2.0 KiB
CHAPTER THE SECOND. THE LAST WAR
Section 10
But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and his barge−load of hungry and starving men. For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if civilisation had come to a final collapse. These crowningbuds upon the tradition that Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered, opened and flared 'like waterlilies of flame'over nations destroyed, over churches smashed or submerged, towns ruined, fields lost to mankind for ever, and amillion weltering bodies. Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would the flames of war still burn amidst theruins? Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance in their answers to that question. Already oncein the history of mankind, in America, before its discovery by the whites, an organised civilisation had given wayto a mere cult of warfare, specialised and cruel, and it seemed for a time to many a thoughtful man as if the wholeworld was but to repeat on a larger scale this ascendancy of the warrior, this triumph of the destructive instincts of
The World Set Free
The World Set Free
42
the race. The subsequent chapters of Barnet's narrative do but supply body to this tragic possibility. He gives a series ofvignettes of civilisation, shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found the Belgian hills swarming withrefugees and desolated by cholera; the vestiges of the contending armies keeping order under a truce, withoutactual battles, but with the cautious hostility of habit, and a great absence of plan everywhere. Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were rumours of cannibalism and hystericalfanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoy and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes. There was the report of anattack upon Russia by the Chinese and Japanese, and of some huge revolutionary outbreak in America. Theweather was stormier than men had ever known it in those regions, with much thunder and lightning and wildcloud−bursts of rain....