peculiarlysensitive 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 thoroughlyuncomfortable 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 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 charmingdescription
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 participate,

it was bound to be so entirely different from these peace
manoeuvres 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.
Section 6

Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest
of masculine youth in all 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 delighteddeparture 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 old-time 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 Khartum. 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 committed 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 teaching
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 sunshine. For innumerable men such an experience has

meant mental and spiritualdestruction, but Barnet, in spite of
his bodilygravitation 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 realised 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.

'It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady--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 plebeianbicycle 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 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 trafficpavement

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 gracefulbridges, beneath
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
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal players

revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shakespeare'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 constructor's globes of