crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to

inflict irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic

to the pitch of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall

wake up."…

'Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. "Presently mankind

will wake up."

'I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were

among these hundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in

rebellion against all these ancient traditions of flag and

empire. Weren't we, perhaps, already in the throes of the last

crisis, in that darkest moment of a nightmare's horror before the

sleeper will endure no more of it-and wakes?

'I don't know how my speculations ended. I think they were not

so much ended as distracted by the distant thudding of the guns

that were opening fire at long range upon Namur.'

Section 7

But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of

modern warfare. So far he had taken part only in a little

shooting. The bayonet attack by which the advanced line was

broken was made at a place called Croix Rouge, more than twenty

miles away, and that night under cover of the darkness the rifle

pits were abandoned and he got his company away without further

loss.

His regiment fell back unpressed behind the fortified lines

between Namur and Sedan, entrained at a station called Mettet,

and was sent northward by Antwerp and Rotterdam to Haarlem.

Hence they marched into North Holland. It was only after the

march into Holland that he began to realise the monstrous and

catastrophic nature of the struggle in which he was playing his

undistinguished part.

He describes very pleasantly the journey through the hills and

open land of Brabant, the repeated crossing of arms of the Rhine,

and the change from the undulating scenery of Belgium to the

flat, rich meadows, the sunlit dyke roads, and the countless

windmills of the Dutch levels. In those days there was unbroken

land from Alkmaar and Leiden to the Dollart. Three great

provinces, South Holland, North Holland, and Zuiderzeeland,

reclaimed at various times between the early tenth century and

1945 and all many feet below the level of the waves outside the

dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern sun and

sustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of

laws and custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a

perpetual defence against the beleaguering sea. For more than two

hundred and fifty miles from Walcheren to Friesland stretched a

line of embankments and pumping stations that was the admiration

of the world.

If some curious god had chosen to watch the course of events in

those northern provinces while that flanking march of the British

was in progress, he would have found a convenient and appropriate

seat for his observation upon one of the great cumulus clouds

that were drifting slowly across the blue sky during all these

eventful days before the great catastrophe. For that was the

quality of the weather, hot and clear, with something of a

breeze, and underfoot dry and a little inclined to be dusty. This

watching god would have looked down upon broad stretches of

sunlit green, sunlit save for the creeping patches of shadow cast

by the clouds, upon sky-reflecting meres, fringed and divided up

by masses of willow and large areas of silvery weeds, upon white

roads lying bare to the sun and upon a tracery of blue canals.

The pastures were alive with cattle, the roads had a busy

traffic, of beasts and bicycles and gaily coloured peasants'

automobiles, the hues of the innumerable motor barges in the

canal vied with the eventfulness of the roadways; and everywhere

in solitary steadings, amidst ricks and barns, in groups by the

wayside, in straggling villages, each with its fine old church,

or in compact towns laced with canals and abounding in bridges

and clipped trees, were human habitations.

The people of this country-side were not belligerents. The

interests and sympathies alike of Holland had been so divided

that to the end she remained undecided and passive in the

struggle of the world powers. And everywhere along the roads

taken by the marching armies clustered groups and crowds of

impartially observant spectators, women and children in peculiar

white caps and old-fashioned sabots, and elderly, clean-shaven

men quietlythoughtful over their long pipes. They had no fear of

their invaders; the days when 'soldiering' meant bands of

licentious looters had long since passed away…

That watcher among the clouds would have seen a great

distribution of khaki-uniformed men and khaki-painted material

over the whole of the sunken area of Holland. He would have

marked the long trains, packed with men or piled with great guns

and war material, creeping slowly, alert for train-wreckers,

along the north-going lines; he would have seen the Scheldt and

Rhine choked with shipping, and pouring out still more men and

still more material; he would have noticed halts and

provisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling

caterpillars of cavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons, the

huge beetles of great guns, crawling under the poplars along the

dykes and roads northward, along ways lined by the neutral,

unmolested, ambiguously observant Dutch. All the barges and

shipping upon the canals had been requisitioned for transport. In

that clear, bright, warm weather, it would all have looked from

above like some extravagant festival of animated toys.

As the sun sank westward the spectacle must have become a little

indistinct because of a golden haze; everything must have become

warmer and more glowing, and because of the lengthening of the

shadows more manifestly in relief. The shadows of the tall

churches grew longer and longer, until they touched the horizon

and mingled in the universal shadow; and then, slow, and soft,

and wrapping the world in fold after fold of deepening blue, came

the night-the night at first obscurely simple, and then with

faint points here and there, and then jewelled in darkling