H. Wells - The World Set Free

and I could look detachedlyupon 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 heardtheir pleasant

voices. How willing those men were! How ready to accept

leadership and forget themselvesin 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 patienceand 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 sawlife plain…'

Very characteristicis 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 aloneseemed unable to sleep. I suppose I was over-weary, and

after a little feverish slumber by the tiller of the barge I sat

up, awakeand 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 sawhow 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,

desirousbut discursive, able and unwisely impulsive, until

Saturn who begot him shall devour him in his turn…

'I was roused from these thoughtsby 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 rememberthat I looked up at them at

first rather idly-as one might notice a flight of birds. Then I

perceivedthat 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 sawthat fleet I was astonished not to have seenit

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 sawcoming 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

doubtfulnumber 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 the shipping on the

main canal, whose whole course, dotted with unsuspicious lights

and fringed with fires, must have been clearly perceptiblefrom

above. Then a long way off towards Alkmaar I heardbugles, 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

thinkit 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 sawit 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 confusionof 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 restof 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 lonelywatcher in a sleeping world; the next sawevery

one about me afoot, the whole world awakeand 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 sawthe bombs fall, and then watched a great

crimson flare leap responsiveto each impact, and mountainous

masses of red-lit steam and flying fragments clamber up towards

the zenith. Against the glare I sawthe 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