constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never

entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb

fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with

radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.

What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the

inducive oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the

Carolinum began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only

slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its

explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding

superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and

thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this

state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting

soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, as

more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread

itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of

what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The

Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up

with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam,

and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption

that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of

the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal. Once

launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and

uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from

the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent

vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud,

saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and

blistering energy, were flung high and far.

Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate

explosive that was to give the 'decisive touch' to war…

Section 5

A recent historical writer has described the world of that time

as one that 'believed in established words and was invincibly

blind to the obvious in things.' Certainly it seems now that

nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier

twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming

impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not

see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. Yet

the broad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind. All

through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of

energy that men were able to command was continually increasing.

Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow,

the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no

increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of

passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being

outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side.

Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of

malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of

police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a

matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a

handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a

city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the

children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as

the Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the

paraphernalia and pretensions of war.

It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce

between the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand,

and the world of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men

of a later time can hope to understand this preposterous state of

affairs. Social organisation was still in the barbaric stage.

There were already great numbers of actively intelligent men and

much private and commercial civilisation, but the community, as a

whole, was aimless, untrained and unorganised to the pitch of

imbecility. Collective civilisation, the 'Modern State,' was

still in the womb of the future…

Section 6

But let us return to Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre and its

account of the experiences of a common man during the war time.

While these terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were

happening in Paris and Berlin, Barnet and his company were

industriously entrenching themselves in Belgian Luxembourg.

He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day's journey

through the north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid

phrases. The country was browned by a warm summer, the trees a

little touched with autumnal colour, and the wheat already

golden. When they stopped for an hour at Hirson, men and women

with tricolour badges upon the platform distributed cakes and

glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and there was much

cheerfulness. 'Such good, cool beer it was,' he wrote. 'I had

had nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom.'

A number of monoplanes, 'like giant swallows,' he notes, were

scouting in the pink evening sky.

Barnet's battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place

called Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to

Jemelle. Here they detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the

railway-trains and stores were passing along it all night-and

next morning he: marched eastward through a cold, overcast dawn,

and a morning, first cloudy and then blazing, over a large

spacious country-side interspersed by forest towards Arlon.

There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked

entrenchments and hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton

that were designed to check and delay any advance from the east

upon the fortified line of the Meuse. They had their orders, and

for two days they worked without either a sight of the enemy or

any suspicion of the disaster that had abruptly decapitated the

armies of Europe, and turned the west of Paris and the centre of

Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction of Pompeii.

And the news, when it did come, came attenuated. 'We heard there