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 saw life plain…'

Very characteristic is 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 alone seemed unable to sleep. I suppose I was over-weary, and

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

up, awake and 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 saw how 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,

desirous but discursive, able and unwisely impulsive, until

Saturn who begot him shall devour him in his turn…

'I was roused from these thoughts by 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 remember that I looked up at them at

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

perceived that 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 saw that fleet I was astonished not to have seen it

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 saw coming 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

doubtful number 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 perceptible from

above. Then a long way off towards Alkmaar I heard bugles, 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

think it 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 saw it 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 confusion of 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 rest of 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