what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The
Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up
with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam,
and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption
that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of
the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal. Once
launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and
uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from
the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent
vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud,
saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and
blistering energy, were flung high and far.
Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate
explosive that was to give the 'decisive touch' to war…
Section 5
A recent historical writer has described the world of that time
as one that 'believed in established words and was invincibly
blind to the obvious in things.' Certainly it seems now that
nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier
twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming
impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not
see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. Yet
the broad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind. All
through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of
energy that men were able to command was continually increasing.
Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow,
the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no
increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of
passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being
outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side.
Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of
malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of
police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a
matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a
handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a
city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the
children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as
the Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the
paraphernalia and pretensions of war.
It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce
between the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand,
and the world of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men
of a later time can hope to understand this preposterous state of
affairs. Social organisation was still in the barbaric stage.
There were already great numbers of actively intelligent men and
much private and commercial civilisation, but the community, as a
whole, was aimless, untrained and unorganised to the pitch of
imbecility. Collective civilisation, the 'Modern State,' was
still in the womb of the future…
Section 6
But let us return to Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre and its
account of the experiences of a common man during the war time.
While these terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were
happening in Paris and Berlin, Barnet and his company were
industriously entrenching themselves in Belgian Luxembourg.
He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day's journey
through the north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid
phrases. The country was browned by a warm summer, the trees a
little touched with autumnal colour, and the wheat already
golden. When they stopped for an hour at Hirson, men and women
with tricolour badges upon the platform distributed cakes and
glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and there was much
cheerfulness. 'Such good, cool beer it was,' he wrote. 'I had
had nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom.'
A number of monoplanes, 'like giant swallows,' he notes, were
scouting in the pink evening sky.
Barnet's battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place
called Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to
Jemelle. Here they detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the
railway-trains and stores were passing along it all night-and
next morning he: marched eastward through a cold, overcast dawn,
and a morning, first cloudy and then blazing, over a large
spacious country-side interspersed by forest towards Arlon.
There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked
entrenchments and hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton
that were designed to check and delay any advance from the east
upon the fortified line of the Meuse. They had their orders, and
for two days they worked without either a sight of the enemy or
any suspicion of the disaster that had abruptly decapitated the
armies of Europe, and turned the west of Paris and the centre of
Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction of Pompeii.
And the news, when it did come, came attenuated. 'We heard there
had been mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,' Barnet
relates; 'but it didn't seem to follow that "They" weren't still
somewhere elaborating their plans and issuing orders. When the
enemy began to emerge from the woods in front of us, we cheered
and blazed away, and didn't trouble much more about anything but
the battle in hand. If now and then one cocked up an eye into the
sky to see what was happening there, the rip of a bullet soon
brought one down to the horizontal again…
That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of
country between Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It
was essentially a rifle and infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do
not seem to have taken any decisive share in the actual fighting
for some days, though no doubt they effected the strategy from
the first by preventing surprise movements. They were aeroplanes
with atomic engines, but they were not provided with atomic
bombs, which were manifestly unsuitable for field use, nor indeed
had they any very effective kind of bomb. And though they
manoeuvred against each other, and there was rifle shooting at
them and between them, there was little actual aerial fighting.
Either the airmen were indisposed to fight or the commanders on
both sides preferred to reserve these machines for scouting…
After a day or so of digging and scheming, Barnet found himself
in the forefront of a battle. He had made his section of rifle
pits chiefly along a line of deep dry ditch that gave a means of
inter-communication, he had had the earth scattered over the
adjacent field, and he had masked his preparations with tussocks
of corn and poppy. The hostile advance came blindly and