among the corn and of the bitter outcries of my own men. Damned foolery! It was damned foolery. But who was to blame? How had we got to this?

"Early in the afternoon an aëroplane 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 I remember that the phrase changed itself in my mind to 'Presently mankind will wake up.'

THE BEGINNING OF THE SPIRITUAL
REBELLION AGAINST WAR

"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. Were n'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 thunder of the guns that were opening fire at long range upon Namur."

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 realize 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 dike roads, and the countless windmills of the Dutch levels. In those days there was unbroken land from Alkmaar and Leyden to the Dollart. Three great provinces, South Holland, North Holland, and ZuyderZee-land, reclaimed at various times between the early tenth century and 1945, and all many feet below the level of the waves outside the dikes, spread out their lush polders to the Northern sun and sustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of laws and custom and tradition insured a perpetual vigilance and a perpetual defense 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 were the admiration of the world.

IN PEACEFUL HOLLAND BEFORE ITS
DESTRUCTION

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 colored automobiles of peasants, the hues of the innumerable motor-barges in the canal vied with the eventfulness of the road

ways; and everywhere in solitary steadings, amid 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 passive in the struggle of the world powers. And everywhere along the roads taken by the marching armies clustered groups and crowds of impartially observant spectators, women and children in peculiar white caps and oldfashioned sabots, and elderly, clean-shaven men quietly thoughtful over their long pipes. They had no fear of their invaders; the days when "soldiering" meant bands of licentious looters had long since passed away.

This watcher among the clouds would have seen a great distribution of khakiuniformed men and khaki-painted material over the whole of the sunken area of Holland. He would have marked the long trains, packed with men or piled with great guns and war material, creeping slowly, alert for train-wreckers, along the north-going lines; he would have seen the Schelde and the Rhine choked with shipping and pouring out still more men and still more material; he would have noticed halts and provisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling caterpillars of cavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons, the huge beetles of great guns, crawling under the poplars along the dikes and roads northward, along ways lined by the neutral, unmolested, ambiguously observant Dutch. All the barges and shipping upon the canals had been requisitioned for transport. In that clear, bright, warm weather it would all have looked from above like some extravagant festival of animated toys.

As the sun sank westward, the spectacle must have become a little indistinct because of a golden haze; everything must have become warmer and more glowing, and, because of the lengthening of the shadows, more manifestly in relief. The shadows of the tall churches grew longer and longer until they touched the horizon and mingled in the general shadow; and

then, slow and soft and wrapping the world in fold after fold of deepening blue, came the night-the night at first obscurely simple, and then with faint points here and there, and then jeweled in darkling splendor with a hundred thousand lights. Out of that mingling of darkness and ambiguous glares the noise of an unceasing activity would have arisen the louder and plainer now because there was no longer any distraction of sight.

It may be that the watcher drifting in the pellucid gulf beneath the stars watched all through the night, it may be that he dozed; but if he gave way to so natural a proclivity, assuredly on the fourth night of the great flank march he was aroused, for that was the night of the battle in the air that decided the fate of Holland.

THE FIRST BATTLE IN THE CLOUDS

THE aëroplanes were fighting at last, and suddenly about him, above and below, with cries and uproar rushing out of the four quarters of heaven, striking, plunging, oversetting, soaring to the zenith, and dropping to the ground, they came to assail or defend the myriads below.

Secretly the central European leader had gathered his flying-machines together, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a handful of ten thousand knives over the low country. And amid that swarming flight were five that drove headlong for the sea walls of Holland, carrying atomic bombs. From north and west and south the allied aëroplanes rose in response, and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last flights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?

And then athwart this whirling rush of aërial duels that swooped and locked and dropped in the void between the lamplights and the stars, came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and first one and then a score of lengthening, fiery serpents plunged hungrily down upon the Dutchmen's dikes, and struck between

land and sea, and flared up again in enormous columns of glare and crimsoned smoke and steam.

And suddenly out of the darkness leaped the little land, with its spires and trees, aghast with terror, still, and distinct, and the sea, tumbled with anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood.

Over the populous country below went a strange, multitudinous crying and a little flurry of alarm-bells.

Like things that suddenly know themselves to be wicked, the surviving aëroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky.

Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might quench the waves came roaring in upon the land.

VI

"WE had cursed our luck," says Barnet, "that we could not get to our quarters at Alkmaar that night. There, we were told, were provisions, tobacco, and everything for which we craved. But the main canal from Zaandam and Amsterdam was hopelessly jammed with craft, and we were glad of a chance opening that enabled us to get out of the main column and lie up in a kind of little harbor, very much neglected and weed-grown, before a deserted house. We broke into this, and found some herrings in a barrel, a heap of cheeses, and stone bottles of gin in the ceilar; and with this I cheered my starving men. We made fires and toasted the cheese and grilled our herrings. None of us had slept for nearly forty hours, and I determined to stay in this refuge until dawn, and then, if the traffic was still choked, leave the barge, and march the rest of the way into Alkmaar.

"This place we had got into was perhaps a hundred yards from the canal, and underneath a little brick bridge we could still see the flotilla and hear the voices of the soldiers. Presently five or six other barges came through and lay up in the mooring near us, and with two of these, full of men of the Antrim regiment, I shared my find of provisions. In return we got tobacco. A large expanse of water spread to the westward of us, and beyond were a cluster of roofs and one or two church towers. The barge was rather cramped for so many men, and I let several squads, thirty or forty perhaps alto

gether, bivouac on the bank. I did not let them go into the house, on account of the furniture, and I left a note of indebtedness for the food we had taken. We were particularly glad of our tobacco and fires because of the numerous mosquitos that rose about us.

"The gate of the house from which we had provisioned ourselves was adorned with the legend 'Vreugde bij Vrede' ('joy with peace'), and it bore every mark of the busy retirement of a comfort-loving proprietor. I went along his garden, which was gay and delightful with big bushes of rose and sweetbrier, to a quaint little summer-house, and there I sat and watched the men in groups cooking and squatting along the bank. The sun was setting in a nearly cloudless sky.

"For the last two weeks I had been a wholly occupied man, intent only upon obeying the orders that came down to me. All through this time I had been working to the very limit of my mental and physical faculties, and my only moments of rest had been devoted to snatches of sleep. Now came this rare, unexpected interlude, and I could look detachedly upon what I was doing, and feel something of its vast wonderfulness. I was irradiated with affection for the men of my company, and with admiration at their cheerful acquiescence in the subordination and needs of our position. I watched their proceedings and heard their cheerful voices. How willing those men were! How ready to accept leadership and forget themselves in collective ends! I thought how manfully they had gone through all the strains and toil of the last two weeks, how they had toughened and shaken down to comradeship together, and how much sweetness there is, after all, in our foolish human blood. For they were just one casual sample of the species; their patience and readiness lay, as the energy of the atom had lain, still waiting to be properly utilized. Again it came to me with overpowering force that the supreme need of our race is leading, that the supreme task is to discover leading, to forget one's self in realizing the collective purpose of the race. Once more I saw life plain.

"That night Holland seemed all sky. There was just a little black lower rim to things, a steeple, perhaps, or a line of

poplars, and then the great hemisphere swept over us. And at first the sky was empty. Yet my uneasiness referred itself in some vague way to the sky. "I was melancholy. I found something strangely sorrowful and submissive. in the sleepers all about me, those men who had marched so far, who had left all the established texture of their lives behind them to come upon this mad campaign-this campaign that signified nothing and consumed everything, this mere fever of fighting. I saw how little and feeble is the life of man, a thing of chances, preposterously unable to find the will to realize even the most timid of its dreams. And I wondered if always it I would be so, if man was a doomed animal who to the last days of his time would never take hold of fate and change it to his will. Always, it may be, he will remain kindly, but jealous; desirous, but discursive; able and unwisely impulsive, until Saturn, who begot him, shall devour him in his turn.

"I was roused by the sudden realization of the presence of a squadron of aëroplanes far away to the northeast and very high. They looked like little black dashes against the deep midnight blue. I remember that I looked up at them at first rather idly, as one might notice a flight of birds. Then I perceived that they were only the extreme wing of a great fleet that was very swiftly advancing in a long line from the direction of the frontier, and my attention tightened.

"Directly I saw that fleet, I was astonished not to have seen it before.

"I stood up softly, undesirous of disturbing my companions, but with my heart beating now rather more rapidly with surprise and excitement. I strained my ears for any sound of guns along our front. Almost instinctively I turned about for protection to the south and west, and peered. And then I saw coming as fast, and much nearer to me, as if they had sprung out of the darkness, three banks of aeroplanes, a group of squadrons very high, a main body at a height perhaps of one or two thousand feet, and a doubtful number flying low and very indistinct. The middle ones were so thick they kept putting out groups of stars. And I realized that, after all, there was to be fighting in the air.

"There was something extraordinarily strange in this swift, noiseless convergence of nearly invisible combatants above the sleeping hosts. Every one about me was still unaware; there was no sign as yet of any agitation among the shipping on the main canal, the whole course of which, dotted with unsuspicious lights and fringed with fires, must have been clearly perceptible from above. Then a long way off toward Alkmaar I heard bugles, and after that shots, and then a wild clamor of bells. I determined to let my men sleep on for as long as they could.

THE SKY BATTLE SEEN FROM THE LAND

"THE battle was joined with the swiftness of dreaming. I do not think it can have been five minutes from the moment when I first became aware of the central European air fleet to the contact of the two forces. I saw it quite plainly in silhouette against the luminous blue of the Northern sky. The allied aeroplanesthey were mostly French-came pouring down like a fierce shower upon the middle of the central European fleet. They looked exactly like a coarser sort of rain. There was a crackling sound-the first sound I heard; it reminded one of the aurora borealis, and I suppose it was an interchange of rifle-shots. There were flashes like summer lightning, and then all the sky became a whirling confusion of battle that was still largely noiseless. Some of the central European aëroplanes were certainly charged and overset; others seemed to collapse and fall, and then flare out with so bright a light that it took the edge off one's vision and made the rest of the battle disappear as though it had been snatched back out of sight.

THE SWEEPING AWAY OF HOLLAND

"AND then while I still peered, and tried to shade those flames from my eyes with my hand, and while the men about me were beginning to stir, the atomic bombs were thrown at the dikes. They made a mighty thunder in the air, and fell like Lucifer in the picture, leaving a flaring trail in the sky. The night, which had been pellucid and detailed and eventful, seemed to vanish, to be replaced abruptly by a black background to these tremendous pillars of fire.

"Hard upon the sound of them came a

roaring wind, and the sky was filled with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds. There was something discontinuous in this impact. At one moment I was a lonely watcher in a sleeping world; the next saw every one about me afoot, the whole world awake and amazed.

"And then the wind had struck me a buffet, taken my helmet, and swept aside the summer-house of 'Vreugde bij Vrede' as a scythe sweeps away grass. I saw the bombs fall, and then watched a great crimson flare leap responsive to each impact, and mountainous masses of red-lit steam and flying fragments clamber up toward the zenith. Against the glare I saw the country-side for miles standing black and clear, churches, trees, chimneys. And suddenly I understood. The central Europeans had burst the dikes. Those flares meant the bursting of the dikes, and in a little while the sea-water would be upon us."

He

He goes on to tell with a certain prolixity of the steps he took—and, all things considered, they were very intelligent steps to meet this amazing crisis. got his men aboard, and hailed the adjacent barges; he got the man who acted as barge engineer at his post and the engines working; he cast loose from his moorings. Then he bethought himself of food, and contrived to land five men, get in a few dozen cheeses, and ship his men again before the inundation reached them.

He is reasonably proud of this piece of coolness. His idea was to take the water head-on, and with his engines full-speed ahead. And all the while he was thanking Heaven he was not in the jam of traffic in the main canal. He rather, I think, overestimated the probable rush of waters; he dreaded being swept away, he explains, and smashed against houses and

trees.

He does not give any estimate of the time it took between the bursting of the dike and the arrival of the waters, but it was probably an interval of about twenty minutes or half an hour. He was working now in darkness, save for the light of his lantern, and in a great wind. He hung out head and stern lights.

Whirling torrents of steam were pouring up from the advancing waters, which had rushed, it must be remembered, through nearly incandescent gaps in the

sea defenses, and this vast uprush of vapor soon altogether veiled the flaring centers of explosion.

"The waters came at last, an advancing cascade. It was like a broad roller sweeping across the country. It came with a deep roaring sound. I had expected a Niagara, but the total fall of the front could not have been much more than twelve feet. Our barge hesitated for a moment, took a dose over her bows, and then lifted. I signaled for full-speed ahead, and brought her head up-stream, and held on like grim death to keep her there.

"There was a wind about as strong as the flood, and I found we were pounding against every conceivable buoyant object that had been between us and the sea. The only light in the world now came from our lamps, the steam became impenetrable at a score of yards from the boat, and the roar of the wind and water cut us off from all remoter sounds. The black, shining waters swirled by, coming into the light of our lamps out of an ebony blackness, and vanishing again into impenetrable black. And on the waters came shapes, came things, that flashed upon us for a moment, now a half-submerged boat, now a cow, now a huge fragment of a house's timberings, now a muddle of packing-cases and scaffolding. The things clapped into sight like something shown by the opening of a shutter, and then bumped shatteringly against us or rushed by us. Once I saw very clearly a man's white face.

"All the while a group of laboring, half-submerged trees remained ahead of us, drawing very slowly nearer. I steered a course to avoid them. They seemed to gesticulate a frantic despair against the black steam clouds behind. Once a great branch detached itself and tore shuddering by me. We did, on the whole, make headway. The last I saw of 'Vreugde bij Vrede' before the night swallowed it was almost dead astern of us."

VII

MORNING found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had been badly strained, and his men were pumping or baling in relays. He had got about a dozen halfdrowned people aboard whose boat had capsized near him, and he had three other