The World Set Free

Section 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 craved.  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 deserted 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 grilled our herrings.  None of us had slept for nearly forty hours, and I determined to stay in this refuge until dawn and then if the traffic was still choked leave the barge 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 squads, 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 adorned with the legend, Vreugde bij Vrede, “Joy with Peace,” and it bore every mark of the busy retirement of a comfort-loving proprietor.  I went along his garden, which was gay and delightful with big bushes of rose and sweet brier, to a quaint little summer-house, and there I sat and watched the men in groups cooking and squatting 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 faculties, and my only moments of rest had been devoted 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 acquiescence in the subordination and needs of our positions.  I watched their proceedings 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 toil 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 supreme 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 twilight 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 feverish slumber 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 rim 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 sleepers all about me, those men who had marched so far, who had left all the established texture 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, preposterously 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 kindly but jealous, desirous but discursive, able and unwisely impulsive, until Saturn who begot him shall devour 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 tightened.

’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 agitation 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 bugles, 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 silhouette 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 Aurora 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 collapse 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 mighty thunder in the air, and fell like Lucifer in the picture, leaving a flaring 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 buffet, taken my helmet and swept aside the summerhouse of Vreugde bij Vrede, as a scythe 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 flares 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 prolixity 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 contrived to land five men, get in a few dozen cheeses, and ship his men again before the inundation 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, overestimated the probable rush of waters; he dreaded 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 interval 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 cascade.  It was like a broad roller sweeping 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 swirled 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 muddle of packing-cases and scaffolding.  The things clapped into sight like something shown by the opening of a shutter, 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 steered 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….’