H. Wells - The World Set Free

whose gifts was already touchedto mellowness, and it had

included the greatest names of every age so far as the advisers

of his family had been able to ascertain them. At present, the

king admitted, these matters of stars and badges were rather

obscured by more urgent affairs, for his own part he had never

set any value upon them at all, but a time might come when they

would be at least interesting, and in short he wished to confer

the Order of Merit upon Leblanc. His sole motive in doing so, he

added, was his strong desireto signalise his personal esteem.

He laid his hand upon the Frenchman's shoulder as he said these

things, with an almost brotherly affection. Leblanc received this

proposal with a modest confusionthat greatly enhanced the king's

opinion of his admirable simplicity. He pointed out that eager

as he was to snatch at the proffered distinction, it might at the

present stage appear invidious, and he therefore suggested that

the conferring of it should be postponed until it could be made

the crown and conclusion of his services. The king was unable to

shake this resolution, and the two men parted with expressions of

mutual esteem.

The king then summoned Firmin in order to make a short note of a

number of things that he had said during the day. But after about

twenty minutes' work the sweet sleepiness of the mountain air

overcame him, and he dismissed Firmin and went to bed and fell

asleep at once, and slept with extreme satisfaction. He had had

an active, agreeable day.

Section 5

The establishment of the new order that was thus so humanly

begun, was, if one measures it by the standard of any preceding

age, a rapid progress. The fighting spiritof the world was

exhausted. Only here or there did fierceness linger. For long

decades the combative side in human affairs had been monstrously

exaggerated by the accidents of political separation. This now

became luminously plain. An enormous proportion of the force that

sustained armaments had been nothing more aggressive than the

fearof war and warlike neighbours. It is doubtfulif any large

section of the men actually enlisted for fighting ever at any

time reallyhungered and thirsted for bloodshed and danger. That

kind of appetite was probably never very strong in the species

after the savage stage was past. The army was a profession, in

which killing had become a disagreeable possibility rather than

an eventful certainty. If one reads the old newspapers and

periodicals of that time, which did so much to keep militarism

alive, one finds very little about glory and adventure and a

constant harping on the disagreeableness of invasion and

subjugation. In one word, militarism was funk. The belligerent

resolution of the armed Europe of the twentieth century was the

resolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to plunge. And now that

its weapons were exploding in its hands, Europe was only too

eager to drop them, and abandon this fancied refuge of violence.

For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness;

nearly all the clever people who had hitherto sustained the

ancient belligerent separations had now been brought to realise

the need for simplicity of attitudeand openness of mind; and in

this atmosphere of moral renascence, there was little attempt to

get negotiable advantages out of resistance to the new order.

Human beings are foolish enough no doubt, but few have stopped to

haggle in a fire-escape. The council had its way with them. The

band of 'patriots' who seized the laboratories and arsenal just

outside Osaka and tried to rouse Japan to revolt against

inclusion in the Republic of Mankind, found they had

miscalculated the national pride and met the swift vengeance of

their own countrymen. That fight in the arsenal was a vivid

incident in this closing chapter of the history of war. To the

last the 'patriots' were undecided whether, in the event of a

defeat, they would explode their supply of atomic bombs or not.

They were fighting with swords outside the iridium doors, and the

moderates of their number were at bay and on the verge of

destruction, only ten, indeed, remained unwounded, when the

republicans burst in to the rescue…

Section 6

One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in

the new rule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism,

the 'Slavic Fox,' the King of the Balkans. He debated and

delayed his submissions. He showed an extraordinary combination

of cunning and temerity in his evasion of the repeated summonses

from Brissago. He affected ill-health and a great preoccupation

with his new official mistress, for his semi-barbaric court was

arranged on the best romantic models. His tactics were ably

seconded by Doctor Pestovitch, his chief minister. Failing to

establish his claims to complete independence, King Ferdinand

Charles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be treated as a

protected state. Finally he professed an unconvincing

submission, and put a mass of obstacles in the way of the

transfer of his national officials to the new government. In

these things he was enthusiastically supported by his subjects,

still for the most part an illiterate peasantry, passionately if

confusedlypatriotic, and so far with no practical knowledgeof

the effectof atomic bombs. More particularly he retained control

of all the Balkan aeroplanes.

For once the extreme naivete of Leblanc seems to have been

mitigated by duplicity. He went on with the general pacification

of the world as if the Balkan submission was made in absolute

good faith, and he announced the disbandment of the force of

aeroplanes that hitherto guarded the council at Brissago upon the

approaching fifteenth of July. But instead he doubled the number

upon duty on that eventful day, and made various arrangements for

their disposition. He consulted certain experts, and when he took

King Egbert into his confidence there was something in his neat

and explicit foresightthat brought back to that ex-monarch's

mindhis half-forgotten fantasy of Leblanc as a fisherman under a

green umbrella.

About five o'clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one

of the outer sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring

unobtrusively over the lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted

and hailed a strange aeroplane that was flying westward, and,

failing to get a satisfactoryreply, set its wireless apparatus

talking and gave chase. A swarm of consorts appeared very

promptly over the westward mountains, and before the unknown

aeroplane had sightedComo, it had a dozen eager attendants

closing in upon it. Its driver seems to have hesitated, dropped

down among the mountains, and then turned southward in flight,

only to find an intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows. He

then went round into the eye of the rising sun, and passed within

a hundred yards of his original pursuer.

The sharpshooter therein opened fire at once, and showed an

intelligent grasp of the situation by disabling the passenger

first. The man at the wheel must have heardhis companion cry out

behind him, but he was too intent on getting away to waste even a

glance behind. Twice after that he must have heardshots. He let

his engine go, he crouched down, and for twenty minutes he must

have steered in the continualexpectation of a bullet. It never