the picture, leaving a flaring trail in the sky. The night,

which had been pellucid and detailed and eventful, seemed to

vanish, to be replaced abruptly by a black background to these

tremendous pillars of fire…

'Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was

filled with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds…

'There was something discontinuous in this impact. At one moment

I was a lonely watcher in a sleeping world; the next saw every

one about me afoot, the whole world awake and amazed…

'And then the wind had struck me a buffet, taken my helmet and

swept aside the summerhouse of Vreugde bij Vrede, as a scythe

sweeps away grass. I saw the bombs fall, and then watched a great

crimson flare leap responsive to each impact, and mountainous

masses of red-lit steam and flying fragments clamber up towards

the zenith. Against the glare I saw the country-side for miles

standing black and clear, churches, trees, chimneys. And

suddenly I understood. The Central Europeans had burst the dykes.

Those flares meant the bursting of the dykes, and in a little

while the sea-water would be upon us…'

He goes on to tell with a certain prolixity of the steps he

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 himself of 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 being swept 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 object that 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 sight like something shown by the opening of

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

us. Once I saw very 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

despair against the black steam clouds behind. Once a great

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

whole, make headway. The last I saw of 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 seen flotilla 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 helping people who were adrift, in picking