The Land Leviathan

But President Penfield was smirking and shaking his head.

'We're ahead of you, Mr Bastable. There's more than one kind of wall, you know. You've only seen what you might call our first line of defence.'

'There isn't anything made strong enough to stop the Land Leviathan,' I said emphatically.

'Oh, I don't know.' Penfield gave Kennedy another of his secret looks. 'Do you want to show him around, Joe? I think we can trust him. He's one of us.'

Kennedy was not so sure. 'Well, if you think so…’

‘Sure I do. I have my hunches. He's okay. A bit misguided, a bit short on imagination - a bit English, eh? But a decent sort. Welcome to Washington, Mr Bastable. Now you'll see how that black scum is to be stopped.'

A while later we left the White House in a horse-drawn carriage provided for us. Kennedy, with some pride, explained how the Capitol had been turned into a well-defended arsenal and how every one of those overblown neo-Graecian buildings contained virtually every operational big gun left in the United States.

But it was not the architecture or the details of the defence system which arrested my vision - it was what I saw m the streets as I passed. Washington had always had a very large Negro population, and now this population was being put to use by the whites. i saw gangs of exhausted, half-starved men, women and children, shackled to one another by chains about the neck, wrists or ankles, hauling huge loads of bricks and sand-bags to the barricades. It was a scene from the past -with sweating, dying black slaves being worked, quite literally, to death by brutal white overseers armed with long bull-whips which they used liberally and with evident relish. It was a sight I had never expected to witness in the twentieth century! I was horrified, but did my best not to betray my emotion to Kennedy, who had not appeared to notice what was going on!

More than once I winced and was sickened when I saw some poor, near-naked woman fall and receive a torrent of abuse, kicking and whipping until she was forced to her feet again, or helped to her feet by her companions. Once I saw a half-grown boy collapse and it was quite plain that he was dead, but his fellow slaves were made to drag his corpse with them by the chains which secured his wrists to theirs.

Trying to appear insouciant, I said as coolly as I could: 'I see now how you managed to raise the walls so quickly. You have reintroduced slavery.'

'Well, you could call it that, couldn't you?' Kennedy grinned. 'The blacks are performing a public service, like the rest of us, helping to build up the country again. Besides,' and his face became serious, 'it's what they know best. It's what most of 'em prefer. They don't think and feel the same as us, Bastable. It's like your worker bee - stop him from working and he becomes morbid and unhappy. Eventually he dies. It's the same with the blacks.'

'Their ultimate fate would seem to be identical, however you look at it,' I commented.

'Sure, but this way they're doing some good.'

I must have seen several thousand Negroes as we travelled through the streets of Washington. A few were evidently employed as individual servants and were in a somewhat better position than their fellows, but most were chained together in gangs, sweating copiously for all that the weather was chill. There was little hope on any of their faces and I was not proud of my own race when I looked at them; also I could not help recalling the pride - arrogance, some would call it - in the bearing of Hood's Ashanti troops.

I stifled the thought, at that moment, but it kept coming back to me with greater and greater force. It was unjust to enslave other human beings and cruel to treat them in such a manner, whichever side committed the injustice. Yet it seemed to me that there was a grain more justice in Hood's policies -for he was repaying a debt, whereas men such as Penfield and Kennedy were acting from the most brutal and cynical of motives.

Mildly, I said: 'But isn't it poor economics to work them so hard? They'll give you better value if they're treated a little better.'

'That logic led to the Civil War, Mr Bastable,' said Kennedy, as if speaking to a child. 'You start thinking like that and sooner or later they decide they deserve to be treated like white men and you get the old social ills being repeated over again. Besides,' he grinned broadly, 'there's not a lot of point in worrying too much about the life expectancy of our Washington niggers, as you'll see.'

We were driving close to one of the main walls now. Here, as everywhere, huge gangs of Negroes were being forced to work at inhuman speed. It was no longer any mystery how Washington had managed to get its defences up so rapidly. I tried to recall the stories of what Hood had done to the whites in Scandinavia, but even the stories, exaggerated and encouraged by Hood himself to improve his savage image, paled in comparison to the reality of what was happening in modern-day Washington!

As we passed the walls, I noticed that large cages, rather like the cages used for transporting circus animals about the country, were much in evidence on top of the walls. I pointed them out and asked Kennedy what they were.

He smirked as he leaned back in the carriage and lit a cigar. 'They, Mr Bastable, are our secret weapon.'

I did not ask him to amplify this statement. I had become too saddened by the fate of the Negroes. I told Kennedy that I was tired and would like to rest. The carriage was turned about and I was taken to a hotel quite close to the Capitol, where I was given a room overlooking a stretch of parkland.

But even here I could look out through my windows and see evidence of the brutality of the whites. Not a hundred yards away, a pit of quick-lime had been sunk, and into it, from time to time, carts would dump the bodies of the dead and the dying.

I thought that I had witnessed Hell in Southern England, but now I knew that I had only been standing on the outskirts. Here, where it had once been declared an article of faith that all men were created equal, where it had seemed possible for the eighteenth-century ideals of reason and justice to be made reality, here was Hell, indeed I

And it was a Hell created in the name of my own race, whose survival I hoped to ensure with my resistance to Hood and his Black Horde.

I slept badly at the hotel and the next morning sought an interview with 'President' Penfield at the White House. I received word that he was too busy to see me. I wandered about the streets, but there was too much there to turn my stomach. I began to feel angry. I felt frustrated. I wanted to remonstrate with Penfield, to beg him to show mercy to the blacks, to set an example of tolerance and decency to his white-hooded followers. Gandhi had been right. There was only one way to behave, even if it seemed, in the short term, against one's self-interest. Surely it was in one's self-interest in the long term to exhibit generosity, humanity, kindness and a sense of justice to one's fellow men. It was cynicism of Penfield's kind which had, after all, led to the threatened extinction of the whole human race. There could be no such thing as a 'righteous' war, for war was by its very nature an act of injustice against the individual, but there could be such a thing as an 'unrighteous' war - an evil war, a war begun by men who were utterly corrupt, both morally and intellectually. I had begun to think that it was a definition of those who would make war - that whatever motives they claimed, whatever ideals they promoted, whatever 'threat' they referred to, they could not be excused - because of their actions they could only be ot a degenerate and immoral character.

Gandhi had said that violence bred violence. Well, it seemed that I was witnessing a living lesson in this creed! I realised how close I had, myself, been on the brink of behaving brutally and cynically, when I had contemplated the assassination of Hood.

Once again, at about the worst time possible, I found my loyalties divided, my mind in confusion, filled with a sense of the impossibility of any action whatsoever on my own part.