It was not until the meeting of Parliament that the Government connection with Nordenholt’s scheme became known to the public; but on the first day of the session the Prime Minister introduced a Bill which subsequently became the Billeting Act; and this brought to light the fact that Nordenholt was not working merely as a private individual. Under the Act, the Government took powers to house the Nitrogen Volunteers, as they were termed, in any locality which might be found necessary. The wording of the Act gave them the fullest power in this matter; but it was so contrived that no one suspected the establishment of only a single Nitrogen Area.
In his speech on the second reading, the Premier excelled all his previous tactical exercises. He explained very clearly the nature of the peril which threatened the country; and he pointed out that the measure was necessary in order to cope with the danger. The new Nitrogen work would entail great shiftings of labour hither and thither, as the new factories grew up; and it was essential to provide dwellings for the artisans engaged in the industry. Everything must give way to this; and since houses could not be built in the short time available, some sort of arrangement must be made which would, he hoped, be merely temporary. He explained that the Government had empowered Nordenholt to carry out the early arrangements; and he was able to give statistics showing the progress which had already been made during the last few days.
At the same time, he introduced a second Bill, somewhat on the lines of the old Defence of the Realm Act, which enabled the Government to cope with circumstances as they arose without the necessity of prolonged Parliamentary debates.
So ingeniously did he handle the matter that there was practically no opposition to either measure. It must be remembered that the influence of the Press had been exerted almost entirely in favour of Nordenholt’s scheme. The previous clamour for action had been succeeded by a chorus of praise; and the bold initiative shown in the Nitrogen plans had been acclaimed throughout the country.
Meanwhile, Nordenholt was making the best of two worlds. Nominally, he was engaged in a private enterprise over which the Government had no control; actually, he had the whole State machinery at his back to assist him in his operations. This dual nature of the matter enabled him to carry out his work with a minimum of interference from red-taped officials, while at the same time he was able to command the resources of State Departments in any line wherein they could be of service to him. After the passing of the two Acts, the Government adjourned Parliament, to avoid the putting of awkward questions; so that during the ensuing weeks the Nitrogen undertaking could progress without any fear of interference or undue publicity.
Transport was the first problem which occupied Nordenholt’s attention. It was in this connection that I caught my first glimpse of the “Nordenholt Gang” at work. The executive staffs of the railways were left intact, but one day there descended upon them a quiet little man in spectacles with full authority in his pocket. Grogan had apparently never been connected with railways in his life, so far as I knew, but he took control of the whole system in the country without showing the faintest sign of hesitation. How he acquired his knowledge, I never learned; but I gathered that he had originally made his mark by his investigations of the effect of trade-routes upon commerce.
His work was to indicate the broad outlines of the scheme, and the railway officials then filled in the details. Yet I was told that he seemed to know to a truck the demands which his projects would entail upon the railways; and he never put forward anything which led to a break-down. I think he had that type of mind which sees straight through the details to the core of an undertaking and which yet retains in due perspective the minutiæ of the machinery.
And it was not only the railways which he had in his charge. All the motor services were brought under his control as well. It was a bewilderingly complex affair; and he had to act as a kind of liaison centre between the two departments, clearing up any troubles which arose and co-ordinating the twin methods of transport. I think he had the power of mental visualisation developed to an abnormal extent; and his memory must have been quite out of the common. To assist him, he had the largest railway map I have ever seen—it covered a whole floor—and on it were placed blocks of metal showing the exact situation of every train in the kingdom. These were moved from time to time by his assistants in accordance with telegraphic information; and if he doubted his recollections at any moment he could go and study the groupings upon it.
I remember seeing him once when things had got slightly out of gear, his hands full of telegraph forms, his feet encased in felt slippers to avoid marking the surface of the map, studying a point in the Welsh system where a number of trucks had been stranded in sidings. With the briefest consideration he seemed to come to a decision, for he gave his orders to an assistant:
“Locomotive, Newport to Crumlin, via Tredegar Junction. (It can’t go through Abercarn, because the 3.46 is on the line now and I don’t want to waste time shunting). Then on to Cwm—C-w-m—to pick up twenty-seven trucks in the siding. All right. After that, back to Aberbeeg—b-double-e-g—since the line is blocked at Victoria by No. 702. Then Blaina—B-l-a-i-n-a—and Abergavenny. All right. . . . Stop a moment. Map-measure, please. Motor Fleet 37 will be at Abergavenny about then with some stores for the North. Hold train at Abergavenny and wire them to stop No. 37 as it passes. That will fill up ten trucks, I think. All right. Train Hereford, Birmingham, via Leominster. Load twelve trucks Birmingham. Tamworth, pick up five truck-loads—food, that red block there—then North behind No. 605. All right. Then wire Abergavenny to send No. 37 to Monmouth. They’ll get their orders there. All right.”
So it went on, I am told, hour after hour, throughout the day. Even the details of the diurnal traffic were not sufficient; for as he went along, he planned the night-operations as well. When he retired for the short sleep-time which he took, every point had been regulated for the ensuing five hours.
At first, everything culminated in the word “North”; but almost immediately the whirling traffic on the south-going rails had to be considered also, as it grew in volume. How he managed it, I do not know; but he seemed to have some subconscious faculty of drawing a balance-sheet of the traffic at any moment; so that he knew if he was sending too much North or too little South. Personally, I imagine that he owed his success to a power akin to that of the professional chess-player who can play a dozen blindfold games at one time. Everybody has the faculty of mental visualisation developed in a greater or less degree; but in Grogan, as far as traffic was concerned, it seems to have attained supernormal proportions. I believe that he actually “saw” in his mind the whole of England covered with his trains and motor fleets and that he had by some means established time-scales which enabled him to calculate the moments at which any train or fleet would pass a series of given points. It was, of course, an immensely more difficult affair than blindfold chess-playing; but I think it clearly depended upon cognate processes.
Congleton, the Shipping Director, had a much easier task. For him there was no trouble of blocked rails or interleaving traffic. His main difficulty arose from berthing accommodation, which was a comparatively simple affair. Most of the food-supplies were transferred North on board ship; and a certain amount of the shifting of population was also done in this way, especially the removal of the Glasgow inhabitants.
I can only give the merest outline of these great operations; for the details are too intricate to be described here. Nordenholt’s first step was to commandeer most of the public halls in the country, which were then fitted up with partitions, etc., in order to convert them into temporary dwelling-places for families. Thereafter, he began to move his Nitrogen Volunteers into the Clyde Valley step by step; and simultaneously, under the Billeting Act, he evicted the local population to make room for his men. There was a considerable outcry; and at times the military had to be employed to persuade the reluctant to move out of their homes; but after the first few cases of obstruction had been dealt with firmly, the people
recognised that it was useless to protest. Edinburgh was also treated in the same way; for Nordenholt had planned to occupy a belt of country running from coast to coast. He had to find room for a population of five millions; and it was evidently going to be a difficult matter.
Looking back upon it now, it was a wonderful piece of work, carried out without any very serious hitches. To transfer a population of nearly ten millions, and to distribute five millions of that over a wide area of England—for this was the only way in which house-room could be found for them—was a gigantic task. Fabulous sums were expended in finding living-room for the refugees in the houses of residents throughout England; and eventually all of them had roofs over their heads, in private dwellings, in converted halls or in commandeered hotels.
Meanwhile, in Glasgow itself, the ever-growing Nitrogen Area was surrounded with military pickets which prevented the mingling of new-comers and the old population. This precaution of Nordenholt’s was mainly directed against the possibility of rioting; for the feeling between the expelled inhabitants and the incomers was extremely bitter; but it served another purpose in that it tended to surround the Nitrogen Area with a certain atmosphere of mystery. This was heightened by the stoppage of all telegraphic and telephonic communication between Glasgow and the South. Soon the only information obtainable in England with regard to affairs in the Clyde Valley came from emigrants; and with the end of the exodus, even the mails ceased and an impenetrable veil fell between the two parts of the island.
A similar screen had fallen between England and Ireland at a slightly earlier date. All postal and telegraphic communication was broken off, and no vessels were permitted to trade with the Irish ports. It was by this means that the knowledge of the great Raid was kept secret. Nordenholt was almost ready to disclose his hand; and the Raid could not be postponed if any cattle were to be obtained alive. By a series of lightning sweeps, the military rounded up all the available live-stock in the island and drove them to the nearest ports, where ships were awaiting them. Bitter guerrilla warfare raged along the tracks of the columns; and the last pages in Irish history were marked with bloodshed. Not that it mattered much, since all were to die in any case before very long.
But I am now coming to the last stages of the exodus. All the required food, all the available machinery and all the Nitrogen Volunteers had been sent up into the Clyde Valley. Without warning, after a secret session, Parliament had resolved to transfer itself to Glasgow. Now came the final moves. On the last day, only pickets of the Military Volunteers—the Labour Defence Force, as Nordenholt had renamed them—were left behind in every important town.
During that night a carefully-planned course of destruction was followed. Every telegraph and telephone exchange was gutted; the remaining artillery was rendered useless; all the printing machinery of newspapers was wrecked; every aeroplane destroyed and practically all aerodromes burned: and as the trains and motors went northward in the night, bridge after bridge on the line or road was blown up. When morning came, there was a complete stoppage of all the normal channels of communication; and up to the Border the railways had been put out of action for months. It was the second step in Nordenholt’s plan.
Hitherto, I have chronicled his successes; but now I must deal with his single failure. He had intended to persuade the King to take refuge in the Clyde Valley, and had even, I believe, found a residence for him near Glasgow. Here, however, he met with a rebuff. I never learned the details of the interview; but it appears that the King refused to save himself. He felt it his duty to share the fate of his people.
“He understood perfectly,” Nordenholt said to me later. “Both of them thoroughly understood what it meant; I think they felt that a Crown rescued at that price wouldn’t be worth wearing. At any rate, they refused to come North.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE CLYDE VALLEY
HITHERTO my narrative has had a certain unity; for I have been describing a chain of events, each of which followed naturally from its forerunners; but now comes a bifurcation. I have explained how the Clyde Valley had been isolated, step by step, from the rest of the country; and when the last food-stores and troops had been brought into the Nitrogen Area, communications between the two districts ceased. From that moment, the two regions had different histories; and I cannot deal with them in an intertwined chronological sequence. I shall therefore continue my account of the Clyde Valley experiment now; and shall deal later with the collapse of civilisation in England.
When planning his colony, Nordenholt decided to occupy a belt of country between the Forth and Clyde which contained all the required materials in the form of coal and iron. Other things, such as copper, he brought into the region in quantities which he believed would suffice for months.
The frontier included something like a thousand square miles of territory; and within the boundary lay the whole industrial tract of mid-Scotland with its countless pits, mines, foundries, factories, shipbuilding yards and other resources.
Under Congleton’s arrangements, as many ships as possible had been brought into the Clyde and Forth at the last moment; and thereafter the Navy blocked the entrances with mine-fields upon an enormous scale. Nothing, either surface craft or submarine, could have penetrated either estuary.
Aerial defence was a secondary matter. No invasion in force would come by that road; and the destruction of the aerodromes had disposed of any early attempts at mere malicious damage. Defences were established, however, around the central area; and to accommodate the aeroplanes which had been brought North, immense flying-grounds were laid out on the level reaches of the lower Clyde.
The storage of the food-supplies cost much thought; but by utilising every spare corner, including railway and tramway depots, it had been possible to get them all under cover and under guard. A strict rationing system was put in force, though the allowance was quite up to normal quantities. The main trouble was, as Nordenholt had anticipated, a shortage of vegetables; and there was also a considerable deficit in the meat-supply. However, after a complete census had been taken, it seemed likely that we should be able to hold out without much difficulty.
These material factors had given little trouble in our arrangements; but when the human counters came into the question, the resulting complications were much greater than appeared at first sight. Taking the problem at its simplest, we had coal at the one end and manufactured nitrogenous products at the other; and the quantity of the latter depended roughly on the amount of the former, since coal represented our source of energy and also part of our raw material in certain of the processes employed. But, in addition, we needed coal for lighting, either by gas or electricity, and also for heating; so that our actual coal output had to be larger than that required for the mere fixation of nitrogen. Then the number of miners had to be adjusted in proportion to those of the remaining workmen in each stage of the process; for it was wasteful to feed men who were employed in producing a superfluity which could not be utilised. Again, the problem was complicated by the fact that the coal could not immediately be used as it was hewn. Time had to be allowed for the construction and erection of the machinery whereby the atmospheric nitrogen was to be fixed; and this introduced further complications into the calculations. Finally, to omit intermediate details, the number of labourers required for spreading the nitrogenous manure upon the soil was governed by the quantities of this material which could be prepared.
But even when calculations had been made which covered all this ground, a further factor entered into the problem. In dealing with a million workers, death, disease and accidents have to be taken into account, since in their effects they touch large numbers of individuals. The incidence of these factors is not uniform in all trades; and hence corrections had to be introduced to bring the various groups into proportion.
The whole of these calculations had, of course, been made during the period of enrolment; and the reason I lay stress upon them at this stage is to show how accurately each sectio
n of the machine was dovetailed into the neighbouring parts: It was impossible to foresee everything: in fact what happened showed that some factors are beyond calculation. But when the Nitrogen Area started as a going concern, everything possible had been provided for, as far as could be seen. It was no fault of Nordenholt’s that things went as they did in the end.
*****
With the segregation of the Nitrogen Area from the rest of the Kingdom, and the transference of Parliament to Glasgow, a problem arose which required instant settlement. A dual control in the district might have been fraught with all manner of evil possibilities; and it was essential, once for all, to decide where the ultimate power lay. Nordenholt allowed no time to be wasted in the matter. At the first meeting of the House of Commons after the Area was definitely closed, he took his seat as a Member and moved the adjournment of the House on a matter of urgent public importance. His speech, as reported officially, was very short.
“Mr. Speaker—Sir, I have watched the proceedings in this House closely during the last weeks; and I have noted that a certain number of members seem animated by a spirit of factious opposition to the Government measures. I call the attention of the House to the state of grave peril in which we all stand; and I ask them if this conduct has their support. I have no wish to complicate matters. We have all of us more responsibility on our shoulders than we can bear; and I have no sympathy with these methods. Those who think with me in this matter will vote with me in the lobby. I move that this House do now adjourn.”
The motion was seconded and the question put without further debate. About forty members went into the lobby against Nordenholt. While they were still there, he drew a whistle from his pocket and blew three shrill blasts. A picket of the Labour Defence Force entered the House in response to the signal and arrested the malcontent members, whom they removed in custody. When the remainder of the Members returned to the Chamber, Nordenholt took his stand before the Mace.
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