H. Wells - The World Set Free

Antarctic circles was still buried beneath vast accumulations of

immemorial ice, and the secret riches of the inner zones of the

crust were untapped and indeed unsuspected. The higher mountain

regions were knownonly to a sprinkling of guide-led climbers and

the frequenters of a few gaunt hotels, and the vast rainless

belts of land that lay across the continental masses, from Gobi

to Sahara and along the backbone of America, with their perfect

air, their daily baths of blazing sunshine, their nights of cool

serenity and glowing stars, and their reservoirs of deep-lying

water, were as yet only desolations of fearand death to the

common imagination.

And now under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of

population which had gathered into the enormous dingy town

centres of that period were dispossessed and scattered

disastrously over the surrounding rural areas. It was as if some

brutal force, grownimpatient at last at man's blindness, had

with the deliberate intention of a rearrangement of population

upon more wholesome lines, shaken the world. The great

industrial regions and the large cities that had escaped the

bombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, in

almost as tragic plight as those that blazed, and the

country-side was disordered by a multitude of wandering and

lawless strangers. In some parts of the world famine raged, and

in many regions there was plague… The plains of north India,

which had become more and more dependent for the general welfare

on the railways and that great system of irrigation canals which

the malignant section of the patriots had destroyed, were in a

stateof peculiar distress, whole villages lay dead together, no

man heeding, and the very tigers and panthers that preyed upon

the emaciated survivors crawled back infected into the jungle to

perish. Large areas of China were a prey to brigand bands…

It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of

the explosion of the atomic bombs survives. There are, of

course, innumerable allusions and partial records, and it is from

these that subsequent ages must piece together the image of these

devastations.

The phenomena, it must be remembered, changed greatly from day to

day, and even from hour to hour, as the exploding bomb shifted

its position, threw off fragments or came into contact with water

or a fresh texture of soil. Barnet, who came within forty miles

of Paris early in October, is concerned chiefly with his account

of the social confusionof the country-side and the problems of

his command, but he speaks of heaped cloud masses of steam. 'All

along the sky to the south-west' and of a red glare beneath these

at night. Parts of Paris were still burning, and numbers of

people were camped in the fields even at this distance watching

over treasured heaps of salvaged loot. He speaks too of the

distant rumbling of the explosion-'like trains going over iron

bridges.'

Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the

'continuous reverberations,' or of the 'thudding and hammering,'

or some such phrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of

steam, from which rain would fall suddenly in torrents and amidst

which lightning played. Drawing nearer to Paris an observer

would have found the salvage camps increasing in number and

blocking up the villages, and large numbers of people, often

starving and ailing, camping under improvised tents because there

was no place for them to go. The sky became more and more

densely overcast until at last it blotted out the light of day

and left nothing but a dull red glare 'extraordinarily depressing

to the spirit.' In this dull glare, great numbers of people were

still living, clinging to their houses and in many cases

subsisting in a stateof partial famine upon the produce in their

gardens and the stores in the shops of the provision dealers.

Coming in still closer, the investigator would have reached the

police cordon, which was trying to check the desperate enterprise

of those who would return to their homes or rescue their more

valuable possessions within the 'zone of imminent danger.'

That zone was rather arbitrarily defined. If our spectator could

have got permission to enter it, he would have entered also a

zone of uproar, a zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange

purplish-red light, and quivering and swaying with the incessant

explosion of the radio-active substance. Whole blocks of

buildings were alight and burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged

flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in comparison with

the full-bodied crimson glare beyond. The shells of other

edifices already burnt rose, pierced by rows of window sockets

against the red-lit mist.

Every step farther would have been as dangerous as a descent

within the crater of an active volcano. These spinning, boiling

bomb centres would shift or break unexpectedly into new regions,

great fragments of earth or drain or masonry suddenly caught by a

jet of disruptive force might come flying by the explorer's head,

or the ground yawn a fiery grave beneath his feet. Few who

adventured into these areas of destruction and survived attempted

any repetition of their experiences. There are stories of puffs

of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting sometimes scores of

miles from the bomb centre and killing and scorching all they

overtook. And the first conflagrations from the Paris centre

spread westward half-way to the sea.

Moreover, the air in this infernal inner circle of red-lit ruins

had a peculiar dryness and a blistering quality, so that it set

up a soreness of the skin and lungs that was very difficult to

heal…

Such was the last stateof Paris, and such on a larger scale was

the conditionof affairs in Chicago, and the same fate had

overtaken Berlin, Moscow, Tokio, the eastern half of London,

Toulon, Kiel, and two hundred and eighteen other centres of

population or armament. Each was a flaming centre of radiant

destruction that only time could quench, that indeed in many

instances time has still to quench. To this day, though indeed

with a constantly diminishing uproar and vigour, these explosions

continue. In the map of nearly every country of the world three

or four or more red circles, a score of miles in diameter, mark

the position of the dying atomic bombs and the death areas that

men have been forced to abandon around them. Within these areas

perished museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of

masterpieces, and a vast accumulation of human achievement, whose

charred remains lie buried, a legacy of curious material that

only future generations may hope to examine…

Section 4

The stateof mindof the dispossessed urban population which

swarmed and perished so abundantly over the country-side during

the dark days of the autumnal months that followed the Last War,

was one of blank despair. Barnet gives sketch after sketch of

groups of these people, camped among the vineyards of Champagne,

as he sawthem during his period of service with the army of

pacification.

There was, for example, that 'man-milliner' who came out from a

field beside the road that rises up eastward out of Epernay, and

asked how things were going in Paris. He was, says Barnet, a

round-faced man, dressed very neatly in black-so neatly that it