplane abroad, and pick them up....'
+
+The king was in a feverish, irritable mood all that evening, but he made
+his plans nevertheless with infinite cunning. They must get the bombs
+away; there must be a couple of atomic hay lorries, the bombs could be
+hidden under the hay.... Pestovitch went and came, instructing trusty
+servants, planning and replanning.... The king and the ex-king talked
+very pleasantly of a number of subjects. All the while at the back
+of King Ferdinand Charles's mind fretted the mystery of his vanished
+aeroplane. There came no news of its capture, and no news of its
+success. At any moment all that power at the back of his visitor might
+crumble away and vanish....
+
+It was past midnight, when the king, in a cloak and slouch hat
+that might equally have served a small farmer, or any respectable
+middle-class man, slipped out from an inconspicuous service gate on the
+eastward side of his palace into the thickly wooded gardens that sloped
+in a series of terraces down to the town. Pestovitch and his guard-valet
+Peter, both wrapped about in a similar disguise, came out among the
+laurels that bordered the pathway and joined him. It was a clear, warm
+night, but the stars seemed unusually little and remote because of the
+aeroplanes, each trailing a searchlight, that drove hither and thither
+across the blue. One great beam seemed to rest on the king for a moment
+as he came out of the palace; then instantly and reassuringly it had
+swept away. But while they were still in the palace gardens another
+found them and looked at them.
+
+'They see us,' cried the king.
+
+'They make nothing of us,' said Pestovitch.
+
+The king glanced up and met a calm, round eye of light, that seemed to
+wink at him and vanish, leaving him blinded....
+
+The three men went on their way. Near the little gate in the garden
+railings that Pestovitch had caused to be unlocked, the king paused
+under the shadow of an flex and looked back at the place. It was
+very high and narrow, a twentieth-century rendering of mediaevalism,
+mediaevalism in steel and bronze and sham stone and opaque glass.
+Against the sky it splashed a confusion of pinnacles. High up in the
+eastward wing were the windows of the apartments of the ex-king Egbert.
+One of them was brightly lit now, and against the light a little black
+figure stood very still and looked out upon the night.
+
+The king snarled.
+
+'He little knows how we slip through his fingers,' said Pestovitch.
+
+And as he spoke they saw the ex-king stretch out his arms slowly, like
+one who yawns, knuckle his eyes and turn inward--no doubt to his bed.
+
+Down through the ancient winding back streets of his capital hurried the
+king, and at an appointed corner a shabby atomic-automobile waited for
+the three. It was a hackney carriage of the lowest grade, with dinted
+metal panels and deflated cushions. The driver was one of the ordinary
+drivers of the capital, but beside him sat the young secretary of
+Pestovitch, who knew the way to the farm where the bombs were hidden.
+
+The automobile made its way through the narrow streets of the old town,
+which were still lit and uneasy--for the fleet of airships overhead had
+kept the cafes open and people abroad--over the great new bridge, and so
+by straggling outskirts to the country. And all through his capital the
+king who hoped to outdo Caesar, sat back and was very still, and no one
+spoke. And as they got out into the dark country they became aware of
+the searchlights wandering over the country-side like the uneasy
+ghosts of giants. The king sat forward and looked at these flitting
+whitenesses, and every now and then peered up to see the flying ships
+overhead.
+
+'I don't like them,' said the king.
+
+Presently one of these patches of moonlight came to rest about them and
+seemed to be following their automobile. The king drew back.
+
+'The things are confoundedly noiseless,' said the king. 'It's like being
+stalked by lean white cats.'
+
+He peered again. 'That fellow is watching us,' he said.
+
+And then suddenly he gave way to panic. 'Pestovitch,' he said, clutching
+his minister's arm, 'they are watching us. I'm not going through with
+this. They are watching us. I'm going back.'
+
+Pestovitch remonstrated. 'Tell him to go back,' said the king, and tried
+to open the window. For a few moments there was a grim struggle in the
+automobile; a gripping of wrists and a blow. 'I can't go through with
+it,' repeated the king, 'I can't go through with it.'
+
+'But they'll hang us,' said Pestovitch.
+
+'Not if we were to give up now. Not if we were to surrender the bombs.
+It is you who brought me into this....'
+
+At last Pestovitch compromised. There was an inn perhaps half a mile
+from the farm. They could alight there and the king could get brandy,
+and rest his nerves for a time. And if he still thought fit to go back
+he could go back.
+
+'See,' said Pestovitch, 'the light has gone again.'
+
+The king peered up. 'I believe he's following us without a light,' said
+the king.
+
+In the little old dirty inn the king hung doubtful for a time, and was
+for going back and throwing himself on the mercy of the council. 'If
+there is a council,' said Pestovitch. 'By this time your bombs may have
+settled it.
+
+'But if so, these infernal aeroplanes would go.'
+
+'They may not know yet.'
+
+'But, Pestovitch, why couldn't you do all this without me?'
+
+Pestovitch made no answer for a moment. 'I was for leaving the bombs
+in their place,' he said at last, and went to the window. About their
+conveyance shone a circle of bright light. Pestovitch had a brilliant
+idea. 'I will send my secretary out to make a kind of dispute with the
+driver. Something that will make them watch up above there. Meanwhile
+you and I and Peter will go out by the back way and up by the hedges to
+the farm....'
+
+It was worthy of his subtle reputation and it answered passing well.
+
+In ten minutes they were tumbling over the wall of the farm-yard, wet,
+muddy, and breathless, but unobserved. But as they ran towards the barns
+the king gave vent to something between a groan and a curse, and all
+about them shone the light--and passed.
+
+But had it passed at once or lingered for just a second?
+
+'They didn't see us,' said Peter.
+
+'I don't think they saw us,' said the king, and stared as the light went
+swooping up the mountain side, hung for a second about a hayrick, and
+then came pouring back.
+
+'In the barn!' cried the king.
+
+He bruised his shin against something, and then all three men were
+inside the huge steel-girdered barn in which stood the two motor
+hay lorries that were to take the bombs away. Kurt and Abel, the two
+brothers of Peter, had brought the lorries thither in daylight. They had
+the upper half of the loads of hay thrown off, ready to cover the bombs,
+so soon as the king should show the hiding-place. 'There's a sort of
+pit here,' said the king. 'Don't light another lantern. This key of mine
+releases a ring....'
+
+For a time scarcely a word was spoken in the darkness of the barn.
+There was the sound of a slab being lifted and then of feet descending a
+ladder into a pit. Then whispering and then heavy breathing as Kurt came
+struggling up with the first of the hidden bombs.
+
+'We shall do it yet,' said the king. And then he gasped. 'Curse that
+light. Why in the name of Heaven didn't we shut the barn door?' For the
+great door stood wide open and all the empty, lifeless yard outside and
+the door and six feet of the floor of the barn were in the blue glare of
+an inquiring searchlight.
+
+'Shut the door, Peter,' said Pestovitch.
+
+'No,' cried the king, too late, as Peter went forward into the light.
+'Don't show yourself!' cried the king. Kurt made a step forward and
+plucked his brother back. For a time all five men stood still. It seemed
+that light would never go and then abruptly it was turned off, leaving
+them blinded. 'Now,' said the king uneasily, 'now shut the door.'
+
+'Not completely,' cried Pestovitch. 'Leave a chink for us to go out
+by....'
+
+It was hot work shifting those bombs, and the king worked for a time
+like a common man. Kurt and Abel carried the great things up and Peter
+brought them to the carts, and the king and Pestovitch helped him to
+place them among the hay. They made as little noise as they could....
+
+'Ssh!' cried the king. 'What's that?'
+
+But Kurt and Abel did not hear, and came blundering up the ladder with
+the last of the load.
+
+'Ssh!' Peter ran forward to them with a whispered remonstrance. Now they
+were still.
+
+The barn door opened a little wider, and against the dim blue light
+outside they saw the black shape of a man.
+
+'Any one here?' he asked, speaking with an Italian accent.
+
+The king broke into a cold perspiration. Then Pestovitch answered: 'Only
+a poor farmer loading hay,' he said, and picked up a huge hay fork and
+went forward softly.
+
+'You load your hay at a very bad time and in a very bad light,' said the
+man at the door, peering in. 'Have you no electric light here?'
+
+Then suddenly he turned on an electric torch, and as he did so
+Pestovitch sprang forward. 'Get out of my barn!' he cried, and drove the
+fork full at the intruder's chest. He had a vague idea that so he
+might stab the man to silence. But the man shouted loudly as the prongs
+pierced him and drove him backward, and instantly there was a sound of
+feet running across the yard.
+
+'Bombs,' cried the man upon the ground, struggling with the prongs in
+his hand, and as Pestovitch staggered forward into view with the force
+of his own thrust, he was shot through the body by one of the two
+new-comers.
+
+The man on the ground was badly hurt but plucky. 'Bombs,' he repeated,
+and struggled up into a kneeling position and held his electric torch
+full upon the face of the king. 'Shoot them,' he cried, coughing and
+spitting blood, so that the halo of light round the king's head danced
+about.
+
+For a moment in that shivering circle of light the two men saw the king
+kneeling up in the cart and Peter on the barn floor beside him. The old
+fox looked at them sideways--snared, a white-faced evil thing. And then,
+as with a faltering suicidal heroism, he leant forward over the bomb
+before him, they fired together and shot him through the head.
+
+The upper part of his face seemed to vanish.
+
+'Shoot them,' cried the man who had been stabbed. 'Shoot them all!'
+
+And then his light went out, and he rolled over with a groan at the feet
+of his comrades.
+
+But each carried a light of his own, and in another moment everything in
+the barn was visible again. They shot Peter even as he held up his hands
+in sign of surrender.
+
+Kurt and Abel at the head of the ladder hesitated for a moment, and then
+plunged backward into the pit. 'If we don't kill them,' said one of
+the sharpshooters, 'they'll blow us to rags. They've gone down that
+hatchway. Come! . . .
+
+'Here they are. Hands up! I say. Hold your light while I shoot....'
+
+Section 8
+
+It was still quite dark when his valet and Firmin came together and told
+the ex-king Egbert that the business was settled.
+
+He started up into a sitting position on the side of his bed.
+
+'Did he go out?' asked the ex-king.
+
+'He is dead,' said Firmin. 'He was shot.'
+
+The ex-king reflected. 'That's about the best thing that could have
+happened,' he said. 'Where are the bombs? In that farm-house on the
+opposite hill-side! Why! the place is in sight! Let us go. I'll dress.
+Is there any one in the place, Firmin, to get us a cup of coffee?'
+
+Through the hungry twilight of the dawn the ex-king's automobile carried
+him to the farm-house where the last rebel king was lying among his
+bombs. The rim of the sky flashed, the east grew bright, and the sun was
+just rising over the hills when King Egbert reached the farm-yard. There
+he found the hay lorries drawn out from the barn with the dreadful bombs
+still packed upon them. A couple of score of aviators held the yard, and
+outside a few peasants stood in a little group and stared, ignorant as
+yet of what had happened. Against the stone wall of the farm-yard five
+bodies were lying neatly side by side, and Pestovitch had an expression
+of surprise on his face and the king was chiefly identifiable by his
+long white hands and his blonde moustache. The wounded aeronaut had been
+carried down to the inn. And after the ex-king had given directions in
+what manner the bombs were to be taken to the new special laboratories
+above Zurich, where they could be unpacked in an atmosphere of chlorine,
+he turned to these five still shapes.
+
+Their five pairs of feet stuck out with a curious stiff unanimity....
+
+'What else was there to do?' he said in answer to some internal protest.
+
+'I wonder, Firmin, if there are any more of them?'
+
+'Bombs, sir?' asked Firmin.
+
+'No, such kings....
+
+'The pitiful folly of it!' said the ex-king, following his thoughts.
+'Firmin, as an ex-professor of International Politics, I think it falls
+to you to bury them. There? . . . No, don't put them near the well.
+People will have to drink from that well. Bury them over there, some way
+off in the field.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+
+THE NEW PHASE
+
+Section 1
+
+The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we may view
+it now from the clarifying standpoint of things accomplished, was in
+its broad issues a simple one. Essentially it was to place social
+organisation upon the new footing that the swift, accelerated advance
+of human knowledge had rendered necessary. The council was gathered
+together with the haste of a salvage expedition, and it was confronted
+with wreckage; but the wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only
+possibilities of the case were either the relapse of mankind to the
+agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the
+acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order. The
+old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy, particularism, and
+belligerency, were incompatible with the monstrous destructive power
+of the new appliances the inhuman logic of science had produced. The
+equilibrium could be restored only by civilisation destroying itself
+down to a level at which modern apparatus could no longer be produced,
+or by human nature adapting itself in its institutions to the new
+conditions. It was for the latter alternative that the assembly existed.
+
+Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The sudden
+development of atomic science did but precipitate and render rapid
+and dramatic a clash between the new and the customary that had been
+gathering since ever the first flint was chipped or the first fire built
+together. From the day when man contrived himself a tool and suffered
+another male to draw near him, he ceased to be altogether a thing of
+instinct and untroubled convictions. From that day forth a widening
+breach can be traced between his egotistical passions and the social
+need. Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead, and his
+passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and the
+tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter and
+wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their development.
+He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite tamed to the home.
+Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest to keep him within the
+bounds of the plough-life and the beast-tending. Slowly a vast system
+of traditional imperatives superposed itself upon his instincts,
+imperatives that were admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, that
+cattle-mincer, who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man.
+
+And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his tilling
+came civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural surplus. It
+appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed boats out upon the
+rivers and presently invaded the seas, and within its primitive courts,
+within temples grown rich and leisurely and amidst the gathering medley
+of the seaport towns rose speculation and philosophy and science, and
+the beginning of the new order that has at last established itself
+as human life. Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then with an
+accumulating velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole
+did not seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand. For
+a time men took up and used these new things and the new powers
+inadvertently as they came to him, recking nothing of the consequences.
+For endless generations change led him very gently. But when he had
+been led far enough, change quickened the pace. It was with a series of
+shocks that he realised at last that he was living the old life less and
+less and a new life more and more.
+
+Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between the old
+way of living and the new were intense. They were far intenser than they
+had been even at the collapse of the Roman imperial system. On the one
+hand was the ancient life of the family and the small community and
+the petty industry, on the other was a new life on a larger scale, with
+remoter horizons and a strange sense of purpose. Already it was growing
+clear that men must live on one side or the other. One could not have
+little tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the same market,
+sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and arrows
+and aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or illiterate peasant
+industries and power-driven factories in the same world. And still less
+it was possible that one could have the ideas and ambitions and greed
+and jealousy of peasants equipped with the vast appliances of the new
+age. If there had been no atomic bombs to bring together most of
+the directing intelligence of the world to that hasty conference at
+Brissago, there would still have been, extended over great areas and
+a considerable space of time perhaps, a less formal conference of
+responsible and understanding people upon the perplexities of this
+world-wide opposition. If the work of Holsten had been spread over
+centuries and imparted to the world by imperceptible degrees, it would
+nevertheless have made it necessary for men to take counsel upon and set
+a plan for the future. Indeed already there had been accumulating for a
+hundred years before the crisis a literature of foresight; there was a
+whole mass of 'Modern State' scheming available for the conference to go
+upon. These bombs did but accentuate and dramatise an already developing
+problem.
+
+Section 2
+
+This assembly was no leap of exceptional minds and super-intelligences
+into the control of affairs. It was teachable, its members trailed
+ideas with them to the gathering, but these were the consequences of the
+'moral shock' the bombs had given humanity, and there is no reason for
+supposing its individual personalities were greatly above the average.
+It would be possible to cite a thousand instances of error and
+inefficiency in its proceedings due to the forgetfulness, irritability,
+or fatigue of its members. It experimented considerably and blundered
+often. Excepting Holsten, whose gift was highly specialised, it is
+questionable whether there was a single man of the first order of human
+quality in the gathering. But it had a modest fear of itself, and a
+consequent directness that gave it a general distinction. There was,
+of course, a noble simplicity about Leblanc, but even of him it may
+be asked whether he was not rather good and honest-minded than in the
+fuller sense great.
+
+The ex-king had wisdom and a certain romantic dash, he was a man among
+thousands, even if he was not a man among millions, but his memoirs, and
+indeed his decision to write memoirs, give the quality of himself
+and his associates. The book makes admirable but astonishing reading.
+Therein he takes the great work the council was doing for granted as
+a little child takes God. It is as if he had no sense of it at all. He
+tells amusing trivialities about his cousin Wilhelm and his secretary
+Firmin, he pokes fun at the American president, who was, indeed,
+rather a little accident of the political machine than a representative
+American, and he gives a long description of how he was lost for three
+days in the mountains in the company of the only Japanese member, a loss
+that seems to have caused no serious interruption of the work of the
+council....
+
+The Brissago conference has been written about time after time, as
+though it were a gathering of the very flower of humanity. Perched
+up there by the freak or wisdom of Leblanc, it had a certain Olympian
+quality, and the natural tendency of the human mind to elaborate such
+a resemblance would have us give its members the likenesses of gods.
+It would be equally reasonable to compare it to one of those enforced
+meetings upon the mountain-tops that must have occurred in the opening
+phases of the Deluge. The strength of the council lay not in itself but
+in the circumstances that had quickened its intelligence, dispelled its
+vanities, and emancipated it from traditional ambitions and antagonisms.
+It was stripped of the accumulation of centuries, a naked government
+with all that freedom of action that nakedness affords. And its problems
+were set before it with a plainness that was out of all comparison with
+the complicated and perplexing intimations of the former time.
+
+Section 3
+
+The world on which the council looked did indeed present a task quite
+sufficiently immense and altogether too urgent for any wanton indulgence
+in internal dissension. It may be interesting to sketch in a few phrases
+the condition of mankind at the close of the period of warring states,
+in the year of crisis that followed the release of atomic power. It was
+a world extraordinarily limited when one measures it by later standards,
+and it was now in a state of the direst confusion and distress.
+
+It must be remembered that at this time men had still to spread into
+enormous areas of the land surface of the globe. There were vast
+mountain wildernesses, forest wildernesses, sandy deserts, and frozen
+lands. Men still clung closely to water and arable soil in temperate or
+sub-tropical climates, they lived abundantly only in river valleys, and
+all their great cities had grown upon large navigable rivers or close
+to ports upon the sea. Over great areas even of this suitable land
+flies and mosquitoes, armed with infection, had so far defeated human
+invasion, and under their protection the virgin forests remained
+untouched. Indeed, the whole world even in its most crowded districts
+was filthy with flies and swarming with needless insect life to an
+extent which is now almost incredible. A population map of the world
+in 1950 would have followed seashore and river course so closely in
+its darker shading as to give an impression that homo sapiens was an
+amphibious animal. His roads and railways lay also along the lower
+contours, only here and there to pierce some mountain barrier or reach
+some holiday resort did they clamber above 3000 feet. And across the
+ocean his traffic passed in definite lines; there were hundreds of
+thousands of square miles of ocean no ship ever traversed except by
+mischance.
+
+Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet he had not yet
+pierced for five miles, and it was still not forty years since, with
+a tragic pertinacity, he had clambered to the poles of the earth. The
+limitless mineral wealth of the Arctic and Antarctic circles was still
+buried beneath vast accumulations of immemorial ice, and the secret
+riches of the inner zones of the crust were untapped and indeed
+unsuspected. The higher mountain regions were known only to a sprinkling
+of guide-led climbers and the frequenters of a few gaunt hotels, and the
+vast rainless belts of land that lay across the continental masses, from
+Gobi to Sahara and along the backbone of America, with their perfect
+air, their daily baths of blazing sunshine, their nights of cool
+serenity and glowing stars, and their reservoirs of deep-lying
+water, were as yet only desolations of fear and death to the common
+imagination.
+
+And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of
+population which had gathered into the enormous dingy town centres
+of that period were dispossessed and scattered disastrously over the
+surrounding rural areas. It was as if some brutal force, grown impatient
+at last at man's blindness, had with the deliberate intention of a
+rearrangement of population upon more wholesome lines, shaken the world.
+The great industrial regions and the large cities that had escaped the
+bombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, in almost as
+tragic plight as those that blazed, and the country-side was disordered
+by a multitude of wandering and lawless strangers. In some parts of the
+world famine raged, and in many regions there was plague.... The plains
+of north India, which had become more and more dependent for the general
+welfare on the railways and that great system of irrigation canals which
+the malignant section of the patriots had destroyed, were in a state of
+peculiar distress, whole villages lay dead together, no man heeding, and
+the very tigers and panthers that preyed upon the emaciated survivors
+crawled back infected into the jungle to perish. Large areas of China
+were a prey to brigand bands....
+
+It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of
+the explosion of the atomic bombs survives. There are, of course,
+innumerable allusions and partial records, and it is from these that
+subsequent ages must piece together the image of these devastations.
+
+The phenomena, it must be remembered, changed greatly from day to day,
+and even from hour to hour, as the exploding bomb shifted its position,
+threw off fragments or came into contact with water or a fresh texture
+of soil. Barnet, who came within forty miles of Paris early in October,
+is concerned chiefly with his account of the social confusion of the
+country-side and the problems of his command, but he speaks of heaped
+cloud masses of steam. 'All along the sky to the south-west' and of a
+red glare beneath these at night. Parts of Paris were still burning,
+and numbers of people were camped in the fields even at this distance
+watching over treasured heaps of salvaged loot. He speaks too of
+the distant rumbling of the explosion--'like trains going over iron
+bridges.'
+
+Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the 'continuous
+reverberations,' or of the 'thudding and hammering,' or some such
+phrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of steam, from which rain
+would fall suddenly in torrents and amidst which lightning played.
+Drawing nearer to Paris an observer would have found the salvage camps
+increasing in number and blocking up the villages, and large numbers
+of people, often starving and ailing, camping under improvised tents
+because there was no place for them to go. The sky became more and more
+densely overcast until at last it blotted out the light of day and left
+nothing but a dull red glare 'extraordinarily depressing to the spirit.'
+In this dull glare, great numbers of people were still living, clinging
+to their houses and in many cases subsisting in a state of partial
+famine upon the produce in their gardens and the stores in the shops of
+the provision dealers.
+
+Coming in still closer, the investigator would have reached the police
+cordon, which was trying to check the desperate enterprise of those who
+would return to their homes or rescue their more valuable possessions
+within the 'zone of imminent danger.'
+
+That zone was rather arbitrarily defined. If our spectator could have
+got permission to enter it, he would have entered also a zone of uproar,
+a zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange purplish-red
+light, and quivering and swaying with the incessant explosion of the
+radio-active substance. Whole blocks of buildings were alight and
+burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly
+and attenuated in comparison with the full-bodied crimson glare beyond.
+The shells of other edifices already burnt rose, pierced by rows of
+window sockets against the red-lit mist.
+
+Every step farther would have been as dangerous as a descent within the
+crater of an active volcano. These spinning, boiling bomb centres would
+shift or break unexpectedly into new regions, great fragments of earth
+or drain or masonry suddenly caught by a jet of disruptive force might
+come flying by the explorer's head, or the ground yawn a fiery grave
+beneath his feet. Few who adventured into these areas of destruction
+and survived attempted any repetition of their experiences. There are
+stories of puffs of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting sometimes
+scores of miles from the bomb centre and killing and scorching all they
+overtook. And the first conflagrations from the Paris centre spread
+westward half-way to the sea.
+
+Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of red-lit ruins had a
+peculiar dryness and a blistering quality, so that it set up a soreness
+of the skin and lungs that was very difficult to heal....
+
+Such was the last state of Paris, and such on a larger scale was the
+condition of affairs in Chicago, and the same fate had overtaken Berlin,
+Moscow, Tokio, the eastern half of London, Toulon, Kiel, and two hundred
+and eighteen other centres of population or armament. Each was a flaming
+centre of radiant destruction that only time could quench, that indeed
+in many instances time has still to quench. To this day, though indeed
+with a constantly diminishing uproar and vigour, these explosions
+continue. In the map of nearly every country of the world three or four
+or more red circles, a score of miles in diameter, mark the position of
+the dying atomic bombs and the death areas that men have been forced to
+abandon around them. Within these areas perished museums, cathedrals,
+palaces, libraries, galleries of masterpieces, and a vast accumulation
+of human achievement, whose charred remains lie buried, a legacy of
+curious material that only future generations may hope to examine....
+
+Section 4
+
+The state of mind of the dispossessed urban population which swarmed and
+perished so abundantly over the country-side during the dark days of the
+autumnal months that followed the Last War, was one of blank despair.
+Barnet gives sketch after sketch of groups of these people, camped among
+the vineyards of Champagne, as he saw them during his period of service
+with the army of pacification.
+
+There was, for example, that 'man-milliner' who came out from a field
+beside the road that rises up eastward out of Epernay, and asked how
+things were going in Paris. He was, says Barnet, a round-faced man,
+dressed very neatly in black--so neatly that it was amazing to discover
+he was living close at hand in a tent made of carpets--and he had 'an
+urbane but insistent manner,' a carefully trimmed moustache and beard,
+expressive eyebrows, and hair very neatly brushed.
+
+'No one goes into Paris,' said Barnet.
+
+'But, Monsieur, that is very unenterprising,' the man by the wayside
+submitted.
+
+'The danger is too great. The radiations eat into people's skins.'
+
+The eyebrows protested. 'But is nothing to be done?'
+
+'Nothing can be done.'
+
+'But, Monsieur, it is extraordinarily inconvenient, this living in exile
+and waiting. My wife and my little boy suffer extremely. There is a lack
+of amenity. And the season advances. I say nothing of the expense and
+difficulty in obtaining provisions.... When does Monsieur think that
+something will be done to render Paris--possible?'
+
+Barnet considered his interlocutor.
+
+'I'm told,' said Barnet, 'that Paris is not likely to be possible again
+for several generations.'
+
+'Oh! but this is preposterous! Consider, Monsieur! What are people like
+ourselves to do in the meanwhile? I am a costumier. All my connections
+and interests, above all my style, demand Paris....'
+
+Barnet considered the sky, from which a light rain was beginning to
+fall, the wide fields about them from which the harvest had been taken,
+the trimmed poplars by the wayside.
+
+'Naturally,' he agreed, 'you want to go to Paris. But Paris is over.'
+
+'Over!'
+
+'Finished.'
+
+'But then, Monsieur--what is to become--of ME?'
+
+Barnet turned his face westward, whither the white road led.
+
+'Where else, for example, may I hope to find--opportunity?'
+
+Barnet made no reply.
+
+'Perhaps on the Riviera. Or at some such place as Homburg. Or some
+plague perhaps.'
+
+'All that,' said Barnet, accepting for the first time facts that had
+lain evident in his mind for weeks; 'all that must be over, too.'
+
+There was a pause. Then the voice beside him broke out. 'But, Monsieur,
+it is impossible! It leaves--nothing.'
+
+'No. Not very much.'
+
+'One cannot suddenly begin to grow potatoes!'
+
+'It would be good if Monsieur could bring himself----'
+
+'To the life of a peasant! And my wife----You do not know the
+distinguished delicacy of my wife, a refined helplessness, a peculiar
+dependent charm. Like some slender tropical creeper--with great white
+flowers.... But all this is foolish talk. It is impossible that Paris,
+which has survived so many misfortunes, should not presently revive.'
+
+'I do not think it will ever revive. Paris is finished. London, too, I
+am told--Berlin. All the great capitals were stricken....'
+
+'But----! Monsieur must permit me to differ.'
+
+'It is so.'
+
+'It is impossible. Civilisations do not end in this manner. Mankind will
+insist.'
+
+'On Paris?'
+
+'On Paris.'
+
+'Monsieur, you might as well hope to go down the Maelstrom and resume
+business there.'
+
+'I am content, Monsieur, with my own faith.'
+
+'The winter comes on. Would not Monsieur be wiser to seek a house?'
+
+'Farther from Paris? No, Monsieur. But it is not possible, Monsieur,
+what you say, and you are under a tremendous mistake.... Indeed you are
+in error.... I asked merely for information....'
+
+'When last I saw him,' said Barnet, 'he was standing under the signpost
+at the crest of the hill, gazing wistfully, yet it seemed to me a little
+doubtfully, now towards Paris, and altogether heedless of a drizzling
+rain that was wetting him through and through....'
+
+Section 5
+
+This effect of chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly apprehended
+deepens as Barnet's record passes on to tell of the approach of winter.
+It was too much for the great mass of those unwilling and incompetent
+nomads to realise that an age had ended, that the old help and guidance
+existed no longer, that times would not mend again, however patiently
+they held out. They were still in many cases looking to Paris when the
+first snowflakes of that pitiless January came swirling about them. The
+story grows grimmer....
+
+If it is less monstrously tragic after Barnet's return to England, it
+is, if anything, harder. England was a spectacle of fear-embittered
+householders, hiding food, crushing out robbery, driving the starving
+wanderers from every faltering place upon the roads lest they should
+die inconveniently and reproachfully on the doorsteps of those who had
+failed to urge them onward....
+
+The remnants of the British troops left France finally in March, after
+urgent representations from the provisional government at Orleans that
+they could be supported no longer. They seem to have been a fairly
+well-behaved, but highly parasitic force throughout, though Barnet is
+clearly of opinion that they did much to suppress sporadic brigandage
+and maintain social order. He came home to a famine-stricken country,
+and his picture of the England of that spring is one of miserable
+patience and desperate expedients. The country was suffering much more
+than France, because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on which
+it had hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, and
+boiled nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid off. On
+the way thither they saw four men hanging from the telegraph posts by
+the roadside, who had been hung for stealing swedes. The labour refuges
+of Kent, he discovered, were feeding their crowds of casual wanderers on
+bread into which clay and sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there was a
+shortage of even such fare as that. He himself struck across country to
+Winchester, fearing to approach the bomb-poisoned district round London,
+and at Winchester he had the luck to be taken on as one of the wireless
+assistants at the central station and given regular rations. The station
+stood in a commanding position on the chalk hill that overlooks the town
+from the east....
+
+Thence he must have assisted in the transmission of the endless cipher
+messages that preceded the gathering at Brissago, and there it was that
+the Brissago proclamation of the end of the war and the establishment of
+a world government came under his hands.
+
+He was feeling ill and apathetic that day, and he did not realise what
+it was he was transcribing. He did it mechanically, as a part of his
+tedious duty.
+
+Afterwards there came a rush of messages arising out of the declaration
+that strained him very much, and in the evening when he was relieved, he
+ate his scanty supper and then went out upon the little balcony before
+the station, to smoke and rest his brains after this sudden and as yet
+inexplicable press of duty. It was a very beautiful, still evening. He
+fell talking to a fellow operator, and for the first time, he declares,
+'I began to understand what it was all about. I began to see just what
+enormous issues had been under my hands for the past four hours. But
+I became incredulous after my first stimulation. "This is some sort of
+Bunkum," I said very sagely.
+
+'My colleague was more hopeful. "It means an end to bomb-throwing and
+destruction," he said. "It means that presently corn will come from
+America."
+
+'"Who is going to send corn when there is no more value in money?" I
+asked.
+
+'Suddenly we were startled by a clashing from the town below. The
+cathedral bells, which had been silent ever since I had come into the
+district, were beginning, with a sort of rheumatic difficulty, to ring.
+Presently they warmed a little to the work, and we realised what was
+going on. They were ringing a peal. We listened with an unbelieving
+astonishment and looking into each other's yellow faces.
+
+'"They mean it," said my colleague.
+
+'"But what can they do now?" I asked. "Everything is broken down...."'
+
+And on that sentence, with an unexpected artistry, Barnet abruptly ends
+his story.
+
+Section 6
+
+From the first the new government handled affairs with a certain
+greatness of spirit. Indeed, it was inevitable that they should act
+greatly. From the first they had to see the round globe as one problem;
+it was impossible any longer to deal with it piece by piece. They had to
+secure it universally from any fresh outbreak of atomic destruction,
+and they had to ensure a permanent and universal pacification. On
+this capacity to grasp and wield the whole round globe their existence
+depended. There was no scope for any further performance.
+
+So soon as the seizure of the existing supplies of atomic ammunition and
+the apparatus for synthesising Carolinum was assured, the disbanding or
+social utilisation of the various masses of troops still under arms had
+to be arranged, the salvation of the year's harvests, and the feeding,
+housing, and employment of the drifting millions of homeless people.
+In Canada, in South America, and Asiatic Russia there were vast
+accumulations of provision that was immovable only because of the
+breakdown of the monetary and credit systems. These had to be brought
+into the famine districts very speedily if entire depopulation was to
+be avoided, and their transportation and the revival of communications
+generally absorbed a certain proportion of the soldiery and more able
+unemployed. The task of housing assumed gigantic dimensions, and from
+building camps the housing committee of the council speedily passed to
+constructions of a more permanent type. They found far less friction
+than might have been expected in turning the loose population on their
+hands to these things. People were extraordinarily tamed by that year of
+suffering and death; they were disillusioned of their traditions, bereft
+of once obstinate prejudices; they felt foreign in a strange world,
+and ready to follow any confident leadership. The orders of the new
+government came with the best of all credentials, rations. The people
+everywhere were as easy to control, one of the old labour experts who
+had survived until the new time witnesses, 'as gangs of emigrant workers
+in a new land.' And now it was that the social possibilities of the
+atomic energy began to appear. The new machinery that had come into
+existence before the last wars increased and multiplied, and the council
+found itself not only with millions of hands at its disposal but with
+power and apparatus that made its first conceptions of the work it had
+to do seem pitifully timid. The camps that were planned in iron and deal
+were built in stone and brass; the roads that were to have been mere
+iron tracks became spacious ways that insisted upon architecture; the
+cultivations of foodstuffs that were to have supplied emergency rations,
+were presently, with synthesisers, fertilisers, actinic light, and
+scientific direction, in excess of every human need.
+
+The government had begun with the idea of temporarily reconstituting the
+social and economic system that had prevailed before the first coming
+of the atomic engine, because it was to this system that the ideas and
+habits of the great mass of the world's dispossessed population
+was adapted. Subsequent rearrangement it had hoped to leave to its
+successors--whoever they might be. But this, it became more and more
+manifest, was absolutely impossible. As well might the council have
+proposed a revival of slavery. The capitalist system had already been
+smashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless gold and energy; it fell
+to pieces at the first endeavour to stand it up again. Already before
+the war half of the industrial class had been out of work, the attempt
+to put them back into wages employment on the old lines was futile from
+the outset--the absolute shattering of the currency system alone would
+have been sufficient to prevent that, and it was necessary therefore to
+take over the housing, feeding, and clothing of this worldwide multitude
+without exacting any return in labour whatever. In a little while the
+mere absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people everywhere
+became an evident social danger, and the government was obliged to
+resort to such devices as simple decorative work in wood and stone, the
+manufacture of hand-woven textiles, fruit-growing, flower-growing, and
+landscape gardening on a grand scale to keep the less adaptable out of
+mischief, and of paying wages to the younger adults for attendance at
+schools that would equip them to use the new atomic machinery.... So
+quite insensibly the council drifted into a complete reorganisation of
+urban and industrial life, and indeed of the entire social system.
+
+Ideas that are unhampered by political intrigue or financial
+considerations have a sweeping way with them, and before a year was
+out the records of the council show clearly that it was rising to its
+enormous opportunity, and partly through its own direct control and
+partly through a series of specific committees, it was planning a new
+common social order for the entire population of the earth. 'There can
+be no real social stability or any general human happiness while
+large areas of the world and large classes of people are in a phase of
+civilisation different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now to
+have great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally accepted
+social purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the rest.' So the
+council expressed its conception of the problem it had to solve. The
+peasant, the field-worker, and all barbaric cultivators were at an
+'economic disadvantage' to the more mobile and educated classes, and the
+logic of the situation compelled the council to take up systematically
+the supersession of this stratum by a more efficient organisation of
+production. It developed a scheme for the progressive establishment
+throughout the world of the 'modern system' in agriculture, a system
+that should give the full advantages of a civilised life to every
+agricultural worker, and this replacement has been going on right up
+to the present day. The central idea of the modern system is the
+substitution of cultivating guilds for the individual cultivator, and
+for cottage and village life altogether. These guilds are associations
+of men and women who take over areas of arable or pasture land, and make
+themselves responsible for a certain average produce. They are bodies
+small enough as a rule to be run on a strictly democratic basis, and
+large enough to supply all the labour, except for a certain assistance
+from townspeople during the harvest, needed upon the land farmed. They
+have watchers' bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but the
+ease and the costlessness of modern locomotion enables them to maintain
+a group of residences in the nearest town with a common dining-room and
+club house, and usually also a guild house in the national or provincial
+capital. Already this system has abolished a distinctively 'rustic'
+population throughout vast areas of the old world, where it has
+prevailed immemorially. That shy, unstimulated life of the lonely hovel,
+the narrow scandals and petty spites and persecutions of the small
+village, that hoarding, half inanimate existence away from books,
+thought, or social participation and in constant contact with cattle,
+pigs, poultry, and their excrement, is passing away out of human
+experience. In a little while it will be gone altogether. In the
+nineteenth century it had already ceased to be a necessary human state,
+and only the absence of any collective intelligence and an imagined need
+for tough and unintelligent soldiers and for a prolific class at a low
+level, prevented its systematic replacement at that time....
+
+And while this settlement of the country was in progress, the urban
+camps of the first phase of the council's activities were rapidly
+developing, partly through the inherent forces of the situation and
+partly through the council's direction, into a modern type of town....
+
+Section 7
+
+It is characteristic of the manner in which large enterprises forced
+themselves upon the Brissago council, that it was not until the end
+of the first year of their administration and then only with extreme
+reluctance that they would take up the manifest need for a lingua franca
+for the world. They seem to have given little attention to the various
+theoretical universal languages which were proposed to them. They wished
+to give as little trouble to hasty and simple people as possible, and
+the world-wide alstribution of English gave them a bias for it from the
+beginning. The extreme simplicity of its grammar was also in its favour.
+
+It was not without some sacrifices that the English-speaking
+peoples were permitted the satisfaction of hearing their speech
+used universally. The language was shorn of a number of grammatical
+peculiarities, the distinctive forms for the subjunctive mood for
+example and most of its irregular plurals were abolished; its spelling
+was systematised and adapted to the vowel sounds in use upon the
+continent of Europe, and a process of incorporating foreign nouns and
+verbs commenced that speedily reached enormous proportions. Within
+ten years from the establishment of the World Republic the New English
+Dictionary had swelled to include a vocabulary of 250,000 words, and
+a man of 1900 would have found considerable difficulty in reading an
+ordinary newspaper. On the other hand, the men of the new time could
+still appreciate the older English literature.... Certain minor acts
+of uniformity accompanied this larger one. The idea of a common
+understanding and a general simplification of intercourse once it was
+accepted led very naturally to the universal establishment of the metric
+system of weights and measures, and to the disappearance of the various
+makeshift calendars that had hitherto confused chronology. The year was
+divided into thirteen months of four weeks each, and New Year's Day
+and Leap Year's Day were made holidays, and did not count at all in
+the ordinary week. So the weeks and the months were brought into
+correspondence. And moreover, as the king put it to Firmin, it was
+decided to 'nail down Easter.' . . . In these matters, as in so many
+matters, the new civilisation came as a simplification of ancient
+complications; the history of the calendar throughout the world is a
+history of inadequate adjustments, of attempts to fix seed-time and
+midwinter that go back into the very beginning of human society; and
+this final rectification had a symbolic value quite beyond its practical
+convenience. But the council would have no rash nor harsh innovations,
+no strange names for the months, and no alteration in the numbering of
+the years.
+
+The world had already been put upon one universal monetary basis. For
+some months after the accession of the council, the world's affairs had
+been carried on without any sound currency at all. Over great regions
+money was still in use, but with the most extravagant variations in
+price and the most disconcerting fluctuations of public confidence. The
+ancient rarity of gold upon which the entire system rested was gone.
+Gold was now a waste product in the release of atomic energy, and it
+was plain that no metal could be the basis of the monetary system
+again. Henceforth all coins must be token coins. Yet the whole world was
+accustomed to metallic money, and a vast proportion of existing
+human relationships had grown up upon a cash basis, and were almost
+inconceivable without that convenient liquidating factor. It seemed
+absolutely necessary to the life of the social organisation to have some
+sort of currency, and the council had therefore to discover some real
+value upon which to rest it. Various such apparently stable values as
+land and hours of work were considered. Ultimately the government,
+which was now in possession of most of the supplies of energy-releasing
+material, fixed a certain number of units of energy as the value of a
+gold sovereign, declared a sovereign to be worth exactly twenty marks,
+twenty-five francs, five dollars, and so forth, with the other current
+units of the world, and undertook, under various qualifications and
+conditions, to deliver energy upon demand as payment for every sovereign
+presented. On the whole, this worked satisfactorily. They saved the
+face of the pound sterling. Coin was rehabilitated, and after a phase
+of price fluctuations, began to settle down to definite equivalents and
+uses again, with names and everyday values familiar to the common run of
+people....
+
+Section 8
+
+As the Brissago council came to realise that what it had supposed to be
+temporary camps of refugees were rapidly developing into great towns of
+a new type, and that it was remoulding the world in spite of itself,
+it decided to place this work of redistributing the non-agricultural
+population in the hands of a compactor and better qualified special
+committee. That committee is now, far more than the council of any
+other of its delegated committees, the active government of the world.
+Developed from an almost invisible germ of 'town-planning' that came
+obscurely into existence in Europe or America (the question is still in
+dispute) somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth century,
+its work, the continual active planning and replanning of the world as
+a place of human habitation, is now so to speak the collective material
+activity of the race. The spontaneous, disorderly spreadings and
+recessions of populations, as aimless and mechanical as the trickling
+of spilt water, which was the substance of history for endless years,
+giving rise here to congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and
+everywhere to a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only
+picturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power of the
+race to aid them, into every available region of the earth. Their
+cities are no longer tethered to running water and the proximity
+of cultivation, their plans are no longer affected by strategic
+considerations or thoughts of social insecurity. The aeroplane and
+the nearly costless mobile car have abolished trade routes; a common
+language and a universal law have abolished a thousand restraining
+inconveniences, and so an astonishing dispersal of habitations has
+begun. One may live anywhere. And so it is that our cities now are true
+social gatherings, each with a character of its own and distinctive
+interests of its own, and most of them with a common occupation. They
+lie out in the former deserts, these long wasted sun-baths of the race,
+they tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote islands, and bask
+on broad lagoons. For a time the whole tendency of mankind was to desert
+the river valleys in which the race had been cradled for half a million
+years, but now that the War against Flies has been waged so successfully
+that this pestilential branch of life is nearly extinct, they are
+returning thither with a renewed appetite for gardens laced by
+watercourses, for pleasant living amidst islands and houseboats and
+bridges, and for nocturnal lanterns reflected by the sea.
+
+Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and more a
+builder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceases to be a cultivator
+of the soil the returns of the Redistribution Committee showed. Every
+year the work of our scientific laboratories increases the productivity
+and simplifies the labour of those who work upon the soil, and the food
+now of the whole world is produced by less than one per cent. of its
+population, a percentage which still tends to decrease. Far fewer people
+are needed upon the land than training and proclivity dispose towards
+it, and as a consequence of this excess of human attention, the garden
+side of life, the creation of groves and lawns and vast regions of
+beautiful flowers, has expanded enormously and continues to expand. For,
+as agricultural method intensifies and the quota is raised, one farm
+association after another, availing itself of the 1975 regulations,
+elects to produce a public garden and pleasaunce in the place of its
+former fields, and the area of freedom and beauty is increased. And the
+chemists' triumphs of synthesis, which could now give us an entirely
+artificial food, remain largely in abeyance because it is so much more
+pleasant and interesting to eat natural produce and to grow such things
+upon the soil. Each year adds to the variety of our fruits and the
+delightfulness of our flowers.
+
+Section 9
+
+The early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain recrudescence
+of political adventure. There was, it is rather curious to note, no
+revival of separatism after the face of King Ferdinand Charles had
+vanished from the sight of men, but in a number of countries, as the
+first urgent physical needs were met, there appeared a variety of
+personalities having this in common, that they sought to revive
+political trouble and clamber by its aid to positions of importance and
+satisfaction. In no case did they speak in the name of kings, and it is
+clear that monarchy must have been far gone in obsolescence before the
+twentieth century began, but they made appeals to the large survivals
+of nationalist and racial feeling that were everywhere to be found, they
+alleged with considerable justice that the council was overriding racial
+and national customs and disregarding religious rules. The great plain
+of India was particularly prolific in such agitators. The revival of
+newspapers, which had largely ceased during the terrible year because
+of the dislocation of the coinage, gave a vehicle and a method of
+organisation to these complaints. At first the council disregarded
+this developing opposition, and then it recognised it with an entirely
+devastating frankness.
+
+Never, of course, had there been so provisional a government. It was of
+an extravagant illegality. It was, indeed, hardly more than a club, a
+club of about a hundred persons. At the outset there were ninety-three,
+and these were increased afterwards by the issue of invitations which
+more than balanced its deaths, to as many at one time as one hundred
+and nineteen. Always its constitution has been miscellaneous. At no time
+were these invitations issued with an admission that they recognised a
+right. The old institution or monarchy had come out unexpectedly well in
+the light of the new regime. Nine of the original members of the
+first government were crowned heads who had resigned their separate
+sovereignty, and at no time afterwards did the number of its royal
+members sink below six. In their case there was perhaps a kind of
+attenuated claim to rule, but except for them and the still more
+infinitesimal pretensions of one or two ex-presidents of republics, no
+member of the council had even the shade of a right to his participation
+in its power. It was natural, therefore, that its opponents should find
+a common ground in a clamour for representative government, and build
+high hopes upon a return, to parliamentary institutions.
+
+The council decided to give them everything they wanted, but in a
+form that suited ill with their aspirations. It became at one stroke a
+representative body. It became, indeed, magnificently representative. It
+became so representative that the politicians were drowned in a deluge
+of votes. Every adult of either sex from pole to pole was given a vote,
+and the world was divided into ten constituencies, which voted on the
+same day by means of a simple modification of the world post. Membership
+of the government, it was decided, must be for life, save in the
+exceptional case of a recall; but the elections, which were held
+quinquenially, were arranged to add fifty members on each occasion. The
+method of proportional representation with one transferable vote was
+adopted, and the voter might also write upon his voting paper in a
+specially marked space, the name of any of his representatives that he
+wished to recall. A ruler was recallable by as many votes as the quota
+by which he had been elected, and the original members by as many votes
+in any constituency as the returning quotas in the first election.
+
+Upon these conditions the council submitted itself very cheerfully to
+the suffrages of the world. None of its members were recalled, and its
+fifty new associates, which included twenty-seven which it had seen fit
+to recommend, were of an altogether too miscellaneous quality to disturb
+the broad trend of its policy. Its freedom from rules or formalities
+prevented any obstructive proceedings, and when one of the two newly
+arrived Home Rule members for India sought for information how to bring
+in a bill, they learnt simply that bills were not brought in. They asked
+for the speaker, and were privileged to hear much ripe wisdom from
+the ex-king Egbert, who was now consciously among the seniors of the
+gathering. Thereafter they were baffled men....
+
+But already by that time the work of the council was drawing to an end.
+It was concerned not so much for the continuation of its construction
+as for the preservation of its accomplished work from the dramatic
+instincts of the politician.
+
+The life of the race becomes indeed more and more independent of the
+formal government. The council, in its opening phase, was heroic in
+spirit; a dragon-slaying body, it slashed out of existence a vast,
+knotted tangle of obsolete ideas and clumsy and jealous proprietorships;
+it secured by a noble system of institutional precautions, freedom of
+inquiry, freedom of criticism, free communications, a common basis of
+education and understanding, and freedom from economic oppression. With
+that its creative task was accomplished. It became more and more an
+established security and less and less an active intervention. There is
+nothing in our time to correspond with the continual petty making and
+entangling of laws in an atmosphere of contention that is perhaps the
+most perplexing aspect of constitutional history in the nineteenth
+century. In that age they seem to have been perpetually making laws when
+we should alter regulations. The work of change which we delegate to
+these scientific committees of specific general direction which have
+the special knowledge needed, and which are themselves dominated by
+the broad intellectual process of the community, was in those days
+inextricably mixed up with legislation. They fought over the details; we
+should as soon think of fighting over the arrangement of the parts of
+a machine. We know nowadays that such things go on best within laws, as
+life goes on between earth and sky. And so it is that government gathers
+now for a day or so in each year under the sunshine of Brissago when
+Saint Bruno's lilies are in flower, and does little more than bless the
+work of its committees. And even these committees are less originative
+and more expressive of the general thought than they were at first. It
+becomes difficult to mark out the particular directive personalities
+of the world. Continually we are less personal. Every good thought
+contributes now, and every able brain falls within that informal and
+dispersed kingship which gathers together into one purpose the energies
+of the race.
+
+Section 10
+
+It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human existence in
+which 'politics,' that is to say a partisan interference with the ruling
+sanities of the world, will be the dominant interest among serious men.
+We seem to have entered upon an entirely new phase in history in which
+contention as distinguished from rivalry, has almost abruptly ceased to
+be the usual occupation, and has become at most a subdued and hidden
+and discredited thing. Contentious professions cease to be an honourable
+employment for men. The peace between nations is also a peace between
+individuals. We live in a world that comes of age. Man the warrior, man
+the lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity;
+the grave dreamers, man the curious learner, and man the creative
+artist, come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a
+less ignoble adventure.
+
+There is no natural life of man. He is, and always has been, a sheath
+of varied and even incompatible possibilities, a palimpsest of inherited
+dispositions. It was the habit of many writers in the early twentieth
+century to speak of competition and the narrow, private life of trade
+and saving and suspicious isolation as though such things were in some
+exceptional way proper to the human constitution, and as though openness
+of mind and a preference for achievement over possession were abnormal
+and rather unsubstantial qualities. How wrong that was the history
+of the decades immediately following the establishment of the world
+republic witnesses. Once the world was released from the hardening
+insecurities of a needless struggle for life that was collectively
+planless and individually absorbing, it became apparent that there was
+in the vast mass of people a long, smothered passion to make things. The
+world broke out into making, and at first mainly into aesthetic
+making. This phase of history, which has been not inaptly termed the
+'Efflorescence,' is still, to a large extent, with us. The majority
+of our population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in
+the world lies no longer with necessities but with their elaboration,
+decoration, and refinement. There has been an evident change in the
+quality of this making during recent years. It becomes more purposeful
+than it was, losing something of its first elegance and prettiness and
+gaining in intensity; but that is a change rather of hue than of nature.
+That comes with a deepening philosophy and a sounder education. For the
+first joyous exercises of fancy we perceive now the deliberation of a
+more constructive imagination. There is a natural order in these things,
+and art comes before science as the satisfaction of more elemental needs
+must come before art, and as play and pleasure come in a human life
+before the development of a settled purpose....
+
+For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work must have
+struggled in man against the limitations imposed upon him by his social
+ineptitude. It was a long smouldering fire that flamed out at last
+in all these things. The evidence of a pathetic, perpetually thwarted
+urgency to make something, is one of the most touching aspects of the
+relics and records of our immediate ancestors. There exists still in the
+death area about the London bombs, a region of deserted small homes that
+furnish the most illuminating comment on the old state of affairs.
+These homes are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat, hideously
+proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects quite filthy,
+only people in complete despair of anything better could have lived
+in them, but to each is attached a ridiculous little rectangle of land
+called 'the garden,' containing usually a prop for drying clothes and
+a loathsome box of offal, the dustbin, full of egg-shells, cinders, and
+such-like refuse. Now that one may go about this region in comparitive
+security--for the London radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable
+proportions--it is possible to trace in nearly every one of
+these gardens some effort to make. Here it is a poor little plank
+summer-house, here it is a 'fountain' of bricks and oyster-shells, here
+a 'rockery,' here a 'workshop.' And in the houses everywhere there
+are pitiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble drawings. These
+efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of blindfolded
+men, they are only one shade less harrowing to a sympathetic observer
+than the scratchings one finds upon the walls of the old prisons, but
+there they are, witnessing to the poor buried instincts that struggled
+up towards the light. That god of joyous expression our poor fathers
+ignorantly sought, our freedom has declared to us....
+
+In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to possess
+a little property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled by others, an
+'independence' as the English used to put it. And what made this desire
+for freedom and prosperity so strong, was very evidently the dream of
+self-expression, of doing something with it, of playing with it, of
+making a personal delightfulness, a distinctiveness. Property was never
+more than a means to an end, nor avarice more than a perversion. Men
+owned in order to do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments
+and his own privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its
+release in a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may
+leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row
+of carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they give
+themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in phenomena
+as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of riches. The work that
+was once the whole substance of social existence--for most men spent all
+their lives in earning a living--is now no more than was the burden upon
+one of those old climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on their
+backs in order that they might ascend mountains. It matters little to
+the easy charities of our emancipated time that most people who have
+made their labour contribution produce neither new beauty nor new
+wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant activities and
+enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They help, it may be,
+by reception and reverberation, and they hinder nothing. ...
+
+Section 11
+
+Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and appearances
+of human life which is going on about us, a change as rapid and as
+wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after the
+barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral and mental changes at
+least as unprecedented. It is not as if old things were going out
+of life and new things coming in, it is rather that the altered
+circumstances of men are making an appeal to elements in his nature
+that have hitherto been suppressed, and checking tendencies that have
+hitherto been over-stimulated and over-developed. He has not so much
+grown and altered his essential being as turned new aspects to the
+light. Such turnings round into a new attitude the world has seen on a
+less extensive scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century,
+for example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth
+their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men. There
+was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth century that
+seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that had not been guilty
+of them within the previous two centuries. The free, frank, kindly,
+gentle life of the prosperous classes in any European country before the
+years of the last wars was in a different world of thought and feeling
+from that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable
+existence of the respectable poor, or the constant personal violence,
+the squalor and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were
+no real differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds;
+their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and habits of
+mind. And turning to more individual instances the constantly observed
+difference between one portion of a life and another consequent upon
+a religious conversion, were a standing example of the versatile
+possibilities of human nature.
+
+The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and
+businesses and economic relations shook them also out of their old
+established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and
+prejudices that came down to them from the past. To borrow a word from
+the old-fashioned chemists, men were made nascent; they were released
+from old ties; for good or evil they were ready for new associations.
+The council carried them forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had
+reached their destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them
+back to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a harder
+one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic bombs had been a
+profound one, and for a while the cunning side of the human animal
+was overpowered by its sincere realisation of the vital necessity for
+reconstruction. The litigious and trading spirits cowered together,
+scared at their own consequences; men thought twice before they sought
+mean advantages in the face of the unusual eagerness to realise new
+aspirations, and when at last the weeds revived again and 'claims' began
+to sprout, they sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed,
+of laws that pointed to the future instead of the past, and under
+the blazing sunshine of a transforming world. A new literature, a new
+interpretation of history were springing into existence, a new teaching
+was already in the schools, a new faith in the young. The worthy man
+who forestalled the building of a research city for the English upon
+the Sussex downs by buying up a series of estates, was dispossessed
+and laughed out of court when he made his demand for some preposterous
+compensation; the owner of the discredited Dass patents makes his last
+appearance upon the scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of
+a paper called The Cry for Justice, in which he duns the world for a
+hundred million pounds. That was the ingenuous Dass's idea of justice,
+that he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually because he
+had annexed the selvage of one of Holsten's discoveries. Dass came
+at last to believe quite firmly in his right, and he died a victim of
+conspiracy mania in a private hospital at Nice. Both of these men
+would probably have ended their days enormously wealthy, and of course
+ennobled in the England of the opening twentieth century, and it is just
+this novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age.
+
+The new government early discovered the need of a universal education
+to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal rule. It made no
+wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and sectarian forms of religious
+profession that at that time divided the earth into a patchwork of
+hatreds and distrusts; it left these organisations to make their peace
+with God in their own time; but it proclaimed as if it were a mere
+secular truth that sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had to
+be shown to all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all around the
+world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and the
+consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was taught not as
+a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the salvation of the world from
+waste and contention was the common duty and occupation of all men and
+women. These things which are now the elementary commonplaces of human
+intercourse seemed to the councillors of Brissago, when first they dared
+to proclaim them, marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by
+doubt, that flushed the cheek and fired the eye.
+
+The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the hands of
+a committee of men and women, which did its work during the next few
+decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness. This educational
+committee was, and is, the correlative upon the mental and spiritual
+side of the redistribution committee. And prominent upon it, and indeed
+for a time quite dominating it, was a Russian named Karenin, who was
+singular in being a congenital cripple. His body was bent so that he
+walked with difficulty, suffered much pain as he grew older, and had
+at last to undergo two operations. The second killed him. Already
+malformation, which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages
+so that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of
+the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world. It had a
+curious effect upon Karenin's colleagues; their feeling towards him was
+mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that it needed usage rather
+than reason to overcome. He had a strong face, with little bright brown
+eyes rather deeply sunken and a large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His
+skin was very yellow and wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all
+times an impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven him
+because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust through
+his being. At the end of his life his personal prestige was very great.
+To him far more than to any contemporary is it due that self-abnegation,
+self-identification with the world spirit, was made the basis of
+universal education. That general memorandum to the teachers which is
+the key-note of the modern educational system, was probably entirely his
+work.
+
+'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,' he wrote. 'That is the
+device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point of all
+we have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything but a plain
+statement of fact. It is the basis for your work. You have to teach
+self-forgetfulness, and everything else that you have to teach is
+contributory and subordinate to that end. Education is the release
+of man from self. You have to widen the horizons of your children,
+encourage and intensify their curiosity and their creative impulses, and
+cultivate and enlarge their sympathies. That is what you are for. Under
+your guidance and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they
+have to shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities,
+and passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the
+universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened out
+until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose. And this
+that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously yourselves.
+Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill, every sort of service,
+love: these are the means of salvation from that narrow loneliness
+of desire, that brooding preoccupation with self and egotistical
+relationships, which is hell for the individual, treason to the race,
+and exile from God....'
+
+Section 12
+
+As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one begins for
+the first time to see them clearly. From the perspectives of a new age
+one can look back upon the great and widening stream of literature with
+a complete understanding. Things link up that seemed disconnected, and
+things that were once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but
+factors in the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of the
+sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries
+falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one sees it as a
+huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the conflict of human egotism
+and personal passion and narrow imaginations on the one hand, against
+the growing sense of wider necessities and a possible, more spacious
+life.
+
+That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire's Candide,
+for example, in which the desire for justice as well as happiness beats
+against human contrariety and takes refuge at last in a forced and
+inconclusive contentment with little things. Candide was but one of
+the pioneers of a literature of uneasy complaint that was presently
+an innumerable multitude of books. The novels more particularly of the
+nineteenth century, if one excludes the mere story-tellers from our
+consideration, witness to this uneasy realisation of changes that call
+for effort and of the lack of that effort. In a thousand aspects,
+now tragically, now comically, now with a funny affectation of divine
+detachment, a countless host of witnesses tell their story of lives
+fretting between dreams and limitations. Now one laughs, now one
+weeps, now one reads with a blank astonishment at this huge and almost
+unpremeditated record of how the growing human spirit, now warily, now
+eagerly, now furiously, and always, as it seems, unsuccessfully, tried
+to adapt itself to the maddening misfit of its patched and ancient
+garments. And always in these books as one draws nearer to the heart
+of the matter there comes a disconcerting evasion. It was the fantastic
+convention of the time that a writer should not touch upon religion.
+To do so was to rouse the jealous fury of the great multitude of
+professional religious teachers. It was permitted to state the discord,
+but it was forbidden to glance at any possible reconciliation. Religion
+was the privilege of the pulpit....
+
+It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It was
+ignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the
+discussion of business questions, it played a trivial and apologetic
+part in public affairs. And this was done not out of contempt but
+respect. The hold of the old religious organisations upon men's respect
+was still enormous, so enormous that there seemed to be a quality of
+irreverence in applying religion to the developments of every day. This
+strange suspension of religion lasted over into the beginnings of the
+new age. It was the clear vision of Marcus Karenin much more than any
+other contemporary influence which brought it back into the texture
+of human life. He saw religion without hallucinations, without
+superstitious reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and
+air, as land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the
+Republic. He saw that indeed it had already percolated away from the
+temples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought to imprison
+it, that it was already at work anonymously and obscurely in the
+universal acceptance of the greater state. He gave it clearer
+expression, rephrased it to the lights and perspectives of the new
+dawn....
+
+But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of the
+times it becomes evident as one reads them in their chronological order,
+so far as that is now ascertainable, that as one comes to the latter
+nineteenth and the earlier twentieth century the writers are much
+more acutely aware of secular change than their predecessors were. The
+earlier novelists tried to show 'life as it is,' the latter showed
+life as it changes. More and more of their characters are engaged in
+adaptation to change or suffering from the effects of world changes. And
+as we come up to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of the
+everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is continually
+more manifest. Barnet's book, which has served us so well, is frankly a
+picture of the world coming about like a ship that sails into the wind.
+Our later novelists give a vast gallery of individual conflicts in which
+old habits and customs, limited ideas, ungenerous temperaments, and
+innate obsessions are pitted against this great opening out of life that
+has happened to us. They tell us of the feelings of old people who have
+been wrenched away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to
+make peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still
+strange to them. They give us the discord between the opening egotisms
+of youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing social life.
+They tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to capture and cripple
+our souls, of romantic failures and tragical misconceptions of the trend
+of the world, of the spirit of adventure, and the urgency of curiosity,
+and how these serve the universal drift. And all their stories lead
+in the end either to happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster or
+salvation. The clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more
+certainly do these novels tell of the possibility of salvation for all
+the world. For any road in life leads to religion for those upon it who
+will follow it far enough....
+
+It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former time
+that it should be an open question as it is to-day whether the world
+is wholly Christian or not Christian at all. But assuredly we have
+the spirit, and as surely have we left many temporary forms behind.
+Christianity was the first expression of world religion, the first
+complete repudiation of tribalism and war and disputation. That it fell
+presently into the ways of more ancient rituals cannot alter that.
+The common sense of mankind has toiled through two thousand years of
+chastening experience to find at last how sound a meaning attaches to
+the familiar phrases of the Christian faith. The scientific thinker
+as he widens out to the moral problems of the collective life, comes
+inevitably upon the words of Christ, and as inevitably does the
+Christian, as his thought grows clearer, arrive at the world
+republic. As for the claims of the sects, as for the use of a name and
+successions, we live in a time that has shaken itself free from such
+claims and consistencies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH
+
+THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
+
+Section 1
+
+The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new
+station for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above the
+Sutlej Gorge, where it comes down out of Thibet.
+
+It is a place of such wildness and beauty as no other scenery in the
+world affords. The granite terrace which runs round the four sides
+of the low block of laboratories looks out in every direction upon
+mountains. Far below in the hidden depths of a shadowy blue cleft, the
+river pours down in its tumultuous passage to the swarming plains of
+India. No sound of its roaring haste comes up to those serenities.
+Beyond that blue gulf, in which whole forests of giant deodars seem no
+more than small patches of moss, rise vast precipices of many-coloured
+rock, fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles.
+These are the northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and snow
+which clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the culminating
+summits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest. Here are cliffs of
+which no other land can show the like, and deep chasms in which Mt.
+Blanc might be plunged and hidden. Here are icefields as big as inland
+seas on which the tumbled boulders lie so thickly that strange little
+flowers can bloom among them under the untempered sunshine. To the
+northward, and blocking out any vision of the uplands of Thibet, rises
+that citadel of porcelain, that gothic pile, the Lio Porgyul, walls,
+towers, and peaks, a clear twelve thousand feet of veined and splintered
+rock above the river. And beyond it and eastward and westward rise peaks
+behind peaks, against the dark blue Himalayan sky. Far away below to the
+south the clouds of the Indian rains pile up abruptly and are stayed by
+an invisible hand.
+
+Hither it was that with a dreamlike swiftness Karenin flew high over
+the irrigations of Rajputana and the towers and cupolas of the ultimate
+Delhi; and the little group of buildings, albeit the southward wall
+dropped nearly five hundred feet, seemed to him as he soared down to it
+like a toy lost among these mountain wildernesses. No road came up to
+this place; it was reached only by flight.
+
+His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted by his
+secretary clambered down through the wing fabric and made his way to the
+officials who came out to receive him.
+
+In this place, beyond infections and noise and any distractions, surgery
+had made for itself a house of research and a healing fastness. The
+building itself would have seemed very wonderful to eyes accustomed to
+the flimsy architecture of an age when power was precious. It was made
+of granite, already a little roughened on the outside by frost, but
+polished within and of a tremendous solidity. And in a honeycomb of
+subtly lit apartments, were the spotless research benches, the operating
+tables, the instruments of brass, and fine glass and platinum and gold.
+Men and women came from all parts of the world for study or experimental
+research. They wore a common uniform of white and ate at long tables
+together, but the patients lived in an upper part of the buildings, and
+were cared for by nurses and skilled attendants....
+
+The first man to greet Karenin was Ciana, the scientific director of the
+institution. Beside him was Rachel Borken, the chief organiser. 'You are
+tired?' she asked, and old Karenin shook his head.
+
+'Cramped,' he said. 'I have wanted to visit such a place as this.'
+
+He spoke as if he had no other business with them.
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+'How many scientific people have you got here now?' he asked.
+
+'Just three hundred and ninety-two,' said Rachel Borken.
+
+'And the patients and attendants and so on?'
+
+'Two thousand and thirty.'
+
+'I shall be a patient,' said Karenin. 'I shall have to be a patient. But
+I should like to see things first. Presently I will be a patient.'
+
+'You will come to my rooms?' suggested Ciana.
+
+'And then I must talk to this doctor of yours,' said Karenin. 'But I
+would like to see a bit of this place and talk to some of your people
+before it comes to that.'
+
+He winced and moved forward.
+
+'I have left most of my work in order,' he said.
+
+'You have been working hard up to now?' asked Rachel Borken.
+
+'Yes. And now I have nothing more to do--and it seems strange.... And
+it's a bother, this illness and having to come down to oneself. This
+doorway and the row of windows is well done; the gray granite and just
+the line of gold, and then those mountains beyond through that arch.
+It's very well done....'
+
+Section 2
+
+Karenin lay on the bed with a soft white rug about him, and Fowler, who
+was to be his surgeon sat on the edge of the bed and talked to him.
+An assistant was seated quietly in the shadow behind the bed. The
+examination had been made, and Karenin knew what was before him. He was
+tired but serene.
+
+'So I shall die,' he said, 'unless you operate?'
+
+Fowler assented. 'And then,' said Karenin, smiling, 'probably I shall
+die.'
+
+'Not certainly.'
+
+'Even if I do not die; shall I be able to work?'
+
+'There is just a chance....'
+
+'So firstly I shall probably die, and if I do not, then perhaps I shall
+be a useless invalid?'
+
+'I think if you live, you may be able to go on--as you do now.'
+
+'Well, then, I suppose I must take the risk of it. Yet couldn't
+you, Fowler, couldn't you drug me and patch me instead of all
+this--vivisection? A few days of drugged and active life--and then the
+end?'
+
+Fowler thought. 'We are not sure enough yet to do things like that,' he
+said.
+
+'But a day is coming when you will be certain.'
+
+Fowler nodded.
+
+'You make me feel as though I was the last of deformity--Deformity is
+uncertainty--inaccuracy. My body works doubtfully, it is not even sure
+that it will die or live. I suppose the time is not far off when such
+bodies as mine will no longer be born into the world.'
+
+'You see,' said Fowler, after a little pause, 'it is necessary that
+spirits such as yours should be born into the world.'
+
+'I suppose,' said Karenin, 'that my spirit has had its use. But if you
+think that is because my body is as it is I think you are mistaken.
+There is no peculiar virtue in defect. I have always chafed against--all
+this. If I could have moved more freely and lived a larger life in
+health I could have done more. But some day perhaps you will be able to
+put a body that is wrong altogether right again. Your science is only
+beginning. It's a subtler thing than physics and chemistry, and it takes
+longer to produce its miracles. And meanwhile a few more of us must die
+in patience.'
+
+'Fine work is being done and much of it,' said Fowler. 'I can say as
+much because I have nothing to do with it. I can understand a lesson,
+appreciate the discoveries of abler men and use my hands, but those
+others, Pigou, Masterton, Lie, and the others, they are clearing the
+ground fast for the knowledge to come. Have you had time to follow their
+work?'
+
+Karenin shook his head. 'But I can imagine the scope of it,' he said.
+
+'We have so many men working now,' said Fowler. 'I suppose at
+present there must be at least a thousand thinking hard, observing,
+experimenting, for one who did so in nineteen hundred.'
+
+'Not counting those who keep the records?'
+
+'Not counting those. Of course, the present indexing of research is
+in itself a very big work, and it is only now that we are getting it
+properly done. But already we are feeling the benefit of that. Since it
+ceased to be a paid employment and became a devotion we have had only
+those people who obeyed the call of an aptitude at work upon these
+things. Here--I must show you it to-day, because it will interest
+you--we have our copy of the encyclopaedic index--every week sheets are
+taken out and replaced by fresh sheets with new results that are brought
+to us by the aeroplanes of the Research Department. It is an index of
+knowledge that grows continually, an index that becomes continually
+truer. There was never anything like it before.'
+
+'When I came into the education committee,' said Karenin, 'that index
+of human knowledge seemed an impossible thing. Research had produced
+a chaotic mountain of results, in a hundred languages and a thousand
+different types of publication....' He smiled at his memories. 'How
+we groaned at the job!'
+
+'Already the ordering of that chaos is nearly done. You shall see.'
+
+'I have been so busy with my own work----Yes, I shall be glad to see.'
+
+The patient regarded the surgeon for a time with interested eyes.
+
+'You work here always?' he asked abruptly.
+
+'No,' said Fowler.
+
+'But mostly you work here?'
+
+'I have worked about seven years out of the past ten. At times I go
+away--down there. One has to. At least I have to. There is a sort of
+grayness comes over all this, one feels hungry for life, real, personal
+passionate life, love-making, eating and drinking for the fun of
+the thing, jostling crowds, having adventures, laughter--above all
+laughter----'
+
+'Yes,' said Karenin understandingly.
+
+'And then one day, suddenly one thinks of these high mountains
+again....'
+
+'That is how I would have lived, if it had not been for my--defects,'
+said Karenin. 'Nobody knows but those who have borne it the exasperation
+of abnormality. It will be good when you have nobody alive whose body
+cannot live the wholesome everyday life, whose spirit cannot come up
+into these high places as it wills.'
+
+'We shall manage that soon,' said Fowler.
+
+'For endless generations man has struggled upward against the
+indignities of his body--and the indignities of his soul. Pains,
+incapacities, vile fears, black moods, despairs. How well I've known
+them. They've taken more time than all your holidays. It is true, is it
+not, that every man is something of a cripple and something of a beast?
+I've dipped a little deeper than most; that's all. It's only now when he
+has fully learnt the truth of that, that he can take hold of himself to
+be neither beast nor cripple. Now that he overcomes his servitude to
+his body, he can for the first time think of living the full life of his
+body.... Before another generation dies you'll have the thing in hand.
+You'll do as you please with the old Adam and all the vestiges from the
+brutes and reptiles that lurk in his body and spirit. Isn't that so?'
+
+'You put it boldly,' said Fowler.
+
+Karenin laughed cheerfully at his caution.... 'When,' asked Karenin
+suddenly, 'when will you operate?'
+
+'The day after to-morrow,' said Fowler. 'For a day I want you to drink
+and eat as I shall prescribe. And you may think and talk as you please.'
+
+'I should like to see this place.'
+
+'You shall go through it this afternoon. I will have two men carry
+you in a litter. And to-morrow you shall lie out upon the terrace. Our
+mountains here are the most beautiful in the world....'
+
+Section 3
+
+The next morning Karenin got up early and watched the sun rise over
+the mountains, and breakfasted lightly, and then young Gardener, his
+secretary, came to consult him upon the spending of his day. Would he
+care to see people? Or was this gnawing pain within him too much to
+permit him to do that?
+
+'I'd like to talk,' said Karenin. 'There must be all sorts of
+lively-minded people here. Let them come and gossip with me. It will
+distract me--and I can't tell you how interesting it makes everything
+that is going on to have seen the dawn of one's own last day.'
+
+'Your last day!'
+
+'Fowler will kill me.'
+
+'But he thinks not.'
+
+'Fowler will kill me. If he does not he will not leave very much of me.
+So that this is my last day anyhow, the days afterwards if they come at
+all to me, will be refuse. I know....'
+
+Gardener was about to speak when Karenin went on again.
+
+'I hope he kills me, Gardener. Don't be--old-fashioned. The thing I am
+most afraid of is that last rag of life. I may just go on--a scarred
+salvage of suffering stuff. And then--all the things I have hidden and
+kept down or discounted or set right afterwards will get the better of
+me. I shall be peevish. I may lose my grip upon my own egotism. It's
+never been a very firm grip. No, no, Gardener, don't say that! You know
+better, you've had glimpses of it. Suppose I came through on the other
+side of this affair, belittled, vain, and spiteful, using the prestige I
+have got among men by my good work in the past just to serve some small
+invalid purpose....'
+
+He was silent for a time, watching the mists among the distant
+precipices change to clouds of light, and drift and dissolve before the
+searching rays of the sunrise.
+
+'Yes,' he said at last, 'I am afraid of these anaesthetics and these fag
+ends of life. It's life we are all afraid of. Death!--nobody minds just
+death. Fowler is clever--but some day surgery will know its duty better
+and not be so anxious just to save something . . . provided only that
+it quivers. I've tried to hold my end up properly and do my work. After
+Fowler has done with me I am certain I shall be unfit for work--and what
+else is there for me? . . . I know I shall not be fit for work....
+
+'I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing thread of
+vitality.... I know it for the splendid thing it is--I who have been
+a diseased creature from the beginning. I know it well enough not to
+confuse it with its husks. Remember that, Gardener, if presently my
+heart fails me and I despair, and if I go through a little phase of pain
+and ingratitude and dark forgetfulness before the end.... Don't believe
+what I may say at the last.... If the fabric is good enough the selvage
+doesn't matter. It can't matter. So long as you are alive you are just
+the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all your life
+from the first moment to the last....'
+
+Section 4
+
+Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to him, and
+he could forget himself again. Rachel Borken sat for a long time with
+him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and with her was a girl
+named Edith Haydon who was already very well known as a cytologist. And
+several of the younger men who were working in the place and a patient
+named Kahn, a poet, and Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent
+some time with him. The talk wandered from point to point and came
+back upon itself, and became now earnest and now trivial as the chance
+suggestions determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notes
+of things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again the
+outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt about many
+of the principal things in life.
+
+'Our age,' he said, 'has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We have
+been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama that was
+played out and growing tiresome.... If I could but sit out the first few
+scenes of the new spectacle....
+
+'How encumbered the world had become! It was ailing as I am ailing with
+a growth of unmeaning things. It was entangled, feverish, confused. It
+was in sore need of release, and I suppose that nothing less than the
+violence of those bombs could have released it and made it a healthy
+world again. I suppose they were necessary. Just as everything turns
+to evil in a fevered body so everything seemed turning to evil in those
+last years of the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete organisations
+seizing upon all the new fine things that science was giving to the
+world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the churches and
+sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat powers and limitless
+possibilities and turning them to evil uses. And they would not suffer
+open speech, they would not permit of education, they would let no one
+be educated to the needs of the new time.... You who are younger cannot
+imagine the mixture of desperate hope and protesting despair in which we
+who could believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years
+before atomic energy came....
+
+'It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would not
+understand, but that those who did understand lacked the power of real
+belief. They said the things, they saw the things, and the things meant
+nothing to them....
+
+'I have been reading some old papers lately. It is wonderful how our
+fathers bore themselves towards science. They hated it. They feared
+it. They permitted a few scientific men to exist and work--a pitiful
+handful.... "Don't find out anything about us," they said to them;
+"don't inflict vision upon us, spare our little ways of life from the
+fearful shaft of understanding. But do tricks for us, little limited
+tricks. Give us cheap lighting. And cure us of certain disagreeable
+things, cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our colds and
+relieve us after repletion...." We have changed all that, Gardener.
+Science is no longer our servant. We know it for something greater than
+our little individual selves. It is the awakening mind of the race, and
+in a little while----In a little while----I wish indeed I could watch
+for that little while, now that the curtain has risen....
+
+'While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs in
+London,' he said. 'Then they are going to repair the ruins and make it
+all as like as possible to its former condition before the bombs fell.
+Perhaps they will dig out the old house in St John's Wood to which
+my father went after his expulsion from Russia.... That London of my
+memories seems to me like a place in another world. For you younger
+people it must seem like a place that could never have existed.'
+
+'Is there much left standing?' asked Edith Haydon.
+
+'Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and north-west, they
+say; and most of the bridges and large areas of dock. Westminster, which
+held most of the government offices, suffered badly from the small bomb
+that destroyed the Parliament, there are very few traces of the old
+thoroughfare of Whitehall or the Government region thereabout, but there
+are plentiful drawings to scale of its buildings, and the great hole in
+the east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor district and very
+like the north and the south.... It will be possible to reconstruct
+most of it.... It is wanted. Already it becomes difficult to recall
+the old time--even for us who saw it.'
+
+'It seems very distant to me,' said the girl.
+
+'It was an unwholesome world,' reflected Karenin. 'I seem to remember
+everybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They were ill.
+They were sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious about money and
+everybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate a queer mixture of
+foods, either too much or too little, and at odd hours. One sees how ill
+they were by their advertisements. All this new region of London they
+are opening up now is plastered with advertisements of pills. Everybody
+must have been taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand
+they have found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and
+unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill and
+tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying age. They
+are equally strange to us. People's skins must have been in a vile
+state. Very few people were properly washed; they carried the filth of
+months on their clothes. All the clothes they wore were old clothes; our
+way of pulping our clothes again after a week or so of wear would have
+seemed fantastic to them. Their clothing hardly bears thinking about.
+And the congestion of them! Everybody was jostling against everybody in
+those awful towns. In an uproar. People were run over and crushed by
+the hundred; every year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed or
+disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it was worse; people used to
+fall dead for want of air in the crowded ways. The irritation of London,
+internal and external, must have been maddening. It was a maddened
+world. It is like thinking of a sick child. One has the same effect of
+feverish urgencies and acute irrational disappointments.
+
+'All history,' he said, 'is a record of a childhood....
+
+'And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and keen
+about even a sick child--and something touching. But so much of the
+old times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly stupid,
+obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very opposite to being
+fresh and young.
+
+'I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of
+nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of blood
+and iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man. Indeed, that
+is what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who ever became great. I
+looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost froggish face, with projecting
+eyes and a thick moustache to hide a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing but
+Germany, Germany emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his class
+in Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to ideas;
+his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a bumpkin's elaborate
+cunning. And he was the most influential man in the world, in the whole
+world, no man ever left so deep a mark on it, because everywhere there
+were gross men to resonate to the heavy notes he emitted. He trampled on
+ten thousand lovely things, and a kind of malice in these louts made
+it pleasant to them to see him trample. No--he was no child; the dull,
+national aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness. Childhood is
+promise. He was survival.
+
+'All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education, art,
+happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the clatter of
+his sabre. The monstrous worship of that old fool's "blood and iron"
+passed all round the earth. Until the atomic bombs burnt our way to
+freedom again....'
+
+'One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium,' said one of
+the young men.
+
+'From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a hundred
+thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but war.'
+
+'Were there no sane men in those days,' asked the young man, 'to stand
+against that idolatry?'
+
+'In a state of despair,' said Edith Haydon.
+
+'He is so far off--and there are men alive still who were alive when
+Bismarck died!' . . . said the young man....
+
+Section 5
+
+'And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck,' said Karenin, following
+his own thoughts. 'You see, men belong to their own age; we stand upon
+a common stock of thought and we fancy we stand upon the ground. I met
+a pleasant man the other day, a Maori, whose great-grandfather was a
+cannibal. It chanced he had a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the
+two were marvellously alike. One felt that a little juggling with time
+and either might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a
+stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one. The world
+also has its moods. Think of the mental food of Bismarck's childhood;
+the humiliations of Napoleon's victories, the crowded, crowning victory
+of the Battle of the Nations.... Everybody in those days, wise or
+foolish, believed that the division of the world under a multitude of
+governments was inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of
+years more. It WAS inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who had
+denied that inevitability publicly would have been counted--oh! a SILLY
+fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a little--forcible, on the lines of
+the accepted ideas. That is all. He thought that since there had to
+be national governments he would make one that was strong at home and
+invincible abroad. Because he had fed with a kind of rough appetite upon
+what we can see now were very stupid ideas, that does not make him
+a stupid man. We've had advantages; we've had unity and collectivism
+blasted into our brains. Where should we be now but for the grace of
+science? I should have been an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden member
+of the Russian Intelligenza, a conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin.
+You, my dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.'
+
+'NEVER,' said Edith stoutly....
+
+For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the young
+people gibed at each other across the smiling old administrator, and
+then presently one of the young scientific men gave things a new turn.
+He spoke like one who was full to the brim.
+
+'You know, sir, I've a fancy--it is hard to prove such things--that
+civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic bombs came
+banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and no induced
+radio-activity, the world would have--smashed--much as it did. Only
+instead of its being a smash that opened a way to better things, it
+might have been a smash without a recovery. It is part of my business
+to understand economics, and from that point of view the century before
+Holsten was just a hundred years' crescendo of waste. Only the extreme
+individualism of that period, only its utter want of any collective
+understanding or purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used up
+material--insanely. They had got through three-quarters of all the coal
+in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they had swept away
+their forests, and they were running short of tin and copper. Their
+wheat areas were getting weary and populous, and many of the big towns
+had so lowered the water level of their available hills that they
+suffered a drought every summer. The whole system was rushing towards
+bankruptcy. And they were spending every year vaster and vaster
+amounts of power and energy upon military preparations, and continually
+expanding the debt of industry to capital. The system was already
+staggering when Holsten began his researches. So far as the world in
+general went there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry.
+They had no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there
+was a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, see the gulf
+beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at large that
+any research at all was in progress. And as I say, sir, if that line
+of escape hadn't opened, before now there might have been a crash,
+revolution, panic, social disintegration, famine, and--it is
+conceivable--complete disorder.... The rails might have rusted on the
+disused railways by now, the telephone poles have rotted and fallen,
+the big liners dropped into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted
+cities become the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We might
+have been brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may
+smile, but that had happened before in human history. The world is still
+studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric bands
+made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of Hadrian became a
+fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome against the Colosseum....
+Had all that possibility of reaction ended so certainly in 1940? Is it
+all so very far away even now?'
+
+'It seems far enough away now,' said Edith Haydon.
+
+'But forty years ago?'
+
+'No,' said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, 'I think you
+underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of the
+twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that intelligence
+didn't tell--but it was there. And I question your hypothesis. I doubt
+if that discovery could have been delayed. There is a kind of inevitable
+logic now in the progress of research. For a hundred years and more
+thought and science have been going their own way regardless of the
+common events of life. You see--they have got loose. If there had been
+no Holsten there would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had
+not come in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Rome
+the march of science had scarcely begun.... Nineveh, Babylon, Athens,
+Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in
+association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which inquiry
+was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the way to begin.
+But already two hundred years ago he had fairly begun.... The politics
+and dignities and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were
+only the last phoenix blaze of the former civilisation flaring up about
+the beginnings of the new. Which we serve.... 'Man lives in the dawn for
+ever,' said Karenin. 'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning.
+It begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and does
+but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of ours, which
+would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago, is already the
+commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream of the possibilities
+in the mind of man that now gather to a head beneath the shelter of its
+peace, these great mountains here seem but little things....'
+
+Section 6
+
+About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept among
+his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he awoke and
+some tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small difficulty in
+connection with the Moravian schools in the Labrador country and in
+Greenland that Gardener knew would interest him. He remained alone for
+a little while after that, and then the two women came to him again.
+Afterwards Edwards and Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon
+love and the place of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of
+India lay under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full
+upon the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast
+splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild rush
+of snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a wet thread
+into the gulfs below, and cease....
+
+Section 7
+
+For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet, talked
+of passionate love. He said that passionate, personal love had been the
+abiding desire of humanity since ever humanity had begun, and now
+only was it becoming a possible experience. It had been a dream that
+generation after generation had pursued, that always men had lost on the
+verge of attainment. To most of those who had sought it obstinately it
+had brought tragedy. Now, lifted above sordid distresses, men and women
+might hope for realised and triumphant love. This age was the Dawn of
+Love....
+
+Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these things.
+Against that continued silence Kahn's voice presently seemed to beat and
+fail. He had begun by addressing Karenin, but presently he was including
+Edith Haydon and Rachel Borken in his appeal. Rachel listened silently;
+Edith watched Karenin and very deliberately avoided Kahn's eyes.
+
+'I know,' said Karenin at last, 'that many people are saying this sort
+of thing. I know that there is a vast release of love-making in the
+world. This great wave of decoration and elaboration that has gone about
+the world, this Efflorescence, has of course laid hold of that. I know
+that when you say that the world is set free, you interpret that to
+mean that the world is set free for love-making. Down there,--under
+the clouds, the lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your
+half-mystical songs, in which you represent this old hard world
+dissolving into a luminous haze of love--sexual love.... I don't think
+you are right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, and
+you see life--ardently--with the eyes of youth. But the power that has
+brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled blackness of
+the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense and awful future of
+our race, is riper and deeper and greater than any such emotions....
+
+'All through my life--it has been a necessary part of my work--I have
+had to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles that perfect
+freedom and almost limitless power will put to the soul of our race. I
+can see now, all over the world, a beautiful ecstasy of waste; "Let us
+sing and rejoice and be lovely and wonderful." . . . The orgy is
+only beginning, Kahn.... It was inevitable--but it is not the end of
+mankind....
+
+'Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of time
+that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it forgot itself
+as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts, its moments, were
+born and wondered and played and desired and hungered and grew weary
+and died. Incalculable successions of vision, visions of sunlit jungle,
+river wilderness, wild forest, eager desire, beating hearts, soaring
+wings and creeping terror flamed hotly and then were as though they
+had never been. Life was an uneasiness across which lights played
+and vanished. And then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a
+question and hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that
+dies not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind,
+a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to the
+stars.... Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of, this sex,
+are but the elementals of life out of which we have arisen. All these
+elementals, I grant you, have to be provided for, dealt with, satisfied,
+but all these things have to be left behind.'
+
+'But Love,' said Kahn.
+
+'I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons. And that is
+what you mean, Kahn.'
+
+Karenin shook his head. 'You cannot stay at the roots and climb the
+tree,' he said....
+
+'No,' he said after a pause, 'this sexual excitement, this love story,
+is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far literature
+and art and sentiment and all our emotional forms have been almost
+altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights and hopes, they have
+all turned on that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but life
+lengthens out now and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself. Poets
+who used to die at thirty live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn! There
+are endless years yet for you--and all full of learning.... We carry an
+excessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free
+ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it. We have learnt in a
+thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex, which in the
+old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our dying, is now like
+a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through human life. You
+poets, you young people want to turn it to delight. Turn it to delight.
+That may be one way out. In a little while, if you have any brains worth
+thinking about, you will be satisfied, and then you will come up here to
+the greater things. The old religions and their new offsets want still,
+I see, to suppress all these things. Let them suppress. If they can
+suppress. In their own people. Either road will bring you here at last
+to the eternal search for knowledge and the great adventure of power.'
+
+'But incidentally,' said Rachel Borken; 'incidentally you have half of
+humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised for--for this love
+and reproduction that is so much less needed than it was.'
+
+'Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction,' said Karenin.
+
+'But the women carry the heavier burden.'
+
+'Not in their imaginations,' said Edwards.
+
+'And surely,' said Kahn, 'when you speak of love as a phase--isn't it a
+necessary phase? Quite apart from reproduction the love of the sexes
+is necessary. Isn't it love, sexual love, which has released the
+imagination? Without that stir, without that impulse to go out from
+ourselves, to be reckless of ourselves and wonderful, would our lives be
+anything more than the contentment of the stalled ox?'
+
+'The key that opens the door,' said Karenin, 'is not the goal of the
+journey.'
+
+'But women!' cried Rachel. 'Here we are! What is our future--as women?
+Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the imagination for you
+men? Let us speak of this question now. It is a thing constantly in my
+thoughts, Karenin. What do you think of us? You who must have thought so
+much of these perplexities.'
+
+Karenin seemed to weigh his words. He spoke very deliberately. 'I do not
+care a rap about your future--as women. I do not care a rap about the
+future of men--as males. I want to destroy these peculiar futures. I
+care for your future as intelligences, as parts of and contribution
+to the universal mind of the race. Humanity is not only naturally
+over-specialised in these matters, but all its institutions, its
+customs, everything, exaggerate, intensify this difference. I want to
+unspecialise women. No new idea. Plato wanted exactly that. I do not
+want to go on as we go now, emphasising this natural difference; I do
+not deny it, but I want to reduce it and overcome it.'
+
+'And--we remain women,' said Rachel Borken. 'Need you remain thinking of
+yourselves as women?'
+
+'It is forced upon us,' said Edith Haydon.
+
+'I do not think a woman becomes less of a woman because she dresses and
+works like a man,' said Edwards. 'You women here, I mean you scientific
+women, wear white clothing like the men, twist up your hair in the
+simplest fashion, go about your work as though there was only one sex in
+the world. You are just as much women, even if you are not so feminine,
+as the fine ladies down below there in the plains who dress for
+excitement and display, whose only thoughts are of lovers, who
+exaggerate every difference.... Indeed we love you more.'
+
+'But we go about our work,' said Edith Haydon.
+
+'So does it matter?' asked Rachel.
+
+'If you go about your work and if the men go about their work then for
+Heaven's sake be as much woman as you wish,' said Karenin. 'When I ask
+you to unspecialise, I am thinking not of the abolition of sex, but the
+abolition of the irksome, restricting, obstructive obsession with sex.
+It may be true that sex made society, that the first society was the
+sex-cemented family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations,
+the first laws sexual taboos. Until a few years ago morality meant
+proper sexual behaviour. Up to within a few years of us the chief
+interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and
+her children and the chief concern of a woman was to get a man to do
+that. That was the drama, that was life. And the jealousy of these
+demands was the master motive in the world. You said, Kahn, a little
+while ago that sexual love was the key that let one out from the
+solitude of self, but I tell you that so far it has only done so in
+order to lock us all up again in a solitude of two.... All that may have
+been necessary but it is necessary no longer. All that has changed
+and changes still very swiftly. Your future, Rachel, AS WOMEN, is a
+diminishing future.'
+
+'Karenin?' asked Rachel, 'do you mean that women are to become men?'
+
+'Men and women have to become human beings.'
+
+'You would abolish women? But, Karenin, listen! There is more than
+sex in this. Apart from sex we are different from you. We take up
+life differently. Forget we are--females, Karenin, and still we are a
+different sort of human being with a different use. In some things we
+are amazingly secondary. Here am I in this place because of my trick of
+management, and Edith is here because of her patient, subtle hands. That
+does not alter the fact that nearly the whole body of science is man
+made; that does not alter the fact that men do so predominatingly make
+history, that you could nearly write a complete history of the world
+without mentioning a woman's name. And on the other hand we have a
+gift of devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly loving
+beautiful things, a care for life and a peculiar keen close eye for
+behaviour. You know men are blind beside us in these last matters. You
+know they are restless--and fitful. We have a steadfastness. We may
+never draw the broad outlines nor discover the new paths, but in the
+future isn't there a confirming and sustaining and supplying role for
+us? As important, perhaps, as yours? Equally important. We hold the
+world up, Karenin, though you may have raised it.'
+
+'You know very well, Rachel, that I believe as you believe. I am not
+thinking of the abolition of woman. But I do want to abolish--the
+heroine, the sexual heroine. I want to abolish the woman whose support
+is jealousy and whose gift possession. I want to abolish the woman who
+can be won as a prize or locked up as a delicious treasure. And away
+down there the heroine flares like a divinity.'
+
+'In America,' said Edwards, 'men are fighting duels over the praises of
+women and holding tournaments before Queens of Beauty.'
+
+'I saw a beautiful girl in Lahore,' said Kahn, 'she sat under a golden
+canopy like a goddess, and three fine men, armed and dressed like the
+ancient paintings, sat on steps below her to show their devotion. And
+they wanted only her permission to fight for her.'
+
+'That is the men's doing,' said Edith Haydon.
+
+'I SAID,' cried Edwards, 'that man's imagination was more specialised
+for sex than the whole being of woman. What woman would do a thing like
+that? Women do but submit to it or take advantage of it.'
+
+'There is no evil between men and women that is not a common evil,' said
+Karenin. 'It is you poets, Kahn, with your love songs which turn the
+sweet fellowship of comrades into this woman-centred excitement. But
+there is something in women, in many women, which responds to these
+provocations; they succumb to a peculiarly self-cultivating egotism.
+They become the subjects of their own artistry. They develop and
+elaborate themselves as scarcely any man would ever do. They LOOK for
+golden canopies. And even when they seem to react against that, they may
+do it still. I have been reading in the old papers of the movements
+to emancipate women that were going on before the discovery of atomic
+force. These things which began with a desire to escape from the
+limitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed assertion of sex,
+and women more heroines than ever. Helen of Holloway was at last as
+big a nuisance in her way as Helen of Troy, and so long as you think
+of yourselves as women'--he held out a finger at Rachel and smiled
+gently--'instead of thinking of yourselves as intelligent beings, you
+will be in danger of--Helenism. To think of yourselves as women is
+to think of yourselves in relation to men. You can't escape that
+consequence. You have to learn to think of yourselves--for our sakes and
+your own sakes--in relation to the sun and stars. You have to cease to
+be our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon our adventures. ...' He
+waved his hand towards the dark sky above the mountain crests.
+
+Section 8
+
+'These questions are the next questions to which research will bring us
+answers,' said Karenin. 'While we sit here and talk idly and inexactly
+of what is needed and what may be, there are hundreds of keen-witted
+men and women who are working these things out, dispassionately and
+certainly, for the love of knowledge. The next sciences to yield
+great harvests now will be psychology and neural physiology. These
+perplexities of the situation between man and woman and the trouble with
+the obstinacy of egotism, these are temporary troubles, the issue of
+our own times. Suddenly all these differences that seem so fixed will
+dissolve, all these incompatibles will run together, and we shall go on
+to mould our bodies and our bodily feelings and personal reactions as
+boldly as we begin now to carve mountains and set the seas in their
+places and change the currents of the wind.'
+
+'It is the next wave,' said Fowler, who had come out upon the terrace
+and seated himself silently behind Karenin's chair.
+
+'Of course, in the old days,' said Edwards, 'men were tied to their city
+or their country, tied to the homes they owned or the work they did....'
+
+'I do not see,' said Karenin, 'that there is any final limit to man's
+power of self-modification.
+
+'There is none,' said Fowler, walking forward and sitting down upon the
+parapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his face. 'There is no
+absolute limit to either knowledge or power.... I hope you do not tire
+yourself talking.'
+
+'I am interested,' said Karenin. 'I suppose in a little while men will
+cease to be tired. I suppose in a little time you will give us something
+that will hurry away the fatigue products and restore our jaded tissues
+almost at once. This old machine may be made to run without slacking or
+cessation.'
+
+'That is possible, Karenin. But there is much to learn.'
+
+'And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don't you think
+there will be some way of saving these?'
+
+Fowler nodded assent.
+
+'And then sleep again. When man with his blazing lights made an end to
+night in his towns and houses--it is only a hundred years or so ago
+that that was done--then it followed he would presently resent his eight
+hours of uselessness. Shan't we presently take a tabloid or lie in some
+field of force that will enable us to do with an hour or so of slumber
+and rise refreshed again?'
+
+'Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction.'
+
+'And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the system
+that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen and
+lengthen the years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youth
+and the contractions of senility. Man who used to weaken and die as
+his teeth decayed now looks forward to a continually lengthening,
+continually fuller term of years. And all those parts of him that once
+gathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous
+corners of his body, you know better and better how to deal with.
+You carve his body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred. The
+psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and remove bad
+complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures and broaden ideas.
+So that we are becoming more and more capable of transmitting what we
+have learnt and preserving it for the race. The race, the racial wisdom,
+science, gather power continually to subdue the individual man to its
+own end. Is that not so?'
+
+Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of new
+work that was in progress in India and Russia. 'And how is it with
+heredity?' asked Karenin.
+
+Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged by
+the genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the laws of
+inheritance and how the sex of children and the complexions and many of
+the parental qualities could be determined.
+
+'He can actually DO----?'
+
+'It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,' said Fowler, 'but
+to-morrow it will be practicable.'
+
+'You see,' cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and Edith,
+'while we have been theorising about men and women, here is science
+getting the power for us to end that old dispute for ever. If woman is
+too much for us, we'll reduce her to a minority, and if we do not like
+any type of men and women, we'll have no more of it. These old bodies,
+these old animal limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross
+inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled cocoon
+from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these things I feel
+like that--like a wet, crawling new moth that still fears to spread its
+wings. Because where do these things take us?'
+
+'Beyond humanity,' said Kahn.
+
+'No,' said Karenin. 'We can still keep our feet upon the earth that made
+us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round planet is no longer
+chained to us like the ball of a galley slave....
+
+'In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange
+gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar gases
+and all the fearful strangenesses of space will be venturing out from
+this earth. This ball will be no longer enough for us; our spirit will
+reach out.... Cannot you see how that little argosy will go glittering
+up into the sky, twinkling and glittering smaller and smaller until the
+blue swallows it up. They may succeed out there; they may perish, but
+other men will follow them....
+
+'It is as if a great window opened,' said Karenin.
+
+Section 9
+
+As the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went up
+upon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better watch
+the sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming of the
+afterglow. They were joined by two of the surgeons from the laboratories
+below, and presently by a nurse who brought Karenin refreshment in a
+thin glass cup. It was a cloudless, windless evening under the deep blue
+sky, and far away to the north glittered two biplanes on the way to the
+observatories on Everest, two hundred miles distant over the precipices
+to the east. The little group of people watched them pass over the
+mountains and vanish into the blue, and then for a time they talked of
+the work that the observatory was doing. From that they passed to the
+whole process of research about the world, and so Karenin's thoughts
+returned again to the mind of the world and the great future that was
+opening upon man's imagination. He asked the surgeons many questions
+upon the detailed possibilities of their science, and he was keenly
+interested and excited by the things they told him. And as they talked
+the sun touched the mountains, and became very swiftly a blazing and
+indented hemisphere of liquid flame and sank.
+
+Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of incandescence, and
+shaded his eyes and became silent.
+
+Presently he gave a little start.
+
+'What?' asked Rachel Borken.
+
+'I had forgotten,' he said.
+
+'What had you forgotten?'
+
+'I had forgotten about the operation to-morrow. I have been so
+interested as Man to-day that I have nearly forgotten Marcus Karenin.
+Marcus Karenin must go under your knife to-morrow, Fowler, and very
+probably Marcus Karenin will die.' He raised his slightly shrivelled
+hand. 'It does not matter, Fowler. It scarcely matters even to me. For
+indeed is it Karenin who has been sitting here and talking; is it not
+rather a common mind, Fowler, that has played about between us? You and
+I and all of us have added thought to thought, but the thread is neither
+you nor me. What is true we all have; when the individual has altogether
+brought himself to the test and winnowing of expression, then the
+individual is done. I feel as though I had already been emptied out of
+that little vessel, that Marcus Karenin, which in my youth held me so
+tightly and completely. Your beauty, dear Edith, and your broad brow,
+dear Rachel, and you, Fowler, with your firm and skilful hands, are now
+almost as much to me as this hand that beats the arm of my chair. And as
+little me. And the spirit that desires to know, the spirit that resolves
+to do, that spirit that lives and has talked in us to-day, lived in
+Athens, lived in Florence, lives on, I know, for ever....
+
+'And you, old Sun, with your sword of flame searing these poor eyes
+of Marcus for the last time of all, beware of me! You think I die--and
+indeed I am only taking off one more coat to get at you. I have
+threatened you for ten thousand years, and soon I warn you I shall be
+coming. When I am altogether stripped and my disguises thrown away. Very
+soon now, old Sun, I shall launch myself at you, and I shall reach you
+and I shall put my foot on your spotted face and tug you about by your
+fiery locks. One step I shall take to the moon, and then I shall leap
+at you. I've talked to you before, old Sun, I've talked to you a million
+times, and now I am beginning to remember. Yes--long ago, long ago,
+before I had stripped off a few thousand generations, dust now
+and forgotten, I was a hairy savage and I pointed my hand at you
+and--clearly I remember it!--I saw you in a net. Have you forgotten
+that, old Sun? . . .
+
+'Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the individual
+that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into
+science and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you slink
+down behind the mountains from me, well may you cower....'
+
+Section 10
+
+Karenin desired that he might dream alone for a little while before he
+returned to the cell in which he was to sleep. He was given relief for a
+pain that began to trouble him and wrapped warmly about with furs, for
+a great coldness was creeping over all things, and so they left him, and
+he sat for a long time watching the afterglow give place to the darkness
+of night.
+
+It seemed to those who had to watch over him unobtrusively lest he
+should be in want of any attention, that he mused very deeply.
+
+The white and purple peaks against the golden sky sank down into cold,
+blue remoteness, glowed out again and faded again, and the burning
+cressets of the Indian stars, that even the moonrise cannot altogether
+quench, began their vigil. The moon rose behind the towering screen of
+dark precipices to the east, and long before it emerged above these, its
+slanting beams had filled the deep gorges below with luminous mist and
+turned the towers and pinnacles of Lio Porgyul to a magic dreamcastle of
+radiance and wonder....
+
+Came a great uprush of ghostly light above the black rim of rocks, and
+then like a bubble that is blown and detaches itself the moon floated
+off clear into the unfathomable dark sky....
+
+And then Karenin stood up. He walked a few paces along the terrace and
+remained for a time gazing up at that great silver disc, that silvery
+shield that must needs be man's first conquest in outer space....
+
+Presently he turned about and stood with his hands folded behind him,
+looking at the northward stars....
+
+At length he went to his own cell. He lay down there and slept
+peacefully till the morning. And early in the morning they came to him
+and the anaesthetic was given him and the operation performed.
+
+It was altogether successful, but Karenin was weak and he had to lie
+very still; and about seven days later a blood clot detached itself from
+the healing scar and travelled to his heart, and he died in an instant
+in the night.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The World Set Free, by Herbert George Wells
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD SET FREE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1059.txt or 1059.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/5/1059/
+
+Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/old/1059.zip b/old/old/1059.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e8492cc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/1059.zip
diff --git a/old/old/twsfr10.txt b/old/old/twsfr10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ba1dd1e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/twsfr10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7680 @@
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The World Set Free, by H.G. Wells
+#12 in our series by H.G. Wells
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+The World Set Free
+
+by H.G. Wells  [Herbert George Wells]
+
+October, 1997  [Etext #1059]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The World Set Free, by H.G. Wells
+******This file should be named twsfr10.txt or twsfr10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, twsfr11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, twsfr10a.txt
+
+
+Scanned by Charles Keller with OmniPage Professional OCR software
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we do NOT keep these books
+in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, for time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text
+files per month, or 384 more Etexts in 1997 for a total of 1000+
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach over 100 billion Etexts given away.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only 10% of the present number of computer users.  2001
+should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it
+will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.
+
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
+Mellon University).
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email
+(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).
+
+******
+If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
+FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
+[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]
+
+ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
+login:  anonymous
+password:  your@login
+cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
+or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET INDEX?00.GUT
+for a list of books
+and
+GET NEW GUT for general information
+and
+MGET GUT* for newsletters.
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+The World Set Free by H.G. Wells
+Scanned by Charles Keller with OmniPage Professional OCR software
+
+
+
+
+
+WE ARE
+ALL THINGS THAT
+MAKE AND PASS,
+STRIVING UPON A
+HIDDEN MISSION,
+OUT TO THE
+OPEN 
+SEA.
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLD SET FREE
+
+H.G. WELLS
+
+
+
+
+TO
+FREDERICK SODDY'S
+'INTERPRETATION OF RADIUM'
+
+THIS STORY, WHICH OWES LONG PASSAGES
+TO THE ELEVENTH CHAPTER OF
+THAT BOOK, ACKNOWLEDGES
+AND INSCRIBES
+ITSELF
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+THE WORLD SET FREE was written in 1913 and published early in
+1914, and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of
+possibility, stories which all turn on the possible developments
+in the future of some contemporary force or group of forces. The
+World Set Free was written under the immediate shadow of the
+Great War.  Every intelligent person in the world felt that
+disaster was impending and knew no way of averting it, but few of
+us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how near the crash was to
+us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is put off
+until the year 1956.  He may naturally want to know the reason
+for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay.  As a
+prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to
+be rather a slow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of
+reality, for example, beat the forecast in Anticipations by about
+twenty years or so. I suppose a desire not to shock the sceptical
+reader's sense of use and wont and perhaps a less creditable
+disposition to hedge, have something to do with this dating
+forward of one's main events, but in the particular case of The
+World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding the
+Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get well
+forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy. 
+1956--or for that matter 2056--may be none too late for that
+crowning revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this
+procrastination of over forty years, the guess at the opening
+phase of the war was fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of
+the Central Empires, the opening campaign through the
+Netherlands, and the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force
+were all justified before the book had been published six months.
+And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after
+the reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the
+essentials of the matter.  One happy hit (in Chapter the Second,
+Section 2), on which the writer may congratulate himself, is the
+forecast that under modern conditions it would be quite
+impossible for any great general to emerge to supremacy and
+concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. There
+could be no Alexanders or Napoleons.  And we soon heard the
+scientific corps muttering, 'These old fools,' exactly as it is
+here foretold.
+
+These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story
+far outnumber the hits.  It is the main thesis which is still of
+interest now; the thesis that because of the development of
+scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate
+sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world, that to
+attempt to keep on with the old system is to heap disaster upon
+disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race altogether.
+The remaining interest of this book now is the sustained validity
+of this thesis and the discussion of the possible ending of war
+on the earth.  I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity to
+break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind.
+I have represented the native common sense of the French mind and
+of the English mind--for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be
+'God's Englishman'--leading mankind towards a bold and resolute
+effort of salvage and reconstruction.  Instead of which, as the
+school book footnotes say, compare to-day's newspaper.  Instead
+of a frank and honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman
+meeting German and Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences
+and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in
+Geneva at the other end of Switzerland a poor little League of
+(Allied) Nations (excluding the United States, Russia, and most
+of the 'subject peoples' of the world), meeting obscurely amidst
+a world-wide disregard to make impotent gestures at the leading
+problems of the debacle. Either the disaster has not been vast
+enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict the
+necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion. 
+Just as the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity
+and thought that increase would go on for ever, so now it would
+seem the world is growing accustomed to a steady glide towards
+social disintegration, and thinks that that too can go on
+continually and never come to a final bump. So soon do use and
+wont establish themselves, and the most flaming and thunderous of
+lessons pale into disregard.
+
+The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question
+whether it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of
+creative sanity in mankind, to avert this steady glide to
+destruction, is now one of the most urgent in the world.  It is
+clear that the writer is temperamentally disposed to hope that
+there is such a possibility. But he has to confess that he sees
+few signs of any such breadth of understanding and steadfastness
+of will as an effectual effort to turn the rush of human affairs
+demands.  The inertia of dead ideas and old institutions carries
+us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is there any
+plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as something
+overriding any national and patriotic consideration, and that is
+in the working class movement throughout the world.  And labour
+internationalism is closely bound up with conceptions of a
+profound social revolution. If world peace is to be attained
+through labour internationalism, it will have to be attained at
+the price of the completest social and economic reconstruction
+and by passing through a phase of revolution that will certainly
+be violent, that may be very bloody, which may be prolonged
+through a long period, and may in the end fail to achieve
+anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains
+that it is in the labour class, and the labour class alone, that
+any conception of a world rule and a world peace has so far
+appeared.  The dream of The World Set Free, a dream of highly
+educated and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily
+setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has thus
+far remained a dream.
+
+H. G. WELLS.
+
+EASTON GLEBE,
+DUNMOW, 1921.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PRELUDE
+THE SUN SNARERS
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+THE LAST WAR
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+THE ENDING OF WAR
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+THE NEW PHASE
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH
+THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
+
+
+
+PRELUDE
+
+THE SUN SNARERS
+
+Section I
+
+THE history of mankind is the history of the attainment of
+external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal.  From
+the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing
+the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of
+burning and the rough implement of stone.  So he passed beyond
+the ape. From that he expands.  Presently he added to himself the
+power of the horse and the ox, he borrowed the carrying strength
+of water and the driving force of the wind, he quickened his fire
+by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first with copper and
+then with iron, increased and varied and became more elaborate
+and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made his way
+easier by paths and roads.  He complicated his social
+relationships and increased his efficiency by the division of
+labour.  He began to store up knowledge. Contrivance followed
+contrivance, each making it possible for a man to do more. 
+Always down the lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and
+again, he is doing more.... A quarter of a million years ago the
+utmost man was a savage, a being scarcely articulate, sheltering
+in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn flint or a
+fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed
+by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity
+declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would
+have sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical
+river valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his
+little herds, a male, a few females, a child or so.
+
+He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led.
+He fled the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the
+promise of sword and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of
+coal; he drank water muddy with the clay that would one day make
+cups of porcelain; he chewed the ear of wild wheat he had plucked
+and gazed with a dim speculation in his eyes at the birds that
+soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became aware of the scent
+of another male and rose up roaring, his roars the formless
+precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great
+individualist, that original, he suffered none other than
+himself.
+
+So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this
+ancestor of all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing
+almost imperceptibly.
+
+Yet he changed.  That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened
+the tiger's claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus
+to the swift grace of the horse, was at work upon him--is at work
+upon him still.  The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him
+were killed soonest and oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker
+eye, the bigger brain, the better balanced body prevailed; age by
+age, the implements were a little better made, the man a little
+more delicately adjusted to his possibilities.  He became more
+social; his herd grew larger; no longer did each man kill or
+drive out his growing sons; a system of taboos made them
+tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon even after
+he was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and the rest
+of mankind. (But they were forbidden to touch the women of the
+tribe, they had to go out and capture women for themselves, and
+each son fled from his stepmother and hid from her lest the anger
+of the Old Man should be roused. All the world over, even to this
+day, these ancient inevitable taboos can be traced.) And now
+instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was better
+tended and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the
+creature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him,
+storing food--until sometimes the neglected grass-seed sprouted
+again and gave a first hint of agriculture.
+
+And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.
+
+Man began to think.  There were times when he was fed, when his
+lusts and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon
+the squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his
+eyes. He scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued
+it and began pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the
+river brink between his fingers, and found a pleasure in its
+patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of vessels,
+and found that it would hold water.  He watched the streaming
+river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant
+water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he
+might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place
+amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his
+brother that once indeed he had done so--at least that some one
+had done so--he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as
+daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith
+began fiction--pointing a way to achievement--and the august
+prophetic procession of tales.
+
+For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations
+that life of our fathers went on.  From the beginning to the
+ripening of that phase of human life, from the first clumsy
+eolith of rudely chipped flint to the first implements of
+polished stone, was two or three thousand centuries, ten or
+fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by human standards, did
+humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the
+beast.  And that first glimmering of speculation, that first
+story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed
+under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous
+listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most
+marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the
+mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch
+the sun.
+
+Section 2
+
+That dream was but a moment in a man's life, whose proper
+business it seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget
+after the manner of all that belongs to the fellowship of the
+beasts. About him, hidden from him by the thinnest of veils, were
+the untouched sources of Power, whose magnitude we scarcely do
+more than suspect even to-day, Power that could make his every
+conceivable dream come real.  But the feet of the race were in
+the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.
+
+At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food
+is abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his
+earlier jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less
+urgently, more social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a
+larger community. There began a division of labour, certain of
+the older men specialised in knowledge and direction, a strong
+man took the fatherly leadership in war, and priest and king
+began to develop their roles in the opening drama of man's
+history.  The priest's solicitude was seed-time and harvest and
+fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a hundred river
+valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there were
+already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They
+flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the
+future, for as yet writing had still to begin.
+
+Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable
+wealth of Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He
+tamed certain animals, he developed his primordially haphazard
+agriculture into a ritual, he added first one metal to his
+resources and then another, until he had copper and tin and iron
+and lead and gold and silver to supplement his stone, he hewed
+and carved wood, made pottery, paddled down his river until he
+came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made the first roads.
+But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and more, was the
+subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger societies.
+The history of man is not simply the conquest of external power;
+it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,
+that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his
+hands from taking his inheritance.  The ape in us still resents
+association. From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the
+achievement of the Peace of the World, man's dealings were
+chiefly with himself and his fellow man, trading, bargaining,
+law-making, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating,
+and every little increment in Power, he turned at once and always
+turns to the purposes of this confused elaborate struggle to
+socialise.  To incorporate and comprehend his fellow men into a
+community of purpose became the last and greatest of his
+instincts.  Already before the last polished phase of the stone
+age was over he had become a political animal. He made
+astonishingly far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of
+counting and then of writing and making records, and with that
+his town communities began to stretch out to dominion; in the
+valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the great Chinese rivers,
+the first empires and the first written laws had their
+beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers and
+knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which
+had been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle
+of pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. 
+The history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking
+up of the Roman Empire.  Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to
+the last, aped Caesar and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or
+Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind. Measured by the duration of human life
+it is a vast space of time between that first dynasty in Egypt
+and the coming of the aeroplane, but by the scale that looks back
+to the makers of the eoliths, it is all of it a story of
+yesterday.
+
+Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this
+period of the warring states, while men's minds were chiefly
+preoccupied by politics and mutual aggression, their progress in
+the acquirement of external Power was slow--rapid in comparison
+with the progress of the old stone age, but slow in comparison
+with this new age of systematic discovery in which we live.  They
+did not very greatly alter the weapons and tactics of warfare,
+the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their knowledge of the
+habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of domestic life
+between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when
+Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were
+inventions and changes, but there were also retrogressions;
+things were found out and then forgotten again; it was, on the
+whole, a progress, but it contained no steps; the peasant life
+was the same, there were already priests and lawyers and town
+craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers doctors, wise women,
+soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and
+south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they
+were doing much the same things and living much the same life as
+they were in Europe in A.D. 1500.  The English excavators of the
+year A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt
+and disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family
+correspondence that they could read with the completest sympathy.
+There were great religious and moral changes throughout the
+period, empires and republics replaced one another, Italy tried a
+vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again
+and again and failed and failed and was still to be tested again
+and rejected again in the New World; Christianity and
+Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults, but
+essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to
+material conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever.  The
+idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life
+would have been entirely strange to human thought through all
+that time.
+
+Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for
+his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and
+goings, the wars and processions, the castle building and
+cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and
+incurable feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the middle
+ages.  He no longer speculated with the untrammelled freedom of
+the stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of everything
+barred his path; but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle
+and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused upon the coin
+and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain leisure for
+thought throughout these times, then men were to be found
+dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with
+the assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread
+symbols in the world about them, questioning the finality of
+scholastic wisdom.  Through all the ages of history there were
+men to whom this whisper had come of hidden things about them.
+They could no longer lead ordinary lives nor content themselves
+with the common things of this world once they had heard this
+voice. And mostly they believed not only that all this world was
+as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at, but that
+these secrets were Power.  Hitherto Power had come to men by
+chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among
+rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some
+odd utilisable thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied
+discovery, sometimes pretending to find.  The world of every day
+laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and
+ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and
+sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and
+entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them
+not at all.  Yet they were of the blood of him who had first
+dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his
+blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly,
+was the snare that will some day catch the sun.
+
+Section 3
+
+Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court
+of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His
+common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious
+anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his
+parallel and Roger Bacon--whom the Franciscans silenced--of his
+kindred.  Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of
+Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years
+before it was first brought into use.  And earlier still was
+Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus
+of Cnossos.  All up and down the record of history whenever there
+was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared.
+And half the alchemists were of their tribe.
+
+When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might
+have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive
+engine. But they could see nothing of the sort.  They were not
+yet beginning to think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all
+too poor to make such engines even had they thought of them. For
+a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this
+new force even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile. Their
+first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited
+for more than five hundred years before the explosive engine
+came.
+
+Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey
+before the world could use their findings for any but the
+roughest, most obvious purposes.  If man in general was not still
+as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his
+paleolithic precursor, he was at best purblind.  
+
+Section 4
+
+The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on
+the verge of discovery, before they began to influence human
+lives.
+
+There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised and
+forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed
+that coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand
+before it dawned upon men that here was something more than a
+curiosity. And it is to be remarked that the first recorded
+suggestion for the use of steam was in war; there is an
+Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of
+corked iron bottles full of heated water.  The mining of coal for
+fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men had ever
+done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam-engine and the
+steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of
+logical necessity. It is the most interesting and instructive
+chapter in the history of the human intelligence, the history of
+steam from its beginning as a fact in human consciousness to the
+perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the
+utilisation of intra-molecular power. Nearly every human being
+must have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands of
+years; the women in particular were always heating water, boiling
+it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with
+its fury; millions of people at different times must have watched
+steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket balls and
+blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the whole human
+record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any
+glimmer of a realisation that here was force, here was strength
+to borrow and use.... Then suddenly man woke up to it, the
+railways spread like a network over the globe, the ever enlarging
+iron steamships began their staggering fight against wind and
+wave.
+
+Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning
+of the Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the
+Warring States.
+
+But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this
+novelty. They would not recognise, they were not able to
+recognise that anything fundamental had happened to their
+immemorial necessities. They called the steam-engine the 'iron
+horse' and pretended that they had made the most partial of
+substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production were
+visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,
+population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and
+concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city
+centres, food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a
+scale that made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of
+imperial Rome, a petty incident; and a huge migration of peoples
+between Europe and Western Asia and America was in Progress,
+and--nobody seems to have realised that something new had come
+into human life, a strange swirl different altogether from any
+previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the swirl when at
+last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of
+accumulating water and eddying inactivity....
+
+The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could
+sit at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or
+coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish
+ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West
+Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world,
+scrutinise the prices current of his geographically distributed
+investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two
+children he had begotten (in the place of his father's eight)
+that he thought the world changed very little. They must play
+cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone
+to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of
+Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all
+would be well with them....
+
+Section 5
+
+Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be
+studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the
+exploitation of steam.  To electricity also, in spite of its
+provocative nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly
+blind for incalculable ages. Could anything be more emphatic than
+the appeal of electricity for attention?  It thundered at man's
+ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes, occasionally it
+killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that concerned him
+enough to merit study. It came into the house with the cat on any
+dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur. 
+It rotted his metals when he put them together.... There is no
+single record that any one questioned why the cat's fur crackles
+or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the
+sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have done his
+very successful best not to think about it at all; until this new
+spirit of the Seeker turned itself to these things.
+
+How often things must have been seen and dismissed as
+unimportant, before the speculative eye and the moment of vision
+came! It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who
+first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and
+silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind
+to the existence of this universal presence.  And even then the
+science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious
+facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with
+magnetism--a mere guess that--perhaps with the lightning.  Frogs'
+legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and
+twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them. 
+Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after
+Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of
+scientific curiosities into the life of the common man.... Then
+suddenly, in the half-century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted
+the steam-engine and took over traction, it ousted every other
+form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected
+wireless telephone and the telephotograph....
+
+Section 6
+
+And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and
+invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific
+revolution had begun.  Each new thing made its way into practice
+against a scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One
+writer upon these subjects gives a funny little domestic
+conversation that happened, he says, in the year 1898, within ten
+years, that is to say, of the time when the first aviators were
+fairly on the wing. He tells us how he sat at his desk in his
+study and conversed with his little boy.
+
+His little boy was in profound trouble.  He felt he had to speak
+very seriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy
+he did not want to do it too harshly.
+
+This is what happened.
+
+'I wish, Daddy,' he said, coming to his point, 'that you wouldn't
+write all this stuff about flying.  The chaps rot me.'
+
+'Yes!' said his father.
+
+'And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots
+me.'
+
+'But there is going to be flying--quite soon.'
+
+The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that.
+'Anyhow,' he said, 'I wish you wouldn't write about it.'
+
+'You'll fly--lots of times--before you die,' the father assured
+him.
+
+The little boy looked unhappy.
+
+The father hesitated.  Then he opened a drawer and took out a
+blurred and under-developed photograph.  'Come and look at this,'
+he said.
+
+The little boy came round to him.  The photograph showed a stream
+and a meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black,
+pencil-like object with flat wings on either side of it. It was
+the first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that
+ever maintained itself in the air by mechanical force. Across the
+margin was written:  'Here we go up, up, up--from S. P. Langley,
+Smithsonian Institution, Washington.'
+
+The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon
+his son. 'Well?' he said.
+
+'That,' said the schoolboy, after reflection, 'is only a model.'
+
+'Model to-day, man to-morrow.'
+
+The boy seemed divided in his allegiance.  Then he decided for
+what he believed quite firmly to be omniscience.  'But old
+Broomie,' he said, 'he told all the boys in his class only
+yesterday, "no man will ever fly."  No one, he says, who has ever
+shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would ever believe anything
+of the sort....'
+
+Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his
+father's reminiscences.
+
+Section 7
+
+At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages
+in the literature of that time witness, it was thought that the
+fact that man had at last had successful and profitable dealings
+with the steam that scalded him and the electricity that flashed
+and banged about the sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a
+culminating exercise of his intelligence and his intellectual
+courage. The air of 'Nunc Dimittis' sounds in same of these
+writings. 'The great things are discovered,' wrote Gerald Brown
+in his summary of the nineteenth century.  'For us there remains
+little but the working out of detail.'  The spirit of the seeker
+was still rare in the world; education was unskilled,
+unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people
+even then could have realised that Science was still but the
+flimsiest of trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No
+one seems to have been afraid of science and its possibilities.
+Yet now where there had been but a score or so of seekers, there
+were many thousands, and for one needle of speculation that had
+been probing the curtain of appearances in 1800, there were now
+hundreds. And already Chemistry, which had been content with her
+atoms and molecules for the better part of a century, was
+preparing herself for that vast next stride that was to
+revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom.
+
+One realises how crude was the science of that time when one
+considers the case of the composition of air.  This was
+determined by that strange genius and recluse, that man of
+mystery, that disembowelled intelligence, Henry Cavendish,
+towards the end of the eighteenth century. So far as he was
+concerned the work was admirably done. He separated all the known
+ingredients of the air with a precision altogether remarkable; he
+even put it upon record that he had some doubt about the purity
+of the nitrogen.  For more than a hundred years his determination
+was repeated by chemists all the world over, his apparatus was
+treasured in London, he became, as they used to say, 'classic,'
+and always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his
+experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen
+(and with a little helium and traces of other substances, and
+indeed all the hints that might have led to the new departures of
+the twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped
+unobserved through the professorial fingers that repeated his
+procedure.
+
+Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to
+the very dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was
+still rather a procession of happy accidents than an orderly
+conquest of nature?
+
+Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the
+world. Even the schoolmaster could not check it.  For the mere
+handful who grew up to feel wonder and curiosity about the
+secrets of nature in the nineteenth century, there were now, at
+the beginning of the twentieth, myriads escaping from the
+limitations of intellectual routine and the habitual life, in
+Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and all
+about the world.
+
+It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be
+called by a whole generation of scientific men, 'the greatest of
+European chemists,' were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico,
+between Fiesole and Florence.  He was then only fifteen, but he
+was already distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a
+savage appetite to understand. He had been particularly attracted
+by the mystery of phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness
+to every other source of light. He was to tell afterwards in his
+reminiscences how he watched the fireflies drifting and glowing
+among the dark trees in the garden of the villa under the warm
+blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept them in cages,
+dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects
+very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the effect
+of various gases and varying temperature upon their light.  Then
+the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir
+William Crookes, a toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium
+particles impinge upon sulphide of zinc and make it luminous,
+induced him to associate the two sets of phenomena. It was a
+happy association for his inquiries.  It was a rare and fortunate
+thing, too, that any one with the mathematical gift should have
+been taken by these curiosities.
+
+Section 8
+
+And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at
+Fiesole, a certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a
+course of afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in
+Edinburgh.  They were lectures that had attracted a very
+considerable amount of attention.  He gave them in a small
+lecture-theatre that had become more and more congested as his
+course proceeded. At his concluding discussion it was crowded
+right up to the ceiling at the back, and there people were
+standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so fascinating
+did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular, a
+chuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging
+his knee with great sand-red hands and drinking in every word,
+eyes aglow, cheeks flushed, and ears burning.
+
+'And so,' said the professor, 'we see that this Radium, which
+seemed at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all
+that was most established and fundamental in the constitution of
+matter, is really at one with the rest of the elements.  It does
+noticeably and forcibly what probably all the other elements are
+doing with an imperceptible slowness.  It is like the single
+voice crying aloud that betrays the silent breathing multitude in
+the darkness. Radium is an element that is breaking up and flying
+to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doing that at less
+perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is; thorium--the stuff of
+this incandescent gas mantle--certainly is; actinium.  I feel
+that we are but beginning the list. And we know now that the
+atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible
+and final and--lifeless--lifeless, is really a reservoir of
+immense energy.  That is the most wonderful thing about all this
+work.  A little while ago we thought of the atoms as we thought
+of bricks, as solid building material, as substantial matter, as
+unit masses of lifeless stuff, and behold! these bricks are
+boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the intensest force. This
+little bottle contains about a pint of uranium oxide; that is to
+say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It is worth
+about a pound.  And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in the
+atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as we
+could get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a
+word, in one instant I could suddenly release that energy here
+and now it would blow us and everything about us to fragments; if
+I could turn it into the machinery that lights this city, it
+could keep Edinburgh brightly lit for a week. But at present no
+man knows, no man has an inkling of how this little lump of stuff
+can be made to hasten the release of its store. It does release
+it, as a burn trickles.  Slowly the uranium changes into radium,
+the radium changes into a gas called the radium emanation, and
+that again to what we call radium A, and so the process goes on,
+giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach the last
+stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead.
+But we cannot hasten it.'
+
+'I take ye, man,' whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red
+hands tightening like a vice upon his knee.  'I take ye, man. Go
+on!  Oh, go on!'
+
+The professor went on after a little pause.  'Why is the change
+gradual?' he asked.  'Why does only a minute fraction of the
+radium disintegrate in any particular second?  Why does it dole
+itself out so slowly and so exactly?  Why does not all the
+uranium change to radium and all the radium change to the next
+lowest thing at once? Why this decay by driblets; why not a decay
+en masse? . . . Suppose presently we find it is possible to
+quicken that decay?'
+
+The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly.  The wonderful inevitable
+idea was coming.  He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed
+in his seat with excitement.  'Why not?' he echoed, 'why not?'
+
+The professor lifted his forefinger.
+
+'Given that knowledge,' he said, 'mark what we should be able to
+do! We should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium;
+not only should we have a source of power so potent that a man
+might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year,
+fight a fleet of battleships, or drive one of our giant liners
+across the Atlantic; but we should also have a clue that would
+enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all
+the other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our
+finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the world
+would become an available reservoir of concentrated force.  Do
+you realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these things would mean
+for us?'
+
+The scrub head nodded.  'Oh! go on.  Go on.'
+
+'It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only
+compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that
+lifted man above the brute.  We stand to-day towards
+radio-activity as our ancestor stood towards fire before he had
+learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a strange thing
+utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano,
+a red destruction that poured through the forest.  So it is that
+we know radio-activity to-day. This--this is the dawn of a new
+day in human living.  At the climax of that civilisation which
+had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the
+savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our
+ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present
+sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an
+entirely new civilisation.  The energy we need for our very
+existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly,
+is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us.
+We cannot pick that lock at present, but----'
+
+He paused.  His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to
+hear him.
+
+'----we will.'
+
+He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.
+
+'And then,' he said. . . .
+
+'Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual
+struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will
+cease to be the lot of Man.  Man will step from the pinnacle of
+this civilisation to the beginning of the next.  I have no
+eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of man's
+material destiny that opens out before me.  I see the desert
+continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice,
+the whole world once more Eden.  I see the power of man reach out
+among the stars....'
+
+He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an
+actor or orator might have envied.
+
+The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,
+sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for
+dispersal. More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass
+of figures became a bright confusion of movement.  Some of the
+people signalled to friends, some crowded down towards the
+platform to examine the lecturer's apparatus and make notes of
+his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair
+wanted no such detailed frittering away of the thoughts that had
+inspired him. He wanted to be alone with them; he elbowed his way
+out almost fiercely, he made himself as angular and bony as a
+cow, fearing lest some one should speak to him, lest some one
+should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm.
+
+He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who
+sees visions.  He had arms disproportionately long, and
+ridiculous big feet.
+
+He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of
+commonness, of everyday life.
+
+He made his way to the top of Arthur's Seat, and there he sat for
+a long time in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that
+ever and again he whispered to himself some precious phrase that
+had stuck in his mind.
+
+'If,' he whispered, 'if only we could pick that lock. . . .'
+
+The sun was sinking over the distant hills.  Already it was shorn
+of its beams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks
+of cloud that would presently engulf it.
+
+'Eh!' said the youngster.  'Eh!'
+
+He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the red
+sun was there before his eyes.  He stared at it, at first without
+intelligence, and then with a gathering recognition. Into his
+mind came a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a
+Stone Age savage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two
+hundred thousand years ago.
+
+'Ye auld thing,' he said--and his eyes were shining, and he made
+a kind of grabbing gesture with his hand; 'ye auld red thing....
+We'll have ye YET.'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
+
+Section I
+
+The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men
+as Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the
+twentieth century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the
+heavier elements and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was
+solved by a wonderful combination of induction, intuition, and
+luck by Holsten so soon as the year 1933. From the first
+detection of radio-activity to its first subjugation to human
+purpose measured little more than a quarter of a century. For
+twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties prevented any
+striking practical application of his success, but the essential
+thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human progress
+was crossed, in that year.  He set up atomic disintegration in a
+minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into
+a heavy gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its
+turn in the course of seven days, and it was only after another
+year's work that he was able to show practically that the last
+result of this rapid release of energy was gold.  But the thing
+was done--at the cost of a blistered chest and an injured finger,
+and from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed
+into riving and rending energy, Holsten knew that he had opened a
+way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might still be, to
+worlds of limitless power. He recorded as much in the strange
+diary biography he left the world, a diary that was up to that
+particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations, and
+which suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human
+record of sensations and emotions that all humanity might
+understand.
+
+He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true,
+but none the less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four
+hours following the demonstration of the correctness of his
+intricate tracery of computations and guesses.  'I thought I
+should not sleep,' he writes--the words he omitted are supplied
+in brackets--(on account of) 'pain in (the) hand and chest and
+(the) wonder of what I had done.... Slept like a child.'
+
+He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing
+to do, he was living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he
+decided to go up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he
+was a little boy as a breezy playground.  He went up by the
+underground tube that was then the recognised means of travel
+from one part of London to another, and walked up Heath Street
+from the tube station to the open heath. He found it a gully of
+planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of house-wreckers.
+The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow, steep, and
+winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it commodious
+and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of
+Neo-Georgian aestheticism.  Such is the illogical quality of
+humanity that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard
+under the seat of current civilisation, saw these changes with
+regret. He had come up Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had
+known the windows of all the little shops, spent hours in the
+vanished cinematograph theatre, and marvelled at the high-flung
+early Georgian houses upon the westward bank of that old gully of
+a thoroughfare; he felt strange with all these familiar things
+gone. He escaped at last with a feeling of relief from this
+choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged upon
+the old familiar scene about the White Stone Pond.  That, at
+least, was very much as it used to be.
+
+There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right
+of him; the reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble,
+the white-fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its
+portico still stood out at the angle of the ways, and the blue
+view to Harrow Hill and Harrow spire, a view of hills and trees
+and shining waters and wind-driven cloud shadows, was like the
+opening of a great window to the ascending Londoner.  All that
+was very reassuring. There was the same strolling crowd, the same
+perpetual miracle of motors dodging through it harmlessly,
+escaping headlong into the country from the Sabbatical stuffiness
+behind and below them. There was a band still, a women's suffrage
+meeting--for the suffrage women had won their way back to the
+tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace again--socialist
+orators, politicians, a band, and the same wild uproar of dogs,
+frantic with the gladness of their one blessed weekly release
+from the back yard and the chain. And away along the road to the
+Spaniards strolled a vast multitude, saying, as ever, that the
+view of London was exceptionally clear that day.
+
+Young Holsten's face was white.  He walked with that uneasy
+affectation of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and
+an under-exercised body.  He hesitated at the White Stone Pond
+whether to go to the left of it or the right, and again at the
+fork of the roads.  He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and
+every now and then he would get in the way of people on the
+footpath or be jostled by them because of the uncertainty of his
+movements. He felt, he confesses, 'inadequate to ordinary
+existence.' He seemed to himself to be something inhuman and
+mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous,
+fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to
+lead--a week of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild
+promenading--and he had launched something that would disorganise
+the entire fabric that held their contentments and ambitions and
+satisfactions together. 'Felt like an imbecile who has presented
+a box full of loaded revolvers to a Creche,' he notes.
+
+He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history
+now knows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and
+Holsten walked together and Holsten was sufficiently pale and
+jumpy for Lawson to tell him he overworked and needed a holiday.
+They sat down at a little table outside the County Council house
+of Golders Hill Park and sent one of the waiters to the Bull and
+Bush for a couple of bottles of beer, no doubt at Lawson's
+suggestion. The beer warmed Holsten's rather dehumanised system.
+He began to tell Lawson as clearly as he could to what his great
+discovery amounted.  Lawson feigned attention, but indeed he had
+neither the knowledge nor the imagination to understand. 'In the
+end, before many years are out, this must eventually change war,
+transit, lighting, building, and every sort of manufacture, even
+agriculture, every material human concern----'
+
+Then Holsten stopped short.  Lawson had leapt to his feet. 'Damn
+that dog!' cried Lawson.  'Look at it now.  Hi!  Here! 
+Phewoo--phewoo phewoo! Come HERE, Bobs!  Come HERE!'
+
+The young scientific man, with his bandaged hand, sat at the
+green table, too tired to convey the wonder of the thing he had
+sought so long, his friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and
+the Sunday people drifted about them through the spring sunshine.
+For a moment or so Holsten stared at Lawson in astonishment, for
+he had been too intent upon what he had been saying to realise
+how little Lawson had attended.
+
+Then he remarked, 'WELL!' and smiled faintly, and--finished the
+tankard of beer before him.
+
+Lawson sat down again.  'One must look after one's dog,' he said,
+with a note of apology.  'What was it you were telling me?'
+
+Section 2
+
+In the evening Holsten went out again.  He walked to Saint Paul's
+Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the
+evening service.  The candles upon the altar reminded him in some
+odd way of the fireflies at Fiesole.  Then he walked back through
+the evening lights to Westminster.  He was oppressed, he was
+indeed scared, by his sense of the immense consequences of his
+discovery. He had a vague idea that night that he ought not to
+publish his results, that they were premature, that some secret
+association of wise men should take care of his work and hand it
+on from generation to generation until the world was riper for
+its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the
+thousands of people he passed had really awakened to the fact of
+change, they trusted the world for what it was, not to alter too
+rapidly, to respect their trusts, their assurances, their habits,
+their little accustomed traffics and hard-won positions.
+
+He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging,
+brightly-lit masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil.  He
+sat down on a seat and became aware of the talk of the two people
+next to him. It was the talk of a young couple evidently on the
+eve of marriage. The man was congratulating himself on having
+regular employment at last; 'they like me,' he said, 'and I like
+the job.  If I work up--in'r dozen years or so I ought to be
+gettin' somethin' pretty comfortable. That's the plain sense of
+it, Hetty.  There ain't no reason whatsoever why we shouldn't get
+along very decently--very decently indeed.'
+
+The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed!
+So it struck upon Holsten's mind.  He added in his diary, 'I had
+a sense of all this globe as that....'
+
+By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this
+populated world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and
+villages, its high roads and the inns beside them, its gardens
+and farms and upland pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships
+coming along the great circles of the ocean, its time-tables and
+appointments and payments and dues as it were one unified and
+progressive spectacle. Sometimes such visions came to him; his
+mind, accustomed to great generalisations and yet acutely
+sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively than the
+minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming sphere
+moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately
+swiftness on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living
+progress that altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little
+deadened him to that incessancy of life, it seemed now just an
+eternal circling.  He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the
+great fixities and recurrencies of the human routine. The remoter
+past of wandering savagery, the inevitable changes of to-morrow
+were veiled, and he saw only day and night, seed-time and
+harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks in the
+summer sunlight and tales by the winter fireside, the ancient
+sequence of hope and acts and age perennially renewed, eddying on
+for ever and ever, save that now the impious hand of research was
+raised to overthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual, sunlit
+spinning-top of man's existence....
+
+For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions,
+famine and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the
+bitter wind, failure and insufficiency and retrocession.  He saw
+all mankind in terms of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat
+beside him, who schemed their inglorious outlook and improbable
+contentments. 'I had a sense of all this globe as that.'
+
+His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a
+time in vain.  He reassured himself against the invasion of this
+disconcerting idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a
+loose wanderer from the flock returning with evil gifts from his
+sustained unnatural excursions amidst the darknesses and
+phosphorescences beneath the fair surfaces of life.  Man had not
+been always thus; the instincts and desires of the little home,
+the little plot, was not all his nature; also he was an
+adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting curiosity, an
+insatiable desire. For a few thousand generations indeed he had
+tilled the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers,
+grinding his corn and trampling the October winepress, yet not
+for so long but that he was still full of restless stirrings.
+
+'If there have been home and routine and the field,' thought
+Holsten, 'there have also been wonder and the sea.'
+
+He turned his head and looked up over the back of the seat at the
+great hotels above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow
+and colour and stir of feasting.  Might his gift to mankind mean
+simply more of that? . . .
+
+He got up and walked out of the garden, surveyed a passing
+tram-car, laden with warm light, against the deep blues of
+evening, dripping and trailing long skirts of shining reflection;
+he crossed the Embankment and stood for a time watching the dark
+river and turning ever and again to the lit buildings and
+bridges. His mind began to scheme conceivable replacements of all
+those clustering arrangements. . . .
+
+'It has begun,' he writes in the diary in which these things are
+recorded. 'It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot
+foresee. I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in
+the armoury of Change.  If I were to burn all these papers,
+before a score of years had passed, some other man would be doing
+this. . .
+
+Section 3
+
+Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy
+dominating every other source of power, but for some years yet a
+vast network of difficulties in detail and application kept the
+new discovery from any effective invasion of ordinary life. The
+path from the laboratory to the workshop is sometimes a tortuous
+one; electro-magnetic radiations were known and demonstrated for
+twenty years before Marconi made them practically available, and
+in the same way it was twenty years before induced radio-activity
+could be brought to practical utilisation.  The thing, of course,
+was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time of its
+discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but
+with very little realisation of the huge economic revolution that
+impended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the
+production of gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon
+unprofitable lines of the alchemist's dreams; there was a
+considerable amount of discussion and expectation in that more
+intelligent section of the educated publics of the various
+civilised countries which followed scientific development; but
+for the most part the world went about its business--as the
+inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the
+perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go about
+their business--just as though the possible was impossible, as
+though the inevitable was postponed for ever because it was
+delayed.
+
+It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought
+induced radio-activity into the sphere of industrial production,
+and its first general use was to replace the steam-engine in
+electrical generating stations.  Hard upon the appearance of this
+came the Dass-Tata engine--the invention of two among the
+brilliant galaxy of Bengali inventors the modernisation of Indian
+thought was producing at this time--which was used chiefly for
+automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes, and such-like, mobile
+purposes. The American Kemp engine, differing widely in principle
+but equally practicable, and the Krupp-Erlanger came hard upon
+the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic
+replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress
+all about the habitable globe. Small wonder was this when the
+cost, even of these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is
+compared with that of the power they superseded. Allowing for
+lubrication the Dass-Tata engine, once it was started cost a
+penny to run thirty-seven miles, and added only nine and quarter
+pounds to the weight of the carriage it drove.  It made the heavy
+alcohol-driven automobile of the time ridiculous in appearance as
+well as preposterously costly.  For many years the price of coal
+and every form of liquid fuel had been clambering to levels that
+made even the revival of the draft horse seem a practicable
+possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this
+stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the
+world's roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful
+armoured monsters that had hooted and smoked and thundered about
+the world for four awful decades were swept away to the dealers
+in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and clean and
+shimmering shapes of silvered steel. At the same time a new
+impetus was given to aviation by the relatively enormous power
+for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible to add
+Redmayne's ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the
+vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force
+of the aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found
+themselves possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover
+or ascend or descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly
+through the air.  The last dread of flying vanished. As the
+journalists of the time phrased it, this was the epoch of the
+Leap into the Air.  The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a
+mania; every one of means was frantic to possess a thing so
+controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and danger of
+the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty thousand of
+these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared
+humming softly into the sky.
+
+And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded
+industrialism.  The railways paid enormous premiums for priority
+in the delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was
+embarked upon so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous
+explosions due to inexperienced handling of the new power, and
+the revolutionary cheapening of both materials and electricity
+made the entire reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter
+merely dependent upon a reorganisation of the methods of the
+builder and the house-furnisher. Viewed from the side of the new
+power and from the point of view of those who financed and
+manufactured the new engines and material it required the age of
+the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing prosperity. 
+Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividends of five
+or six hundred per cent. and enormous fortunes were made and
+fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new
+developments.  This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the
+fact that in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one
+of the recoverable waste products was gold--the former
+disintegrated dust of bismuth and the latter dust of lead--and
+that this new supply of gold led quite naturally to a rise in
+prices throughout the world.
+
+This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this
+crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich people--every great
+city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing--was
+the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human
+history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a
+deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production
+there was also a huge destruction of values.  These glaring
+factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles
+swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of
+dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were
+indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that
+gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night.
+Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social
+catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at
+no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil
+was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers
+upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled
+labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of
+employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the
+rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values
+at every centre of population, the value of existing house
+property had become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong
+depreciation, all the securities upon which the credit of the
+world rested were slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the
+stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic;--this was the
+reverse of the spectacle, these were the black and monstrous
+under-consequences of the Leap into the Air.
+
+There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out
+into Threadneedle Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran.
+'The Steel Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,' he
+shouted. 'The State Railways are going to scrap all their
+engines. Everything's going to be scrapped--everything.  Come and
+scrap the mint, you fellows, come and scrap the mint!'
+
+In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of
+America quadrupled any previous record.  There was an enormous
+increase also in violent crime throughout the world.  The thing
+had come upon an unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human
+society was to be smashed by its own magnificent gains.
+
+For there had been no foresight of these things.  There had been
+no attempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations
+this flood of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs.
+The world in these days was not really governed at all, in the
+sense in which government came to be understood in subsequent
+years. Government was a treaty, not a design; it was forensic,
+conservative, disputatious, unseeing, unthinking, uncreative;
+throughout the world, except where the vestiges of absolutism
+still sheltered the court favourite and the trusted servant, it
+was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an
+enormous advantage in being the only trained caste.  Their
+professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation
+of the fantastically naive electoral methods by which they
+clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts,
+conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and seize
+advantages and suspicious of every generosity. Government was an
+obstructive business of energetic fractions, progress went on
+outside of and in spite of public activities, and legislation was
+the last crippling recognition of needs so clamorous and
+imperative and facts so aggressively established as to invade
+even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very
+existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.
+
+The world was so little governed that with the very coming of
+plenty, in the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when
+everything necessary to satisfy human needs and everything
+necessary to realise such will and purpose as existed then in
+human hearts was already at hand, one has still to tell of
+hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict, and incoherent
+suffering.  There was no scheme for the distribution of this vast
+new wealth that had come at last within the reach of men; there
+was no clear conception that any such distribution was possible.
+As one attempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of
+the new age, as one measures it against the latent achievement
+that later years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the
+blindness, the narrowness, the insensate unimaginative
+individualism of the pre-atomic time. Under this tremendous dawn
+of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise, in the
+very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess
+over all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patiently in
+her strong arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty,
+the solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in
+her very presence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court,
+the world was to witness such things as the squalid spectacle of
+the Dass-Tata patent litigation.
+
+There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room,
+during the exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading
+counsel of the day argued and shouted over a miserable little
+matter of more royalties or less and whether the Dass-Tata
+company might not bar the Holsten-Roberts' methods of utilising
+the new power. The Dass-Tata people were indeed making a
+strenuous attempt to secure a world monopoly in atomic
+engineering.  The judge, after the manner of those times, sat
+raised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown and a foolish
+huge wig, the counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and
+queer black gowns over their usual costume, wigs and gowns that
+were held to be necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean
+wooden benches stirred and whispered artful-looking solicitors,
+busily scribbling reporters, the parties to the case, expert
+witnesses, interested people, and a jostling confusion of
+subpoenaed persons, briefless young barristers (forming a style
+on the most esteemed and truculent examples) and casual eccentric
+spectators who preferred this pit of iniquity to the free
+sunlight outside. Every one was damply hot, the examining King's
+Counsel wiped the perspiration from his huge, clean-shaven upper
+lip; and into this atmosphere of grasping contention and human
+exhalations the daylight filtered through a window that was
+manifestly dirty.  The jury sat in a double pew to the left of
+the judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs that have fallen
+into an ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the would-be
+omnivorous Dass, under cross-examination....
+
+Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon
+as they appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a
+basis for further work, and to that confiding disposition and one
+happy flash of adaptive invention the alert Dass owed his
+claim....
+
+But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching,
+patenting, pre-empting, monopolising this or that feature of the
+new development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to
+the purposes of their little lusts and avarice. That trial is
+just one of innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the
+face of the world festered with patent legislation. It chanced,
+however, to have one oddly dramatic feature in the fact that
+Holsten, after being kept waiting about the court for two days as
+a beggar might have waited at a rich man's door, after being
+bullied by ushers and watched by policemen, was called as a
+witness, rather severely handled by counsel, and told not to
+'quibble' by the judge when he was trying to be absolutely
+explicit.
+
+The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, and sneered at
+Holsten's astonishment round the corner of his monstrous wig.
+Holsten was a great man, was he?  Well, in a law-court great men
+were put in their places.
+
+'We want to know has the plaintiff added anything to this or
+hasn't he?' said the judge, 'we don't want to have your views
+whether Sir Philip Dass's improvements were merely superficial
+adaptations or whether they were implicit in your paper. No
+doubt--after the manner of inventors--you think most things that
+were ever likely to be discovered are implicit in your papers. No
+doubt also you think too that most subsequent additions and
+modifications are merely superficial.  Inventors have a way of
+thinking that.  The law isn't concerned with that sort of thing.
+The law has nothing to do with the vanity of inventors. The law
+is concerned with the question whether these patent rights have
+the novelty the plantiff claims for them.  What that admission
+may or may not stop, and all these other things you are saying in
+your overflowing zeal to answer more than the questions addressed
+to you--none of these things have anything whatever to do with
+the case in hand. It is a matter of constant astonishment to me
+in this court to see how you scientific men, with all your
+extraordinary claims to precision and veracity, wander and wander
+so soon as you get into the witness-box. I know no more
+unsatisfactory class of witness. The plain and simple question
+is, has Sir Philip Dass made any real addition to existing
+knowledge and methods in this matter or has he not?  We don't
+want to know whether they were large or small additions nor what
+the consequences of your admission may be. That you will leave to
+us.'
+
+Holsten was silent.
+
+'Surely?' said the judge, almost pityingly.
+
+'No, he hasn't,' said Holsten, perceiving that for once in his
+life he must disregard infinitesimals.
+
+'Ah!' said the judge, 'now why couldn't you say that when counsel
+put the question? . . .'
+
+An entry in Holsten's diary-autobiography, dated five days later,
+runs: 'Still amazed.  The law is the most dangerous thing in this
+country. It is hundreds of years old.  It hasn't an idea.  The
+oldest of old bottles and this new wine, the most explosive wine.
+Something will overtake them.'
+
+Section 4
+
+There was a certain truth in Holsten's assertion that the law was
+'hundreds of years old.'  It was, in relation to current thought
+and widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the
+material and methods of life had been changing rapidly and were
+now changing still more rapidly, the law-courts and the
+legislatures of the world were struggling desperately to meet
+modern demands with devices and procedures, conceptions of rights
+and property and authority and obligation that dated from the
+rude compromises of relatively barbaric times. The horse-hair
+wigs and antic dresses of the British judges, their musty courts
+and overbearing manners, were indeed only the outward and visible
+intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal and political
+organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century was
+indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong,
+that now fettered the governing body that once it had protected.
+
+Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and outspoken publication
+that in the field of natural science had been the beginning of
+the conquest of nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth
+and nineteenth centuries preparing the spirit of the new world
+within the degenerating body of the old.  The idea of a greater
+subordination of individual interests and established
+institutions to the collective future, is traceable more and more
+clearly in the literature of those times, and movement after
+movement fretted itself away in criticism of and opposition to
+first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and
+political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley,
+with no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established
+rulers of the world as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas
+and suggestions that was known as Socialism, and more
+particularly its international side, feeble as it was in creative
+proposals or any method of transition, still witnesses to the
+growth of a conception of a modernised system of
+inter-relationships that should supplant the existing tangle of
+proprietary legal ideas.
+
+The word 'Sociology' was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular
+writer upon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the
+middle of the nineteenth century, but the idea of a state,
+planned as an electric-traction system is planned, without
+reference to pre-existing apparatus, upon scientific lines, did
+not take a very strong hold upon the popular imagination of the
+world until the twentieth century.  Then, the growing impatience
+of the American people with the monstrous and socially paralysing
+party systems that had sprung out of their absurd electoral
+arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called the
+'Modern State' movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in
+America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the
+thought of bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property,
+employment, education, and government, than had ever been
+contemplated before. No doubt these Modern State ideas were very
+largely the reflection upon social and political thought of the
+vast revolution in material things that had been in progress for
+two hundred years, but for a long time they seemed to be having
+no more influence upon existing institutions than the writings of
+Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the time of the death
+of the latter. They were fermenting in men's minds, and it needed
+only just such social and political stresses as the coming of the
+atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward abruptly
+into crude and startling realisation.
+
+Section 5
+
+Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre is one of those autobiographical
+novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades
+of the twentieth century.  It was published in 1970, and one must
+understand Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual
+than in a literal sense.  It is indeed an allusive title,
+carrying the world back to the Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a
+century and a half earlier.
+
+Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history
+of his life and ideas between his nineteenth and his twenty-third
+birthdays. He was neither a very original nor a very brilliant
+man, but he had a trick of circumstantial writing; and though no
+authentic portrait was to survive for the information of
+posterity, he betrays by a score of casual phrases that he was
+short, sturdy, inclined to be plump, with a 'rather blobby' face,
+and full, rather projecting blue eyes. He belonged until the
+financial debacle of 1956 to the class of fairly prosperous
+people, he was a student in London, he aeroplaned to Italy and
+then had a pedestrian tour from Genoa to Rome, crossed in the air
+to Greece and Egypt, and came back over the Balkans and Germany. 
+His family fortunes, which were largely invested in bank shares,
+coal mines, and house property, were destroyed.  Reduced to
+penury, he sought to earn a living. He suffered great hardship,
+and was then caught up by the war and had a year of soldiering,
+first as an officer in the English infantry and then in the army
+of pacification.  His book tells all these things so simply and
+at the same time so explicitly, that it remains, as it were, an
+eye by which future generations may have at least one man's
+vision of the years of the Great Change.
+
+And he was, he tells us, a 'Modern State' man 'by instinct' from
+the beginning.  He breathed in these ideas in the class rooms and
+laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, a long
+and delicately beautiful facade, along the South Bank of the
+Thames opposite the ancient dignity of Somerset House.  Such
+thought was interwoven with the very fabric of that pioneer
+school in the educational renascence in England.  After the
+customary exchange years in Heidelberg and Paris, he went into
+the classical school of London University.  The older so-called
+'classical' education of the British pedagogues, probably the
+most paralysing, ineffective, and foolish routine that ever
+wasted human life, had already been swept out of this great
+institution in favour of modern methods; and he learnt Greek and
+Latin as well as he had learnt German, Spanish, and French, so
+that he wrote and spoke them freely, and used them with an
+unconscious ease in his study of the foundation civilisations of
+the European system to which they were the key. (This change was
+still so recent that he mentions an encounter in Rome with an
+'Oxford don' who 'spoke Latin with a Wiltshire accent and
+manifest discomfort, wrote Greek letters with his tongue out, and
+seemed to think a Greek sentence a charm when it was a quotation
+and an impropriety when it wasn't.')
+
+Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam engines upon the
+English railways and the gradual cleansing of the London
+atmosphere as the smoke-creating sea-coal fires gave place to
+electric heating. The building of laboratories at Kensington was
+still in progress, and he took part in the students' riots that
+delayed the removal of the Albert Memorial.  He carried a banner
+with 'We like Funny Statuary' on one side, and on the other
+'Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should our Great Departed
+Stand in the Rain?'  He learnt the rather athletic aviation of
+those days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he was
+fined for flying over the new prison for political libellers at
+Wormwood Scrubs, 'in a manner calculated to exhilarate the
+prisoners while at exercise.'  That was the time of the attempted
+suppression of any criticism of the public judicature and the
+place was crowded with journalists who had ventured to call
+attention to the dementia of Chief Justice Abrahams.  Barnet was
+not a very good aviator, he confesses he was always a little
+afraid of his machine--there was excellent reason for every one
+to be afraid of those clumsy early types--and he never attempted
+steep descents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned
+one of those oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity
+and extravagant filthiness still astonish the visitors to the
+museum of machinery at South Kensington.  He mentions running
+over a dog and complains of the ruinous price of 'spatchcocks' in
+Surrey.  'Spatchcocks,' it seems, was a slang term for crushed
+hens.
+
+He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military
+service to a minimum, and his want of any special scientific or
+technical qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that
+handicapped his aviation indicated the infantry of the line as
+his sphere of training.  That was the most generalised form of
+soldiering. The development of the theory of war had been for
+some decades but little assisted by any practical experience.
+What fighting had occurred in recent years, had been fighting in
+minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaric soldiers
+and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and the
+great powers of the world were content for the most part to
+maintain armies that sustained in their broader organisation the
+traditions of the European wars of thirty and forty years before.
+There was the infantry arm to which Barnet belonged and which was
+supposed to fight on foot with a rifle and be the main portion of
+the army. There were cavalry forces (horse soldiers), having a
+ratio to the infantry that had been determined by the experiences
+of the Franco-German war in 1871.  There was also artillery, and
+for some unexplained reason much of this was still drawn by
+horses; though there were also in all the European armies a small
+number of motor-guns with wheels so constructed that they could
+go over broken ground. In addition there were large developments
+of the engineering arm, concerned with motor transport,
+motor-bicycle scouting, aviation, and the like.
+
+No first-class intelligence had been sought to specialise in and
+work out the problem of warfare with the new appliances and under
+modern conditions, but a succession of able jurists, Lord
+Haldane, Chief Justice Briggs, and that very able King's Counsel,
+Philbrick, had reconstructed the army frequently and thoroughly
+and placed it at last, with the adoption of national service,
+upon a footing that would have seemed very imposing to the public
+of 1900.  At any moment the British Empire could now put a
+million and a quarter of arguable soldiers upon the board of
+Welt-Politik. The traditions of Japan and the Central European
+armies were more princely and less forensic; the Chinese still
+refused resolutely to become a military power, and maintained a
+small standing army upon the American model that was said, so far
+as it went, to be highly efficient, and Russia, secured by a
+stringent administration against internal criticism, had scarcely
+altered the design of a uniform or the organisation of a battery
+since the opening decades of the century. Barnet's opinion of his
+military training was manifestly a poor one, his Modern State
+ideas disposed him to regard it as a bore, and his common sense
+condemned it as useless.  Moreover, his habit of body made him
+peculiarly sensitive to the fatigues and hardships of service.
+
+'For three days in succession we turned out before dawn and--for
+no earthly reason--without breakfast,' he relates. 'I suppose
+that is to show us that when the Day comes the first thing will
+be to get us thoroughly uncomfortable and rotten. We then
+proceeded to Kriegspiel, according to the mysterious ideas of
+those in authority over us.  On the last day we spent three hours
+under a hot if early sun getting over eight miles of country to a
+point we could have reached in a motor omnibus in nine minutes
+and a half--I did it the next day in that--and then we made a
+massed attack upon entrenchments that could have shot us all
+about three times over if only the umpires had let them. Then
+came a little bayonet exercise, but I doubt if I am sufficiently
+a barbarian to stick this long knife into anything living. Anyhow
+in this battle I shouldn't have had a chance. Assuming that by
+some miracle I hadn't been shot three times over, I was far too
+hot and blown when I got up to the entrenchments even to lift my
+beastly rifle.  It was those others would have begun the
+sticking....
+
+'For a time we were watched by two hostile aeroplanes; then our
+own came up and asked them not to, and--the practice of aerial
+warfare still being unknown--they very politely desisted and went
+away and did dives and circles of the most charming description
+over the Fox Hills.'
+
+All Barnet's accounts of his military training were written in
+the same half-contemptuous, half-protesting tone. He was of
+opinion that his chances of participating in any real warfare
+were very slight, and that, if after all he should participate,
+it was bound to be so entirely different from these peace
+manoeuvres that his only course as a rational man would be to
+keep as observantly out of danger as he could until he had learnt
+the tricks and possibilities of the new conditions.  He states
+this quite frankly. Never was a man more free from sham heroics.
+
+Section 6
+
+Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest
+of masculine youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that
+for some time he failed to connect the rush of wonderful new
+possibilities with the financial troubles of his family. 'I knew
+my father was worried,' he admits.  That cast the smallest of
+shadows upon his delighted departure for Italy and Greece and
+Egypt with three congenial companions in one of the new atomic
+models. They flew over the Channel Isles and Touraine, he
+mentions, and circled about Mont Blanc--'These new helicopters,
+we found,' he notes, 'had abolished all the danger and strain of
+sudden drops to which the old-time aeroplanes were liable'--and
+then he went on by way of Pisa, Paestum, Ghirgenti, and Athens,
+to visit the pyramids by moonlight, flying thither from Cairo,
+and to follow the Nile up to Khartum.  Even by later standards,
+it must have been a very gleeful holiday for a young man, and it
+made the tragedy of his next experiences all the darker.  A week
+after his return his father, who was a widower, announced himself
+ruined, and committed suicide by means of an unscheduled opiate.
+
+At one blow Barnet found himself flung out of the possessing,
+spending, enjoying class to which he belonged, penniless and with
+no calling by which he could earn a living.  He tried teaching
+and some journalism, but in a little while he found himself on
+the underside of a world in which he had always reckoned to live
+in the sunshine.  For innumerable men such an experience has
+meant mental and spiritual destruction, but Barnet, in spite of
+his bodily gravitation towards comfort, showed himself when put
+to the test, of the more valiant modern quality. He was saturated
+with the creative stoicism of the heroic times that were already
+dawning, and he took his difficulties and discomforts stoutly as
+his appointed material, and turned them to expression.
+
+Indeed, in his book, he thanks fortune for them.  'I might have
+lived and died,' he says, 'in that neat fool's paradise of secure
+lavishness above there.  I might never have realised the
+gathering wrath and sorrow of the ousted and exasperated masses. 
+In the days of my own prosperity things had seemed to me to be
+very well arranged.' Now from his new point of view he was to
+find they were not arranged at all; that government was a
+compromise of aggressions and powers and lassitudes, and law a
+convention between interests, and that the poor and the weak,
+though they had many negligent masters, had few friends.
+
+'I had thought things were looked after,' he wrote. 'It was with
+a kind of amazement that I tramped the roads and starved--and
+found that no one in particular cared.'
+
+He was turned out of his lodging in a backward part of London.
+
+'It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady--she was a needy
+widow, poor soul, and I was already in her debt--to keep an old
+box for me in which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and
+the like. She lived in great fear of the Public Health and
+Morality Inspectors, because she was sometimes too poor to pay
+the customary tip to them, but at last she consented to put it in
+a dark tiled place under the stairs, and then I went forth into
+the world--to seek first the luck of a meal and then shelter.'
+
+He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in
+which a year or so ago he had been numbered among the spenders.
+
+London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of
+visible smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine,
+had already ceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the
+Victorian time; it had been, and indeed was, constantly being
+rebuilt, and its main streets were already beginning to take on
+those characteristics that distinguished them throughout the
+latter half of the twentieth century. The insanitary horse and
+the plebeian bicycle had been banished from the roadway, which
+was now of a resilient, glass-like surface, spotlessly clean; and
+the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow vestige of the
+ancient footpath on either side of the track and forbidden at the
+risk of a fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway. People
+descended from their automobiles upon this pavement and went
+through the lower shops to the lifts and stairs to the new ways
+for pedestrians, the Rows, that ran along the front of the houses
+at the level of the first story, and, being joined by frequent
+bridges, gave the newer parts of London a curiously Venetian
+appearance. In some streets there were upper and even third-story
+Rows.  For most of the day and all night the shop windows were
+lit by electric light, and many establishments had made, as it
+were, canals of public footpaths through their premises in order
+to increase their window space.
+
+Barnet made his way along this night-scene rather apprehensively
+since the police had power to challenge and demand the Labour
+Card of any indigent-looking person, and if the record failed to
+show he was in employment, dismiss him to the traffic pavement
+below.
+
+But there was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet's
+appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too,
+had other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to
+reach the galleries about Leicester Square--that great focus of
+London life and pleasure.
+
+He gives a vivid description of the scene that evening. In the
+centre was a garden raised on arches lit by festoons of lights
+and connected with the Rows by eight graceful bridges, beneath
+which hummed the interlacing streams of motor traffic, pulsating
+as the current alternated between east and west and north and
+south.  Above rose great frontages of intricate rather than
+beautiful reinforced porcelain, studded with lights, barred by
+bold illuminated advertisements, and glowing with reflections.
+There were the two historical music halls of this place, the
+Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal players
+revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shakespeare's plays,
+and four other great houses of refreshment and entertainment
+whose pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night.
+The south side of the square was in dark contrast to the others;
+it was still being rebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars
+surmounted by the frozen gestures of monstrous cranes rose over
+the excavated sites of vanished Victorian buildings.
+
+This framework attracted Barnet's attention for a time to the
+exclusion of other interests.  It was absolutely still, it had a
+dead rigidity, a stricken inaction, no one was at work upon it
+and all its machinery was quiet; but the constructor's globes of
+vacuum light filled its every interstice with a quivering green
+moonshine and showed alert but motionless--soldier sentinels!
+
+He asked a passing stroller, and was told that the men had struck
+that day against the use of an atomic riveter that would have
+doubled the individual efficiency and halved the number of steel
+workers.
+
+'Shouldn't wonder if they didn't get chucking bombs,' said
+Barnet's informant, hovered for a moment, and then went on his
+way to the Alhambra music hall.
+
+Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at
+the corners of the square.  Something very sensational had been
+flashed upon the transparencies.  Forgetting for a moment his
+penniless condition, he made his way over a bridge to buy a
+paper, for in those days the papers, which were printed upon thin
+sheets of metallic foil, were sold at determinate points by
+specially licensed purveyors. Half over, he stopped short at a
+change in the traffic below; and was astonished to see that the
+police signals were restricting vehicles to the half roadway. 
+When presently he got within sight of the transparencies that had
+replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read of the Great
+March of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the
+West End, and so without expenditure he was able to understand
+what was coming.
+
+He watched, and his book describes this procession which the
+police had considered it unwise to prevent and which had been
+spontaneously organised in imitation of the Unemployed
+Processions of earlier times. He had expected a mob but there was
+a kind of sullen discipline about the procession when at last it
+arrived.  What seemed for a time an unending column of men
+marched wearily, marched with a kind of implacable futility,
+along the roadway underneath him. He was, he says, moved to join
+them, but instead he remained watching. They were a dingy,
+shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part
+incapable of any but obsolete and superseded types of labour.
+They bore a few banners with the time-honoured inscription:
+'Work, not Charity,' but otherwise their ranks were unadorned.
+
+They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was
+nothing truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no
+definite objective they were just marching and showing themselves
+in the more prosperous parts of London.  They were a sample of
+that great mass of unskilled cheap labour which the now still
+cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for evermore. They were
+being 'scrapped'--as horses had been 'scrapped.'
+
+Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened
+by his own precarious condition.  For a time, he says, he felt
+nothing but despair at the sight; what should be done, what could
+be done for this gathering surplus of humanity? They were so
+manifestly useless--and incapable--and pitiful.
+
+What were they asking for?
+
+They had been overtaken by unexpected things.  Nobody had
+foreseen----
+
+It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous
+shambling enigma below meant.  It was an appeal against the
+unexpected, an appeal to those others who, more fortunate, seemed
+wiser and more powerful, for something--for INTELLIGENCE.  This
+mute mass, weary footed, rank following rank, protested its
+persuasion that some of these others must have foreseen these
+dislocations--that anyhow they ought to have foreseen--and
+arranged.
+
+That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so
+dumbly to assert.
+
+'Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened
+room,' he says.  'These men were praying to their fellow
+creatures as once they prayed to God!  The last thing that men
+will realise about anything is that it is inanimate.  They had
+transferred their animation to mankind.  They still believed
+there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or
+malignant.... It had only to be aroused to be
+conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion.... And I saw, too,
+that as yet THERE WAS NO SUCH INTELLIGENCE. The world waits for
+intelligence.  That intelligence has still to be made, that will
+for good and order has still to be gathered together, out of
+scraps of impulse and wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever
+is fine and creative in our souls, into a common purpose. It's
+something still to come....'
+
+It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that
+this not very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might
+well have been altogether occupied with the problem of his own
+individual necessities, should be able to stand there and
+generalise about the needs of the race.
+
+But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time
+there was already dawning the light of a new era. The spirit of
+humanity was escaping, even then it was escaping, from its
+extreme imprisonment in individuals.  Salvation from the bitter
+intensities of self, which had been a conscious religious end for
+thousands of years, which men had sought in mortifications, in
+the wilderness, in meditation, and by innumerable strange paths,
+was coming at last with the effect of naturalness into the talk
+of men, into the books they read, into their unconscious
+gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and everyday
+acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the spirit
+of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of
+those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very
+threat of hell and torment had failed to drive them.  And this
+young man, homeless and without provision even for the immediate
+hours, in the presence of social disorganisation, distress, and
+perplexity, in a blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasure that
+blotted out the stars, could think as he tells us he thought.
+
+'I saw life plain,' he wrote.  'I saw the gigantic task before
+us, and the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable
+difficulty filled me with exaltation.  I saw that we have still
+to discover government, that we have still to discover education,
+which is the necessary reciprocal of government, and that all
+this--in which my own little speck of a life was so manifestly
+overwhelmed--this and its yesterday in Greece and Rome and Egypt
+were nothing, the mere first dust swirls of the beginning, the
+movements and dim murmurings of a sleeper who will presently be
+awake....'
+
+Section 7
+
+And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his
+descent from this ecstatic vision of reality.
+
+'Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold
+and a little hungry.'
+
+He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood
+upon the Thames Embankment.  He made his way through the
+galleries of the booksellers and the National Gallery, which had
+been open continuously day and night to all decently dressed
+people now for more than twelve years, and across the
+rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the hotel colonnade
+to the Embankment.  He had long known of these admirable offices,
+which had swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all the
+casual indigent from the London streets, and he believed that he
+would, as a matter of course, be able to procure a ticket for
+food and a night's lodgings and some indication of possible
+employment.
+
+But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he
+got to the Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested
+and besieged by a large and rather unruly crowd.  He hovered for
+a time on the outskirts of the waiting multitude, perplexed and
+dismayed, and then he became aware of a movement, a purposive
+trickling away of people, up through the arches of the great
+buildings that had arisen when all the railway stations were
+removed to the south side of the river, and so to the covered
+ways of the Strand.  And here, in the open glare of midnight, he
+found unemployed men begging, and not only begging, but begging
+with astonishing assurance, from the people who were emerging
+from the small theatres and other such places of entertainment
+which abounded in that thoroughfare.
+
+This was an altogether unexampled thing.  There had been no
+begging in London streets for a quarter of a century.  But that
+night the police were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with
+the destitute who were invading those well-kept quarters of the
+town. They had become stonily blind to anything but manifest
+disorder.
+
+Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask;
+indeed his bearing must have been more valiant than his
+circumstances, for twice he says that he was begged from.  Near
+the Trafalgar Square gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and
+blackened eyebrows, who was walking alone, spoke to him with a
+peculiar friendliness.
+
+'I'm starving,' he said to her abruptly.
+
+'Oh! poor dear!' she said; and with the impulsive generosity of
+her kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his
+hand....
+
+It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey,
+might under the repressive social legislation of those times,
+have brought Barnet within reach of the prison lash. But he took
+it, he confesses, and thanked her as well as he was able, and
+went off very gladly to get food.
+
+Section 8
+
+A day or so later--and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon
+the roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social
+disorganisation and police embarrassment--he wandered out into
+the open country. He speaks of the roads of that plutocratic age
+as being 'fenced with barbed wire against unpropertied people,'
+of the high-walled gardens and trespass warnings that kept him to
+the dusty narrowness of the public ways. In the air, happy rich
+people were flying, heedless of the misfortunes about them, as he
+himself had been flying two years ago, and along the road swept
+the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. One was rarely
+out of earshot of its whistles and gongs and siren cries even in
+the field paths or over the open downs. The officials of the
+labour exchanges were everywhere overworked and infuriated, the
+casual wards were so crowded that the surplus wanderers slept in
+ranks under sheds or in the open air, and since giving to
+wayfarers had been made a punishable offence there was no longer
+friendship or help for a man from the rare foot passenger or the
+wayside cottage....
+
+'I wasn't angry,' said Barnet.  'I saw an immense selfishness, a
+monstrous disregard for anything but pleasure and possession in
+all those people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how
+certainly if the richest had changed places with the poorest,
+that things would have been the same.  What else can happen when
+men use science and every new thing that science gives, and all
+their available intelligence and energy to manufacture wealth and
+appliances, and leave government and education to the rustling
+traditions of hundreds of years ago?  Those traditions come from
+the dark ages when there was really not enough for every one,
+when life was a fierce struggle that might be masked but could
+not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce
+dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony
+between material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and
+the poor grew savage and every added power that came to men made
+the rich richer and the poor less necessary and less free.  The
+men I met in the casual wards and the relief offices were all
+smouldering for revolt, talking of justice and injustice and
+revenge.  I saw no hope in that talk, nor in anything but
+patience....'
+
+But he did not mean a passive patience.  He meant that the method
+of social reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual
+rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled
+aspects was solved.  'I tried to talk to those discontented men,'
+he wrote, 'but it was hard for them to see things as I saw them.
+When I talked of patience and the larger scheme, they answered,
+"But then we shall all be dead"--and I could not make them see,
+what is so simple to my own mind, that that did not affect the
+question. Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to
+statesmanship.'
+
+He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those
+wanderings, and a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in
+the market-place at Bishop's Stortford announcing a 'Grave
+International Situation' did not excite him very much.  There had
+been so many grave international situations in recent years.
+
+This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly
+attacking the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to
+the help of the Slavs.
+
+But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the
+vagrants in the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master
+that all serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the
+morrow to their mobilisation centres.  The country was on the eve
+of war. He was to go back through London to Surrey.  His first
+feeling, he records, was one of extreme relief that his days of
+'hopeless battering at the underside of civilisation' were at an
+end. Here was something definite to do, something definitely
+provided for. But his relief was greatly modified when he found
+that the mobilisation arrangements had been made so hastily and
+carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at the improvised
+depot at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink but a cup
+of cold water. The depot was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one
+was free to leave it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SECOND
+
+THE LAST WAR
+
+Section I
+
+Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order,
+it is difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow,
+the motives that plunged mankind into the war that fills the
+histories of the middle decades of the twentieth century.
+
+It must always be remembered that the political structure of the
+world at that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the
+collective intelligence.  That is the central fact of that
+history. For two hundred years there had been no great changes in
+political or legal methods and pretensions, the utmost change had
+been a certain shifting of boundaries and slight readjustment of
+procedure, while in nearly every other aspect of life there had
+been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, and an enormous
+enlargement of scope and outlook. The absurdities of courts and
+the indignities of representative parliamentary government,
+coupled with the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other
+directions, had withdrawn the best intelligences more and more
+from public affairs. The ostensible governments of the world in
+the twentieth century were following in the wake of the
+ostensible religions. They were ceasing to command the services
+of any but second-rate men. After the middle of the eighteenth
+century there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the world's
+memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen. 
+Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted,
+common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new
+possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the
+past.
+
+Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the
+boundaries of the various 'sovereign states,' and the conception
+of a general predominance in human affairs on the part of some
+one particular state. The memory of the empires of Rome and
+Alexander squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human
+imagination--it bored into the human brain like some grisly
+parasite and filled it with disordered thoughts and violent
+impulses.  For more than a century the French system exhausted
+its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then the infection
+passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart and
+centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs.  Later ages
+were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this
+obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the
+infinite knowingness of the political writer, the cunning
+refusals to accept plain facts, the strategic devices, the
+tactical manoeuvres, the records of mobilisations and
+counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible almost as soon as
+it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their
+state craftsmen sat with their historical candles burning, and,
+in spite of strange, new reflections and unfamiliar lights and
+shadows, still wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps of
+Europe and the world.
+
+It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions
+of men and women outside the world of these specialists
+sympathised and agreed with their portentous activities. One
+school of psychologists inclined to minimise this participation,
+but the balance of evidence goes to show that there were massive
+responses to these suggestions of the belligerent schemer.
+Primitive man had been a fiercely combative animal; innumerable
+generations had passed their lives in tribal warfare, and the
+weight of tradition, the example of history, the ideals of
+loyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the incitements
+of the international mischief-maker. The political ideas of the
+common man were picked up haphazard, there was practically
+nothing in such education as he was given that was ever intended
+to fit him for citizenship as such (that conception only
+appeared, indeed, with the development of Modern State ideas),
+and it was therefore a comparatively easy matter to fill his
+vacant mind with the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion and
+national aggression.
+
+For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily
+patriotic when presently his battalion came up from the depot to
+London, to entrain for the French frontier.  He tells of children
+and women and lads and old men cheering and shouting, of the
+streets and rows hung with the flags of the Allied Powers, of a
+real enthusiasm even among the destitute and unemployed. The
+Labour Bureaux were now partially transformed into enrolment
+offices, and were centres of hotly patriotic excitement.  At
+every convenient place upon the line on either side of the
+Channel Tunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the
+feeling in the regiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by
+grim anticipations, was none the less warlike.
+
+But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of minds without
+established ideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it
+was with himself, a natural response to collective movement, and
+to martial sounds and colours, and the exhilarating challenge of
+vague dangers. And people had been so long oppressed by the
+threat of and preparation for war that its arrival came with an
+effect of positive relief.
+
+Section 2
+
+The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the
+lower Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct
+from the various British depots to the points in the Ardennes
+where they were intended to entrench themselves.
+
+Most of the documents bearing upon the campaign were destroyed
+during the war, from the first the scheme of the Allies seems to
+have been confused, but it is highly probable that the formation
+of an aerial park in this region, from which attacks could be
+made upon the vast industrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a
+flanking raid through Holland upon the German naval
+establishments at the mouth of the Elbe, were integral parts of
+the original project. Nothing of this was known to such pawns in
+the game as Barnet and his company, whose business it was to do
+what they were told by the mysterious intelligences at the
+direction of things in Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff
+had also been transferred. From first to last these directing
+intelligences remained mysterious to the body of the army, veiled
+under the name of 'Orders.' There was no Napoleon, no Caesar to
+embody enthusiasm.  Barnet says, 'We talked of Them.  THEY are
+sending us up into Luxembourg.  THEY are going to turn the
+Central European right.'
+
+Behind the veil of this vagueness the little group of more or
+less worthy men which constituted Headquarters was beginning to
+realise the enormity of the thing it was supposed to control....
+
+In the great hall of the War Control, whose windows looked out
+across the Seine to the Trocadero and the palaces of the western
+quarter, a series of big-scale relief maps were laid out upon
+tables to display the whole seat of war, and the staff-officers
+of the control were continually busy shifting the little blocks
+which represented the contending troops, as the reports and
+intelligence came drifting in to the various telegraphic bureaux
+in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller apartments there were
+maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for example, the
+reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav commanders were
+recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps, as upon
+chessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard
+and the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world
+supremacy against the Central European powers. Very probably he
+had a definite idea of his game; very probably he had a coherent
+and admirable plan.
+
+But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new
+strategy of aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy
+that Holsten had opened for mankind.  While he planned
+entrenchments and invasions and a frontier war, the Central
+European generalship was striking at the eyes and the brain.  And
+while, with a certain diffident hesitation, he developed his
+gambit that night upon the lines laid down by Napoleon and
+Moltke, his own scientific corps in a state of mutinous activity
+was preparing a blow for Berlin.  'These old fools!' was the key
+in which the scientific corps was thinking.
+
+The War Control in Paris, on the night of July the second, was an
+impressive display of the paraphernalia of scientific military
+organisation, as the first half of the twentieth century
+understood it. To one human being at least the consulting
+commanders had the likeness of world-wielding gods.
+
+She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute,
+and she had been engaged in relay with other similar women to
+take down orders in duplicate and hand them over to the junior
+officers in attendance, to be forwarded and filed.  There had
+come a lull, and she had been sent out from the dictating room to
+take the air upon the terrace before the great hall and to eat
+such scanty refreshment as she had brought with her until her
+services were required again.
+
+From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view
+not only of the wide sweep of the river below her, and all the
+eastward side of Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to Saint Cloud,
+great blocks and masses of black or pale darkness with pink and
+golden flashes of illumination and endless interlacing bands of
+dotted lights under a still and starless sky, but also the whole
+spacious interior of the great hall with its slender pillars and
+gracious arching and clustering lamps was visible to her.  There,
+over a wilderness of tables, lay the huge maps, done on so large
+a scale that one might fancy them small countries; the messengers
+and attendants went and came perpetually, altering, moving the
+little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of men, and
+the great commander and his two consultants stood amidst all
+these things and near where the fighting was nearest, scheming,
+directing.  They had but to breathe a word and presently away
+there, in the world of reality, the punctual myriads moved.  Men
+rose up and went forward and died. The fate of nations lay behind
+the eyes of these three men. Indeed they were like gods.
+
+Most godlike of the three was Dubois.  It was for him to decide;
+the others at most might suggest.  Her woman's soul went out to
+this grave, handsome, still, old man, in a passion of instinctive
+worship.
+
+Once she had taken words of instruction from him direct. She had
+awaited them in an ecstasy of happiness--and fear. For her
+exaltation was made terrible by the dread that some error might
+dishonour her....
+
+She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating
+minuteness of an impassioned woman's observation.
+
+He said little, she remarked.  He looked but little at the maps.
+The tall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm
+of ideas, conflicting ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting
+of the little red, blue, black, and yellow pieces on the board,
+and wanted to draw the commander's attention to this and that.
+Dubois listened, nodded, emitted a word and became still again,
+brooding like the national eagle.
+
+His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she
+could not see his eyes; his moustache overhung the mouth from
+which those words of decision came.  Viard, too, said little; he
+was a dark man with a drooping head and melancholy, watchful
+eyes. He was more intent upon the French right, which was feeling
+its way now through Alsace to the Rhine.  He was, she knew, an
+old colleague of Dubois; he knew him better, she decided, he
+trusted him more than this unfamiliar Englishman....
+
+Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in
+profile; these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered
+years ago. To seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse
+to hurry--itself a confession of miscalculation; by attention to
+these simple rules, Dubois had built up a steady reputation from
+the days when he had been a promising junior officer, a still,
+almost abstracted young man, deliberate but ready.  Even then men
+had looked at him and said: 'He will go far.'  Through fifty
+years of peace he had never once been found wanting, and at
+manoeuvres his impassive persistence had perplexed and hypnotised
+and defeated many a more actively intelligent man. Deep in his
+soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery about the
+modern art of warfare, the key to his career.  And this discovery
+was that NOBODY KNEW, that to act therefore was to blunder, that
+to talk was to confess; and that the man who acted slowly and
+steadfastly and above all silently, had the best chance of
+winning through. Meanwhile one fed the men.  Now by this same
+strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious unknowns of the
+Central European command. Delhi might talk of a great flank march
+through Holland, with all the British submarines and hydroplanes
+and torpedo craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it; Viard
+might crave for brilliance with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes,
+and ski-men among the Swiss mountains, and a sudden swoop upon
+Vienna; the thing was to listen--and wait for the other side to
+begin experimenting.  It was all experimenting. And meanwhile he
+remained in profile, with an air of assurance--like a man who
+sits in an automobile after the chauffeur has had his directions.
+
+And every one about him was the stronger and surer for that quiet
+face, that air of knowledge and unruffled confidence. The
+clustering lights threw a score of shadows of him upon the maps,
+great bunches of him, versions of a commanding presence, lighter
+or darker, dominated the field, and pointed in every direction.
+Those shadows symbolised his control.  When a messenger came from
+the wireless room to shift this or that piece in the game, to
+replace under amended reports one Central European regiment by a
+score, to draw back or thrust out or distribute this or that
+force of the Allies, the Marshal would turn his head and seem not
+to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who approves a
+pupil's self-correction. 'Yes, that's better.'
+
+How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how
+wonderful it all was.  This was the brain of the western world,
+this was Olympus with the warring earth at its feet.  And he was
+guiding France, France so long a resentful exile from
+imperialism, back to her old predominance.
+
+It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be
+privileged to participate....
+
+It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal
+devotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact,
+punctual. She must control herself....
+
+She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when
+the war would be over and victory enthroned.  Then perhaps this
+harshness, this armour would be put aside and the gods might
+unbend. Her eyelids drooped....
+
+She roused herself with a start.  She became aware that the night
+outside was no longer still.  That there was an excitement down
+below on the bridge and a running in the street and a flickering
+of searchlights among the clouds from some high place away beyond
+the Trocadero.  And then the excitement came surging up past her
+and invaded the hall within.
+
+One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of
+the room, gesticulating and shouting something.
+
+And all the world had changed.  A kind of throbbing. She couldn't
+understand.  It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed
+machinery and cables of the ways beneath, were beating--as pulses
+beat.  And about her blew something like a wind--a wind that was
+dismay.
+
+Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child
+might look towards its mother.
+
+He was still serene.  He was frowning slightly, she thought, but
+that was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand
+gauntly gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too
+manifestly disposed to drag him towards the great door that
+opened on the terrace. And Viard was hurrying towards the huge
+windows and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent forward
+and with eyes upturned.
+
+Something up there?
+
+And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.
+
+The sound struck her like a blow.  She crouched together against
+the masonry and looked up.  She saw three black shapes swooping
+down through the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two
+of them, there had already started curling trails of red....
+
+Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through
+moments that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl
+down towards her.
+
+She felt torn out of the world.  There was nothing else in the
+world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening,
+all-embracing, continuing sound.  Every other light had gone out
+about her and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting
+pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly
+flight of huge angular sheets of glass.  She had an impression of
+a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddened living thing
+that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst a chaos of
+falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earth furiously,
+that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing rabbit . . .
+
+She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.
+
+She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that
+a little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She
+tried to raise herself and found her leg was very painful. She
+was not clear whether it was night or day nor where she was; she
+made a second effort, wincing and groaning, and turned over and
+got into a sitting position and looked about her.
+
+Everything seemed very silent.  She was, in fact, in the midst of
+a vast uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing
+had been destroyed.
+
+At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous
+experience.
+
+She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world,
+a world of heaped broken things.  And it was lit--and somehow
+this was more familiar to her mind than any other fact about
+her--by a flickering, purplish-crimson light.  Then close to her,
+rising above a confusion of debris, she recognised the Trocadero;
+it was changed, something had gone from it, but its outline was
+unmistakable. It stood out against a streaming, whirling uprush
+of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled Paris and the Seine
+and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful, luminous
+organisation of the War Control....
+
+She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she
+lay, and examined her surroundings with an increasing
+understanding....
+
+The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the
+river. Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water,
+from which these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps
+of vapour came into circling existence a foot or so from its
+mirror-surface. Near at hand and reflected exactly in the water
+was the upper part of a familiar-looking stone pillar.  On the
+side of her away from the water the heaped ruins rose steeply in
+a confused slope up to a glaring crest.  Above and reflecting
+this glare towered pillowed masses of steam rolling swiftly
+upward to the zenith. It was from this crest that the livid glow
+that lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind
+connected this mound with the vanished buildings of the War
+Control.
+
+'Mais!' she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite
+motionless for a time, crouching close to the warm earth.
+
+Then presently this dim, broken human thing began to look about
+it again.  She began to feel the need of fellowship.  She wanted
+to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate her experience.
+And her foot hurt her atrociously.  There ought to be an
+ambulance. A little gust of querulous criticisms blew across her
+mind. This surely was a disaster!  Always after a disaster there
+should be ambulances and helpers moving about....
+
+She craned her head.  There was something there.  But everything
+was so still!
+
+'Monsieur!' she cried.  Her ears, she noted, felt queer, and she
+began to suspect that all was not well with them.
+
+It was terribly lonely in this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps
+this man--if it was a man, for it was difficult to see--might for
+all his stillness be merely insensible.  He might have been
+stunned....
+
+The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a
+moment every little detail was distinct.  It was Marshal Dubois. 
+He was lying against a huge slab of the war map.  To it there
+stuck and from it there dangled little wooden objects, the
+symbols of infantry and cavalry and guns, as they were disposed
+upon the frontier. He did not seem to be aware of this at his
+back, he had an effect of inattention, not indifferent attention,
+but as if he were thinking....
+
+She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was
+evident he frowned.  He frowned slightly, he had an air of not
+wanting to be disturbed.  His face still bore that expression of
+assured confidence, that conviction that if things were left to
+him France might obey in security....
+
+She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer.
+A strange surmise made her eyes dilate.  With a painful wrench
+she pulled herself up so that she could see completely over the
+intervening lumps of smashed-up masonry.  Her hand touched
+something wet, and after one convulsive movement she became
+rigid.
+
+It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head
+and shoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness
+and a pool of shining black....
+
+And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled,
+and a rush of hot water came pouring over her.  Then it seemed to
+her that she was dragged downward....
+
+Section 3
+
+When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and
+the black hair close-cropped en brosse, who was in charge of the
+French special scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster
+to the War Control, he was so wanting in imagination in any
+sphere but his own, that he laughed.  Small matter to him that
+Paris was burning. His mother and father and sister lived at
+Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had ever had, and it was
+poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen.  He slapped his
+second-in-command on the shoulder. 'Now,' he said, 'there's
+nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them
+tit-for-tat.... Strategy and reasons of state--they're over....
+Come along, my boy, and we'll just show these old women what we
+can do when they let us have our heads.'
+
+He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the
+courtyard of the chateau in which he had been installed and
+shouted for his automobile.  Things would have to move quickly
+because there was scarcely an hour and a half before dawn. He
+looked at the sky and noted with satisfaction a heavy bank of
+clouds athwart the pallid east.
+
+He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and
+aeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck away
+in barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods.  A hawk could not
+have discovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun.
+But that night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was
+handy and quite prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not
+a couple of miles away; he was going to Berlin with that and just
+one other man. Two men would be enough for what he meant to
+do....
+
+He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts
+science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of
+destruction, and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic
+type....
+
+He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming
+face. He smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great
+pleasures. There was an exotic richness, a chuckling flavour,
+about the voice in which he gave his orders, and he pointed his
+remarks with the long finger of a hand that was hairy and
+exceptionally big.
+
+'We'll give them tit-for-tat,' he said.  'We'll give them
+tit-for-tat. No time to lose, boys....'
+
+And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and
+Saxony the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless
+as a dancing sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass,
+flew like an arrow to the heart of the Central European hosts.
+
+It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above
+the banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to
+plunge at once into their wet obscurities should some hostile
+flier range into vision. The tense young steersman divided his
+attention between the guiding stars above and the level, tumbled
+surfaces of the vapour strata that hid the world below.  Over
+great spaces those banks lay as even as a frozen lava-flow and
+almost as still, and then they were rent by ragged areas of
+translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim patches of the
+land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw quite
+distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps
+and signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid
+through a boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill. 
+But if the world was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through
+that vapour floor came the deep roar of trains, the whistles of
+horns of motor-cars, a sound of rifle fire away to the south, and
+as he drew near his destination the crowing of cocks....
+
+The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at
+first starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to
+east as the dawn came on.  The Milky Way was invisible in the
+blue, and the lesser stars vanished.  The face of the adventurer
+at the steering-wheel, darkly visible ever and again by the oval
+greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm
+beauty which all concentrated purpose gives, and something of the
+happiness of an idiot child that has at last got hold of the
+matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his
+legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained
+in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that
+would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far
+had ever seen in action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential
+substance, had been tested only in almost infinitesimal
+quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the
+thought of great destruction slumbering in the black spheres
+between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out very exactly
+the instructions that had been given him, the man's mind was a
+blank. His aquiline profile against the starlight expressed
+nothing but a profound gloom.
+
+The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital was
+approached.
+
+So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by
+no aeroplanes at all.  The frontier scouts they must have passed
+in the night; probably these were mostly under the clouds; the
+world was wide and they had had luck in not coming close to any
+soaring sentinel.  Their machine was painted a pale gray, that
+lay almost invisibly over the cloud levels below. But now the
+east was flushing with the near ascent of the sun, Berlin was but
+a score of miles ahead, and the luck of the Frenchmen held. By
+imperceptible degrees the clouds below dissolved....
+
+Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering
+light and with all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was
+Berlin.  The left finger of the steersman verified roads and open
+spaces below upon the mica-covered square of map that was
+fastened by his wheel. There in a series of lake-like expansions
+was the Havel away to the right; over by those forests must be
+Spandau; there the river split about the Potsdam island; and
+right ahead was Charlottenburg cleft by a great thoroughfare that
+fell like an indicating beam of light straight to the imperial
+headquarters.  There, plain enough, was the Thiergarten; beyond
+rose the imperial palace, and to the right those tall buildings,
+those clustering, beflagged, bemasted roofs, must be the offices
+in which the Central European staff was housed. It was all coldly
+clear and colourless in the dawn.
+
+He looked up suddenly as a humming sound grew out of nothing and
+became swiftly louder.  Nearly overhead a German aeroplane was
+circling down from an immense height to challenge him. He made a
+gesture with his left arm to the gloomy man behind and then
+gripped his little wheel with both hands, crouched over it, and
+twisted his neck to look upward.  He was attentive, tightly
+strung, but quite contemptuous of their ability to hurt him. No
+German alive, he was assured, could outfly him, or indeed any one
+of the best Frenchmen.  He imagined they might strike at him as a
+hawk strikes, but they were men coming down out of the bitter
+cold up there, in a hungry, spiritless, morning mood; they came
+slanting down like a sword swung by a lazy man, and not so
+rapidly but that he was able to slip away from under them and get
+between them and Berlin.  They began challenging him in German
+with a megaphone when they were still perhaps a mile away. The
+words came to him, rolled up into a mere blob of hoarse sound.
+Then, gathering alarm from his grim silence, they gave chase and
+swept down, a hundred yards above him perhaps, and a couple of
+hundred behind.  They were beginning to understand what he was.
+He ceased to watch them and concentrated himself on the city
+ahead, and for a time the two aeroplanes raced....
+
+A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one
+was tearing paper.  A second followed.  Something tapped the
+machine.
+
+It was time to act.  The broad avenues, the park, the palaces
+below rushed widening out nearer and nearer to them. 'Ready!'
+said the steersman.
+
+The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the
+bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied
+it against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter. 
+Between its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he
+bent his head until his lips touched it.  Then he had to bite in
+order to let the air in upon the inducive.  Sure of its
+accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane
+and judged his pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent
+forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the side.
+
+'Round,' he whispered inaudibly.
+
+The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a
+descending column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a
+whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks,
+hurled high and sideways and the steersman, with gleaming eyes
+and set teeth, fought in great banking curves for a balance.  The
+gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his nostrils dilated,
+his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped....
+
+When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the
+crater of a small volcano.  In the open garden before the
+Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and
+poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation. They
+were too high to distinguish people clearly, or mark the bomb's
+effect upon the building until suddenly the facade tottered and
+crumbled before the flare as sugar dissolves in water. The man
+stared for a moment, showed all his long teeth, and then
+staggered into the cramped standing position his straps
+permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down
+after its fellow.
+
+The explosion came this time more directly underneath the
+aeroplane and shot it upward edgeways.  The bomb box tipped to
+the point of disgorgement, and the bomb-thrower was pitched
+forward upon the third bomb with his face close to its celluloid
+stud. He clutched its handles, and with a sudden gust of
+determination that the thing should not escape him, bit its stud.
+Before he could hurl it over, the monoplane was slipping
+sideways. Everything was falling sideways.  Instinctively he gave
+himself up to gripping, his body holding the bomb in its place.
+
+Then that bomb had exploded also, and steersman, thrower, and
+aeroplane were just flying rags and splinters of metal and drops
+of moisture in the air, and a third column of fire rushed eddying
+down upon the doomed buildings below....
+
+Section 4
+
+Never before in the history of warfare had there been a
+continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth
+century the only explosives known were combustibles whose
+explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and
+these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night
+were strange even to the men who used them.  Those used by the
+Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with
+unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of
+membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by which
+the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and
+admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up
+radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere.  This
+liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb
+was a blazing continual explosion. The Central European bombs
+were the same, except that they were larger and had a more
+complicated arrangement for animating the inducive.
+
+Always before in the development of warfare the shells and
+rockets fired had been but momentarily explosive, they had gone
+off in an instant once for all, and if there was nothing living
+or valuable within reach of the concussion and the flying
+fragments then they were spent and over.  But Carolinum, which
+belonged to the beta group of Hyslop's so-called 'suspended
+degenerator' elements, once its degenerative process had been
+induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing
+could arrest it. Of all Hyslop's artificial elements, Carolinum
+was the most heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to
+make and handle. To this day it remains the most potent
+degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists
+called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it
+poured out half of the huge store of energy in its great
+molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen
+days' emission was a half of that first period's outpouring, and
+so on.  As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum,
+though every seventeen days its power is halved, though
+constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never
+entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb
+fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with
+radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.
+
+What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the
+inducive oxidised and became active.  Then the surface of the
+Carolinum began to degenerate.  This degeneration passed only
+slowly into the substance of the bomb.  A moment or so after its
+explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding
+superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and
+thunder.  Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this
+state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting
+soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth.  There, as
+more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread
+itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of
+what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The
+Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up
+with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam,
+and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption
+that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of
+the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal.  Once
+launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and
+uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from
+the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent
+vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud,
+saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and
+blistering energy, were flung high and far.
+
+Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate
+explosive that was to give the 'decisive touch' to war....
+
+Section 5
+
+A recent historical writer has described the world of that time
+as one that 'believed in established words and was invincibly
+blind to the obvious in things.'  Certainly it seems now that
+nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier
+twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming
+impossible. And as certainly they did not see it.  They did not
+see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. Yet
+the broad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind. All
+through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of
+energy that men were able to command was continually increasing.
+Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow,
+the power to destroy, was continually increasing.  There was no
+increase whatever in the ability to escape.  Every sort of
+passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being
+outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side. 
+Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of
+malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of
+police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a
+matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a
+handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a
+city.  These facts were before the minds of everybody; the
+children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as
+the Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the
+paraphernalia and pretensions of war.
+
+It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce
+between the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand,
+and the world of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men
+of a later time can hope to understand this preposterous state of
+affairs.  Social organisation was still in the barbaric stage.
+There were already great numbers of actively intelligent men and
+much private and commercial civilisation, but the community, as a
+whole, was aimless, untrained and unorganised to the pitch of
+imbecility. Collective civilisation, the 'Modern State,' was
+still in the womb of the future.... 
+
+Section 6
+
+But let us return to Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre and its
+account of the experiences of a common man during the war time.
+While these terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were
+happening in Paris and Berlin, Barnet and his company were
+industriously entrenching themselves in Belgian Luxembourg.
+
+He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day's journey
+through the north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid
+phrases. The country was browned by a warm summer, the trees a
+little touched with autumnal colour, and the wheat already
+golden. When they stopped for an hour at Hirson, men and women
+with tricolour badges upon the platform distributed cakes and
+glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and there was much
+cheerfulness. 'Such good, cool beer it was,' he wrote.  'I had
+had nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom.'
+
+A number of monoplanes, 'like giant swallows,' he notes, were
+scouting in the pink evening sky.
+
+Barnet's battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place
+called Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to
+Jemelle.  Here they detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the
+railway--trains and stores were passing along it all night--and
+next morning he: marched eastward through a cold, overcast dawn,
+and a morning, first cloudy and then blazing, over a large
+spacious country-side interspersed by forest towards Arlon.
+
+There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked
+entrenchments and hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton
+that were designed to check and delay any advance from the east
+upon the fortified line of the Meuse.  They had their orders, and
+for two days they worked without either a sight of the enemy or
+any suspicion of the disaster that had abruptly decapitated the
+armies of Europe, and turned the west of Paris and the centre of
+Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction of Pompeii.
+
+And the news, when it did come, came attenuated.  'We heard there
+had been mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,' Barnet
+relates; 'but it didn't seem to follow that "They" weren't still
+somewhere elaborating their plans and issuing orders.  When the
+enemy began to emerge from the woods in front of us, we cheered
+and blazed away, and didn't trouble much more about anything but
+the battle in hand. If now and then one cocked up an eye into the
+sky to see what was happening there, the rip of a bullet soon
+brought one down to the horizontal again....
+
+That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of
+country between Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It
+was essentially a rifle and infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do
+not seem to have taken any decisive share in the actual fighting
+for some days, though no doubt they effected the strategy from
+the first by preventing surprise movements. They were aeroplanes
+with atomic engines, but they were not provided with atomic
+bombs, which were manifestly unsuitable for field use, nor indeed
+had they any very effective kind of bomb.  And though they
+manoeuvred against each other, and there was rifle shooting at
+them and between them, there was little actual aerial fighting.
+Either the airmen were indisposed to fight or the commanders on
+both sides preferred to reserve these machines for scouting....
+
+After a day or so of digging and scheming, Barnet found himself
+in the forefront of a battle.  He had made his section of rifle
+pits chiefly along a line of deep dry ditch that gave a means of
+inter-communication, he had had the earth scattered over the
+adjacent field, and he had masked his preparations with tussocks
+of corn and poppy. The hostile advance came blindly and
+unsuspiciously across the fields below and would have been very
+cruelly handled indeed, if some one away to the right had not
+opened fire too soon.
+
+'It was a queer thrill when these fellows came into sight,' he
+confesses; 'and not a bit like manoeuvres.  They halted for a
+time on the edge of the wood and then came forward in an open
+line. They kept walking nearer to us and not looking at us, but
+away to the right of us.  Even when they began to be hit, and
+their officers' whistles woke them up, they didn't seem to see
+us. One or two halted to fire, and then they all went back
+towards the wood again.  They went slowly at first, looking round
+at us, then the shelter of the wood seemed to draw them, and they
+trotted. I fired rather mechanically and missed, then I fired
+again, and then I became earnest to hit something, made sure of
+my sighting, and aimed very carefully at a blue back that was
+dodging about in the corn.  At first I couldn't satisfy myself
+and didn't shoot, his movements were so spasmodic and uncertain;
+then I think he came to a ditch or some such obstacle and halted
+for a moment. "GOT you," I whispered, and pulled the trigger.
+
+'I had the strangest sensations about that man.  In the first
+instance, when I felt that I had hit him I was irradiated with
+joy and pride....
+
+'I sent him spinning.  He jumped and threw up his arms....
+
+'Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping
+about. Suddenly I felt sick.  I hadn't killed him....
+
+'In some way he was disabled and smashed up and yet able to
+struggle about.  I began to think....
+
+'For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn.
+Either he was calling out or some one was shouting to him....
+
+'Then he jumped up--he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with
+one last effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still
+and never moved again.
+
+'He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him
+dead. I had been wanting to do so for some time....'
+
+The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made
+for themselves in the woods below.  A man was hit in the pit next
+to Barnet, and began cursing and crying out in a violent rage.
+Barnet crawled along the ditch to him and found him in great
+pain, covered with blood, frantic with indignation, and with the
+half of his right hand smashed to a pulp.  'Look at this,' he
+kept repeating, hugging it and then extending it.  'Damned
+foolery!  Damned foolery! My right hand, sir!  My right hand!'
+
+For some time Barnet could do nothing with him.  The man was
+consumed by his tortured realisation of the evil silliness of
+war, the realisation which had come upon him in a flash with the
+bullet that had destroyed his skill and use as an artificer for
+ever. He was looking at the vestiges with a horror that made him
+impenetrable to any other idea.  At last the poor wretch let
+Barnet tie up his bleeding stump and help him along the ditch
+that conducted him deviously out of range....
+
+When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water,
+and all day long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst.
+For food they had chocolate and bread.
+
+'At first,' he says, 'I was extraordinarily excited by my baptism
+of fire. Then as the heat of the day came on I experienced an
+enormous tedium and discomfort.  The flies became extremely
+troublesome, and my little grave of a rifle pit was invaded by
+ants. I could not get up or move about, for some one in the trees
+had got a mark on me.  I kept thinking of the dead Prussian down
+among the corn, and of the bitter outcries of my own man. Damned
+foolery!  It WAS damned foolery.  But who was to blame? How had
+we got to this? . . .
+
+'Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with
+dynamite bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and
+suddenly dived down over beyond the trees.
+
+' "From Holland to the Alps this day," I thought, "there must be
+crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to
+inflict irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic
+to the pitch of impossibility.  It is a dream. Presently I shall
+wake up." . . .
+
+'Then the phrase changed itself in my mind.  "Presently mankind
+will wake up."
+
+'I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were
+among these hundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in
+rebellion against all these ancient traditions of flag and
+empire. Weren't we, perhaps, already in the throes of the last
+crisis, in that darkest moment of a nightmare's horror before the
+sleeper will endure no more of it--and wakes?
+
+'I don't know how my speculations ended.  I think they were not
+so much ended as distracted by the distant thudding of the guns
+that were opening fire at long range upon Namur.'  
+
+Section 7
+
+But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of
+modern warfare.  So far he had taken part only in a little
+shooting. The bayonet attack by which the advanced line was
+broken was made at a place called Croix Rouge, more than twenty
+miles away, and that night under cover of the darkness the rifle
+pits were abandoned and he got his company away without further
+loss.
+
+His regiment fell back unpressed behind the fortified lines
+between Namur and Sedan, entrained at a station called Mettet,
+and was sent northward by Antwerp and Rotterdam to Haarlem. 
+Hence they marched into North Holland.  It was only after the
+march into Holland that he began to realise the monstrous and
+catastrophic nature of the struggle in which he was playing his
+undistinguished part.
+
+He describes very pleasantly the journey through the hills and
+open land of Brabant, the repeated crossing of arms of the Rhine,
+and the change from the undulating scenery of Belgium to the
+flat, rich meadows, the sunlit dyke roads, and the countless
+windmills of the Dutch levels.  In those days there was unbroken
+land from Alkmaar and Leiden to the Dollart.  Three great
+provinces, South Holland, North Holland, and Zuiderzeeland,
+reclaimed at various times between the early tenth century and
+1945 and all many feet below the level of the waves outside the
+dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern sun and
+sustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of
+laws and custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a
+perpetual defence against the beleaguering sea. For more than two
+hundred and fifty miles from Walcheren to Friesland stretched a
+line of embankments and pumping stations that was the admiration
+of the world.
+
+If some curious god had chosen to watch the course of events in
+those northern provinces while that flanking march of the British
+was in progress, he would have found a convenient and appropriate
+seat for his observation upon one of the great cumulus clouds
+that were drifting slowly across the blue sky during all these
+eventful days before the great catastrophe. For that was the
+quality of the weather, hot and clear, with something of a
+breeze, and underfoot dry and a little inclined to be dusty. This
+watching god would have looked down upon broad stretches of
+sunlit green, sunlit save for the creeping patches of shadow cast
+by the clouds, upon sky-reflecting meres, fringed and divided up
+by masses of willow and large areas of silvery weeds, upon white
+roads lying bare to the sun and upon a tracery of blue canals.
+The pastures were alive with cattle, the roads had a busy
+traffic, of beasts and bicycles and gaily coloured peasants'
+automobiles, the hues of the innumerable motor barges in the
+canal vied with the eventfulness of the roadways; and everywhere
+in solitary steadings, amidst ricks and barns, in groups by the
+wayside, in straggling villages, each with its fine old church,
+or in compact towns laced with canals and abounding in bridges
+and clipped trees, were human habitations.
+
+The people of this country-side were not belligerents.  The
+interests and sympathies alike of Holland had been so divided
+that to the end she remained undecided and passive in the
+struggle of the world powers. And everywhere along the roads
+taken by the marching armies clustered groups and crowds of
+impartially observant spectators, women and children in peculiar
+white caps and old-fashioned sabots, and elderly, clean-shaven
+men quietly thoughtful over their long pipes. They had no fear of
+their invaders; the days when 'soldiering' meant bands of
+licentious looters had long since passed away....
+
+That watcher among the clouds would have seen a great
+distribution of khaki-uniformed men and khaki-painted material
+over the whole of the sunken area of Holland.  He would have
+marked the long trains, packed with men or piled with great guns
+and war material, creeping slowly, alert for train-wreckers,
+along the north-going lines; he would have seen the Scheldt and
+Rhine choked with shipping, and pouring out still more men and
+still more material; he would have noticed halts and
+provisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling
+caterpillars of cavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons, the
+huge beetles of great guns, crawling under the poplars along the
+dykes and roads northward, along ways lined by the neutral,
+unmolested, ambiguously observant Dutch.  All the barges and
+shipping upon the canals had been requisitioned for transport. In
+that clear, bright, warm weather, it would all have looked from
+above like some extravagant festival of animated toys.
+
+As the sun sank westward the spectacle must have become a little
+indistinct because of a golden haze; everything must have become
+warmer and more glowing, and because of the lengthening of the
+shadows more manifestly in relief.  The shadows of the tall
+churches grew longer and longer, until they touched the horizon
+and mingled in the universal shadow; and then, slow, and soft,
+and wrapping the world in fold after fold of deepening blue, came
+the night--the night at first obscurely simple, and then with
+faint points here and there, and then jewelled in darkling
+splendour with a hundred thousand lights. Out of that mingling of
+darkness and ambiguous glares the noise of an unceasing activity
+would have arisen, the louder and plainer now because there was
+no longer any distraction of sight.
+
+It may be that watcher drifting in the pellucid gulf beneath the
+stars watched all through the night; it may be that he dozed. But
+if he gave way to so natural a proclivity, assuredly on the
+fourth night of the great flank march he was aroused, for that
+was the night of the battle in the air that decided the fate of
+Holland.  The aeroplanes were fighting at last, and suddenly
+about him, above and below, with cries and uproar rushing out of
+the four quarters of heaven, striking, plunging, oversetting,
+soaring to the zenith and dropping to the ground, they came to
+assail or defend the myriads below.
+
+Secretly the Central European power had gathered his flying
+machines together, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a
+handful of ten thousand knives over the low country. And amidst
+that swarming flight were five that drove headlong for the sea
+walls of Holland, carrying atomic bombs.  From north and west and
+south, the allied aeroplanes rose in response and swept down upon
+this sudden attack.  So it was that war in the air began. Men
+rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like
+archangels.  The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth.
+Surely the last fights of mankind were the best.  What was the
+heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking
+charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this
+giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?
+
+And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped
+and locked and dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and
+the stars, came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and
+first one and then a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged
+hungrily down upon the Dutchmen's dykes and struck between land
+and sea and flared up again in enormous columns of glare and
+crimsoned smoke and steam.
+
+And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires
+and trees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea,
+tumbled with anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood....
+
+Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous
+crying and a flurry of alarm bells... .
+
+The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky,
+like things that suddenly know themselves to be wicked....
+
+Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might
+quench, the waves came roaring in upon the land....
+
+Section 8
+
+'We had cursed our luck,' says Barnet, 'that we could not get to
+our quarters at Alkmaar that night.  There, we were told, were
+provisions, tobacco, and everything for which we craved. But the
+main canal from Zaandam and Amsterdam was hopelessly jammed with
+craft, and we were glad of a chance opening that enabled us to
+get out of the main column and lie up in a kind of little harbour
+very much neglected and weedgrown before a deserted house.  We
+broke into this and found some herrings in a barrel, a heap of
+cheeses, and stone bottles of gin in the cellar; and with this I
+cheered my starving men. We made fires and toasted the cheese and
+grilled our herrings. None of us had slept for nearly forty
+hours, and I determined to stay in this refuge until dawn and
+then if the traffic was still choked leave the barge and march
+the rest of the way into Alkmaar.
+
+'This place we had got into was perhaps a hundred yards from the
+canal and underneath a little brick bridge we could see the
+flotilla still, and hear the voices of the soldiers. Presently
+five or six other barges came through and lay up in the meer near
+by us, and with two of these, full of men of the Antrim regiment,
+I shared my find of provisions.  In return we got tobacco. A
+large expanse of water spread to the westward of us and beyond
+were a cluster of roofs and one or two church towers. The barge
+was rather cramped for so many men, and I let several squads,
+thirty or forty perhaps altogether, bivouac on the bank. I did
+not let them go into the house on account of the furniture, and I
+left a note of indebtedness for the food we had taken. We were
+particularly glad of our tobacco and fires, because of the
+numerous mosquitoes that rose about us.
+
+'The gate of the house from which we had provisioned ourselves
+was adorned with the legend, Vreugde bij Vrede, "Joy with Peace,"
+and it bore every mark of the busy retirement of a comfort-loving
+proprietor. I went along his garden, which was gay and delightful
+with big bushes of rose and sweet brier, to a quaint little
+summer-house, and there I sat and watched the men in groups
+cooking and squatting along the bank. The sun was setting in a
+nearly cloudless sky.
+
+'For the last two weeks I had been a wholly occupied man, intent
+only upon obeying the orders that came down to me.  All through
+this time I had been working to the very limit of my mental and
+physical faculties, and my only moments of rest had been devoted
+to snatches of sleep. Now came this rare, unexpected interlude,
+and I could look detachedly upon what I was doing and feel
+something of its infinite wonderfulness. I was irradiated with
+affection for the men of my company and with admiration at their
+cheerful acquiescence in the subordination and needs of our
+positions.  I watched their proceedings and heard their pleasant
+voices.  How willing those men were! How ready to accept
+leadership and forget themselves in collective ends! I thought
+how manfully they had gone through all the strains and toil of
+the last two weeks, how they had toughened and shaken down to
+comradeship together, and how much sweetness there is after all
+in our foolish human blood.  For they were just one casual sample
+of the species--their patience and readiness lay, as the energy
+of the atom had lain, still waiting to be properly utilised.
+Again it came to me with overpowering force that the supreme need
+of our race is leading, that the supreme task is to discover
+leading, to forget oneself in realising the collective purpose of
+the race. Once more I saw life plain....'
+
+Very characteristic is that of the 'rather too corpulent' young
+officer, who was afterwards to set it all down in the Wander
+Jahre.  Very characteristic, too, it is of the change in men's
+hearts that was even then preparing a new phase of human history.
+
+He goes on to write of the escape from individuality in science
+and service, and of his discovery of this 'salvation.' All that
+was then, no doubt, very moving and original; now it seems only
+the most obvious commonplace of human life.
+
+The glow of the sunset faded, the twilight deepened into night.
+The fires burnt the brighter, and some Irishmen away across the
+meer started singing.  But Barnet's men were too weary for that
+sort of thing, and soon the bank and the barge were heaped with
+sleeping forms.
+
+'I alone seemed unable to sleep.  I suppose I was over-weary, and
+after a little feverish slumber by the tiller of the barge I sat
+up, awake and uneasy....
+
+'That night Holland seemed all sky.  There was just a little
+black lower rim to things, a steeple, perhaps, or a line of
+poplars, and then the great hemisphere swept over us.  As at
+first the sky was empty. Yet my uneasiness referred itself in
+some vague way to the sky.
+
+'And now I was melancholy.  I found something strangely sorrowful
+and submissive in the sleepers all about me, those men who had
+marched so far, who had left all the established texture of their
+lives behind them to come upon this mad campaign, this campaign
+that signified nothing and consumed everything, this mere fever
+of fighting. I saw how little and feeble is the life of man, a
+thing of chances, preposterously unable to find the will to
+realise even the most timid of its dreams.  And I wondered if
+always it would be so, if man was a doomed animal who would never
+to the last days of his time take hold of fate and change it to
+his will.  Always, it may be, he will remain kindly but jealous,
+desirous but discursive, able and unwisely impulsive, until
+Saturn who begot him shall devour him in his turn....
+
+'I was roused from these thoughts by the sudden realisation of
+the presence of a squadron of aeroplanes far away to the
+north-east and very high. They looked like little black dashes
+against the midnight blue. I remember that I looked up at them at
+first rather idly--as one might notice a flight of birds.  Then I
+perceived that they were only the extreme wing of a great fleet
+that was advancing in a long line very swiftly from the direction
+of the frontier and my attention tightened.
+
+'Directly I saw that fleet I was astonished not to have seen it
+before.
+
+'I stood up softly, undesirous of disturbing my companions, but
+with my heart beating now rather more rapidly with surprise and
+excitement. I strained my ears for any sound of guns along our
+front. Almost instinctively I turned about for protection to the
+south and west, and peered; and then I saw coming as fast and
+much nearer to me, as if they had sprung out of the darkness,
+three banks of aeroplanes; a group of squadrons very high, a main
+body at a height perhaps of one or two thousand feet, and a
+doubtful number flying low and very indistinct. The middle ones
+were so thick they kept putting out groups of stars. And I
+realised that after all there was to be fighting in the air.
+
+'There was something extraordinarily strange in this swift,
+noiseless convergence of nearly invisible combatants above the
+sleeping hosts.  Every one about me was still unconscious; there
+was no sign as yet of any agitation among the shipping on the
+main canal, whose whole course, dotted with unsuspicious lights
+and fringed with fires, must have been clearly perceptible from
+above.  Then a long way off towards Alkmaar I heard bugles, and
+after that shots, and then a wild clamour of bells. I determined
+to let my men sleep on for as long as they could....
+
+'The battle was joined with the swiftness of dreaming. I do not
+think it can have been five minutes from the moment when I first
+became aware of the Central European air fleet to the contact of
+the two forces.  I saw it quite plainly in silhouette against the
+luminous blue of the northern sky. The allied aeroplanes--they
+were mostly French--came pouring down like a fierce shower upon
+the middle of the Central European fleet. They looked exactly
+like a coarser sort of rain.  There was a crackling sound--the
+first sound I heard--it reminded one of the Aurora Borealis, and
+I supposed it was an interchange of rifle shots. There were
+flashes like summer lightning; and then all the sky became a
+whirling confusion of battle that was still largely noiseless.
+Some of the Central European aeroplanes were certainly charged
+and overset; others seemed to collapse and fall and then flare
+out with so bright a light that it took the edge off one's vision
+and made the rest of the battle disappear as though it had been
+snatched back out of sight.
+
+'And then, while I still peered and tried to shade these flames
+from my eyes with my hand, and while the men about me were
+beginning to stir, the atomic bombs were thrown at the dykes.
+They made a mighty thunder in the air, and fell like Lucifer in
+the picture, leaving a flaring trail in the sky.  The night,
+which had been pellucid and detailed and eventful, seemed to
+vanish, to be replaced abruptly by a black background to these
+tremendous pillars of fire....
+
+'Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was
+filled with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds....
+
+'There was something discontinuous in this impact.  At one moment
+I was a lonely watcher in a sleeping world; the next saw every
+one about me afoot, the whole world awake and amazed....
+
+'And then the wind had struck me a buffet, taken my helmet and
+swept aside the summerhouse of Vreugde bij Vrede, as a scythe
+sweeps away grass. I saw the bombs fall, and then watched a great
+crimson flare leap responsive to each impact, and mountainous
+masses of red-lit steam and flying fragments clamber up towards
+the zenith. Against the glare I saw the country-side for miles
+standing black and clear, churches, trees, chimneys.  And
+suddenly I understood. The Central Europeans had burst the dykes. 
+Those flares meant the bursting of the dykes, and in a little
+while the sea-water would be upon us....'
+
+He goes on to tell with a certain prolixity of the steps he
+took--and all things considered they were very intelligent
+steps--to meet this amazing crisis.  He got his men aboard and
+hailed the adjacent barges; he got the man who acted as barge
+engineer at his post and the engines working, he cast loose from
+his moorings. Then he bethought himself of food, and contrived to
+land five men, get in a few dozen cheeses, and ship his men again
+before the inundation reached them.
+
+He is reasonably proud of this piece of coolness.  His idea was
+to take the wave head-on and with his engines full speed ahead.
+And all the while he was thanking heaven he was not in the jam of
+traffic in the main canal.  He rather, I think, overestimated the
+probable rush of waters; he dreaded being swept away, he
+explains, and smashed against houses and trees.
+
+He does not give any estimate of the time it took between the
+bursting of the dykes and the arrival of the waters, but it was
+probably an interval of about twenty minutes or half an hour. He
+was working now in darkness--save for the light of his
+lantern--and in a great wind.  He hung out head and stern
+lights....
+
+Whirling torrents of steam were pouring up from the advancing
+waters, which had rushed, it must be remembered, through nearly
+incandescent gaps in the sea defences, and this vast uprush of
+vapour soon veiled the flaring centres of explosion altogether.
+
+'The waters came at last, an advancing cascade.  It was like a
+broad roller sweeping across the country.  They came with a deep,
+roaring sound. I had expected a Niagara, but the total fall of
+the front could not have been much more than twelve feet.  Our
+barge hesitated for a moment, took a dose over her bows, and then
+lifted. I signalled for full speed ahead and brought her head
+upstream, and held on like grim death to keep her there.
+
+'There was a wind about as strong as the flood, and I found we
+were pounding against every conceivable buoyant object that had
+been between us and the sea.  The only light in the world now
+came from our lamps, the steam became impenetrable at a score of
+yards from the boat, and the roar of the wind and water cut us
+off from all remoter sounds. The black, shining waters swirled
+by, coming into the light of our lamps out of an ebony blackness
+and vanishing again into impenetrable black. And on the waters
+came shapes, came things that flashed upon us for a moment, now a
+half-submerged boat, now a cow, now a huge fragment of a house's
+timberings, now a muddle of packing-cases and scaffolding. The
+things clapped into sight like something shown by the opening of
+a shutter, and then bumped shatteringly against us or rushed by
+us. Once I saw very clearly a man's white face....
+
+'All the while a group of labouring, half-submerged trees
+remained ahead of us, drawing very slowly nearer.  I steered a
+course to avoid them. They seemed to gesticulate a frantic
+despair against the black steam clouds behind.  Once a great
+branch detached itself and tore shuddering by me.  We did, on the
+whole, make headway. The last I saw of Vreugde bij Vrede before
+the night swallowed it, was almost dead astern of us....'
+
+Section 9
+
+Morning found Barnet still afloat.  The bows of his barge had
+been badly strained, and his men were pumping or baling in
+relays. He had got about a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose
+boat had capsized near him, and he had three other boats in tow.
+He was afloat, and somewhere between Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but
+he could not tell where.  It was a day that was still half night.
+Gray waters stretched in every direction under a dark gray sky,
+and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, in many
+cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the upper
+third of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted
+a dimly seen flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned,
+furniture, rafts, timbering, and miscellaneous objects.
+
+The drowned were under water that morning.  Only here and there
+did a dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box
+or chair or such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre.  It was
+not till the Thursday that the dead came to the surface in any
+quantity. The view was bounded on every side by a gray mist that
+closed overhead in a gray canopy.  The air cleared in the
+afternoon, and then, far away to the west under great banks of
+steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of the atomic bombs came
+visible across the waste of water.
+
+They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London
+sunsets. 'They sat upon the sea,' says Barnet, 'like frayed-out
+waterlilies of flame.'
+
+Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the
+track of the canal, in helping people who were adrift, in picking
+up derelict boats, and in taking people out of imperilled houses.
+He found other military barges similarly employed, and it was
+only as the day wore on and the immediate appeals for aid were
+satisfied that he thought of food and drink for his men, and what
+course he had better pursue.  They had a little cheese, but no
+water. 'Orders,' that mysterious direction, had at last
+altogether disappeared. He perceived he had now to act upon his
+own responsibility.
+
+'One's sense was of a destruction so far-reaching and of a world
+so altered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and
+expect to find things as they had been before the war began. I
+sat on the quarter-deck with Mylius my engineer and Kemp and two
+others of the non-commissioned officers, and we consulted upon
+our line of action.  We were foodless and aimless.  We agreed
+that our fighting value was extremely small, and that our first
+duty was to get ourselves in touch with food and instructions
+again. Whatever plan of campaign had directed our movements was
+manifestly smashed to bits.  Mylius was of opinion that we could
+take a line westward and get back to England across the North
+Sea.  He calculated that with such a motor barge as ours it would
+be possible to reach the Yorkshire coast within four-and-twenty
+hours. But this idea I overruled because of the shortness of our
+provisions, and more particularly because of our urgent need of
+water.
+
+'Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their
+demands did much to exasperate our thirst.  I decided that if we
+went away to the south we should reach hilly country, or at least
+country that was not submerged, and then we should be able to
+land, find some stream, drink, and get supplies and news. Many of
+the barges adrift in the haze about us were filled with British
+soldiers and had floated up from the Nord See Canal, but none of
+them were any better informed than ourselves of the course of
+events. "Orders" had, in fact, vanished out of the sky.
+
+' "Orders" made a temporary reappearance late that evening in the
+form of a megaphone hail from a British torpedo boat, announcing
+a truce, and giving the welcome information that food and water
+were being hurried down the Rhine and were to be found on the
+barge flotilla lying over the old Rhine above Leiden.' . . .
+
+We will not follow Barnet, however, in the description of his
+strange overland voyage among trees and houses and churches by
+Zaandam and between Haarlem and Amsterdam, to Leiden.  It was a
+voyage in a red-lit mist, in a world of steamy silhouette, full
+of strange voices and perplexity, and with every other sensation
+dominated by a feverish thirst. 'We sat,' he says, 'in a little
+huddled group, saying very little, and the men forward were mere
+knots of silent endurance. Our only continuing sound was the
+persistent mewing of a cat one of the men had rescued from a
+floating hayrick near Zaandam.  We kept a southward course by a
+watch-chain compass Mylius had produced....
+
+'I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army,
+nor had we any strong sense of the war as the dominating fact
+about us.  Our mental setting had far more of the effect of a
+huge natural catastrophe.  The atomic bombs had dwarfed the
+international issues to complete insignificance. When our minds
+wandered from the preoccupations of our immediate needs, we
+speculated upon the possibility of stopping the use of these
+frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed. For
+to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still
+greater power of destruction of which they were the precursors
+might quite easily shatter every relationship and institution of
+mankind.
+
+' "What will they be doing," asked Mylius, "what will they be
+doing? It's plain we've got to put an end to war.  It's plain
+things have to be run some way.  THIS--all this--is impossible."
+
+'I made no immediate answer.  Something--I cannot think what--had
+brought back to me the figure of that man I had seen wounded on
+the very first day of actual fighting.  I saw again his angry,
+tearful eyes, and that poor, dripping, bloody mess that had been
+a skilful human hand five minutes before, thrust out in indignant
+protest. "Damned foolery," he had stormed and sobbed, "damned
+foolery. My right hand, sir!  My RIGHT hand. . . ."
+
+'My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me.  "I think we
+are too--too silly," I said to Mylius, "ever to stop war. If we'd
+had the sense to do it, we should have done it before this. I
+think this----" I pointed to the gaunt black outline of a smashed
+windmill that stuck up, ridiculous and ugly, above the blood-lit
+waters--"this is the end." ' 
+
+Section 10
+
+But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and
+his barge-load of hungry and starving men.
+
+For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if
+civilisation had come to a final collapse.  These crowning buds
+upon the tradition that Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered,
+opened and flared 'like waterlilies of flame' over nations
+destroyed, over churches smashed or submerged, towns ruined,
+fields lost to mankind for ever, and a million weltering bodies. 
+Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would the flames of war
+still burn amidst the ruins?
+
+Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance
+in their answers to that question.  Already once in the history
+of mankind, in America, before its discovery by the whites, an
+organised civilisation had given way to a mere cult of warfare,
+specialised and cruel, and it seemed for a time to many a
+thoughtful man as if the whole world was but to repeat on a
+larger scale this ascendancy of the warrior, this triumph of the
+destructive instincts of the race.
+
+The subsequent chapters of Barnet's narrative do but supply body
+to this tragic possibility.  He gives a series of vignettes of
+civilisation, shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found
+the Belgian hills swarming with refugees and desolated by
+cholera; the vestiges of the contending armies keeping order
+under a truce, without actual battles, but with the cautious
+hostility of habit, and a great absence of plan everywhere.
+
+Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were
+rumours of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys
+of the Semoy and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes. 
+There was the report of an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and
+Japanese, and of some huge revolutionary outbreak in America. 
+The weather was stormier than men had ever known it in those
+regions, with much thunder and lightning and wild cloud-bursts of
+rain....
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE THIRD
+
+THE ENDING OF WAR
+
+Section 1
+
+On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding
+two long stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to
+Bellinzona, and southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass
+meadows which is very beautiful in springtime with a great
+multitude of wild flowers. More particularly is this so in early
+June, when the slender asphodel Saint Bruno's lily, with its
+spike of white blossom, is in flower. To the westward of this
+delightful shelf there is a deep and densely wooded trench, a
+great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of which arise
+great precipices very high and wild.  Above the asphodel fields
+the mountains climb in rocky slopes to solitudes of stone and
+sunlight that curve round and join that wall of cliffs in one
+common skyline. This desolate and austere background contrasts
+very vividly with the glowing serenity of the great lake below,
+with the spacious view of fertile hills and roads and villages
+and islands to south and east, and with the hotly golden rice
+flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And because it was a remote
+and insignificant place, far away out of the crowding tragedies
+of that year of disaster, away from burning cities and starving
+multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was here
+that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest,
+if possible, before it was too late, the debacle of civilisation. 
+Here, brought together by the indefatigable energy of that
+impassioned humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at
+Washington, the chief Powers of the world were to meet in a last
+desperate conference to 'save humanity.'
+
+Leblanc was one of those ingenuous men whose lot would have been
+insignificant in any period of security, but who have been caught
+up to an immortal role in history by the sudden simplification of
+human affairs through some tragical crisis, to the measure of
+their simplicity. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln, and such was
+Garibaldi.  And Leblanc, with his transparent childish innocence,
+his entire self-forgetfulness, came into this confusion of
+distrust and intricate disaster with an invincible appeal for the
+manifest sanities of the situation. His voice, when he spoke, was
+'full of remonstrance.'  He was a little bald, spectacled man,
+inspired by that intellectual idealism which has been one of the
+peculiar gifts of France to humanity. He was possessed of one
+clear persuasion, that war must end, and that the only way to end
+war was to have but one government for mankind. He brushed aside
+all other considerations.  At the very outbreak of the war, so
+soon as the two capitals of the belligerents had been wrecked, he
+went to the president in the White House with this proposal. He
+made it as if it was a matter of course.  He was fortunate to be
+in Washington and in touch with that gigantic childishness which
+was the characteristic of the American imagination.  For the
+Americans also were among the simple peoples by whom the world
+was saved. He won over the American president and the American
+government to his general ideas; at any rate they supported him
+sufficiently to give him a standing with the more sceptical
+European governments, and with this backing he set to work--it
+seemed the most fantastic of enterprises--to bring together all
+the rulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable
+letters, he sent messages, he went desperate journeys, he
+enlisted whatever support he could find; no one was too humble
+for an ally or too obstinate for his advances; through the
+terrible autumn of the last wars this persistent little visionary
+in spectacles must have seemed rather like a hopeful canary
+twittering during a thunderstorm.  And no accumulation of
+disasters daunted his conviction that they could be ended.
+
+For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of
+destruction.  Power after Power about the armed globe sought to
+anticipate attack by aggression.  They went to war in a delirium
+of panic, in order to use their bombs first.  China and Japan had
+assailed Russia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had
+attacked Japan, India was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit
+of fire spouting death and flame; the redoubtable King of the
+Balkans was mobilising.  It must have seemed plain at last to
+every one in those days that the world was slipping headlong to
+anarchy. By the spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres,
+and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable
+crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy fabric of
+the world's credit had vanished, industry was completely
+disorganised and every city, every thickly populated area was
+starving or trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the
+capital cities of the world were burning; millions of people had
+already perished, and over great areas government was at an end.
+Humanity has been compared by one contemporary writer to a
+sleeper who handles matches in his sleep and wakes to find
+himself in flames.
+
+For many months it was an open question whether there was to be
+found throughout all the race the will and intelligence to face
+these new conditions and make even an attempt to arrest the
+downfall of the social order.  For a time the war spirit defeated
+every effort to rally the forces of preservation and
+construction. Leblanc seemed to be protesting against
+earthquakes, and as likely to find a spirit of reason in the
+crater of Etna.  Even though the shattered official governments
+now clamoured for peace, bands of irreconcilables and invincible
+patriots, usurpers, adventurers, and political desperadoes, were
+everywhere in possession of the simple apparatus for the
+disengagement of atomic energy and the initiation of new centres
+of destruction.  The stuff exercised an irresistible fascination
+upon a certain type of mind.  Why should any one give in while he
+can still destroy his enemies?  Surrender?  While there is still
+a chance of blowing them to dust?  The power of destruction which
+had once been the ultimate privilege of government was now the
+only power left in the world--and it was everywhere. There were
+few thoughtful men during that phase of blazing waste who did not
+pass through such moods of despair as Barnet describes, and
+declare with him:  'This is the end....'
+
+And all the while Leblanc was going to and fro with glittering
+glasses and an inexhaustible persuasiveness, urging the manifest
+reasonableness of his view upon ears that ceased presently to be
+inattentive. Never at any time did he betray a doubt that all
+this chaotic conflict would end.  No nurse during a nursery
+uproar was ever so certain of the inevitable ultimate peace. 
+From being treated as an amiable dreamer he came by insensible
+degrees to be regarded as an extravagant possibility.  Then he
+began to seem even practicable. The people who listened to him in
+1958 with a smiling impatience, were eager before 1959 was four
+months old to know just exactly what he thought might be done. 
+He answered with the patience of a philosopher and the lucidity
+of a Frenchman.  He began to receive responses of a more and more
+hopeful type.  He came across the Atlantic to Italy, and there he
+gathered in the promises for this congress. He chose those high
+meadows above Brissago for the reasons we have stated.  'We must
+get away,' he said, 'from old associations.' He set to work
+requisitioning material for his conference with an assurance that
+was justified by the replies.  With a slight incredulity the
+conference which was to begin a new order in the world, gathered
+itself together.  Leblanc summoned it without arrogance, he
+controlled it by virtue of an infinite humility.  Men appeared
+upon those upland slopes with the apparatus for wireless
+telegraphy; others followed with tents and provisions; a little
+cable was flung down to a convenient point upon the Locarno road
+below. Leblanc arrived, sedulously directing every detail that
+would affect the tone of the assembly.  He might have been a
+courier in advance rather than the originator of the gathering.
+And then there arrived, some by the cable, most by aeroplane, a
+few in other fashions, the men who had been called together to
+confer upon the state of the world.  It was to be a conference
+without a name.  Nine monarchs, the presidents of four republics,
+a number of ministers and ambassadors, powerful journalists, and
+such-like prominent and influential men, took part in it. There
+were even scientific men; and that world-famous old man, Holsten,
+came with the others to contribute his amateur statecraft to the
+desperate problem of the age.  Only Leblanc would have dared so
+to summon figure heads and powers and intelligence, or have had
+the courage to hope for their agreement....
+
+Section 2
+
+And one at least of those who were called to this conference of
+governments came to it on foot.  This was King Egbert, the young
+king of the most venerable kingdom in Europe.  He was a rebel,
+and had always been of deliberate choice a rebel against the
+magnificence of his position.  He affected long pedestrian tours
+and a disposition to sleep in the open air.  He came now over the
+Pass of Sta Maria Maggiore and by boat up the lake to Brissago;
+thence he walked up the mountain, a pleasant path set with oaks
+and sweet chestnut.  For provision on the walk, for he did not
+want to hurry, he carried with him a pocketful of bread and
+cheese. A certain small retinue that was necessary to his comfort
+and dignity upon occasions of state he sent on by the cable car,
+and with him walked his private secretary, Firmin, a man who had
+thrown up the Professorship of World Politics in the London
+School of Sociology, Economics, and Political Science, to take up
+these duties. Firmin was a man of strong rather than rapid
+thought, he had anticipated great influence in this new position,
+and after some years he was still only beginning to apprehend how
+largely his function was to listen. Originally he had been
+something of a thinker upon international politics, an authority
+upon tariffs and strategy, and a valued contributor to various of
+the higher organs of public opinion, but the atomic bombs had
+taken him by surprise, and he had still to recover completely
+from his pre-atomic opinions and the silencing effect of those
+sustained explosives.
+
+The king's freedom from the trammels of etiquette was very
+complete. In theory--and he abounded in theory--his manners were
+purely democratic. It was by sheer habit and inadvertency that he
+permitted Firmin, who had discovered a rucksack in a small shop
+in the town below, to carry both bottles of beer.  The king had
+never, as a matter of fact, carried anything for himself in his
+life, and he had never noted that he did not do so.
+
+'We will have nobody with us,' he said, 'at all.  We will be
+perfectly simple.'
+
+So Firmin carried the beer.
+
+As they walked up--it was the king made the pace rather than
+Firmin--they talked of the conference before them, and Firmin,
+with a certain want of assurance that would have surprised him in
+himself in the days of his Professorship, sought to define the
+policy of his companion. 'In its broader form, sir,' said Firmin;
+'I admit a certain plausibility in this project of Leblanc's, but
+I feel that although it may be advisable to set up some sort of
+general control for International affairs--a sort of Hague Court
+with extended powers--that is no reason whatever for losing sight
+of the principles of national and imperial autonomy.'
+
+'Firmin,' said the king, 'I am going to set my brother kings a
+good example.'
+
+Firmin intimated a curiosity that veiled a dread.
+
+'By chucking all that nonsense,' said the king.
+
+He quickened his pace as Firmin, who was already a little out of
+breath, betrayed a disposition to reply.
+
+'I am going to chuck all that nonsense,' said the king, as Firmin
+prepared to speak.  'I am going to fling my royalty and empire on
+the table--and declare at once I don't mean to haggle.  It's
+haggling--about rights--has been the devil in human affairs,
+for--always. I am going to stop this nonsense.'
+
+Firmin halted abruptly.  'But, sir!' he cried.
+
+The king stopped six yards ahead of him and looked back at his
+adviser's perspiring visage.
+
+'Do you really think, Firmin, that I am here as--as an infernal
+politician to put my crown and my flag and my claims and so forth
+in the way of peace?  That little Frenchman is right. You know he
+is right as well as I do.  Those things are over. We--we kings
+and rulers and representatives have been at the very heart of the
+mischief.  Of course we imply separation, and of course
+separation means the threat of war, and of course the threat of
+war means the accumulation of more and more atomic bombs. The old
+game's up.  But, I say, we mustn't stand here, you know. The
+world waits.  Don't you think the old game's up, Firmin?'
+
+Firmin adjusted a strap, passed a hand over his wet forehead, and
+followed earnestly.  'I admit, sir,' he said to a receding back,
+'that there has to be some sort of hegemony, some sort of
+Amphictyonic council----'
+
+'There's got to be one simple government for all the world,' said
+the king over his shoulder.
+
+'But as for a reckless, unqualified abandonment, sir----'
+
+'BANG!' cried the king.
+
+Firmin made no answer to this interruption.  But a faint shadow
+of annoyance passed across his heated features.
+
+'Yesterday,' said the king, by way of explanation, 'the Japanese
+very nearly got San Francisco.'
+
+'I hadn't heard, sir.'
+
+'The Americans ran the Japanese aeroplane down into the sea and
+there the bomb got busted.'
+
+'Under the sea, sir?'
+
+'Yes. Submarine volcano.  The steam is in sight of the
+Californian coast. It was as near as that.  And with things like
+this happening, you want me to go up this hill and haggle. 
+Consider the effect of that upon my imperial cousin--and all the
+others!'
+
+'HE will haggle, sir.'
+
+'Not a bit of it,' said the king.
+
+'But, sir.'
+
+'Leblanc won't let him.'
+
+Firmin halted abruptly and gave a vicious pull at the offending
+strap. 'Sir, he will listen to his advisers,' he said, in a tone
+that in some subtle way seemed to implicate his master with the
+trouble of the knapsack.
+
+The king considered him.
+
+'We will go just a little higher,' he said.  'I want to find this
+unoccupied village they spoke of, and then we will drink that
+beer. It can't be far.  We will drink the beer and throw away the
+bottles. And then, Firmin, I shall ask you to look at things in a
+more generous light.... Because, you know, you must....'
+
+He turned about and for some time the only sound they made was
+the noise of their boots upon the loose stones of the way and the
+irregular breathing of Firmin.
+
+At length, as it seemed to Firmin, or quite soon, as it seemed to
+the king, the gradient of the path diminished, the way widened
+out, and they found themselves in a very beautiful place indeed.
+It was one of those upland clusters of sheds and houses that are
+still to be found in the mountains of North Italy, buildings that
+were used only in the high summer, and which it was the custom to
+leave locked up and deserted through all the winter and spring,
+and up to the middle of June.  The buildings were of a soft-toned
+gray stone, buried in rich green grass, shadowed by chestnut
+trees and lit by an extraordinary blaze of yellow broom. Never
+had the king seen broom so glorious; he shouted at the light of
+it, for it seemed to give out more sunlight even than it
+received; he sat down impulsively on a lichenous stone, tugged
+out his bread and cheese, and bade Firmin thrust the beer into
+the shaded weeds to cool.
+
+'The things people miss, Firmin,' he said, 'who go up into the
+air in ships!'
+
+Firmin looked around him with an ungenial eye.  'You see it at
+its best, sir,' he said, 'before the peasants come here again and
+make it filthy.'
+
+'It would be beautiful anyhow,' said the king.
+
+'Superficially, sir,' said Firmin.  'But it stands for a social
+order that is fast vanishing away.  Indeed, judging by the grass
+between the stones and in the huts, I am inclined to doubt if it
+is in use even now.'
+
+'I suppose,' said the king, 'they would come up immediately the
+hay on this flower meadow is cut.  It would be those slow,
+creamy-coloured beasts, I expect, one sees on the roads below,
+and swarthy girls with red handkerchiefs over their black
+hair.... It is wonderful to think how long that beautiful old
+life lasted. In the Roman times and long ages before ever the
+rumour of the Romans had come into these parts, men drove their
+cattle up into these places as the summer came on.... How haunted
+is this place! There have been quarrels here, hopes, children
+have played here and lived to be old crones and old gaffers, and
+died, and so it has gone on for thousands of lives.  Lovers,
+innumerable lovers, have caressed amidst this golden broom....'
+
+He meditated over a busy mouthful of bread and cheese.
+
+'We ought to have brought a tankard for that beer,' he said.
+
+Firmin produced a folding aluminium cup, and the king was pleased
+to drink.
+
+'I wish, sir,' said Firmin suddenly, 'I could induce you at least
+to delay your decision----'
+
+'It's no good talking, Firmin,' said the king.  'My mind's as
+clear as daylight.'
+
+'Sire,' protested Firmin, with his voice full of bread and cheese
+and genuine emotion, 'have you no respect for your kingship?'
+
+The king paused before he answered with unwonted gravity. 'It's
+just because I have, Firmin, that I won't be a puppet in this
+game of international politics.'  He regarded his companion for a
+moment and then remarked:  'Kingship!--what do YOU know of
+kingship, Firmin?
+
+'Yes,' cried the king to his astonished counsellor.  'For the
+first time in my life I am going to be a king.  I am going to
+lead, and lead by my own authority.  For a dozen generations my
+family has been a set of dummies in the hands of their advisers. 
+Advisers!  Now I am going to be a real king--and I am going
+to--to abolish, dispose of, finish, the crown to which I have
+been a slave. But what a world of paralysing shams this roaring
+stuff has ended! The rigid old world is in the melting-pot again,
+and I, who seemed to be no more than the stuffing inside a regal
+robe, I am a king among kings. I have to play my part at the head
+of things and put an end to blood and fire and idiot disorder.'
+
+'But, sir,' protested Firmin.
+
+'This man Leblanc is right.  The whole world has got to be a
+Republic, one and indivisible.  You know that, and my duty is to
+make that easy. A king should lead his people; you want me to
+stick on their backs like some Old Man of the Sea.  To-day must
+be a sacrament of kings. Our trust for mankind is done with and
+ended.  We must part our robes among them, we must part our
+kingship among them, and say to them all, now the king in every
+one must rule the world.... Have you no sense of the magnificence
+of this occasion?  You want me, Firmin, you want me to go up
+there and haggle like a damned little solicitor for some price,
+some compensation, some qualification....'
+
+Firmin shrugged his shoulders and assumed an expression of
+despair. Meanwhile, he conveyed, one must eat.
+
+For a time neither spoke, and the king ate and turned over in his
+mind the phrases of the speech he intended to make to the
+conference. By virtue of the antiquity of his crown he was to
+preside, and he intended to make his presidency memorable. 
+Reassured of his eloquence, he considered the despondent and
+sulky Firmin for a space.
+
+'Firmin,' he said, 'you have idealised kingship.'  'It has been
+my dream, sir,' said Firmin sorrowfully, 'to serve.'
+
+'At the levers, Firmin,' said the king.
+
+'You are pleased to be unjust,' said Firmin, deeply hurt.
+
+'I am pleased to be getting out of it,' said the king.
+
+'Oh, Firmin,' he went on, 'have you no thought for me?  Will you
+never realise that I am not only flesh and blood but an
+imagination--with its rights.  I am a king in revolt against that
+fetter they put upon my head.  I am a king awake.  My reverend
+grandparents never in all their august lives had a waking moment. 
+They loved the job that you, you advisers, gave them; they never
+had a doubt of it. It was like giving a doll to a woman who ought
+to have a child. They delighted in processions and opening things
+and being read addresses to, and visiting triplets and
+nonagenarians and all that sort of thing.  Incredibly.  They used
+to keep albums of cuttings from all the illustrated papers
+showing them at it, and if the press-cutting parcels grew thin
+they were worried. It was all that ever worried them.  But there
+is something atavistic in me; I hark back to unconstitutional
+monarchs.  They christened me too retrogressively, I think.  I
+wanted to get things done. I was bored.  I might have fallen into
+vice, most intelligent and energetic princes do, but the palace
+precautions were unusually thorough. I was brought up in the
+purest court the world has ever seen. . . . Alertly pure.... So I
+read books, Firmin, and went about asking questions. The thing
+was bound to happen to one of us sooner or later. Perhaps, too,
+very likely I'm not vicious.  I don't think I am.'
+
+He reflected.  'No,' he said.
+
+Firmin cleared his throat.  'I don't think you are, sir,' he
+said. 'You prefer----'
+
+He stopped short.  He had been going to say 'talking.' He
+substituted 'ideas.'
+
+'That world of royalty!' the king went on.  'In a little while no
+one will understand it any more.  It will become a riddle....
+
+'Among other things, it was a world of perpetual best clothes.
+Everything was in its best clothes for us, and usually wearing
+bunting. With a cinema watching to see we took it properly.  If
+you are a king, Firmin, and you go and look at a regiment, it
+instantly stops whatever it is doing, changes into full uniform
+and presents arms. When my august parents went in a train the
+coal in the tender used to be whitened.  It did, Firmin, and if
+coal had been white instead of black I have no doubt the
+authorities would have blackened it. That was the spirit of our
+treatment.  People were always walking about with their faces to
+us.  One never saw anything in profile. One got an impression of
+a world that was insanely focused on ourselves. And when I began
+to poke my little questions into the Lord Chancellor and the
+archbishop and all the rest of them, about what I should see if
+people turned round, the general effect I produced was that I
+wasn't by any means displaying the Royal Tact they had expected
+of me....'
+
+He meditated for a time.
+
+'And yet, you know, there is something in the kingship, Firmin.
+It stiffened up my august little grandfather.  It gave my
+grandmother a kind of awkward dignity even when she was
+cross--and she was very often cross.  They both had a profound
+sense of responsibility. My poor father's health was wretched
+during his brief career; nobody outside the circle knows just how
+he screwed himself up to things. "My people expect it," he used
+to say of this tiresome duty or that. Most of the things they
+made him do were silly--it was part of a bad tradition, but there
+was nothing silly in the way he set about them.... The spirit of
+kingship is a fine thing, Firmin; I feel it in my bones; I do not
+know what I might not be if I were not a king. I could die for my
+people, Firmin, and you couldn't. No, don't say you could die for
+me, because I know better. Don't think I forget my kingship,
+Firmin, don't imagine that. I am a king, a kingly king, by right
+divine.  The fact that I am also a chattering young man makes not
+the slightest difference to that. But the proper text-book for
+kings, Firmin, is none of the court memoirs and Welt-Politik
+books you would have me read; it is old Fraser's Golden Bough. 
+Have you read that, Firmin?'
+
+Firmin had.  'Those were the authentic kings.  In the end they
+were cut up and a bit given to everybody.  They sprinkled the
+nations--with Kingship.'
+
+Firmin turned himself round and faced his royal master.
+
+'What do you intend to do, sir?' he asked.  'If you will not
+listen to me, what do you propose to do this afternoon?'
+
+The king flicked crumbs from his coat.
+
+'Manifestly war has to stop for ever, Firmin.  Manifestly this
+can only be done by putting all the world under one government.
+Our crowns and flags are in the way.  Manifestly they must go.'
+
+'Yes, sir,' interrupted Firmin, 'but WHAT government? I don't see
+what government you get by a universal abdication!'
+
+'Well,' said the king, with his hands about his knees, 'WE shall
+be the government.'
+
+'The conference?' exclaimed Firmin.
+
+'Who else?' asked the king simply.
+
+'It's perfectly simple,' he added to Firmin's tremendous silence.
+
+'But,' cried Firmin, 'you must have sanctions!  Will there be no
+form of election, for example?'
+
+'Why should there be?' asked the king, with intelligent
+curiosity.
+
+'The consent of the governed.'
+
+'Firmin, we are just going to lay down our differences and take
+over government.  Without any election at all.  Without any
+sanction. The governed will show their consent by silence.  If
+any effective opposition arises we shall ask it to come in and
+help. The true sanction of kingship is the grip upon the sceptre.
+We aren't going to worry people to vote for us.  I'm certain the
+mass of men does not want to be bothered with such things....
+We'll contrive a way for any one interested to join in.  That's
+quite enough in the way of democracy.  Perhaps later--when things
+don't matter.... We shall govern all right, Firmin.  Government
+only becomes difficult when the lawyers get hold of it, and since
+these troubles began the lawyers are shy.  Indeed, come to think
+of it, I wonder where all the lawyers are.... Where are they?  A
+lot, of course, were bagged, some of the worst ones, when they
+blew up my legislature. You never knew the late Lord Chancellor.
+. . .
+
+'Necessities bury rights.  And create them.  Lawyers live on dead
+rights disinterred.... We've done with that way of living. We
+won't have more law than a code can cover and beyond that
+government will be free....
+
+'Before the sun sets to-day, Firmin, trust me, we shall have made
+our abdications, all of us, and declared the World Republic,
+supreme and indivisible.  I wonder what my august grandmother
+would have made of it!  All my rights! . . . And then we shall go
+on governing.  What else is there to do?  All over the world we
+shall declare that there is no longer mine or thine, but ours. 
+China, the United States, two-thirds of Europe, will certainly
+fall in and obey.  They will have to do so. What else can they
+do?  Their official rulers are here with us. They won't be able
+to get together any sort of idea of not obeying us.... Then we
+shall declare that every sort of property is held in trust for
+the Republic....'
+
+'But, sir!' cried Firmin, suddenly enlightened.  'Has this been
+arranged already?'
+
+'My dear Firmin, do you think we have come here, all of us, to
+talk at large?  The talking has been done for half a century.
+Talking and writing.  We are here to set the new thing, the
+simple, obvious, necessary thing, going.'
+
+He stood up.
+
+Firmin, forgetting the habits of a score of years, remained
+seated.
+
+'WELL,' he said at last.  'And I have known nothing!'
+
+The king smiled very cheerfully.  He liked these talks with
+Firmin.
+
+Section 3
+
+That conference upon the Brissago meadows was one of the most
+heterogeneous collections of prominent people that has ever met
+together. Principalities and powers, stripped and shattered until
+all their pride and mystery were gone, met in a marvellous new
+humility.  Here were kings and emperors whose capitals were lakes
+of flaming destruction, statesmen whose countries had become
+chaos, scared politicians and financial potentates.  Here were
+leaders of thought and learned investigators dragged reluctantly
+to the control of affairs. Altogether there were ninety-three of
+them, Leblanc's conception of the head men of the world.  They
+had all come to the realisation of the simple truths that the
+indefatigable Leblanc had hammered into them; and, drawing his
+resources from the King of Italy, he had provisioned his
+conference with a generous simplicity quite in accordance with
+the rest of his character, and so at last was able to make his
+astonishing and entirely rational appeal. He had appointed King
+Egbert the president, he believed in this young man so firmly
+that he completely dominated him, and he spoke himself as a
+secretary might speak from the president's left hand, and
+evidently did not realise himself that he was telling them all
+exactly what they had to do.  He imagined he was merely
+recapitulating the obvious features of the situation for their
+convenience. He was dressed in ill-fitting white silk clothes,
+and he consulted a dingy little packet of notes as he spoke. 
+They put him out. He explained that he had never spoken from
+notes before, but that this occasion was exceptional.
+
+And then King Egbert spoke as he was expected to speak, and
+Leblanc's spectacles moistened at that flow of generous
+sentiment, most amiably and lightly expressed.  'We haven't to
+stand on ceremony,' said the king, 'we have to govern the world. 
+We have always pretended to govern the world and here is our
+opportunity.'
+
+'Of course,' whispered Leblanc, nodding his head rapidly, 'of
+course.'
+
+'The world has been smashed up, and we have to put it on its
+wheels again,' said King Egbert.  'And it is the simple common
+sense of this crisis for all to help and none to seek advantage.
+Is that our tone or not?'
+
+The gathering was too old and seasoned and miscellaneous for any
+great displays of enthusiasm, but that was its tone, and with an
+astonishment that somehow became exhilarating it began to resign,
+repudiate, and declare its intentions.  Firmin, taking notes
+behind his master, heard everything that had been foretold among
+the yellow broom, come true.  With a queer feeling that he was
+dreaming, he assisted at the proclamation of the World State, and
+saw the message taken out to the wireless operators to be
+throbbed all round the habitable globe. 'And next,' said King
+Egbert, with a cheerful excitement in his voice, 'we have to get
+every atom of Carolinum and all the plant for making it, into our
+control....'
+
+Firman was not alone in his incredulity.  Not a man there who was
+not a very amiable, reasonable, benevolent creature at bottom;
+some had been born to power and some had happened upon it, some
+had struggled to get it, not clearly knowing what it was and what
+it implied, but none was irreconcilably set upon its retention at
+the price of cosmic disaster.  Their minds had been prepared by
+circumstances and sedulously cultivated by Leblanc; and now they
+took the broad obvious road along which King Egbert was leading
+them, with a mingled conviction of strangeness and necessity. 
+Things went very smoothly; the King of Italy explained the
+arrangements that had been made for the protection of the camp
+from any fantastic attack; a couple of thousand of aeroplanes,
+each carrying a sharpshooter, guarded them, and there was an
+excellent system of relays, and at night all the sky would be
+searched by scores of lights, and the admirable Leblanc gave
+luminous reasons for their camping just where they were and going
+on with their administrative duties forthwith. He knew of this
+place, because he had happened upon it when holiday-making with
+Madame Leblanc twenty years and more ago. 'There is very simple
+fare at present,' he explained, 'on account of the disturbed
+state of the countries about us.  But we have excellent fresh
+milk, good red wine, beef, bread, salad, and lemons. . . . In a
+few days I hope to place things in the hands of a more efficient
+caterer....'
+
+The members of the new world government dined at three long
+tables on trestles, and down the middle of these tables Leblanc,
+in spite of the barrenness of his menu, had contrived to have a
+great multitude of beautiful roses.  There was similar
+accommodation for the secretaries and attendants at a lower level
+down the mountain. The assembly dined as it had debated, in the
+open air, and over the dark crags to the west the glowing June
+sunset shone upon the banquet. There was no precedency now among
+the ninety-three, and King Egbert found himself between a
+pleasant little Japanese stranger in spectacles and his cousin of
+Central Europe, and opposite a great Bengali leader and the
+President of the United States of America.  Beyond the Japanese
+was Holsten, the old chemist, and Leblanc was a little way down
+the other side.
+
+The king was still cheerfully talkative and abounded in ideas. He
+fell presently into an amiable controversy with the American, who
+seemed to feel a lack of impressiveness in the occasion.
+
+It was ever the Transatlantic tendency, due, no doubt, to the
+necessity of handling public questions in a bulky and striking
+manner, to over-emphasise and over-accentuate, and the president
+was touched by his national failing.  He suggested now that there
+should be a new era, starting from that day as the first day of
+the first year.
+
+The king demurred.
+
+'From this day forth, sir, man enters upon his heritage,' said
+the American.
+
+'Man,' said the king, 'is always entering upon his heritage. You
+Americans have a peculiar weakness for anniversaries--if you will
+forgive me saying so.  Yes--I accuse you of a lust for dramatic
+effect. Everything is happening always, but you want to say this
+or this is the real instant in time and subordinate all the
+others to it.'
+
+The American said something about an epoch-making day.
+
+'But surely,' said the king, 'you don't want us to condemn all
+humanity to a world-wide annual Fourth of July for ever and ever
+more. On account of this harmless necessary day of declarations.
+No conceivable day could ever deserve that.  Ah! you do not know,
+as I do, the devastations of the memorable.  My poor grandparents
+were--RUBRICATED. The worst of these huge celebrations is that
+they break up the dignified succession of one's contemporary
+emotions. They interrupt.  They set back.  Suddenly out come the
+flags and fireworks, and the old enthusiasms are furbished
+up--and it's sheer destruction of the proper thing that ought to
+be going on. Sufficient unto the day is the celebration thereof.
+Let the dead past bury its dead.  You see, in regard to the
+calendar, I am for democracy and you are for aristocracy.  All
+things I hold, are august, and have a right to be lived through
+on their merits. No day should be sacrificed on the grave of
+departed events. What do you think of it, Wilhelm?'
+
+'For the noble, yes, all days should be noble.'
+
+'Exactly my position,' said the king, and felt pleased at what he
+had been saying.
+
+And then, since the American pressed his idea, the king contrived
+to shift the talk from the question of celebrating the epoch they
+were making to the question of the probabilities that lay ahead.
+Here every one became diffident.  They could see the world
+unified and at peace, but what detail was to follow from that
+unification they seemed indisposed to discuss.  This diffidence
+struck the king as remarkable.  He plunged upon the possibilities
+of science. All the huge expenditure that had hitherto gone into
+unproductive naval and military preparations, must now, he
+declared, place research upon a new footing.  'Where one man
+worked we will have a thousand.' He appealed to Holsten.  'We
+have only begun to peep into these possibilities,' he said.  'You
+at any rate have sounded the vaults of the treasure house.'
+
+'They are unfathomable,' smiled Holsten.
+
+'Man,' said the American, with a manifest resolve to justify and
+reinstate himself after the flickering contradictions of the
+king, 'Man, I say, is only beginning to enter upon his heritage.'
+
+'Tell us some of the things you believe we shall presently learn,
+give us an idea of the things we may presently do,' said the king
+to Holsten.
+
+Holsten opened out the vistas....
+
+'Science,' the king cried presently, 'is the new king of the
+world.'
+
+'OUR view,' said the president, 'is that sovereignty resides with
+the people.'
+
+'No!' said the king, 'the sovereign is a being more subtle than
+that. And less arithmetical. Neither my family nor your
+emancipated people. It is something that floats about us, and
+above us, and through us. It is that common impersonal will and
+sense of necessity of which Science is the best understood and
+most typical aspect. It is the mind of the race.  It is that
+which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to its
+demands....'
+
+He paused and glanced down the table at Leblanc, and then
+re-opened at his former antagonist.
+
+'There is a disposition,' said the king, 'to regard this
+gathering as if it were actually doing what it appears to be
+doing, as if we ninety-odd men of our own free will and wisdom
+were unifying the world. There is a temptation to consider
+ourselves exceptionally fine fellows, and masterful men, and all
+the rest of it. We are not.  I doubt if we should average out as
+anything abler than any other casually selected body of
+ninety-odd men. We are no creators, we are consequences, we are
+salvagers--or salvagees. The thing to-day is not ourselves but
+the wind of conviction that has blown us hither....'
+
+The American had to confess he could hardly agree with the king's
+estimate of their average.
+
+'Holster, perhaps, and one or two others, might lift us a
+little,' the king conceded.  'But the rest of us?'
+
+His eyes flitted once more towards Leblanc.
+
+'Look at Leblanc,' he said.  'He's just a simple soul. There are
+hundreds and thousands like him.  I admit, a certain dexterity, a
+certain lucidity, but there is not a country town in France where
+there is not a Leblanc or so to be found about two o'clock in its
+principal cafe.  It's just that he isn't complicated or
+Super-Mannish, or any of those things that has made all he has
+done possible. But in happier times, don't you think, Wilhelm, he
+would have remained just what his father was, a successful
+epicier, very clean, very accurate, very honest.  And on holidays
+he would have gone out with Madame Leblanc and her knitting in a
+punt with a jar of something gentle and have sat under a large
+reasonable green-lined umbrella and fished very neatly and
+successfully for gudgeon....'
+
+The president and the Japanese prince in spectacles protested
+together.
+
+'If I do him an injustice,' said the king, 'it is only because I
+want to elucidate my argument.  I want to make it clear how small
+are men and days, and how great is man in comparison....'
+
+Section 4
+
+So it was King Egbert talked at Brissago after they had
+proclaimed the unity of the world.  Every evening after that the
+assembly dined together and talked at their ease and grew
+accustomed to each other and sharpened each other's ideas, and
+every day they worked together, and really for a time believed
+that they were inventing a new government for the world.  They
+discussed a constitution. But there were matters needing
+attention too urgently to wait for any constitution.  They
+attended to these incidentally. The constitution it was that
+waited.  It was presently found convenient to keep the
+constitution waiting indefinitely as King Egbert had foreseen,
+and meanwhile, with an increasing self-confidence, that council
+went on governing....
+
+On this first evening of all the council's gatherings, after King
+Egbert had talked for a long time and drunken and praised very
+abundantly the simple red wine of the country that Leblanc had
+procured for them, he fathered about him a group of congenial
+spirits and fell into a discourse upon simplicity, praising it
+above all things and declaring that the ultimate aim of art,
+religion, philosophy, and science alike was to simplify. He
+instanced himself as a devotee to simplicity.  And Leblanc he
+instanced as a crowning instance of the splendour of this
+quality. Upon that they all agreed.
+
+When at last the company about the tables broke up, the king
+found himself brimming over with a peculiar affection and
+admiration for Leblanc, he made his way to him and drew him aside
+and broached what he declared was a small matter. There was, he
+said, a certain order in his gift that, unlike all other orders
+and decorations in the world, had never been corrupted. It was
+reserved for elderly men of supreme distinction, the acuteness of
+whose gifts was already touched to mellowness, and it had
+included the greatest names of every age so far as the advisers
+of his family had been able to ascertain them. At present, the
+king admitted, these matters of stars and badges were rather
+obscured by more urgent affairs, for his own part he had never
+set any value upon them at all, but a time might come when they
+would be at least interesting, and in short he wished to confer
+the Order of Merit upon Leblanc.  His sole motive in doing so, he
+added, was his strong desire to signalise his personal esteem. 
+He laid his hand upon the Frenchman's shoulder as he said these
+things, with an almost brotherly affection. Leblanc received this
+proposal with a modest confusion that greatly enhanced the king's
+opinion of his admirable simplicity.  He pointed out that eager
+as he was to snatch at the proffered distinction, it might at the
+present stage appear invidious, and he therefore suggested that
+the conferring of it should be postponed until it could be made
+the crown and conclusion of his services. The king was unable to
+shake this resolution, and the two men parted with expressions of
+mutual esteem.
+
+The king then summoned Firmin in order to make a short note of a
+number of things that he had said during the day. But after about
+twenty minutes' work the sweet sleepiness of the mountain air
+overcame him, and he dismissed Firmin and went to bed and fell
+asleep at once, and slept with extreme satisfaction. He had had
+an active, agreeable day.  
+
+Section 5
+
+The establishment of the new order that was thus so humanly
+begun, was, if one measures it by the standard of any preceding
+age, a rapid progress.  The fighting spirit of the world was
+exhausted. Only here or there did fierceness linger.  For long
+decades the combative side in human affairs had been monstrously
+exaggerated by the accidents of political separation.  This now
+became luminously plain. An enormous proportion of the force that
+sustained armaments had been nothing more aggressive than the
+fear of war and warlike neighbours. It is doubtful if any large
+section of the men actually enlisted for fighting ever at any
+time really hungered and thirsted for bloodshed and danger.  That
+kind of appetite was probably never very strong in the species
+after the savage stage was past. The army was a profession, in
+which killing had become a disagreeable possibility rather than
+an eventful certainty. If one reads the old newspapers and
+periodicals of that time, which did so much to keep militarism
+alive, one finds very little about glory and adventure and a
+constant harping on the disagreeableness of invasion and
+subjugation.  In one word, militarism was funk. The belligerent
+resolution of the armed Europe of the twentieth century was the
+resolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to plunge. And now that
+its weapons were exploding in its hands, Europe was only too
+eager to drop them, and abandon this fancied refuge of violence.
+
+For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness;
+nearly all the clever people who had hitherto sustained the
+ancient belligerent separations had now been brought to realise
+the need for simplicity of attitude and openness of mind; and in
+this atmosphere of moral renascence, there was little attempt to
+get negotiable advantages out of resistance to the new order.
+Human beings are foolish enough no doubt, but few have stopped to
+haggle in a fire-escape. The council had its way with them. The
+band of 'patriots' who seized the laboratories and arsenal just
+outside Osaka and tried to rouse Japan to revolt against
+inclusion in the Republic of Mankind, found they had
+miscalculated the national pride and met the swift vengeance of
+their own countrymen. That fight in the arsenal was a vivid
+incident in this closing chapter of the history of war.  To the
+last the 'patriots' were undecided whether, in the event of a
+defeat, they would explode their supply of atomic bombs or not. 
+They were fighting with swords outside the iridium doors, and the
+moderates of their number were at bay and on the verge of
+destruction, only ten, indeed, remained unwounded, when the
+republicans burst in to the rescue.... 
+
+Section 6
+
+One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in
+the new rule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism,
+the 'Slavic Fox,' the King of the Balkans.  He debated and
+delayed his submissions. He showed an extraordinary combination
+of cunning and temerity in his evasion of the repeated summonses
+from Brissago.  He affected ill-health and a great preoccupation
+with his new official mistress, for his semi-barbaric court was
+arranged on the best romantic models. His tactics were ably
+seconded by Doctor Pestovitch, his chief minister. Failing to
+establish his claims to complete independence, King Ferdinand
+Charles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be treated as a
+protected state.  Finally he professed an unconvincing
+submission, and put a mass of obstacles in the way of the
+transfer of his national officials to the new government.  In
+these things he was enthusiastically supported by his subjects,
+still for the most part an illiterate peasantry, passionately if
+confusedly patriotic, and so far with no practical knowledge of
+the effect of atomic bombs. More particularly he retained control
+of all the Balkan aeroplanes.
+
+For once the extreme naivete of Leblanc seems to have been
+mitigated by duplicity.  He went on with the general pacification
+of the world as if the Balkan submission was made in absolute
+good faith, and he announced the disbandment of the force of
+aeroplanes that hitherto guarded the council at Brissago upon the
+approaching fifteenth of July.  But instead he doubled the number
+upon duty on that eventful day, and made various arrangements for
+their disposition. He consulted certain experts, and when he took
+King Egbert into his confidence there was something in his neat
+and explicit foresight that brought back to that ex-monarch's
+mind his half-forgotten fantasy of Leblanc as a fisherman under a
+green umbrella.
+
+About five o'clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one
+of the outer sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring
+unobtrusively over the lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted
+and hailed a strange aeroplane that was flying westward, and,
+failing to get a satisfactory reply, set its wireless apparatus
+talking and gave chase. A swarm of consorts appeared very
+promptly over the westward mountains, and before the unknown
+aeroplane had sighted Como, it had a dozen eager attendants
+closing in upon it.  Its driver seems to have hesitated, dropped
+down among the mountains, and then turned southward in flight,
+only to find an intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows. He
+then went round into the eye of the rising sun, and passed within
+a hundred yards of his original pursuer.
+
+The sharpshooter therein opened fire at once, and showed an
+intelligent grasp of the situation by disabling the passenger
+first. The man at the wheel must have heard his companion cry out
+behind him, but he was too intent on getting away to waste even a
+glance behind. Twice after that he must have heard shots.  He let
+his engine go, he crouched down, and for twenty minutes he must
+have steered in the continual expectation of a bullet.  It never
+came, and when at last he glanced round, three great planes were
+close upon him, and his companion, thrice hit, lay dead across
+his bombs. His followers manifestly did not mean either to upset
+or shoot him, but inexorably they drove him down, down.  At last
+he was curving and flying a hundred yards or less over the level
+fields of rice and maize.  Ahead of him and dark against the
+morning sunrise was a village with a very tall and slender
+campanile and a line of cable bearing metal standards that he
+could not clear. He stopped his engine abruptly and dropped flat. 
+He may have hoped to get at the bombs when he came down, but his
+pitiless pursuers drove right over him and shot him as he fell.
+
+Three other aeroplanes curved down and came to rest amidst grass
+close by the smashed machine.  Their passengers descended, and
+ran, holding their light rifles in their hands towards the debris
+and the two dead men.  The coffin-shaped box that had occupied
+the centre of the machine had broken, and three black objects,
+each with two handles like the ears of a pitcher, lay peacefully
+amidst the litter.
+
+These objects were so tremendously important in the eyes of their
+captors that they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and
+broken amidst the wreckage as they might have disregarded dead
+frogs by a country pathway.
+
+'By God,' cried the first.  'Here they are!'
+
+'And unbroken!' said the second.
+
+'I've never seen the things before,' said the first.
+
+'Bigger than I thought,' said the second.
+
+The third comer arrived.  He stared for a moment at the bombs and
+then turned his eyes to the dead man with a crushed chest who lay
+in a muddy place among the green stems under the centre of the
+machine.
+
+'One can take no risks,' he said, with a faint suggestion of
+apology.
+
+The other two now also turned to the victims.  'We must signal,'
+said the first man.  A shadow passed between them and the sun,
+and they looked up to see the aeroplane that had fired the last
+shot. 'Shall we signal?' came a megaphone hail.
+
+'Three bombs,' they answered together.
+
+'Where do they come from?' asked the megaphone.
+
+The three sharpshooters looked at each other and then moved
+towards the dead men.  One of them had an idea.  'Signal that
+first,' he said, 'while we look.'  They were joined by their
+aviators for the search, and all six men began a hunt that was
+necessarily brutal in its haste, for some indication of identity. 
+They examined the men's pockets, their bloodstained clothes, the
+machine, the framework.  They turned the bodies over and flung
+them aside.  There was not a tattoo mark. . . . Everything was
+elaborately free of any indication of its origin.
+
+'We can't find out!' they called at last.
+
+'Not a sign?'
+
+'Not a sign.'
+
+'I'm coming down,' said the man overhead....
+
+Section 7
+
+The Slavic fox stood upon a metal balcony in his picturesque Art
+Nouveau palace that gave upon the precipice that overhung his
+bright little capital, and beside him stood Pestovitch, grizzled
+and cunning, and now full of an ill-suppressed excitement. Behind
+them the window opened into a large room, richly decorated in
+aluminium and crimson enamel, across which the king, as he
+glanced ever and again over his shoulder with a gesture of
+inquiry, could see through the two open doors of a little azure
+walled antechamber the wireless operator in the turret working at
+his incessant transcription. Two pompously uniformed messengers
+waited listlessly in this apartment. The room was furnished with
+a stately dignity, and had in the middle of it a big green
+baize-covered table with the massive white metal inkpots and
+antiquated sandboxes natural to a new but romantic monarchy. It
+was the king's council chamber and about it now, in attitudes of
+suspended intrigue, stood the half-dozen ministers who
+constituted his cabinet.  They had been summoned for twelve
+o'clock, but still at half-past twelve the king loitered in the
+balcony and seemed to be waiting for some news that did not come.
+
+The king and his minister had talked at first in whispers; they
+had fallen silent, for they found little now to express except a
+vague anxiety. Away there on the mountain side were the white
+metal roofs of the long farm buildings beneath which the bomb
+factory and the bombs were hidden. (The chemist who had made all
+these for the king had died suddenly after the declaration of
+Brissago.) Nobody knew of that store of mischief now but the king
+and his adviser and three heavily faithful attendants; the
+aviators who waited now in the midday blaze with their
+bomb-carrying machines and their passenger bomb-throwers in the
+exercising grounds of the motor-cyclist barracks below were still
+in ignorance of the position of the ammunition they were
+presently to take up. It was time they started if the scheme was
+to work as Pestovitch had planned it.  It was a magnificent plan. 
+It aimed at no less than the Empire of the World.  The government
+of idealists and professors away there at Brissago was to be
+blown to fragments, and then east, west, north, and south those
+aeroplanes would go swarming over a world that had disarmed
+itself, to proclaim Ferdinand Charles, the new Caesar, the
+Master, Lord of the Earth.  It was a magnificent plan. But the
+tension of this waiting for news of the success of the first blow
+was--considerable.
+
+The Slavic fox was of a pallid fairness, he had a remarkably long
+nose, a thick, short moustache, and small blue eyes that were a
+little too near together to be pleasant.  It was his habit to
+worry his moustache with short, nervous tugs whenever his
+restless mind troubled him, and now this motion was becoming so
+incessant that it irked Pestovitch beyond the limits of
+endurance.
+
+'I will go,' said the minister, 'and see what the trouble is with
+the wireless.  They give us nothing, good or bad.'
+
+Left to himself, the king could worry his moustache without
+stint; he leant his elbows forward on the balcony and gave both
+of his long white hands to the work, so that he looked like a
+pale dog gnawing a bone.  Suppose they caught his men, what
+should he do? Suppose they caught his men?
+
+The clocks in the light gold-capped belfries of the town below
+presently intimated the half-hour after midday.
+
+Of course, he and Pestovitch had thought it out.  Even if they
+had caught those men, they were pledged to secrecy.... Probably
+they would be killed in the catching.... One could deny anyhow,
+deny and deny.
+
+And then he became aware of half a dozen little shining specks
+very high in the blue.... Pestovitch came out to him presently.
+'The government messages, sire, have all dropped into cipher,' he
+said. 'I have set a man----'
+
+'LOOK!' interrupted the king, and pointed upward with a long,
+lean finger.
+
+Pestovitch followed that indication and then glanced for one
+questioning moment at the white face before him.
+
+'We have to face it out, sire,' he said.
+
+For some moments they watched the steep spirals of the descending
+messengers, and then they began a hasty consultation....
+
+They decided that to be holding a council upon the details of an
+ultimate surrender to Brissago was as innocent-looking a thing as
+the king could well be doing, and so, when at last the ex-king
+Egbert, whom the council had sent as its envoy, arrived upon the
+scene, he discovered the king almost theatrically posed at the
+head of his councillors in the midst of his court. The door upon
+the wireless operators was shut.
+
+The ex-king from Brissago came like a draught through the
+curtains and attendants that gave a wide margin to King
+Ferdinand's state, and the familiar confidence of his manner
+belied a certain hardness in his eye.  Firmin trotted behind him,
+and no one else was with him. And as Ferdinand Charles rose to
+greet him, there came into the heart of the Balkan king again
+that same chilly feeling that he had felt upon the balcony--and
+it passed at the careless gestures of his guest. For surely any
+one might outwit this foolish talker who, for a mere idea and at
+the command of a little French rationalist in spectacles, had
+thrown away the most ancient crown in all the world.
+
+One must deny, deny....
+
+And then slowly and quite tiresomely he realised that there was
+nothing to deny.  His visitor, with an amiable ease, went on
+talking about everything in debate between himself and Brissago
+except----.
+
+Could it be that they had been delayed?  Could it be that they
+had had to drop for repairs and were still uncaptured? Could it
+be that even now while this fool babbled, they were over there
+among the mountains heaving their deadly charge over the side of
+the aeroplane?
+
+Strange hopes began to lift the tail of the Slavic fox again.
+
+What was the man saying?  One must talk to him anyhow until one
+knew. At any moment the little brass door behind him might open
+with the news of Brissago blown to atoms.  Then it would be a
+delightful relief to the present tension to arrest this chatterer
+forthwith. He might be killed perhaps.  What?
+
+The king was repeating his observation.  'They have a ridiculous
+fancy that your confidence is based on the possession of atomic
+bombs.'
+
+King Ferdinand Charles pulled himself together.  He protested.
+
+'Oh, quite so,' said the ex-king, 'quite so.'
+
+'What grounds?'  The ex-king permitted himself a gesture and the
+ghost of a chuckle--why the devil should he chuckle? 'Practically
+none,' he said.  'But of course with these things one has to be
+so careful.'
+
+And then again for an instant something--like the faintest shadow
+of derision--gleamed out of the envoy's eyes and recalled that
+chilly feeling to King Ferdinand's spine.
+
+Some kindred depression had come to Pestovitch, who had been
+watching the drawn intensity of Firmin's face.  He came to the
+help of his master, who, he feared, might protest too much.
+
+'A search!' cried the king.  'An embargo on our aeroplanes.'
+
+'Only a temporary expedient,' said the ex-king Egbert, 'while the
+search is going on.'
+
+The king appealed to his council.
+
+'The people will never permit it, sire,' said a bustling little
+man in a gorgeous uniform.
+
+'You'll have to make 'em,' said the ex-king, genially addressing
+all the councillors.
+
+King Ferdinand glanced at the closed brass door through which no
+news would come.
+
+'When would you want to have this search?'
+
+The ex-king was radiant.  'We couldn't possibly do it until the
+day after to-morrow,' he said.
+
+'Just the capital?'
+
+'Where else?' asked the ex-king, still more cheerfully.
+
+'For my own part,' said the ex-king confidentially, 'I think the
+whole business ridiculous.  Who would be such a fool as to hide
+atomic bombs?  Nobody.  Certain hanging if he's caught--certain,
+and almost certain blowing up if he isn't. But nowadays I have to
+take orders like the rest of the world. And here I am.'
+
+The king thought he had never met such detestable geniality. He
+glanced at Pestovitch, who nodded almost imperceptibly. It was
+well, anyhow, to have a fool to deal with. They might have sent a
+diplomatist.  'Of course,' said the king, 'I recognise the
+overpowering force--and a kind of logic--in these orders from
+Brissago.'
+
+'I knew you would,' said the ex-king, with an air of relief, 'and
+so let us arrange----'
+
+They arranged with a certain informality.  No Balkan aeroplane
+was to adventure into the air until the search was concluded, and
+meanwhile the fleets of the world government would soar and
+circle in the sky. The towns were to be placarded with offers of
+reward to any one who would help in the discovery of atomic
+bombs....
+
+'You will sign that,' said the ex-king.
+
+'Why?'
+
+'To show that we aren't in any way hostile to you.'
+
+Pestovitch nodded 'yes' to his master.
+
+'And then, you see,' said the ex-king in that easy way of his,
+'we'll have a lot of men here, borrow help from your police, and
+run through all your things.  And then everything will be over.
+Meanwhile, if I may be your guest....' When presently Pestovitch
+was alone with the king again, he found him in a state of
+jangling emotions.  His spirit was tossing like a wind-whipped
+sea. One moment he was exalted and full of contempt for 'that
+ass' and his search; the next he was down in a pit of dread.
+'They will find them, Pestovitch, and then he'll hang us.'
+
+'Hang us?'
+
+The king put his long nose into his councillor's face. 'That
+grinning brute WANTS to hang us,' he said.  'And hang us he will,
+if we give him a shadow of a chance.'
+
+'But all their Modern State Civilisation!'
+
+'Do you think there's any pity in that crew of Godless,
+Vivisecting Prigs?' cried this last king of romance.  'Do you
+think, Pestovitch, they understand anything of a high ambition or
+a splendid dream?  Do you think that our gallant and sublime
+adventure has any appeal to them? Here am I, the last and
+greatest and most romantic of the Caesars, and do you think they
+will miss the chance of hanging me like a dog if they can,
+killing me like a rat in a hole?  And that renegade! He who was
+once an anointed king! . . .
+
+'I hate that sort of eye that laughs and keeps hard,' said the
+king.
+
+'I won't sit still here and be caught like a fascinated rabbit,'
+said the king in conclusion.  'We must shift those bombs.'
+
+'Risk it,' said Pestovitch.  'Leave them alone.'
+
+'No,' said the king. 'Shift them near the frontier.  Then while
+they watch us here--they will always watch us here now--we can
+buy an aeroplane abroad, and pick them up....'
+
+The king was in a feverish, irritable mood all that evening, but
+he made his plans nevertheless with infinite cunning. They must
+get the bombs away; there must be a couple of atomic hay lorries,
+the bombs could be hidden under the hay.... Pestovitch went and
+came, instructing trusty servants, planning and replanning....
+The king and the ex-king talked very pleasantly of a number of
+subjects. All the while at the back of King Ferdinand Charles's
+mind fretted the mystery of his vanished aeroplane. There came no
+news of its capture, and no news of its success. At any moment
+all that power at the back of his visitor might crumble away and
+vanish....
+
+It was past midnight, when the king, in a cloak and slouch hat
+that might equally have served a small farmer, or any respectable
+middle-class man, slipped out from an inconspicuous service gate
+on the eastward side of his palace into the thickly wooded
+gardens that sloped in a series of terraces down to the town. 
+Pestovitch and his guard-valet Peter, both wrapped about in a
+similar disguise, came out among the laurels that bordered the
+pathway and joined him. It was a clear, warm night, but the stars
+seemed unusually little and remote because of the aeroplanes,
+each trailing a searchlight, that drove hither and thither across
+the blue. One great beam seemed to rest on the king for a moment
+as he came out of the palace; then instantly and reassuringly it
+had swept away. But while they were still in the palace gardens
+another found them and looked at them.
+
+'They see us,' cried the king.
+
+'They make nothing of us,' said Pestovitch.
+
+The king glanced up and met a calm, round eye of light, that
+seemed to wink at him and vanish, leaving him blinded....
+
+The three men went on their way.  Near the little gate in the
+garden railings that Pestovitch had caused to be unlocked, the
+king paused under the shadow of an flex and looked back at the
+place. It was very high and narrow, a twentieth-century rendering
+of mediaevalism, mediaevalism in steel and bronze and sham stone
+and opaque glass. Against the sky it splashed a confusion of
+pinnacles. High up in the eastward wing were the windows of the
+apartments of the ex-king Egbert.  One of them was brightly lit
+now, and against the light a little black figure stood very still
+and looked out upon the night.
+
+The king snarled.
+
+'He little knows how we slip through his fingers,' said
+Pestovitch.
+
+And as he spoke they saw the ex-king stretch out his arms slowly,
+like one who yawns, knuckle his eyes and turn inward--no doubt to
+his bed.
+
+Down through the ancient winding back streets of his capital
+hurried the king, and at an appointed corner a shabby
+atomic-automobile waited for the three.  It was a hackney
+carriage of the lowest grade, with dinted metal panels and
+deflated cushions.  The driver was one of the ordinary drivers of
+the capital, but beside him sat the young secretary of
+Pestovitch, who knew the way to the farm where the bombs were
+hidden.
+
+The automobile made its way through the narrow streets of the old
+town, which were still lit and uneasy--for the fleet of airships
+overhead had kept the cafes open and people abroad--over the
+great new bridge, and so by straggling outskirts to the country.
+And all through his capital the king who hoped to outdo Caesar,
+sat back and was very still, and no one spoke.  And as they got
+out into the dark country they became aware of the searchlights
+wandering over the country-side like the uneasy ghosts of giants.
+The king sat forward and looked at these flitting whitenesses,
+and every now and then peered up to see the flying ships
+overhead.
+
+'I don't like them,' said the king.
+
+Presently one of these patches of moonlight came to rest about
+them and seemed to be following their automobile.  The king drew
+back.
+
+'The things are confoundedly noiseless,' said the king. 'It's
+like being stalked by lean white cats.'
+
+He peered again.  'That fellow is watching us,' he said.
+
+And then suddenly he gave way to panic.  'Pestovitch,' he said,
+clutching his minister's arm, 'they are watching us. I'm not
+going through with this.  They are watching us. I'm going back.'
+
+Pestovitch remonstrated.  'Tell him to go back,' said the king,
+and tried to open the window.  For a few moments there was a grim
+struggle in the automobile; a gripping of wrists and a blow. 'I
+can't go through with it,' repeated the king, 'I can't go through
+with it.'
+
+'But they'll hang us,' said Pestovitch.
+
+'Not if we were to give up now.  Not if we were to surrender the
+bombs. It is you who brought me into this....'
+
+At last Pestovitch compromised.  There was an inn perhaps half a
+mile from the farm.  They could alight there and the king could
+get brandy, and rest his nerves for a time.  And if he still
+thought fit to go back he could go back.
+
+'See,' said Pestovitch, 'the light has gone again.'
+
+The king peered up.  'I believe he's following us without a
+light,' said the king.
+
+In the little old dirty inn the king hung doubtful for a time,
+and was for going back and throwing himself on the mercy of the
+council. 'If there is a council,' said Pestovitch.  'By this time
+your bombs may have settled it.
+
+'But if so, these infernal aeroplanes would go.'
+
+'They may not know yet.'
+
+'But, Pestovitch, why couldn't you do all this without me?'
+
+Pestovitch made no answer for a moment.  'I was for leaving the
+bombs in their place,' he said at last, and went to the window.
+About their conveyance shone a circle of bright light. Pestovitch
+had a brilliant idea.  'I will send my secretary out to make a
+kind of dispute with the driver.  Something that will make them
+watch up above there.  Meanwhile you and I and Peter will go out
+by the back way and up by the hedges to the farm....'
+
+It was worthy of his subtle reputation and it answered passing
+well.
+
+In ten minutes they were tumbling over the wall of the farm-yard,
+wet, muddy, and breathless, but unobserved.  But as they ran
+towards the barns the king gave vent to something between a groan
+and a curse, and all about them shone the light--and passed.
+
+But had it passed at once or lingered for just a second?
+
+'They didn't see us,' said Peter.
+
+'I don't think they saw us,' said the king, and stared as the
+light went swooping up the mountain side, hung for a second about
+a hayrick, and then came pouring back.
+
+'In the barn!' cried the king.
+
+He bruised his shin against something, and then all three men
+were inside the huge steel-girdered barn in which stood the two
+motor hay lorries that were to take the bombs away.  Kurt and
+Abel, the two brothers of Peter, had brought the lorries thither
+in daylight. They had the upper half of the loads of hay thrown
+off, ready to cover the bombs, so soon as the king should show
+the hiding-place. 'There's a sort of pit here,' said the king. 
+'Don't light another lantern. This key of mine releases a
+ring....'
+
+For a time scarcely a word was spoken in the darkness of the
+barn. There was the sound of a slab being lifted and then of feet
+descending a ladder into a pit.  Then whispering and then heavy
+breathing as Kurt came struggling up with the first of the hidden
+bombs.
+
+'We shall do it yet,' said the king.  And then he gasped. 'Curse
+that light.  Why in the name of Heaven didn't we shut the barn
+door?'  For the great door stood wide open and all the empty,
+lifeless yard outside and the door and six feet of the floor of
+the barn were in the blue glare of an inquiring searchlight.
+
+'Shut the door, Peter,' said Pestovitch.
+
+'No,' cried the king, too late, as Peter went forward into the
+light. 'Don't show yourself!' cried the king.  Kurt made a step
+forward and plucked his brother back.  For a time all five men
+stood still. It seemed that light would never go and then
+abruptly it was turned off, leaving them blinded.  'Now,' said
+the king uneasily, 'now shut the door.'
+
+'Not completely,' cried Pestovitch.  'Leave a chink for us to go
+out by....'
+
+It was hot work shifting those bombs, and the king worked for a
+time like a common man.  Kurt and Abel carried the great things
+up and Peter brought them to the carts, and the king and
+Pestovitch helped him to place them among the hay.  They made as
+little noise as they could....
+
+'Ssh!' cried the king.  'What's that?'
+
+But Kurt and Abel did not hear, and came blundering up the ladder
+with the last of the load.
+
+'Ssh!' Peter ran forward to them with a whispered remonstrance.
+Now they were still.
+
+The barn door opened a little wider, and against the dim blue
+light outside they saw the black shape of a man.
+
+'Any one here?' he asked, speaking with an Italian accent.
+
+The king broke into a cold perspiration.  Then Pestovitch
+answered: 'Only a poor farmer loading hay,' he said, and picked
+up a huge hay fork and went forward softly.
+
+'You load your hay at a very bad time and in a very bad light,'
+said the man at the door, peering in.  'Have you no electric
+light here?'
+
+Then suddenly he turned on an electric torch, and as he did so
+Pestovitch sprang forward.  'Get out of my barn!' he cried, and
+drove the fork full at the intruder's chest. He had a vague idea
+that so he might stab the man to silence. But the man shouted
+loudly as the prongs pierced him and drove him backward, and
+instantly there was a sound of feet running across the yard.
+
+'Bombs,' cried the man upon the ground, struggling with the
+prongs in his hand, and as Pestovitch staggered forward into view
+with the force of his own thrust, he was shot through the body by
+one of the two new-comers.
+
+The man on the ground was badly hurt but plucky.  'Bombs,' he
+repeated, and struggled up into a kneeling position and held his
+electric torch full upon the face of the king.  'Shoot them,' he
+cried, coughing and spitting blood, so that the halo of light
+round the king's head danced about.
+
+For a moment in that shivering circle of light the two men saw
+the king kneeling up in the cart and Peter on the barn floor
+beside him. The old fox looked at them sideways--snared, a
+white-faced evil thing. And then, as with a faltering suicidal
+heroism, he leant forward over the bomb before him, they fired
+together and shot him through the head.
+
+The upper part of his face seemed to vanish.
+
+'Shoot them,' cried the man who had been stabbed.  'Shoot them
+all!'
+
+And then his light went out, and he rolled over with a groan at
+the feet of his comrades.
+
+But each carried a light of his own, and in another moment
+everything in the barn was visible again.  They shot Peter even
+as he held up his hands in sign of surrender.
+
+Kurt and Abel at the head of the ladder hesitated for a moment,
+and then plunged backward into the pit.  'If we don't kill them,'
+said one of the sharpshooters, 'they'll blow us to rags. They've
+gone down that hatchway.  Come! . . .
+
+'Here they are.  Hands up!  I say.  Hold your light while I
+shoot....' 
+
+Section 8
+
+It was still quite dark when his valet and Firmin came together
+and told the ex-king Egbert that the business was settled.
+
+He started up into a sitting position on the side of his bed.
+
+'Did he go out?' asked the ex-king.
+
+'He is dead,' said Firmin.  'He was shot.'
+
+The ex-king reflected.  'That's about the best thing that could
+have happened,' he said.  'Where are the bombs?  In that
+farm-house on the opposite hill-side! Why! the place is in sight! 
+Let us go. I'll dress.  Is there any one in the place, Firmin, to
+get us a cup of coffee?'
+
+Through the hungry twilight of the dawn the ex-king's automobile
+carried him to the farm-house where the last rebel king was lying
+among his bombs.  The rim of the sky flashed, the east grew
+bright, and the sun was just rising over the hills when King
+Egbert reached the farm-yard. There he found the hay lorries
+drawn out from the barn with the dreadful bombs still packed upon
+them. A couple of score of aviators held the yard, and outside a
+few peasants stood in a little group and stared, ignorant as yet
+of what had happened.  Against the stone wall of the farm-yard
+five bodies were lying neatly side by side, and Pestovitch had an
+expression of surprise on his face and the king was chiefly
+identifiable by his long white hands and his blonde moustache.
+The wounded aeronaut had been carried down to the inn. And after
+the ex-king had given directions in what manner the bombs were to
+be taken to the new special laboratories above Zurich, where they
+could be unpacked in an atmosphere of chlorine, he turned to
+these five still shapes.
+
+Their five pairs of feet stuck out with a curious stiff
+unanimity....
+
+'What else was there to do?' he said in answer to some internal
+protest.
+
+'I wonder, Firmin, if there are any more of them?'
+
+'Bombs, sir?' asked Firmin.
+
+'No, such kings....
+
+'The pitiful folly of it!' said the ex-king, following his
+thoughts. 'Firmin,' as an ex-professor of International Politics,
+I think it falls to you to bury them.  There? . . . No, don't put
+them near the well. People will have to drink from that well. 
+Bury them over there, some way off in the field.'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FOURTH
+
+THE NEW PHASE 
+
+Section 1
+
+The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we
+may view it now from the clarifying standpoint of things
+accomplished, was in its broad issues a simple one.  Essentially
+it was to place social organisation upon the new footing that the
+swift, accelerated advance of human knowledge had rendered
+necessary. The council was gathered together with the haste of a
+salvage expedition, and it was confronted with wreckage; but the
+wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only possibilities of
+the case were either the relapse of mankind to the agricultural
+barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the
+acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social
+order.  The old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy,
+particularism, and belligerency, were incompatible with the
+monstrous destructive power of the new appliances the inhuman
+logic of science had produced.  The equilibrium could be restored
+only by civilisation destroying itself down to a level at which
+modern apparatus could no longer be produced, or by human nature
+adapting itself in its institutions to the new conditions. It was
+for the latter alternative that the assembly existed.
+
+Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind. The
+sudden development of atomic science did but precipitate and
+render rapid and dramatic a clash between the new and the
+customary that had been gathering since ever the first flint was
+chipped or the first fire built together.  From the day when man
+contrived himself a tool and suffered another male to draw near
+him, he ceased to be altogether a thing of instinct and
+untroubled convictions. From that day forth a widening breach can
+be traced between his egotistical passions and the social need. 
+Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead, and his
+passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and
+the tribe. But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter
+and wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their
+development. He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite
+tamed to the home. Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest
+to keep him within the bounds of the plough-life and the
+beast-tending. Slowly a vast system of traditional imperatives
+superposed itself upon his instincts, imperatives that were
+admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, that cattle-mincer,
+who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man.
+
+And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his
+tilling came civilisation.  Civilisation was the agricultural
+surplus. It appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed
+boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded the seas, and
+within its primitive courts, within temples grown rich and
+leisurely and amidst the gathering medley of the seaport towns
+rose speculation and philosophy and science, and the beginning of
+the new order that has at last established itself as human life. 
+Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then with an accumulating
+velocity, the new powers were fabricated. Man as a whole did not
+seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand.  For a
+time men took up and used these new things and the new powers
+inadvertently as they came to him, recking nothing of the
+consequences.  For endless generations change led him very
+gently. But when he had been led far enough, change quickened the
+pace. It was with a series of shocks that he realised at last
+that he was living the old life less and less and a new life more
+and more.
+
+Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between
+the old way of living and the new were intense.  They were far
+intenser than they had been even at the collapse of the Roman
+imperial system. On the one hand was the ancient life of the
+family and the small community and the petty industry, on the
+other was a new life on a larger scale, with remoter horizons and
+a strange sense of purpose. Already it was growing clear that men
+must live on one side or the other. One could not have little
+tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the same market,
+sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and
+arrows and aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or
+illiterate peasant industries and power-driven factories in the
+same world. And still less it was possible that one could have
+the ideas and ambitions and greed and jealousy of peasants
+equipped with the vast appliances of the new age.  If there had
+been no atomic bombs to bring together most of the directing
+intelligence of the world to that hasty conference at Brissago,
+there would still have been, extended over great areas and a
+considerable space of time perhaps, a less formal conference of
+responsible and understanding people upon the perplexities of
+this world-wide opposition. If the work of Holsten had been
+spread over centuries and imparted to the world by imperceptible
+degrees, it would nevertheless have made it necessary for men to
+take counsel upon and set a plan for the future. Indeed already
+there had been accumulating for a hundred years before the crisis
+a literature of foresight; there was a whole mass of 'Modern
+State' scheming available for the conference to go upon. These
+bombs did but accentuate and dramatise an already developing
+problem.  
+
+Section 2
+
+This assembly was no leap of exceptional minds and
+super-intelligences into the control of affairs.  It was
+teachable, its members trailed ideas with them to the gathering,
+but these were the consequences of the 'moral shock' the bombs
+had given humanity, and there is no reason for supposing its
+individual personalities were greatly above the average.  It
+would be possible to cite a thousand instances of error and
+inefficiency in its proceedings due to the forgetfulness,
+irritability, or fatigue of its members. It experimented
+considerably and blundered often.  Excepting Holsten, whose gift
+was highly specialised, it is questionable whether there was a
+single man of the first order of human quality in the gathering.
+But it had a modest fear of itself, and a consequent directness
+that gave it a general distinction.  There was, of course, a
+noble simplicity about Leblanc, but even of him it may be asked
+whether he was not rather good and honest-minded than in the
+fuller sense great.
+
+The ex-king had wisdom and a certain romantic dash, he was a man
+among thousands, even if he was not a man among millions, but his
+memoirs, and indeed his decision to write memoirs, give the
+quality of himself and his associates.  The book makes admirable
+but astonishing reading. Therein he takes the great work the
+council was doing for granted as a little child takes God.  It is
+as if he had no sense of it at all. He tells amusing trivialities
+about his cousin Wilhelm and his secretary Firmin, he pokes fun
+at the American president, who was, indeed, rather a little
+accident of the political machine than a representative American,
+and he gives a long description of how he was lost for three days
+in the mountains in the company of the only Japanese member, a
+loss that seems to have caused no serious interruption of the
+work of the council....
+
+The Brissago conference has been written about time after time,
+as though it were a gathering of the very flower of humanity.
+Perched up there by the freak or wisdom of Leblanc, it had a
+certain Olympian quality, and the natural tendency of the human
+mind to elaborate such a resemblance would have us give its
+members the likenesses of gods.  It would be equally reasonable
+to compare it to one of those enforced meetings upon the
+mountain-tops that must have occurred in the opening phases of
+the Deluge.  The strength of the council lay not in itself but in
+the circumstances that had quickened its intelligence, dispelled
+its vanities, and emancipated it from traditional ambitions and
+antagonisms. It was stripped of the accumulation of centuries, a
+naked government with all that freedom of action that nakedness
+affords. And its problems were set before it with a plainness
+that was out of all comparison with the complicated and
+perplexing intimations of the former time.  
+
+Section 3
+
+The world on which the council looked did indeed present a task
+quite sufficiently immense and altogether too urgent for any
+wanton indulgence in internal dissension.  It may be interesting
+to sketch in a few phrases the condition of mankind at the close
+of the period of warring states, in the year of crisis that
+followed the release of atomic power. It was a world
+extraordinarily limited when one measures it by later standards,
+and it was now in a state of the direst confusion and distress.
+
+It must be remembered that at this time men had still to spread
+into enormous areas of the land surface of the globe. There were
+vast mountain wildernesses, forest wildernesses, sandy deserts,
+and frozen lands.  Men still clung closely to water and arable
+soil in temperate or sub-tropical climates, they lived abundantly
+only in river valleys, and all their great cities had grown upon
+large navigable rivers or close to ports upon the sea. Over great
+areas even of this suitable land flies and mosquitoes, armed with
+infection, had so far defeated human invasion, and under their
+protection the virgin forests remained untouched. Indeed, the
+whole world even in its most crowded districts was filthy with
+flies and swarming with needless insect life to an extent which
+is now almost incredible.  A population map of the world in 1950
+would have followed seashore and river course so closely in its
+darker shading as to give an impression that homo sapiens was an
+amphibious animal.  His roads and railways lay also along the
+lower contours, only here and there to pierce some mountain
+barrier or reach some holiday resort did they clamber above 3000
+feet. And across the ocean his traffic passed in definite lines;
+there were hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean no ship
+ever traversed except by mischance.
+
+Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet he had not
+yet pierced for five miles, and it was still not forty years
+since, with a tragic pertinacity, he had clambered to the poles
+of the earth. The limitless mineral wealth of the Arctic and
+Antarctic circles was still buried beneath vast accumulations of
+immemorial ice, and the secret riches of the inner zones of the
+crust were untapped and indeed unsuspected.  The higher mountain
+regions were known only to a sprinkling of guide-led climbers and
+the frequenters of a few gaunt hotels, and the vast rainless
+belts of land that lay across the continental masses, from Gobi
+to Sahara and along the backbone of America, with their perfect
+air, their daily baths of blazing sunshine, their nights of cool
+serenity and glowing stars, and their reservoirs of deep-lying
+water, were as yet only desolations of fear and death to the
+common imagination.
+
+And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of
+population which had gathered into the enormous dingy town
+centres of that period were dispossessed and scattered
+disastrously over the surrounding rural areas.  It was as if some
+brutal force, grown impatient at last at man's blindness, had
+with the deliberate intention of a rearrangement of population
+upon more wholesome lines, shaken the world.  The great
+industrial regions and the large cities that had escaped the
+bombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, in
+almost as tragic plight as those that blazed, and the
+country-side was disordered by a multitude of wandering and
+lawless strangers.  In some parts of the world famine raged, and
+in many regions there was plague.... The plains of north India,
+which had become more and more dependent for the general welfare
+on the railways and that great system of irrigation canals which
+the malignant section of the patriots had destroyed, were in a
+state of peculiar distress, whole villages lay dead together, no
+man heeding, and the very tigers and panthers that preyed upon
+the emaciated survivors crawled back infected into the jungle to
+perish. Large areas of China were a prey to brigand bands....
+
+It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of
+the explosion of the atomic bombs survives.  There are, of
+course, innumerable allusions and partial records, and it is from
+these that subsequent ages must piece together the image of these
+devastations.
+
+The phenomena, it must be remembered, changed greatly from day to
+day, and even from hour to hour, as the exploding bomb shifted
+its position, threw off fragments or came into contact with water
+or a fresh texture of soil.  Barnet, who came within forty miles
+of Paris early in October, is concerned chiefly with his account
+of the social confusion of the country-side and the problems of
+his command, but he speaks of heaped cloud masses of steam. 'All
+along the sky to the south-west' and of a red glare beneath these
+at night. Parts of Paris were still burning, and numbers of
+people were camped in the fields even at this distance watching
+over treasured heaps of salvaged loot.  He speaks too of the
+distant rumbling of the explosion--'like trains going over iron
+bridges.'
+
+Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the
+'continuous reverberations,' or of the 'thudding and hammering,'
+or some such phrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of
+steam, from which rain would fall suddenly in torrents and amidst
+which lightning played.  Drawing nearer to Paris an observer
+would have found the salvage camps increasing in number and
+blocking up the villages, and large numbers of people, often
+starving and ailing, camping under improvised tents because there
+was no place for them to go.  The sky became more and more
+densely overcast until at last it blotted out the light of day
+and left nothing but a dull red glare 'extraordinarily depressing
+to the spirit.' In this dull glare, great numbers of people were
+still living, clinging to their houses and in many cases
+subsisting in a state of partial famine upon the produce in their
+gardens and the stores in the shops of the provision dealers.
+
+Coming in still closer, the investigator would have reached the
+police cordon, which was trying to check the desperate enterprise
+of those who would return to their homes or rescue their more
+valuable possessions within the 'zone of imminent danger.'
+
+That zone was rather arbitrarily defined.  If our spectator could
+have got permission to enter it, he would have entered also a
+zone of uproar, a zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange
+purplish-red light, and quivering and swaying with the incessant
+explosion of the radio-active substance. Whole blocks of
+buildings were alight and burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged
+flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in comparison with
+the full-bodied crimson glare beyond. The shells of other
+edifices already burnt rose, pierced by rows of window sockets
+against the red-lit mist.
+
+Every step farther would have been as dangerous as a descent
+within the crater of an active volcano.  These spinning, boiling
+bomb centres would shift or break unexpectedly into new regions,
+great fragments of earth or drain or masonry suddenly caught by a
+jet of disruptive force might come flying by the explorer's head,
+or the ground yawn a fiery grave beneath his feet.  Few who
+adventured into these areas of destruction and survived attempted
+any repetition of their experiences.  There are stories of puffs
+of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting sometimes scores of
+miles from the bomb centre and killing and scorching all they
+overtook. And the first conflagrations from the Paris centre
+spread westward half-way to the sea.
+
+Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of red-lit ruins
+had a peculiar dryness and a blistering quality, so that it set
+up a soreness of the skin and lungs that was very difficult to
+heal....
+
+Such was the last state of Paris, and such on a larger scale was
+the condition of affairs in Chicago, and the same fate had
+overtaken Berlin, Moscow, Tokio, the eastern half of London,
+Toulon, Kiel, and two hundred and eighteen other centres of
+population or armament. Each was a flaming centre of radiant
+destruction that only time could quench, that indeed in many
+instances time has still to quench. To this day, though indeed
+with a constantly diminishing uproar and vigour, these explosions
+continue.  In the map of nearly every country of the world three
+or four or more red circles, a score of miles in diameter, mark
+the position of the dying atomic bombs and the death areas that
+men have been forced to abandon around them. Within these areas
+perished museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of
+masterpieces, and a vast accumulation of human achievement, whose
+charred remains lie buried, a legacy of curious material that
+only future generations may hope to examine.... 
+
+Section 4
+
+The state of mind of the dispossessed urban population which
+swarmed and perished so abundantly over the country-side during
+the dark days of the autumnal months that followed the Last War,
+was one of blank despair. Barnet gives sketch after sketch of
+groups of these people, camped among the vineyards of Champagne,
+as he saw them during his period of service with the army of
+pacification.
+
+There was, for example, that 'man-milliner' who came out from a
+field beside the road that rises up eastward out of Epernay, and
+asked how things were going in Paris.  He was, says Barnet, a
+round-faced man, dressed very neatly in black--so neatly that it
+was amazing to discover he was living close at hand in a tent
+made of carpets--and he had 'an urbane but insistent manner,' a
+carefully trimmed moustache and beard, expressive eyebrows, and
+hair very neatly brushed.
+
+'No one goes into Paris,' said Barnet.
+
+'But, Monsieur, that is very unenterprising,' the man by the
+wayside submitted.
+
+'The danger is too great.  The radiations eat into people's
+skins.'
+
+The eyebrows protested.  'But is nothing to be done?'
+
+'Nothing can be done.'
+
+'But, Monsieur, it is extraordinarily inconvenient, this living
+in exile and waiting.  My wife and my little boy suffer
+extremely. There is a lack of amenity.  And the season advances.
+I say nothing of the expense and difficulty in obtaining
+provisions. . . . When does Monsieur think that something will be
+done to render Paris--possible?'
+
+Barnet considered his interlocutor.
+
+'I'm told,' said Barnet, 'that Paris is not likely to be possible
+again for several generations.'
+
+'Oh! but this is preposterous!  Consider, Monsieur!  What are
+people like ourselves to do in the meanwhile?  I am a costumier.
+All my connections and interests, above all my style, demand
+Paris. . . .'
+
+Barnet considered the sky, from which a light rain was beginning
+to fall, the wide fields about them from which the harvest had
+been taken, the trimmed poplars by the wayside.
+
+'Naturally,' he agreed, 'you want to go to Paris.  But Paris is
+over.'
+
+'Over!'
+
+'Finished.'
+
+'But then, Monsieur--what is to become--of ME?'
+
+Barnet turned his face westward, whither the white road led.
+
+'Where else, for example, may I hope to find--opportunity?'
+
+Barnet made no reply.
+
+'Perhaps on the Riviera.  Or at some such place as Homburg.  Or
+some plague perhaps.'
+
+'All that,' said Barnet, accepting for the first time facts that
+had lain evident in his mind for weeks; 'all that must be over,
+too.'
+
+There was a pause.  Then the voice beside him broke out. 'But,
+Monsieur, it is impossible!  It leaves--nothing.'
+
+'No. Not very much.'
+
+'One cannot suddenly begin to grow potatoes!'
+
+'It would be good if Monsieur could bring himself----'
+
+'To the life of a peasant!  And my wife----You do not know the
+distinguished delicacy of my wife, a refined helplessness, a
+peculiar dependent charm.  Like some slender tropical
+creeper--with great white flowers.... But all this is foolish
+talk. It is impossible that Paris, which has survived so many
+misfortunes, should not presently revive.'
+
+'I do not think it will ever revive.  Paris is finished.  London,
+too, I am told--Berlin.  All the great capitals were
+stricken....'
+
+'But----! Monsieur must permit me to differ.'
+
+'It is so.'
+
+'It is impossible.  Civilisations do not end in this manner.
+Mankind will insist.'
+
+'On Paris?'
+
+'On Paris.'
+
+'Monsieur, you might as well hope to go down the Maelstrom and
+resume business there.'
+
+'I am content, Monsieur, with my own faith.'
+
+'The winter comes on.  Would not Monsieur be wiser to seek a
+house?'
+
+'Farther from Paris?  No, Monsieur.  But it is not possible,
+Monsieur, what you say, and you are under a tremendous
+mistake.... Indeed you are in error.... I asked merely for
+information....'
+
+'When last I saw him,' said Barnet, 'he was standing under the
+signpost at the crest of the hill, gazing wistfully, yet it
+seemed to me a little doubtfully, now towards Paris, and
+altogether heedless of a drizzling rain that was wetting him
+through and through....'
+
+Section 5
+
+This effect of chill dismay, of a doom as yet imperfectly
+apprehended deepens as Barnet's record passes on to tell of the
+approach of winter.  It was too much for the great mass of those
+unwilling and incompetent nomads to realise that an age had
+ended, that the old help and guidance existed no longer, that
+times would not mend again, however patiently they held out. They
+were still in many cases looking to Paris when the first
+snowflakes of that pitiless January came swirling about them. The
+story grows grimmer....
+
+If it is less monstrously tragic after Barnet's return to
+England, it is, if anything, harder.  England was a spectacle of
+fear-embittered householders, hiding food, crushing out robbery,
+driving the starving wanderers from every faltering place upon
+the roads lest they should die inconveniently and reproachfully
+on the doorsteps of those who had failed to urge them onward....
+
+The remnants of the British troops left France finally in March,
+after urgent representations from the provisional government at
+Orleans that they could be supported no longer. They seem to have
+been a fairly well-behaved, but highly parasitic force
+throughout, though Barnet is clearly of opinion that they did
+much to suppress sporadic brigandage and maintain social order.
+He came home to a famine-stricken country, and his picture of the
+England of that spring is one of miserable patience and desperate
+expedients. The country was suffering much more than France,
+because of the cessation of the overseas supplies on which it had
+hitherto relied. His troops were given bread, dried fish, and
+boiled nettles at Dover, and marched inland to Ashford and paid
+off. On the way thither they saw four men hanging from the
+telegraph posts by the roadside, who had been hung for stealing
+swedes. The labour refuges of Kent, he discovered, were feeding
+their crowds of casual wanderers on bread into which clay and
+sawdust had been mixed. In Surrey there was a shortage of even
+such fare as that. He himself struck across country to
+Winchester, fearing to approach the bomb-poisoned district round
+London, and at Winchester he had the luck to be taken on as one
+of the wireless assistants at the central station and given
+regular rations.  The station stood in a commanding position on
+the chalk hill that overlooks the town from the east....
+
+Thence he must have assisted in the transmission of the endless
+cipher messages that preceded the gathering at Brissago, and
+there it was that the Brissago proclamation of the end of the war
+and the establishment of a world government came under his hands.
+
+He was feeling ill and apathetic that day, and he did not realise
+what it was he was transcribing.  He did it mechanically, as a
+part of his tedious duty.
+
+Afterwards there came a rush of messages arising out of the
+declaration that strained him very much, and in the evening when
+he was relieved, he ate his scanty supper and then went out upon
+the little balcony before the station, to smoke and rest his
+brains after this sudden and as yet inexplicable press of duty. 
+It was a very beautiful, still evening. He fell talking to a
+fellow operator, and for the first time, he declares, 'I began to
+understand what it was all about.  I began to see just what
+enormous issues had been under my hands for the past four hours. 
+But I became incredulous after my first stimulation. "This is
+some sort of Bunkum," I said very sagely.
+
+'My colleague was more hopeful.  "It means an end to
+bomb-throwing and destruction," he said.  "It means that
+presently corn will come from America."
+
+' "Who is going to send corn when there is no more value in
+money?" I asked.
+
+'Suddenly we were startled by a clashing from the town below. The
+cathedral bells, which had been silent ever since I had come into
+the district, were beginning, with a sort of rheumatic
+difficulty, to ring.  Presently they warmed a little to the work,
+and we realised what was going on.  They were ringing a peal. We
+listened with an unbelieving astonishment and looking into each
+other's yellow faces.
+
+' "They mean it," said my colleague.
+
+' "But what can they do now?"  I asked.  "Everything is broken
+down...." '
+
+And on that sentence, with an unexpected artistry, Barnet
+abruptly ends his story.
+
+Section 6
+
+From the first the new government handled affairs with a certain
+greatness of spirit.  Indeed, it was inevitable that they should
+act greatly. From the first they had to see the round globe as
+one problem; it was impossible any longer to deal with it piece
+by piece.  They had to secure it universally from any fresh
+outbreak of atomic destruction, and they had to ensure a
+permanent and universal pacification. On this capacity to grasp
+and wield the whole round globe their existence depended.  There
+was no scope for any further performance.
+
+So soon as the seizure of the existing supplies of atomic
+ammunition and the apparatus for synthesising Carolinum was
+assured, the disbanding or social utilisation of the various
+masses of troops still under arms had to be arranged, the
+salvation of the year's harvests, and the feeding, housing, and
+employment of the drifting millions of homeless people.  In
+Canada, in South America, and Asiatic Russia there were vast
+accumulations of provision that was immovable only because of the
+breakdown of the monetary and credit systems. These had to be
+brought into the famine districts very speedily if entire
+depopulation was to be avoided, and their transportation and the
+revival of communications generally absorbed a certain proportion
+of the soldiery and more able unemployed.  The task of housing
+assumed gigantic dimensions, and from building camps the housing
+committee of the council speedily passed to constructions of a
+more permanent type. They found far less friction than might have
+been expected in turning the loose population on their hands to
+these things. People were extraordinarily tamed by that year of
+suffering and death; they were disillusioned of their traditions,
+bereft of once obstinate prejudices; they felt foreign in a
+strange world, and ready to follow any confident leadership.  The
+orders of the new government came with the best of all
+credentials, rations. The people everywhere were as easy to
+control, one of the old labour experts who had survived until the
+new time witnesses, 'as gangs of emigrant workers in a new land.' 
+And now it was that the social possibilities of the atomic energy
+began to appear. The new machinery that had come into existence
+before the last wars increased and multiplied, and the council
+found itself not only with millions of hands at its disposal but
+with power and apparatus that made its first conceptions of the
+work it had to do seem pitifully timid. The camps that were
+planned in iron and deal were built in stone and brass; the roads
+that were to have been mere iron tracks became spacious ways that
+insisted upon architecture; the cultivations of foodstuffs that
+were to have supplied emergency rations, were presently, with
+synthesisers, fertilisers, actinic light, and scientific
+direction, in excess of every human need.
+
+The government had begun with the idea of temporarily
+reconstituting the social and economic system that had prevailed
+before the first coming of the atomic engine, because it was to
+this system that the ideas and habits of the great mass of the
+world's dispossessed population was adapted.  Subsequent
+rearrangement it had hoped to leave to its successors--whoever
+they might be. But this, it became more and more manifest, was
+absolutely impossible. As well might the council have proposed a
+revival of slavery. The capitalist system had already been
+smashed beyond repair by the onset of limitless gold and energy;
+it fell to pieces at the first endeavour to stand it up again. 
+Already before the war half of the industrial class had been out
+of work, the attempt to put them back into wages employment on
+the old lines was futile from the outset--the absolute shattering
+of the currency system alone would have been sufficient to
+prevent that, and it was necessary therefore to take over the
+housing, feeding, and clothing of this worldwide multitude
+without exacting any return in labour whatever. In a little while
+the mere absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people
+everywhere became an evident social danger, and the government
+was obliged to resort to such devices as simple decorative work
+in wood and stone, the manufacture of hand-woven textiles,
+fruit-growing, flower-growing, and landscape gardening on a grand
+scale to keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying
+wages to the younger adults for attendance at schools that would
+equip them to use the new atomic machinery.... So quite
+insensibly the council drifted into a complete reorganisation of
+urban and industrial life, and indeed of the entire social
+system.
+
+Ideas that are unhampered by political intrigue or financial
+considerations have a sweeping way with them, and before a year
+was out the records of the council show clearly that it was
+rising to its enormous opportunity, and partly through its own
+direct control and partly through a series of specific
+committees, it was planning a new common social order for the
+entire population of the earth. 'There can be no real social
+stability or any general human happiness while large areas of the
+world and large classes of people are in a phase of civilisation
+different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now to have
+great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally
+accepted social purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the
+rest.'  So the council expressed its conception of the problem it
+had to solve.  The peasant, the field-worker, and all barbaric
+cultivators were at an 'economic disadvantage' to the more mobile
+and educated classes, and the logic of the situation compelled
+the council to take up systematically the supersession of this
+stratum by a more efficient organisation of production. It
+developed a scheme for the progressive establishment throughout
+the world of the 'modern system' in agriculture, a system that
+should give the full advantages of a civilised life to every
+agricultural worker, and this replacement has been going on right
+up to the present day. The central idea of the modern system is
+the substitution of cultivating guilds for the individual
+cultivator, and for cottage and village life altogether.  These
+guilds are associations of men and women who take over areas of
+arable or pasture land, and make themselves responsible for a
+certain average produce.  They are bodies small enough as a rule
+to be run on a strictly democratic basis, and large enough to
+supply all the labour, except for a certain assistance from
+townspeople during the harvest, needed upon the land farmed. They
+have watchers' bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but
+the ease and the costlessness of modern locomotion enables them
+to maintain a group of residences in the nearest town with a
+common dining-room and club house, and usually also a guild house
+in the national or provincial capital.  Already this system has
+abolished a distinctively 'rustic' population throughout vast
+areas of the old world, where it has prevailed immemorially. That
+shy, unstimulated life of the lonely hovel, the narrow scandals
+and petty spites and persecutions of the small village, that
+hoarding, half inanimate existence away from books, thought, or
+social participation and in constant contact with cattle, pigs,
+poultry, and their excrement, is passing away out of human
+experience. In a little while it will be gone altogether.  In the
+nineteenth century it had already ceased to be a necessary human
+state, and only the absence of any collective intelligence and an
+imagined need for tough and unintelligent soldiers and for a
+prolific class at a low level, prevented its systematic
+replacement at that time....
+
+And while this settlement of the country was in progress, the
+urban camps of the first phase of the council's activities were
+rapidly developing, partly through the inherent forces of the
+situation and partly through the council's direction, into a
+modern type of town.... 
+
+Section 7
+
+It is characteristic of the manner in which large enterprises
+forced themselves upon the Brissago council, that it was not
+until the end of the first year of their administration and then
+only with extreme reluctance that they would take up the manifest
+need for a lingua franca for the world.  They seem to have given
+little attention to the various theoretical universal languages
+which were proposed to them.  They wished to give as little
+trouble to hasty and simple people as possible, and the
+world-wide alstribution of English gave them a bias for it from
+the beginning. The extreme simplicity of its grammar was also in
+its favour.
+
+It was not without some sacrifices that the English-speaking
+peoples were permitted the satisfaction of hearing their speech
+used universally. The language was shorn of a number of
+grammatical peculiarities, the distinctive forms for the
+subjunctive mood for example and most of its irregular plurals
+were abolished; its spelling was systematised and adapted to the
+vowel sounds in use upon the continent of Europe, and a process
+of incorporating foreign nouns and verbs commenced that speedily
+reached enormous proportions. Within ten years from the
+establishment of the World Republic the New English Dictionary
+had swelled to include a vocabulary of 250,000 words, and a man
+of 1900 would have found considerable difficulty in reading an
+ordinary newspaper.  On the other hand, the men of the new time
+could still appreciate the older English literature.... Certain
+minor acts of uniformity accompanied this larger one. The idea of
+a common understanding and a general simplification of
+intercourse once it was accepted led very naturally to the
+universal establishment of the metric system of weights and
+measures, and to the disappearance of the various makeshift
+calendars that had hitherto confused chronology.  The year was
+divided into thirteen months of four weeks each, and New Year's
+Day and Leap Year's Day were made holidays, and did not count at
+all in the ordinary week. So the weeks and the months were
+brought into correspondence. And moreover, as the king put it to
+Firmin, it was decided to 'nail down Easter.' . . . In these
+matters, as in so many matters, the new civilisation came as a
+simplification of ancient complications; the history of the
+calendar throughout the world is a history of inadequate
+adjustments, of attempts to fix seed-time and midwinter that go
+back into the very beginning of human society; and this final
+rectification had a symbolic value quite beyond its practical
+convenience. But the council would have no rash nor harsh
+innovations, no strange names for the months, and no alteration
+in the numbering of the years.
+
+The world had already been put upon one universal monetary basis.
+For some months after the accession of the council, the world's
+affairs had been carried on without any sound currency at all. 
+Over great regions money was still in use, but with the most
+extravagant variations in price and the most disconcerting
+fluctuations of public confidence. The ancient rarity of gold
+upon which the entire system rested was gone. Gold was now a
+waste product in the release of atomic energy, and it was plain
+that no metal could be the basis of the monetary system again.
+Henceforth all coins must be token coins.  Yet the whole world
+was accustomed to metallic money, and a vast proportion of
+existing human relationships had grown up upon a cash basis, and
+were almost inconceivable without that convenient liquidating
+factor. It seemed absolutely necessary to the life of the social
+organisation to have some sort of currency, and the council had
+therefore to discover some real value upon which to rest it. 
+Various such apparently stable values as land and hours of work
+were considered. Ultimately the government, which was now in
+possession of most of the supplies of energy-releasing material,
+fixed a certain number of units of energy as the value of a gold
+sovereign, declared a sovereign to be worth exactly twenty marks,
+twenty-five francs, five dollars, and so forth, with the other
+current units of the world, and undertook, under various
+qualifications and conditions, to deliver energy upon demand as
+payment for every sovereign presented.  On the whole, this worked
+satisfactorily.  They saved the face of the pound sterling. Coin
+was rehabilitated, and after a phase of price fluctuations, began
+to settle down to definite equivalents and uses again, with names
+and everyday values familiar to the common run of people....
+
+Section 8
+
+As the Brissago council came to realise that what it had supposed
+to be temporary camps of refugees were rapidly developing into
+great towns of a new type, and that it was remoulding the world
+in spite of itself, it decided to place this work of
+redistributing the non-agricultural population in the hands of a
+compactor and better qualified special committee.  That committee
+is now, far more than the council of any other of its delegated
+committees, the active government of the world.  Developed from
+an almost invisible germ of 'town-planning' that came obscurely
+into existence in Europe or America (the question is still in
+dispute) somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth
+century, its work, the continual active planning and replanning
+of the world as a place of human habitation, is now so to speak
+the collective material activity of the race. The spontaneous,
+disorderly spreadings and recessions of populations, as aimless
+and mechanical as the trickling of spilt water, which was the
+substance of history for endless years, giving rise here to
+congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and everywhere to
+a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only
+picturesque, is at an end.  Men spread now, with the whole power
+of the race to aid them, into every available region of the
+earth. Their cities are no longer tethered to running water and
+the proximity of cultivation, their plans are no longer affected
+by strategic considerations or thoughts of social insecurity. The
+aeroplane and the nearly costless mobile car have abolished trade
+routes; a common language and a universal law have abolished a
+thousand restraining inconveniences, and so an astonishing
+dispersal of habitations has begun.  One may live anywhere. And
+so it is that our cities now are true social gatherings, each
+with a character of its own and distinctive interests of its own,
+and most of them with a common occupation.  They lie out in the
+former deserts, these long wasted sun-baths of the race, they
+tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote islands, and bask
+on broad lagoons. For a time the whole tendency of mankind was to
+desert the river valleys in which the race had been cradled for
+half a million years, but now that the War against Flies has been
+waged so successfully that this pestilential branch of life is
+nearly extinct, they are returning thither with a renewed
+appetite for gardens laced by watercourses, for pleasant living
+amidst islands and houseboats and bridges, and for nocturnal
+lanterns reflected by the sea.
+
+Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and
+more a builder, a traveller, and a maker.  How much he ceases to
+be a cultivator of the soil the returns of the Redistribution
+Committee showed. Every year the work of our scientific
+laboratories increases the productivity and simplifies the labour
+of those who work upon the soil, and the food now of the whole
+world is produced by less than one per cent. of its population, a
+percentage which still tends to decrease. Far fewer people are
+needed upon the land than training and proclivity dispose towards
+it, and as a consequence of this excess of human attention, the
+garden side of life, the creation of groves and lawns and vast
+regions of beautiful flowers, has expanded enormously and
+continues to expand.  For, as agricultural method intensifies and
+the quota is raised, one farm association after another, availing
+itself of the 1975 regulations, elects to produce a public garden
+and pleasaunce in the place of its former fields, and the area of
+freedom and beauty is increased.  And the chemists' triumphs of
+synthesis, which could now give us an entirely artificial food,
+remain largely in abeyance because it is so much more pleasant
+and interesting to eat natural produce and to grow such things
+upon the soil. Each year adds to the variety of our fruits and
+the delightfulness of our flowers.  
+
+Section 9
+
+The early years of the World Republic witnessed a certain
+recrudescence of political adventure.  There was, it is rather
+curious to note, no revival of separatism after the face of King
+Ferdinand Charles had vanished from the sight of men, but in a
+number of countries, as the first urgent physical needs were met,
+there appeared a variety of personalities having this in common,
+that they sought to revive political trouble and clamber by its
+aid to positions of importance and satisfaction.  In no case did
+they speak in the name of kings, and it is clear that monarchy
+must have been far gone in obsolescence before the twentieth
+century began, but they made appeals to the large survivals of
+nationalist and racial feeling that were everywhere to be found,
+they alleged with considerable justice that the council was
+overriding racial and national customs and disregarding religious
+rules. The great plain of India was particularly prolific in such
+agitators. The revival of newspapers, which had largely ceased
+during the terrible year because of the dislocation of the
+coinage, gave a vehicle and a method of organisation to these
+complaints. At first the council disregarded this developing
+opposition, and then it recognised it with an entirely
+devastating frankness.
+
+Never, of course, had there been so provisional a government. It
+was of an extravagant illegality.  It was, indeed, hardly more
+than a club, a club of about a hundred persons. At the outset
+there were ninety-three, and these were increased afterwards by
+the issue of invitations which more than balanced its deaths, to
+as many at one time as one hundred and nineteen. Always its
+constitution has been miscellaneous. At no time were these
+invitations issued with an admission that they recognised a
+right.  The old institution or monarchy had come out unexpectedly
+well in the light of the new regime. Nine of the original members
+of the first government were crowned heads who had resigned their
+separate sovereignty, and at no time afterwards did the number of
+its royal members sink below six. In their case there was perhaps
+a kind of attenuated claim to rule, but except for them and the
+still more infinitesimal pretensions of one or two ax-presidents
+of republics, no member of the council had even the shade of a
+right to his participation in its power. It was natural,
+therefore, that its opponents should find a common ground in a
+clamour for representative government, and build high hopes upon
+a return, to parliamentary institutions.
+
+The council decided to give them everything they wanted, but in a
+form that suited ill with their aspirations.  It became at one
+stroke a representative body.  It became, indeed, magnificently
+representative. It became so representative that the politicians
+were drowned in a deluge of votes.  Every adult of either sex
+from pole to pole was given a vote, and the world was divided
+into ten constituencies, which voted on the same day by means of
+a simple modification of the world post.  Membership of the
+government, it was decided, must be for life, save in the
+exceptional case of a recall; but the elections, which were held
+quinquenially, were arranged to add fifty members on each
+occasion.  The method of proportional representation with one
+transferable vote was adopted, and the voter might also write
+upon his voting paper in a specially marked space, the name of
+any of his representatives that he wished to recall. A ruler was
+recallable by as many votes as the quota by which he had been
+elected, and the original members by as many votes in any
+constituency as the returning quotas in the first election.
+
+Upon these conditions the council submitted itself very
+cheerfully to the suffrages of the world.  None of its members
+were recalled, and its fifty new associates, which included
+twenty-seven which it had seen fit to recommend, were of an
+altogether too miscellaneous quality to disturb the broad trend
+of its policy.  Its freedom from rules or formalities prevented
+any obstructive proceedings, and when one of the two newly
+arrived Home Rule members for India sought for information how to
+bring in a bill, they learnt simply that bills were not brought
+in.  They asked for the speaker, and were privileged to hear much
+ripe wisdom from the ex-king Egbert, who was now consciously
+among the seniors of the gathering. Thereafter they were baffled
+men....
+
+But already by that time the work of the council was drawing to
+an end. It was concerned not so much for the continuation of its
+construction as for the preservation of its accomplished work
+from the dramatic instincts of the politician.
+
+The life of the race becomes indeed more and more independent of
+the formal government.  The council, in its opening phase, was
+heroic in spirit; a dragon-slaying body, it slashed out of
+existence a vast, knotted tangle of obsolete ideas and clumsy and
+jealous proprietorships; it secured by a noble system of
+institutional precautions, freedom of inquiry, freedom of
+criticism, free communications, a common basis of education and
+understanding, and freedom from economic oppression.  With that
+its creative task was accomplished. It became more and more an
+established security and less and less an active intervention. 
+There is nothing in our time to correspond with the continual
+petty making and entangling of laws in an atmosphere of
+contention that is perhaps the most perplexing aspect of
+constitutional history in the nineteenth century. In that age
+they seem to have been perpetually making laws when we should
+alter regulations.  The work of change which we delegate to these
+scientific committees of specific general direction which have
+the special knowledge needed, and which are themselves dominated
+by the broad intellectual process of the community, was in those
+days inextricably mixed up with legislation. They fought over the
+details; we should as soon think of fighting over the arrangement
+of the parts of a machine.  We know nowadays that such things go
+on best within laws, as life goes on between earth and sky. And
+so it is that government gathers now for a day or so in each year
+under the sunshine of Brissago when Saint Bruno's lilies are in
+flower, and does little more than bless the work of its
+committees. And even these committees are less originative and
+more expressive of the general thought than they were at first. 
+It becomes difficult to mark out the particular directive
+personalities of the world. Continually we are less personal. 
+Every good thought contributes now, and every able brain falls
+within that informal and dispersed kingship which gathers
+together into one purpose the energies of the race.
+
+Section 10
+
+It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human
+existence in which 'politics,' that is to say a partisan
+interference with the ruling sanities of the world, will be the
+dominant interest among serious men.  We seem to have entered
+upon an entirely new phase in history in which contention as
+distinguished from rivalry, has almost abruptly ceased to be the
+usual occupation, and has become at most a subdued and hidden and
+discredited thing. Contentious professions cease to be an
+honourable employment for men. The peace between nations is also
+a peace between individuals. We live in a world that comes of
+age.  Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering
+aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the
+curious learner, and man the creative artist, come forward to
+replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble
+adventure.
+
+There is no natural life of man.  He is, and always has been, a
+sheath of varied and even incompatible possibilities, a
+palimpsest of inherited dispositions.  It was the habit of many
+writers in the early twentieth century to speak of competition
+and the narrow, private life of trade and saving and suspicious
+isolation as though such things were in some exceptional way
+proper to the human constitution, and as though openness of mind
+and a preference for achievement over possession were abnormal
+and rather unsubstantial qualities. How wrong that was the
+history of the decades immediately following the establishment of
+the world republic witnesses.  Once the world was released from
+the hardening insecurities of a needless struggle for life that
+was collectively planless and individually absorbing, it became
+apparent that there was in the vast mass of people a long,
+smothered passion to make things.  The world broke out into
+making, and at first mainly into aesthetic making.  This phase of
+history, which has been not inaptly termed the 'Efflorescence,'
+is still, to a large extent, with us.  The majority of our
+population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in the
+world lies no longer with necessities but with their elaboration,
+decoration, and refinement. There has been an evident change in
+the quality of this making during recent years.  It becomes more
+purposeful than it was, losing something of its first elegance
+and prettiness and gaining in intensity; but that is a change
+rather of hue than of nature. That comes with a deepening
+philosophy and a sounder education. For the first joyous
+exercises of fancy we perceive now the deliberation of a more
+constructive imagination. There is a natural order in these
+things, and art comes before science as the satisfaction of more
+elemental needs must come before art, and as play and pleasure
+come in a human life before the development of a settled
+purpose....
+
+For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work
+must have struggled in man against the limitations imposed upon
+him by his social ineptitude.  It was a long smouldering fire
+that flamed out at last in all these things.  The evidence of a
+pathetic, perpetually thwarted urgency to make something, is one
+of the most touching aspects of the relics and records of our
+immediate ancestors. There exists still in the death area about
+the London bombs, a region of deserted small homes that furnish
+the most illuminating comment on the old state of affairs.  These
+homes are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat, hideously
+proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects quite
+filthy, only people in complete despair of anything better could
+have lived in them, but to each is attached a ridiculous little
+rectangle of land called 'the garden,' containing usually a prop
+for drying clothes and a loathsome box of offal, the dustbin,
+full of egg-shells, cinders, and such-like refuse. Now that one
+may go about this region in comparitive security--for the London
+radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable proportions--it is
+possible to trace in nearly every one of these gardens some
+effort to make.  Here it is a poor little plank summer-house,
+here it is a 'fountain' of bricks and oyster-shells, here a
+'rockery,' here a 'workshop.' And in the houses everywhere there
+are pitiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble drawings.
+These efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of
+blindfolded men, they are only one shade less harrowing to a
+sympathetic observer than the scratchings one finds upon the
+walls of the old prisons, but there they are, witnessing to the
+poor buried instincts that struggled up towards the light. That
+god of joyous expression our poor fathers ignorantly sought, our
+freedom has declared to us....
+
+In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to
+possess a little property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled
+by others, an 'independence' as the English used to put it. And
+what made this desire for freedom and prosperity so strong, was
+very evidently the dream of self-expression, of doing something
+with it, of playing with it, of making a personal delightfulness,
+a distinctiveness.  Property was never more than a means to an
+end, nor avarice more than a perversion.  Men owned in order to
+do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments and his own
+privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its release in
+a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may
+leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row
+of carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion.  Or they
+give themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in
+phenomena as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of
+riches. The work that was once the whole substance of social
+existence--for most men spent all their lives in earning a
+living--is now no more than was the burden upon one of those old
+climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on their backs in
+order that they might ascend mountains. It matters little to the
+easy charities of our emancipated time that most people who have
+made their labour contribution produce neither new beauty nor new
+wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant activities and
+enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They help, it
+may be, by reception and reverberation, and they hinder nothing. 
+... 
+
+Section 11
+
+Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and
+appearances of human life which is going on about us, a change as
+rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to
+manhood after the barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral
+and mental changes at least as unprecedented. It is not as if old
+things were going out of life and new things coming in, it is
+rather that the altered circumstances of men are making an appeal
+to elements in his nature that have hitherto been suppressed, and
+checking tendencies that have hitherto been over-stimulated and
+over-developed. He has not so much grown and altered his
+essential being as turned new aspects to the light. Such turnings
+round into a new attitude the world has seen on a less extensive
+scale before.  The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for
+example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth
+their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men.
+There was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth
+century that seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that
+had not been guilty of them within the previous two centuries.
+The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in
+any European country before the years of the last wars was in a
+different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy,
+suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the
+respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor
+and naive passions of the lowest stratum.  Yet there were no real
+differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds;
+their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and
+habits of mind. And turning to more individual instances the
+constantly observed difference between one portion of a life and
+another consequent upon a religious conversion, were a standing
+example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.
+
+The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities
+and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of
+their old established habits of thought, and out of the lightly
+held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.
+To borrow a word from the old-fashioned chemists, men were made
+nascent; they were released from old ties; for good or evil they
+were ready for new associations.  The council carried them
+forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had reached their
+destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them back
+to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a
+harder one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic
+bombs had been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side
+of the human animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of
+the vital necessity for reconstruction. The litigious and trading
+spirits cowered together, scared at their own consequences; men
+thought twice before they sought mean advantages in the face of
+the unusual eagerness to realise new aspirations, and when at
+last the weeds revived again and 'claims' began to sprout, they
+sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed, of laws that
+pointed to the future instead of the past, and under the blazing
+sunshine of a transforming world.  A new literature, a new
+interpretation of history were springing into existence, a new
+teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in the young.
+The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research city
+for the English upon the Sussex downs by buying up a series of
+estates, was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made
+his demand for some preposterous compensation; the owner of the
+discredited Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the
+scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of a paper called
+The Cry for Justice, in which he duns the world for a hundred
+million pounds. That was the ingenuous Dass's idea of justice,
+that he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually
+because he had annexed the selvage of one of Holsten's
+discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his
+right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private
+hospital at Nice.  Both of these men would probably have ended
+their days enormously wealthy, and of course ennobled in the
+England of the opening twentieth century, and it is just this
+novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age.
+
+The new government early discovered the need of a universal
+education to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal
+rule. It made no wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and
+sectarian forms of religious profession that at that time divided
+the earth into a patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it left
+these organisations to make their peace with God in their own
+time; but it proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truth that
+sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had to be shown to
+all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all around the
+world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and
+the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was
+taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the
+salvation of the world from waste and contention was the common
+duty and occupation of all men and women. These things which are
+now the elementary commonplaces of human intercourse seemed to
+the councillors of Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim
+them, marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by doubt,
+that flushed the cheek and fired the eye.
+
+The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the
+hands of a committee of men and women, which did its work during
+the next few decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness.
+This educational committee was, and is, the correlative upon the
+mental and spiritual side of the redistribution committee. And
+prominent upon it, and indeed for a time quite dominating it, was
+a Russian named Karenin, who was singular in being a congenital
+cripple. His body was bent so that he walked with difficulty,
+suffered much pain as he grew older, and had at last to undergo
+two operations. The second killed him.  Already malformation,
+which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages so
+that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of
+the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world. 
+It had a curious effect upon Karenin's colleagues; their feeling
+towards him was mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that
+it needed usage rather than reason to overcome.  He had a strong
+face, with little bright brown eyes rather deeply sunken and a
+large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His skin was very yellow and
+wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all times an
+impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven him
+because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust
+through his being.  At the end of his life his personal prestige
+was very great.  To him far more than to any contemporary is it
+due that self-abnegation, self-identification with the world
+spirit, was made the basis of universal education. That general
+memorandum to the teachers which is the key-note of the modern
+educational system, was probably entirely his work.
+
+'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,' he wrote. 'That is
+the device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point
+of all we have to do.  It is a mistake to regard it as anything
+but a plain statement of fact.  It is the basis for your work.
+You have to teach self-forgetfulness, and everything else that
+you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end.
+Education is the release of man from self.  You have to widen the
+horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their
+curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge
+their sympathies. That is what you are for.  Under your guidance
+and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to
+shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and
+passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the
+universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened
+out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose. 
+And this that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously
+yourselves. Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill,
+every sort of service, love:  these are the means of salvation
+from that narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding
+preoccupation with self and egotistical relationships, which is
+hell for the individual, treason to the race, and exile from
+God....'
+
+Section 12
+
+As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one
+begins for the first time to see them clearly. From the
+perspectives of a new age one can look back upon the great and
+widening stream of literature with a complete understanding.
+Things link up that seemed disconnected, and things that were
+once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but factors in
+the statement of a gigantic problem.  An enormous bulk of the
+sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth
+centuries falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one
+sees it as a huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the
+conflict of human egotism and personal passion and narrow
+imaginations on the one hand, against the growing sense of wider
+necessities and a possible, more spacious life.
+
+That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire's
+Candide, for example, in which the desire for justice as well as
+happiness beats against human contrariety and takes refuge at
+last in a forced and inconclusive contentment with little things.
+Candide was but one of the pioneers of a literature of uneasy
+complaint that was presently an innumerable multitude of books.
+The novels more particularly of the nineteenth century, if one
+excludes the mere story-tellers from our consideration, witness
+to this uneasy realisation of changes that call for effort and of
+the lack of that effort.  In a thousand aspects, now tragically,
+now comically, now with a funny affectation of divine detachment,
+a countless host of witnesses tell their story of lives fretting
+between dreams and limitations.  Now one laughs, now one weeps,
+now one reads with a blank astonishment at this huge and almost
+unpremeditated record of how the growing human spirit, now
+warily, now eagerly, now furiously, and always, as it seems,
+unsuccessfully, tried to adapt itself to the maddening misfit of
+its patched and ancient garments. And always in these books as
+one draws nearer to the heart of the matter there comes a
+disconcerting evasion.  It was the fantastic convention of the
+time that a writer should not touch upon religion. To do so was
+to rouse the jealous fury of the great multitude of professional
+religious teachers.  It was permitted to state the discord, but
+it was forbidden to glance at any possible reconciliation.
+Religion was the privilege of the pulpit....
+
+It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It was
+ignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the
+discussion of business questions, it played a trivial and
+apologetic part in public affairs.  And this was done not out of
+contempt but respect. The hold of the old religious organisations
+upon men's respect was still enormous, so enormous that there
+seemed to be a quality of irreverence in applying religion to the
+developments of every day. This strange suspension of religion
+lasted over into the beginnings of the new age.  It was the clear
+vision of Marcus Karenin much more than any other contemporary
+influence which brought it back into the texture of human life. 
+He saw religion without hallucinations, without superstitious
+reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and air, as
+land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the
+Republic.  He saw that indeed it had already percolated away from
+the temples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought
+to imprison it, that it was already at work anonymously and
+obscurely in the universal acceptance of the greater state. He
+gave it clearer expression, rephrased it to the lights and
+perspectives of the new dawn....
+
+But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of
+the times it becomes evident as one reads them in their
+chronological order, so far as that is now ascertainable, that as
+one comes to the latter nineteenth and the earlier twentieth
+century the writers are much more acutely aware of secular change
+than their predecessors were. The earlier novelists tried to show
+'life as it is,' the latter showed life as it changes.  More and
+more of their characters are engaged in adaptation to change or
+suffering from the effects of world changes.  And as we come up
+to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of the
+everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is
+continually more manifest. Barnet's book, which has served us so
+well, is frankly a picture of the world coming about like a ship
+that sails into the wind. Our later novelists give a vast gallery
+of individual conflicts in which old habits and customs, limited
+ideas, ungenerous temperaments, and innate obsessions are pitted
+against this great opening out of life that has happened to us. 
+They tell us of the feelings of old people who have been wrenched
+away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to make
+peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still
+strange to them. They give us the discord between the opening
+egotisms of youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing
+social life. They tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to
+capture and cripple our souls, of romantic failures and tragical
+misconceptions of the trend of the world, of the spirit of
+adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how these serve the
+universal drift. And all their stories lead in the end either to
+happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster or salvation.  The
+clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more
+certainly do these novels tell of the possibility of salvation
+for all the world. For any road in life leads to religion for
+those upon it who will follow it far enough....
+
+It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former
+time that it should be an open question as it is to-day whether
+the world is wholly Christian or not Christian at all.  But
+assuredly we have the spirit, and as surely have we left many
+temporary forms behind. Christianity was the first expression of
+world religion, the first complete repudiation of tribalism and
+war and disputation. That it fell presently into the ways of more
+ancient rituals cannot alter that.  The common sense of mankind
+has toiled through two thousand years of chastening experience to
+find at last how sound a meaning attaches to the familiar phrases
+of the Christian faith. The scientific thinker as he widens out
+to the moral problems of the collective life, comes inevitably
+upon the words of Christ, and as inevitably does the Christian,
+as his thought grows clearer, arrive at the world republic.  As
+for the claims of the sects, as for the use of a name and
+successions, we live in a time that has shaken itself free from
+such claims and consistencies.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIFTH
+
+THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
+
+Section 1
+
+The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new
+station for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above
+the Sutlej Gorge, where it comes down out of Thibet.
+
+It is a place of such wildness and beauty as no other scenery in
+the world affords.  The granite terrace which runs round the four
+sides of the low block of laboratories looks out in every
+direction upon mountains.  Far below in the hidden depths of a
+shadowy blue cleft, the river pours down in its tumultuous
+passage to the swarming plains of India.  No sound of its roaring
+haste comes up to those serenities. Beyond that blue gulf, in
+which whole forests of giant deodars seem no more than small
+patches of moss, rise vast precipices of many-coloured rock,
+fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles. 
+These are the northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and
+snow which clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the
+culminating summits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest. 
+Here are cliffs of which no other land can show the like, and
+deep chasms in which Mt.  Blanc might be plunged and hidden. Here
+are icefields as big as inland seas on which the tumbled boulders
+lie so thickly that strange little flowers can bloom among them
+under the untempered sunshine.  To the northward, and blocking
+out any vision of the uplands of Thibet, rises that citadel of
+porcelain, that gothic pile, the Lio Porgyul, walls, towers, and
+peaks, a clear twelve thousand feet of veined and splintered rock
+above the river. And beyond it and eastward and westward rise
+peaks behind peaks, against the dark blue Himalayan sky.  Far
+away below to the south the clouds of the Indian rains pile up
+abruptly and are stayed by an invisible hand.
+
+Hither it was that with a dreamlike swiftness Karenin flew high
+over the irrigations of Rajputana and the towers and cupolas of
+the ultimate Delhi; and the little group of buildings, albeit the
+southward wall dropped nearly five hundred feet, seemed to him as
+he soared down to it like a toy lost among these mountain
+wildernesses. No road came up to this place; it was reached only
+by flight.
+
+His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted
+by his secretary clambered down through the wing fabric and made
+his way to the officials who came out to receive him.
+
+In this place, beyond infections and noise and any distractions,
+surgery had made for itself a house of research and a healing
+fastness. The building itself would have seemed very wonderful to
+eyes accustomed to the flimsy architecture of an age when power
+was precious. It was made of granite, already a little roughened
+on the outside by frost, but polished within and of a tremendous
+solidity. And in a honeycomb of subtly lit apartments, were the
+spotless research benches, the operating tables, the instruments
+of brass, and fine glass and platinum and gold.  Men and women
+came from all parts of the world for study or experimental
+research. They wore a common uniform of white and ate at long
+tables together, but the patients lived in an upper part of the
+buildings, and were cared for by nurses and skilled
+attendants....
+
+The first man to greet Karenin was Ciana, the scientific director
+of the institution.  Beside him was Rachel Borken, the chief
+organiser. 'You are tired?' she asked, and old Karenin shook his
+head.
+
+'Cramped,' he said.  'I have wanted to visit such a place as
+this.'
+
+He spoke as if he had no other business with them.
+
+There was a little pause.
+
+'How many scientific people have you got here now?' he asked.
+
+'Just three hundred and ninety-two,' said Rachel Borken.
+
+'And the patients and attendants and so on?'
+
+'Two thousand and thirty.'
+
+'I shall be a patient,' said Karenin.  'I shall have to be a
+patient. But I should like to see things first.  Presently I will
+be a patient.'
+
+'You will come to my rooms?' suggested Ciana.
+
+'And then I must talk to this doctor of yours,' said Karenin. 
+'But I would like to see a bit of this place and talk to some of
+your people before it comes to that.'
+
+He winced and moved forward.
+
+'I have left most of my work in order,' he said.
+
+'You have been working hard up to now?' asked Rachel Borken.
+
+'Yes. And now I have nothing more to do--and it seems strange....
+And it's a bother, this illness and having to come down to
+oneself. This doorway and the row of windows is well done; the
+gray granite and just the line of gold, and then those mountains
+beyond through that arch. It's very well done....'
+
+Section 2
+
+Karenin lay on the bed with a soft white rug about him, and
+Fowler, who was to be his surgeon sat on the edge of the bed and
+talked to him. An assistant was seated quietly in the shadow
+behind the bed. The examination had been made, and Karenin knew
+what was before him. He was tired but serene.
+
+'So I shall die,' he said, 'unless you operate?'
+
+Fowler assented.  'And then,' said Karenin, smiling, 'probably I
+shall die.'
+
+'Not certainly.'
+
+'Even if I do not die; shall I be able to work?'
+
+'There is just a chance....'
+
+'So firstly I shall probably die, and if I do not, then perhaps I
+shall be a useless invalid?'
+
+'I think if you live, you may be able to go on--as you do now.'
+
+'Well, then, I suppose I must take the risk of it. Yet couldn't
+you, Fowler, couldn't you drug me and patch me instead of all
+this--vivisection?  A few days of drugged and active life--and
+then the end?'
+
+Fowler thought.  'We are not sure enough yet to do things like
+that,' he said.
+
+'But a day is coming when you will be certain.'
+
+Fowler nodded.
+
+'You make me feel as though I was the last of
+deformity--Deformity is uncertainty--inaccuracy.  My body works
+doubtfully, it is not even sure that it will die or live.  I
+suppose the time is not far off when such bodies as mine will no
+longer be born into the world.'
+
+'You see,' said Fowler, after a little pause, 'it is necessary
+that spirits such as yours should be born into the world.'
+
+'I suppose,' said Karenin, 'that my spirit has had its use.  But
+if you think that is because my body is as it is I think you are
+mistaken. There is no peculiar virtue in defect.  I have always
+chafed against--all this.  If I could have moved more freely and
+lived a larger life in health I could have done more.  But some
+day perhaps you will be able to put a body that is wrong
+altogether right again. Your science is only beginning.  It's a
+subtler thing than physics and chemistry, and it takes longer to
+produce its miracles. And meanwhile a few more of us must die in
+patience.'
+
+'Fine work is being done and much of it,' said Fowler.  'I can
+say as much because I have nothing to do with it.  I can
+understand a lesson, appreciate the discoveries of abler men and
+use my hands, but those others, Pigou, Masterton, Lie, and the
+others, they are clearing the ground fast for the knowledge to
+come. Have you had time to follow their work?'
+
+Karenin shook his head.  'But I can imagine the scope of it,' he
+said.
+
+'We have so many men working now,' said Fowler.  'I suppose at
+present there must be at least a thousand thinking hard,
+observing, experimenting, for one who did so in nineteen
+hundred.'
+
+'Not counting those who keep the records?'
+
+'Not counting those.  Of course, the present indexing of research
+is in itself a very big work, and it is only now that we are
+getting it properly done.  But already we are feeling the benefit
+of that. Since it ceased to be a paid employment and became a
+devotion we have had only those people who obeyed the call of an
+aptitude at work upon these things.  Here--I must show you it
+to-day, because it will interest you--we have our copy of the
+encyclopaedic index--every week sheets are taken out and replaced
+by fresh sheets with new results that are brought to us by the
+aeroplanes of the Research Department.  It is an index of
+knowledge that grows continually, an index that becomes
+continually truer. There was never anything like it before.'
+
+'When I came into the education committee,' said Karenin, 'that
+index of human knowledge seemed an impossible thing. Research had
+produced a chaotic mountain of results, in a hundred languages
+and a thousand different types of publication. . . .' He smiled
+at his memories.  'How we groaned at the job!'
+
+'Already the ordering of that chaos is nearly done.  You shall
+see.'
+
+'I have been so busy with my own work----Yes, I shall be glad to
+see.'
+
+The patient regarded the surgeon for a time with interested eyes.
+
+'You work here always?' he asked abruptly.
+
+'No,' said Fowler.
+
+'But mostly you work here?'
+
+'I have worked about seven years out of the past ten. At times I
+go away--down there.  One has to.  At least I have to. There is a
+sort of grayness comes over all this, one feels hungry for life,
+real, personal passionate life, love-making, eating and drinking
+for the fun of the thing, jostling crowds, having adventures,
+laughter--above all laughter----'
+
+'Yes,' said Karenin understandingly.
+
+'And then one day, suddenly one thinks of these high mountains
+again....'
+
+'That is how I would have lived, if it had not been for
+my--defects,' said Karenin.  'Nobody knows but those who have
+borne it the exasperation of abnormality.  It will be good when
+you have nobody alive whose body cannot live the wholesome
+everyday life, whose spirit cannot come up into these high places
+as it wills.'
+
+'We shall manage that soon,' said Fowler.
+
+'For endless generations man has struggled upward against the
+indignities of his body--and the indignities of his soul. Pains,
+incapacities, vile fears, black moods, despairs.  How well I've
+known them.  They've taken more time than all your holidays. It
+is true, is it not, that every man is something of a cripple and
+something of a beast?  I've dipped a little deeper than most;
+that's all.  It's only now when he has fully learnt the truth of
+that, that he can take hold of himself to be neither beast nor
+cripple. Now that he overcomes his servitude to his body, he can
+for the first time think of living the full life of his body....
+Before another generation dies you'll have the thing in hand.
+You'll do as you please with the old Adam and all the vestiges
+from the brutes and reptiles that lurk in his body and spirit.
+Isn't that so?'
+
+'You put it boldly,' said Fowler.
+
+Karenin laughed cheerfully at his caution.... 'When,' asked
+Karenin suddenly, 'when will you operate?'
+
+'The day after to-morrow,' said Fowler.  'For a day I want you to
+drink and eat as I shall prescribe.  And you may think and talk
+as you please.'
+
+'I should like to see this place.'
+
+'You shall go through it this afternoon.  I will have two men
+carry you in a litter.  And to-morrow you shall lie out upon the
+terrace. Our mountains here are the most beautiful in the
+world....'
+
+Section 3
+
+The next morning Karenin got up early and watched the sun rise
+over the mountains, and breakfasted lightly, and then young
+Gardener, his secretary, came to consult him upon the spending of
+his day. Would he care to see people?  Or was this gnawing pain
+within him too much to permit him to do that?
+
+'I'd like to talk,' said Karenin.  'There must be all sorts of
+lively-minded people here.  Let them come and gossip with me. It
+will distract me--and I can't tell you how interesting it makes
+everything that is going on to have seen the dawn of one's own
+last day.'
+
+'Your last day!'
+
+'Fowler will kill me.'
+
+'But he thinks not.'
+
+'Fowler will kill me.  If he does not he will not leave very much
+of me. So that this is my last day anyhow, the days afterwards if
+they come at all to me, will be refuse.  I know....'
+
+Gardener was about to speak when Karenin went on again.
+
+'I hope he kills me, Gardener.  Don't be--old-fashioned. The
+thing I am most afraid of is that last rag of life. I may just go
+on--a scarred salvage of suffering stuff. And then--all the
+things I have hidden and kept down or discounted or set right
+afterwards will get the better of me. I shall be peevish.  I may
+lose my grip upon my own egotism. It's never been a very firm
+grip.  No, no, Gardener, don't say that! You know better, you've
+had glimpses of it.  Suppose I came through on the other side of
+this affair, belittled, vain, and spiteful, using the prestige I
+have got among men by my good work in the past just to serve some
+small invalid purpose....'
+
+He was silent for a time, watching the mists among the distant
+precipices change to clouds of light, and drift and dissolve
+before the searching rays of the sunrise.
+
+'Yes,' he said at last, 'I am afraid of these anaesthetics and
+these fag ends of life.  It's life we are all afraid of.
+Death!--nobody minds just death.  Fowler is clever--but some day
+surgery will know its duty better and not be so anxious just to
+save something . . . provided only that it quivers. I've tried to
+hold my end up properly and do my work. After Fowler has done
+with me I am certain I shall be unfit for work--and what else is
+there for me? . . . I know I shall not be fit for work....
+
+'I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing
+thread of vitality.... I know it for the splendid thing it is--I
+who have been a diseased creature from the beginning. I know it
+well enough not to confuse it with its husks. Remember that,
+Gardener, if presently my heart fails me and I despair, and if I
+go through a little phase of pain and ingratitude and dark
+forgetfulness before the end.... Don't believe what I may say at
+the last.... If the fabric is good enough the selvage doesn't
+matter. It can't matter.  So long as you are alive you are just
+the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all your
+life from the first moment to the last....'
+
+Section 4
+
+Presently, in accordance with his wish, people came to talk to
+him, and he could forget himself again.  Rachel Borken sat for a
+long time with him and talked chiefly of women in the world, and
+with her was a girl named Edith Haydon who was already very well
+known as a cytologist.  And several of the younger men who were
+working in the place and a patient named Kahn, a poet, and
+Edwards, a designer of plays and shows, spent some time with him. 
+The talk wandered from point to point and came back upon itself,
+and became now earnest and now trivial as the chance suggestions
+determined. But soon afterwards Gardener wrote down notes of
+things he remembered, and it is possible to put together again
+the outlook of Karenin upon the world and how he thought and felt
+about many of the principal things in life.
+
+'Our age,' he said, 'has been so far an age of scene-shifting. We
+have been preparing a stage, clearing away the setting of a drama
+that was played out and growing tiresome.... If I could but sit
+out the first few scenes of the new spectacle....
+
+'How encumbered the world had become!  It was ailing as I am
+ailing with a growth of unmeaning things.  It was entangled,
+feverish, confused. It was in sore need of release, and I suppose
+that nothing less than the violence of those bombs could have
+released it and made it a healthy world again.  I suppose they
+were necessary. Just as everything turns to evil in a fevered
+body so everything seemed turning to evil in those last years of
+the old time. Everywhere there were obsolete organisations
+seizing upon all the new fine things that science was giving to
+the world, nationalities, all sorts of political bodies, the
+churches and sects, proprietorship, seizing upon those treat
+powers and limitless possibilities and turning them to evil uses. 
+And they would not suffer open speech, they would not permit of
+education, they would let no one be educated to the needs of the
+new time.... You who are younger cannot imagine the mixture of
+desperate hope and protesting despair in which we who could
+believe in the possibilities of science lived in those years
+before atomic energy came....
+
+'It was not only that the mass of people would not attend, would
+not understand, but that those who did understand lacked the
+power of real belief.  They said the things, they saw the things,
+and the things meant nothing to them....
+
+'I have been reading some old papers lately.  It is wonderful how
+our fathers bore themselves towards science.  They hated it. They
+feared it.  They permitted a few scientific men to exist and
+work--a pitiful handful.... "Don't find out anything about us,"
+they said to them; "don't inflict vision upon us, spare our
+little ways of life from the fearful shaft of understanding. But
+do tricks for us, little limited tricks.  Give us cheap lighting.
+And cure us of certain disagreeable things, cure us of cancer,
+cure us of consumption, cure our colds and relieve us after
+repletion...." We have changed all that, Gardener.  Science is no
+longer our servant. We know it for something greater than our
+little individual selves. It is the awakening mind of the race,
+and in a little while----In a little while----I wish indeed I
+could watch for that little while, now that the curtain has
+risen....
+
+'While I lie here they are clearing up what is left of the bombs
+in London,' he said.  'Then they are going to repair the ruins
+and make it all as like as possible to its former condition
+before the bombs fell. Perhaps they will dig out the old house in
+St John's Wood to which my father went after his expulsion from
+Russia.... That London of my memories seems to me like a place in
+another world. For you younger people it must seem like a place
+that could never have existed.'
+
+'Is there much left standing?' asked Edith Haydon.
+
+'Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and
+north-west, they say; and most of the bridges and large areas of
+dock. Westminster, which held most of the government offices,
+suffered badly from the small bomb that destroyed the Parliament,
+there are very few traces of the old thoroughfare of Whitehall or
+the Government region thereabout, but there are plentiful
+drawings to scale of its buildings, and the great hole in the
+east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor district and
+very like the north and the south. . . . It will be possible to
+reconstruct most of it.  . . . It is wanted. Already it becomes
+difficult to recall the old time--even for us who saw it.'
+
+'It seems very distant to me,' said the girl.
+
+'It was an unwholesome world,' reflected Karenin.  'I seem to
+remember everybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They
+were ill.  They were sick with confusion.  Everybody was anxious
+about money and everybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate
+a queer mixture of foods, either too much or too little, and at
+odd hours.  One sees how ill they were by their advertisements.
+All this new region of London they are opening up now is
+plastered with advertisements of pills.  Everybody must have been
+taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand they have
+found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and
+unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill
+and tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying
+age. They are equally strange to us.  People's skins must have
+been in a vile state.  Very few people were properly washed; they
+carried the filth of months on their clothes.  All the clothes
+they wore were old clothes; our way of pulping our clothes again
+after a week or so of wear would have seemed fantastic to them.
+Their clothing hardly bears thinking about.  And the congestion
+of them! Everybody was jostling against everybody in those awful
+towns. In an uproar.  People were run over and crushed by the
+hundred; every year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed
+or disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it was worse; people
+used to fall dead for want of air in the crowded ways.  The
+irritation of London, internal and external, must have been
+maddening.  It was a maddened world. It is like thinking of a
+sick child.  One has the same effect of feverish urgencies and
+acute irrational disappointments.
+
+'All history,' he said, 'is a record of a childhood....
+
+'And yet not exactly a childhood.  There is something clean and
+keen about even a sick child--and something touching. But so much
+of the old times makes one angry.  So much they did seems grossly
+stupid, obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very
+opposite to being fresh and young.
+
+'I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of
+nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of
+blood and iron.  And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man.
+Indeed, that is what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who
+ever became great.  I looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost
+froggish face, with projecting eyes and a thick moustache to hide
+a poor mouth. He aimed at nothing but Germany, Germany
+emphasised, indurated, enlarged; Germany and his class in
+Germany; beyond that he had no ideas, he was inaccessible to
+ideas; his mind never rose for a recorded instant above a
+bumpkin's elaborate cunning.  And he was the most influential man
+in the world, in the whole world, no man ever left so deep a mark
+on it, because everywhere there were gross men to resonate to the
+heavy notes he emitted.  He trampled on ten thousand lovely
+things, and a kind of malice in these louts made it pleasant to
+them to see him trample.  No--he was no child; the dull, national
+aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness. Childhood is
+promise.  He was survival.
+
+'All Europe offered its children to him, it sacrificed education,
+art, happiness and all its hopes of future welfare to follow the
+clatter of his sabre.  The monstrous worship of that old fool's
+"blood and iron" passed all round the earth.  Until the atomic
+bombs burnt our way to freedom again. . . .'
+
+'One thinks of him now as one thinks of the megatherium,' said
+one of the young men.
+
+'From first to last mankind made three million big guns and a
+hundred thousand complicated great ships for no other purpose but
+war.'
+
+'Were there no sane men in those days,' asked the young man, 'to
+stand against that idolatry?'
+
+'In a state of despair,' said Edith Haydon.
+
+'He is so far off--and there are men alive still who were alive
+when Bismarck died!' . . . said the young man....
+
+Section 5
+
+'And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck,' said Karenin,
+following his own thoughts.  'You see, men belong to their own
+age; we stand upon a common stock of thought and we fancy we
+stand upon the ground. I met a pleasant man the other day, a
+Maori, whose great-grandfather was a cannibal.  It chanced he had
+a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the two were marvellously
+alike.  One felt that a little juggling with time and either
+might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a
+stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one. 
+The world also has its moods. Think of the mental food of
+Bismarck's childhood; the humiliations of Napoleon's victories,
+the crowded, crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations....
+Everybody in those days, wise or foolish, believed that the
+division of the world under a multitude of governments was
+inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of years more. 
+It WAS inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who had denied
+that inevitability publicly would have been counted--oh! a SILLY
+fellow.  Old Bismarck was only just a little--forcible, on the
+lines of the accepted ideas.  That is all. He thought that since
+there had to be national governments he would make one that was
+strong at home and invincible abroad. Because he had fed with a
+kind of rough appetite upon what we can see now were very stupid
+ideas, that does not make him a stupid man. We've had advantages;
+we've had unity and collectivism blasted into our brains.  Where
+should we be now but for the grace of science? I should have been
+an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden member of the Russian
+Intelligenza, a conspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin. You, my
+dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.'
+
+'NEVER,' said Edith stoutly....
+
+For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the
+young people gibed at each other across the smiling old
+administrator, and then presently one of the young scientific men
+gave things a new turn. He spoke like one who was full to the
+brim.
+
+'You know, sir, I've a fancy--it is hard to prove such
+things--that civilisation was very near disaster when the atomic
+bombs came banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and
+no induced radio-activity, the world would have--smashed--much as
+it did. Only instead of its being a smash that opened a way to
+better things, it might have been a smash without a recovery.  It
+is part of my business to understand economics, and from that
+point of view the century before Holsten was just a hundred
+years' crescendo of waste. Only the extreme individualism of that
+period, only its utter want of any collective understanding or
+purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used up
+material--insanely.  They had got through three-quarters of all
+the coal in the planet, they had used up most of the oil, they
+had swept away their forests, and they were running short of tin
+and copper. Their wheat areas were getting weary and populous,
+and many of the big towns had so lowered the water level of their
+available hills that they suffered a drought every summer.  The
+whole system was rushing towards bankruptcy.  And they were
+spending every year vaster and vaster amounts of power and energy
+upon military preparations, and continually expanding the debt of
+industry to capital. The system was already staggering when
+Holsten began his researches. So far as the world in general went
+there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry.  They had
+no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there
+was a need to be saved. They could not, they would not, see the
+gulf beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at
+large that any research at all was in progress.  And as I say,
+sir, if that line of escape hadn't opened, before now there might
+have been a crash, revolution, panic, social disintegration,
+famine, and--it is conceivable--complete disorder. . . . The
+rails might have rusted on the disused railways by now, the
+telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big liners dropped
+into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted cities become
+the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We might have been
+brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may smile,
+but that had happened before in human history. The world is still
+studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric
+bands made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of
+Hadrian became a fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome
+against the Colosseum.... Had all that possibility of reaction
+ended so certainly in 1940?  Is it all so very far away even
+now?'
+
+'It seems far enough away now,' said Edith Haydon.
+
+'But forty years ago?'
+
+'No,' said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, 'I think you
+underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of
+the twentieth century.  Officially, I know, politically, that
+intelligence didn't tell--but it was there.  And I question your
+hypothesis. I doubt if that discovery could have been delayed. 
+There is a kind of inevitable logic now in the progress of
+research.  For a hundred years and more thought and science have
+been going their own way regardless of the common events of life. 
+You see--they have got loose. If there had been no Holsten there
+would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had not come
+in one year it would have come in another.  In decadent Rome the
+march of science had scarcely begun.... Nineveh, Babylon, Athens,
+Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in
+association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which
+inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the
+way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly
+begun.... The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth
+and twentieth centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the
+former civilisation flaring up about the beginnings of the new. 
+Which we serve.... 'Man lives in the dawn for ever,' said
+Karenin.  'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning.  It
+begins everlastingly.  Each step seems vaster than the last, and
+does but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of
+ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago,
+is already the commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream
+of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather to a head
+beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here seem
+but little things....'
+
+Section 6
+
+About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept
+among his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he
+awoke and some tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small
+difficulty in connection with the Moravian schools in the
+Labrador country and in Greenland that Gardener knew would
+interest him. He remained alone for a little while after that,
+and then the two women came to him again.  Afterwards Edwards and
+Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon love and the place
+of women in the renascent world.  The cloudbanks of India lay
+under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full upon
+the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast
+splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild
+rush of snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a
+wet thread into the gulfs below, and cease....
+
+Section 7
+
+For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet,
+talked of passionate love.  He said that passionate, personal
+love had been the abiding desire of humanity since ever humanity
+had begun, and now only was it becoming a possible experience. It
+had been a dream that generation after generation had pursued,
+that always men had lost on the verge of attainment. To most of
+those who had sought it obstinately it had brought tragedy. Now,
+lifted above sordid distresses, men and women might hope for
+realised and triumphant love.  This age was the Dawn of Love....
+
+Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these
+things. Against that continued silence Kahn's voice presently
+seemed to beat and fail.  He had begun by addressing Karenin, but
+presently he was including Edith Haydon and Rachel Borken in his
+appeal. Rachel listened silently; Edith watched Karenin and very
+deliberately avoided Kahn's eyes.
+
+'I know,' said Karenin at last, 'that many people are saying this
+sort of thing.  I know that there is a vast release of
+love-making in the world.  This great wave of decoration and
+elaboration that has gone about the world, this Efflorescence,
+has of course laid hold of that. I know that when you say that
+the world is set free, you interpret that to mean that the world
+is set free for love-making. Down there,--under the clouds, the
+lovers foregather.  I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical
+songs, in which you represent this old hard world dissolving into
+a luminous haze of love--sexual love.... I don't think you are
+right or true in that.  You are a young, imaginative man, and you
+see life--ardently--with the eyes of youth. But the power that
+has brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled
+blackness of the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense
+and awful future of our race, is riper and deeper and greater
+than any such emotions....
+
+'All through my life--it has been a necessary part of my work--I
+have had to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles
+that perfect freedom and almost limitless power will put to the
+soul of our race. I can see now, all over the world, a beautiful
+ecstasy of waste; "Let us sing and rejoice and be lovely and
+wonderful." . . . The orgy is only beginning, Kahn.... It was
+inevitable--but it is not the end of mankind....
+
+'Think what we are.  It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of
+time that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it
+forgot itself as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts,
+its moments, were born and wondered and played and desired and
+hungered and grew weary and died.  Incalculable successions of
+vision, visions of sunlit jungle, river wilderness, wild forest,
+eager desire, beating hearts, soaring wings and creeping terror
+flamed hotly and then were as though they had never been. Life
+was an uneasiness across which lights played and vanished. And
+then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a question and
+hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that dies
+not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind,
+a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to
+the stars.... Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of,
+this sex, are but the elementals of life out of which we have
+arisen. All these elementals, I grant you, have to be provided
+for, dealt with, satisfied, but all these things have to be left
+behind.'
+
+'But Love,' said Kahn.
+
+'I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons. And
+that is what you mean, Kahn.'
+
+Karenin shook his head.  'You cannot stay at the roots and climb
+the tree,' he said....
+
+'No,' he said after a pause, 'this sexual excitement, this love
+story, is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far
+literature and art and sentiment and all our emotional forms have
+been almost altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights
+and hopes, they have all turned on that marvellous discovery of
+the love interest, but life lengthens out now and the mind of
+adult humanity detaches itself.  Poets who used to die at thirty
+live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn!  There are endless years
+yet for you--and all full of learning.... We carry an excessive
+burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free
+ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it.  We have learnt
+in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex,
+which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our
+dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges
+through human life. You poets, you young people want to turn it
+to delight. Turn it to delight.  That may be one way out.  In a
+little while, if you have any brains worth thinking about, you
+will be satisfied, and then you will come up here to the greater
+things.  The old religions and their new offsets want still, I
+see, to suppress all these things. Let them suppress.  If they
+can suppress.  In their own people. Either road will bring you
+here at last to the eternal search for knowledge and the great
+adventure of power.'
+
+'But incidentally,' said Rachel Borken; 'incidentally you have
+half of humanity, you have womankind, very much specialised
+for--for this love and reproduction that is so much less needed
+than it was.'
+
+'Both sexes are specialised for love and reproduction,' said
+Karenin.
+
+'But the women carry the heavier burden.'
+
+'Not in their imaginations,' said Edwards.
+
+'And surely,' said Kahn, 'when you speak of love as a
+phase--isn't it a necessary phase?  Quite apart from reproduction
+the love of the sexes is necessary.  Isn't it love, sexual love,
+which has released the imagination?  Without that stir, without
+that impulse to go out from ourselves, to be reckless of
+ourselves and wonderful, would our lives be anything more than
+the contentment of the stalled ox?'
+
+'The key that opens the door,' said Karenin, 'is not the goal of
+the journey.'
+
+'But women!' cried Rachel.  'Here we are!  What is our future--as
+women? Is it only that we have unlocked the doors of the
+imagination for you men?  Let us speak of this question now.  It
+is a thing constantly in my thoughts, Karenin.  What do you think
+of us? You who must have thought so much of these perplexities.'
+
+Karenin seemed to weigh his words.  He spoke very deliberately.
+'I do not care a rap about your future--as women.  I do not care
+a rap about the future of men--as males.  I want to destroy these
+peculiar futures.  I care for your future as intelligences, as
+parts of and contribution to the universal mind of the race.
+Humanity is not only naturally over-specialised in these matters,
+but all its institutions, its customs, everything, exaggerate,
+intensify this difference.  I want to unspecialise women.  No new
+idea. Plato wanted exactly that.  I do not want to go on as we go
+now, emphasising this natural difference; I do not deny it, but I
+want to reduce it and overcome it.'
+
+'And--we remain women,' said Rachel Borken.  'Need you remain
+thinking of yourselves as women?'
+
+'It is forced upon us,' said Edith Haydon.
+
+'I do not think a woman becomes less of a woman because she
+dresses and works like a man,' said Edwards.  'You women here, I
+mean you scientific women, wear white clothing like the men,
+twist up your hair in the simplest fashion, go about your work as
+though there was only one sex in the world.  You are just as much
+women, even if you are not so feminine, as the fine ladies down
+below there in the plains who dress for excitement and display,
+whose only thoughts are of lovers, who exaggerate every
+difference.... Indeed we love you more.'
+
+'But we go about our work,' said Edith Haydon.
+
+'So does it matter?' asked Rachel.
+
+'If you go about your work and if the men go about their work
+then for Heaven's sake be as much woman as you wish,' said
+Karenin.  'When I ask you to unspecialise, I am thinking not of
+the abolition of sex, but the abolition of the irksome,
+restricting, obstructive obsession with sex.  It may be true that
+sex made society, that the first society was the sex-cemented
+family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations, the
+first laws sexual taboos.  Until a few years ago morality meant
+proper sexual behaviour.  Up to within a few years of us the
+chief interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule
+a woman and her children and the chief concern of a woman was to
+get a man to do that.  That was the drama, that was life. And the
+jealousy of these demands was the master motive in the world. You
+said, Kahn, a little while ago that sexual love was the key that
+let one out from the solitude of self, but I tell you that so far
+it has only done so in order to lock us all up again in a
+solitude of two.... All that may have been necessary but it is
+necessary no longer.  All that has changed and changes still very
+swiftly. Your future, Rachel, AS WOMEN, is a diminishing future.'
+
+'Karenin?' asked Rachel, 'do you mean that women are to become
+men?'
+
+'Men and women have to become human beings.'
+
+'You would abolish women?  But, Karenin, listen!  There is more
+than sex in this.  Apart from sex we are different from you. We
+take up life differently.  Forget we are--females, Karenin, and
+still we are a different sort of human being with a different
+use. In some things we are amazingly secondary.  Here am I in
+this place because of my trick of management, and Edith is here
+because of her patient, subtle hands.  That does not alter the
+fact that nearly the whole body of science is man made; that does
+not alter the fact that men do so predominatingly make history,
+that you could nearly write a complete history of the world
+without mentioning a woman's name. And on the other hand we have
+a gift of devotion, of inspiration, a distinctive power for truly
+loving beautiful things, a care for life and a peculiar keen
+close eye for behaviour. You know men are blind beside us in
+these last matters. You know they are restless--and fitful.  We
+have a steadfastness. We may never draw the broad outlines nor
+discover the new paths, but in the future isn't there a
+confirming and sustaining and supplying role for us?  As
+important, perhaps, as yours?  Equally important. We hold the
+world up, Karenin, though you may have raised it.'
+
+'You know very well, Rachel, that I believe as you believe. I am
+not thinking of the abolition of woman.  But I do want to
+abolish--the heroine, the sexual heroine.  I want to abolish the
+woman whose support is jealousy and whose gift possession.  I
+want to abolish the woman who can be won as a prize or locked up
+as a delicious treasure. And away down there the heroine flares
+like a divinity.'
+
+'In America,' said Edwards, 'men are fighting duels over the
+praises of women and holding tournaments before Queens of
+Beauty.'
+
+'I saw a beautiful girl in Lahore,' said Kahn, 'she sat under a
+golden canopy like a goddess, and three fine men, armed and
+dressed like the ancient paintings, sat on steps below her to
+show their devotion. And they wanted only her permission to fight
+for her.'
+
+'That is the men's doing,' said Edith Haydon.
+
+'I SAID,' cried Edwards, 'that man's imagination was more
+specialised for sex than the whole being of woman.  What woman
+would do a thing like that?  Women do but submit to it or take
+advantage of it.'
+
+'There is no evil between men and women that is not a common
+evil,' said Karenin.  'It is you poets, Kahn, with your love
+songs which turn the sweet fellowship of comrades into this
+woman-centred excitement. But there is something in women, in
+many women, which responds to these provocations; they succumb to
+a peculiarly self-cultivating egotism. They become the subjects
+of their own artistry.  They develop and elaborate themselves as
+scarcely any man would ever do. They LOOK for golden canopies. 
+And even when they seem to react against that, they may do it
+still.  I have been reading in the old papers of the movements to
+emancipate women that were going on before the discovery of
+atomic force.  These things which began with a desire to escape
+from the limitations and servitude of sex, ended in an inflamed
+assertion of sex, and women more heroines than ever. Helen of
+Holloway was at last as big a nuisance in her way as Helen of
+Troy, and so long as you think of yourselves as women'--he held
+out a finger at Rachel and smiled gently--'instead of thinking of
+yourselves as intelligent beings, you will be in danger
+of--Helenism.  To think of yourselves as women is to think of
+yourselves in relation to men.  You can't escape that
+consequence. You have to learn to think of yourselves--for our
+sakes and your own sakes--in relation to the sun and stars.  You
+have to cease to be our adventure, Rachel, and come with us upon
+our adventures. ...' He waved his hand towards the dark sky above
+the mountain crests.
+
+Section 8
+
+'These questions are the next questions to which research will
+bring us answers,' said Karenin.  'While we sit here and talk
+idly and inexactly of what is needed and what may be, there are
+hundreds of keen-witted men and women who are working these
+things out, dispassionately and certainly, for the love of
+knowledge. The next sciences to yield great harvests now will be
+psychology and neural physiology.  These perplexities of the
+situation between man and woman and the trouble with the
+obstinacy of egotism, these are temporary troubles, the issue of
+our own times. Suddenly all these differences that seem so fixed
+will dissolve, all these incompatibles will run together, and we
+shall go on to mould our bodies and our bodily feelings and
+personal reactions as boldly as we begin now to carve mountains
+and set the seas in their places and change the currents of the
+wind.'
+
+'It is the next wave,' said Fowler, who had come out upon the
+terrace and seated himself silently behind Karenin's chair.
+
+'Of course, in the old days,' said Edwards, 'men were tied to
+their city or their country, tied to the homes they owned or the
+work they did....'
+
+'I do not see,' said Karenin, 'that there is any final limit to
+man's power of self-modification.
+
+'There is none,' said Fowler, walking forward and sitting down
+upon the parapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his
+face. 'There is no absolute limit to either knowledge or
+power.... I hope you do not tire yourself talking.'
+
+'I am interested,' said Karenin.  'I suppose in a little while
+men will cease to be tired.  I suppose in a little time you will
+give us something that will hurry away the fatigue products and
+restore our jaded tissues almost at once.  This old machine may
+be made to run without slacking or cessation.'
+
+'That is possible, Karenin.  But there is much to learn.'
+
+'And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don't
+you think there will be some way of saving these?'
+
+Fowler nodded assent.
+
+'And then sleep again.  When man with his blazing lights made an
+end to night in his towns and houses--it is only a hundred years
+or so ago that that was done--then it followed he would presently
+resent his eight hours of uselessness.  Shan't we presently take
+a tabloid or lie in some field of force that will enable us to do
+with an hour or so of slumber and rise refreshed again?'
+
+'Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction.'
+
+'And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the
+system that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you
+lengthen and lengthen the years that stretch between the
+passionate tumults of youth and the contractions of senility. Man
+who used to weaken and die as his teeth decayed now looks forward
+to a continually lengthening, continually fuller term of years.
+And all those parts of him that once gathered evil against him,
+the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous corners of his
+body, you know better and better how to deal with. You carve his
+body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred. The
+psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and
+remove bad complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures
+and broaden ideas.  So that we are becoming more and more capable
+of transmitting what we have learnt and preserving it for the
+race. The race, the racial wisdom, science, gather power
+continually to subdue the individual man to its own end.  Is that
+not so?'
+
+Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of
+new work that was in progress in India and Russia.  'And how is
+it with heredity?' asked Karenin.
+
+Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged
+by the genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the
+laws of inheritance and how the sex of children and the
+complexions and many of the parental qualities could be
+determined.
+
+'He can actually DO----?'
+
+'It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,' said
+Fowler, 'but to-morrow it will be practicable.'
+
+'You see,' cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and
+Edith, 'while we have been theorising about men and women, here
+is science getting the power for us to end that old dispute for
+ever. If woman is too much for us, we'll reduce her to a
+minority, and if we do not like any type of men and women, we'll
+have no more of it.  These old bodies, these old animal
+limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross
+inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled
+cocoon from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these
+things I feel like that--like a wet, crawling new moth that still
+fears to spread its wings. Because where do these things take
+us?'
+
+'Beyond humanity,' said Kahn.
+
+'No,' said Karenin.  'We can still keep our feet upon the earth
+that made us.  But the air no longer imprisons us, this round
+planet is no longer chained to us like the ball of a galley
+slave....
+
+'In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange
+gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar
+gases and all the fearful strangenesses of space will be
+venturing out from this earth. This ball will be no longer enough
+for us; our spirit will reach out.... Cannot you see how that
+little argosy will go glittering up into the sky, twinkling and
+glittering smaller and smaller until the blue swallows it up. 
+They may succeed out there; they may perish, but other men will
+follow them....
+
+'It is as if a great window opened,' said Karenin.
+
+Section 9
+
+As the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went
+up upon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better
+watch the sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming
+of the afterglow. They were joined by two of the surgeons from
+the laboratories below, and presently by a nurse who brought
+Karenin refreshment in a thin glass cup.  It was a cloudless,
+windless evening under the deep blue sky, and far away to the
+north glittered two biplanes on the way to the observatories on
+Everest, two hundred miles distant over the precipices to the
+east.  The little group of people watched them pass over the
+mountains and vanish into the blue, and then for a time they
+talked of the work that the observatory was doing. From that they
+passed to the whole process of research about the world, and so
+Karenin's thoughts returned again to the mind of the world and
+the great future that was opening upon man's imagination. He
+asked the surgeons many questions upon the detailed possibilities
+of their science, and he was keenly interested and excited by the
+things they told him.  And as they talked the sun touched the
+mountains, and became very swiftly a blazing and indented
+hemisphere of liquid flame and sank.
+
+Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of
+incandescence, and shaded his eyes and became silent.
+
+Presently he gave a little start.
+
+'What?' asked Rachel Borken.
+
+'I had forgotten,' he said.
+
+'What had you forgotten?'
+
+'I had forgotten about the operation to-morrow. I have been so
+interested as Man to-day that I have nearly forgotten Marcus
+Karenin.  Marcus Karenin must go under your knife to-morrow,
+Fowler, and very probably Marcus Karenin will die.'  He raised
+his slightly shrivelled hand. 'It does not matter, Fowler.  It
+scarcely matters even to me. For indeed is it Karenin who has
+been sitting here and talking; is it not rather a common mind,
+Fowler, that has played about between us?  You and I and all of
+us have added thought to thought, but the thread is neither you
+nor me.  What is true we all have; when the individual has
+altogether brought himself to the test and winnowing of
+expression, then the individual is done. I feel as though I had
+already been emptied out of that little vessel, that Marcus
+Karenin, which in my youth held me so tightly and completely.
+Your beauty, dear Edith, and your broad brow, dear Rachel, and
+you, Fowler, with your firm and skilful hands, are now almost as
+much to me as this hand that beats the arm of my chair.  And as
+little me. And the spirit that desires to know, the spirit that
+resolves to do, that spirit that lives and has talked in us
+to-day, lived in Athens, lived in Florence, lives on, I know, for
+ever....
+
+'And you, old Sun, with your sword of flame searing these poor
+eyes of Marcus for the last time of all, beware of me!  You think
+I die--and indeed I am only taking off one more coat to get at
+you. I have threatened you for ten thousand years, and soon I
+warn you I shall be coming.  When I am altogether stripped and my
+disguises thrown away.  Very soon now, old Sun, I shall launch
+myself at you, and I shall reach you and I shall put my foot on
+your spotted face and tug you about by your fiery locks. One step
+I shall take to the moon, and then I shall leap at you. I've
+talked to you before, old Sun, I've talked to you a million
+times, and now I am beginning to remember.  Yes--long ago, long
+ago, before I had stripped off a few thousand generations, dust
+now and forgotten, I was a hairy savage and I pointed my hand at
+you and--clearly I remember it!--I saw you in a net. Have you
+forgotten that, old Sun? . . .
+
+'Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the
+individual that have held me dispersed so long.  I gather my
+billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common
+purpose. Well may you slink down behind the mountains from me,
+well may you cower....' 
+
+Section 10
+
+Karenin desired that he might dream alone for a little while
+before he returned to the cell in which he was to sleep. He was
+given relief for a pain that began to trouble him and wrapped
+warmly about with furs, for a great coldness was creeping over
+all things, and so they left him, and he sat for a long time
+watching the afterglow give place to the darkness of night.
+
+It seemed to those who had to watch over him unobtrusively lest
+he should be in want of any attention, that he mused very deeply.
+
+The white and purple peaks against the golden sky sank down into
+cold, blue remoteness, glowed out again and faded again, and the
+burning cressets of the Indian stars, that even the moonrise
+cannot altogether quench, began their vigil.  The moon rose
+behind the towering screen of dark precipices to the east, and
+long before it emerged above these, its slanting beams had filled
+the deep gorges below with luminous mist and turned the towers
+and pinnacles of Lio Porgyul to a magic dreamcastle of radiance
+and wonder....
+
+Came a great uprush of ghostly light above the black rim of
+rocks, and then like a bubble that is blown and detaches itself
+the moon floated off clear into the unfathomable dark sky....
+
+And then Karenin stood up.  He walked a few paces along the
+terrace and remained for a time gazing up at that great silver
+disc, that silvery shield that must needs be man's first conquest
+in outer space....
+
+Presently he turned about and stood with his hands folded behind
+him, looking at the northward stars. . . .
+
+At length he went to his own cell.  He lay down there and slept
+peacefully till the morning.  And early in the morning they came
+to him and the anaesthetic was given him and the operation
+performed.
+
+It was altogether successful, but Karenin was weak and he had to
+lie very still; and about seven days later a blood clot detached
+itself from the healing scar and travelled to his heart, and he
+died in an instant in the night.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The World Set Free, by H.G. Wells
+
diff --git a/old/old/twsfr10.zip b/old/old/twsfr10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d5d24b9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/twsfr10.zip