between the scientific and intellectualmovement 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 activelyintelligent 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 scientificpossibility 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 actualaerial 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

unsuspiciously across the fields below and would have been very
cruelly handled indeed, if some one away to the right had not

opened fire too soon.
'It was a queer thrill when these fellows came into sight,' he

confesses; 'and not a bit like manoeuvres. They halted for a
time on the edge of the wood and then came forward in an open

line. They kept walking nearer to us and not looking at us, but
away to the right of us. Even when they began to be hit, and

their officers' whistles woke them up, they didn't seem to see
us. One or two halted to fire, and then they all went back

towards the wood again. They went slowly at first, looking round
at us, then the shelter of the wood seemed to draw them, and they

trotted. I fired rather mechanically and missed, then I fired
again, and then I became earnest to hit something, made sure of

my sighting, and aimed very carefully at a blue back that was
dodging about in the corn. At first I couldn't satisfy myself

and didn't shoot, his movements were so spasmodic and uncertain;
then I think he came to a ditch or some such obstacle and halted

for a moment. "GOT you," I whispered, and pulled the trigger.
'I had the strangest sensations about that man. In the first

instance, when I felt that I had hit him I was irradiated with
joy and pride....

'I sent him spinning. He jumped and threw up his arms....
'Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping

about. Suddenly I felt sick. I hadn't killed him....
'In some way he was disabled and smashed up and yet able to

struggle about. I began to think....
'For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn.

Either he was calling out or some one was shouting to him....
'Then he jumped up--he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with

one last effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still
and never moved again.

'He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him
dead. I had been wanting to do so for some time....'

The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made
for themselves in the woods below. A man was hit in the pit next

to Barnet, and began cursing and crying out in a violent rage.
Barnet crawled along the ditch to him and found him in great

pain, covered with blood, frantic with indignation, and with the
half of his right hand smashed to a pulp. 'Look at this,' he

kept repeating, hugging it and then extending it. 'Damned
foolery! Damned foolery! My right hand, sir! My right hand!'

For some time Barnet could do nothing with him. The man was
consumed by his tortured realisation of the evil silliness of

war, the realisation which had come upon him in a flash with the
bullet that had destroyed his skill and use as an artificer for

ever. He was looking at the vestiges with a horror that made him
impenetrable to any other idea. At last the poor wretch let

Barnet tie up his bleeding stump and help him along the ditch
that conducted him deviously out of range....

When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water,
and all day long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst.

For food they had chocolate and bread.
'At first,' he says, 'I was extraordinarily excited by my baptism

of fire. Then as the heat of the day came on I experienced an
enormous tedium and discomfort. The flies became extremely

troublesome, and my little grave of a rifle pit was invaded by
ants. I could not get up or move about, for some one in the trees

had got a mark on me. I kept thinking of the dead Prussian down
among the corn, and of the bitter outcries of my own man. Damned

foolery! It WAS damned foolery. But who was to blame? How had
we got to this? . . .

'Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with
dynamite bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and