by H. G. Wells
those days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he was
fined for flying over the new prison for political libellers at
Wormwood Scrubs, 'in a manner calculated to exhilarate the
prisoners while at exercise.' That was the time of the attempted
suppression of any criticism of the public judicature and the
place was crowded with journalists who had ventured to call
attention to the dementia of Chief Justice Abrahams. Barnet was
not a very good aviator, he confesses he was always a little
afraid of his machine-there was excellent reason for every one
to be afraid of those clumsy early types-and he never attempted
steep descents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned
one of those oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity
and extravagant filthiness still astonish the visitors to the
museum of machinery at South Kensington. He mentions running
over a dog and complains of the ruinous price of 'spatchcocks' in
Surrey. 'Spatchcocks,' it seems, was a slang term for crushed
hens.
He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military
service to a minimum, and his want of any special scientific or
technical qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that
handicapped his aviation indicated the infantry of the line as
his sphere of training. That was the most generalised form of
soldiering. The development of the theory of war had been for
some decades but little assisted by any practical experience.
What fighting had occurred in recent years, had been fighting in
minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaric soldiers
and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and the
great powers of the world were content for the most part to
maintain armies that sustained in their broader organisation the
traditions of the European wars of thirty and forty years before.
There was the infantry arm to which Barnet belonged and which was
supposed to fight on foot with a rifle and be the main portion of
the army. There were cavalry forces (horse soldiers), having a
ratio to the infantry that had been determined by the experiences
of the Franco-German war in 1871. There was also artillery, and
for some unexplained reason much of this was still drawn by
horses; though there were also in all the European armies a small
number of motor-guns with wheels so constructed that they could
go over broken ground. In addition there were large developments
of the engineering arm, concerned with motor transport,
motor-bicycle scouting, aviation, and the like.
No first-class intelligence had been sought to specialise in and
work out the problem of warfare with the new appliances and under
modern conditions, but a succession of able jurists, Lord
Haldane, Chief Justice Briggs, and that very able King's Counsel,
Philbrick, had reconstructed the army frequently and thoroughly
and placed it at last, with the adoption of national service,
upon a footing that would have seemed very imposing to the public
of 1900. At any moment the British Empire could now put a
million and a quarter of arguable soldiers upon the board of
Welt-Politik. The traditions of Japan and the Central European
armies were more princely and less forensic; the Chinese still
refused resolutely to become a military power, and maintained a
small standing army upon the American model that was said, so far
as it went, to be highly efficient, and Russia, secured by a
stringent administration against internal criticism, had scarcely
altered the design of a uniform or the organisation of a battery
since the opening decades of the century. Barnet's opinion of his
military training was manifestly a poor one, his Modern State
ideas disposed him to regard it as a bore, and his common sense
condemned it as useless. Moreover, his habit of body made him
peculiarly sensitive to the fatigues and hardships of service.
'For three days in succession we turned out before dawn and-for
no earthly reason-without breakfast,' he relates. 'I suppose
that is to show us that when the Day comes the first thing will
be to get us thoroughly uncomfortable and rotten. We then
proceeded to Kriegspiel, according to the mysterious ideas of
those in authority over us. On the last day we spent three hours
under a hot if early sun getting over eight miles of country to a
point we could have reached in a motor omnibus in nine minutes
and a half-I did it the next day in that-and then we made a
massed attack upon entrenchments that could have shot us all
about three times over if only the umpires had let them. Then
came a little bayonet exercise, but I doubt if Iam sufficiently
a barbarian to stick this long knife into anything living. Anyhow
in this battle I shouldn't have had a chance. Assuming that by
some miracle I hadn't been shot three times over, I was far too
hot and blown when I got up to the entrenchments even to lift my
beastly rifle. It was those others would have begun the
sticking…
'For a time we were watched by two hostile aeroplanes; then our
own came up and asked them not to, and-the practice of aerial
warfare still being unknown-they very politely desisted and went
away and did dives and circles of the most charming description
over the Fox Hills.'
All Barnet's accounts of his military training were written in
the same half-contemptuous, half-protesting tone. He was of
opinion that his chances of participating in any real warfare
were very slight, and that, if after all he should participate,
it was bound to be so entirely different from these peace
manoeuvres that his only course as a rational man would be to
keep as observantly out of danger as he could until he had learnt
the tricks and possibilities of the new conditions. He states
this quite frankly. Never was a man more free from sham heroics.
Section 6
Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest
of masculine youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that
for some time he failed to connect the rush of wonderful new
possibilities with the financial troubles of his family. 'I knew
my father was worried,' he admits. That cast the smallest of
shadows upon his delighted departure for Italy and Greece and
Egypt with three congenial companions in one of the new atomic
models. They flew over the Channel Isles and Touraine, he
mentions, and circled about Mont Blanc-'These new helicopters,
we found,' he notes, 'had abolished all the danger and strain of
sudden drops to which the old-time aeroplanes were liable'-and
then he went on by way of Pisa, Paestum, Ghirgenti, and Athens,
to visit the pyramids by moonlight, flying thither from Cairo,
and to follow the Nile up to Khartum. Even by later standards,
it must have been a very gleeful holiday for a young man, and it
made the tragedy of his next experiences all the darker. A week
after his return his father, who was a widower, announced himself
ruined, a
nd committed suicide by means of an unscheduled opiate.
At one blow Barnet found himself flung out of the possessing,
spending, enjoying class to which he belonged, penniless and with
no calling by which he could earn a living. He tried teaching
and some journalism, but in a little while he found himself on
the underside of a world in which he had always reckoned to live
in the sunshine. For innumerable men such an experience has
meant mental and spiritual destruction, but Barnet, in spite of
his bodily gravitation towards comfort, showed himself when put
to the test, of the more valiant modern quality. He was saturated
with the creative stoicism of the heroic times that were already
dawning, and he took his difficulties and discomforts stoutly as
his appointed material, and turned them to expression.
Indeed, in his book, he thanks fortune for them. 'I might have
lived and died,' he says, 'in that neat fool's paradise of secure
lavishness above there. I might never have realised the
gathering wrath and sorrow of the ousted and exasperated masses.
In the days of my own prosperity things had seemed to me to be
very well arranged.' Now from his new point of view he was to
find they were not arranged at all; that government was a
compromise of aggressions and powers and lassitudes, and law a
convention between interests, and that the poor and the weak,
though they had many negligent masters, had few friends.
'I had thought things were looked after,' he wrote. 'It was with
a kind of amazement that I tramped the roads and starved-and
found that no one in particular cared.'
He was turned out of his lodging in a backward part of London.
'It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady-she was a needy
widow, poor soul, and I was already in her debt-to keep an old
box for me in which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and
the like. She lived in great fear of the Public Health and
Morality Inspectors, because she was sometimes too poor to pay
the customary tip to them, but at last she consented to put it in
a dark tiled place under the stairs, and then I went forth into
the world-to seek first the luck of a meal and then shelter.'
He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in
which a year or so ago he had been numbered among the spenders.
London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of
visible smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine,
had already ceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the
Victorian time; it had been, and indeed was, constantly being
rebuilt, and its main streets were already beginning to take on
those characteristics that distinguished them throughout the
latter half of the twentieth century. The insanitary horse and
the plebeian bicycle had been banished from the roadway, which
was now of a resilient, glass-like surface, spotlessly clean; and
the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow vestige of the
ancient footpath on either side of the track and forbidden at the
risk of a fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway. People
descended from their automobiles upon this pavement and went
through the lower shops to the lifts and stairs to the new ways
for pedestrians, the Rows, that ran along the front of the houses
at the level of the first story, and, being joined by frequent
bridges, gave the newer parts of London a curiously Venetian
appearance. In some streets there were upper and even third-story
Rows. For most of the day and all night the shop windows were
lit by electric light, and many establishments had made, as it
were, canals of public footpaths through their premises in order
to increase their window space.
Barnet made his way along this night-scene rather apprehensively
since the police had power to challenge and demand the Labour
Card of any indigent-looking person, and if the record failed to
show he was in employment, dismiss him to the traffic pavement
below.
But there was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet's
appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too,
had other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to
reach the galleries about Leicester Square-that great focus of
London life and pleasure.
He gives a vivid description of the scene that evening. In the
centre was a garden raised on arches lit by festoons of lights
and connected with the Rows by eight graceful bridges, beneath
which hummed the interlacing streams of motor traffic, pulsating
as the current alternated between east and west and north and
south. Above rose great frontages of intricate rather than
beautiful reinforced porcelain, studded with lights, barred by
bold illuminated advertisements, and glowing with reflections.
There were the two historical music halls of this place, the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal players
revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shakespeare's plays,
and four other great houses of refreshment and entertainment
whose pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night.
The south side of the square was in dark contrast to the others;
it was still being rebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars
surmounted by the frozen gestures of monstrous cranes rose over
the excavated sites of vanished Victorian buildings.
This framework attracted Barnet's attention for a time to the
exclusion of other interests. It was absolutely still, it had a
dead rigidity, a stricken inaction, no one was at work upon it
and all its machinery was quiet; but the constructor's globes of
vacuum light filled its every interstice with a quivering green
moonshine and showed alert but motionless-soldier sentinels!
He asked a passing stroller, and was told that the men had struck
that day against the use of an atomic riveter that would have
doubled the individual efficiency and halved the number of steel
workers.
'Shouldn't wonder if they didn't get chucking bombs,' said
Barnet's informant, hovered for a moment, and then went on his
way to the Alhambra music hall.
Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at
the corners of the square. Something very sensational had been
flashed upon the transparencies. Forgetting for a moment his
penniless condition, he made his way over a bridge to buy a
paper, for in those days the papers, which were printed upon thin
sheets of metallic foil, were sold at determinate points by
specially licensed purveyors. Half over, he stopped short at a
change in the traffic below; and was astonished to see that the
police signals were restricting vehicles to the half roadway.
When presently he got within sight of the transparencies that had
replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read of the Great
March of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the
West End, and so without expenditure he was able to understand
what was coming.
He watched, and his book describes
this procession which the
police had considered it unwise to prevent and which had been
spontaneously organised in imitation of the Unemployed
Processions of earlier times. He had expected a mob but there was
a kind of sullen discipline about the procession when at last it
arrived. What seemed for a time an unending column of men
marched wearily, marched with a kind of implacable futility,
along the roadway underneath him. He was, he says, moved to join
them, but instead he remained watching. They were a dingy,
shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part
incapable of any but obsolete and superseded types of labour.
They bore a few banners with the time-honoured inscription:
'Work, not Charity,' but otherwise their ranks were unadorned.
They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was
nothing truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no
definite objective they were just marching and showing themselves
in the more prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of
that great mass of unskilled cheap labour which the now still
cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for evermore. They were
being 'scrapped'-as horses had been 'scrapped.'
Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened
by his own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt
nothing but despair at the sight; what should be done, what could
be done for this gathering surplus of humanity? They were so
manifestly useless-and incapable-and pitiful.
What were they asking for?
They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had
foreseen--
It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous
shambling enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the
unexpected, an appeal to those others who, more fortunate, seemed
wiser and more powerful, for something-for INTELLIGENCE. This
mute mass, weary footed, rank following rank, protested its
persuasion that some of these others must have foreseen these
dislocations-that anyhow they ought to have foreseen-and
arranged.
That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so
dumbly to assert.
'Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened
room,' he says. 'These men were praying to their fellow
creatures as once they prayed to God! The last thing that men
will realise about anything is that it is inanimate. They had