H. Wells - The World Set Free

explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding

superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and

thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this

state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting

soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, as

more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread

itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of

what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The

Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up

with a boiling confusionof molten soil and superheated steam,

and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption

that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of

the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal. Once

launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and

uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from

the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent

vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud,

saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and

blistering energy, were flung high and far.

Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate

explosive that was to give the 'decisive touch' to war…

Section 5

A recent historical writer has described the world of that time

as one that 'believed in established words and was invincibly

blind to the obvious in things.' Certainly it seems now that

nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier

twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming

impossible. And as certainly they did not seeit. They did not

seeit until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. Yet

the broad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind. All

through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of

energy that men were able to command was continuallyincreasing.

Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow,

the power to destroy, was continuallyincreasing. There was no

increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of

passivedefence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being

outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side.

Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of

malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of

police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a

matter of common knowledgethat a man could carry about in a

handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a

city. These facts were before the mindsof everybody; the

children in the streets knewthem. And yet the world still, as

the Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the

paraphernalia and pretensions of war.

It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce

between the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand,

and the world of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men

of a later time can hope to understandthis preposterous stateof

affairs. Social organisation was still in the barbaric stage.

There were already great numbers of actively intelligent men and

much private and commercial civilisation, but the community, as a

whole, was aimless, untrained and unorganised to the pitch of

imbecility. Collective civilisation, the 'Modern State,' was

still in the womb of the future…

Section 6

But let us return to Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre and its

account of the experiencesof a common man during the war time.

While these terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were

happening in Paris and Berlin, Barnet and his company were

industriously entrenching themselvesin 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 touchedwith 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 sightof 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 heardthere

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 seewhat 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 doubtthey effectedthe 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 effectivekind 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