H. Wells - The World Set Free

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 wokethem 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 satisfy myself

and didn't shoot, his movements were so spasmodic and uncertain;

then I thinkhe 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 feltthat I had hit him I was irradiated with

joyand pride…

'I sent him spinning. He jumped and threw up his arms…

'Then I sawthe corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping

about. Suddenly I feltsick. 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 themselvesin 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 helphim 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 experiencedan

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 thinkingof the dead Prussian down

among the corn, and of the bitteroutcries 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

wakeup."…

'Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. "Presently mankind

will wakeup."

'I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were

among these hundreds of thousands, whose spiritswere 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 knowhow my speculations ended. I thinkthey 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 seenno 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 pleasantlythe 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,