With no microphones, only the unaided human voice, everything said on that small space far below (I am seeing it as I write through Tsi Kwang's eyes) had to be simple, because it had to be shouted. And this added to the challenge of the spectacle, for everything else was kept informal. Casual. (Except of course for the necessary guards.) But what was said had to be reduced almost to slogans, or at least to simple statements or questions, for from halfway up the tiers no one could have heard complex argument, legal niceties.
Everyone present - and all had come with their minds full of historical examples, memories of their own, or their parents' or their ancestors' experience of being oppressed, ill-treated - every person present had come burning with the need to hear at last! (as Agent Tsi Kwang put it) the Truth.
The "Trial" began straight away, on the first evening. The delegates were still arriving, were exhausted and some famished. Makeshift trestles stood about among sparse trees on the parched grasses, with jars of water and baskets of the local bread. These supplies vanished instantly, and everyone understood the signs of parsimony to come. The tents were going up over several acres. The first lootings had taken place and been stopped. Thousands of young people milled about. Some, from the extreme north, the Icelanders, the Scandinavians, were devastated by the heat. The deep burning skies were particularly noted by Agent Tsi Kwang. (She is from Northern Province.) The cicadas were loud. The usual dogs had arrived from nowhere and were nosing about for what they could find. At precisely four o'clock the word went around that the "Trial" would begin at once. And even as those travel-tired, hungry delegates crowded on to the hot stone seats under that scorching sky, with no preliminaries at all, the two groups of contenders filed down into the arena and took their places. The torches had not yet been lit, of course, but the children were in their places, two to a torch.
On the small wood tables were no books, papers, notes - nothing.
George Sherban stood by the table on one side, with his group, where the shade was soon to engulf them. On the other, in full sun, sat the frail old man, the white villain, whose history of course they all knew, since word of mouth is the fastest, if not most accurate, means of conveying information. Each young person on these tiers knew of George Sherban and that the villain had been of the old British left, had been imprisoned for crimes against the people, and rehabilitated, and brought here by the Youth Armies to defend an impossible case.
It was a restless crowd. They shifted about on the hard stone, grumbled because of the heat, the lack of microphones, that the "Trial" had begun even before many delegates had come. There were the greetings of people who might not have met for years or months, at some Conference perhaps halfway across the world. And there was an under-mood of desperation and of anxiety, which did not relate to the present scene at all, but to our general preoccupation that war is obviously imminent. And perhaps, even then, before so much as a word had been exchanged between accuser and accused, it was evident to everyone that the "Trial" was hardly central to humanity's real problems, that it is not enough to ascribe every crime in the book to any particular class or nation or race - I say this relying on your understanding, for I do not want it to be thought that my long (or so it seems to me) exile in these backward provinces has caused any softening of my ability to see things from a correct class viewpoint. But our human predicament is grave indeed, and it was not possible for those five thousand, the elected "cream" of the world's youth, to sit there in those surroundings face to face, in all their gaunt threadbare hungry desperation, and not to see certain facts writ clear.
They were allowed no more than half an hour for settling themselves, for the absorption of what they could see - of what they were being forced to see - when George Sherban opened the "Trial" by strolling forward two steps from the table and saying:
"I have been elected to represent the nonwhite races in this Trial by - " and he recited a list of something like forty groups, organisations, armies. Agent Tsi Kwang said the silence was profound, for almost at once the moving and the whispering and the coughing ceased as they all understood they had to remain completely still to hear anything at all. And this was the first opportunity they all had to absorb the assault on their expectations of the man's appearance.
He had no list in his hand, but recited the names, long ones some of them, and some often sounding absurdly bureaucratic (I make this comment relying on our old understanding of the necessary absurdity of some forms of organisation) without any aid to memory. He stood there, so said Agent Tsi Kwang, quite calm, relaxed, and smiling.
He stood back two steps, and waited.
The old white man in his chair then spoke up. His voice was weaker than George Sherban's, though clear, and the silence was absolute. It seems to me that this was a silence of more than hatred or contempt, for even Agent Tsi Kwang commented that he made "a figure you had to think about." For one thing, I believe that most of the youth do not see an old or elderly person from one year's end - or decade's end even - to the next, except as ancient creatures hurrying away from them in fear, or as clothed skeletons lying on the streets waiting for the Death Squads, or perhaps in glimpses of them forgotten in institutions waiting to die of neglect and famine. The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out, "removed from the honourable record of history," as Tsi Kwang so happily puts it. She was unable, she said, to take her eyes off the "old criminal element." The sight of him filled her with "a correct and concrete loathing." She felt he should be wiped off the face of the earth "like a beetle." And similar remarks quite reasonable in the circumstances. You will have observed that I quote this agent as often as I do - and intend to throughout this account - because of what might perhaps be described as the classic correctness of her viewpoint. She can be relied upon always to supply the apt comment. The other agents, none of them up to her level, have been useful to me in my attempt to present a picture of appropriate light and shade.
What the old ghost said was that he represented the white races - and at that point there was no reaction of boos or jeers, only silence - and he had been appointed to do this by... and here there was no long list of organisations from every part of the globe, but only "The Combined Co-ordinating Committee of the Youth Armies."
He remained silent in his chair, while George Sherban stood forward again and called up loudly and clearly the following words, pausing between phrases, and looking around the tiers.
"I open this Trial with an indictment. This is the indictment. That it is the white races of this world that have destroyed it, corrupted it, made possible the wars that have ruined it, have laid the basis for the war that we all fear, have poisoned the seas, and the waters, and the air, have stolen everything for themselves, have laid waste the goodness of the earth from the North to the South, and from East to West, have behaved always with arrogance, and contempt, and barbarity towards others, and have been above all guilty of the supreme crime of stupidity - and must now accept the burden of culpability, as murderers, thieves and destroyers, for the dreadful situation we now all find ourselves in."
Throughout this there was not a sound, but as he ended and stood back, the great crowd let out a hissing groan, and "it was more frightening than if we had cursed the villains or hurled insults at them." This is the comment of another of our agents, not Tsi Kwang, who confined herself to: "No stone was left unturned to shame the criminals standing at the bar of history." Another comment was from a letter written by Benjamin Sherban, intercepted by us. "Farce has ever been my meat and drink, but I tell you that if I hadn't eaten too long and too full of sheer bloody lunacy so that I can't react any longer, I would have dropped dead from fright at that hissing." I quote this as contrast to our ever admirable and to-be-relied-on Tsi Kwang. (You will remember that Benjamin Sherban was standing immediately behind the Defendant.)