The World Set Free

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The World Set Free Page 10

by H. G. Wells

industriously entrenching themselves in Belgian Luxembourg.

  He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day's journey

  through the north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid

  phrases. The country was browned by a warm summer, the trees a

  little touched with autumnal colour, and the wheat already

  golden. When they stopped for an hour at Hirson, men and women

  with tricolour badges upon the platform distributed cakes and

  glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and there was much

  cheerfulness. 'Such good, cool beer it was,' he wrote. 'I had

  had nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom.'

  A number of monoplanes, 'like giant swallows,' he notes, were

  scouting in the pink evening sky.

  Barnet's battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place

  called Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to

  Jemelle. Here they detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the

  railway-trains and stores were passing along it all night-and

  next morning he: marched eastward through a cold, overcast dawn,

  and a morning, first cloudy and then blazing, over a large

  spacious country-side interspersed by forest towards Arlon.

  There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked

  entrenchments and hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton

  that were designed to check and delay any advance from the east

  upon the fortified line of the Meuse. They had their orders, and

  for two days they worked without either a sight of the enemy or

  any suspicion of the disaster that had abruptly decapitated the

  armies of Europe, and turned the west of Paris and the centre of

  Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction of Pompeii.

  And the news, when it did come, came attenuated. 'We heard there

  had been mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,' Barnet

  relates; 'but it didn't seem to follow that "They" weren't still

  somewhere elaborating their plans and issuing orders. When the

  enemy began to emerge from the woods in front of us, we cheered

  and blazed away, and didn't trouble much more about anything but

  the battle in hand. If now and then one cocked up an eye into the

  sky to see what was happening there, the rip of a bullet soon

  brought one down to the horizontal again…

  That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of

  country between Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It

  was essentially a rifle and infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do

  not seem to have taken any decisive share in the actual fighting

  for some days, though no doubt they effected the strategy from

  the first by preventing surprise movements. They were aeroplanes

  with atomic engines, but they were not provided with atomic

  bombs, which were manifestly unsuitable for field use, nor indeed

  had they any very effective kind of bomb. And though they

  manoeuvred against each other, and there was rifle shooting at

  them and between them, there was little actual aerial fighting.

  Either the airmen were indisposed to fight or the commanders on

  both sides preferred to reserve these machines for scouting…

  After a day or so of digging and scheming, Barnet found himself

  in the forefront of a battle. He had made his section of rifle

  pits chiefly along a line of deep dry ditch that gave a means of

  inter-communication, he had had the earth scattered over the

  adjacent field, and he had masked his preparations with tussocks

  of corn and poppy. The hostile advance came blindly and

  unsuspiciously across the fields below and would have been very

  cruelly handled indeed, if some one away to the right had not

  opened fire too soon.

  'It was a queer thrill when these fellows came into sight,' he

  confesses; 'and not a bit like manoeuvres. They halted for a

  time on the edge of the wood and then came forward in an open

  line. They kept walking nearer to us and not looking at us, but

  away to the right of us. Even when they began to be hit, and

  their officers' whistles woke them up, they didn't seem to see

  us. One or two halted to fire, and then they all went back

  towards the wood again. They went slowly at first, looking round

  at us, then the shelter of the wood seemed to draw them, and they

  trotted. I fired rather mechanically and missed, then I fired

  again, and then I became earnest to hit something, made sure of

  my sighting, and aimed very carefully at a blue back that was

  dodging about in the corn. At first I couldn't satisfymyself

  and didn't shoot, his movements were so spasmodic and uncertain;

  then I think he came to a ditch or some such obstacle and halted

  for a moment. "GOT you," I whispered, and pulled the trigger.

  'I had the strangest sensations about that man. In the first

  instance, when I felt that I had hit him I was irradiated with

  joy and pride…

  'I sent him spinning. He jumped and threw up his arms…

  'Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping

  about. Suddenly I felt sick. I hadn't killed him…

  'In some way he was disabled and smashed up and yet able to

  struggle about. I began to think…

  'For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn.

  Either he was calling out or some one was shouting to him…

  'Then he jumped up-he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with

  one last effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still

  and never moved again.

  'He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him

  dead. I had been wanting to do so for some time…'

  The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made

  for themselves in the woods below. A man was hit in the pit next

  to Barnet, and began cursing and crying out in a violent rage.

  Barnet crawled along the ditch to him and found him in great

  pain, covered with blood, frantic with indignation, and with the

  half of his right hand smashed to a pulp. 'Look at this,' he

  kept repeating, hugging it and then extending it. 'Damned

  foolery! Damned foolery! My right hand, sir! My right hand!'

  For some time Barnet could do nothing with him. The man was

  consumed by his tortured realisation of the evil silliness of

  war, the realisation which had come upon him in a flash with the

  bullet that had destroyed his skill and use as an artificer for

  ever. He was looking at the vestiges with a horror that made him

  impenetrable to any other idea. At last the poor wretch let

  Barnet tie up his bleeding stump and help him along the ditch

  that conducted him deviously out of range…

  When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water,

  and all day long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst.

  For food they had chocolate and bread.

  'At first,' he says, 'I was extraordinarily excited by my baptism

  of fire. Then as the heat of the day came on I experienced an

  enormous tedium and discomfort. The flies became extremely

  troublesome, and my little grave of a rifle pit was invaded by

  ants. I could not get up or move about, for some one in the trees

  had got a mark on me. I kept thinking of the dead
Prussian down

  among the corn, and of the bitter outcries of my own man. Damned

  foolery! It WAS damned foolery. But who was to blame? How had

  we got to this?…

  'Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with

  dynamite bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and

  suddenly dived down over beyond the trees.

  ' "From Holland to the Alps this day," I thought, "there must be

  crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to

  inflict irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic

  to the pitch of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall

  wake up."…

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

  will wake up."

  'I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were

  among these hundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in

  rebellion against all these ancient traditions of flag and

  empire. Weren't we, perhaps, already in the throes of the last

  crisis, in that darkest moment of a nightmare's horror before the

  sleeper will endure no more of it-and wakes?

  'I don't know how my speculations ended. I think they were not

  so much ended as distracted by the distant thudding of the guns

  that were opening fire at long range upon Namur.'

  Section 7

  But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of

  modern warfare. So far he had taken part only in a little

  shooting. The bayonet attack by which the advanced line was

  broken was made at a place called Croix Rouge, more than twenty

  miles away, and that night under cover of the darkness the rifle

  pits were abandoned and he got his company away without further

  loss.

  His regiment fell back unpressed behind the fortified lines

  between Namur and Sedan, entrained at a station called Mettet,

  and was sent northward by Antwerp and Rotterdam to Haarlem.

  Hence they marched into North Holland. It was only after the

  march into Holland that he began to realise the monstrous and

  catastrophic nature of the struggle in which he was playing his

  undistinguished part.

  He describes very pleasantly the journey through the hills and

  open land of Brabant, the repeated crossing of arms of the Rhine,

  and the change from the undulating scenery of Belgium to the

  flat, rich meadows, the sunlit dyke roads, and the countless

  windmills of the Dutch levels. In those days there was unbroken

  land from Alkmaar and Leiden to the Dollart. Three great

  provinces, South Holland, North Holland, and Zuiderzeeland,

  reclaimed at various times between the early tenth century and

  1945 and all many feet below the level of the waves outside the

  dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern sun and

  sustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of

  laws and custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a

  perpetual defence against the beleaguering sea. For more than two

  hundred and fifty miles from Walcheren to Friesland stretched a

  line of embankments and pumping stations that was the admiration

  of the world.

  If some curious god had chosen to watch the course of events in

  those northern provinces while that flanking march of the British

  was in progress, he would have found a convenient and appropriate

  seat for his observation upon one of the great cumulus clouds

  that were drifting slowly across the blue sky during all these

  eventful days before the great catastrophe. For that was the

  quality of the weather, hot and clear, with something of a

  breeze, and underfoot dry and a little inclined to be dusty. This

  watching god would have looked down upon broad stretches of

  sunlit green, sunlit save for the creeping patches of shadow cast

  by the clouds, upon sky-reflecting meres, fringed and divided up

  by masses of willow and large areas of silvery weeds, upon white

  roads lying bare to the sun and upon a tracery of blue canals.

  The pastures were alive with cattle, the roads had a busy

  traffic, of beasts and bicycles and gaily coloured peasants'

  automobiles, the hues of the innumerable motor barges in the

  canal vied with the eventfulness of the roadways; and everywhere

  in solitary steadings, amidst ricks and barns, in groups by the

  wayside, in straggling villages, each with its fine old church,

  or in compact towns laced with canals and abounding in bridges

  and clipped trees, were human habitations.

  The people of this country-side were not belligerents. The

  interests and sympathies alike of Holland had been so divided

  that to the end she remained undecided and passive in the

  struggle of the world powers. And everywhere along the roads

  taken by the marching armies clustered groups and crowds of

  impartially observant spectators, women and children in peculiar

  white caps and old-fashioned sabots, and elderly, clean-shaven

  men quietlythoughtful over their long pipes. They had no fear of

  their invaders; the days when 'soldiering' meant bands of

  licentious looters had long since passed away…

  That watcher among the clouds would have seen a great

  distribution of khaki-uniformed men and khaki-painted material

  over the whole of the sunken area of Holland. He would have

  marked the long trains, packed with men or piled with great guns

  and war material, creeping slowly, alert for train-wreckers,

  along the north-going lines; he would have seen the Scheldt and

  Rhine choked with shipping, and pouring out still more men and

  still more material; he would have noticed halts and

  provisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling

  caterpillars of cavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons, the

  huge beetles of great guns, crawling under the poplars along the

  dykes and roads northward, along ways lined by the neutral,

  unmolested, ambiguously observant Dutch. All the barges and

  shipping upon the canals had been requisitioned for transport. In

  that clear, bright, warm weather, it would all have looked from

  above like some extravagant festival of animated toys.

  As the sun sank westward the spectacle must have become a little

  indistinct because of a golden haze; everything must have become

  warmer and more glowing, and because of the lengthening of the

  shadows more manifestly in relief. The shadows of the tall

  churches grew longer and longer, until they touched the horizon

  and mingled in the universal shadow; and then, slow, and soft,

  and wrapping the world in fold after fold of deepening blue, came

  the night-the night at first obscurely simple, and then with

  faint points here and there, and then jewelled in darkling

  splendour with a hundred thousand lights. Out of that mingling of

  darkness and ambiguous glares the noise of an unceasing activity

  would have arisen, the louder and plainer now because there was

  no longer any distraction of sight.

  It may be that watcher drifting in the pellucid gulf beneath the

  stars watched all through the night; it may be that he dozed. But

  if he gave way to so natural a proclivit
y, assuredly on the

  fourth night of the great flank march he was aroused, for that

  was the night of the battle in the air that decided the fate of

  Holland. The aeroplanes were fighting at last, and suddenly

  about him, above and below, with cries and uproar rushing out of

  the four quarters of heaven, striking, plunging, oversetting,

  soaring to the zenith and dropping to the ground, they came to

  assail or defend the myriads below.

  Secretly the Central European power had gathered his flying

  machines together, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a

  handful of ten thousand knives over the low country. And amidst

  that swarming flight were five that drove headlong for the sea

  walls of Holland, carrying atomic bombs. From north and west and

  south, the allied aeroplanes rose in response and swept down upon

  this sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began. Men

  rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like

  archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth.

  Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the

  heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking

  charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this

  giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?

  And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped

  and locked and dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and

  the stars, came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and

  first one and then a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged

  hungrily down upon the Dutchmen's dykes and struck between land

  and sea and flared up again in enormous columns of glare and

  crimsoned smoke and steam.

  And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires

  and trees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea,

  tumbled with anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood…

  Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous

  crying and a flurry of alarm bells…

  The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky,

  like things that suddenly knowthemselves to be wicked…

  Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might

  quench, the waves came roaring in upon the land…

  Section 8

  'We had cursed our luck,' says Barnet, 'that we could not get to

  our quarters at Alkmaar that night. There, we were told, were

  provisions, tobacco, and everything for which we craved. But the

 

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