“It is unfortunate that most of Ferguson’s documentation was lost when his home was burned during the unsettled years after the war. But we know that what Mexico’s Presidente Lopez said to his staff was: ‘My generals, win me this war.’ And this entire volume does not have enough space to record what the United States generals were told by the White House, the Congress as a whole, the Committees on Military affairs, the Special Committees on Conduct of the War, the State Department, the Commerce Department, the Interior Department, the Director of the Budget, the War Manpower Commission, the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the Steel lobby, the Oil lobby, the Labor lobby, the political journals, the daily newspapers, the broadcasters, the ministry, the Granges, the Chambers of Commerce. However, we do know-unhappily-that the United States generals obeyed their orders. This sorry fact was inscribed indelibly on the record at the Peace of Galveston.”
Muhlenhoff yawned and closed the book. An amusing theory, he thought, ,but thin. Political generals? Nonsense.
He was glad to see that his subordinates had given up their attempt to pass responsibility for the immediate problem to his shoulders; the intercom had been silent for many minutes now. It only showed, he thought comfortably, that they had absorbed his leading better than they knew.
He glanced regretfully at the door that had sheltered him, for this precious refreshing interlude, from the shocks of the project outside. Well, the interlude was over; now to see about this leakage thing. Muhlenhoff made a note, in his tidy card-catalog mind, to have Maintenance on the carpet. The door was bulging out of true. Incredible sloppiness! And some damned fool had shut the locks in the ventilating system. The air was becoming stuffy.
Aggressive and confident, the political engineer pressed the release that opened the door to the greatest shock of all.
Nightmare with Zeppelins
Elsewhere I have mentioned Cyril’s incomplete Civil War novel, The Crater. The opening chapters introduced his viewpoint character, an English journalist. I liked the character; I liked the background material; and I used them verbatim in this short story.
THE ZEPPELIN dirigible balloons bombed London again last night and I got little sleep what with the fire brigades clanging down the street and the antiaircraft guns banging away. Bad news in the morning post. A plain card from Emmie to let me know that Sam’s gone, fast and without much pain. She didn’t say, but I suppose it was the flu, which makes him at least the fifth of the old lib-lab boys taken off this winter. And why not? We’re in our seventies and eighties. It’s high time.
Shaw said as much the other day when I met him on the steps of the Museum reading room, he striding in, I doddering out. In that brutal, flippant way of his, he was rather funny about how old Harry Lewes was standing in the way of youngsters like himself, but I can’t bring myself to put his remarks down; they would be a little too painful to contemplate.
Well, he’s quite recovered from that business with his foot that gave us all such a fright. Barring the ‘flu, he may live to my age, and about 1939 bright youngsters now unborn will be watching him like hawks for the smallest sign of rigidity, of eccentricity, and saying complacently: “Grand old boy, G.B.S. Such a pity he’s going the least bit soft upstairs.” And I shall by then be watching from Olympus, and chuckling.
Enough of him. He has the most extraordinary way of getting into everybody’s conversation, though it is true that my own conversation does wander, these bad days. I did not think that the second decade of the twentieth century would be like this, though, as I have excellent reason to be, I am glad it is not worse.
I am really quite unhappy and uncomfortable as I sit here at the old desk. Though all the world knows I don’t hold with personal service for the young and healthy, I am no longer a member of either of those classes. I do miss the ministrations of Bagley, who at this moment is probably lying in a frozen trench and even more uncomfortable than I. I can’t seem to build as warm a fire as he used to. The coals won’t go right. Luckily, I know what to do when I am unhappy and uncomfortable: work.
Anyway, Wells is back from France. He has been talking, he says, to some people at the Cavendish Laboratory, wherever that is. He told me we must make a “radium bomb.” I wanted to ask: “Must we, Wells? Must we, really?”
He says the great virtue of a radium bomb is that it explodes and keeps on exploding-for hours, days, weeks. The italics are Wells’s-one could hear them in his rather high-pitched voice-and he is welcome to them.
I once saw an explosion which would have interested Wells and, although it did not keep on exploding, it was as much of an explosion as I ever care to see.
I thought of telling him so. But, if he believed me, there would be a hue and a cry-I wonder, was I ever once as consecrated as he?-and if he did not, he might all the same use it for the subject of one of his “scientific” romances. After I am gone, of course, but surely that event cannot be long delayed, and in any case that would spoil it. And I want the work. I do not think I have another book remaining-forty-one fat volumes will have to do-but this can hardly be a book. A short essay; it must be short if it is not to become an autobiography and, though I have resisted few temptations in my life, I mean to fight that one off to the end. That was another jeer of Shaw’s. Well, he scored off me, for I confess that some such thought had stirred in my mind.
My lifelong struggle with voice and pen against social injustice had barely begun in 1864, and yet I had played a part in three major work stoppages, published perhaps a dozen pamphlets and was the editor and principal contributor of the still-remembered Labour’s Voice. I write with what must look like immodesty only to explain how it was that I came to the attention of Miss Carlotta Cox. I was working with the furious energy of a very young man who has discovered his vocation, and no doubt Miss Cox mistook my daemon-now long gone, alas!-for me.
Miss Cox was a member of that considerable group of ruling-class Englishmen and women who devote time, thought and money to improving the lot of the workingman. Everybody knows of good Josiah Wedgewood, Mr. William Morris, Miss Nightingale; they were the great ones. Perhaps I alone today remember Miss Cox, but there were hundreds like her and pray God there will always be.
She was then a spinster in her sixties and had spent most of her life giving away her fortune. She had gone once in her youth to the cotton mills whence that fortune had come, and knew after her first horrified look what her course must be. She instructed her man of business to sell all her shares in that Inferno of sweated labour and for the next forty years, as she always put it, attempted to make restitution.
She summoned me, in short, to her then-celebrated stationer’s shop and, between waiting on purchasers of nibs and foolscap, told me her plan. I was to go to Africa.
Across the Atlantic, America was at war within herself. The rebellious South was holding on, not with any hope of subduing the North, but in the expectation of support from England.
England herself was divided. Though England had abolished slavery on her own soil almost a century earlier, still the detestable practise had Its apologists, and there were those who held the rude blacks incapable of assuming the dignities of freedom. I was to seek out the Dahomeys and the Congolese on their own grounds and give the lie to those who thought them less than men.