1
Viewed from the standpoint of a sane1 and ambitious social order, it is difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow, the motives3 that plunged5 mankind into the war that fills the histories of the middle decades of the twentieth century.
It must always be remembered that the political structure of the world at that time was everywhere extraordinarily6 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 pretensions7, 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 absurdities8 of courts and the indignities9 of representative parliamentary government, coupled with the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other directions, had withdrawn10 the best intelligences more and more from public affairs. The ostensible11 governments of the world in the twentieth century were following in the wake of the ostensible religions. They were ceasing to command the services of any but second-rate men. After the middle of the eighteenth century there are no more great ecclesiastics12 upon the world’s memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen. Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted, common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the past.
Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the boundaries of the various ‘sovereign states,’ and the conception of a general predominance in human affairs on the part of some one particular state. The memory of the empires of Rome and Alexander squatted13, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human imagination — it bored into the human brain like some grisly parasite14 and filled it with disordered thoughts and violent impulses. For more than a century the French system exhausted15 its vitality16 in belligerent17 convulsions, and then the infection passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart and centre of Europe, and from them onward18 to the Slavs. Later ages were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this obsession19, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the infinite knowingness of the political writer, the cunning refusals to accept plain facts, the strategic devices, the tactical manoeuvres, the records of mobilisations and counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible20 almost as soon as it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their state craftsmen21 sat with their historical candles burning, and, in spite of strange, new reflections and unfamiliar22 lights and shadows, still wrangling23 and planning to rearrange the maps of Europe and the world.
It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry24 how far the millions of men and women outside the world of these specialists sympathised and agreed with their portentous25 activities. One school of psychologists inclined to minimise this participation26, but the balance of evidence goes to show that there were massive responses to these suggestions of the belligerent schemer. Primitive27 man had been a fiercely combative29 animal; innumerable generations had passed their lives in tribal30 warfare31, and the weight of tradition, the example of history, the ideals of loyalty32 and devotion fell in easily enough with the incitements of the international mischief33-maker. The political ideas of the common man were picked up haphazard34, there was practically nothing in such education as he was given that was ever intended to fit him for citizenship35 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 exasperated36 suspicion and national aggression38.
For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily patriotic39 when presently his battalion40 came up from the depot41 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 Allied42 Powers, of a real enthusiasm even among the destitute43 and unemployed44. The Labour Bureaux were now partially45 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 regiment46, if a little stiffened47 and darkened by grim anticipations48, was none the less warlike.
But all this emotion was the fickle49 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 martial50 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.
2
The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the lower Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct from the various British depots51 to the points in the Ardennes where they were intended to entrench52 themselves.
Most of the documents bearing upon the campaign were destroyed during the war, from the first the scheme of the Allies seems to have been confused, but it is highly probable that the formation of an aerial park in this region, from which attacks could be made upon the vast industrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a flanking raid through Holland upon the German naval53 establishments at the mouth of the Elbe, were integral parts of the original project. Nothing of this was known to such pawns54 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 embody55 enthusiasm. Barnet says, ‘We talked of Them. THEY are sending us up into Luxembourg. THEY are going to turn the Central European right.’
Behind the veil of this vagueness the little group of more or less worthy56 men which constituted Headquarters was beginning to realise the enormity of the thing it was supposed to control. . . .
In the great hall of the War Control, whose windows looked out across the Seine to the Trocadero and the palaces of the western quarter, a series of big-scale relief maps were laid out upon tables to display the whole seat of war, and the staff-officers of the control were continually busy shifting the little blocks which represented the contending troops, as the reports and intelligence came drifting in to the various telegraphic bureaux in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller apartments there were maps of a less detailed57 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 consultation58 with General Viard and the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world supremacy59 against the Central European powers. Very probably he had a definite idea of his game; very probably he had a coherent and admirable plan.
But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new strategy of aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy that Holsten had opened for mankind. While he planned entrenchments and invasions and a frontier war, the Central European generalship was striking at the eyes and the brain. And while, with a certain diffident hesitation60, he developed his gambit that night upon the lines laid down by Napoleon and Moltke, his own scientific corps61 in a state of mutinous62 activity was preparing a blow for Berlin. ‘These old fools!’ was the key in which the scientific corps was thinking.
The War Control in Paris, on the night of July the second, was an impressive display of the paraphernalia63 of scientific military organisation64, as the first half of the twentieth century understood it. To one human being at least the consulting commanders had the likeness65 of world-wielding gods.
She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute, and she had been engaged in relay with other similar women to take down orders in duplicate and hand them over to the junior officers in attendance, to be forwarded and filed. There had come a lull66, and she had been sent out from the dictating67 room to take the air upon the terrace before the great hall and to eat such scanty68 refreshment69 as she had brought with her until her services were required again.
From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view not only of the wide sweep of the river below her, and all the eastward70 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 spacious71 interior of the great hall with its slender pillars and gracious arching and clustering lamps was visible to her. There, over a wilderness72 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 consultants73 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 myriads74 moved. Men rose up and went forward and died. The fate of nations lay behind the eyes of these three men. Indeed they were like gods.
Most godlike of the three was Dubois. It was for him to decide; the others at most might suggest. Her woman’s soul went out to this grave, handsome, still, old man, in a passion of instinctive75 worship.
Once she had taken words of instruction from him direct. She had awaited them in an ecstasy76 of happiness — and fear. For her exaltation was made terrible by the dread77 that some error might dishonour78 her. . . .
She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating minuteness of an impassioned woman’s observation.
He said little, she remarked. He looked but little at the maps. The tall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm79 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 eyebrows80 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 drooping81 head and melancholy82, watchful83 eyes. He was more intent upon the French right, which was feeling its way now through Alsace to the Rhine. He was, she knew, an old colleague of Dubois; he knew him better, she decided84, he trusted him more than this unfamiliar Englishman. . . .
Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in profile; these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered years ago. To seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse to hurry — itself a confession85 of miscalculation; by attention to these simple rules, Dubois had built up a steady reputation from the days when he had been a promising86 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 persistence87 had perplexed88 and hypnotised and defeated many a more actively89 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 steadfastly90 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 torpedo91 craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it; Viard might crave92 for brilliance93 with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes, and ski-men among the Swiss mountains, and a sudden swoop94 upon Vienna; the thing was to listen — and wait for the other side to begin experimenting. It was all experimenting. And meanwhile he remained in profile, with an air of assurance — like a man who sits in an automobile95 after the chauffeur96 has had his directions.
And every one about him was the stronger and surer for that quiet face, that air of knowledge and unruffled confidence. The clustering lights threw a score of shadows of him upon the maps, great bunches of him, versions of a commanding presence, lighter97 or darker, dominated the field, and pointed98 in every direction. Those shadows symbolised his control. When a messenger came from the wireless99 room to shift this or that piece in the game, to replace under amended100 reports one Central European regiment by a score, to draw back or thrust out or distribute this or that force of the Allies, the Marshal would turn his head and seem not to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who approves a pupil’s self-correction. ‘Yes, that’s better.’
How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how wonderful it all was. This was the brain of the western world, this was Olympus with the warring earth at its feet. And he was guiding France, France so long a resentful exile from imperialism101, back to her old predominance.
It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be privileged to participate. . . .
It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal devotion, and to have to be impersonal102, abstract, exact, punctual. She must control herself. . . .
She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when the war would be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this harshness, this armour103 would be put aside and the gods might unbend. Her eyelids104 drooped105. . . .
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 flickering106 of searchlights among the clouds from some high place away beyond the Trocadero. And then the excitement came surging up past her and invaded the hall within.
One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of the room, gesticulating and shouting something.
And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing107. She couldn’t understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed108 machinery109 and cables of the ways beneath, were beating — as pulses beat. And about her blew something like a wind — a wind that was dismay.
Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child might look towards its mother.
He was still serene110. 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, bent111 forward and with eyes upturned.
Something up there?
And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.
The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched112 together against the masonry113 and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping114 down through the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two of them, there had already started curling trails of red. . . .
Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through moments that seemed infinities115, watching those red missiles whirl down towards her.
She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but a crimson116-purple glare and sound, deafening117, all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out about her and against this glare hung slanting118 walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass. She had an impression of a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddened living thing that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst a chaos119 of falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earth furiously, that seemed to be burrowing120 into it like a blazing rabbit. . . .
She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.
She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that a little rivulet121 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, wincing122 and groaning123, and turned over and got into a sitting position and looked about her.
Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of a vast uproar124, but she did not realise this because her hearing had been destroyed.
At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous experience.
She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world, a world of heaped broken things. And it was lit — and somehow this was more familiar to her mind than any other fact about her — by a flickering, purplish-crimson light. Then close to her, rising above a confusion of debris125, she recognised the Trocadero; it was changed, something had gone from it, but its outline was unmistakable. It stood out against a streaming, whirling uprush of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled Paris and the Seine and the warm, overcast126 evening and the beautiful, luminous127 organisation of the War Control. . . .
She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she lay, and examined her surroundings with an increasing understanding. . . .
The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape129 into the river. Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water, from which these warm rivulets130 and torrents131 were trickling132. Wisps of vapour came into circling existence a foot or so from its mirror-surface. Near at hand and reflected exactly in the water was the upper part of a familiar-looking stone pillar. On the side of her away from the water the heaped ruins rose steeply in a confused slope up to a glaring crest133. 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 mound134 with the vanished buildings of the War Control.
‘Mais!’ she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite motionless for a time, crouching135 close to the warm earth.
Then presently this dim, broken human thing began to look about it again. She began to feel the need of fellowship. She wanted to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate her experience. And her foot hurt her atrociously. There ought to be an ambulance. A little gust136 of querulous criticisms blew across her mind. This surely was a disaster! Always after a disaster there should be ambulances and helpers moving about. . . .
She craned her head. There was something there. But everything was so still!
‘Monsieur!’ she cried. Her ears, she noted137, felt queer, and she began to suspect that all was not well with them.
It was terribly lonely in this chaotic138 strangeness, and perhaps this man — if it was a man, for it was difficult to see — might for all his stillness be merely insensible. He might have been stunned140. . . .
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 slab141 of the war map. To it there stuck and from it there dangled142 little wooden objects, the symbols of infantry143 and cavalry144 and guns, as they were disposed upon the frontier. He did not seem to be aware of this at his back, he had an effect of inattention, not indifferent attention, but as if he were thinking. . . .
She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was evident he frowned. He frowned slightly, he had an air of not wanting to be disturbed. His face still bore that expression of assured confidence, that conviction that if things were left to him France might obey in security. . . .
She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer. A strange surmise145 made her eyes dilate146. With a painful wrench147 she pulled herself up so that she could see completely over the intervening lumps of smashed-up masonry. Her hand touched something wet, and after one convulsive movement she became rigid148.
It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head and shoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged149 darkness and a pool of shining black. . . .
And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled150, and a rush of hot water came pouring over her. Then it seemed to her that she was dragged downward. . . .
3
When the rather brutish young aviator151 with the bullet head and the black hair close-cropped en brosse, who was in charge of the French special scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster to the War Control, he was so wanting in imagination in any sphere but his own, that he laughed. Small matter to him that Paris was burning. His mother and father and sister lived at Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had ever had, and it was poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen. He slapped his second-in-command on the shoulder. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them tit-for-tat. . . . Strategy and reasons of state — they’re over. . . . Come along, my boy, and we’ll just show these old women what we can do when they let us have our heads.’
He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the courtyard of the chateau152 in which he had been installed and shouted for his automobile. Things would have to move quickly because there was scarcely an hour and a half before dawn. He looked at the sky and noted with satisfaction a heavy bank of clouds athwart the pallid153 east.
He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and aeroplanes were scattered154 all over the country-side, stuck away in barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods. A hawk155 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 tarpaulin156 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 complement157 to all those other gifts science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of destruction, and he was an adventurous158 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 chuckling159 flavour, about the voice in which he gave his orders, and he pointed his remarks with the long finger of a hand that was hairy and exceptionally big.
‘We’ll give them tit-for-tat,’ he said. ‘We’ll give them tit-for-tat. No time to lose, boys. . . . ’
And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and Saxony the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancing sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow to the heart of the Central European hosts.
It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above the banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to plunge4 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 strata160 that hid the world below. Over great spaces those banks lay as even as a frozen lava-flow and almost as still, and then they were rent by ragged areas of translucency161, pierced by clear chasms162, so that dim patches of the land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw quite distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps and signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid through a boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill. But if the world was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through that vapour floor came the deep roar of trains, the whistles of horns of motor-cars, a sound of rifle fire away to the south, and as he drew near his destination the crowing of cocks. . . .
The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at first starry163 and then paler with a light that crept from north to east as the dawn came on. The Milky164 Way was invisible in the blue, and the lesser165 stars vanished. The face of the adventurer at the steering-wheel, darkly visible ever and again by the oval greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm beauty which all concentrated purpose gives, and something of the happiness of an idiot child that has at last got hold of the matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained in its compartments166 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 chambers167 embedded168 in lead. Beyond the thought of great destruction slumbering170 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 aquiline171 profile against the starlight expressed nothing but a profound gloom.
The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital was approached.
So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by no aeroplanes at all. The frontier scouts172 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 ascent173 of the sun, Berlin was but a score of miles ahead, and the luck of the Frenchmen held. By imperceptible degrees the clouds below dissolved. . . .
Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering174 light and with all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was Berlin. The left finger of the steersman verified roads and open spaces below upon the mica-covered square of map that was fastened by his wheel. There in a series of lake-like expansions was the Havel away to the right; over by those forests must be Spandau; there the river split about the Potsdam island; and right ahead was Charlottenburg cleft175 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 attentive176, 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 mere139 blob of hoarse177 sound. Then, gathering alarm from his grim silence, they gave chase and swept down, a hundred yards above him perhaps, and a couple of hundred behind. They were beginning to understand what he was. He ceased to watch them and concentrated himself on the city ahead, and for a time the two aeroplanes raced. . . .
A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one was tearing paper. A second followed. Something tapped the machine.
It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces below rushed widening out nearer and nearer to them. ‘Ready!’ said the steersman.
The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter. Between its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he bent his head until his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in order to let the air in upon the inducive. Sure of its accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane and judged his pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted178 the bomb over the side.
‘Round,’ he whispered inaudibly.
The bomb flashed blinding scarlet179 in mid-air, and fell, a descending180 column of blaze eddying181 spirally in the midst of a whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks, hurled183 high and sideways and the steersman, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, fought in great banking184 curves for a balance. The gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his nostrils185 dilated186, his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped187. . . .
When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater188 of a small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle a shuddering189 star of evil splendour spurted190 and poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation191. They were too high to distinguish people clearly, or mark the bomb’s effect upon the building until suddenly the facade192 tottered193 and crumbled before the flare194 as sugar dissolves in water. The man stared for a moment, showed all his long teeth, and then staggered into the cramped195 standing128 position his straps196 permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down after its fellow.
The explosion came this time more directly underneath197 the aeroplane and shot it upward edgeways. The bomb box tipped to the point of disgorgement, and the bomb-thrower was pitched forward upon the third bomb with his face close to its celluloid stud. He clutched its handles, and with a sudden gust of determination that the thing should not escape him, bit its stud. Before he could hurl182 it over, the monoplane was slipping sideways. Everything was falling sideways. Instinctively198 he gave himself up to gripping, his body holding the bomb in its place.
Then that bomb had exploded also, and steersman, thrower, and aeroplane were just flying rags and splinters of metal and drops of moisture in the air, and a third column of fire rushed eddying down upon the doomed199 buildings below. . . .
4
Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely200 to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them. Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by which the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This liberated201 fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a blazing continual explosion. The Central European bombs were the same, except that they were larger and had a more complicated arrangement for animating202 the inducive.
Always before in the development of warfare the shells and rockets fired had been but momentarily explosive, they had gone off in an instant once for all, and if there was nothing living or valuable within reach of the concussion203 and the flying fragments then they were spent and over. But Carolinum, which belonged to the beta group of Hyslop’s so-called ‘suspended degenerator’ elements, once its degenerative process had been induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing could arrest it. Of all Hyslop’s artificial elements, Carolinum was the most heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to make and handle. To this day it remains204 the most potent205 degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it poured out half of the huge store of energy in its great molecules206 in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen days’ emission207 was a half of that first period’s outpouring, and so on. As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum, though every seventeen days its power is halved208, though constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb fields of that frantic209 time in human history are sprinkled with radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient210 rays.
What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the inducive oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum began to degenerate211. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its explosion began it was still mainly an inert212 sphere exploding superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus213 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 monstrous214 cavern215 of fiery216 energy at the base of what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The Carolinum, unable to disperse217, freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam, and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption218 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, puffs219 of heavy incandescent220 vapour and fragments of viciously punitive221 rock and mud, saturated222 with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching223 and blistering224 energy, were flung high and far.
Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate explosive that was to give the ‘decisive touch’ to war. . . .
5
A recent historical writer has described the world of that time as one that ‘believed in established words and was invincibly225 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 fumbling226 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. Applied227 to warfare that meant that the power to inflict228 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 forth229, 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 wreck230 half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as the Americans used to phrase it, ‘fooled around’ with the paraphernalia and pretensions of war.
It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce between the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand, and the world of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men of a later time can hope to understand this preposterous231 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 civilisation232, but the community, as a whole, was aimless, untrained and unorganised to the pitch of imbecility. Collective civilisation, the ‘Modern State,’ was still in the womb of the future. . . .
6
But let us return to Frederick Barnet’s Wander Jahre and its account of the experiences of a common man during the war time. While these terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were happening in Paris and Berlin, Barnet and his company were industriously234 entrenching235 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 scouting236 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 interspersed237 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 fortified238 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 abruptly239 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 attenuated240. ‘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 essentially241 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 trotted242. 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 dodging243 about in the corn. At first I couldn’t satisfy myself and didn’t shoot, his movements were so spasmodic and uncertain; then I think he came to a ditch or some such obstacle and halted for a moment. “GOT you,” I whispered, and pulled the trigger.
‘I had the strangest sensations about that man. In the first instance, when I felt that I had hit him I was irradiated with joy and pride. . . .
‘I sent him spinning. He jumped and threw up his arms. . . .
‘Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping about. Suddenly I felt sick. I hadn’t killed him. . . .
‘In some way he was disabled and smashed up and yet able to struggle about. I began to think. . . .
‘For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn. Either he was calling out or some one was shouting to him. . . .
‘Then he jumped up — he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with one last effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still and never moved again.
‘He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him dead. I had been wanting to do so for some time. . . . ’
The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made for themselves in the woods below. A man was hit in the pit next to Barnet, and began cursing and crying out in a violent rage. Barnet crawled along the ditch to him and found him in great pain, covered with blood, frantic with indignation, and with the half of his right hand smashed to a pulp244. ‘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 vestiges245 with a horror that made him impenetrable to any other idea. At last the poor wretch246 let Barnet tie up his bleeding stump247 and help him along the ditch that conducted him deviously248 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 tedium249 and discomfort250. 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 dynamite251 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 idiotic252 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 sleeper253 will endure no more of it — and wakes?
‘I don’t know how my speculations254 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.’
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 Rouge255, 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 northward256 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 dyke257 roads, and the countless258 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, reclaimed259 at various times between the early tenth century and 1945 and all many feet below the level of the waves outside the dykes260, spread out their lush polders to the northern sun and sustained a dense261 industrious233 population. An intricate web of laws and custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a perpetual defence against the beleaguering262 sea. For more than two hundred and fifty miles from Walcheren to Friesland stretched a line of embankments and pumping stations that was the admiration263 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 catastrophe264. 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 meres265, fringed and divided up by masses of willow266 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 gaily267 coloured peasants’ automobiles268, the hues269 of the innumerable motor barges270 in the canal vied with the eventfulness of the roadways; and everywhere in solitary272 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 abounding273 in bridges and clipped trees, were human habitations.
The people of this country-side were not belligerents274. 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 impartially275 observant spectators, women and children in peculiar276 white caps and old-fashioned sabots, and elderly, clean-shaven men quietly thoughtful over their long pipes. They had no fear of their invaders277; the days when ‘soldiering’ meant bands of licentious278 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 shipping279, and pouring out still more men and still more material; he would have noticed halts and provisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling280 caterpillars281 of cavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons282, the huge beetles283 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 extravagant284 festival of animated285 toys.
As the sun sank westward286 the spectacle must have become a little indistinct because of a golden haze287; everything must have become warmer and more glowing, and because of the lengthening288 of the shadows more manifestly in relief. The shadows of the tall churches grew longer and longer, until they touched the horizon and mingled289 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 mingling290 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 distraction291 of sight.
It may be that watcher drifting in the pellucid292 gulf293 beneath the stars watched all through the night; it may be that he dozed294. But if he gave way to so natural a proclivity295, 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, plunging296, oversetting, soaring to the zenith and dropping to the ground, they came to assail297 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 swarming298 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 slew299 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 duels300 that swooped301 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 flared302 up again in enormous columns of glare and crimsoned303 smoke and steam.
And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires304 and trees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea, tumbled with anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood. . . .
Over the populous305 country below went a strange multitudinous crying and a flurry of alarm bells . . . .
The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky, like things that suddenly know themselves to be wicked. . . .
Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might quench306, the waves came roaring in upon the land. . . .
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 craved307. 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 deserted308 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 grilled309 our herrings. None of us had slept for nearly forty hours, and I determined310 to stay in this refuge until dawn and then if the traffic was still choked leave the barge271 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 squads311, 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 adorned312 with the legend, Vreugde bij Vrede, “Joy with Peace,” and it bore every mark of the busy retirement313 of a comfort-loving proprietor314. I went along his garden, which was gay and delightful315 with big bushes of rose and sweet brier, to a quaint316 little summer-house, and there I sat and watched the men in groups cooking and squatting317 along the bank. The sun was setting in a nearly cloudless sky.
‘For the last two weeks I had been a wholly occupied man, intent only upon obeying the orders that came down to me. All through this time I had been working to the very limit of my mental and physical faculties318, and my only moments of rest had been devoted319 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 acquiescence320 in the subordination and needs of our positions. I watched their proceedings321 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 toil322 of the last two weeks, how they had toughened and shaken down to comradeship together, and how much sweetness there is after all in our foolish human blood. For they were just one casual sample of the species — their patience and readiness lay, as the energy of the atom had lain, still waiting to be properly utilised. Again it came to me with overpowering force that the supreme323 need of our race is leading, that the supreme task is to discover leading, to forget oneself in realising the collective purpose of the race. Once more I saw life plain. . . . ’
Very characteristic is that of the ‘rather too corpulent’ young officer, who was afterwards to set it all down in the Wander Jahre. Very characteristic, too, it is of the change in men’s hearts that was even then preparing a new phase of human history.
He goes on to write of the escape from individuality in science and service, and of his discovery of this ‘salvation.’ All that was then, no doubt, very moving and original; now it seems only the most obvious commonplace of human life.
The glow of the sunset faded, the twilight324 deepened into night. The fires burnt the brighter, and some Irishmen away across the meer started singing. But Barnet’s men were too weary for that sort of thing, and soon the bank and the barge were heaped with sleeping forms.
‘I alone seemed unable to sleep. I suppose I was over-weary, and after a little feverish325 slumber169 by the tiller of the barge I sat up, awake and uneasy. . . .
‘That night Holland seemed all sky. There was just a little black lower rim28 to things, a steeple, perhaps, or a line of poplars, and then the great hemisphere swept over us. As at first the sky was empty. Yet my uneasiness referred itself in some vague way to the sky.
‘And now I was melancholy. I found something strangely sorrowful and submissive in the sleepers326 all about me, those men who had marched so far, who had left all the established texture327 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, preposterously328 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 kindly329 but jealous, desirous but discursive330, able and unwisely impulsive331, until Saturn332 who begot333 him shall devour334 him in his turn. . . .
‘I was roused from these thoughts by the sudden realisation of the presence of a squadron of aeroplanes far away to the north-east and very high. They looked like little black dashes against the midnight blue. I remember that I looked up at them at first rather idly — as one might notice a flight of birds. Then I perceived that they were only the extreme wing of a great fleet that was advancing in a long line very swiftly from the direction of the frontier and my attention tightened335.
‘Directly I saw that fleet I was astonished not to have seen it before.
‘I stood up softly, undesirous of disturbing my companions, but with my heart beating now rather more rapidly with surprise and excitement. I strained my ears for any sound of guns along our front. Almost instinctively I turned about for protection to the south and west, and peered; and then I saw coming as fast and much nearer to me, as if they had sprung out of the darkness, three banks of aeroplanes; a group of squadrons very high, a main body at a height perhaps of one or two thousand feet, and a doubtful number flying low and very indistinct. The middle ones were so thick they kept putting out groups of stars. And I realised that after all there was to be fighting in the air.
‘There was something extraordinarily strange in this swift, noiseless convergence of nearly invisible combatants above the sleeping hosts. Every one about me was still unconscious; there was no sign as yet of any agitation336 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 bugles337, and after that shots, and then a wild clamour of bells. I determined to let my men sleep on for as long as they could. . . .
‘The battle was joined with the swiftness of dreaming. I do not think it can have been five minutes from the moment when I first became aware of the Central European air fleet to the contact of the two forces. I saw it quite plainly in silhouette338 against the luminous blue of the northern sky. The allied aeroplanes — they were mostly French — came pouring down like a fierce shower upon the middle of the Central European fleet. They looked exactly like a coarser sort of rain. There was a crackling sound — the first sound I heard — it reminded one of the Aurora339 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 collapse340 and fall and then flare out with so bright a light that it took the edge off one’s vision and made the rest of the battle disappear as though it had been snatched back out of sight.
‘And then, while I still peered and tried to shade these flames from my eyes with my hand, and while the men about me were beginning to stir, the atomic bombs were thrown at the dykes. They made a mighty341 thunder in the air, and fell like Lucifer in the picture, leaving a flaring342 trail in the sky. The night, which had been pellucid and detailed and eventful, seemed to vanish, to be replaced abruptly by a black background to these tremendous pillars of fire. . . .
‘Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was filled with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds. . . .
‘There was something discontinuous in this impact. At one moment I was a lonely watcher in a sleeping world; the next saw every one about me afoot, the whole world awake and amazed. . . .
‘And then the wind had struck me a buffet343, taken my helmet and swept aside the summerhouse of Vreugde bij Vrede, as a scythe344 sweeps away grass. I saw the bombs fall, and then watched a great crimson flare leap responsive to each impact, and mountainous masses of red-lit steam and flying fragments clamber up towards the zenith. Against the glare I saw the country-side for miles standing black and clear, churches, trees, chimneys. And suddenly I understood. The Central Europeans had burst the dykes. Those flares345 meant the bursting of the dykes, and in a little while the sea-water would be upon us. . . . ’
He goes on to tell with a certain prolixity346 of the steps he took — and all things considered they were very intelligent steps — to meet this amazing crisis. He got his men aboard and hailed the adjacent barges; he got the man who acted as barge engineer at his post and the engines working, he cast loose from his moorings. Then he bethought himself of food, and contrived347 to land five men, get in a few dozen cheeses, and ship his men again before the inundation348 reached them.
He is reasonably proud of this piece of coolness. His idea was to take the wave head-on and with his engines full speed ahead. And all the while he was thanking heaven he was not in the jam of traffic in the main canal. He rather, I think, overestimated349 the probable rush of waters; he dreaded350 being swept away, he explains, and smashed against houses and trees.
He does not give any estimate of the time it took between the bursting of the dykes and the arrival of the waters, but it was probably an interval351 of about twenty minutes or half an hour. He was working now in darkness — save for the light of his lantern — and in a great wind. He hung out head and stern lights. . . .
Whirling torrents of steam were pouring up from the advancing waters, which had rushed, it must be remembered, through nearly incandescent gaps in the sea defences, and this vast uprush of vapour soon veiled the flaring centres of explosion altogether.
‘The waters came at last, an advancing cascade352. It was like a broad roller sweeping353 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 swirled355 by, coming into the light of our lamps out of an ebony blackness and vanishing again into impenetrable black. And on the waters came shapes, came things that flashed upon us for a moment, now a half-submerged boat, now a cow, now a huge fragment of a house’s timberings, now a muddle356 of packing-cases and scaffolding. The things clapped into sight like something shown by the opening of a shutter357, and then bumped shatteringly against us or rushed by us. Once I saw very clearly a man’s white face. . . .
‘All the while a group of labouring, half-submerged trees remained ahead of us, drawing very slowly nearer. I steered358 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. . . . ’
9
Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had been badly strained, and his men were pumping or baling in relays. He had got about a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose boat had capsized near him, and he had three other boats in tow. He was afloat, and somewhere between Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but he could not tell where. It was a day that was still half night. Gray waters stretched in every direction under a dark gray sky, and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, in many cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the upper third of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted a dimly seen flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned, furniture, rafts, timbering, and miscellaneous objects.
The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there did a dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly359 to a box or chair or such-like buoy354 hint at the hidden massacre360. 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 canopy361. The air cleared in the afternoon, and then, far away to the west under great banks of steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of the atomic bombs came visible across the waste of water.
They showed flat and sullen362 through the mist, like London sunsets. ‘They sat upon the sea,’ says Barnet, ‘like frayed-out waterlilies of flame.’
Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the track of the canal, in helping363 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 immediate364 appeals for aid were satisfied that he thought of food and drink for his men, and what course he had better pursue. They had a little cheese, but no water. ‘Orders,’ that mysterious direction, had at last altogether disappeared. He perceived he had now to act upon his own responsibility.
‘One’s sense was of a destruction so far-reaching and of a world so altered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and expect to find things as they had been before the war began. I sat on the quarter-deck with Mylius my engineer and Kemp and two others of the non-commissioned officers, and we consulted upon our line of action. We were foodless and aimless. We agreed that our fighting value was extremely small, and that our first duty was to get ourselves in touch with food and instructions again. Whatever plan of campaign had directed our movements was manifestly smashed to bits. Mylius was of opinion that we could take a line westward and get back to England across the North Sea. He calculated that with such a motor barge as ours it would be possible to reach the Yorkshire coast within four-and-twenty hours. But this idea I overruled because of the shortness of our provisions, and more particularly because of our urgent need of water.
‘Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their demands did much to exasperate37 our thirst. I decided that if we went away to the south we should reach hilly country, or at least country that was not submerged, and then we should be able to land, find some stream, drink, and get supplies and news. Many of the barges adrift in the haze about us were filled with British soldiers and had floated up from the Nord See Canal, but none of them were any better informed than ourselves of the course of events. “Orders” had, in fact, vanished out of the sky.
‘“Orders” made a temporary reappearance late that evening in the form of a megaphone hail from a British torpedo boat, announcing a truce365, and giving the welcome information that food and water were being hurried down the Rhine and were to be found on the barge flotilla lying over the old Rhine above Leiden.’ . . .
We will not follow Barnet, however, in the description of his strange overland voyage among trees and houses and churches by Zaandam and between Haarlem and Amsterdam, to Leiden. It was a voyage in a red-lit mist, in a world of steamy silhouette, full of strange voices and perplexity, and with every other sensation dominated by a feverish thirst. ‘We sat,’ he says, ‘in a little huddled366 group, saying very little, and the men forward were mere knots of silent endurance. Our only continuing sound was the persistent367 mewing of a cat one of the men had rescued from a floating hayrick near Zaandam. We kept a southward course by a watch-chain compass Mylius had produced. . . .
‘I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army, nor had we any strong sense of the war as the dominating fact about us. Our mental setting had far more of the effect of a huge natural catastrophe. The atomic bombs had dwarfed368 the international issues to complete insignificance369. When our minds wandered from the preoccupations of our immediate needs, we speculated upon the possibility of stopping the use of these frightful370 explosives before the world was utterly371 destroyed. For to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still greater power of destruction of which they were the precursors372 might quite easily shatter every relationship and institution of mankind.
‘“What will they be doing,” asked Mylius, “what will they be doing? It’s plain we’ve got to put an end to war. It’s plain things have to be run some way. THIS— all this — is impossible.”
‘I made no immediate answer. Something — I cannot think what — had brought back to me the figure of that man I had seen wounded on the very first day of actual fighting. I saw again his angry, tearful eyes, and that poor, dripping, bloody373 mess that had been a skilful374 human hand five minutes before, thrust out in indignant protest. “Damned foolery,” he had stormed and sobbed375, “damned foolery. My right hand, sir! My RIGHT hand . . . .”
‘My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me. “I think we are too — too silly,” I said to Mylius, “ever to stop war. If we’d had the sense to do it, we should have done it before this. I think this ——” I pointed to the gaunt black outline of a smashed windmill that stuck up, ridiculous and ugly, above the blood-lit waters —“this is the end.”’
10
But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and his barge-load of hungry and starving men.
For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if civilisation had come to a final collapse. These crowning buds upon the tradition that Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered, opened and flared ‘like waterlilies of flame’ over nations destroyed, over churches smashed or submerged, towns ruined, fields lost to mankind for ever, and a million weltering bodies. Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would the flames of war still burn amidst the ruins?
Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance in their answers to that question. Already once in the history of mankind, in America, before its discovery by the whites, an organised civilisation had given way to a mere cult2 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 ascendancy376 of the warrior377, this triumph of the destructive instincts of the race.
The subsequent chapters of Barnet’s narrative378 do but supply body to this tragic379 possibility. He gives a series of vignettes of civilisation, shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found the Belgian hills swarming with refugees and desolated380 by cholera381; the vestiges of the contending armies keeping order under a truce, without actual battles, but with the cautious hostility382 of habit, and a great absence of plan everywhere.
Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were rumours383 of cannibalism384 and hysterical385 fanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoy and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes. There was the report of an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and Japanese, and of some huge revolutionary outbreak in America. The weather was stormier than men had ever known it in those regions, with much thunder and lightning and wild cloud-bursts of rain. . . .
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1
sane
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| adj.心智健全的，神志清醒的，明智的，稳健的 | |
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2
cult
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| n.异教，邪教；时尚，狂热的崇拜 | |
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motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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4
plunge
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| v.跳入，(使)投入，(使)陷入；猛冲 | |
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plunged
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| v.颠簸( plunge的过去式和过去分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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extraordinarily
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| adv.格外地；极端地 | |
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pretensions
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| 自称( pretension的名词复数 )； 自命不凡； 要求； 权力 | |
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absurdities
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| n.极端无理性( absurdity的名词复数 )；荒谬；谬论；荒谬的行为 | |
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indignities
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| n.侮辱，轻蔑( indignity的名词复数 ) | |
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10
withdrawn
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| vt.收回；使退出；vi.撤退，退出 | |
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ostensible
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| adj.(指理由)表面的，假装的 | |
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ecclesiastics
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| n.神职者，教会，牧师( ecclesiastic的名词复数 ) | |
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13
squatted
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| v.像动物一样蹲下( squat的过去式和过去分词 )；非法擅自占用（土地或房屋）；为获得其所有权；而占用某片公共用地。 | |
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14
parasite
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| n.寄生虫；寄生菌；食客 | |
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15
exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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vitality
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| n.活力，生命力，效力 | |
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belligerent
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| adj.好战的，挑起战争的；n.交战国，交战者 | |
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onward
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| adj.向前的，前进的；adv.向前，前进，在先 | |
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obsession
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| n.困扰，无法摆脱的思想(或情感) | |
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20
credible
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| adj.可信任的，可靠的 | |
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craftsmen
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| n. 技工 | |
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22
unfamiliar
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| adj.陌生的，不熟悉的 | |
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23
wrangling
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| v.争吵，争论，口角( wrangle的现在分词 ) | |
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24
inquiry
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| n.打听，询问，调查，查问 | |
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25
portentous
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| adj.不祥的，可怕的，装腔作势的 | |
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participation
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| n.参与，参加，分享 | |
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27
primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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rim
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| n.(圆物的)边，轮缘；边界 | |
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combative
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| adj.好战的；好斗的 | |
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tribal
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| adj.部族的，种族的 | |
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31
warfare
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| n.战争(状态)；斗争；冲突 | |
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32
loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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33
mischief
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| n.损害，伤害，危害；恶作剧，捣蛋，胡闹 | |
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34
haphazard
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| adj.无计划的，随意的，杂乱无章的 | |
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35
citizenship
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| n.市民权，公民权，国民的义务(身份) | |
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36
exasperated
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| adj.恼怒的 | |
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37
exasperate
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| v.激怒，使（疾病）加剧，使恶化 | |
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38
aggression
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| n.进攻，侵略，侵犯，侵害 | |
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39
patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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40
battalion
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| n.营；部队；大队(的人) | |
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41
depot
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| n.仓库，储藏处；公共汽车站；火车站 | |
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42
allied
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| adj.协约国的；同盟国的 | |
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43
destitute
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| adj.缺乏的；穷困的 | |
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44
unemployed
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| adj.失业的，没有工作的；未动用的，闲置的 | |
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45
partially
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| adv.部分地，从某些方面讲 | |
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46
regiment
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| n.团，多数，管理；v.组织，编成团，统制 | |
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47
stiffened
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| 加强的 | |
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48
anticipations
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| 预期( anticipation的名词复数 )； 预测； （信托财产收益的）预支； 预期的事物 | |
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49
fickle
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| adj.(爱情或友谊上)易变的，不坚定的 | |
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50
martial
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| adj.战争的，军事的，尚武的，威武的 | |
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51
depots
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| 仓库( depot的名词复数 )； 火车站； 车库； 军需库 | |
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52
entrench
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| v.使根深蒂固；n.壕沟；防御设施 | |
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53
naval
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| adj.海军的，军舰的，船的 | |
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54
pawns
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| n.（国际象棋中的）兵( pawn的名词复数 )；卒；被人利用的人；小卒v.典当，抵押( pawn的第三人称单数 )；以（某事物）担保 | |
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55
embody
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| vt.具体表达，使具体化；包含，收录 | |
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56
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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57
detailed
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| adj.详细的，详尽的，极注意细节的，完全的 | |
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58
consultation
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| n.咨询；商量；商议；会议 | |
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59
supremacy
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| n.至上；至高权力 | |
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60
hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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61
corps
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| n.(通信等兵种的)部队；(同类作的)一组 | |
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62
mutinous
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| adj.叛变的，反抗的；adv.反抗地，叛变地；n.反抗，叛变 | |
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63
paraphernalia
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| n.装备；随身用品 | |
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64
organisation
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| n.组织，安排，团体，有机休 | |
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65
likeness
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| n.相像，相似（之处） | |
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66
lull
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| v.使安静，使入睡，缓和，哄骗；n.暂停，间歇 | |
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67
dictating
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| v.大声讲或读( dictate的现在分词 )；口授；支配；摆布 | |
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68
scanty
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| adj.缺乏的，仅有的，节省的，狭小的，不够的 | |
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69
refreshment
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| n.恢复，精神爽快，提神之事物；（复数）refreshments:点心，茶点 | |
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70
eastward
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| adv.向东；adj.向东的；n.东方，东部 | |
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71
spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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72
wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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73
consultants
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| 顾问( consultant的名词复数 )； 高级顾问医生，会诊医生 | |
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74
myriads
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| n.无数，极大数量( myriad的名词复数 ) | |
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75
instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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76
ecstasy
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| n.狂喜，心醉神怡，入迷 | |
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77
dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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78
dishonour
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| n./vt.拒付（支票、汇票、票据等）；vt.凌辱，使丢脸；n.不名誉，耻辱，不光彩 | |
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79
swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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80
eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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81
drooping
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| adj. 下垂的，无力的 动词droop的现在分词 | |
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82
melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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83
watchful
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| adj.注意的，警惕的 | |
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84
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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85
confession
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| n.自白，供认，承认 | |
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86
promising
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| adj.有希望的，有前途的 | |
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87
persistence
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| n.坚持，持续，存留 | |
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88
perplexed
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| adj.不知所措的 | |
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actively
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| adv.积极地，勤奋地 | |
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steadfastly
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| adv.踏实地，不变地；岿然；坚定不渝 | |
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91
torpedo
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| n.水雷，地雷；v.用鱼雷破坏 | |
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92
crave
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| vt.渴望得到，迫切需要，恳求，请求 | |
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93
brilliance
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| n.光辉，辉煌，壮丽，（卓越的）才华，才智 | |
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94
swoop
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| n.俯冲，攫取；v.抓取，突然袭击 | |
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automobile
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| n.汽车，机动车 | |
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96
chauffeur
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| n.(受雇于私人或公司的)司机；v.为…开车 | |
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97
lighter
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| n.打火机，点火器；驳船；v.用驳船运送；light的比较级 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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wireless
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| adj.无线的；n.无线电 | |
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Amended
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| adj. 修正的 动词amend的过去式和过去分词 | |
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101
imperialism
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| n.帝国主义，帝国主义政策 | |
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102
impersonal
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| adj.无个人感情的，与个人无关的，非人称的 | |
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103
armour
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| （=armor）n.盔甲；装甲部队 | |
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104
eyelids
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| n.眼睑( eyelid的名词复数 )；眼睛也不眨一下；不露声色；面不改色 | |
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105
drooped
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| 弯曲或下垂，发蔫( droop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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106
flickering
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| adj.闪烁的，摇曳的，一闪一闪的 | |
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throbbing
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| a. 跳动的,悸动的 | |
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108
concealed
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| a.隐藏的，隐蔽的 | |
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109
machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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110
serene
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| adj. 安详的，宁静的，平静的 | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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112
crouched
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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113
masonry
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| n.砖土建筑；砖石 | |
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114
swooping
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| 俯冲，猛冲( swoop的现在分词 ) | |
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115
infinities
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| n.无穷大( infinity的名词复数 )；无限远的点；无法计算的量；无限大的量 | |
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116
crimson
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| n./adj.深(绯)红色(的)；vi.脸变绯红色 | |
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117
deafening
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| adj. 振耳欲聋的, 极喧闹的 动词deafen的现在分词形式 | |
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118
slanting
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| 倾斜的，歪斜的 | |
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119
chaos
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| n.混乱，无秩序 | |
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120
burrowing
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| v.挖掘（洞穴），挖洞( burrow的现在分词 )；翻寻 | |
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121
rivulet
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| n.小溪，小河 | |
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122
wincing
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| 赶紧避开，畏缩( wince的现在分词 ) | |
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123
groaning
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| adj. 呜咽的, 呻吟的 动词groan的现在分词形式 | |
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124
uproar
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| n.骚动，喧嚣，鼎沸 | |
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125
debris
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| n.瓦砾堆，废墟，碎片 | |
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126
overcast
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| adj.阴天的，阴暗的，愁闷的；v.遮盖，（使）变暗，包边缝；n.覆盖，阴天 | |
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127
luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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128
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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129
cape
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| n.海角，岬；披肩，短披风 | |
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130
rivulets
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| n.小河，小溪( rivulet的名词复数 ) | |
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131
torrents
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| n.倾注；奔流( torrent的名词复数 )；急流；爆发；连续不断 | |
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132
trickling
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| n.油画底色含油太多而成泡沫状突起v.滴( trickle的现在分词 )；淌；使)慢慢走；缓慢移动 | |
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133
crest
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| n.顶点；饰章；羽冠；vt.达到顶点；vi.形成浪尖 | |
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134
mound
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| n.土墩，堤，小山；v.筑堤，用土堆防卫 | |
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135
crouching
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的现在分词 ) | |
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136
gust
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| n.阵风，突然一阵（雨、烟等），（感情的）迸发 | |
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137
noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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138
chaotic
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| adj.混沌的，一片混乱的，一团糟的 | |
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139
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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140
stunned
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| adj. 震惊的，惊讶的 动词stun的过去式和过去分词 | |
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141
slab
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| n.平板，厚的切片；v.切成厚板，以平板盖上 | |
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142
dangled
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| 悬吊着( dangle的过去式和过去分词 )； 摆动不定； 用某事物诱惑…； 吊胃口 | |
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143
infantry
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| n.[总称]步兵(部队) | |
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144
cavalry
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| n.骑兵；轻装甲部队 | |
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145
surmise
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| v./n.猜想，推测 | |
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146
dilate
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| vt.使膨胀，使扩大 | |
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147
wrench
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| v.猛拧；挣脱；使扭伤；n.扳手；痛苦，难受 | |
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148
rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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149
ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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150
crumbled
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| （把…）弄碎， （使）碎成细屑( crumble的过去式和过去分词 )； 衰落； 坍塌； 损坏 | |
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151
aviator
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| n.飞行家，飞行员 | |
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152
chateau
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| n.城堡，别墅 | |
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153
pallid
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| adj.苍白的，呆板的 | |
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154
scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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155
hawk
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| n.鹰，骗子；鹰派成员 | |
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156
tarpaulin
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| n.涂油防水布，防水衣，防水帽 | |
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157
complement
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| n.补足物，船上的定员；补语；vt.补充，补足 | |
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158
adventurous
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| adj.爱冒险的；惊心动魄的，惊险的，刺激的 | |
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159
chuckling
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| 轻声地笑( chuckle的现在分词 ) | |
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160
strata
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| n.地层（复数）；社会阶层 | |
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161
translucency
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| 半透明，半透明物； 半透澈度 | |
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162
chasms
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| 裂缝( chasm的名词复数 )； 裂口； 分歧； 差别 | |
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163
starry
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| adj.星光照耀的, 闪亮的 | |
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164
milky
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| adj.牛奶的，多奶的；乳白色的 | |
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165
lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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166
compartments
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| n.间隔( compartment的名词复数 )；（列车车厢的）隔间；（家具或设备等的）分隔间；隔层 | |
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167
chambers
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| n.房间( chamber的名词复数 )；（议会的）议院；卧室；会议厅 | |
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168
embedded
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| a.扎牢的 | |
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169
slumber
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| n.睡眠，沉睡状态 | |
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170
slumbering
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| 微睡，睡眠（slumber的现在分词形式） | |
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171
aquiline
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| adj.钩状的，鹰的 | |
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172
scouts
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| 侦察员[机，舰]( scout的名词复数 )； 童子军； 搜索； 童子军成员 | |
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173
ascent
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| n.(声望或地位)提高；上升，升高；登高 | |
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174
gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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175
cleft
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| n.裂缝；adj.裂开的 | |
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176
attentive
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| adj.注意的，专心的；关心(别人)的，殷勤的 | |
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177
hoarse
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| adj.嘶哑的，沙哑的 | |
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178
hoisted
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| 把…吊起，升起( hoist的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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179
scarlet
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| n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的 | |
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180
descending
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| n. 下行 adj. 下降的 | |
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181
eddying
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| 涡流，涡流的形成 | |
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182
hurl
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| vt.猛投，力掷，声叫骂 | |
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183
hurled
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| v.猛投，用力掷( hurl的过去式和过去分词 )；大声叫骂 | |
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184
banking
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| n.银行业，银行学，金融业 | |
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185
nostrils
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| 鼻孔( nostril的名词复数 ) | |
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186
dilated
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| adj.加宽的，扩大的v.（使某物）扩大，膨胀，张大( dilate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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187
strapped
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| adj.用皮带捆住的，用皮带装饰的；身无分文的；缺钱；手头紧v.用皮带捆扎(strap的过去式和过去分词)；用皮带抽打；包扎；给…打绷带 | |
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188
crater
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| n.火山口，弹坑 | |
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189
shuddering
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| v.战栗( shudder的现在分词 )；发抖；（机器、车辆等）突然震动；颤动 | |
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190
spurted
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| （液体，火焰等）喷出，（使）涌出( spurt的过去式和过去分词 )； （短暂地）加速前进，冲刺 | |
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191
accusation
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| n.控告，指责，谴责 | |
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192
facade
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| n.(建筑物的)正面，临街正面；外表 | |
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193
tottered
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| v.走得或动得不稳( totter的过去式和过去分词 )；踉跄；蹒跚；摇摇欲坠 | |
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194
flare
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| v.闪耀，闪烁；n.潮红；突发 | |
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195
cramped
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| a.狭窄的 | |
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196
straps
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| n.带子( strap的名词复数 )；挎带；肩带；背带v.用皮带捆扎( strap的第三人称单数 )；用皮带抽打；包扎；给…打绷带 | |
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197
underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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198
instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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199
doomed
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| 命定的 | |
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200
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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201
liberated
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| a.无拘束的，放纵的 | |
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202
animating
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| v.使有生气( animate的现在分词 )；驱动；使栩栩如生地动作；赋予…以生命 | |
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203
concussion
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| n.脑震荡；震动 | |
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204
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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205
potent
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| adj.强有力的，有权势的；有效力的 | |
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206
molecules
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| 分子( molecule的名词复数 ) | |
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207
emission
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| n.发出物，散发物；发出，散发 | |
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208
halved
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| v.把…分成两半( halve的过去式和过去分词 )；把…减半；对分；平摊 | |
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209
frantic
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| adj.狂乱的，错乱的，激昂的 | |
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210
inconvenient
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| adj.不方便的，令人感到麻烦的 | |
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211
degenerate
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| v.退步，堕落；adj.退步的，堕落的；n.堕落者 | |
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212
inert
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| adj.无活动能力的，惰性的；迟钝的 | |
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213
nucleus
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| n.核，核心，原子核 | |
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214
monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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215
cavern
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| n.洞穴，大山洞 | |
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216
fiery
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| adj.燃烧着的，火红的；暴躁的；激烈的 | |
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217
disperse
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| vi.使分散；使消失；vt.分散；驱散 | |
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218
eruption
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| n.火山爆发；（战争等）爆发；（疾病等）发作 | |
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219
puffs
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| n.吸( puff的名词复数 )；（烟斗或香烟的）一吸；一缕（烟、蒸汽等）；（呼吸或风的）呼v.使喷出( puff的第三人称单数 )；喷着汽（或烟）移动；吹嘘；吹捧 | |
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220
incandescent
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| adj.遇热发光的， 白炽的，感情强烈的 | |
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221
punitive
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| adj.惩罚的，刑罚的 | |
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222
saturated
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| a.饱和的，充满的 | |
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223
scorching
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| adj. 灼热的 | |
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224
blistering
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| adj.酷热的；猛烈的；使起疱的；可恶的v.起水疱；起气泡；使受暴晒n.[涂料] 起泡 | |
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225
invincibly
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| adv.难战胜地，无敌地 | |
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226
fumbling
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| n. 摸索,漏接 v. 摸索,摸弄,笨拙的处理 | |
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227
applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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228
inflict
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| vt.(on)把…强加给，使遭受，使承担 | |
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229
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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230
wreck
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| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
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231
preposterous
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| adj.荒谬的，可笑的 | |
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232
civilisation
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| n.文明，文化，开化，教化 | |
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233
industrious
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| adj.勤劳的，刻苦的，奋发的 | |
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234
industriously
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235
entrenching
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| v.用壕沟围绕或保护…( entrench的现在分词 )；牢固地确立… | |
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236
scouting
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| 守候活动，童子军的活动 | |
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237
interspersed
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| adj.[医]散开的；点缀的v.intersperse的过去式和过去分词 | |
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238
fortified
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| adj. 加强的 | |
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239
abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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240
attenuated
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| v.（使）变细( attenuate的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）变薄；（使）变小；减弱 | |
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241
essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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242
trotted
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| 小跑，急走( trot的过去分词 )； 匆匆忙忙地走 | |
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243
dodging
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| n.避开，闪过，音调改变v.闪躲( dodge的现在分词 )；回避 | |
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244
pulp
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| n.果肉，纸浆；v.化成纸浆，除去...果肉，制成纸浆 | |
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245
vestiges
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| 残余部分( vestige的名词复数 )； 遗迹； 痕迹； 毫不 | |
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246
wretch
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| n.可怜的人，不幸的人；卑鄙的人 | |
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247
stump
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| n.残株，烟蒂，讲演台；v.砍断，蹒跚而走 | |
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248
deviously
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| 弯曲地，绕道地 | |
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249
tedium
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| n.单调；烦闷 | |
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250
discomfort
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| n.不舒服，不安，难过，困难，不方便 | |
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251
dynamite
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| n./vt.(用)炸药(爆破) | |
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252
idiotic
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| adj.白痴的 | |
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253
sleeper
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| n.睡眠者，卧车，卧铺 | |
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254
speculations
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| n.投机买卖( speculation的名词复数 )；思考；投机活动；推断 | |
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255
rouge
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| n.胭脂，口红唇膏；v.(在…上)擦口红 | |
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256
northward
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| adv.向北；n.北方的地区 | |
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257
dyke
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| n.堤，水坝，排水沟 | |
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258
countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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259
reclaimed
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|
| adj.再生的；翻造的；收复的；回收的v.开拓( reclaim的过去式和过去分词 )；要求收回；从废料中回收（有用的材料）；挽救 | |
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260
dykes
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| abbr.diagonal wire cutters 斜线切割机n.堤( dyke的名词复数 )；坝；堰；沟 | |
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261
dense
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| a.密集的，稠密的，浓密的；密度大的 | |
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262
beleaguering
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| v.围攻( beleaguer的现在分词 )；困扰；骚扰 | |
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263
admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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264
catastrophe
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| n.大灾难，大祸 | |
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265
meres
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|
| abbr.matrix of environmental residuals for energy systems 能源系统环境残留矩阵 | |
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266
willow
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| n.柳树 | |
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267
gaily
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| adv.欢乐地，高兴地 | |
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268
automobiles
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| n.汽车( automobile的名词复数 ) | |
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269
hues
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| 色彩( hue的名词复数 )； 色调； 信仰； 观点 | |
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270
barges
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| 驳船( barge的名词复数 ) | |
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271
barge
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| n.平底载货船，驳船 | |
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272
solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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273
abounding
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|
| adj.丰富的，大量的v.大量存在，充满，富于( abound的现在分词 ) | |
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274
belligerents
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|
| n.交战的一方（指国家、集团或个人）( belligerent的名词复数 ) | |
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275
impartially
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|
| adv.公平地，无私地 | |
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276
peculiar
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|
| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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277
invaders
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| 入侵者，侵略者，侵入物( invader的名词复数 ) | |
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278
licentious
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|
| adj.放纵的，淫乱的 | |
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279
shipping
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| n.船运（发货，运输，乘船） | |
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280
bustling
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| adj.喧闹的 | |
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281
caterpillars
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|
| n.毛虫( caterpillar的名词复数 )；履带 | |
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282
wagons
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| n.四轮的运货马车( wagon的名词复数 )；铁路货车；小手推车 | |
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283
beetles
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| n.甲虫( beetle的名词复数 ) | |
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284
extravagant
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|
| adj.奢侈的；过分的；(言行等)放肆的 | |
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285
animated
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|
| adj.生气勃勃的，活跃的，愉快的 | |
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286
westward
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|
| n.西方，西部；adj.西方的，向西的；adv.向西 | |
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287
haze
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|
| n.霾，烟雾；懵懂，迷糊；vi.(over)变模糊 | |
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288
lengthening
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| （时间或空间）延长，伸长( lengthen的现在分词 )； 加长 | |
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289
mingled
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|
| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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290
mingling
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| adj.混合的 | |
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291
distraction
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| n.精神涣散，精神不集中，消遣，娱乐 | |
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292
pellucid
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|
| adj.透明的，简单的 | |
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293
gulf
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| n.海湾；深渊，鸿沟；分歧，隔阂 | |
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294
dozed
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| v.打盹儿，打瞌睡( doze的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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295
proclivity
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|
| n.倾向，癖性 | |
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296
plunging
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|
| adj.跳进的，突进的v.颠簸( plunge的现在分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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297
assail
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| v.猛烈攻击，抨击，痛斥 | |
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298
swarming
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|
| 密集( swarm的现在分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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299
slew
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| v.（使）旋转；n.大量，许多 | |
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300
duels
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|
| n.两男子的决斗( duel的名词复数 )；竞争，斗争 | |
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301
swooped
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| 俯冲，猛冲( swoop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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302
Flared
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|
| adj. 端部张开的, 爆发的, 加宽的, 漏斗式的 动词flare的过去式和过去分词 | |
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303
crimsoned
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|
| 变为深红色（crimson的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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304
spires
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| n.（教堂的） 塔尖，尖顶( spire的名词复数 ) | |
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305
populous
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|
| adj.人口稠密的，人口众多的 | |
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306
quench
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|
| vt.熄灭，扑灭；压制 | |
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307
craved
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|
| 渴望，热望( crave的过去式 )； 恳求，请求 | |
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308
deserted
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|
| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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309
grilled
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|
| adj. 烤的, 炙过的, 有格子的 动词grill的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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310
determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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311
squads
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| n.（军队中的）班( squad的名词复数 )；（暗杀）小组；体育运动的运动（代表）队；（对付某类犯罪活动的）警察队伍 | |
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312
adorned
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| [计]被修饰的 | |
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313
retirement
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|
| n.退休，退职 | |
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314
proprietor
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|
| n.所有人；业主；经营者 | |
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315
delightful
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|
| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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316
quaint
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|
| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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317
squatting
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|
| v.像动物一样蹲下( squat的现在分词 )；非法擅自占用（土地或房屋）；为获得其所有权；而占用某片公共用地。 | |
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318
faculties
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|
| n.能力( faculty的名词复数 )；全体教职员；技巧；院 | |
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319
devoted
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|
| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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320
acquiescence
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|
| n.默许；顺从 | |
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321
proceedings
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| n.进程，过程，议程；诉讼(程序)；公报 | |
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322
toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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323
supreme
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|
| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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324
twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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325
feverish
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|
| adj.发烧的，狂热的，兴奋的 | |
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326
sleepers
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|
| n.卧铺（通常以复数形式出现）；卧车( sleeper的名词复数 )；轨枕；睡觉（呈某种状态）的人；小耳环 | |
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327
texture
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| n.(织物)质地；(材料)构造；结构；肌理 | |
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328
preposterously
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| adv.反常地；荒谬地；荒谬可笑地；不合理地 | |
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329
kindly
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|
| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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330
discursive
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| adj.离题的，无层次的 | |
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331
impulsive
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| adj.冲动的，刺激的；有推动力的 | |
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332
Saturn
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| n.农神，土星 | |
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333
begot
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| v.为…之生父( beget的过去式 )；产生，引起 | |
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334
devour
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| v.吞没；贪婪地注视或谛听，贪读；使着迷 | |
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335
tightened
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|
| 收紧( tighten的过去式和过去分词 )； （使）变紧； （使）绷紧； 加紧 | |
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336
agitation
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| n.搅动；搅拌；鼓动，煽动 | |
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337
bugles
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| 妙脆角，一种类似薯片但做成尖角或喇叭状的零食； 号角( bugle的名词复数 )； 喇叭； 匍匐筋骨草； （装饰女服用的）柱状玻璃（或塑料）小珠 | |
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338
silhouette
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|
| n.黑色半身侧面影，影子，轮廓；v.描绘成侧面影，照出影子来，仅仅显出轮廓 | |
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339
aurora
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| n.极光 | |
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340
collapse
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| vi.累倒；昏倒；倒塌；塌陷 | |
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341
mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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342
flaring
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| a.火焰摇曳的，过份艳丽的 | |
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343
buffet
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| n.自助餐；饮食柜台；餐台 | |
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344
scythe
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| n. 长柄的大镰刀，战车镰； v. 以大镰刀割 | |
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345
flares
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| n.喇叭裤v.（使）闪耀( flare的第三人称单数 )；（使）（船舷）外倾；（使）鼻孔张大；（使）（衣裙、酒杯等）呈喇叭形展开 | |
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346
prolixity
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| n.冗长，罗嗦 | |
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347
contrived
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| adj.不自然的，做作的；虚构的 | |
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348
inundation
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| n.the act or fact of overflowing | |
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349
overestimated
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| 对（数量）估计过高，对…作过高的评价( overestimate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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350
dreaded
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|
| adj.令人畏惧的；害怕的v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的过去式和过去分词) | |
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351
interval
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|
| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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352
cascade
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| n.小瀑布，喷流；层叠；vi.成瀑布落下 | |
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353
sweeping
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| adj.范围广大的，一扫无遗的 | |
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354
buoy
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| n.浮标；救生圈；v.支持，鼓励 | |
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355
swirled
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| v.旋转，打旋( swirl的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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356
muddle
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|
| n.困惑，混浊状态；vt.使混乱，使糊涂，使惊呆；vi.胡乱应付，混乱 | |
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357
shutter
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| n.百叶窗；(照相机)快门；关闭装置 | |
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358
steered
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| v.驾驶( steer的过去式和过去分词 )；操纵；控制；引导 | |
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359
stoutly
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| adv.牢固地，粗壮的 | |
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360
massacre
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| n.残杀，大屠杀；v.残杀，集体屠杀 | |
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361
canopy
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| n.天篷，遮篷 | |
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362
sullen
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| adj.愠怒的，闷闷不乐的，(天气等)阴沉的 | |
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363
helping
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| n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的 | |
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364
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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365
truce
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| n.休战，(争执，烦恼等的)缓和；v.以停战结束 | |
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366
huddled
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| 挤在一起（huddle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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367
persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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368
dwarfed
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| vt.（使）显得矮小（dwarf的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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369
insignificance
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| n.不重要；无价值；无意义 | |
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370
frightful
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| adj.可怕的；讨厌的 | |
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371
utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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372
precursors
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| n.先驱( precursor的名词复数 )；先行者；先兆；初期形式 | |
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373
bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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374
skilful
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| (=skillful)adj.灵巧的，熟练的 | |
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375
sobbed
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| 哭泣，啜泣( sob的过去式和过去分词 )； 哭诉，呜咽地说 | |
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376
ascendancy
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| n.统治权，支配力量 | |
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377
warrior
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| n.勇士，武士，斗士 | |
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378
narrative
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| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
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379
tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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380
desolated
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| adj.荒凉的，荒废的 | |
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381
cholera
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| n.霍乱 | |
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382
hostility
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| n.敌对，敌意；抵制［pl.］交战，战争 | |
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383
rumours
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| n.传闻( rumour的名词复数 )；风闻；谣言；谣传 | |
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384
cannibalism
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| n.同类相食；吃人肉 | |
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385
hysterical
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| adj.情绪异常激动的，歇斯底里般的 | |
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