In the Days of the Comet

My thoughts go into the woods and wildernesses and jungles of the world, to the wild life that shared man’s suspension, and I think of a thousand feral acts interrupted and truncated—­as it were frozen, like the frozen words Pantagruel met at sea.  Not only men it was that were quieted, all living creatures that breathe the air became insensible, impassive things.  Motionless brutes and birds lay amidst the drooping trees and herbage in the universal twilight, the tiger sprawled beside his fresh-struck victim, who bled to death in a dreamless sleep.  The very flies came sailing down the air with wings outspread; the spider hung crumpled in his loaded net; like some gaily painted snowflake the butterfly drifted to earth and grounded, and was still.  And as a queer contrast one gathers that the fishes in the sea suffered not at all. . . .

Speaking of the fishes reminds me of a queer little inset upon that great world-dreaming.  The odd fate of the crew of the submarine vessel B 94 has always seemed memorable to me.  So far as I know, they were the only men alive who never saw that veil of green drawn across the world.  All the while that the stillness held above, they were working into the mouth of the Elbe, past the booms and the mines, very slowly and carefully, a sinister crustacean of steel, explosive crammed, along the muddy bottom.  They trailed a long clue that was to guide their fellows from the mother ship floating awash outside.  Then in the long channel beyond the forts they came up at last to mark down their victims and get air.  That must have been before the twilight of dawn, for they tell of the brightness of the stars.  They were amazed to find themselves not three hundred yards from an ironclad that had run ashore in the mud, and heeled over with the falling tide.  It was afire amidships, but no one heeded that—­no one in all that strange clear silence heeded that—­and not only this wrecked vessel, but all the dark ships lying about them, it seemed to their perplexed and startled minds must be full of dead men!

Theirs I think must have been one of the strangest of all experiences; they were never insensible; at once, and, I am told, with a sudden catch of laughter, they began to breathe the new air.  None of them has proved a writer; we have no picture of their wonder, no description of what was said.  But we know these men were active and awake for an hour and a half at least before the general awakening came, and when at last the Germans stirred and sat up they found these strangers in possession of their battleship, the submarine carelessly adrift, and the Englishmen, begrimed and weary, but with a sort of furious exultation, still busy, in the bright dawn, rescuing insensible enemies from the sinking conflagration. . . .

But the thought of certain stokers the sailors of the submarine failed altogether to save brings me back to the thread of grotesque horror that runs through all this event, the thread I cannot overlook for all the splendors of human well-being that have come from it.  I cannot forget the unguided ships that drove ashore, that went down in disaster with all their sleeping hands, nor how, inland, motor-cars rushed to destruction upon the roads, and trains upon the railways kept on in spite of signals, to be found at last by their amazed, reviving drivers standing on unfamiliar lines, their fires exhausted, or, less lucky, to be discovered by astonished peasants or awakening porters smashed and crumpled up into heaps of smoking, crackling ruin.  The foundry fires of the Four Towns still blazed, the smoke of our burning still denied the sky.  Fires burnt indeed the brighter for the Change—­and spread. . . .