Chapter II: Part 2

“Curious, the failure to understand the influence on ourselves of what we make and use. We just make and use and damn the consequence.... When Lavoisier invented the chemical balance, did he stop to consider the possibilities of chemical action in combination with outbursts of human emotion? If he had...!”

In the silence that followed they heard the chiming of three-quarters—and there flashed inconsequently into Theodore’s memory, a vision of himself, a small boy with his hand in his mother’s, staring up, round-eyed, at Big Ben of London—while his mother taught him the words that were fitted to the chime.

Lord—through—this—hour
Be—Thou—our—guide,
So—by—Thy—power
No—foot—shall—slide.

... That, or something like that.... Odd, that he should remember them now—when for years he had not remembered.... “Lord—through—this—hour——”

He realized suddenly that Markham was speaking—in jerks, between pulls at his pipe. “... And the same with mechanics—not the engine but the engine plus humanity. Take young James Watt and his interest in the lid of a tea-kettle! In France, by the way, they tell the same story of Papin; but, so far as the rest of us are concerned it doesn’t much matter who first watched the lid of a kettle with intelligence—the point is that somebody watched it and saw certain of its latent possibilities. Only its more immediate possibilities—and we may take it for granted that amongst those which he did not foresee were the most important. The industrial system—the drawing of men into crowds where they might feed the machine and be fed by it—the shrinkage of the world through the use of mechanical transport. That—the shrinkage—when we first saw it coming, we took to mean union of peoples and the clasping of distant hands—forgetting that it also meant the cutting of distant throats.... Yet it might have struck us that we are all potential combatants—and the only known method of preventing a fight is to keep the combatants apart! These odd, simple facts that we all of us know—and lose sight of ... the drawing together of peoples has always meant the clashing of their interests ... and so new hatreds. Inevitably new hatreds.”

Theodore quoted: “‘All men hate each other naturally’.... You believe that?”

“Of individuals, no—but of all communities, yes. Is there any form of the life collective that is capable of love for its fellow—for another community? Is there any church that will stand aside that another church may be advantaged? ... You and I are civilized, as man and man; but collectively we are part of a life whose only standard and motive is self-interest, its own advantage ... a beast-life, morally. If you understand that, you understand to-night ... Which demands from us sacrifices, makes none itself.... That’s as far as we have got in the mass.”

Through the half-open window came the hum and murmur of the crowd that waited for the hour.... Theodore stirred restlessly, conscious of the unseen turning of countless faces to the clock—and aware, through the murmur, of the frenzied little beating of his watch.... He hesitated to look at it—and when he drew it out and said “Five minutes more,” his voice sounded oddly in his ears.

“Five minutes,” said Markham.... He laughed suddenly and pushed the bottle across the table. “Do you know where we are now—you and I and all of us? On the crest of the centuries. They’ve carried us a long roll upwards and now here we are—on top! In five more minutes—three hundred little seconds—we shall hear the crest curl over.... Meanwhile, have a drink!”

He checked himself and held up a finger. “Your watch is slow!”

The hum and murmur of the crowd had ceased and through silence unbroken came the prayer of the Westminster chime.

Lord—through—this—hour
Be—Thou—our—guide,
So—by—Thy—power
No—foot—shall—slide.

There was no other sound for the twelve booming strokes of the hour: it was only as the last beat quivered into silence that there broke the moving thunder of a multitude.

“Over!” said Markham. “Hear it crash?... Well, here’s to the centuries—after all, they did the best they knew for us!”

V

The war-footing arrangements of the Distribution Office included a system of food control involving local supervision; hence provincial centres came suddenly into being, and to one of these—at York—Theodore Savage was dispatched at little more than an hour’s notice on the morning after war was declared. He telephoned Phillida and they met at King’s Cross and had ten hurried minutes on the platform; she was still eager and excited, bubbling over with the impulse to action—was hoping to start training for hospital work—had been promised an opening—she would tell him all about it when she wrote. Her excitement took the bitterness out of the parting—perhaps, in her need to give and serve, she was even proud that the sacrifice of parting was demanded of her.... The last he saw of her was a smiling face and a cheery little wave of the hand.

He made the journey to York with a carriageful of friendly and talkative folk who, in normal days, would have been strangers to him and to each other; as it was, they exchanged newspapers and optimistic views and grew suddenly near to each other in their common interest and resentment.... That was what war meant in those first stirring days—friendliness, good comradeship, the desire to give and serve, the thrill of unwonted excitement.... Looking back from after years it seemed to him that mankind, in those days, was finer and more gracious than he had ever known it—than he would ever know it again.

* * * * *

The first excitement over, he lived somewhat tediously at York between his office and dingily respectable lodgings; discovering very swiftly that, so far as he, Theodore Savage, was concerned, a state of hostilities meant the reverse of alarums and excursions. For him it was the strictest of official routine and the multiplication of formalities. His hours of liberty were fewer than in London, his duties more tiresome, his chief less easy to get on with; there was frequent overtime, and leave—which meant Phillida—was not even a distant possibility. For all his honest desire of service he was soon frankly bored by his work; its atmosphere of minute regularity and insistent detail was out of keeping with the tremor and uncertainty of war, and there was something æsthetically wrong about a fussy process of docketing and checking while nations were at death grips and the fate of a world in the balance.... His one personal satisfaction was the town, York itself—the walls, the Bars, and above all the Minster; he lodged near the Minster, could see it from his window, and its enduring dignity was a daily relief alike from the feverish perusal of war news, his landlady’s colour-scheme and taste in furniture and the fidgety trifling of the office.

In the evening he read many newspapers and wrote long letters to Phillida; who also, he gathered, had discovered that war might be tedious. “We haven’t any patients yet,” she scribbled him in one of her later letters, “but, of course, I’m learning all sorts of things that will be useful later on, when we do get them. Bandaging and making beds—and then we attend lectures. It’s rather dull waiting and bandaging each other for practice—but naturally I’m thankful that there aren’t enough casualties to go round. Up to now the regular hospitals have taken all that there are—‘temporaries’ like us don’t get even a look in.... The news is really splendid, isn’t it?”

There were few casualties in the beginning because curiously little happened; Western Europe was removed from the actual storm-centre, and in England, after the first few days of alarmist rumours concerning invasion by air and sea, the war, for a time, settled down into a certain amount of precautionary rationing and a daily excitement in newspaper form—so much so that the timorous well-to-do, who had retired from London on the outbreak of hostilities, trickled back in increasing numbers. Hostilities, in the beginning, were local and comparatively ineffective; one of the results of the limitation of troops and armaments enforced by the constitution of the League was to give to the opening moves of the contest a character unprepared and amateurish. The aim, on either side, was to obtain time for effective preparation, to organize forces and resources; to train fighters and mobilize chemists, to convert factories, manufacture explosive and gas, and institute a system of co-operation between the strategy of far-flung allies. Hence, in the beginning, the conflict was partial and, as regards its strategy, hesitating; there were spasms of bloody incident which were deadly enough in themselves, but neither side cared to engage itself seriously before it had attained its full strength.... First blood was shed in a fashion that was frankly mediæval; the heady little democracy whose failure to establish a claim in the Court of Arbitration had been the immediate cause of the conflict, flung itself with all its half-civilized resources upon its neighbour and enemy, the victorious party to the suit. Between the two little communities was a treasured feud which had burst out periodically in defiance of courts and councils; and, control once removed, the border tribesmen gathered for the fray with all the enthusiasm of their rude forefathers, and raided each other’s territory in bands armed with knives and revolvers. Their doings made spirited reading in the press in the early days of the war—before the generality of newspaper readers had even begun to realize that battles were no longer won by the shock of troops and that the root-principle of modern warfare was the use of the enemy civilian population as an auxiliary destructive force.

Certain states and races grasped the principle sooner than others, being marked out for early enlightenment by the accident of geographical position. In those not immediately affected, such as Britain, censorship on either side ruled out, as impossible for publication, the extent of the damage inflicted on allies, and the fact that it was not only in enemy countries that large masses of population, hunted out of cities by chemical warfare and the terror from above, had become nomadic and predatory. That, as the struggle grew fiercer, became, inevitably, the declared aim of the strategist; the exhaustion of the enemy by burdening him with a starving and nomadic population. War, once a matter of armies in the field, had resolved itself into an open and thorough-going effort to ruin enemy industry by setting his people on the run; to destroy enemy agriculture not only by incendiary devices—the so-called poison-fire—but by the secondary and even more potent agency of starving millions driven out to forage as they could.... The process, in the stilted phrase of the communiqué, was described as “displacement of population”; and displacement of population, not victory in the field, became the real military objective.

To the soldier, at least, it was evident very early in the struggle that the perfection of scientific destruction had entailed, of necessity, the indirect system of strategy associated with industrial warfare; displacement of population being no more than a natural development of the striker’s method of attacking a government by starving the non-combatant community. The aim of the scientific soldier, like that of the soldier of the past, was to cut his enemy’s communications, to intercept and hamper his supplies; and the obvious way to attain that end was by ruthless disorganization of industrial centres, by letting loose a famished industrial population to trample and devour his crops. Manufacturing districts, on either side, were rendered impossible to work in by making them impossible to live in; and from one crowded centre after another there streamed out squalid and panic-stricken herds, devouring the country as they fled. Seeking food, seeking refuge, turning this way or that; pursued by the terror overhead or imagining themselves pursued; and breaking, striving to separate, to make themselves small and invisible.... And, as air-fleets increased in strength and tactics were perfected—as one centre of industry after another went down and out—the process of disintegration was rapid. To the tentative and hesitating opening of the war had succeeded a fury of widespread destruction; and statesmen, rendered desperate by the sudden crumbling of their own people—the sudden lapse into primitive conditions—could hope for salvation only through a quicker process of “displacement” on the enemy side.

There were reasons, political and military, why the average British civilian, during the opening phases of the struggle, knew little of warfare beyond certain food restrictions, the news vouchsafed in the communiqués and the regulation comments thereon; the enemy forces which might have brought home to him the meaning of the term “displacement” were occupied at first with other and nearer antagonists. Hence continental Europe—and not Europe alone—was spotted with ulcers of spreading devastation before displacement was practised in England. There had been stirrings of uneasiness from time to time—of uneasiness and almost of wonder that the weapon she was using with deadly effect had not been turned against herself; but at the actual moment of invasion there was something like public confidence in a speedy end to the struggle—and the principal public grievance was the shortage and high price of groceries.

* * * * *

Whatever he forgot and confused in after days—and there were stretches of time that remained with him only as a blur—Theodore remembered very clearly every detail and event of the night when disaster began. Young Hewlett’s voice as he announced disaster—and what he, Theodore, was doing when the boy rapped on the window. Not only what happened, but his mood when the interruption came and the causes of it; he had suffered an irritating day at the office, crossed swords with a self-important chief and been openly snubbed for his pains. As a result, his landlady’s evening grumble on the difficulties of war-time housekeeping seemed longer and less bearable than usual, and he was still out of tune with the world in general when he sat down to write to Phillida. He remembered phrases of the letter—never posted—wherein he worked off his irritation. “I got into trouble to-day through thinking of you when I was supposed to be occupied with indents. You are responsible, Blessed Girl, for several most horrible muckers, affecting the service of the country.... Your empty hospital don’t want you and my empty-headed boss don’t want me—oh, lady mine, if I could only make him happy by sacking myself and catching the next train to London!” ... And so on and so on....

It was late, nearing midnight, when he finished his letter and, for want of other occupation, turned back to a half-read evening paper; the communiqués were meagre, but there was a leading article pointing out the inevitable effect of displacement on the enemy’s resources and morale, and he waded through its comfortable optimism. As he laid aside the paper he realized how sleepy he was and rose yawning; he was on his way to the door, with intent to turn in, when the rapping on the window halted him. He pulled aside the blind and saw a face against the glass—pressed close, with a flattened white nose.

“Who’s that?” he asked, pushing up the window. It was Hewlett, one of his juniors at the office, out of breath with running and excitement.

“I say, Savage, come along out. There’s no end going on—fires, the whole sky’s red. They’ve come over at last and no mistake. Crashaw and I have been watching ’em and I thought you’d like to have a look. It’s worth seeing—we’re just along there, on the wall. Hurry up!”

The boy was dancing with eagerness to get back and Theodore had to run to keep up with him. He and Crashaw, Hewlett explained in gasps, had spent the evening in a billiard-room; it was on their way back to their diggings that they had noticed sudden lights in the sky—sort of flashes—and gone up on the wall to see better.... No, it wasn’t only searchlights—you could see them too—sudden flashes and the sky all red. Fires—to the south. It was the real thing, no doubt about that—and the only wonder was why they hadn’t come before.... At the head of the steps leading up to the wall were three or four figures with their heads all turned one way; and as Hewlett, mounting first, called “Still going on?” another voice called back, “Rather!”

They stood on the broad, flat wall and watched—in a chill little wind. The skyline to the south and south-west was reddened with a glow that flickered and wavered spasmodically and, as Hewlett had said, there were flashes—the bursting of explosive or star-shells. Also there were moments when the reddened skyline throbbed suddenly in places, grew vividly golden and sent out long fiery streamers.... They guessed at direction and wondered how far off; the wind was blowing sharply from the north, towards the glow; hence it carried sound away from them and it was only now and then that they caught more than a mutter and rumble.

As the minutes drew out the news spread through the town and the watchers on the wall increased in numbers; not only men but women, roused from bed, who greeted the flares with shrill, excited “Oh’s” and put ceaseless questions to their men folk. Young Hewlett, at Theodore’s elbow, gave himself up to frank interest in his first sight of war; justifying a cheerfulness that amounted to enthusiasm by explaining at intervals that he guessed our fellows were giving ’em what for and by this time they were sorry they’d come.... Once a shawled woman demanded tartly why they didn’t leave off, then, if they’d had enough? Whereat Hewlett, unable to think of an answer, pretended not to hear and moved away.

Of his own sensations while he watched from the wall Theodore remembered little save the bodily sensation of chill; he saw himself standing with his back to the wind, his shoulders hunched and the collar of his coat turned up. The murmur of hushed voices remained with him and odd snatches of fragmentary talk; there was the woman who persisted uneasily, “But you can’t ’ear ’em coming with these ’ere silent engines—why, they might be right over us naow!” And the man who answered her gruffly with “You’d jolly well know if they were!” ... And perpetual conjecture as to distance and direction of the glow; disputes between those who asserted that over there was Leeds, and those who scoffed contemptuously at the idea—arguing that, if Leeds were the centre of disturbance, the guns would have sounded much nearer.... Petty talk, he remembered, and plainly enough—but not how much he feared or foresaw. He must have been anxious, uneasy, or he would not have stood for long hours in the chill of the wind; but his definite impressions were only of scattered, for the most part uneducated, talk, of silhouetted figures that shifted and grouped, of turning his eyes from the lurid skyline to the shadowy rock that in daylight was the mass of the cathedral.... In the end sheer craving for warmth drove him in; leaving Hewlett and Crashaw deaf to his reminder that the office expected them at nine.

* * * * *

With the morning came news and—more plentifully—rumour; also, the wind having dropped, a persistent thunder from the south. Industrial Yorkshire, it was clear, was being subjected to that process of human displacement which, so far, it had looked on as an item in the daily communiqué; the attack, moreover, was an attack in force, since the invaders did not find it needful to desist with the passing of darkness. Rumour, in the absence of official intelligence, invented an enveloping air-fleet which should cut them off from their base; and meanwhile the thunder continued....

This much, at least, was shortly official and certain: nearly all rail, road and postal communication to the south was cut off—trains had ceased to run Londonwards and ordinary traffic on the highways was held up at barriers and turned back. Only military cars used the roads—and returned to add their reports to those brought in by air-scouts; but as a rule the information they furnished was for official enlightenment only, and it was not till the refugees arrived in numbers that the full meaning of displacement was made clear to the ordinary man.

It was after the second red night that the refugees appeared in their thousands—a horde of human rats driven out of their holes by terror, by fire and by gas. Whatever their status and possessions in the life of peace, they came with few exceptions on foot; as roads, like railways, were a target for the airman, the highway was avoided for the by-path or the open field, and the flight from every panic-stricken centre could be traced by long wastes of trampled crops. There were those who, terrified beyond bearing by the crash of masonry and long trembling underground, saw safety only in the roofless open, refused to enter houses and persisted in huddling in fields—unafraid, as yet, of the so-called poison-fire which had licked up the crops in Holderness and the corn-growing district round Pontefract.... Leeds, for a day or two, was hardly touched; but with the outpouring of fugitives from Dewsbury, Wakefield, Halifax and Bradford, Leeds also began to vomit her terrified multitudes. A wave of vagrant destitution rushed suddenly and blindly northward—anywhere away from the ruin of explosive, the flames and death by suffocation; while authority strove vainly to control and direct the torrent of overpowering misery.

It was in the early morning that the torrent reached York and rolled through it; overwhelming the charity, private and public, that at first made efforts to cope with the rush of misery. Theodore’s room for a time was given up to a man with bandaged eyes and puffed face whom his wife had led blindfold from Castleford. The man himself sat dumb and suffering, breathing heavily through blistered lips; the woman raged vulgarly against the Government which had neglected to supply them with gas-masks, to have the place properly defended, to warn people! “The bloody fools ought to have known what was coming and if her man was blinded for the rest of his life it was all the fault of this ’ere Government that never troubled its blasted ’ead as long as it drew its money.” ... That was in the beginning, before the flood of misery had swollen so high that even the kindliest shrank from its squalid menace; and Theodore, because it was the first he heard, remembered her story when he had forgotten others more piteous.

Before midday there was only one problem for local authority, civil and military—the disposal of displaced population; that is to say, the herding of vagrants that could not all be sheltered, that could not all be fed, that blackened fields, choked streets, drove onward and sank from exhaustion. The railway line to the north was still clear and, in obedience to wireless instructions from London, trains packed with refugees were sent off to the north, with the aim of relieving the pressure on local resources. Disorganization of transport increased the difficulty of food supply and even on the first day of panic and migration the agricultural community were raising a cry of alarm. Blind terror and hunger between them wrought havoc; fields were trampled and fugitives were plundering already—would plunder more recklessly to-morrow.

All day, all night, displaced humanity came stumbling in panic from the south and south-west; spreading news of the torment it had fled from, the dead it had left and the worse than dead who still crouched in an inferno whence they could not summon courage to fly. The railways could not deal with a tithe of the number who clamoured to be carried to the north, into safety; by the first evening the town was well-nigh eaten out, and householders, hardening their hearts against misery, were bolting themselves in, for fear of misery grown desperate. While out in the country farmers stabled their live-stock and kept ceaseless watch against the hungry.

All day the approaches to the station were besieged by those who hoped for a train; and, on the second night of the invasion, Theodore, sent by his chief with a message to the military transport officer, fought his way through a solid crowd on the platform—a crowd excluded from a train that was packed and struggling with humanity. A crowd that was squalid, unreasoning and blindly selfish; intent only on flight and safety—and some of it brutally intent. There were scuffles with porters and soldiers who refused to open locked doors, angry hootings and wild swayings backward and forward as the train moved out of the station; Theodore’s efforts to make his way to the station-master’s office were held to be indicative of a desire to travel by the next train and he was buffeted aside without mercy. There was something in the brute mass of terror that sickened him—a suggestion already of the bestial, the instinctive, the unhuman.

The transport officer looked up at him with tired, angry eyes and demanded what the hell he wanted?... Whereat Theodore handed him a typewritten note from a punctilious chief and explained that they had tried to get through on the telephone, either to him or the station-master, but——

“I should rather think not,” said the transport officer rudely. “We’ve both of us got more important things to worry about than little Distribution people. The telephone clerk did bring me some idiotic message or other, but I told him I didn’t want to hear it.”

He glanced at the typewritten note—then glared at it—and went off into a cackle of laughter; which finally tailed into blasphemy coupled with obscene abuse.

“Seen this?” he asked when he had sworn himself out. “Well, at any rate you know what it’s about. The —— has sent for particulars of to-morrow’s refugee train service—wants to know the number and capacity of trains to be dispatched to Newcastle-on-Tyne. Wants to enter it in duplicate, I suppose—and make lots and lots and lots of carbon copies. God in Heaven!”—and again he sputtered into blasphemy.... “Well, I needn’t bother to write down the answer; even if you’ve no more sense than he has, you’ll be able to remember it all right. It’s nil to both questions; nil trains to Newcastle, nil capacity. So that’s that!... What’s more—if it’s any satisfaction to your darned-fool boss to know it—we haven’t been sending any trains to Newcastle all day.”

“But I thought,” began Theodore—wondering if the man were drunk? He was, more than slightly—having fought for two days with panic-stricken devils and helped himself through with much whisky; but, drunk or not, he was sure of his facts and rapped them out with authority.

“Not to Newcastle. The first two or three got as far as Darlington—this morning. There they were pulled up. Then it was Northallerton—now we send ’em off to Thirsk and leave the people there to deal with ’em. You bet they’ll send ’em further if they can—you don’t suppose they want to be eaten out, any more than we do. But, for all I know, they’re getting ’em in from the other side.”

“The other side?” Theodore repeated. “What do you mean?” Whereat the transport officer, grown suddenly uncommunicative, leaned back in his chair and whistled.

“That’s all I can tell you,” he vouchsafed at length. “Trains haven’t run beyond Darlington since yesterday. I conclude H.Q. knows the reason, but they haven’t imparted it to me—I’ve only had my orders. It isn’t our business if the trains get stopped so long as we send ’em off—and we’re sending ’em and asking no questions.”

“Do you mean,” Theodore stammered, “that—this—is going on up north?”

“What do you think?” said the transport officer. “It’s the usual trick, isn’t it?... Start ’em running from two sides at once—don’t let ’em settle, send ’em backwards and forwards, keep ’em going!... We’ve played it often enough on them—now we’re getting a bit of our own back.... However, I’ve no official information. You know just as much as I do.”

“But,” Theodore persisted, “the people coming through from the north. What do they say—they must know?”

“There aren’t any people coming through,” said the other grimly. “Military order since this morning—no passenger traffic from the north runs this side of Thirsk. We’ve got enough of our own, haven’t we?... All I say is—God help Thirsk and especially God help the station-master!”

He straightened himself suddenly and grabbed at the papers on his table.

“Now, you’ve got what the damn fool sent you for—and I’m trying to make out my report.”

* * * * *

As Theodore fought his way out of the station and the crowd that seethed round it, he had an intolerable sense of being imprisoned between two fires. If he could see far enough to the north—to Durham and the Tyneside—there would be another hot, throbbing horizon and another stream of human destitution pouring lamentably into the night.... And, between the two fires, the two streams were meeting—turning back upon themselves, intermingling ... in blind and agonized obedience to the order to “keep ’em going!”... What happened when a train was halted by signal and the thronged misery inside it learned that here, without forethought or provision made, its flight must come to an end? At Thirsk, Northallerton, by the wayside, anywhere, in darkness?... A thin sweep of rain was driving down the street, and he fancied wretched voices calling through darkness, through rain. Asking what, in God’s name, was to become of them and where, in God’s name, they were to go?... And the overworked officials who could give no answer, seeking only to be rid of the massed and dreadful helplessness that cumbered the ground on which it trod!... Displacement of population—the daily, stilted phrase—had become to him a raw and livid fact and he stood amazed at the limits of his own imagination. Day after day he had read the phrase, been familiar with it; yet, so far, the horror had been words to him. Now the daily, stilted phrase was translated, comprehensible: “Don’t let ’em settle—keep ’em going.”

* * * * *

Back at the office, he discovered that his errand to the station had been superfluous; his chief, the man of precedent, order and many carbon copies, was staring, haggard and bewildered, at a typewritten document signed by the military commandant.... And obtaining, incidentally, his first glimpse into a world till now unthinkable—where precedent was not, where reference was useless and order had ceased to exist.

VI

That night ended Theodore’s life as a clerk in the Civil Service. The confusion consequent on the breakdown of transport had left of the Distribution system but a paralysed mockery, a name without functions attached to it; and with morning Theodore and his able-bodied fellows were impressed into a special constabulary, hastily organized as a weapon against vagrancy grown desperate and riotous. They were armleted, put through a hurried course of instruction, furnished with revolvers or rifles and told to shoot plunderers at sight.

No system of improvised rationing could satisfy even the elementary needs of the hundreds of thousands who swept hither and thither, as panic seized or the invader drove them; hence military authority, in self-preservation, turned perforce on the growing menace of fugitive and destitute humanity. Order, so long as the semblance of it lasted, strove to protect and maintain the supplies of the fighting forces; which entailed, inevitably, the leaving to the fate of their own devices of the famished useless, the horde of devouring mouths. Interruption of transport meant entire dependence on local food stuffs; and, as stocks grew lower and plundering increased, provisions were seized by the military.... Theodore, in the first hours of his new duty, helped to load an armed lorry with the contents of a grocer’s shop and fight it through the streets of York. There was an ugly rush as the driver started his engine; men who had been foodless for days had watched, in sullen craving, while the shop was emptied of its treasure of sacks and tins; and when the engine buzzed a child wailed miserably, a woman shrieked “Don’t let them, don’t let them!” and the whole pack snarled and surged forward. Wolfish white faces showed at the tailboard and before the car drew clear her escort had used their revolvers. Theodore, not yet hardened to shooting, seized the nearest missile, a tin of meat, and hurled it into one of the faces; when they drew away three or four of the pack were tearing at each other for the treasure contained in the tin.

He noticed, as the days went by, how quickly he slipped from the outlook and habits of civilized man and adopted those of the primitive, even of the animal. It was not only that he was suspicious of every man, careful in approach, on the alert and ready for violence; he learned, like the animal, to be indifferent to the suffering that did not concern him. Violence, when it did not affect him directly, was a noise in the distance—no more; and as swiftly as he became inured to bloodshed he grew hardened to the sight of misery. At first he had sickened when he ate his rations at the thought of a million-fold suffering that starved while he filled his stomach; later, as order’s representative, he herded and hustled a massed starvation without scruple, driving it away when it grouped itself threateningly, shooting when it promised to give trouble to authority, and looking upon death, itself, indifferently.

It amazed him, looking back, to realize the swiftness with which ordered society had crumbled; laws, systems, habits of body and mind—they had gone, leaving nothing but animal fear and the animal need to be fed. Within little more than a week of the night when young Hewlett had called him to watch the red flashes and the glare in the sky, there remained of the fabric of order built up through the centuries very little but a military force that was fighting on two sides—against inward disorder and alien attack—and struggling to maintain itself alive. Automatically, inevitably—under pressure of starvation, blind vagrancy and terror—that which had once been a people, an administrative whole, was relapsing into a tribal separatism, the last barrier against nomadic anarchy.... As famished destitution overran the country, localities not yet destitute tried systematically and desperately to shut out the vagrant and defended what was left to them by force. Countrymen beat off the human plague that devoured their substance and trampled their crops underfoot; barriers were erected that no stranger might pass and bloody little skirmishes were frequent at the outskirts of villages. As bread grew scarcer and more precious, the penalties on those who stole it were increasingly savage; tribal justice—lynch law—took the place of petty sessions and assize, and plunderers, even suspected plunderers, were strung up to trees and their bodies left dangling as a warning.... And a day or two later, it might be, the poison-fire swept through the fields and devoured the homes of those who had executed tribal justice; or a horde of destitution, too strong to be denied, drove them out; and, homeless in their turn, they swelled the tide of plunderers and vagrants.... Man, with bewildering rapidity, was slipping through the stages whereby, through the striving of long generations, he had raised himself from primitive barbarism and the law that he shares with the brute.

Very steadily the process of displacement continued. On most nights, in one direction or another, there were sudden outbursts of light—the glare of explosion or burning buildings or the greenish-blue reflection of the poison-fire. The silent engine gave no warning of its coming, and the first announcement of danger was the bursting of gas-shell and high explosive, or the sudden vivid pallor of the poison-fire as it ran before the wind and swept along dry fields and hedgerows. Where it swept it left not only long tracts of burned crop and black skeleton trees, but, often enough, the charred bodies of the homeless whom its rush had outpaced and overtaken.... Sudden and unreasoning panic was frequent—wild rushes from imaginary threats—and there were many towns which, when their turn came, were shells and empty buildings only; dead towns, whence the inhabitants had already fled in a body. York had been standing all but silent for days when an enemy swooped down to destroy it and Theodore, guarding military stores in a camp on the Ripon road, looked his last on the towers of the Minster, magnificent against a sea of flame. Death, in humanity, had ceased to move him greatly; but he turned away his head from the death of high human achievement.

For the first few days of disaster there was a certain amount of news, or what passed for news, from the outside world; in districts yet untouched and not wholly panic-stricken, local journals struggled out and communiqués—true or false—were published by the military authorities. But with the rapid growth of the life nomadic, the herding and driving to and fro, with the consequent absence of centres for the dissemination of news or information, the outside world withdrew to a distance and veiled itself in silence unbroken. With the disappearance of the newspaper there was left only rumour, and rumour was always current—sometimes hopeful, sometimes dreadful, always wild; to-day, Peace was coming, a treaty all but signed—and to-morrow London was in ruins.... No one knew for certain what was happening out of eyeshot, or could more than guess how far devastation extended. This alone was a certainty; that in every direction that a man might turn, he met those who were flying from destruction, threatened or actual; and that night after night and day after day, humanity crouched before the science itself had perfected.... Sometimes there were visible encounters in the air, contending squadrons that chased, manœuvred and gave battle; but the invaders, driven off, returned again and the process of displacement continued. And, with every hour of its continuance, the death-roll grew longer, uncounted; and men, who had struggled to retain a hold on their humanity and the life civilized, gave up the struggle, became predatory beasts and fought with each other for the means to keep life in their bodies.

* * * * *

In after years Theodore tried vainly to remember how long he was quartered in the camp on the Ripon road—whether it was weeks or a matter of days only. Then or later he lost all sense of time, retaining only a memory of happenings, of events that followed each other and connecting them roughly with the seasons—frosty mornings, wet and wind or summer heat. There were the nights when York flamed and the days when thick smoke hung over it; and the morning when aeroplanes fought overhead and two crashed within a mile of the camp. There was the night of pitched battle with a rabble of the starving, grown desperate, which rushed the guard suddenly out of the darkness and beat and hacked at the doors of the sheds which contained the hoarded treasure of food. Theodore, with every other man in the camp, was turned out hastily to do battle with the horde of invaders—to shoot into the mass of them and drive them back to their starvation. In the end the rush was stemmed and the camp cleared of the mob; but there was a hideous five minutes of shots and knife-thrusts and hand-to-hand struggling before the final stampede. Even after the stampede the menace was not at an end; when the sun rose it showed to the watchers in the camp a sullen rabble that lingered not a field’s breadth distant—a couple of hundred wolfish men and women who could not tear themselves away from the neighbourhood of food, who glared covetously and took hopeless counsel together till the order to charge them was given and they broke and fled, spitting back hatred.

After that, the night guard was doubled and the commanding officer applied in haste for reinforcements; barbed wire entanglements were stretched round the camp and orders were given to disperse any crowd that assembled and lingered in the neighbourhood. Behind their entanglements and line of sentries the little garrison lived as on an island in the flood of anarchy and ruin—a remnant of order, defending itself against chaos. And, for all the discipline with which they faced anarchy and the ruthlessness with which they beat back chaos, they knew (so often as they dared to think) that the time might be at hand—must be at hand, if no deliverance came—when they, every man of them, would be swept from their island to the common fate and become as the creatures, scarce human, who crawled to them for food and were refused. When darkness fell and flames showed red on the horizon, they would wonder how long before their own turn came—and be thankful for the lightening in the east; and as each convoy of lorries drove up to remove supplies from their fast dwindling stores, they would scan the faces of men who were ignorant and helpless as themselves to see if they were bearers of good news.... And the news was always their own news repeated; of ruin and burning, of famine and the threat of the famished. No message—save stereotyped military orders—from that outside world whence alone they could hope for salvation.

There remained with Theodore to the end of his days the dreadful memory of the women. At the beginning—just at the beginning—of disaster, authority had connived at a certain amount of charitable diversion of military stores for the benefit of women and children; but as supplies dwindled and destroying hordes of vagrants multiplied, the tacit permission was withdrawn. The soldier, the instrument of order, unfed was an instrument of order no longer; discipline was discipline for so long only as it obtained the necessities of life, and troops whose rations failed them in the end ceased to be troops and swelled the flood of vagrant and destitute anarchy. The useless mouth was the weapon of the enemy; and authority hardened its heart perforce against the crying of the useless mouth.

Once a score or so of women, with a tall, frantic girl as their leader, stood for hours at the edge of the wire entanglement and called on the soldiers to shoot—if they would not feed them, to shoot. Then, receiving only silence as answer, the tall girl cried out that, by God, the soldiers should be forced to shoot! and led her companions—some cumbered with children—to tear and hurl themselves across the stretch of barbed and twisted wire. As they scrambled over, bleeding, crying and their clothes in rags, they were seized by the wrists and hustled to the gate of the camp—some limp and effortless, others kicking and writhing to get free. When the gate was closed and barred on them they beat on it—then lay about wretchedly ... and at last shambled wretchedly away....

More dreadful even than the women who dragged with them children they could not feed, were those who sought to bribe the possessors of food with the remnant of their feminine attractions; who eyed themselves anxiously in streams, pulled their sodden clothes into a semblance of jauntiness and made piteous attempts at flirtation. Money being worthless, since it could buy neither safety nor food, the price for those who traded their bodies was paid in a hunk of bread or meat.... Those women suffered most who had no man of their own to forage and fend for them, and were no longer young enough for other men to look on with pleasure. They—as humanity fell to sheer wolfishness and the right of the strongest—were beaten back and thrust aside when it came to the sharing-out of spoil.

* * * * *

He remembered very clearly a day when news that was authentic reached them from the outside world; an aeroplane came down with engine-trouble in a field on the edge of the camp, and the haggard-faced pilot, beset with breathless questions, laughed roughly when they asked him of London—how lately he had been there, what was happening? “Oh yes, I was over it a day or two ago. You’re no worse off than they are down south—London’s been on the run for days.” He turned back to his engine and whistled tunelessly through the silence that had fallen on his hearers.... Theodore said it over slowly to himself, “London’s been on the run for days.” If so—if so—then what, in God’s name, of Phillida?

Hitherto he had fought back his dread for Phillida, denying to himself, as he denied to others, the rumour that disaster was widespread and general, and insisting that she, at least, was safe. If there was one thing intolerable, one thing that could not be, it was Phillida vagrant, Phillida starving—his dainty lady bedraggled and grovelling for her bread.... like the haggard women who had beaten with their hands on the gate....

“It must stop,” he choked suddenly, “it must stop—it can’t go on!”

The pilot broke off from his whistling to stare at the distorted face.

“No,” he said grimly, “it can’t go on. What’s more, it’s stopping, by degrees—stopping itself; you mayn’t have noticed it yet, but we do. Taking ’em all round they’re leaving off, not coming as thick as they did. And”—his mouth twisted ironically—“we’re leaving off and for the same reason.”

“The same reason?” someone echoed him.

“Because we can’t go on.... You don’t expect us to carry on long in this, do you?” He shrugged and jerked his head towards a smoke cloud on the western skyline. “That’s what ran us—gone up in smoke. Food and factories and transport and Lord knows what beside. The things that ran us and kept us going ... We’re living on our own fat now—what there is of it—and so are the people on the other side. We can just keep going as long as it lasts; but it’s getting precious short now, and when we’ve finished it—when there’s no fat left!...” He laughed unpleasantly and stared at the rolling smoke cloud.

Someone else asked him about the rumour ever-current of negotiation—whether there was truth in it, whether he had heard anything?

“Much what you’ve heard,” he said, and shrugged his shoulders. “There’s talk—there always is—plenty of it; but I don’t suppose I know any more than you do.... It stands to reason that someone must be trying to put an end to it—but who’s trying to patch it up with who?... And what is there left to patch? Lord knows! They say the real trouble is that when governments have gone there’s no one to negotiate with. No responsible authority—sometimes no authority at all. Nothing to get hold of. You can’t make terms with rabble; you can’t even find out what it wants—and it’s rabble now, here, there, and everywhere. When there’s nothing else left, how do you get hold of it, treat with it? Who makes terms, who signs, who orders?... Meanwhile, we go on till we’re told to stop—those of us that are left.... And I suppose they’re doing much the same—keeping on because they don’t know how to stop.”

Theodore asked what he meant when he spoke of “no government.” “You can’t mean it literally? You can’t mean...?”

“Why not?” said the pilot. “Is there any here?”—and jerked his head, this time towards the road. Its long white ribbon was spotted with groups and single figures of vagrants—scarecrow vagrants—crawling onward they knew not whither.

“See that,” he said, “see that—does anyone govern it? Make rules for it, defend it, keep it alive?... And that’s everywhere.”

Someone whispered back “Everywhere” under his breath; the rest stared in silence at the spotted white ribbon of road.

“You can’t mean...?” said Theodore again.

The airman shrugged his shoulders and laughed roughly.

“I believe,” he said, “there are still some wretched people who call themselves a government, try to be a government—at least, there were the other day.... Sometimes I wonder _how_ they try, what they say to each other—poor devils! How they look when the heads of what used to be departments bring them in the day’s report? Can’t you imagine their silly, ghastly faces?... Even if they’re still in existence, what in God’s name can they do—except let us go on killing each other in the hope that something may turn up. If they give orders, sign papers, make laws, does anyone listen, pay any attention? Does it make any difference to _that_?” Again he jerked his head towards the road, and in the word as in the gesture was loathing, fear and contempt. “And in other parts of what used to be the civilized world—where this sort of hell has been going on longer—what do you suppose is happening?”

No one answered; he laughed again roughly, as if he were contemptuous of their hopes, and a man beside Theodore—a corporal—swung round on him, white-faced and snarling.

“Damn you!... I’ve got a girl.... I’ve got a girl!...”

He choked, moved away and stood rigid, staring at the road.

Theodore heard himself asking, “If there isn’t any government—what is there?”

“What’s left of the army,” said the other, “that’s all that hangs together. Bits of it, here and there—getting smaller, losing touch with the other bits; hanging on to its rations—what’s left of ’em.... And we hold together just as long as we can fight back the rabble; not an hour, not a minute longer! When we’ve gnawed our way through the last of our rations—what then?... You may do what you like, but I’m keeping a shot for myself. Whether we’re through with it or whether we’re not. Just stopping fighting won’t clear up this mess.... And I’ll die—what I am. Not rabble!”

* * * * *

Whether after days or whether after weeks, there came a time when they ceased to have dealings with the world beyond their wire defences; when the store-sheds in the camp were all but emptied of their hoard of foodstuffs and such military authority as might still exist took no further interest in the doings of a useless garrison. Orders and communications, once frequent, grew fewer, and finally, as military authority crumbled, they were left to isolation, to their own defence and devices. Since no man any longer had need of them, they were cut off from intercourse with those other remnants of the life disciplined whence lorries had once arrived in search of rations; separated from such other bands of their fellows as still held together, they were no longer part of an army, were nothing but a band of armed men. Though their own daily rations were cut down to the barest necessities of life, there was little grumbling, since even the dullest knew the reason; as the airman had told them, they were living on their own fat, for so long as their own fat lasted. For all their isolation, their fears and daily perils kept them disciplined; they held together, obeyed orders and kept watch, not because they still felt themselves part of a nation or a military force, but because there remained in their common keeping the means to support bare life. It was not loyalty or patriotism, but the sense of their common danger, their common need of defence against the famished world outside their camp, that kept them comrades, obedient to a measure of discipline, and made them still a community.

There had been altercation of the fiercest before they were left to themselves—when lorries drove up for food which was refused them, on the ground that the camp had not sufficient for its own needs. Disputes at the refusal were furious and violent; men, driven out forcibly, went off shouting threats that they would come back and take what was denied them—would bring their machine-guns and take it. Those who yet had the wherewithal to keep life in their bodies knew the necessity that prompted the threat and lived thenceforth in a state of siege against men who had once been their comrades. With the giving out of military supplies and the consequent breaking of the bonds of discipline, bands of soldiers, scouring the countryside, were an added terror to their fellow-vagrants and, so long as their ammunition lasted, fared better than starvation unarmed.... If central authority existed it gave no sign; while military force that had once been united—an army—dissolved into its primitive elements: tribes of armed men, held together by their fear of a common enemy. In the wreck of civilization, of its systems, institutions and polity, there endured longest that form of order which had first evolved from the chaos of barbarism—the disciplined strength of the soldier.... A people retracing its progress from chaos retraced it step by step.

VII

The end of civilization came to Theodore Savage and his fellows as it had come to uncounted thousands.

There had been a still warm day with a haze on it—he judged it early autumn or perhaps late summer; for the rest, like any other day in the camp routine—of watchfulness, of scanning the sky and the distance, of the passing of vagabond starvation, of an evil smell drifting with the lazy air from the dead who lay unburied where they fell. Before nightfall the haze was lifted by a cold little wind from the east; and soon after darkness a moon at the full cast white, merciless light and black shadow.