to Barnet, and began cursing and crying out in a violent rage.
Barnet crawled along the ditch to him and found him in great
pain, covered with blood, frantic with indignation, and with the
half of his right hand smashed to a pulp. 'Look at this,' he
kept repeating, hugging it and then extending it. 'Damned
foolery! Damned foolery! My right hand, sir! My right hand!'
For some time Barnet could do nothing with him. The man was
consumed by his tortured realisation of the evil silliness of
war, the realisation which had come upon him in a flash with the
bullet that had destroyed his skill and use as an artificer for
ever. He was looking at the vestiges with a horror that made him
impenetrable to any other idea. At last the poor wretch let
Barnet tie up his bleeding stump and help him along the ditch
that conducted him deviously out of range…
When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water,
and all day long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst.
For food they had chocolate and bread.
'At first,' he says, 'I was extraordinarily excited by my baptism
of fire. Then as the heat of the day came on I experienced an
enormous tedium and discomfort. The flies became extremely
troublesome, and my little grave of a rifle pit was invaded by
ants. I could not get up or move about, for some one in the trees
had got a mark on me. I kept thinking of the dead Prussian down
among the corn, and of the bitter outcries of my own man. Damned
foolery! It WAS damned foolery. But who was to blame? How had
we got to this?…
'Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with
dynamite bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and
suddenly dived down over beyond the trees.
' "From Holland to the Alps this day," I thought, "there must be
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