up derelict boats, and in taking people out of imperilled houses.

He found other military barges similarly employed, and it was

only as the day wore on and the immediate appeals for aid were

satisfied that he thought of food and drink for his men, and what

course he had better pursue. They had a little cheese, but no

water. 'Orders,' that mysterious direction, had at last

altogether disappeared. He perceived he had now to act upon his

own responsibility.

'One's sense was of a destruction so far-reaching and of a world

so altered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and

expect to find things as they had been before the war began. I

sat on the quarter-deck with Mylius my engineer and Kemp and two

others of the non-commissioned officers, and we consulted upon

our line of action. We were foodless and aimless. We agreed

that our fighting value was extremely small, and that our first

duty was to get ourselves in touch with food and instructions

again. Whatever plan of campaign had directed our movements was

manifestly smashed to bits. Mylius was of opinion that we could

take a line westward and get back to England across the North

Sea. He calculated that with such a motor barge as ours it would

be possible to reach the Yorkshire coast within four-and-twenty

hours. But this idea I overruled because of the shortness of our

provisions, and more particularly because of our urgent need of

water.

'Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their

demands did much to exasperate our thirst. I decided that if we

went away to the south we should reach hilly country, or at least

country that was not submerged, and then we should be able to

land, find some stream, drink, and get supplies and news. Many of

the barges adrift in the haze about us were filled with British

soldiers and had floated up from the Nord See Canal, but none of

them were any better informed than ourselves of the course of

events. "Orders" had, in fact, vanished out of the sky.

' "Orders" made a temporary reappearance late that evening in the

form of a megaphone hail from a British torpedo boat, announcing

a truce, and giving the welcome information that food and water

were being hurried down the Rhine and were to be found on the

barge flotilla lying over the old Rhine above Leiden.'…

We will not follow Barnet, however, in the description of his

strange overland voyage among trees and houses and churches by

Zaandam and between Haarlem and Amsterdam, to Leiden. It was a

voyage in a red-lit mist, in a world of steamy silhouette, full

of strange voices and perplexity, and with every other sensation

dominated by a feverish thirst. 'We sat,' he says, 'in a little

huddled group, saying very little, and the men forward were mere

knots of silent endurance. Our only continuing sound was the

persistent mewing of a cat one of the men had rescued from a

floating hayrick near Zaandam. We kept a southward course by a

watch-chain compass Mylius had produced…

'I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army,

nor had we any strong sense of the war as the dominating fact

about us. Our mental setting had far more of the effect of a

huge natural catastrophe. The atomic bombs had dwarfed the

international issues to complete insignificance. When our minds

wandered from the preoccupations of our immediate needs, we

speculated upon the possibility of stopping the use of these

frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed. For

to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still

greater power of destruction of which they were the precursors

might quite easily shatter every relationship and institution of

mankind.

' "What will they be doing," asked Mylius, "what will they be

doing? It's plain we've got to put an end to war. It's plain

things have to be run some way. THIS-all this-is impossible."

'I made no immediate answer. Something-I cannot think what-had

brought back to me the figure of that man I had seen wounded on

the very first day of actual fighting. I saw again his angry,

tearful eyes, and that poor, dripping, bloody mess that had been

a skilful human hand five minutes before, thrust out in indignant

protest. "Damned foolery," he had stormed and sobbed, "damned

foolery. My right hand, sir! My RIGHT hand…"

'My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me. "I think we

are too-too silly," I said to Mylius, "ever to stop war. If we'd

had the sense to do it, we should have done it before this. I

think this--" I pointed to the gaunt black outline of a smashed

windmill that stuck up, ridiculous and ugly, above the blood-lit

waters-"this is the end." '

Section 10

But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and

his barge-load of hungry and starving men.

For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if

civilisation had come to a final collapse. These crowning buds

upon the tradition that Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered,

opened and flared 'like waterlilies of flame' over nations

destroyed, over churches smashed or submerged, towns ruined,

fields lost to mankind for ever, and a million weltering bodies.

Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would the flames of war

still burn amidst the ruins?

Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance

in their answers to that question. Already once in the history

of mankind, in America, before its discovery by the whites, an

organised civilisation had given way to a mere cult of warfare,

specialised and cruel, and it seemed for a time to many a

thoughtful man as if the whole world was but to repeat on a