The World Set Free

Section 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 cult of warfare, specialised and cruel, and it seemed for a time to many a thoughtful man as if the whole world was but to repeat on a larger scale this ascendancy of the warrior, this triumph of the destructive instincts of the race.

The subsequent chapters of Barnet’s narrative do but supply body to this tragic possibility.  He gives a series of vignettes of civilisation, shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably.  He found the Belgian hills swarming with refugees and desolated by cholera; the vestiges of the contending armies keeping order under a truce, without actual battles, but with the cautious hostility of habit, and a great absence of plan everywhere.

Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were rumours of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoy and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes.  There was the report of an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and Japanese, and of some huge revolutionary outbreak in America.  The weather was stormier than men had ever known it in those regions, with much thunder and lightning and wild cloud-bursts of rain….