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RARE BOOK COLLÏCTION j| 

THE LIBRARIES 

The University 
of Georgia 

U u cJH 

ROGER H. WEST 

.jWl'liüiliHiilllll II IHI! II III (itlil!lllimi!t!l!lllllll!lllll I Mlflll I I lu »l!HIIIH!HI lilllul'îl! 

 THE WORLD SET FREE 

Hi (H milttülll ÜIII1! 

il i i mini n ui t um i n 

 MR. WELLS has also written 

The following NOVELS : 

LOVE AND MR.- LEWISHAM 
KIPPS MR. POLLY 
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE 
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
ANN VERONICA MARRIAGE 
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS 
and TONO BUNGAY 

Numerous short stories now collected 
in one volume under the title of 

THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND 

The following fantastic and imaginative 
ROMANCES : 

THE TIME MACHINE 

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS 

THE SEA LADY 

THE WONDERFUL VISIT 

IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET 

THE SLEEPER AWAKES 

THE FOOD OF THE GODS 

THE WAR IN THE AIR 

THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON 

and THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU 

A series of books upon social and political 
questions of which 

ANTICIPATIONS (iCOCj) 

A MODERN UTOPIA 
FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELIGION 
AND PHILOSOPHY) 

and NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 

are the chief. And two little books 
- about play called 

FLOOR GAMES AND LITTLE WARS 

' Hi 1 til». UllllUul IHIIHH 'Mill I H M!!lli:< 

THE WORLD SET 
FREE 

A STORT OF MANKIND 

BY 

H. G. WELLS 

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 

1914 

 "i T i--Tri! ;7îi 7i-_rm: i !i' 

W? 

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

COPYRIGHT 

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED 
LONDON AND BECCLES 

1'i'nt i ! in iir.ni nu 'wiimiiii mumi'iini HI u'liiiimi »u :;i. 

ÎTO 

FREDERICK SODDY'S 
«INTERPRETATION OF RADIUM" 

THIS STORY, WHICH OWES LONG PASSAGES 

TO THE ELEVENTH CHAPTER OF 

THAT BOOK, ACKNOWLEDGES 

AND INSCRIBES 

ITSELF 

 CONTENTS 

PRELUDE 

THE SUN SNARERS 

PAGE 
I 

CHAPTER THE FIRST 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY ..... 30 

CHAPTER THE SECOND 
THE LAST WAR ....... 76 

CHAPTER THE THIRD 
THE ENDING OF WAR .... 

134 

CHAPTER THE FOURTH 
THE NEW PHASE ...... 192 

CHAPTER THE FIFTH 
THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN .. . . 244 

!'™j:'ii'i!'!iiiiiinn I'D« i r HUH nil ! ilium.':! mum MM H^imr-! '•« "••• 

 I.H i niiiiiiii'i >m i if i u u« « mil', wwiiui' »mmi '"-'U 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

PRELUDE 

THE SUN SNARERS 

THE history of mankind is the history of the 
attainment of external power. Man is the tool- 
using, fire-making animal. From the outset of 
his terrestrial career we find him supplementing 
the natural strength and bodily weapons of a 
beast by the heat of burning and the rough 
implement of stone. So he passed beyond the 
ape. From that he expands. Presently he 
added to himself the power of the horse and 
the ox, he borrowed the carrying strength of 
water and the driving force of the wind, he 
quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple 
tools, pointed first with copper and then with 
iron, increased and varied and became more 
elaborate and efficient. He sheltered his heat 
in houses and made his way easier by paths and 
roads. He complicated his social relationships 

 , i,r. lii n p rr 

2 THE WORLD SET FREE 

and increased his efficiency by the division of 
labour. He began to store up knowledge. 
Contrivance followed contrivance, each making 
it possible for a man to do more. Always down 
the lengthening record, save for a set-back ever 
and again, he is doing more. . . . 

A quarter of a million years ago the utmost 
man was a savage, a being scarcely articulate, 
sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a 
rough-hewn flint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, 
living in small family groups, killed by some 
younger man so soon as his first virile activity 
declined. Over most of the great wildernesses 
of earth you would have sought him in vain ; 
only in a few temperate and sub-tropical river 
valleys would you have found the squatting lairs 
of his little herds, a male, a few females, a child 
or so. 

He knew no future then, no kind of life 
except the life he led. He fled the cave-bear 
over the rocks full of iron ore and the promise 
of sword and spear ; he froze to death upon a 
ledge of coal ; he drank water muddy with the 
clay that would one day make cups of porcelain ; 
he chewed the ear of wild wheat he had plucked 
and gazed with a dim speculation in his eyes at 
the birds that soared beyond his reach. Or 
suddenly he became aware of the scent of 
another male and rose up roaring, his roars the 
formless precursors of moral admonitions. For 

THE SUN SNARERS 3 

he was a great individualist, that original, he 
suffered none other than himself. 

So through the long generations, this heavy 
precursor, this ancestor of all. of us, fought and 
bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly. 

Yet he changed. That keen chisel of neces 
sity which sharpened the tiger's claw age by 
age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus to 
the swift grace of the horse, was at work upon 
him—is at work upon him still. The clumsier 
and more stupidly fierce among him were killed 
soonest and oftenest ; the finer hand, the quicker 
eye, the bigger brain, the better balanced body 
prevailed ; age by age, the implements were a 
little better made, the man a little more delicately 
adjusted to his possibilities. He became more 
social ; his herd grew larger ; no longer did 
each man kill or drive out his growing sons ; a 
system of taboos made them tolerable to him, 
and they revered him alive and soon even after 
he was dead, and were his allies against the 
beasts and the rest of mankind. (But they were 
forbidden to touch the women of the tribe, they 
had to go out and capture women for themselves, 
and each son fled from his stepmother and hid 
from her lest the anger of the Old Man should 
be roused. All the world over, even to this day, 
these ancient inevitable taboos can be traced.) 
And now instead of caves came huts and hovels, 
and the fire was better tended and there were 

IMF | |i ii immiimuuiMJllJïil! HMHWMIMI IMIHIIIIIIII 

 4 THE WORLD SET FREE 

wrappings and garments ; and so aided, the 
creature spread into colder climates, carrying 
food with him, storing food—until sometimes 
the neglected grass-seed sprouted again and gave 
a first hint of agriculture. 

And already there were the beginnings of 
leisure and thought. 

Man began to think. There were times 
when he was fed, when his lusts and his fears 
were all appeased, when the sun shone upon 
the squatting-place and dim stirrings of specu 
lation lit his eyes. He scratched upon a bone 
and found resemblance and pursued it and began 
pictorial art, moulded the soft warm clay of the 
river brink between his fingers and found a 
pleasure in its patternings and repetitions, shaped 
it into the form of vessels and found that it 
would hold water. He watched the streaming 
river and wondered from what bountiful breast 
this incessant water came ; he blinked at the 
sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it 
and spear it as it went down to its resting- 
place amidst the distant hills. Then he was 
roused to convey to his brother that once indeed 
he had done so—at least that someone had done 
so—he mixed that perhaps with another dream 
almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had 
been beset ; and therewith began fiction—point 
ing a way to achievement — and the august 
prophetic procession of tales. 

THE SUN SNARERS 5 

For scores and hundreds of centuries, for 
.myriads of generations that life of our fathers 
went on. From the beginning to the ripen 
ing of that phase of human life, from the first 
clumsy eolith of rudely chipped flint to the 
first implements of polished stone, was two or 
three thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand 
generations. So slowly, by human standards,^ 
did humanity gather itself together out of the 
dim intimations of the beast. And that first 
glimmering of speculation, that first story of 
achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and 
flushed under his matted hair gesticulating to 
his gaping incredulous listener, gripping his wrist 
to keep him attentive, was the most marvellous 
beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed 
the mammoths, and it began the setting of that 
snare that shall catch the sun. 

§ 2 

That dream was but a moment in a man's life, 
whose proper business it seemed was to get food 
and kill his fellows and beget after the manner of 
all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. 
About him, hidden from him by the thinnest of 
veils, were the untouched sources of Power, whose 
magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even 
to-day, Power that could make his every con 
ceivable dream come real. But the feet of the 

 6 THE WORLD SET FREE 

race were in the way of it, though he died blindly 
unknowing. 

At last, in the generous levels of warm river 
valleys, where food is abundant and life very easy, 
the emerging human, overcoming his earlier 
jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him 
less urgently, more social and tolerant and 
amenable, achieved a larger community. There 
began a division of labour, certain of the older 
men specialized in knowledge and direction, a 
strong man took the fatherly leadership in war, 
and priest and king began to develop their rôles 
in the opening drama of man's history. The 
priest's solicitude was seed-time and harvest and 
fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a 
hundred river valleys about the warm temperate 
zone of the earth there were already towns and 
temples, a score of thousand years ago. They 
flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and 
unsuspicious of the future, for as yet writing had 
still to begin. 

Very slowly did man increase his demand 
upon the illimitable wealth of Power that offered 
itself on every hand to him. He tamed certain 
animals, he developed his primordially haphazard 
agriculture into a ritual, he added first one metal 
to his resources and then another until he had 
copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and 
silver to supplement his stone, he hewed and 
carved wood, made pottery, paddled down his 

i .111 i ii mi mini" 

THE SUN SNARERS 7 

river until he came to the sea, discovered the 
wheel and made the first roads. But his chief 
activity for a hundred centuries and more, was 
the subjugation of himself and others to krger 
and larger societies. The history of man is not 
simply the conquest of external power ; it is first 
the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses, 
that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, 
that tie his hands from taking his inheritance. 
The ape in us still resents association. From the 
dawn of the age of polished stone to the achieve 
ment of the Peace of the World, man's dealings 
were chiefly with himself and his fellow man, 
trading, bargaining, law-making, propitiating, 
enslaving, conquering, exterminating, and every 
little increment in Power, he turned at once and 
always turns to the purposes of this confused 
elaborate struggle to socialize. To incorporate 
and comprehend his fellow men into a community 
of purpose became the last and greatest of his 
instincts. Already before the last polished phase 
of the stone age was over he had become a 
political animal. He made astonishingly far- 
reaching discoveries within himself, first of 
counting and then of writing and making records, 
and with that his town communities began to 
stretch out to dominion ; in the valleys of the 
Nile, the Euphrates and the great Chinese rivers, 
the first empires and the first written laws had 
their beginnings. Men specialized for fighting 

 .'8 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

and rule as soldiers and knights. Later as ships 
grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which had 
been a barrier became a highway, and at last out 
of a tangle of pirate polities came the great 
struggle of Carthage and Rome. The history of 
Europe is the history of the victory and breaking 
up of the Roman Empire. Every ascendant 
monarch in Europe up to the last, aped Caesar 
and called himself Kaiser or Czar or Imperator 
or Kasir-i-Hind. Measured by the duration of 
human life it is a vast space of time between that 
first dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the 
aeroplane, but by the scale that looks back to 
the makers of the eoliths, it is all of it a story of 
yesterday. 

Now during this period of two hundred 
centuries or more, this period of the warring 
states, while men's minds were chiefly preoccupied 
by politics and mutual aggression, their progress 
in the acquirement of external Power was slow— 
rapid in comparison with the progress of the old 
stone age, but slow in comparison with this new 
age of systematic discovery in which we live. 
They did not very greatly alter the weapons and 
tactics of warfare, the methods of agriculture, 
seamanship, their knowledge of the habitable 
globe, or the devices and utensils of domestic 
life between the days of the early Egyptians 
and the days when Christopher Columbus was a 
child. Of course there were inventions and 

THE SUN SNARERS 9 

changes, but there were also retrogressions ; 
things were found out and then forgotten again ; 
it was on the whole a progress but it contained 
no steps ; the peasant, life was the same, there 
were already priests and lawyers and town crafts 
men and territorial lords and rulers, doctors, wise 
women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China 
and Assyria and south-eastern Europe at the 
beginning of that period, and they were doing 
much the same things and living much the 
same life as they were in Europe in 1500 A.D. 
The English excavators of the year 1900 A.D. 
could delve into the remains of Babylon and 
Egypt and disinter legal documents, domestic 
accounts and family correspondence that they 
could read with the completest sympathy. There 
were great religious and moral changes through 
out the period, empires and republics replaced one 
another, Italy tried a vast experiment in slavery, 
and indeed slavery was tried again and again and 
failed and failed and was still to be tested again and 
rejected again in the New World ; Christianity 
and Mahometanism swept away a thousand more 
specialized cults, but essentially these were pro 
gressive adaptations ^ of mankind to material 
conditions that must have seemed fixed for 
ever. The idea of revolutionary changes in the 
material conditions of life would have been 
entirely strange to human thought through all 
that time. 

 10 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there 
still, waiting for his opportunity amidst the 
busy pre-occupations, the comings and goings, 
the wars and processions, the castle building 
and cathedral building, the arts and loves, the 
small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the 
crusades and trading journeys of the middle 
ages. He no longer speculated with the un 
trammelled freedom of the stone-age savage ; 
authoritative explanations of everything barred 
his path ; but he speculated with a better brain, 
sat idle and gazed at circling stars in the sky and 
mused upon the coin and crystal in his hand. 
Whenever there was a certain leisure for thought 
throughout these times, then men were to be 
found dissatisfied with the appearances of things, 
dissatisfied with the assurances of orthodox 
belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols 
in the world about them, questioning the finality 
of scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages 
of history there were men to whom this whisper 
had come of hidden things about them. They 
could no longer lead ordinary lives nor content 
themselves with the common things of this 
world once they had heard this voice. And 
mostly they believed not only that all this world 
was as it were a painted curtain before things 
unguessed at, but that these secrets were 
Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by 
chance, but now there were these seekers, seeking, 

11 I I I IK 

THE SUN SNARERS 

ii 

seeking among rare and curious and perplexing 
objects, sometimes finding some odd utilizable 
thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with 
fancied discovery, sometimes pretending to find. 
The world of every day laughed at these eccentric 
beings, or found them annoying and ill-treated 
them, or was seized with fear and made saints 
and sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with 
covetousness and entertained them hopefully ; 
but for the greater part heeded them not at 
all. Yet they were of the blood of him who 
had first dreamt of attacking the mammoth ; 
every one of them was of his blood and 
descent; and the thing they sought, all un 
wittingly, was the snare that will some day catch 
the sun. 

§ 3 

Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, 
who went about the court of Sforza in Milan in 
a state of dignified abstraction. His common 
place books are full of prophetic subtlety and 
ingenious anticipations of the methods of the 
early aviators. Dürer was his parallel and 
Roger Bacon—whom the Franciscans silenced 
—of his kindred. Such a man again in an 
earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew 
of the power of steam nineteen hundred years 

 12 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

before it was first brought into use. And 
earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and 
still earlier the legendary Daedalus of Cnossos. 
All up and down the record of history whenever 
there was a little leisure from war and brutality 
the seekers appeared. And half the alchemists 
were of their tribe. 

When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch 
of gunpowder one might have supposed that 
men would have gone at once to the explosive 
engine. But they could see nothing of the sort. 
They were not yet beginning to think of seeing 
things ; their metallurgy was all too poor to 
make such engines even had they thought of 
them. For a time they could not make instru 
ments sound enough to stand this new force 
even for so rough a purpose as hurling a 
missile. Their first guns had barrels of coopered 
timber, and the world waited for more than 
five hundred years before the explosive engine 
came. 

Even when the seekers found, it was at first 
a long journey before the world could use their 
findings for any but the roughest, most obvious 
purposes. If man in general was not still as 
absolutely blind to the unconquered energies 
about him as his paleolithic precursor, he was 
at best purblind. 

I »Ml .1 lll'llll'lill ' ••<<•••<•• 

THE SUN SNARERS 

§ 4 

The latent energy of coal and the power 
of steam waited long on the verge of discovery, 
before they began to influence human lives. 

There were no doubt many such devices 
as Hero's toys devised and forgotten, time after 
time, in courts and palaces, but it needed that 
coal should be mined and burning with plenty 
of iron at hand before it dawned upon men that 
here was something more than a curiosity. And 
it is to be remarked that the first recorded 
suggestion for the use of steam was in war ; 
there is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is 
proposed to fire shot out of corked iron bottles 
full of heated water. The mining of coal for 
fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale 
than men had ever done before, the steam 
pumping engine, the steam-engine and the 
steam-boat, followed one another in an order 
that had a kind of logical necessity. It is the 
most interesting and instructive chapter in the 
history of the human intelligence, the history of 
steam from its beginning as a fact in human 
consciousness to the perfection of the great 
turbine engines that preceded the utilization 
of intra-molecular power. Nearly every human 
being must have seen steam, seen it incuriously 
for many thousands of years ; the women in 

 14 THE WORLD SET FREE 

particular were always heating water, boiling it, 
seeing it boil away, seeing the lids of vessels 
dance with its fury ; millions of people at 
different times must have watched steam 
pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket 
balls and blowing pumice into foam, and yet 
you may search the whole human record through, 
letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any 
glimmer of a realization that here was force, 
here was strength to borrow and use. . . . 
Then suddenly man woke up to it, the rail 
ways spread like a network over the globe, the 
ever enlarging iron steamships began their 
staggering fight against wind and wave. 

Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, 
it was the beginning of the Age of Energy that 
was to close the long history of the Warring 
States. 

But for a long time men did not realize 
the importance of this novelty. They would not 
recognize, they were not able to recognize that 
anything fundamental had happened to their 
immemorial necessities. They called the steam- 
engine the " iron horse " and pretended that they 
had made the most partial of substitutions. 
Steam machinery and factory production were 
visibly revolutionizing the conditions of industrial 
production, population was streaming steadily in 
from the countryside and concentrating in hitherto 
unthought-of masses about a few city centres, 

l ljlUl!|!!III!l!!tlH;'imn]l;ilUJJJ"l.'l IIIMMIIHM'UII1"'!" !.!•"••'_• 

THE SUN SNARERS 15 

food was coming to them over enormous 
distances upon a scale that made the one sole 
precedent, the corn ships of imperial Rome, a 
petty incident ; and a huge migration of peoples 
between Europe and Western Asia and America 
was in progress, and—nobody seems to have 
realized that something new had come into 
human life, a strange swirl different altogether 
from any previous circling and mutation, a swirl 
like the swirl when at last the lock gates begin to 
open after a long phase of accumulating water 
and eddying inactivity. . . . 

The sober Englishman at the close of the 
nineteenth century could sit at his breakfast- 
table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee 
from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some 
Danish ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind 
up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, 
glance at the latest telegrams from all the world, 
scrutinize the prices current of his geographically 
distributed investments in South Africa, Japan 
and Egypt, and tell the two children he had 
begotten (in the place of his father's eight) that 
he thought the world changed very little. They 
must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the 
old school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he 
had shirked, learn a few scraps of Horace and 
Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and 
all would be well with them. . . . 

 ~"_7'. : Till« JT mini i.'iillli I Him 

16 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

§5 

Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier 
of the two to be studied, invaded the common 
life of men a few decades after the exploitation 
of steam. To electricity also, in spite of its 
provocative nearness all about him, mankind had 
been utterly blind for incalculable ages. 

Could anything be more emphatic than the 
appeal of electricity for attention ? It thundered 
at man's ears, it signalled to him in blinding 
flashes, occasionally it killed him, and he could 
not see it as a thing that concerned him enough 
to merit study. It came into the house with the 
cat on any dry day and crackled insinuatingly 
whenever he stroked her fur. It rotted his 
metals when he put them together. . . . There 
is no single record that anyone questioned why 
the cat's fur crackles or why hair is so unruly to 
brush on a frosty day, before the sixteenth 
century. For endless years man seems to have 
done his very successful best not to think about 
it at all ; until this new spirit of the Seeker 
turned itself to these things. 

How often things must have been seen and 
dismissed as unimportant, before the speculative 
eye and the moment of vision came ! It was 
Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who 
first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and 

THE SUN SNARERS 17 

bits of glass and silk and shellac and so began the 
quickening of the human mind to the existence 
of this universal presence. And even then the 
science of electricity remained a- mere little group 
of curious facts for nearly two hundred years, 
connected perhaps with magnetism—a mere guess 
that—perhaps with the lightning. Frogs' legs 
must have hung by copper hooks from iron 
railings and twitched upon countless occasions 
before Galvani saw them. Except for the 
lightning conductor, it was 250 yearc after 
Gilbert^before, .electricity stepped out of the 
cabinet of scientific curiosities into the life~of~the 
common man. . . . Then suddenly, m the half- 
century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the 
steam-engine and took over traction, it ousted 
every other form of household heating, abolished 
distance with the perfected wireless telephone 
and the telephotograph. . . . 

§6 

And there was an extraordinary mental re 
sistance to discovery and invention for at least 
a hundred years after the scientific revolution 
had begun. Each new thing made its way into 
practice against a scepticism that amounted at 
times to hostility. One writer upon these 
subjects gives a funny little domestic conver 
sation that happened, he says, in the year 1898, 

 i8 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

within ten years, that is to say, of the time when 
the first aviators were fairly on the wing. He 
tells us how he sat at his desk in his study and 
conversed with his little boy. 

His little boy was in profound trouble. He 
felt he had to speak very seriously to his father, 
and as he was a kindly little boy he did not want 
to do it too harshly. 

This is what happened. 

" I wish, Daddy," he said, coming to his 
point, "that you wouldn't write all this stuff 
about flying. The chaps rot me." 

" Yes ! " said his father. 

" And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he 
rots me. Everybody rots me." 

" But there is going to be flying—quite 

soon. 

The little boy was too well bred to say what 
he thought of that. "Anyhow," he said, "I 
wish you wouldn't write about it." 

" You'll fly—lots of times—before you die," 
the father assured him. 

The little boy looked unhappy. 

The father hesitated. Then he opened a 
drawer and took out a blurred and under 
developed photograph. " Come and look at 
this," he said. 

The little boy came round to him. The 
photograph showed a stream and a meadow 
beyond and some trees and in the air a black 

THE SUN SNARERS 

19 

pencil-like object with flat wings on either side 
of it. It was the first record of the first 
apparatus heavier than air that ever maintained 
itself in the air by mechanical force. Across 
the margin was written : " Here we go up, 
up, up—from S. P. Langley, Smithsonian 
Institution, Washington." 

The father watched the effect of this re 
assuring document upon his son. " Well ? " 
he said. 

"That," said the schoolboy after reflection, 
" is only a model." 

" Model to-day, man to-morrow." 

The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. 
Then he decided for what he believed quite 
firmly to be omniscience. " But old Broomie," 
he said, "he told all the boys in his class only 
yesterday, ' no man will ever fly.' No one, he 
says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on 
the wing would ever believe anything of the 
sort. . . ." 

Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic 
and edit his father's reminiscences. 

§ 7 

At the close of the nineteenth century, as a 
multitude of passages in the literature of that 
time witness, it was thought that the fact that 
man had at last had successful and profitable 

 20 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

dealings with the steam that scalded him and 
the electricity that flashed and banged about 
the sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps 
a culminating exercise of his intelligence and 
his intellectual courage. The air of " Nunc 
Dimittis " sounds in some of these writings. 
" The great things are discovered," wrote Gerald 
Brown in his summary of the nineteenth cen 
tury. " For us there remains little but the 
working out of detail." The spirit of the 
seeker was still rare in the world ; education 
was unskilled, unstimulating, scholarly and but 
little valued, and few people even then could 
have realized that Science was still but the 
flimsiest of trial sketches and discovery scarcely 
beginning. No one seems to have been afraid 
of science and its possibilities. Yet now where 
there had been but a score or so of seekers, 
there were many thousands, and for one needle 
of speculation that had been probing the curtain 
of appearances in 1800, there were now hun- 
1 dreds. And already Chemistry, which had been 
content with her atoms and molecules for the 
better part of a century, was preparing herself 
for that vast next stride that was to revolutionize 
the whole life of man from top to bottom. 

One realizes how crude was the science of 
that time when one considers the case of the 
composition of air. This was determined by that 
strange genius and recluse, that man of 

THE SUN SNARERS 

21 

that disembowelled intelligence, Henrv^Cavendish, 
towardsjthe^^nd^of_the eighteenth century. So 
far as he was concerned the work~~was~a3mirably 
done. He separated all the known ingredients 
of the air with a precision altogether remark 
able ; he even put it upon record that he had 
some doubt about the purity of the nitrogen. 
For more than a hundred years his determi 
nation was repeated by chemists all the world 
over, his apparatus was treasured in London, he 
became as they used to say " classic," and always, 
at every one of the innumerable repetitions of 
his experiment, that sly element argon was 
J^-?-S.JLmon§> —he nitrogen (and_with a little 
helium and traces of~other substances, and 
indeed all the hints that might have led to the 
new departures of the twentieth century chem 
istry) and every time it slipped unobserved 
through the professorial fingers that repeated his 
procedure. 

Is it any wonder then with this margin of 
inaccuracy, that up to the very dawn of the 
twentieth century scientific discovery was still 
rather a procession of happy accidents than an 
orderly conquest of nature ? 

Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading 
steadily through the world. Even the school 
master could not check it. For the mere handful 
who grew up to feel wonder and curiosity 
about the secrets of nature in the nineteenth 

 22 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

century, there were now at the beginning of 
the twentieth myriads escaping from the limi 
tations of intellectual routine and the habitual 
life, in Europe, in America, North and South, 
in Japan, in China and all about the world. 

It was in IQIO that the parents of young 

ft******^*-MS«« •*• Bu -n»iimnnaff 

Holsten, who was to be called by a whole 
generation of scientific men, " the greatest of 
European chemists," were staying in a villa near 
Santo Domenico between Fiesole and Florence. 
He was then only fifteen, but he was already 
distinguished as a mathematician and possessed 
by a savage appetite to understand. He had 
been particularly attracted by the mystery of 
phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness 
to every other source of light. He was to 
tell afterwards in his reminiscences how he 
watched the fireflies drifting and glowing among 
the dark trees in the garden of the villa under 
the warm blue night sky of Italy ; how he 
caught and kept them in cages, dissected them, 
first studying the general anatomy of insects 
very elaborately, and how he began to experi 
ment with the effect of various gases and 
varying temperature upon their light. Then 
the chance present of a little scientific toy 
invented by Sir William Crookes, a toy called 
the spinthariscopeT"" on which radium particles 
impingTnTpon~suTphide of zinc and make it 
luminous, induced him to associate the two sets 

THE SUN SNARERS 23 

of phenomena. It was a happy association for 
his enquiries. It was a rare and fortunate thing, 
too, that any one with the mathematical gift 
should have been taken by these curiosities. 

And while the boy Holsten was mooning 
over his fireflies at Fiesole, a certain professor of 
physics named Rufus was giving a course of 
afternoon lectures upon^^adium and Radio- 
Actiyity^jnJEdinburgh. They were lectures that 
had attracted a very considerable amount of 
attention. He gave them in a small lecture- 
theatre that had become more and more con 
gested as his course proceeded. At his 
concluding discussion it was crowded right up 
to the ceiling at the back, and there people were 
standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, 
so fascinating did they find his suggestions. 
One youngster in particular, a chuckle-headed 
scrub-haired lad from the Highknds, sat hugging 
his knee with great sand-red hands and drinking 
in every word, eyes aglow, cheeks flushed and 
ears burning. 

" And so," said the professor, " we see that 
Oiis Radium, which seemed at first a fantastic 
exception, a mad inversion of all that was most 
established and fundamental in the constitution 
of matter, is really at one with the rest of the 

 24 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

elements. It does noticeably and forcibly what 
probably all the other elements are doing with 
an imperceptible slowness. It is like the single 
voice crying aloud that betrays the silent breathing 
multitude in the darkness. ^Radium _js an 
element that is breaking upland flying to pieces. 
But perhaps all elements are doing that at less 
perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is ; thorium 
—the stuff of this incandescent gas mantle— 
certainly is ; actinium. I feel that we are but 
beginning the list. And we know now that 
the atom, that once we thought hard and im 
penetrable, and indivisible and final and— 
lifeless—lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense 
energy. That is the most wonderful thing about 
all this work. A little while ago we thought of 
the atoms as we thought of bricks, as solid 
building material, as substantial matter, as unit 
masses of lifeless stuff, and behold ! these bricks 
are boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the 
intensest force. This^little^bptde contains about 
a pint qfjaranium oxide ; that is to say about 
fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It 
is worth about a pound. And in this bottle, 
ladies and gentlemen, in the atoms in this 
bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as 
we could get by burning a hundred and sixty 
tons of coal. If at a word, in one instant I 
could suddenly release that energy here and now 
it would blow us and everything about us to 

THE SUN SNARERS 25 

fragments ; if I could turn it into the machinery 
that lights this city, it could keep Edinburgh 
brightly lit for a week. But at present no man 
knows, no man has an inkling of how this little 
lump of stuff can be made to hasten the release 
of its store. It does release it, as a burn 
trickles. Slowly the uranium changes into 
radium, the radium changes into a gas called 
the radium emanation, and that again to what 
we call radium A, and so the process goes on, 
giving out energy at every stage, until at kst we 
reach the last stage of all, which is, so far as we 
can tell at present, lead. But we cannot 
hasten it." 

" I take ye, man," whispered the chuckle- 
headed lad, with his red hands tightening like a 
vice upon his knee. " I take ye, man. Go on ! 
Oh, go on ! " 

The professor went on after a little pause. 
" Why is the change gradual ? " he asked. 
"Why does only a minute fraction of the 
radium disintegrate in any particular second ? 
Why does it dole itself out so slowly and so 
exactly ? Why does not all the uranium change 
to radium and all the radium change to the next 
lowest thing at once ? Why this decay by 
driblets ; why not a decay en masse ? . . . . 
Suppose presently we find it is possible to 
quicken that decay ? " 

The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. 

 26 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

The wonderful inevitable idea was coming. 
He drew his knee up towards his chin and 
swayed in his seat with excitement. " Why 
not ?" he echoed, " why not ? " 

The professor lifted his forefinger. 
" Given that knowledge," he said, " mark 
what we should be able to do ! We should not 
only be able to use this uranium and thorium; 
not only should we have a source of power so 
potent that a man might carry in his hand the 
energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of 
battleships or drive one of our giant liners across 
the Atlantic ; but we should also have a clue that 
would enable us at last to quicken the process of 
disintegration in all the other elements, where 
decay is still so slow as to escape our finest 
measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in 
the world would become an available reservoir of 
concentrated force. Do you realize, ladies and 
gentlemen, what these things would mean for 
us?" 

The scrub head nodded. " Oh ! go on. 
Go on." 

" It would mean a change in human con 
ditions that I can only compare to the discovery 
of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above 
the brute. We stand to-day towards radio 
activity exactly as our ancestor stood towards fire 
before he had learnt to make it. He knew it 
then only as a strange thing utterly beyond his 

THE SUN SNARERS 

27 

control, a flare on the crest of the volcano, a red 
destruction that poured through the forest. So 
it is that we know radio-activity to-day. This — 
this is the dawn of a new day in human living. 
At the climax of that civilization which had its 
beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick 
of the savage, just when it is becoming apparent 
that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne 
indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we 
discover suddenly the possibility of an entirely 
new civilization. The energy_we_need_ for our 
very_ existence, and with which Nature supplies 
usjatiTl so grudgingly^ ïs~ïh~~realiïy locked_ up in 
inconceivable quantities all about us. We cannot 

but——1' 

He paused. His voice sank so that every 
body strained a little to hear him. 
« —— we will." 

He put up that lean finger again, his solitary 
gesture. 

" And then," he said. . . . 

" Then that perpetual struggle for existence, 
that perpetual struggle to live on the bare surplus 
of Nature's energies will cease to be the lot of 
Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this 
civilization to the beginning of the next. I have 
no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express 
the vision of man's material destiny that opens 
out before me. I see the desert continents 
transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of 

 28 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

ice, the whole world once more Eden. I see the 
power of man reach out among the stars. . . ." 

He stopped abruptly with a catching of the 
breath that many an actor or orator might have 
envied. . . . 

The lecture was over, the audience hung 
silent for a few seconds, sighed, became audible, 
stirred, fluttered, prepared for dispersal. More 
light was turned on and what had been a dim 
mass of figures became a bright confusion of 
movement. Some of the people signalled to 
friends, some crowded down towards the platform 
to examine the lecturer's apparatus and make 
notes of his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed 
lad with the scrub hair wanted no such detailed 
frittering away of the thoughts that had inspired 
him. He wanted to be alone with them ; he 
elbowed his way out almost fiercely, he made 
himself as angular and bony as a cow, fearing lest 
someone should speak to him, lest someone 
should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm. 

He went through the streets with a rapt face;, 
like a saint who sees visions. He had arms 
disproportionately long, and ridiculous big feet. 

He must get alone, get somewhere high out 
of all this crowding of commonness of everyday 
life. 

He made his way to the top of Arthur's Seat, 
and there he sat for a long time in the golden 
evening sunshine, still, except that ever and again 

THE SUN SNARERS 

29 

he whispered to himself some precious phrase that 
had stuck in his mind. 

" If," he whispered, " if only we could pick 
that lock. . . ." 

The sun was sinking over the distant hills. 
Already it was shorn of its beams, a globe of 
ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks of 
cloud that would presently engulf it. 

" Eh ! " said the youngster. " Eh ! " 

He seemed to wake up at last out of his 
entrancement, and the red sun was there before 
his eyes. He stared at it, at first without intelli 
gence and then with a gathering recognition. 
Into his mind came a strange echo of that 
ancestral fancy, that fancy of a Stone Age savage, 
dead and scattered bones among the drift two 
hundred thousand years ago. 

" Ye auld thing," he said,—and his eyes were 
shining, and he made a kind of grabbing gesture 
with his hand ; " ye auld red thing. . . . We'll 
have ye yet" 

 CHAPTER THE FIRST 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 
§ I 

THE problem which was already being mooted by 
such scientific men as Ramsay, Rutherford, and 
Soddy in the very beginning of the twentieth 
century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in 
the heavier elements and so tapping the internal 
energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful 
combination of induction, intuition and luck by 
Holsten so soon as the year 1933. From the first 
detection of radio-activity to its first subjugation 
to human purpose measured little more than a 
quarter of a century. For twenty years after that, 
indeed, minor difficulties prevented any striking 
practical application of his success, but the essen 
tial thing was done, this new boundary in the 
march of human progress was crossed, in that 
year. He set up atomic disintegration in a 
minute particle of bismuth ; it exploded with 
great violence into a heavy gas of extreme 
radio-activity, which disintegrated in its turn in 
the course of seven days, and it was only after 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 31 

another year's work that he was able to show 
practically that the last result of this rapid 
release of energy was gold. But the thing was 
done,—at the cost of a blistered chest and an 
injured finger, and from the moment when the 
invisible speck of bismuth flashed into riving and 
rending energy, Holsten knew that he had opened 
a way for mankind, however narrow and dark it 
might still be, to worlds of limitless power. He 
recorded as much in the strange diary biography 
he left the world, a diary that was up to that 
particular moment a mass of speculations and 
calculations, and which suddenly became for a 
space an amazingly minute and human record 
of sensations and emotions that all humanity 
might understand. 

He gives, in broken phrases and often single 
words, it is true, but none the less vividly for 
that, a record of the twenty-four hours following 
the demonstration of the correctness of his intri 
cate tracery of computations and guesses. " I 
thought I should not sleep," he writes—the 
words he omitted are supplied in brackets—(on 
account of) "pain in (the) hand and chest and 
(the) wonder of what I had done. . . . Slept 
like a child." 

He felt strange and disconcerted the next 
morning ; he had nothing to do, he was living 
alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he 
decided to go up to Hampstead Heath, which 

 32 THE WORLD SET FREE 

he had known when he was a little boy as a 
breezy play-ground. He went up by the under 
ground tube that was then the recognised means 
of travel from one part of London to another, 
and walked up Heath Street from the tube 
station to the open heath. He found it a gully 
of planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings 
of house-wreckers. The spirit of the times had 
seized upon that narrow, steep, and winding 
thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it 
commodious and interesting according to the 
remarkable ideals of Neo-Georgian sestheticism. 
Such is the illogical quality of humanity that 
Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard 
under the seat of current civilization, saw these 
changes with regret. He had come up Heath 
Street perhaps a thousand times, had known the 
windows of all the little shops, spent hours in 
the vanished cinematograph theatre, and mar 
velled at the high-flung early Georgian houses 
upon the westward bank of that old gully of a 
thoroughfare ; he felt strange with all these 
familiar things gone. He escaped at last with 
a feeling of relief from this choked alley of 
trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged upon 
the old familiar scene about the White Stone 
Pond. That, at least, was very much as it used 
to be. 

There were still the fine old red-brick houses 
to left and right of him ; the reservoir had been 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 33 

improved by a portico of marble, the white- 
fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its 
portico still stood out at the angle of the ways, 
and the blue view to Harrow Hill and Harrow 
spire, a view of hills and trees and shining waters 
and wind-driven cloud shadows, was like the 
opening of a great window to the ascending 
Londoner. All that was very reassuring. There 
was the same strolling crowd, the same perpetual 
miracle of motors dodging through it harmlessly, 
escaping headlong into the country from the 
Sabbatical stuffiness behind and below them. 
There was a band still, a women's suffrage 
meeting—for the suffrage women had won their 
way back to the tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the 
populace again—socialist orators, politicians, a 
band, and the same wild uproar of dogs, frantic 
with the gladness of their one blessed weekly 
release from the back yard and the chain. And 
away along the road to the Spaniards strolled 
a vast multitude, saying as ever that the 
view of London was exceptionally clear that 
day. 

Young Holsten's face was white. He walked 
with that uneasy affectation of ease that marks 
an over-strained nervous system and an under- 
exercised body. He hesitated at the White 
Stone Pond whether to go to the left of it or the 
right, and again at the fork of the roads. He 
kept shifting his stick in his hand, and every 

D 

 34 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

now and then he would get in the way of people 
on the footpath or be jostled by them because 
of the uncertainty of his movements. He felt, 
he confesses, " inadequate to ordinary existence." 
He seemed to himself to be something inhuman 
and mischievous. All the people about him 
looked fairly prosperous, fairly happy, fairly well 
adapted to the lives they had to lead,—a week 
of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild 
promenading—and he had launched something 
that would disorganize the entire fabric that 
held their contentments and ambitions and satis 
factions together. "Felt like an imbecile who 
has presented a box full of loaded revolvers to 
a Creche," he notes. 

He met a man named Lawson, an old school 
fellow, of whom history now knows only that he 
was red-faced and had a terrier. He and 
Holsten walked together and Holsten was suffi 
ciently pale and jumpy for Lawson to tell him 
he overworked and needed a holiday. They sat 
down at a little table outside the County Council 
house of Golders Hill Park and sent one of the 
waiters to the Bull and Bush for a couple of 
bottles of beer, no doubt at Lawson's suggestion. 
The beer warmed Holsten's rather dehumanized 
system. He began to tell Lawson as clearly as 
he could to what his great discovery amounted. 
Lawson feigned attention, but indeed he had 
neither the knowledge nor the imagination to 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 35 

understand. "In the end, before many years 
are out, this must eventually change war, transit, 
lighting, building and every sort of manufac 
ture, even agriculture, every material human 
concern——— " 

Then Holsten stopped short. Lawson had 
leapt to his feet. " Damn that dog ! " cried 
Lawson. " Look at it now. Hi ! Here ! 
Phewoo—phewoo—phewoo ! Come here, Bobs ! 
Come here ! " 

The young scientific man with his bandaged 
hand sat at the green table, too tired to convey 
the wonder of the thing he had sought so long, 
his friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and 
the Sunday people drifted about them through 
the spring sunshine. For a moment or so 
Holsten stared at Lawson in astonishment, for 
he had been too intent upon what he had been 
saying to realize how little Lawson had attended. 

Then he remarked, " Well ! " and smiled 
faintly and—finished the tankard of beer before 
him. 

Lawson sat down again. " One must look 
after one's dog," he said with a note of apology. 
" What was it you were telling me ? " 

In the evening Holsten went out again. He 
walked to Saint Paul's Cathedral and stood for 

 36 THE WORLD SET FREE 

a time near the door listening to the evening 
service. The candles upon the altar reminded 
him in some odd way of the fireflies at Fiesole. 
Then he walked back through the evening lights 
to Westminster. He was oppressed, he was in 
deed scared, by his sense of the immense conse 
quences of his discovery. He had a vague idea 
that night that he ought not to publish his 
results, that they were premature, that some 
secret association of wise men should take care 
of his work and hand it on from generation to 
generation until the world was riper for its 
practical application. He felt that nobody in 
all the thousands of people he passed had really 
awakened to the fact of change, they trusted the 
world for .what it was, not to alter too rapidly, 
to respect their trusts, their assurances, their 
habits, their little accustomed traffics and hard- 
won positions. 

He went into those little gardens beneath 
the over-hanging brightly-lit masses of the Savoy 
Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He sat down on a 
seat and became aware of the talk of the two 
people next to him. It was the talk of a young 
couple evidently on the eve of marriage. The 
man was congratulating himself on having regular 
employment at last ; " they like me," he said, 
" and I like the job. If I work up—in'r dozen 
years or so I ought to be gettin' somethin' 
pretty comfortable. That's the plain sense of 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 37 

it, Hetty. There ain't no reason whatsoever 
why we shouldn't get along very decently— 
very decently indeed." 

The desire for little successes amidst conditions 
securely fixed ! So it struck upon Holsten's 
mind. He added in his diary, " I had a sense 
of all this globe as that. . . ." 

By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant 
vision of this populated world as a whole, of all 
its cities and towns and villages, its high roads 
and the inns beside them, its gardens and farms 
and upland pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its 
ships coming along the great circles of the ocean, 
its time-tables and appointments and payments 
and dues as it were one unified and progressive 
spectacle. Sometimes such visions came to him ; 
his mind, accustomed to great generalizations and 
yet acutely sensitive to detail, saw things far 
more comprehensively than the minds of most of 
his contemporaries. Usually the teeming sphere 
moved on to its predestined ends and circled with 
a stately swiftness on its path about the sun. 
Usually it was all a living progress that altered 
under his regard. But now fatigue a little 
deadened him to that incessancy of life, it 
seemed now just an eternal circling. He 
lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the great 
fixities and recurrencies of the human routine. 
The remoter past of wandering savagery, the 
mevitable changes of to-morrow were veiled, and 

 38 THE WORLD SET FREE 

he saw only day and night, seed-time and harvest, 
loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks 
in the summer sunlight and tales by the winter 
fireside, the ancient sequence of hope and acts 
and age perennially renewed, eddying on for 
ever and ever, save that now the impious hand 
of research was raised to overthrow this drowsy, 
gently humming, habitual, sunlit spinning-top of 
man's existence. . . . 

For a time he forgot wars and crimes and 
hates and persecutions, famine and pestilence, the 
cruelties of beasts, weariness and the bitter wind, 
failure and insufficiency and retrocession. He 
saw all mankind in terms of the humble Sunday 
couple upon the seat beside him, who schemed 
their inglorious outlook and improbable content 
ments. " I had a sense of all this globe as that." 
His intelligence struggled against this mood 
and struggled for a time in vain. He reassured 
himself against the invasion of this disconcerting 
idea that he was something strange and inhuman, 
a loose wanderer from the flock returning with 
evil gifts from his sustained unnatural excursions 
amidst the darknesses and phosphorescences 
beneath the fair surfaces of life. Man had not 
been always thus ; the instincts and desires of the 
little home, the little plot, was not all his 
nature ; also he was an adventurer, an ex 
perimenter, an unresting curiosity, an insatiable 
desire. For a few thousand generations indeed 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 39 

he had tilled the earth and followed the 
seasons, saying his prayers, grinding his corn 
and trampling the October winepress, yet not 
for so long but that he was still full of restless 
stirrings. . . . 

" If there have been home and routine and 
the field," thought Holsten, " there have also 
been wonder and the sea." 

He turned his head and looked up over the 
back of the seat at the great hotels above him, 
full of softly shaded lights and the glow and 
colour and stir of feasting. Might his gift to 
mankind mean simply more of that ? ... 

He got up and walked out of the garden, 
surveyed a passing tramcar, laden with warm 
light, against the deep blues of evening, dripping 
and trailing long skirts of shining reflection ; he 
crossed the Embankment and stood for a time 
watching the dark river and turning ever and 
again to the lit buildings and bridges. His 
mind began to scheme conceivable replacements 
of all those clustering arrangements. . . . 

" It has begun," he writes in the diary in 
which these things are recorded. " It is not for 
me to reach out to consequences I cannot fore 
see. I am a part, not a whole ; I am a little 
instrument in the armoury of Change. If I were 
to burn all these papers, before a score of years 
had passed some other man would be doing 
this. . . ." 

 4o 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

§ 3 

Holsten, before he died, was destined to see 
atomic energy dominating every other source 
of power, but for some years yet a vast network 
of difficulties in detail and application kept the 
new discovery from any effective invasion of 
ordinary life. The path from the laboratory to 
the workshop is sometimes a tortupus one ; 
electro-magnetic radiations were known and 
demonstrated for twenty years before Marconi 
made them practically available, and in the same 
way it was twenty years before induced radio 
activity could be brought to practical utilization. 
The thing of course was discussed very much, 
more perhaps at the time of its discovery than 
during the interval of technical adaptation, but 
with very little realization of the huge economic 
revolution that impended. What chiefly im 
pressed the journalists of 1933 was the produc 
tion of gold from bismuth and the realization 
albeit upon unprofitable lines of the alchemist's 
dreams ; there was a considerable amount of 
discussion and expectation in that more intelligent 
section of the educated publics of the various 
civilized countries which followed scientific 
development ; but for the most part the world 
went about its business—as the inhabitants of 
those Swiss villages which live under the 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 41 

perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and 
mountains go about their business—just as 
though the possible was impossible, as though 
the inevitable was postponed for ever because 
it was delayed. 

It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts 
engine brought induced radio-activity into the 
sphere of industrial production, and its first 
general use was to replace the steam engine in 
electrical generating stations. Hard upon the 
appearance of this came the Dass-Tata engine— 
the invention of two among the brilliant galaxy 
of Bengali inventors the modernization of Indian 
thought was producing at this time—which was 
used chiefly for automobiles, aeroplanes, water- 
planes and suchlike mobile purposes. The 
American Kemp engine, differing widely in prin 
ciple but equally practicable, and the Krupp- 
Erlanger came hard upon the heels of this, and 
by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic replacement 
of industrial methods and machinery was in pro 
gress all about the habitable globe. Small 
wonder was this when the cost, even of these 
earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is com 
pared with that of the power they superseded. 
Allowing for lubrication the Dass-Tata engine, 
once it was started, cost a penny to run thirty- 
seven miles, and added only nine and a quarter 
Pounds to the weight of the carriage it drove. 
It made the heavy alcohol-driven automobile of 

 T 

42 THE WORLD SET FREE 

the time ridiculous in appearance as well as pre 
posterously costly. For many years the price of 
coal and every form of liquid fuel had been 
clambering to levels that made even the revival 
of the draft horse seem a practicable possibility, 
and now with the abrupt relaxation of this 
stringency the change in appearance of the traffic 
upon the world's roads was instantaneous. In 
three years the frightful armoured monsters that 
had hooted and smoked and th-undered about the 
world for four awful decades were swept away 
to the dealers in old metal, and the highways 
thronged with light and clean and shimmering 
shapes of silvered steel. At the same time a new 
impetus was given to aviation by the relatively 
enormous power for weight of the atomic engine, 
it was at last possible to add Redmayne's in 
genious helicopter ascent and descent engine to 
the vertical propeller that had hitherto been the 
sole driving force of the aeroplane without over 
weighting the machine, and men found them 
selves possessed of an instrument of flight that 
could hover or ascend or descend vertically and 
gently as well as rush wildly through the air. 
The last dread of flying vanished. As the 
journalists of the time phrased it, this was the 
epoch of the Leap into the Air. The new 
atomic aeroplane became indeed a mania ; every 
one of means was frantic to possess a thing so 
controllable, so secure and so free from the dust 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 43 

and danger of the road, and in France alone in 
the year 1943 thirty thousand of these new aero 
planes were manufactured and licensed, and soared 
humming softly into the sky. 

And with an equal speed atomic engines of 
various types invaded industrialism. The rail 
ways paid enormous premiums for priority in the 
delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelt 
ing was embarked upon so eagerly as to lead to 
a number of disastrous explosions due to inex 
perienced handling of the new power, and the 
revolutionary cheapening of both materials and 
electricity made the entire reconstruction of 
domestic buildings a matter merely dependent 
upon a reorganization of the methods of the 
builder and the house furnisher. Viewed from 
the side of the new power and from the point of 
view of those who financed and manufactured 
the new engines and material it required, the age 
of the Leap into the Air was one of astonish 
ing prosperity. Patent-holding companies were 
presently paying dividends of five or six hundred 
per cent, and enormous fortunes were made and 
fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned 
m the new developments. This prosperity was 
not a little enhanced by the fact that in both the 
Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one of 
the recoverable waste products was gold—the 
former disintegrated dust of bismuth and the 
latter dust of lead—and that this new supply of 

 44 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

gold led quite naturally to a rise in prices 
throughout the world. 

This spectacle of feverish enterprise was pro 
ductivity, this crowding flight of happy and 
fortunate rich people—every great city was as if 
a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing— 
was the bright side of the opening phase of the 
new epoch in human history. Beneath that 
brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepen 
ing dismay. If there was a vast development of 
production there was also a huge destruction of 
values. These glaring factories working night 
and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging 
noiselessly along the roads, these flights of 
dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled 
in the air, were indeed no more than the bright 
nesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when 
the world sinks towards twilight and the night. 
Between these high lights accumulated disaster, 
social catastrophe. The coal mines were mani 
festly doomed to closure at no very distant date, 
the vast amount of capital invested in oil was 
becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, 
steel workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of 
unskilled or under-skilled labourers in innumer 
able occupations were being flung out of employ 
ment by the superior efficiency of the new 
machinery, the rapid fall in the cost of transit 
was destroying high land values at every centre 
of population, the value of existing house property 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 45 

had become problematical, gold was under 
going headlong depreciation, all the securities 
upon which the credit of the world rested were 
slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the 
stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic ;— 
this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were 
the black and monstrous under-consequences of 
the Leap into the Air. 

There is a story of a demented London 
stockbroker running out into Threadneedle Street 
and tearing off his clothes as he ran. " The Steel 
Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant," he 
shouted. " The State Railways are going to scrap 
all their engines. Everything's going to be 
scrapped—everything. Come and scrap the mint, 
you fellows, come and scrap the mint ! " 

In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United 
States of America quadrupled any previous record. 
There was an enormous increase also in violent 
crime throughout the world. The thing had come 
upon an unprepared humanity ; it seemed as 
though human society was to be smashed by its 
own magnificent gains. 

For there had been no foresight of these 
things. There had been no attempt anywhere 
even to compute the probable dislocations this 
flood of inexpensive energy would produce in 
human affairs. The world in these days was not 
really governed at all, in the sense in which 
government came to be understood in subsequent 

 46 THE WORLD SET FREE 

years. Government was a treaty, not a design ; 
it was forensic, conservative, disputatious, unseeing, 
unthinking, uncreative ; throughout the world, 
except where the vestiges of absolutism still 
sheltered the court favourite and the trusted 
servant, it was in the hands of the predominant 
caste of lawyers, who had an enormous advantage 
in being the only trained caste. Their profes 
sional education and every circumstance in the 
manipulation of the fantastically naïve electoral 
methods by which they clambered to power, 
conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, 
conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and 
seize advantages and suspicious of every generosity. 
Government was an obstructive business of 
energetic fractions, progress went on outside of 
and in spite of public activities, and legislation 
was the last crippling recognition of needs so 
clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively 
established as to invade even the dingy seclusions 
of the judges and threaten the very existence of 
the otherwise inattentive political machine. 

The world was so little governed that with 
the very coming of plenty, in the full tide of an 
incalculable abundance, when everything necessary 
to satisfy human needs and everything necessary 
to realize such will and purpose as existed then in 
human hearts was already at hand, one has still 
to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion, 
conflict and incoherent suffering. There was no 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 47 

scheme for the distribution of this vast new wealth 
that had come at last within the reach of men ; 
there was no clear conception that any such 
distribution was possible. As one attempts a 
comprehensive view of those opening years of the 
new age, as one measures it against the latent 
achievement that later years have demonstrated, 
one begins to measure the blindness, the 
narrowness, the insensate unimaginative indivi 
dualism of the pre-atomic time. Under this 
tremendous dawn of power and freedom, under a 
sky ablaze with promise, in the very presence of 
science standing like some bountiful goddess over 
all the squat darknesses of human life, holding 
patiently in her strong arms, until men chose to 
take them, security, plenty, the solution of 
riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in her 
very presence, and with the earnest of her gifts 
in court, the world was to witness such things as the 
squalid spectacle of the Dass-Tata patent litigation. 
There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy 
oblong box of a room, during the exceptional heat 
of the May of 1956, the leading counsel of the 
day argued and snouted over a miserable little 
matter of more royalties or less and whether the 
Dass-Tata company might not bar the Holsten- 
Roberts' methods of utilizing the new power. The 
AJass-Tata people were indeed making a strenuous 
attempt to secure a world monopoly in atomic 
engineering. The judge, after the manner of 

 48 THE WORLD SET FREE 

those times, sat raised above the court, wearing a 
preposterous gown and a foolish huge wig, the 
counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and 
queer black gowns over their usual costume, wigs 
and gowns that were held to be necessary to their 
pleading, and upon unclean wooden benches 
stirred and whispered artful-looking solicitors, 
busily scribbling reporters, the parties to the case, 
expert witnesses, interested people, and a jostling 
confusion of subpoena-ed persons, briefless young 
barristers (forming a style on the most esteemed 
and truculent examples) and casual eccentric 
spectators who preferred this pit of iniquity to the 
free sunlight outside. Everyone was damply hot, 
the examining King's Counsel wiped the perspira 
tion from his huge, clean-shaven upper lip ; and 
into this atmosphere of grasping contention and 
human exhalations the daylight filtered through a 
window that was manifestly dirty. The jury sat 
in a double pew to the left of the judge, looking as 
uncomfortable as frogs that have fallen into an 
ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the would- 
be omnivorous Dass, under cross-examination. . . . 

Holsten had always been accustomed to publish 
his results so soon as they appeared to him to be 
sufficiently advanced to furnish a basis for further 
work, and to that confiding disposition and one 
happy flash of adaptive invention the alert Dass 
owed his claim. . . . 

But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 49 

people were clutching, patenting, pre-empting, 
monopolising this or that feature of the new 
development, seeking to subdue this gigantic 
winged power to the purposes of their little lusts 
and avarice. That trial is just one of innumerable 
disputes of the same kind. For a time the face 
of the world festered with patent legislation. It 
chanced however to have one oddly dramatic 
feature in the fact that Holsten, after being kept 
waiting about the court for two days as a beggar 
might have waited at a rich man's door, after 
being bullied by ushers and watched by policemen, 
was called as a witness, rather severely handled by 
counsel, and told not to " quibble " by the judge 
when he was trying to be absolutely explicit. 

The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, 
and sneered at Holsten's astonishment round the 
corner of his monstrous wig. Holsten was a great 
man, was he ? Well, in a law-court great men 
were put in their places. 

"We want to know has the plaintiff added 
anything to this or hasn't he ?" said the judge, 
" we don't want to have your views whether Sir 
Philip Dass's improvements were merely super 
ficial adaptations or whether they were implicit in 
your paper. No doubt—after the manner of 
inventors—you think most things that were ever 
likely to be discovered are implicit in your papers. 
No doubt also you think too that most subsequent 
additions and modifications are merely superficial. 

 5° 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

Inventors have a way of thinking that. The law 
isn't concerned with that sort of thing. The law 
has nothing to do with the vanity of inventors. 
The law is concerned with the question whether 
these patent rights have the novelty the plaintiff 
claims for them. What that admission may or 
may not stop, and all these other things you are 
saying in your overflowing zeal to answer more 
than the questions addressed to you—none of 
these things have anything whatever to do with 
the case in hand. It is a matter of constant 
astonishment to me in this court to see how you 
scientific men, with all your extraordinary claims to 
precision and veracity, wander and wander so soon 
as you get into the witness-box. I know no more 
unsatisfactory class of witness. The plain and 
simple question is, has Sir Philip Dass made any 
real addition to existing knowledge and methods 
in this matter or has he not ? We don't want to 
know whether they were large or small additions 
nor what the consequences of your admission may 
be. That you will leave to us." 

Holsten was silent. 

c< Surely ? " said the judge almost pityingly. 

" No, he hasn't," said Holsten, perceiving 
that for once in his life he must disregard in 
finitesimals. 

" Ah ! " said the judge, " Now why couldn't 
you say that when counsel put the question ? ..." 

An entry in Holsten's diary-autobiography, 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 51 

dated five days later, runs : " Still amazed. The 
law is the most dangerous thing in this country. 
It is hundreds of years old. It hasn't an idea. 
The oldest of old bottles and this new wine, the 
most explosive wine. Something will overtake 
them." 

§4 

There was a certain truth in Holsten's asser 
tion that the law was " hundreds of years old." 
It was, in relation to current thought and widely 
accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost 
all the material and methods of life had been 
changing rapidly and were now changing still 
more rapidly, the law-courts and the legislatures 
of the world were struggling desperately to meet 
modern demands with devices and procedures, 
conceptions of rights and property and authority 
and obligation that dated from the rude com 
promises of relatively barbaric times. The horse 
hair wigs and antic dresses of the British judges, 
their musty courts and overbearing manners, 
were indeed only the outward and visible intima 
tions of profounder anachronisms. The legal 
and political organization of the earth in the 
middle twentieth century was indeed everywhere 
like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong, 
that now fettered the governing body that once it 
had protected. 

 52 THE WORLD SET FREE 

Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and out 
spoken publication that in the field of natural 
science had been the beginning of the conquest of 
nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries preparing the spirit of 
the new world within the degenerating body of 
the old. The idea of a greater subordination 
of individual interests and established institutions 
to the collective future, is traceable more and 
more clearly in the literature of those times, and 
movement after movement fretted itself away in 
criticism of and opposition to first this aspect and 
then that of the legal, social and political order. 
Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley, 
with no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the 
established rulers of the world as Anarchs, and 
the entire system of ideas and suggestions that 
was known as Socialism, and more particularly its 
international side, feeble as it was in creative 
proposals or any method of transition, still 
witnesses to the growth of a conception of a 
modernized system of inter-relationships that 
should supplant the existing tangle of proprietary 
legal ideas. 

The word " Sociology " was invented by 
Herbert Spencer, a popular writer upon philo 
sophical subjects who flourished about the middle 
of the nineteenth century, but the idea of a state, 
planned as an electric traction system is planned, 
without reference to pre-existing apparatus, upon 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 53 

scientific lines, did not take a very strong hold 
upon the popular imagination of the world until 
the twentieth century. Then, the growing im 
patience of the American people with the 
monstrous and socially paralyzing party systems 
that had sprung out of their absurd electoral 
arrangements, led to the appearance of what came 
to be called the " Modern State " movement, and 
a galaxy of brilliant writers, in America, Europe 
and the East, stirred up the world to the thought 
of bolder rearrangements of social interaction, 
property, employment, education and government, 
than had ever been contemplated before. No 
doubt these Modern State ideas were very largely 
the reflection upon social and political thought of 
the vast revolution in material things that had 
been in progress for two hundred years, but for a 
long time they seemed to be having no more 
influence upon existing institutions than the 
writings of Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have 
had at the time of the death of the ktter. They 
were fermenting in men's minds, and it needed 
only just such social and political stresses as the 
coming of the atomic mechanisms brought about, 
to thrust them forward abruptly into crude and 
startling realization. 

 THE WORLD SET FREE 

§ 5 

Frederick Barnefs Wander Jahre is one of 
those autobiographical novels that were popular 
throughout the third and fourth decades of the 
twentieth century. It was published in 1970 and 
one must understand Wander Jahre rather in a 
spiritual and intellectual than in a literal sense. 
It is indeed an allusive title carrying the world 
back to the Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a century 
and a half earlier. 

Its author, Frederick Bar net, gives a minute 
and curious history of his life and ideas between 
his nineteenth and his twenty-third birthdays. 
He was neither a very original nor a very 
brilliant man, but he had a trick of circumstantial 
writing ; and though no authentic portrait was 
to survive for the information of posterity, he 
betrays by a score of casual phrases that he was 
short, sturdy, inclined to be plump, with a 
"rather blobby " face, and full, rather projecting 
blue eyes. He belonged until the financial 
débâcle of 1956 to the class of1 fairly prosperous 
people, he was a student in London, he aero- 
planed to Italy and then had a pedestrian tour 
from Genoa to Rome, crossed in the air to 
Greece and Egypt and came back over the 
Balkans and Germany. His family fortunes, 
which were largely invested in bank shares, coal 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 55 

mines and house property, were destroyed. 
Reduced to penury he sought to earn a living. 
He suffered great hardship, and was then caught 
up by the war and had a year of soldiering, first as 
an officer in the English infantry and then in the 
army of pacification. His book tells all these 
things so simply and at the same time so 
explicitly that it remains as it were an eye by 
which future generations may have at least one 
man's vision of the years of the Great Change. 

And he was, he tells us, a " Modern State " 
man " by instinct " from the beginning. He 
breathed in these ideas in the class rooms and 
laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school 
that rose, a long and delicately beautiful façade, 
along the South Bank of the Thames opposite the 
ancient dignity of Somerset House. Such thought 
was interwoven with the very fabric of that 
pioneer school in the educational renascence in 
England. After the customary exchange years 
in Heidelberg and Paris, he went into the 
classical school of London University. The 
older so-called "classical" education of the British 
pedagogues, probably the most paralysing, in 
effective and foolish routine that ever wasted 
human life, had already been swept out of this 
great institution in favour of modern methods ; 
and he learnt Greek and Latin as well as he had 
learnt German, Spanish and French, so that he 
wrote and spoke them freely and used them with 

 56 THE WORLD SET FREE 

an unconscious ease in his study of the foundation 
civilizations of the European system to which 
they were the key. (This change was still so 
recent that he mentions an encounter in Rome 
with an " Oxford don " who " spoke Latin with 
a Wiltshire accent and manifest discomfort, wrote 
Greek letters with his tongue out, and seemed to 
think a Greek sentence a charm when it was a 
quotation and an impropriety when it wasn't.") 

Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam 
engines upon the English railways and the gradual 
cleansing of the London atmosphere as the smoke- 
creating sea-coal fires gave place to electric heating. 
The building of laboratories at Kensington was 
still in progress and he took part in the students' 
riots that delayed the removal of the Albert 
Memorial. He carried a banner with " We like 
Funny Statuary " on one side and on the other 
" Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should 
our Great Departed Stand in the Rain ? " He 
learnt the rather athletic aviation of those days at 
the University grounds at Sydenham, and he was 
fined for flying over the new prison for political 
libellers at Wormwood Scrubs, " in a manner 
calculated to exhilarate the prisoners while at 
exercise." That was the time of the attempted 
suppression of any criticism of the public judi 
cature and the pkce was crowded with journalists 
who had ventured to call attention to the 
dementia of Chief Justice Abrahams. Barnet was 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 57 

not a very good aviator, he confesses he was always 
a little afraid of his machine—there was excellent 
reason for everyone to be afraid of those clumsy 
early types—and he never attempted steep 
descents or very high flying. He also, he records, 
owned one of those oil-driven motor bicycles 
whose clumsy complexity and extravagant filthi- 
ness still astonish the visitors to the museum of 
machinery at South Kensington. He mentions 
running over a dog and complains of the ruinous 
price of " spatchcocks " in Surrey. " Spatch 
cocks," it seems, was a slang term of crushed 
hens. 

He passed the examinations necessary to 
reduce his military service to a minimum, and 
his want of any special scientific or technical 
qualification and a certain precocious corpulence 
that handicapped his aviation indicated the 
infantry of the line as his sphere of training. 
That was the most generalized form of soldiering. 
The development of the theory of war had been 
for some decades but little assisted by any 
practical experience. What fighting had occurred 
in recent years, had been fighting in minor or 
uncivilized states, with peasant or barbaric 
soldiers and with but a small equipment of 
modern contrivances, and the great powers of the 
world were content for the most part to maintain 
armies that sustained in their broader organization 
the traditions of the European wars of thirty and 

 58 THE WORLD SET FREE 

forty years before. There was the infantry arm 
to which Barnet belonged and which was supposed 
to fight on foot with a rifle and be the main 
portion of the army. There were cavalry forces, 
(horse soldiers), having a ratio to the infantry 
that had been determined by the experiences of 
the Franco-German war in 1871. There was also 
artillery, and for some unexplained reason much 
of this was still drawn by horses ; though there 
were also in all the European 'armies a small 
number of motor-guns with wheels so constructed 
that they could go over broken ground. In 
addition there were large developments of the 
engineering arm, concerned with motor transport, 
motor-bicycle scouting, aviation and the like. 

No first-class intelligence had been sought to 
specialize in and work out the problem of warfare 
with the new appliances and under modern con 
ditions, but a succession of able jurists, Lord 
Haldane, Chief Justice Briggs, and that very able 
King's Counsel Philbrick, had reconstructed the 
army frequently and thoroughly and placed it at 
last, with the adoption of national service, upon a 
footing that would have seemed very imposing to 
the public of 1900. At any moment the British 
Empire could now put a million and a quarter of 
arguable soldiers upon the board of Welt-Politik. 
The traditions of Japan and the Central European 
armies were more princely and less forensic ; the 
Chinese still refused resolutely to become a 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 59 

military power and maintained a small standing 
army upon the American model that was said, 
so far as it went, to be highly efficient, and 
Russia, secured by a stringent administration 
against internal criticism, had scarcely altered the 
design of a uniform or the organization of a 
battery since the opening decades of the century. 
Barnet's opinion of his military training was 
manifestly a poor one, his Modern State ideas 
disposed him to regard it as a bore and his 
common sense condemned it as useless. More 
over his habit of body made him peculiarly 
sensitive to the fatigues and hardships of service. 
" For three days in succession we turned out 
before dawn and—for no earthly reason—without 
breakfast," he relates. "I suppose that is to 
show us that when the Day comes the first thing 
will be to get us thoroughly uncomfortable and 
rotten. We then proceeded to Kriegspiel 
according to the mysterious ideas of those in 
authority over us. On the last day we spent 
three hours under a hot if early sun getting over 
eight miles of country to a point we could have 
reached in a motor omnibus in nine minutes and 
a half—I did it the next day in that—and then 
we made a massed attack upon entrenchments 
that could have shot us all about three times 
over if only the umpires had let them. Then 
came a little bayonet exercise, but I doubt if I am 
sufficiently a barbarian to stick this long knife 

 n' 

6o THE WORLD SET FREE 

into anything living. Anyhow in this battle 
I shouldn't have had a chance. Assuming that 
by some miracle I hadn't been shot three times 
over, I was far too hot and blown when I got up 
to the entrenchments even to lift my beastly rifle. 
It was those others would have begun the 
sticking. . . . 

" For a time we were watched by two hostile 
aeroplanes ; then our own came up and asked 
them not to, and—the practice of aerial warfare 
still being unknown—they very politely desisted 
and went away and did dives and circles of the 
most charming description over the Fox Hills." 

All Barnet's accounts of his military training 
were written in the same half-contemptuous, half- 
protesting tone. He was of opinion that his 
chances of participating in any real warfare were 
very slight, and that, if after all he should partici 
pate, it was bound to be so entirely different from 
these peace manœuvres that his only course as a 
rational man would be to keep as observantly out 
of danger as he could until he had learnt the tricks 
and possibilities of the new conditions. He states 
this quite frankly. Never was a man more free 
from sham heroics. 

§6 

Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic 
engine with the zest of masculine youth in all 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 61 

fresh machinery, and it is evident that for some 
time he failed to connect the rush of wonderful 
new possibilities with the financial troubles of his 
family. " I knew my father was worried," he 
admits. That cast the smallest of shadows upon 
his delighted departure for Italy and Greece and 
Egypt with three congenial companions in one 
of the new atomic models. They flew over the 
Channel Isles and Touraine, he mentions, and 
circled about Mont Blanc—"These new helicopters, 
we found," he notes, "had abolished all the 
danger and strain of sudden drops to which the 
oldtime aeroplanes were liable,"—and then he went 
on by way of Pisa, Paestum, Ghirgenti and Athens 
to visit the pyramids by moonlight, flying thither 
from Cairo, and to follow the Nile up to Khartoum. 
Even by later standards it must have been a very 
gleeful holiday for a young man, and it made the 
tragedy of his next experiences all the darker. A 
week after his return his father, who was a 
widower, announced himself ruined, and com 
mitted suicide by means of an unscheduled 
opiate. 

At one blow Barnet found himself flung out 
of the possessing, spending, enjoying class to 
which he belonged, penniless and with no calling 
by which he could earn a living. He tried teach- 
mg and some journalism, but in a little while he 
found himself on the underside of a world in 
which he had always reckoned to live in the 

 62 THE WORLD SET FREE 

sunshine. For innumerable men such an experi 
ence has meant mental and spiritual destruction, 
but Barnet, in spite of his bodily gravitation 
towards comfort, showed himself, when put to the 
test, of the more valiant modern quality. He was 
saturated with the creative stoicism of the heroic 
times that were already dawning, and he took 
his difficulties and discomforts stoutly as his 
appointed material, and turned them to 
expression. 

Indeed, in his book he thanks fortune for 
them. " I might have lived and died," he says, 
"in that neat fool's paradise of secure lavishness 
above there. I might never have realized the 
gathering wrath and sorrow of the ousted and 
exasperated masses. In the days of my own 
prosperity things had seemed to me to be very well 
arranged." Now from his new point of view he 
was to find they were not arranged at all ; that 
government was a compromise of aggressions and 
powers and lassitudes, and law a convention 
between interests, and that the poor and the weak 
though they had many negligent masters had few 
friends. 

" I had thought things were looked after," he 
wrote. " It was with a kind of amazement that 
I tramped the roads and starved—and found that 
no one in particular cared." 

He was turned out of his lodging in a 
backward part of London. 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 63 

" It was with difficulty I persuaded my land 
lady—she was a needy widow, poor soul, and I 
was already in her debt—to keep an old box for 
me in which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes 
and the like. She lived in great fear of the 
Public Health and Morality Inspectors because 
she was sometimes too poor to pay the customary 
tip to them, but at last she consented to put it in 
a dark tiled place under the stairs, and then I 
went forth into the world—to seek first the luck 
of a meal and then shelter." 

He wandered down into the thronging gayer 
parts of London in which a year or so ago he had 
been numbered among the spenders. 

London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by 
which any production of visible smoke with or 
without excuse was punishable by a fine, had 
already ceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened 
city of the Victorian time ; it had been and indeed 
was constantly being rebuilt, and its main streets 
were already beginning to take on those 
characteristics that distinguished them throughout 
the latter half of the twentieth century. The 
insanitary horse and the plebeian bicycle had 
been banished from the roadway, which was now 
of a resilient glass-like surface, spotlessly clean ; 
and the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow 
vestige of the ancient footpath on either side of 
the track and forbidden at the risk of a fine, if he 
survived, to cross the roadway. People descended 

 64 THE WORLD SET FREE 

from their automobiles upon this pavement and 
went through the lower shops to the lifts and 
stairs to the new ways for pedestrians, the Rows, 
that ran along the front of the houses at the level 
of the first story and, being joined by frequent 
bridges, gave the newer parts of London a 
curiously Venetian appearance. In some streets 
there were upper and even third-story Rows. 
For most of the day and all night the shop 
windows were lit by electric light, and many 
establishments had made as it were canals of 
public footpaths through their premises in order 
to increase their window space. 

Barnet made his way along this night-scene 
rather apprehensively since the police had power 
to challenge and demand the Labour Card of any 
indigent-looking person, and if the record failed 
to show he was in employment dismiss him to 
the traffic pavement below. 

But there was still enough of his former 
gentility about Barnet's appearance and bearing 
to protect him from this ; the police, too, had 
other things to think of that night, and he was 
permitted to reach the galleries about Leicester 
Square,—that great focus of London life and 
pleasure. 

He gives a vivid description of the scene that 
evening. In the centre was a garden raised on 
arches lit by festoons of lights and connected with 
the Rows by eight graceful bridges, beneath 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 65 

which hummed the interlacing streams of motor 
traffic, pulsating as the current alternated between 
east and west and north and south. Above rose 
great frontages of intricate rather than beautiful 
reinforced porcelain, studded with lights, barred 
by bold illuminated advertisements, and glowing 
with reflections. There were the two historical 
music halls of this place, the Shakespear 
Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal 
players revolved perpetually through the cycle 
of Shakespear's plays, and four other great 
houses of refreshment and entertainment whose 
pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of 
the night. The south side of the square was in 
dark contrast to the others ; it was still being 
rebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars surmounted by 
the frozen gestures of monstrous cranes rose 
over the excavated sites of vanished Victorian 
buildings. 

This framework attracted Barnet's attention 
for a time to the exclusion of other interests. It 
was absolutely still, it had a dead rigidity, a 
stricken inaction, no one was at work upon it 
and all its machinery was quiet ; but the 
constructors' globes of vacuum light filled its 
every interstice with a quivering green moon 
shine and showed alert but motionless—soldier 
sentinels ! 

He asked a passing stroller, and was told that 
the men had struck that day against the use of an 

 66 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

atomic riveter that would have doubled the 
individual efficiency and halved the number of 
steel workers. 

" Shouldn't wonder if they didn't get chuck 
ing bombs," said Barnet's informant, hovered for 
a moment, and then went on his way to the 
Alhambra music hall. 

Barnet became aware of an excitement in the 
newspaper kiosks at the corners of the square. 
Something very sensational had been flashed 
upon the transparencies. Forgetting for a 
moment his penniless condition he made his 
way over a bridge to buy a paper, for in those 
days the papers, which were printed upon thin 
sheets of metallic foil, were sold at determinate 
points by specially licensed purveyors. Half 
over he stopped short at a change in the traffic 
below ; and was astonished to see that the police 
signals were restricting vehicles to the half road 
way. When presently he got within sight of the 
transparencies that had replaced the placards of 
Victorian times, he read of the Great March 
of the Unemployed that was already in progress 
through the West End, and so without expendi 
ture he was able to understand what was coming. 

He watched, and his book describes this 
procession which the police had considered it 
unwise to prevent and which had been spon 
taneously organized in imitation of the Un 
employed Processions of earlier times. He had 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 67 

expected a mob, but there was a kind of sullen 
discipline about the procession when at last it 
arrived. What seemed for a time an unending 
column of men marched wearily, marched with a 
kind of implacable futility, along the roadway 
underneath him. He was, he says, moved to 
join them, but instead he remained watching. 
They were a dingy, shabby, ineffective-looking 
multitude, for the most part incapable of any 
but obsolete and superseded types of labour. 
They bore a few banners with the time-honoured 
inscription : " Work not Charity," but otherwise 
their ranks were unadorned. 

They were not singing, they were not even 
talking, there was nothing truculent nor aggres 
sive in their bearing, they had no definite 
objective, they were just marching and showing 
themselves in the more prosperous parts of 
London. They were a sample of that great 
mass of unskilled cheap labour which the now 
still cheaper mechanical powers had superseded 
for evermore. They were being " scrapped "— 
as horses had been " scrapped." 

Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, 
his mind quickened by his own precarious condi 
tion. For a time, he says, he felt nothing but 
despair at the sight ; what should be done, what 
could be done for this gathering surplus of 
humanity? They were so manifestly useless— 
and incapable—and pitiful. 

 68 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

What were they asking for ? 

They had been overtaken by unexpected 
things. Nobody had foreseen——— 

It flashed suddenly into his mind just what 
the multitudinous shambling enigma below 
meant. It was an appeal against the unexpected, 
an appeal to those others who, more fortunate, 
seemed wiser and more powerful, for something 
—for intelligence. This mute mass, weary footed, 
rank following rank, protested its persuasion that 
some of these others must have foreseen these 
dislocations,—that anyhow they ought to have 
foreseen—and arranged. 

That was what this crowd of wreckage was 
feeling and seeking so dumbly to assert. 

" Things came to me like the turning on of a 
light in a darkened room," he says. " These 
men were praying to their fellow creatures as 
once they prayed to God ! The last thing that 
men will realize about anything is that it is 
inanimate. They had transferred their animation 
to mankind. They still believed there was in 
telligence somewhere, even if it was careless or 
malignant. ... It had only to be aroused to be 
conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion. 
. . . And I saw too that as yet there was no such 
intelligence. The world waits for intelligence. 
That intelligence has still to be made, that will 
for good and order has still to be gathered 
together, out of scraps of impulse and wandering 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 69 

seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine and 
creative in our souls, into a common purpose. 
It's something still to come. . . ." 

It is characteristic of the widening thought of 
the time that this not very heroical young man 
who, in any previous age, might well have been 
altogether occupied with the problem of his own 
individual necessities, should be able to stand 
there and generalize about the needs of the 
race. 

But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that 
chaotic time there was already dawning the light 
of a new era. The spirit of humanity was 
escaping, even then it was escaping, from its 
extreme imprisonment in individuals. Salvation 
from the bitter intensities of self, which had been 
a conscious religious end for thousands of years, 
which men had sought in mortifications, in the 
wilderness, in meditation and by innumerable 
strange paths, was coming at last with the effect 
of naturalness into the talk of men, into the 
books they read, into their unconscious gestures, 
into their newspapers and daily purposes and 
everyday acts. The broad horizons, the magic 
possibilities that the spirit of the seeker had 
revealed to them, were charming them out of 
those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from 
which the very threat of hell and torment had 
failed to drive them. And this young man, 
homeless and without provision even for the 

 70 THE WORLD SET FREE 

immediate hours, in the presence of social dis 
organization, distress and perplexity, in a blazing 
wilderness of thoughtless pleasure that blotted 
out the stars, could think as he tells us he 
thought. 

" I saw life plain," he wrote. " I saw the 
gigantic task before us, and the very splendour of 
its intricate and immeasurable difficulty filled me 
with exaltation. I saw that we have still to dis 
cover government, that we have still to discover 
education, which is the necessary reciprocal of 
government, and that all this—in which my own 
little speck of a life was so manifestly overwhelmed 
—this and its yesterday in Greece and Rome and 
Egypt were nothing, the mere first dust swirls of 
the beginning, the movements and dim murmur- 
ings of a sleeper who will presently be awake. ..." 

§7 

And then the story tells, with an engaging 
simplicity, of his descent from this ecstatic vision 
of reality. 

"Presently I found myself again and I was 
beginning to feel cold and a little hungry." 

He bethought himself of the John Burns 
Relief Offices which stood upon the Thames 
Embankment. He made his way through the 
galleries of the booksellers and the National 
Gallery, which had been open continuously day 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 71 

and night to all decently dressed people now for 
more than twelve years, and across the rose- 
gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the hotel 
colonnade to the Embankment. He had long 
known of these admirable offices, which had 
swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all 
the casual indigent from the London streets, and 
he believed that he would as a matter of course 
be able to procure a ticket for food and a night's 
lodgings and some indication of possible employ 
ment. 

But he had not reckoned upon the new 
labour troubles, and when he got to the Embank 
ment he found the offices hopelessly congested 
and besieged by a large and rather unruly crowd. 
He hovered for a time on the outskirts of the 
waiting multitude, perplexed and dismayed, and 
then he became aware of a movement, a purposive 
trickling away of people, up through the arches of 
the great buildings that had arisen when all the 
railway stations were removed to the south side 
or the river, and so to the covered ways of the 
strand. And here in the open glare of midnight 
he found unemployed men begging, and not 
only begging but begging with astonishing assur 
ance, from the people who were emerging from 
the small theatres and other such places of enter 
tainment which abounded in that thoroughfare. 

TU" 

inis was an altogether unexampled thing. 
There had been no begging in London streets for 

 72 THE WORLD SET FREE 

a quarter of a century. But that night the police 
were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with 
the destitute who were invading those well-kept 
quarters of the town. They had become stonily 
blind to anything but manifest disorder. 

Barnet walked through the crowd unable to 
bring himself to ask ; indeed his bearing must 
have been more valiant than his circumstances for 
twice he says that he was begged from. Near the 
Trafalgar Square gardens, a girl with reddened 
cheeks and blackened eyebrows who was walking 
alone spoke to him with a peculiar friendliness. 

" I'm starving," he said to her abruptly. 

" Oh ! poor dear ! " she said ; and with the 
impulsive generosity of her kind glanced round 
and slipped a silver piece into his hand. . . . 

It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of 
De Quincey, might under the repressive social 
legislation of those times have brought Barnet 
within reach of the prison lash. But he took it, 
he confesses, and thanked her as well as he was 
able and went off very gladly to get food. 

§8 

A day or so later—and again his freedom to 
go as he pleased upon the roads may be taken as 
a mark of increasing social disorganization and 
police embarrassment—he wandered out into the 
open country. 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 73 

He speaks of the roads of that plutocratic age 
as being " fenced with barbed wire against unpro- 
pertied people," of the high-walled gardens and 
trespass warnings that kept him to the dusty 
narrowness of the public ways. In the air, happy 
rich people were flying, heedless of the mis 
fortunes about them, as he himself had been 
flying two years ago, and along the road swept 
the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. 
One was rarely out of earshot of its whistles and 
gongs and siren cries even in the field paths or 
over the open downs. The officials of the labour 
exchanges were everywhere overworked and 
infuriated, the casual wards were so crowded 
that the surplus wanderers slept in ranks under 
sheds or in the open air, and since giving to 
wayfarers had been made a punishable offence 
there was no longer friendship or help for a 
man from the rare foot passenger or the wayside 
cottage. . . . 

" I wasn't angry," said Barnet. " I saw an 
immense selfishness, a monstrous disregard for 
anything but pleasure and possession in all those 
people above us, but I saw how inevitable that 
was, how certainly if the richest had changed 
places with the poorest, that things would have 
been the same. What else can happen when men 
use science and every new thing that science gives 
and all their available intelligence and energy to 
manufacture wealth and appliances, and leave 

 74 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

government and education to the rustling tra 
ditions of hundreds of years ago ? Those 
traditions come from the dark ages when there 
was really not enough for everyone, when life was 
a fierce struggle that might be masked but could 
not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, 
this fierce dispossession of others, must follow 
from such a disharmony between material and 
training. Of course the rich were vulgar and the 
poor grew savage and every added power that 
came to men made the rich richer and the poor 
less necessary and less free. The men I met in 
the casual wards and the relief offices were all 
smouldering for revolt, talking of justice and in 
justice and revenge. I saw no hope in that talk, 
nor in anything but patience. . . ." 

But he did not mean a passive patience. He 
meant that the method of social reconstruction 
was still a riddle, that no effectual rearrangement 
was possible until this riddle in all its tangled 
aspects was solved. " I tried to talk to those dis 
contented men," he wrote, " but it was hard for 
them to see things as I saw them. "When I 
talked of patience and the larger scheme, they 
answered, ' But then we shall all be dead '—and I 
could not make them see, what is so simple to my 
own mind, that that did not affect the question. 
Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to 
statesmanship." 

He does not seem to have seen a newspaper 

THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY 75 

during those wanderings, and a chance sight of 
the transparency of a kiosk in the market-place 
at Bishop's Stortford announcing a "Grave 
International Situation " did not excite him very 
much. There had been so many grave interna 
tional situations in recent years. 

This time it was talk of the Central European 
powers suddenly attacking the Slav Confederacy, 
with France and England going to the help of the 
Slavs. 

But the next night he found a tolerable meal 
awaiting the vagrants in the casual ward, and 
learnt from the workhouse master that all service 
able trained men were to be sent back on the 
morrow to their mobilisation centres. The 
country was on the eve of war. He was to go 
back through London to Surrey. His first 
feeling, he records, was one of extreme relief that 
his days of " hopeless battering at the underside 
of civilization " were at an end. Here was 
something definite to do, something definitely 
provided for. But his relief was greatly modified 
when he found that the mobilization arrangements 
had been made so hastily and carelessly that for 
nearly thirty-six hours at the improvised dépôt at 
Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink 
but a cup of cold water. The dépôt was abso 
lutely unprovisioned, and no one was free to 
leave it. 

 I, 

THE LAST WAR 

77 

CHAPTER THE SECOND 

THE LAST WAR 
§ I 

VIEWED from the standpoint of a sane and 
ambitious social order, it is difficult to under 
stand and it would be tedious to follow the 
motives that plunged mankind into the war that 
fills the histories of the middle decades of the 
twentieth century. 

It must always be remembered that the 
political structure of the world at that time 
was everywhere extraordinarily behind the 
collective intelligence. That is the central fact 
of that history. For two hundred years there 
had been no great changes in political or legal 
methods and pretensions, the utmost change had 
been a certain shifting of boundaries and slight 
readjustment of procedure, while in nearly every 
other aspect of life there had been fundamental 
revolutions, gigantic releases and an enormous 
enlargement of scope and outlook. The absurdi 
ties of courts and the indignities of representative 

parliamentary government, coupled with the 
opening of vast fields of opportunity in other 
directions, had withdrawn the best intelligences 
more and more from public affairs. The ostensi 
ble governments of the world in the twentieth 
century were following in the wake of the 
ostensible religions. They were ceasing to 
command the services of any but second-rate 
men. After the middle of the eighteenth century 
there are no more great ecclesiastics upon the 
world's memory, after the opening of the 
twentieth no more statesmen. Everywhere one 
finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted, 
common-place type in the seats of authority, 
blind to the new possibilities and litigiously 
reliant upon the traditions of the past. 

Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn 
traditions were the boundaries of the various 
" sovereign states," and the conception of a general 
predominance in human affairs on the part of 
some one particular state. The memory of the 
empires of Rome and Alexander squatted, an 
unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human imagina 
tion—it bored into the human brain like some 
grisly parasite and filled it with disordered 
thoughts and violent impulses. For more than 
a century the French system exhausted its vitality 
in belligerent convulsions, and then the infection 
passed to the German-speaking peoples who were 
the heart and centre of Europe, and from them 

! i 

 78 THE WORLD SET FREE 

onward to the Slavs. Later ages were to store 
and neglect the vast insane literature of this 
obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agree 
ments, the infinite knowingness of the political 
writer, the cunning refusals to accept plain facts, 
the strategic devices, the tactical manœuvres, the 
records of mobilizations and counter-mobiliza 
tions. It ceased to be credible almost as soon 
as it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of 
the new age their state-craftsmen sat with their 
historical candles burning, and, in spite of strange 
new reflections and unfamiliar lights and shadows, 
still wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps 
of Europe and the world. 

It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry 
how far the millions of men and women outside 
the world of these specialists sympathized and 
agreed with their portentous activities. One 
school of psychologists inclined to minimize this 
participation, but the balance of evidence goes to 
show that there were massive responses to these 
suggestions of the belligerent schemer. Primitive 
man had been a fiercely combative animal ; 
innumerable generations had passed their lives in 
tribal warfare, and the weight of tradition, the 
example of history, the ideals of loyalty and 
devotion fell in easily enough with the incite 
ments of the international mischief-maker. The 
political ideas of the common man were picked up 
haphazard, there was practically nothing in such 

THE LAST WAR 

79 

education as he was given that was ever intended 
to fit him for citizenship as such (that conception 
only appeared indeed with the development of 
Modern State ideas) and it was therefore a com 
paratively easy matter to fill his vacant mind with 
the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion and 
national aggression. 

For example, Barnet describes the London 
crowd as noisily patriotic when presently his 
battalion came up from the dépôt to London, to 
entrain for the French frontier. He tells of 
children and women and lads and old men 
cheering and shouting, of the streets and rows 
hung with the flags of the allied powers, of a real 
enthusiasm even among the destitute and un 
employed. The Labour Bureaux were now 
partially transformed into enrolment offices and 
were centres of hotly patriotic excitement. At 
every convenient place upon the line on either 
side of the Channel Tunnel there were enthusi 
astic spectators, and the feeling in the regiment, 
if a little stiffened and darkened by grim antici 
pations, was none the less warlike. 

But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of 
minds without established ideas ; it was with 
most of them, Barnet says, as it was with himself, 
a natural response to collective movement, and 
to martial sounds and colours, and the exhilarating 
challenge of vague dangers. And people had 
been so long oppressed by the threat of and 

 8o 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

preparation for war that its arrival came with an 
effect of positive relief. 

The plan of campaign of the allies assigned 
the defence of the lower Meuse to the English, 
and the troop-trains were run direct from the 
various British depots to the points in the 
Ardennes where they were intended to entrench 
themselves. 

Most of the documents bearing upon the 
campaign were destroyed during the war, from 
the first the scheme of the allies seems to have 
been confused, but it is highly probable that the 
formation of an aerial park in this region, from 
which attacks could be made upon the vast 
industrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a 
flanking raid through Holland upon the German 
naval establishments at the mouth of the Elbe, 
were integral parts of the original project. 
Nothing of this was known to such pawns in the 
game as Barnet and his company, whose business 
it was to do what they were told by the 
mysterious intelligences at the direction of things 
in Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff had 
also been transferred. From first to last these 
directing intelligences remained mysterious to the 
body of the army, veiled under the name of 
" Orders." There was no Napoleon, no Caesar 

THE LAST WAR 

81 

to embody enthusiasm. Barnet says, " We 
talked of Them. They are sending us up into 
Luxembourg. They are going to turn the 
Central European right." 

Behind the veil of this vagueness the little 
group of more or less worthy men which con 
stituted Headquarters was beginning to realize 
the enormity of the thing it was supposed to 
control. . . . 

In the great hall of the War Control whose 
windows looked out across the Seine to the 
Trocadero and the palaces of the western quarter, 
a series of big-scale relief maps were laid out 
upon tables to display the whole seat of war, and 
the staff-officers of the control were continually 
busy shifting the little blocks which represented 
the contending troops, as the reports and intelli 
gence came drifting in to the various telegraphic 
bureaux in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller 
apartments there were maps of a less detailed 
sort, upon which for example the reports of the 
British Admiralty and of the Slav commanders 
were recorded as they kept coming to hand. 
Upon these maps as upon chessboards Marshal 
Dubois, in consultation with General Viard and 
the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for 
world supremacy against the Central European 
powers. Very probably he had a definite idea of 
his game ; very probably he had a coherent and 
admirable plan. 

G 

 82 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

But he had reckoned without a proper 
estimate either of the new strategy of aviation or 
of the possibilities of atomic energy that Holsten 
had opened for mankind. While he planned 
entrenchments and invasions and a frontier war, 
the Central European generalship was striking at 
the eyes and the brain. And while, with a certain 
diffident hesitation, he developed his gambit that 
night upon the lines laid down by Napoleon and 
Moltke, his own scientific corps in a state of 
mutinous activity was preparing a blow for Berlin. 
"These old fools !" was the key in which the 
scientific corps was thinking. 

The War Control in Paris on the night of 
July the second was an impressive display of the 
paraphernalia of scientific military organization, as 
the first half of the twentieth century understood 
it. To one human being at least the consulting 
commanders had the likeness of world-wielding 
gods. . . . 

She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly 
sixty words a minute, and she had been engaged 
in relay with other similar women to take down 
orders in duplicate and hand them over to the 
junior officers in attendance to be forwarded and 
filed. There had come a lull, and she had been 
sent out from the dictating room to take the air 
upon the terrace before the great hall and to eat 
such scanty refreshment as she had brought with 
her until her services were required again. 

THE LAST WAR 83 

From her position upon the terrace this 
young woman had a view not only of the wide 
sweep of the river below her, and all the eastward 
side of Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to Saint 
Cloud, great blocks and masses of bkck or pa]e 
darkness with pink and golden flashes of 
illumination and endless interlacing bands of 
dotted lights under a still and starless sky, but 
also the whole spacious interior of the great hall 
with its slender pillars and gracious arching and 
clustering lamps was visible to her. There, over 
a wilderness of tables, lay the huge maps, done on 
so large a scale that one might fancy them small 
countries ; the messengers and attendants went 
and came perpetually, altering, moving the little 
pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of 
men, and the great commander and his two 
consultants stood amidst all these things and near 
where the fighting was nearest, scheming, 
directing. They had but to breathe a word and 
presently away there, in the world of reality, the 
punctual myriads moved. Men rose up and 
went forward and died. The fate of nations lay 
behind the eyes of these three men. Indeed they 
were like gods. 

Most godlike of the three was Dubois. It 
was for him to decide ; the others at most might 
suggest. Her woman's soul went out to this 
grave, handsome, still, old man, in a passion of 
instinctive worship. . . . 

 84 THE WORLD SET FREE 

Once she had taken words of instruction from 
him direct. She had awaited them in an ecstasy 
of happiness—and fear. For her exaltation was 
made terrible by the dread that some error might 
dishonour her. . . . 

She watched him now through the glass with 
all the unpenetrating minuteness of an impas 
sioned woman's observation. 

He said little, she remarked. He looked but 
little at the maps. The tall Englishman beside 
him was manifestly troubled by a swarm of 
ideas, conflicting ideas ; he craned his neck at 
every shifting of the little red, blue, black and 
yellow pieces on the board and wanted to draw 
the commander's attention to this and that. 
Dubois listened, nodded, emitted a word and 
became still again, brooding like the national 
eagle. 

His eyes were so deeply sunken under his 
white eyebrows that she could not see his eyes ; 
his moustache overhung the mouth from which 
those words of decision came. Viard, too, said 
little ; he was a dark man with a drooping head 
and melancholy watchful eyes. He was more 
intent upon the French right, which was feeling 
its way now through Alsace to the Rhine. He 
was, she knew, an old colleague of Dubois ; he 
knew him better, she decided, he trusted him 
more than this unfamiliar Englishman. . . . 

Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far 

THE LAST WAR 85 

as possible in profile ; these were the lessons 
that old Dubois had mastered years ago. To 
seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse 
to hurry—itself a confession of miscalculation ; 
by attention to these simple rules, Dubois had 
built up a steady reputation from the days when 
he had been a promising junior officer, a still, 
almost abstracted young man, deliberate but 
ready. Even then men had looked at him and 
said : " He will go far." Through fifty years of 
peace he had never once been found wanting, 
and at manœuvres his impassive persistence had 
perplexed and hypnotized and defeated many 
a more actively intelligent man. Deep in his soul 
Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery 
about the modern art of warfare, the key to his 
career. And this discovery was that nobody knew, 
that to act therefore was to blunder, that to talk 
was to confess ; and that the man who acted 
slowly and steadfastly and above all silently had 
the best chance of winning through. Meanwhile 
one fed the men. Now by this same strategy 
he hoped to shatter those mysterious unknowns 
of the Central European command. Delhi 
might talk of a great flank march through 
Holknd with all the British submarines and 
hydroplanes and torpedo craft pouring up the 
Rhine in support of it ; Viard might crave for 
brilliance with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes and 
ski-men among the Swiss mountains and a 

 86 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

sudden swoop upon Vienna ; the thing was to 
listen—and wait for the other side to begin 
experimenting. It was all experimenting. And 
meanwhile he remained in profile, with an air of 
assurance—like a man who sits in an automobile 
after the chauffeur has had his directions. 

And every one about him was the stronger 
and surer for that quiet face, that air of know 
ledge and unruffled confidence. The clustering 
lights threw a score of shadows of him upon 
the maps, great bunches of him, versions of a 
commanding presence, lighter or darker, domi 
nated the field, and pointed in every direction. 
Those shadows symbolized his control. When 
a messenger came from the wireless room to 
shift this or that piece in the game, to replace 
under amended reports one Central European 
regiment by a score, to draw back or thrust out 
or distribute this or that force of the allies, the 
Marshal would turn his head and seem not to 
see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods 
who approves a pupil's self-correction. " Yes, 
that's better." 

How wonderful he was, thought the woman 
at the window, how wonderful it all was. This 
was the brain of the western world, this was 
Olympus with the warring earth at its feet. And 
he was guiding France, France so long a resent 
ful exile from imperialism, back to her old 
predominance. 

THE LAST WAR 

87 

It seemed to her beyond the desert of a 
woman that she should be privileged to 
participate. . . . 

It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy 
impulse to personal devotion, and to have to 
be impersonal, abstract, exact, punctual. She 
must control herself. . . . 

She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, 
dreams of the days when the war would be over 
and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this 
harshness, this armour would be put aside 
and the gods might unbend. Her eyelids 
drooped. . . . 

She roused herself with a start. She became 
aware that the night outside was no longer still. 
That there was an excitement down below on 
the bridge and a running in the street and a 
flickering of searchlights among the clouds from 
some high place away beyond the Trocadero. 
And then the excitement came surging up past 
her and invaded the hall within. 

One of the sentinels from the terrace stood 
at the upper end of the room gesticulating and 
shouting something. 

And all the world had changed. A kind of 
throbbing. She couldn't understand. It was as 
if all the water-pipes and concealed machinery 
and cables of the ways beneath, were beating—as 
pulses beat. And about her blew something like 
a wind—a wind that was dismay. 

 88 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a 
frightened child might look towards its mother. 

He was still serene. He was frowning 
slightly, she thought, but that was natural enough, 
for the Earl of Delhi with one hand gauntly 
gesticulating had taken him by the arm and was 
all too manifestly disposed to drag him towards 
the great door that opened on the terrace. And 
Viard was hurrying towards the huge windows 
and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent 
forward and with eyes upturned. 

Something up there ? 

And then it was as if thunder broke over 
head. 

The sound struck her like a blow. She 
crouched together against the masonry and looked 
up. She saw three black shapes swooping down 
through the torn clouds, and from a point a little 
below two of them there had already started 
curling trails of red. . . . 

Everything else in her being was paralyzed, 
she hung through moments that seemed infinities, 
watching those red missiles whirl down towards 
her. 

She felt torn out of the world. There was 
nothing else in the world but a crimson-purple 
glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, con 
tinuing sound. Every other light had gone 
out about her and against this glare hung slanting 
walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of 

THE LAST WAR 

89 

cornices and a disorderly flight of huge angular 
sheets of glass. 

She had an impression of a great ball of 
crimson-purple fire like a maddened living thing 
that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly 
amidst a chaos of falling masonry, that seemed to 
be attacking the earth furiously, that seemed to be 
burrowing into it like a blazing rabbit. . . . 

She had all the sensations of waking up out of 
a dream. 

She found she was lying face downward on a 
bank of mould and that a little rivulet of hot 
water was running over one foot. She tried to 
raise herself and found her leg was very painful. 
She was not clear whether it was night or day nor 
where she was ; she made a second effort, wincing 
and groaning, and turned over and got into a 
sitting position and looked about her. 

Everything seemed very silent. She was in 
fact in the midst of a vast uproar, but she did 
not realize this because her hearing had been 
destroyed. 

At first she could not join on what she saw to 
any previous experience. 

She seemed to be in a strange world, a sound 
less ruinous world, a world of heaped broken 
things. And it was lit—and somehow this was 
more familiar to her mind than any other fact 
about her—by a flickering, purplish-crimson light. 
Then close to her, rising above a confusion of 

 _v 

90 

THE WORLD SET FREE 

débris, she recognized the Trocadero ; it was 
changed, something had gone from it, but its out 
line was unmistakable. It stood out against a 
streaming whirling uprush of red-lit steam. And 
with that she recalled Paris and the Seine and the 
warm overcast evening and the beautiful luminous 
organization of the War Control. . . . 

She drew herself a little way up the slope of 
earth on which she lay and examined her 
surroundings with an increasing understand 
ing. ... 

The earth on which she was lying projected 
like a cape into the river. Quite close to her was 
a brimming lake of dammed-up water from which 
these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. 
Wisps of vapour came into circling existence a 
foot or so from its mirror-surface. Near at hand 
and reflected exactly in the water was the upper 
part of a familiar-looking stone pillar. On the 
side of her away from the water the heaped ruins 
rose steeply in a confused slope up to a glaring 
crest. Above and reflecting this glare towered 
pillowed masses of steam rolling swiftly upward 
to the zenith. It was from this crest that the 
livid glow that lit the world about her proceeded, 
and slowly her mind connected this mound with 
the vanished buildings of the War Control. 

" Mais ! " she whispered and remained with 
staring eyes quite motionless for a time, crouching 
close to the warm earth. 

THE LAST WAR 91 

Then presently this dim, broken human thing 
began to look about it again. She began to feel 
the need of fellowship. She wanted to question, 
wanted to speak, wanted to relate her experience. 
And her foot hurt her atrociously. There ought 
to be an ambulance. A little gust of querulous 
criticisms blew across her mind. This surely was 
a disaster ! Always after a disaster there should 
be ambulances and helpers moving about. . . . 

She craned her head. There was something 
there. But everything was so still ! 

" Monsieur ! " she cried. Her ears, she noted, 
felt queer, and she began to suspect that all was 
not well with them. 

It was terribly lonely in this chaotic ' strange 
ness, and perhaps this man—if it was a man, for 
it was difficult to see—might for all his stillness 
be merely insensible. He might have been 
stunned. . . . 

The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his 
corner and for a moment every little detail was 
distinct. It was Marshal Dubois. He was 
lying against a huge slab of t