by H. G. Wells
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." '
Section 10
But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and
his barge-load of hungry and starving men.
For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if
civilisation had come to a final collapse. These crowning buds
upon the tradition that Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered,
opened and flared 'like waterlilies of flame' over nations
destroyed, over churches smashed or submerged, towns ruined,
fields lost to mankind for ever, and a million weltering bodies.
Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would the flames of war
still burn amidst the ruins?
Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance
in their answers to that question. Already once in the history
of mankind, in America, before its discovery by the whites, an
organised civilisation had given way to a mere cult of warfare,
specialised and cruel, and it seemed for a time to many a
thoughtful man as if the whole world was but to repeat on a
larger scale this ascendancy of the warrior, this triumph of the
destructive instincts of the race.
The subsequent chapters of Barnet's narrative do but supply body
to this tragic possibility. He gives a series of vignettes of
civilisation, shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found
the Belgian hills swarming with refugees and desolated by
cholera; the vestiges of the contending armies keeping order
under a truce, without actual battles, but with the cautious
hostility of habit, and a great absence of plan everywhere.
Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were
rumours of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys
of the Semoy and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes.
There was the report of an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and
Japanese, and of some huge revolutionary outbreak in America.
The weather was stormier than men had ever known it in those
regions, with much thunder and lightning and wild cloud-bursts of
rain…
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE ENDING OF WAR
Section 1
On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding
two long stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to
Bellinzona, and southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass
meadows which is very beautiful in springtime with a great
multitude of wild flowers. More particularly is this so in early
June, when the slender asphodel Saint Bruno's lily, with its
spike of white blossom, is in flower. To the westward of this
delightful shelf there is a deep and densely wooded trench, a
great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of which arise
great precipices very high and wild. Above the asphodel fields
the mountains climb in rocky slopes to solitudes of stone and
sunlight that curve round and join that wall of cliffs in one
common skyline. This desolate and austere background contrasts
very vividly with the glowing serenity of the great lake below,
with the spacious view of fertile hills and roads and villages
and islands to south and east, and with the hotly golden rice
flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And because it was a remote
and insignificant place, far away out of the crowding tragedies
of that year of disaster, away from burning cities and starving
multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was here
that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest,
if possible, before it was too late, the debacle of civilisation.
Here, brought together by the indefatigable energy of that
impassioned humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at
Washington, the chief Powers of the world were to meet in a last
desperate conference to 'save humanity.'
Leblanc was one of those ingenuous men whose lot would have been
insignificant in any period of security, but who have been caught
up to an immortal role in history by the sudden simplification of
human affairs through some tragical crisis, to the measu
re of
their simplicity. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln, and such was
Garibaldi. And Leblanc, with his transparent childish innocence,
his entire self-forgetfulness, came into this confusion of
distrust and intricate disaster with an invincible appeal for the
manifest sanities of the situation. His voice, when he spoke, was
'full of remonstrance.' He was a little bald, spectacled man,
inspired by that intellectual idealism which has been one of the
peculiar gifts of France to humanity. He was possessed of one
clear persuasion, that war must end, and that the only way to end
war was to have but one government for mankind. He brushed aside
all other considerations. At the very outbreak of the war, so
soon as the two capitals of the belligerents had been wrecked, he
went to the president in the White House with this proposal. He
made it as if it was a matter of course. He was fortunate to be
in Washington and in touch with that gigantic childishness which
was the characteristic of the American imagination. For the
Americans also were among the simple peoples by whom the world
was saved. He won over the American president and the American
government to his general ideas; at any rate they supported him
sufficiently to give him a standing with the more sceptical
European governments, and with this backing he set to work-it
seemed the most fantastic of enterprises-to bring together all
the rulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable
letters, he sent messages, he went desperate journeys, he
enlisted whatever support he could find; no one was too humble
for an ally or too obstinate for his advances; through the
terrible autumn of the last wars this persistent little visionary
in spectacles must have seemed rather like a hopeful canary
twittering during a thunderstorm. And no accumulation of
disasters daunted his conviction that they could be ended.
For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of
destruction. Power after Power about the armed globe sought to
anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium
of panic, in order to use their bombs first. China and Japan had
assailed Russia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had
attacked Japan, India was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit
of fire spouting death and flame; the redoubtable King of the
Balkans was mobilising. It must have seemed plain at last to
every one in those days that the world was slipping headlong to
anarchy. By the spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres,
and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable
crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy fabric of
the world's credit had vanished, industry was completely
disorganised and every city, every thickly populated area was
starving or trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the
capital cities of the world were burning; millions of people had
already perished, and over great areas government was at an end.
Humanity has been compared by one contemporary writer to a
sleeper who handles matches in his sleep and wakes to find
himself in flames.
For many months it was an open question whether there was to be
found throughout all the race the will and intelligence to face
these new conditions and make even an attempt to arrest the
downfall of the social order. For a time the war spirit defeated
every effort to rally the forces of preservation and
construction. Leblanc seemed to be protesting against
earthquakes, and as likely to find a spirit of reason in the
crater of Etna. Even though the shattered official governments
now clamoured for peace, bands of irreconcilables and invincible
patriots, usurpers, adventurers, and political desperadoes, were
everywhere in possession of the simple apparatus for the
disengagement of atomic energy and the initiation of new centres
of destruction. The stuff exercised an irresistible fascination
upon a certain type of mind. Why should any one give in while he
can still destroy his enemies? Surrender? While there is still
a chance of blowing them to dust? The power of destruction which
had once been the ultimate privilege of government was now the
only power left in the world-and it was everywhere. There were
few thoughtful men during that phase of blazing waste who did not
pass through such moods of despair as Barnet describes, and
declare with him: 'This is the end…'
And all the while Leblanc was going to and fro with glittering
glasses and an inexhaustible persuasiveness, urging the manifest
reasonableness of his view upon ears that ceased presently to be
inattentive. Never at any time did he betray a doubt that all
this chaotic conflict would end. No nurse during a nursery
uproar was ever so certain of the inevitable ultimate peace.
From being treated as an amiable dreamer he came by insensible
degrees to be regarded as an extravagant possibility. Then he
began to seem even practicable. The people who listened to him in
1958 with a smiling impatience, were eager before 1959 was four
months old to know just exactly what he thought might be done.
He answered with the patience of a philosopher and the lucidity
of a Frenchman. He began to receive responses of a more and more
hopeful type. He came across the Atlantic to Italy, and there he
gathered in the promises for this congress. He chose those high
meadows above Brissago for the reasons we have stated. 'We must
get away,' he said, 'from old associations.' He set to work
requisitioning material for his conference with an assurance that
was justified by the replies. With a slight incredulity the
conference which was to begin a new order in the world, gathered
itself together. Leblanc summoned it without arrogance, he
controlled it by virtue of an infinite humility. Men appeared
upon those upland slopes with the apparatus for wireless
telegraphy; others followed with tents and provisions; a little
cable was flung down to a convenient point upon the Locarno road
below. Leblanc arrived, sedulously directing every detail that
would affect the tone of the assembly. He might have been a
courier in advance rather than the originator of the gathering.
And then there arrived, some by the cable, most by aeroplane, a
few in other fashions, the men who had been called together to
confer upon the state of the world. It was to be a conference
without a name. Nine monarchs, the presidents of four republics,
a number of ministers and ambassadors, powerful journalists, and
such-like prominent and influential men, took part in it. There
were even scientific men; and that world-famous old man, Holsten,
came with the others to contribute his amateur statecraft to the
desperate problem of the age. Only Leblanc would have dared so
to summon figure heads and powers and intelligence, or have had
the courage to hope for their agreement…
Section 2
And one at least of those who were called to
this conference of
governments came to it on foot. This was King Egbert, the young
king of the most venerable kingdom in Europe. He was a rebel,
and had always been of deliberate choice a rebel against the
magnificence of his position. He affected long pedestrian tours
and a disposition to sleep in the open air. He came now over the
Pass of Sta Maria Maggiore and by boat up the lake to Brissago;
thence he walked up the mountain, a pleasant path set with oaks
and sweet chestnut. For provision on the walk, for he did not
want to hurry, he carried with him a pocketful of bread and
cheese. A certain small retinue that was necessary to his comfort
and dignity upon occasions of state he sent on by the cable car,
and with him walked his private secretary, Firmin, a man who had
thrown up the Professorship of World Politics in the London
School of Sociology, Economics, and Political Science, to take up
these duties. Firmin was a man of strong rather than rapid
thought, he had anticipated great influence in this new position,
and after some years he was still only beginning to apprehend how
largely his function was to listen. Originally he had been
something of a thinker upon international politics, an authority
upon tariffs and strategy, and a valued contributor to various of
the higher organs of public opinion, but the atomic bombs had
taken him by surprise, and he had still to recover completely
from his pre-atomic opinions and the silencing effect of those
sustained explosives.
The king's freedom from the trammels of etiquette was very
complete. In theory-and he abounded in theory-his manners were
purely democratic. It was by sheer habit and inadvertency that he
permitted Firmin, who had discovered a rucksack in a small shop
in the town below, to carry both bottles of beer. The king had
never, as a matter of fact, carried anything for himself in his
life, and he had never noted that he did not do so.
'We will have nobody with us,' he said, 'at all. We will be
perfectly simple.'
So Firmin carried the beer.
As they walked up-it was the king made the pace rather than
Firmin-they talked of the conference before them, and Firmin,
with a certain want of assurance that would have surprised him in
himself in the days of his Professorship, sought to define the