by H. G. Wells
industriously entrenching themselves in Belgian Luxembourg.
He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day's journey
through the north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid
phrases. The country was browned by a warm summer, the trees a
little touched with autumnal colour, and the wheat already
golden. When they stopped for an hour at Hirson, men and women
with tricolour badges upon the platform distributed cakes and
glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and there was much
cheerfulness. 'Such good, cool beer it was,' he wrote. 'I had
had nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom.'
A number of monoplanes, 'like giant swallows,' he notes, were
scouting in the pink evening sky.
Barnet's battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place
called Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to
Jemelle. Here they detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the
railway-trains and stores were passing along it all night-and
next morning he: marched eastward through a cold, overcast dawn,
and a morning, first cloudy and then blazing, over a large
spacious country-side interspersed by forest towards Arlon.
There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked
entrenchments and hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton
that were designed to check and delay any advance from the east
upon the fortified line of the Meuse. They had their orders, and
for two days they worked without either a sight of the enemy or
any suspicion of the disaster that had abruptly decapitated the
armies of Europe, and turned the west of Paris and the centre of
Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction of Pompeii.
And the news, when it did come, came attenuated. 'We heard there
had been mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,' Barnet
relates; 'but it didn't seem to follow that "They" weren't still
somewhere elaborating their plans and issuing orders. When the
enemy began to emerge from the woods in front of us, we cheered
and blazed away, and didn't trouble much more about anything but
the battle in hand. If now and then one cocked up an eye into the
sky to see what was happening there, the rip of a bullet soon
brought one down to the horizontal again…
That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of
country between Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It
was essentially a rifle and infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do
not seem to have taken any decisive share in the actual fighting
for some days, though no doubt they effected the strategy from
the first by preventing surprise movements. They were aeroplanes
with atomic engines, but they were not provided with atomic
bombs, which were manifestly unsuitable for field use, nor indeed
had they any very effective kind of bomb. And though they
manoeuvred against each other, and there was rifle shooting at
them and between them, there was little actual aerial fighting.
Either the airmen were indisposed to fight or the commanders on
both sides preferred to reserve these machines for scouting…
After a day or so of digging and scheming, Barnet found himself
in the forefront of a battle. He had made his section of rifle
pits chiefly along a line of deep dry ditch that gave a means of
inter-communication, he had had the earth scattered over the
adjacent field, and he had masked his preparations with tussocks
of corn and poppy. The hostile advance came blindly and
unsuspiciously across the fields below and would have been very
cruelly handled indeed, if some one away to the right had not
opened fire too soon.
'It was a queer thrill when these fellows came into sight,' he
confesses; 'and not a bit like manoeuvres. They halted for a
time on the edge of the wood and then came forward in an open
line. They kept walking nearer to us and not looking at us, but
away to the right of us. Even when they began to be hit, and
their officers' whistles woke them up, they didn't seem to see
us. One or two halted to fire, and then they all went back
towards the wood again. They went slowly at first, looking round
at us, then the shelter of the wood seemed to draw them, and they
trotted. I fired rather mechanically and missed, then I fired
again, and then I became earnest to hit something, made sure of
my sighting, and aimed very carefully at a blue back that was
dodging about in the corn. At first I couldn't satisfymyself
and didn't shoot, his movements were so spasmodic and uncertain;
then I think he came to a ditch or some such obstacle and halted
for a moment. "GOT you," I whispered, and pulled the trigger.
'I had the strangest sensations about that man. In the first
instance, when I felt that I had hit him I was irradiated with
joy and pride…
'I sent him spinning. He jumped and threw up his arms…
'Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping
about. Suddenly I felt sick. I hadn't killed him…
'In some way he was disabled and smashed up and yet able to
struggle about. I began to think…
'For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn.
Either he was calling out or some one was shouting to him…
'Then he jumped up-he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with
one last effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still
and never moved again.
'He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him
dead. I had been wanting to do so for some time…'
The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made
for themselves in the woods below. A man was hit in the pit next
to Barnet, and began cursing and crying out in a violent rage.
Barnet crawled along the ditch to him and found him in great
pain, covered with blood, frantic with indignation, and with the
half of his right hand smashed to a pulp. 'Look at this,' he
kept repeating, hugging it and then extending it. 'Damned
foolery! Damned foolery! My right hand, sir! My right hand!'
For some time Barnet could do nothing with him. The man was
consumed by his tortured realisation of the evil silliness of
war, the realisation which had come upon him in a flash with the
bullet that had destroyed his skill and use as an artificer for
ever. He was looking at the vestiges with a horror that made him
impenetrable to any other idea. At last the poor wretch let
Barnet tie up his bleeding stump and help him along the ditch
that conducted him deviously out of range…
When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water,
and all day long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst.
For food they had chocolate and bread.
'At first,' he says, 'I was extraordinarily excited by my baptism
of fire. Then as the heat of the day came on I experienced an
enormous tedium and discomfort. The flies became extremely
troublesome, and my little grave of a rifle pit was invaded by
ants. I could not get up or move about, for some one in the trees
had got a mark on me. I kept thinking of the dead
Prussian down
among the corn, and of the bitter outcries of my own man. Damned
foolery! It WAS damned foolery. But who was to blame? How had
we got to this?…
'Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with
dynamite bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and
suddenly dived down over beyond the trees.
' "From Holland to the Alps this day," I thought, "there must be
crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to
inflict irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic
to the pitch of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall
wake up."…
'Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. "Presently mankind
will wake up."
'I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were
among these hundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in
rebellion against all these ancient traditions of flag and
empire. Weren't we, perhaps, already in the throes of the last
crisis, in that darkest moment of a nightmare's horror before the
sleeper will endure no more of it-and wakes?
'I don't know how my speculations ended. I think they were not
so much ended as distracted by the distant thudding of the guns
that were opening fire at long range upon Namur.'
Section 7
But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of
modern warfare. So far he had taken part only in a little
shooting. The bayonet attack by which the advanced line was
broken was made at a place called Croix Rouge, more than twenty
miles away, and that night under cover of the darkness the rifle
pits were abandoned and he got his company away without further
loss.
His regiment fell back unpressed behind the fortified lines
between Namur and Sedan, entrained at a station called Mettet,
and was sent northward by Antwerp and Rotterdam to Haarlem.
Hence they marched into North Holland. It was only after the
march into Holland that he began to realise the monstrous and
catastrophic nature of the struggle in which he was playing his
undistinguished part.
He describes very pleasantly the journey through the hills and
open land of Brabant, the repeated crossing of arms of the Rhine,
and the change from the undulating scenery of Belgium to the
flat, rich meadows, the sunlit dyke roads, and the countless
windmills of the Dutch levels. In those days there was unbroken
land from Alkmaar and Leiden to the Dollart. Three great
provinces, South Holland, North Holland, and Zuiderzeeland,
reclaimed at various times between the early tenth century and
1945 and all many feet below the level of the waves outside the
dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern sun and
sustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of
laws and custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a
perpetual defence against the beleaguering sea. For more than two
hundred and fifty miles from Walcheren to Friesland stretched a
line of embankments and pumping stations that was the admiration
of the world.
If some curious god had chosen to watch the course of events in
those northern provinces while that flanking march of the British
was in progress, he would have found a convenient and appropriate
seat for his observation upon one of the great cumulus clouds
that were drifting slowly across the blue sky during all these
eventful days before the great catastrophe. For that was the
quality of the weather, hot and clear, with something of a
breeze, and underfoot dry and a little inclined to be dusty. This
watching god would have looked down upon broad stretches of
sunlit green, sunlit save for the creeping patches of shadow cast
by the clouds, upon sky-reflecting meres, fringed and divided up
by masses of willow and large areas of silvery weeds, upon white
roads lying bare to the sun and upon a tracery of blue canals.
The pastures were alive with cattle, the roads had a busy
traffic, of beasts and bicycles and gaily coloured peasants'
automobiles, the hues of the innumerable motor barges in the
canal vied with the eventfulness of the roadways; and everywhere
in solitary steadings, amidst ricks and barns, in groups by the
wayside, in straggling villages, each with its fine old church,
or in compact towns laced with canals and abounding in bridges
and clipped trees, were human habitations.
The people of this country-side were not belligerents. The
interests and sympathies alike of Holland had been so divided
that to the end she remained undecided and passive in the
struggle of the world powers. And everywhere along the roads
taken by the marching armies clustered groups and crowds of
impartially observant spectators, women and children in peculiar
white caps and old-fashioned sabots, and elderly, clean-shaven
men quietlythoughtful over their long pipes. They had no fear of
their invaders; the days when 'soldiering' meant bands of
licentious looters had long since passed away…
That watcher among the clouds would have seen a great
distribution of khaki-uniformed men and khaki-painted material
over the whole of the sunken area of Holland. He would have
marked the long trains, packed with men or piled with great guns
and war material, creeping slowly, alert for train-wreckers,
along the north-going lines; he would have seen the Scheldt and
Rhine choked with shipping, and pouring out still more men and
still more material; he would have noticed halts and
provisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling
caterpillars of cavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons, the
huge beetles of great guns, crawling under the poplars along the
dykes and roads northward, along ways lined by the neutral,
unmolested, ambiguously observant Dutch. All the barges and
shipping upon the canals had been requisitioned for transport. In
that clear, bright, warm weather, it would all have looked from
above like some extravagant festival of animated toys.
As the sun sank westward the spectacle must have become a little
indistinct because of a golden haze; everything must have become
warmer and more glowing, and because of the lengthening of the
shadows more manifestly in relief. The shadows of the tall
churches grew longer and longer, until they touched the horizon
and mingled in the universal shadow; and then, slow, and soft,
and wrapping the world in fold after fold of deepening blue, came
the night-the night at first obscurely simple, and then with
faint points here and there, and then jewelled in darkling
splendour with a hundred thousand lights. Out of that mingling of
darkness and ambiguous glares the noise of an unceasing activity
would have arisen, the louder and plainer now because there was
no longer any distraction of sight.
It may be that watcher drifting in the pellucid gulf beneath the
stars watched all through the night; it may be that he dozed. But
if he gave way to so natural a proclivit
y, assuredly on the
fourth night of the great flank march he was aroused, for that
was the night of the battle in the air that decided the fate of
Holland. The aeroplanes were fighting at last, and suddenly
about him, above and below, with cries and uproar rushing out of
the four quarters of heaven, striking, plunging, oversetting,
soaring to the zenith and dropping to the ground, they came to
assail or defend the myriads below.
Secretly the Central European power had gathered his flying
machines together, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a
handful of ten thousand knives over the low country. And amidst
that swarming flight were five that drove headlong for the sea
walls of Holland, carrying atomic bombs. From north and west and
south, the allied aeroplanes rose in response and swept down upon
this sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began. Men
rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like
archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth.
Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the
heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking
charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this
giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?
And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped
and locked and dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and
the stars, came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and
first one and then a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged
hungrily down upon the Dutchmen's dykes and struck between land
and sea and flared up again in enormous columns of glare and
crimsoned smoke and steam.
And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires
and trees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea,
tumbled with anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood…
Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous
crying and a flurry of alarm bells…
The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky,
like things that suddenly knowthemselves to be wicked…
Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might
quench, the waves came roaring in upon the land…
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