larger scale this ascendancy of the warrior, this triumph of the

destructive instincts of the race.

The subsequent chapters of Barnet's narrative do but supply body

to this tragic possibility. He gives a series of vignettes of

civilisation, shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found

the Belgian hills swarming with refugees and desolated by

cholera; the vestiges of the contending armies keeping order

under a truce, without actual battles, but with the cautious

hostility of habit, and a great absence of plan everywhere.

Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were

rumours of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys

of the Semoy and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes.

There was the report of an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and

Japanese, and of some huge revolutionary outbreak in America.

The weather was stormier than men had ever known it in those

regions, with much thunder and lightning and wild cloud-bursts of

rain…

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE ENDING OF WAR

Section 1

On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding

two long stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to

Bellinzona, and southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass

meadows which is very beautiful in springtime with a great

multitude of wild flowers. More particularly is this so in early

June, when the slender asphodel Saint Bruno's lily, with its

spike of white blossom, is in flower. To the westward of this

delightful shelf there is a deep and densely wooded trench, a

great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of which arise

great precipices very high and wild. Above the asphodel fields

the mountains climb in rocky slopes to solitudes of stone and

sunlight that curve round and join that wall of cliffs in one

common skyline. This desolate and austere background contrasts

very vividly with the glowing serenity of the great lake below,

with the spacious view of fertile hills and roads and villages

and islands to south and east, and with the hotly golden rice

flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And because it was a remote

and insignificant place, far away out of the crowding tragedies

of that year of disaster, away from burning cities and starving

multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was here

that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest,

if possible, before it was too late, the debacle of civilisation.

Here, brought together by the indefatigable energy of that

impassioned humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at

Washington, the chief Powers of the world were to meet in a last

desperate conference to 'save humanity.'

Leblanc was one of those ingenuous men whose lot would have been

insignificant in any period of security, but who have been caught

up to an immortal role in history by the sudden simplification of

human affairs through some tragical crisis, to the measure of

their simplicity. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln, and such was

Garibaldi. And Leblanc, with his transparent childish innocence,

his entire self-forgetfulness, came into this confusion of

distrust and intricate disaster with an invincible appeal for the

manifest sanities of the situation. His voice, when he spoke, was

'full of remonstrance.' He was a little bald, spectacled man,

inspired by that intellectual idealism which has been one of the

peculiar gifts of France to humanity. He was possessed of one

clear persuasion, that war must end, and that the only way to end

war was to have but one government for mankind. He brushed aside

all other considerations. At the very outbreak of the war, so

soon as the two capitals of the belligerents had been wrecked, he

went to the president in the White House with this proposal. He

made it as if it was a matter of course. He was fortunate to be

in Washington and in touch with that gigantic childishness which

was the characteristic of the American imagination. For the

Americans also were among the simple peoples by whom the world

was saved. He won over the American president and the American

government to his general ideas; at any rate they supported him

sufficiently to give him a standing with the more sceptical

European governments, and with this backing he set to work-it

seemed the most fantastic of enterprises-to bring together all

the rulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable

letters, he sent messages, he went desperate journeys, he

enlisted whatever support he could find; no one was too humble

for an ally or too obstinate for his advances; through the

terrible autumn of the last wars this persistent little visionary

in spectacles must have seemed rather like a hopeful canary

twittering during a thunderstorm. And no accumulation of

disasters daunted his conviction that they could be ended.

For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of

destruction. Power after Power about the armed globe sought to

anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium

of panic, in order to use their bombs first. China and Japan had

assailed Russia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had

attacked Japan, India was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit

of fire spouting death and flame; the redoubtable King of the

Balkans was mobilising. It must have seemed plain at last to

every one in those days that the world was slipping headlong to

anarchy. By the spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres,

and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable

crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy fabric of

the world's credit had vanished, industry was completely

disorganised and every city, every thickly populated area was

starving or trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the

capital cities of the world were burning; millions of people had

already perished, and over great areas government was at an end.

Humanity has been compared by one contemporary writer to a

sleeper who handles matches in his sleep and wakes to find

himself in flames.

For many months it was an open question whether there was to be

found throughout all the race the will and intelligence to face

these new conditions and make even an attempt to arrest the

downfall of the social order. For a time the war spirit defeated

every effort to rally the forces of preservation and

construction. Leblanc seemed to be protesting against

earthquakes, and as likely to find a spirit of reason in the

crater of Etna. Even though the shattered official governments

now clamoured for peace, bands of irreconcilables and invincible