exaggerated by the accidents of political separation. This now
became luminously plain. An enormous proportion of the force that
sustained armaments had been nothing more aggressive than the
fear of war and warlike neighbours. It is doubtful if any large
section of the men actually enlisted for fighting ever at any
time really hungered and thirsted for bloodshed and danger. That
kind of appetite was probably never very strong in the species
after the savage stage was past. The army was a profession, in
which killing had become a disagreeable possibility rather than
an eventful certainty. If one reads the old newspapers and
periodicals of that time, which did so much to keep militarism
alive, one finds very little about glory and adventure and a
constant harping on the disagreeableness of invasion and
subjugation. In one word, militarism was funk. The belligerent
resolution of the armed Europe of the twentieth century was the
resolution of a fiercely frightened sheep to plunge. And now that
its weapons were exploding in its hands, Europe was only too
eager to drop them, and abandon this fancied refuge of violence.
For a time the whole world had been shocked into frankness;
nearly all the clever people who had hitherto sustained the
ancient belligerent separations had now been brought to realise
the need for simplicity of attitude and openness of mind; and in
this atmosphere of moral renascence, there was little attempt to
get negotiable advantages out of resistance to the new order.
Human beings are foolish enough no doubt, but few have stopped to
haggle in a fire-escape. The council had its way with them. The
band of 'patriots' who seized the laboratories and arsenal just
outside Osaka and tried to rouse Japan to revolt against
inclusion in the Republic of Mankind, found they had
miscalculated the national pride and met the swift vengeance of
their own countrymen. That fight in the arsenal was a vivid
incident in this closing chapter of the history of war. To the
last the 'patriots' were undecided whether, in the event of a
defeat, they would explode their supply of atomic bombs or not.
They were fighting with swords outside the iridium doors, and the
moderates of their number were at bay and on the verge of
destruction, only ten, indeed, remained unwounded, when the
republicans burst in to the rescue…
Section 6
One single monarch held out against the general acquiescence in
the new rule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism,
the 'Slavic Fox,' the King of the Balkans. He debated and
delayed his submissions. He showed an extraordinary combination
of cunning and temerity in his evasion of the repeated summonses
from Brissago. He affected ill-health and a great preoccupation
with his new official mistress, for his semi-barbaric court was
arranged on the best romantic models. His tactics were ably
seconded by Doctor Pestovitch, his chief minister. Failing to
establish his claims to complete independence, King Ferdinand
Charles annoyed the conference by a proposal to be treated as a
protected state. Finally he professed an unconvincing
submission, and put a mass of obstacles in the way of the
transfer of his national officials to the new government. In
these things he was enthusiastically supported by his subjects,
still for the most part an illiterate peasantry, passionately if
confusedly patriotic, and so far with no practical knowledge of
the effect of atomic bombs. More particularly he retained control
of all the Balkan aeroplanes.
For once the extreme naivete of Leblanc seems to have been
mitigated by duplicity. He went on with the general pacification
of the world as if the Balkan submission was made in absolute
goodfaith, and he announced the disbandment of the force of
aeroplanes that hitherto guarded the council at Brissago upon the
approaching fifteenth of July. But instead he doubled the number
upon duty on that eventful day, and made various arrangements for
their disposition. He consulted certain experts, and when he took
King Egbert into his confidence there was something in his neat
and explicit foresight that brought back to that ex-monarch's
mind his half-forgotten fantasy of Leblanc as a fisherman under a
green umbrella.
About five o'clock in the morning of the seventeenth of July one
of the outer sentinels of the Brissago fleet, which was soaring
unobtrusively over the lower end of the lake of Garda, sighted
and hailed a strange aeroplane that was flying westward, and,
failing to get a satisfactory reply, set its wireless apparatus
talking and gave chase. A swarm of consorts appeared very
promptly over the westward mountains, and before the unknown
aeroplane had sighted Como, it had a dozen eager attendants
closing in upon it. Its driver seems to have hesitated, dropped
down among the mountains, and then turned southward in flight,
only to find an intercepting biplane sweeping across his bows. He
then went round into the eye of the rising sun, and passed within
a hundred yards of his original pursuer.
The sharpshooter therein opened fire at once, and showed an
intelligent grasp of the situation by disabling the passenger
first. The man at the wheel must have heard his companion cry out
behind him, but he was too intent on getting away to waste even a
glance behind. Twice after that he must have heard shots. He let
his engine go, he crouched down, and for twenty minutes he must
have steered in the continual expectation of a bullet. It never
came, and when at last he glanced round, three great planes were
close upon him, and his companion, thrice hit, lay dead across
his bombs. His followers manifestly did not mean either to upset
or shoot him, but inexorably they drove him down, down. At last