While these terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were
happening in Paris and Berlin, Barnet and his company were
industriously entrenching themselves in Belgian Luxembourg.
He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day's journey
through the north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid
phrases. The country was browned by a warm summer, the trees a
little touched with autumnal colour, and the wheat already
golden. When they stopped for an hour at Hirson, men and women
with tricolour badges upon the platform distributed cakes and
glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and there was much
cheerfulness. 'Such good, cool beer it was,' he wrote. 'I had
had nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom.'
A number of monoplanes, 'like giant swallows,' he notes, were
scouting in the pink evening sky.
Barnet's battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place
called Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to
Jemelle. Here they detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the
railway-trains and stores were passing along it all night-and
next morning he: marched eastward through a cold, overcast dawn,
and a morning, first cloudy and then blazing, over a large
spacious country-side interspersed by forest towards Arlon.
There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked
entrenchments and hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton
that were designed to check and delay any advance from the east
upon the fortified line of the Meuse. They had their orders, and
for two days they worked without either a sight of the enemy or
any suspicion of the disaster that had abruptly decapitated the
armies of Europe, and turned the west of Paris and the centre of
Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction of Pompeii.
And the news, when it did come, came attenuated. 'We heard there
had been mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,' Barnet
relates; 'but it didn't seem to follow that "They" weren't still
somewhere elaborating their plans and issuing orders. When the
enemy began to emerge from the woods in front of us, we cheered
and blazed away, and didn't trouble much more about anything but
the battle in hand. If now and then one cocked up an eye into the
sky to see what was happening there, the rip of a bullet soon
brought one down to the horizontal again…
That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of
country between Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It
was essentially a rifle and infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do
not seem to have taken any decisive share in the actual fighting
for some days, though no doubt they effected the strategy from
the first by preventing surprise movements. They were aeroplanes
with atomic engines, but they were not provided with atomic
bombs, which were manifestly unsuitable for field use, nor indeed
had they any very effective kind of bomb. And though they
manoeuvred against each other, and there was rifle shooting at
them and between them, there was little actual aerial fighting.
Either the airmen were indisposed to fight or the commanders on
both sides preferred to reserve these machines for scouting…
After a day or so of digging and scheming, Barnet found himself
in the forefront of a battle. He had made his section of rifle
pits chiefly along a line of deep dry ditch that gave a means of
inter-communication, he had had the earth scattered over the
adjacent field, and he had masked his preparations with tussocks
of corn and poppy. The hostile advance came blindly and
unsuspiciously across the fields below and would have been very
cruelly handled indeed, if some one away to the right had not
opened fire too soon.
'It was a queer thrill when these fellows came into sight,' he
confesses; 'and not a bit like manoeuvres. They halted for a
time on the edge of the wood and then came forward in an open
line. They kept walking nearer to us and not looking at us, but
away to the right of us. Even when they began to be hit, and
their officers' whistles woke them up, they didn't seem to see
us. One or two halted to fire, and then they all went back
towards the wood again. They went slowly at first, looking round
at us, then the shelter of the wood seemed to draw them, and they
trotted. I fired rather mechanically and missed, then I fired
again, and then I became earnest to hit something, made sure of
my sighting, and aimed very carefully at a blue back that was
dodging about in the corn. At first I couldn't satisfymyself
and didn't shoot, his movements were so spasmodic and uncertain;
then I think he came to a ditch or some such obstacle and halted
for a moment. "GOT you," I whispered, and pulled the trigger.
'I had the strangest sensations about that man. In the first
instance, when I felt that I had hit him I was irradiated with
joy and pride…
'I sent him spinning. He jumped and threw up his arms…
'Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping
about. Suddenly I felt sick. I hadn't killed him…
'In some way he was disabled and smashed up and yet able to
struggle about. I began to think…
'For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn.
Either he was calling out or some one was shouting to him…
'Then he jumped up-he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with
one last effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still
and never moved again.
'He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him
dead. I had been wanting to do so for some time…'
The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made
for themselves in the woods below. A man was hit in the pit next