The World Set Free

Section 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 stoutly to a box or chair or such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre.  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 canopy.  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 sullen 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 helping 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 immediate 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 exasperate 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 truce, 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 huddled group, saying very little, and the men forward were mere knots of silent endurance.  Our only continuing sound was the persistent 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 dwarfed the international issues to complete insignificance.  When our minds wandered from the preoccupations of our immediate needs, we speculated upon the possibility of stopping the use of these frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed.  For to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still greater power of destruction of which they were the precursors 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, bloody mess that had been a skilful human hand five minutes before, thrust out in indignant protest.  “Damned foolery,” he had stormed and sobbed, “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.”’