by H. G. Wells
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 t
he 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…'
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