H. Wells - The World Set Free

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 disposedhim 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 doubtif I amsufficiently

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 beingunknown-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 realwarfare

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 experiencesall the darker. A week

after his return his father, who was a widower, announced himself

ruined, and committed suicide by means of an unscheduled opiate.

At one blow Barnet found himselfflung out of the possessing,

spending, enjoyingclass 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 himselfon

the underside of a world in which he had always reckoned to live

in the sunshine. For innumerable men such an experiencehas

meant mental and spiritualdestruction, but Barnet, in spite of

his bodily gravitation towards comfort, showed himselfwhen 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 sorrowof 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 thoughtthings 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 fearof 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