H. Wells - The World Set Free

took-and all things considered they were very intelligent

steps-to meet this amazing crisis. He got his men aboard and

hailed the adjacent barges; he got the man who acted as barge

engineer at his post and the engines working, he cast loose from

his moorings. Then he bethought himselfof food, and contrived to

land five men, get in a few dozen cheeses, and ship his men again

before the inundation reached them.

He is reasonably proud of this piece of coolness. His idea was

to take the wave head-on and with his engines full speed ahead.

And all the while he was thanking heaven he was not in the jam of

traffic in the main canal. He rather, I think, overestimated the

probable rush of waters; he dreaded beingswept away, he

explains, and smashed against houses and trees.

He does not give any estimate of the time it took between the

bursting of the dykes and the arrival of the waters, but it was

probably an interval of about twenty minutes or half an hour. He

was working now in darkness-save for the light of his

lantern-and in a great wind. He hung out head and stern

lights…

Whirling torrents of steam were pouring up from the advancing

waters, which had rushed, it must be remembered, through nearly

incandescent gaps in the sea defences, and this vast uprush of

vapour soon veiled the flaring centres of explosion altogether.

'The waters came at last, an advancing cascade. It was like a

broad roller sweeping across the country. They came with a deep,

roaring sound. I had expected a Niagara, but the total fall of

the front could not have been much more than twelve feet. Our

barge hesitated for a moment, took a dose over her bows, and then

lifted. I signalled for full speed ahead and brought her head

upstream, and held on like grim death to keep her there.

'There was a wind about as strong as the flood, and I found we

were pounding against every conceivable buoyant objectthat had

been between us and the sea. The only light in the world now

came from our lamps, the steam became impenetrable at a score of

yards from the boat, and the roar of the wind and water cut us

off from all remoter sounds. The black, shining waters swirled

by, coming into the light of our lamps out of an ebony blackness

and vanishing again into impenetrable black. And on the waters

came shapes, came things that flashed upon us for a moment, now a

half-submerged boat, now a cow, now a huge fragment of a house's

timberings, now a muddle of packing-cases and scaffolding. The

things clapped into sightlike something shown by the opening of

a shutter, and then bumped shatteringly against us or rushed by

us. Once I sawvery clearly a man's white face…

'All the while a group of labouring, half-submerged trees

remained ahead of us, drawing very slowly nearer. I steered a

course to avoid them. They seemed to gesticulate a frantic

despairagainst the black steam clouds behind. Once a great

branch detacheditself and tore shuddering by me. We did, on the

whole, make headway. The last I sawof Vreugde bij Vrede before

the night swallowed it, was almost dead astern of us…'

Section 9

Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had

been badly strained, and his men were pumping or baling in

relays. He had got about a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose

boat had capsized near him, and he had three other boats in tow.

He was afloat, and somewhere between Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but

he could not tell where. It was a day that was still half night.

Gray waters stretched in every direction under a dark gray sky,

and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, in many

cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the upper

third of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted

a dimly seenflotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned,

furniture, rafts, timbering, and miscellaneous objects.

The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there

did a dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box

or chair or such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was

not till the Thursday that the dead came to the surface in any

quantity. The view was bounded on every side by a gray mist that

closed overhead in a gray canopy. The air cleared in the

afternoon, and then, far away to the west under great banks of

steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of the atomic bombs came

visible across the waste of water.

They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London

sunsets. 'They sat upon the sea,' says Barnet, 'like frayed-out

waterlilies of flame.'

Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the

track of the canal, in helpingpeople who were adrift, in picking

up derelict boats, and in taking people out of imperilled houses.

He found other military barges similarly employed, and it was

only as the day wore on and the immediate appeals for aid were

satisfiedthat he thoughtof food and drink for his men, and what

course he had better pursue. They had a little cheese, but no

water. 'Orders,' that mysterious direction, had at last

altogether disappeared. He perceivedhe had now to act upon his

own responsibility.

'One's sense was of a destruction so far-reaching and of a world

so altered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and

expect to find things as they had been before the war began. I

sat on the quarter-deck with Mylius my engineer and Kemp and two

others of the non-commissioned officers, and we consulted upon

our line of action. We were foodless and aimless. We agreed

that our fighting value was extremely small, and that our first

duty was to get ourselvesin touchwith food and instructions

again. Whatever plan of campaign had directed our movements was

manifestly smashed to bits. Mylius was of opinion that we could

take a line westward and get back to England across the North

Sea. He calculated that with such a motor barge as ours it would

be possible to reach the Yorkshire coast within four-and-twenty

hours. But this idea I overruled because of the shortness of our

provisions, and more particularly because of our urgent need of

water.

'Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their

demands did much to exasperate our thirst. I decided that if we

went away to the south we should reach hilly country, or at least

country that was not submerged, and then we should be able to

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 SeeCanal, but none of

them were any better informed than ourselvesof the course of

events. "Orders" had, in fact, vanished out of the sky.

' "Orders" made a temporary reappearance late that evening in the

formof a megaphone hail from a British torpedo boat, announcing

a truce, and giving the welcome information that food and water

were beinghurried 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