The World Set Free .............................................................................................................................................1

H.G. Wells...............................................................................................................................................1

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. 1956or for that matter 2056may 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

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 mindfor 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 today'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 worldwide 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

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

THE history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the toolusing,

firemaking 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 setback 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

roughhewn flint or a firepointed 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 subtropical river valleys would you have found the

He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led. He fled the cavebear 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,

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 himis 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 fooduntil

sometimes the neglected grassseed sprouted again and gave a first hint of agriculture.

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 squattingplace 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 restingplace amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his

brother that once indeed he had done soat least that some one had done sohe mixed that perhaps with

another dream almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith began

fictionpointing a way to achievementand 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 storyteller

brighteyed 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

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 today, Power that could make his every conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the

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

seedtime 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

selfconcentration 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, lawmaking,

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

farreaching 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

KasiriHind. 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

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 slowrapid 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 southeastern 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

Yet the dreamer, the storyteller, 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 stoneage 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 illtreated 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

Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified

abstraction. His commonplace books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations of the

methods of the early aviators. Durer was his parallel and Roger Baconwhom the Franciscans silencedof

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

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.

The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the verge of discovery, before they began to

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 steamengine and the

steamboat, 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

intramolecular 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

Steam was the firstcomer in the new powers, it was the beginning of the Age of Energy that was to close the

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 steamengine 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 countryside and concentrating in hitherto unthoughtof

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, andnobody 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

The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit at his breakfasttable, 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

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

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 magnetisma mere guess thatperhaps

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 halfcentury between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steamengine and took over

traction, it ousted every other form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected wireless

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

'I wish, Daddy,' he said, coming to his point, 'that you wouldn't write all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot

The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that. 'Anyhow,' he said, 'I wish you wouldn't write

The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a blurred and underdeveloped photograph.

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, pencillike 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, upfrom S. P. Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.'

The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son. 'Well?' he said.

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

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

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

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 twentiethcentury

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 twentiethcentury

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

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

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 RadioActivity in Edinburgh. They were

lectures that had attracted a very considerable amount of attention. He gave them in a small lecturetheatre

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 chuckleheaded,

scrubhaired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging his knee with great sandred hands and drinking in every

'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; thoriumthe stuff of this incandescent gas

mantlecertainly 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 andlifelesslifeless, 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,

'I take ye, man,' whispered the chuckleheaded lad, with his red hands tightening like a vice upon his knee. 'I

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

The chuckleheaded 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?'

'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

'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 today towards radioactivity 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 radioactivity today. Thisthis 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 firestick of the savage, just when it is

becoming apparent that our everincreasing 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

'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 chuckleheaded 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

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.

The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn of its beams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging

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

'Ye auld thing,' he saidand his eyes were shining, and he made a kind of grabbing gesture with his hand;

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 radioactivity 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 radioactivity 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 radioactivity, 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 doneat 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

He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true, but none the less vividly for that, a record of the

twentyfour hours following the demonstration of the correctness of his intricate tracery of computations and

guesses. 'I thought I should not sleep,' he writesthe 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 housewreckers. 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 NeoGeorgian 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 highflung 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

There were still the fine old redbrick houses to left and right of him; the reservoir had been improved by a

portico of marble, the whitefronted 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 winddriven 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 meetingfor the suffrage women had won their way

back to the tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace againsocialist 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

Young Holsten's face was white. He walked with that uneasy affectation of ease that marks an overstrained

nervous system and an underexercised 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 leada week of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild

promenadingand 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

He met a man named Lawson, an old schoolfellow, of whom history now knows only that he was redfaced

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

Then Holsten stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. 'Damn that dog!' cried Lawson. 'Look at it now. Hi!

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, andfinished 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

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 hardwon positions.

He went into those little gardens beneath the overhanging, brightlylit 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 upin'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

The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed! So it struck upon Holsten's mind. He added in

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 timetables 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

tomorrow were veiled, and he saw only day and night, seedtime 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 spinningtop 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

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

'If there have been home and routine and the field,' thought Holsten, 'there have also been wonder and the

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 tramcar, 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. . .

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;

electromagnetic 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 radioactivity 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 businessas the inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the perpetual threat of

overhanging rocks and mountains go about their businessjust as though the possible was impossible, as

It was in 1953 that the first HolstenRoberts engine brought induced radioactivity into the sphere of

industrial production, and its first general use was to replace the steamengine in electrical generating

stations. Hard upon the appearance of this came the DassTata enginethe invention of two among the

brilliant galaxy of Bengali inventors the modernisation of Indian thought was producing at this timewhich

was used chiefly for automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes, and suchlike, mobile purposes. The American

Kemp engine, differing widely in principle but equally practicable, and the KruppErlanger 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

DassTata engine, once it was started cost a penny to run thirtyseven miles, and added only nine and quarter

pounds to the weight of the carriage it drove. It made the heavy alcoholdriven 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

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

housefurnisher. 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. Patentholding 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 DassTata and

HolstenRoberts engines one of the recoverable waste products was goldthe former disintegrated dust of

bismuth and the latter dust of leadand that this new supply of gold led quite naturally to a rise in prices

This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich

peopleevery great city was as if a crawling anthill had suddenly taken wingwas 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 dragonflies 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 underskilled 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

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 scrappedeverything. 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 preatomic 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

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 DassTata company might not bar the HolstenRoberts' methods of utilising the new

power. The DassTata 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 dirtylooking 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 artfullooking 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, cleanshaven 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 ashpit,

and in the witnessbox lied the wouldbe omnivorous Dass, under crossexamination....

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

But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching, patenting, preempting, 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 lawcourt 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 doubtafter the manner of inventorsyou 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 younone 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 witnessbox. 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.'

'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 diaryautobiography, 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

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 lawcourts 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 horsehair 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 freethinking 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 interrelationships that should supplant the existing tangle

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 electrictraction

system is planned, without reference to preexisting 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.

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

Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history of his life and ideas between his nineteenth

and his twentythird 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

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 socalled '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

Barnet saw the last days of the coalsteam engines upon the English railways and the gradual cleansing of the

London atmosphere as the smokecreating seacoal 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

machinethere was excellent reason for every one to be afraid of those clumsy early typesand he never

attempted steep descents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned one of those oildriven

motorbicycles 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 FrancoGerman 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

motorguns 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, motorbicycle scouting, aviation, and

No firstclass 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 WeltPolitik. 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

'For three days in succession we turned out before dawn andfor no earthly reasonwithout 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 halfI did it the next

day in thatand 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

'For a time we were watched by two hostile aeroplanes; then our own came up and asked them not to,

andthe practice of aerial warfare still being unknownthey very politely desisted and went away and did

All Barnet's accounts of his military training were written in the same halfcontemptuous, halfprotesting

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

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 oldtime 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

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

'I had thought things were looked after,' he wrote. 'It was with a kind of amazement that I tramped the roads

'It was with difficulty I persuaded my landladyshe was a needy widow, poor soul, and I was already in her

debtto 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

He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in which a year or so ago he had been

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 smokedarkened 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, glasslike

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 thirdstory 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

Barnet made his way along this nightscene rather apprehensively since the police had power to challenge

and demand the Labour Card of any indigentlooking person, and if the record failed to show he was in

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

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

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

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

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

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, ineffectivelooking multitude, for the most part incapable of any but obsolete

and superseded types of labour. They bore a few banners with the timehonoured inscription: 'Work, not

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

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

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 somethingfor INTELLIGENCE. This mute mass, weary footed, rank following rank,

protested its persuasion that some of these others must have foreseen these dislocationsthat anyhow they

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 consciencestricken, 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

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,

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

'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 thisin which

my own little speck of a life was so manifestly overwhelmedthis 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

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 rosegardens 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

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

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 wellkept quarters of the town. They had become stonily blind to anything but manifest

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

'Oh! poor dear!' she said; and with the impulsive generosity of her kind, glanced round and slipped a silver

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

A day or so laterand again his freedom to go as he pleased upon the roads may be taken as a mark of

increasing social disorganisation and police embarrassmenthe 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 highwalled 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

'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

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

He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and a chance sight of the transparency

of a kiosk in the marketplace 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

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 thirtysix 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.

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

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

secondrate 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, shortsighted, commonplace type in the seats of authority, blind to the new possibilities and

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

imaginationit 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 Germanspeaking 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 countermobilisations. 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

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

mischiefmaker. 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

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.

The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the lower Meuse to the English, and the

trooptrains were run direct from the various British depots to the points in the Ardennes where they were

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.

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 bigscale relief maps were laid out upon tables to display the whole

seat of war, and the staffofficers 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

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

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

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

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

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

happinessand fear. For her exaltation was made terrible by the dread that some error might dishonour

She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating minuteness of an impassioned woman's

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

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 hurryitself 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 skimen among the Swiss mountains, and a sudden swoop upon Vienna; the thing was to listenand

wait for the other side to begin experimenting. It was all experimenting. And meanwhile he remained in

profile, with an air of assurancelike a man who sits in an automobile after the chauffeur has had his

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 selfcorrection. '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

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,

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

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

One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of the room, gesticulating and shouting

And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn't understand. It was as if all the waterpipes

and concealed machinery and cables of the ways beneath, were beatingas pulses beat. And about her blew

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.

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

Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through moments that seemed infinities, watching those

She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but a crimsonpurple glare and sound,

deafening, allembracing, 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 crimsonpurple 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 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

Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of a vast uproar, but she did not realise this

She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world, a world of heaped broken things. And it was

litand somehow this was more familiar to her mind than any other fact about herby a flickering,

purplishcrimson 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 redlit steam. And with that she recalled Paris and the Seine and the warm, overcast

She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she lay, and examined her surroundings with an

The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the river. Quite close to her was a brimming lake

of dammedup water, from which these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps of vapour came into

circling existence a foot or so from its mirrorsurface. Near at hand and reflected exactly in the water was the

upper part of a familiarlooking 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

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....

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

It was terribly lonely in this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps this manif it was a man, for it was difficult to

seemight 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

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

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

smashedup masonry. Her hand touched something wet, and after one convulsive movement she became

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

And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled, and a rush of hot water came pouring

When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and the black hair closecropped 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 lovemaking then, was a girl in Rouen. He slapped his secondincommand on the shoulder.

'Now,' he said, 'there's nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them titfortat.... Strategy and

reasons of statethey're over.... Come along, my boy, and we'll just show these old women what we can do

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

He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and aeroplanes were scattered all over the

countryside, 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

'We'll give them titfortat,' he said. 'We'll give them titfortat. No time to lose, boys....'

And presently over the cloudbanks 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

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 lavaflow 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 motorcars, 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 steeringwheel, 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, coffinshaped 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

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

Away to the northeastward, 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

micacovered square of map that was fastened by his wheel. There in a series of lakelike 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,

A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one was tearing paper. A second followed.

It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces below rushed widening out nearer and nearer to

The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the bombthrower 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

The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in midair, 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 bombthrower 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

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

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 radioactivity 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

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 socalled '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 twentiethcentury 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 radioactive 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 battlefields and bomb fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with radiant

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

Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate explosive that was to give the 'decisive

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 lawyerpolitician 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

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 railwaytrains and stores

were passing along it all nightand next morning he: marched eastward through a cold, overcast dawn, and

a morning, first cloudy and then blazing, over a large spacious countryside interspersed by forest towards

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

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

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

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 intercommunication, 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

'I had the strangest sensations about that man. In the first instance, when I felt that I had hit him I was

'Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping about. Suddenly I felt sick. I hadn't killed

'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

'Then he jumped uphe seemed to try to get up upon his feet with one last effort; and then he fell like a sack

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

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

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

When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water, and all day long the line of pits suffered

'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

' "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

'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

'I don't know how my speculations ended. I think they were not so much ended as distracted by the distant

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

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

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 skyreflecting 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

The people of this countryside 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 oldfashioned sabots, and elderly,

cleanshaven men quietly thoughtful over their long pipes. They had no fear of their invaders; the days when

That watcher among the clouds would have seen a great distribution of khakiuniformed men and

khakipainted 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 trainwreckers, along

the northgoing 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 maggotlike 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

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 nightthe 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

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

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

And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped and locked and dropped in the void between

the lamplights 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

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

Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might quench, the waves came roaring in upon the

'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 comfortloving proprietor. I went

along his garden, which was gay and delightful with big bushes of rose and sweet brier, to a quaint little

summerhouse, and there I sat and watched the men in groups cooking and squatting along the bank. The sun

'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 speciestheir 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

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

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

'I alone seemed unable to sleep. I suppose I was overweary, and after a little feverish slumber by the tiller of

'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

'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,

'I was roused from these thoughts by the sudden realisation of the presence of a squadron of aeroplanes far

away to the northeast and very high. They looked like little black dashes against the midnight blue. I

remember that I looked up at them at first rather idlyas 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

'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

'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

'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 aeroplanesthey were

mostly Frenchcame 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 soundthe first sound I heardit

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

'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

'Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was filled with flickering lightnings and

'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 redlit steam and flying fragments clamber up

towards the zenith. Against the glare I saw the countryside 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 seawater would be upon us....'

He goes on to tell with a certain prolixity of the steps he tookand all things considered they were very

intelligent stepsto 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

He is reasonably proud of this piece of coolness. His idea was to take the wave headon 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

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

darknesssave for the light of his lanternand 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

'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 halfsubmerged boat, now a cow, now a huge fragment of a

house's timberings, now a muddle of packingcases 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

'All the while a group of labouring, halfsubmerged 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....'

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 halfdrowned 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 suchlike 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

They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London sunsets. 'They sat upon the sea,' says Barnet, 'like

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

'One's sense was of a destruction so farreaching 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 quarterdeck with

Mylius my engineer and Kemp and two others of the noncommissioned 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 fourandtwenty 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

' "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

redlit 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

'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

' "What will they be doing," asked Mylius, "what will they be doing? It's plain we've got to put an end to war.

'I made no immediate answer. SomethingI cannot think whathad 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

'My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me. "I think we are tootoo 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 bloodlit

But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and his bargeload of hungry and starving

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

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

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

On the mountainside 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 selfforgetfulness, 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 workit seemed the most

fantastic of enterprisesto 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

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

worldand 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 suchlike prominent and influential men, took part in it. There were

even scientific men; and that worldfamous 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....

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 preatomic opinions and the silencing

The king's freedom from the trammels of etiquette was very complete. In theoryand he abounded in

theoryhis 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

As they walked upit was the king made the pace rather than Firminthey 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 affairsa sort of Hague Court with extended powersthat is no reason

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 tableand declare at once I don't mean to haggle. It's hagglingabout

rightshas been the devil in human affairs, foralways. I am going to stop this nonsense.'

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 asas 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. Wewe 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.

Firmin made no answer to this interruption. But a faint shadow of annoyance passed across his heated

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

'The Americans ran the Japanese aeroplane down into the sea and there the bomb got busted.'

'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

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.

'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

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 softtoned 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

Firmin looked around him with an ungenial eye. 'You see it at its best, sir,' he said, 'before the peasants come

'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, creamycoloured 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....'

'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

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:

'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 kingand I am going toto 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 meltingpot 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

'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. Today 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

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

'Firmin,' he said, 'you have idealised kingship.' 'It has been my dream, sir,' said Firmin sorrowfully, 'to serve.'

'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 imaginationwith 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 presscutting 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.

'That world of royalty!' the king went on. 'In a little while no one will understand it any more. It will become

'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

'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 crossand 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 sillyit 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 textbook for kings,

Firmin, is none of the court memoirs and WeltPolitik books you would have me read; it is old Fraser's

Firmin had. 'Those were the authentic kings. In the end they were cut up and a bit given to everybody. They

'What do you intend to do, sir?' he asked. 'If you will not listen to me, what do you propose to do this

'Manifestly war has to stop for ever, Firmin. Manifestly this can only be done by putting all the world under

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

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

'But,' cried Firmin, 'you must have sanctions! Will there be no form of election, for example?'

'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

laterwhen 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 today, 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, twothirds 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

'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,

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 ninetythree 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 illfitting 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

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.'

'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

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 holidaymaking 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 ninetythree, 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

It was ever the Transatlantic tendency, due, no doubt, to the necessity of handling public questions in a bulky

and striking manner, to overemphasise and overaccentuate, 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

'Man,' said the king, 'is always entering upon his heritage. You Americans have a peculiar weakness for

anniversariesif you will forgive me saying so. YesI 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

'But surely,' said the king, 'you don't want us to condemn all humanity to a worldwide 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

wereRUBRICATED. 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 upand 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

'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.

'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

'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

He paused and glanced down the table at Leblanc, and then reopened 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 ninetyodd 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 ninetyodd

men. We are no creators, we are consequences, we are salvagersor salvagees. The thing today is not

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?'

'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 SuperMannish, 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 greenlined umbrella and fished very neatly and

'If I do him an injustice,' said the king, 'it is only because I want to elucidate my argument. I want to make it

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 selfconfidence, that council went on

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

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

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

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 fireescape. 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

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 illhealth and a great preoccupation with his new official mistress, for his

semibarbaric 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 exmonarch's

mind his halfforgotten 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

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,

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 coffinshaped 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

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.

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

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.

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 illsuppressed 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 baizecovered 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 halfdozen ministers who constituted his cabinet. They had been summoned for

twelve o'clock, but still at halfpast twelve the king loitered in the balcony and seemed to be waiting for

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 bombcarrying machines and their passenger bombthrowers in the exercising grounds of

the motorcyclist 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 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

'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

The clocks in the light goldcapped belfries of the town below presently intimated the halfhour after

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

Pestovitch followed that indication and then glanced for one questioning moment at the white face before

For some moments they watched the steep spirals of the descending messengers, and then they began a hasty

They decided that to be holding a council upon the details of an ultimate surrender to Brissago was as

innocentlooking a thing as the king could well be doing, and so, when at last the exking 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 exking 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 balconyand

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

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

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

'What grounds?' The exking permitted himself a gesture and the ghost of a chucklewhy 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 somethinglike the faintest shadow of derisiongleamed out of the envoy's

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.

'Only a temporary expedient,' said the exking Egbert, 'while the search is going on.'

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

'You'll have to make 'em,' said the exking, genially addressing all the councillors.

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

The exking was radiant. 'We couldn't possibly do it until the day after tomorrow,' he said.

'For my own part,' said the exking confidentially, 'I think the whole business ridiculous. Who would be such

a fool as to hide atomic bombs? Nobody. Certain hanging if he's caughtcertain, 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 forceand a kind of logicin these orders from

'I knew you would,' said the exking, 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

'And then, you see,' said the exking 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 windwhipped 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

The king put his long nose into his councillor's face. 'That grinning brute WANTS to hang us,' he said. 'And

'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 won't sit still here and be caught like a fascinated rabbit,' said the king in conclusion. 'We must shift those

'No,' said the king. 'Shift them near the frontier. Then while they watch us herethey will always watch us

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 exking 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

It was past midnight, when the king, in a cloak and slouch hat that might equally have served a small farmer,

or any respectable middleclass 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 guardvalet 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.

The king glanced up and met a calm, round eye of light, that seemed to wink at him and vanish, leaving him

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 twentiethcentury 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 exking Egbert. One of them was brightly lit now, and against the light a

And as he spoke they saw the exking stretch out his arms slowly, like one who yawns, knuckle his eyes and

Down through the ancient winding back streets of his capital hurried the king, and at an appointed corner a

shabby atomicautomobile 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 uneasyfor

the fleet of airships overhead had kept the cafes open and people abroadover 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 countryside 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.

Presently one of these patches of moonlight came to rest about them and seemed to be following their

'The things are confoundedly noiseless,' said the king. 'It's like being stalked by lean white cats.'

And then suddenly he gave way to panic. 'Pestovitch,' he said, clutching his minister's arm, 'they are watching

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

'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

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.

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

In ten minutes they were tumbling over the wall of the farmyard, 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,

'I don't think they saw us,' said the king, and stared as the light went swooping up the mountain side, hung for

He bruised his shin against something, and then all three men were inside the huge steelgirdered 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 hidingplace. 'There's a sort of pit here,' said the

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

'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.

'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

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

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.

The king broke into a cold perspiration. Then Pestovitch answered: 'Only a poor farmer loading hay,' he said,

'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

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

'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

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

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 sidewayssnared, a whitefaced evil thing. And then,

as with a faltering suicidal heroism, he leant forward over the bomb before him, they fired together and shot

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

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.

It was still quite dark when his valet and Firmin came together and told the exking Egbert that the business

The exking reflected. 'That's about the best thing that could have happened,' he said. 'Where are the bombs?

In that farmhouse on the opposite hillside! Why! the place is in sight! Let us go. I'll dress. Is there any one

Through the hungry twilight of the dawn the exking's automobile carried him to the farmhouse 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 farmyard. 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 farmyard 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 exking 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.

'The pitiful folly of it!' said the exking, following his thoughts. 'Firmin,' as an exprofessor 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

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

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 ploughlife and the beasttending. Slowly a vast system of traditional

imperatives superposed itself upon his instincts, imperatives that were admirably fitted to make him that

cultivator, that cattlemincer, 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

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 powerdriven 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 worldwide 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

This assembly was no leap of exceptional minds and superintelligences 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 honestminded than in the

The exking 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 mountaintops 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

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

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 subtropical 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

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 guideled 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 deeplying water, were as yet only desolations of fear and death to

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 countryside 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

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

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 countryside and the problems of his command, but he speaks of heaped cloud

masses of steam. 'All along the sky to the southwest' 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

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

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

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 purplishred light, and

quivering and swaying with the incessant explosion of the radioactive substance. Whole blocks of buildings

were alight and burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in

comparison with the fullbodied crimson glare beyond. The shells of other edifices already burnt rose,

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, radioactive

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 halfway to the sea.

Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of redlit 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

The state of mind of the dispossessed urban population which swarmed and perished so abundantly over the

countryside 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 'manmilliner' 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 roundfaced man, dressed

very neatly in blackso neatly that it was amazing to discover he was living close at hand in a tent made of

carpetsand he had 'an urbane but insistent manner,' a carefully trimmed moustache and beard, expressive

'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

'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

'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

There was a pause. Then the voice beside him broke out. 'But, Monsieur, it is impossible! It

'To the life of a peasant! And my wifeYou do not know the distinguished delicacy of my wife, a refined

helplessness, a peculiar dependent charm. Like some slender tropical creeperwith great white flowers....

But all this is foolish talk. It is impossible that Paris, which has survived so many misfortunes, should not

'I do not think it will ever revive. Paris is finished. London, too, I am toldBerlin. All the great capitals were

'It is impossible. Civilisations do not end in this manner. Mankind will insist.'

'Monsieur, you might as well hope to go down the Maelstrom and resume business there.'

'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

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 fearembittered 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

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

wellbehaved, 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 faminestricken 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

bombpoisoned 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

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

He was feeling ill and apathetic that day, and he did not realise what it was he was transcribing. He did it

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

'My colleague was more hopeful. "It means an end to bombthrowing and destruction," he said. "It means

'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

And on that sentence, with an unexpected artistry, Barnet abruptly ends his story.

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

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 successorswhoever 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 outsetthe 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 handwoven textiles, fruitgrowing,

flowergrowing, 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

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 fieldworker,

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

diningroom 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

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

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 worldwide 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 Englishspeaking 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 seedtime 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,

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

energyreleasing 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, twentyfive 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

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 nonagricultural 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

'townplanning' 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 sunbaths 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

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

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

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 ninetythree, 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 axpresidents 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

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

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 twentyseven 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

exking Egbert, who was now consciously among the seniors of the gathering. Thereafter they were baffled

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

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 dragonslaying 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

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

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 eggshells,

cinders, and suchlike refuse. Now that one may go about this region in comparitive securityfor the

London radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable proportionsit is possible to trace in nearly every one of

these gardens some effort to make. Here it is a poor little plank summerhouse, here it is a 'fountain' of bricks

and oystershells, 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

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 selfexpression, 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 existencefor most men spent all their lives in earning a

livingis 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. ...

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 overstimulated and overdeveloped. 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

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 oldfashioned 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 lawcourts 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

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

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 thinlipped 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 selfabnegation,

selfidentification with the world spirit, was made the basis of universal education. That general

memorandum to the teachers which is the keynote of the modern educational system, was probably entirely

'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 selfforgetfulness, 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....'

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

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 storytellers 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

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 wellbeing 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

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 illdefined 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

It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former time that it should be an open question as it is

today 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

The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new station for surgical work at Paran, high

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

manycoloured 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

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

His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted by his secretary clambered down through the

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

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.

'I shall be a patient,' said Karenin. 'I shall have to be a patient. But I should like to see things first. Presently I

'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

'Yes. And now I have nothing more to doand 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....'

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 firstly I shall probably die, and if I do not, then perhaps I shall be a useless invalid?'

'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 thisvivisection? A few days of drugged and active lifeand then the end?'

'You make me feel as though I was the last of deformityDeformity is uncertaintyinaccuracy. 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

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

'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 againstall 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

'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

'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. 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. HereI must show you it today, because it will interest youwe have our copy of

the encyclopaedic indexevery 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!'

'I have worked about seven years out of the past ten. At times I go awaydown 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,

lovemaking, eating and drinking for the fun of the thing, jostling crowds, having adventures,

'That is how I would have lived, if it had not been for mydefects,' 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.'

'For endless generations man has struggled upward against the indignities of his bodyand 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

Karenin laughed cheerfully at his caution.... 'When,' asked Karenin suddenly, 'when will you operate?'

'The day after tomorrow,' said Fowler. 'For a day I want you to drink and eat as I shall prescribe. And you

'You shall go through it this afternoon. I will have two men carry you in a litter. And tomorrow you shall lie

out upon the terrace. Our mountains here are the most beautiful in the world....'

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 livelyminded people here. Let them come and

gossip with me. It will distract meand I can't tell you how interesting it makes everything that is going on

'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

'I hope he kills me, Gardener. Don't beoldfashioned. The thing I am most afraid of is that last rag of life. I

may just go ona scarred salvage of suffering stuff. And thenall 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

'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 cleverbut 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 workand what else is

'I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing thread of vitality.... I know it for the splendid thing

it isI 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

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

'Our age,' he said, 'has been so far an age of sceneshifting. 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

'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

'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

'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 worka 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

whileIn a little whileI wish indeed I could watch for that little while, now that the curtain has

'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

'Square miles that are scarcely shaken in the south and northwest, 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

'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 pillcarrying age followed the

weaponcarrying 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

'And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and keen about even a sick childand something

touching. But so much of the old times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly stupid, obstinately,

'I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of nineteenthcentury 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.

Nohe was no child; the dull, national aggressiveness he stood for, no childishness. Childhood is promise.

'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

'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

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

'He is so far offand there are men alive still who were alive when Bismarck died!' . . . said the young

'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 greatgrandfather 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 countedoh! a SILLY

fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a littleforcible, 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.'

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

'You know, sir, I've a fancyit is hard to prove such thingsthat civilisation was very near disaster when

the atomic bombs came banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and no induced radioactivity, the

world would havesmashedmuch 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 materialinsanely. They had got through threequarters 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, andit is

conceivablecomplete disorder. . . . The rails might have rusted on the disused railways by now, the

telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big liners dropped into sheetiron in the ports; the burnt, deserted

cities become the ruinous hidingplaces 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 brokendown 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?'

'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 tellbut 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 seethey 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 breathingspace, 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

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

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

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

'I know,' said Karenin at last, 'that many people are saying this sort of thing. I know that there is a vast release

of lovemaking 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 lovemaking. Down there,under the clouds, the lovers

foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your halfmystical songs, in which you represent this old hard world

dissolving into a luminous haze of lovesexual love.... I don't think you are right or true in that. You are a

young, imaginative man, and you see lifeardentlywith the eyes of youth. But the power that has brought

man into these high places under this blueveiled 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 lifeit has been a necessary part of my workI 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 inevitablebut 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

overmind, 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

'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 eightyfive. You, too, Kahn! There are endless years yet for youand 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 forfor this love and reproduction that is so much less needed than it was.'

'And surely,' said Kahn, 'when you speak of love as a phaseisn'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,

'But women!' cried Rachel. 'Here we are! What is our futureas 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 futureas

women. I do not care a rap about the future of menas 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 overspecialised 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

'Andwe remain women,' said Rachel Borken. 'Need you remain thinking of yourselves as women?'

'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

'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 sexcemented 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.'

'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 arefemales, 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 restlessand 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

'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 abolishthe 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

'In America,' said Edwards, 'men are fighting duels over the praises of women and holding tournaments

'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

'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 womancentred excitement. But

there is something in women, in many women, which responds to these provocations; they succumb to a

peculiarly selfcultivating 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 ofHelenism. 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 yourselvesfor our sakes and your own sakesin 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

'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 keenwitted 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

'It is the next wave,' said Fowler, who had come out upon the terrace and seated himself silently behind

'Of course, in the old days,' said Edwards, 'men were tied to their city or their country, tied to the homes they

'I do not see,' said Karenin, 'that there is any final limit to man's power of selfmodification.

'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

'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

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

'And then sleep again. When man with his blazing lights made an end to night in his towns and housesit is

only a hundred years or so ago that that was donethen 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

'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 remodelled 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

Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of new work that was in progress in India and

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

'It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,' said Fowler, 'but tomorrow 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 thatlike a wet, crawling new moth that still fears to spread its wings. Because where

'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.

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

Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of incandescence, and shaded his eyes and became silent.

'I had forgotten about the operation tomorrow. I have been so interested as Man today that I have nearly

forgotten Marcus Karenin. Marcus Karenin must go under your knife tomorrow, 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 today, lived

'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 dieand 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. Yeslong 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 andclearly I

'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

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

It seemed to those who had to watch over him unobtrusively lest he should be in want of any attention, that

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

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