IV


The Moving Finger had written off another five minutes or so when police
were suddenly active and sections of the crowd lunged uncomfortably; way
was being made for the passing of an official car—and in the backward
swirl of packed humanity Theodore was thrust one way, Phillida and the
Rathbone boy another. For a moment he saw them as they looked round and
beckoned him; the next, the swirl had carried him yet further—and when
it receded they were lost amongst the drifting, shifting thousands.
After ten minutes more of pushing to and fro in search of them, Theodore
gave up the chase as fruitless and made his way disconsolately to the
Westminster edge of the crowd.... Phillida, if he knew her, would stay
till the stroke of midnight, later if the spirit moved her; and she had
an escort in the Rathbone boy, who, in due time, would see her home....
There was no need to worry—but he cursed the luck of what might be their
last evening.

For a time he lingered uncertainly on the edge of the pushing, shuffling
mass; perhaps would have lingered till the hour struck, if there had not
drifted to his memory the evening at Vallance’s when Holt had declared
this night to be impossible—and when Markham had “made it war.” And,
with that, he remembered also that Markham had rooms near by—in one of
the turnings off Great Smith Street.

There was a light in the room that he knew for Markham’s and it was only
after he had rung that he wondered what had urged him to come. He was
still wondering when the door opened and could think of no better
explanation than “I saw you were up—by your light.”

“If you’d passed five minutes ago,” said Markham, as he led the way
upstairs, “you wouldn’t have seen any light. I’m only just back from the
lab—and dining off biscuits and whisky.”

“Is this making any difference to you, then?” Theodore asked. “I mean,
in the way of work?”

Markham nodded as he poured out his visitor’s whisky. “Yes, I’m serving
the country—the military people have taken me over, lock and stock: with
everyone else, apparently, who has ever done chemical research. I’ve
been pretty hard at it the last few days, ever since the scare was
serious.... And you—are you soldiering?”

“No,” said Theodore and told him of the departmental prohibition.

“It mayn’t make much difference in the end,” said Markham.... “You see,
I was right—the other evening.”

“Yes,” Theodore answered, “I believe that was why I came in. The crowd
to-night reminded me of what you said at Vallance’s—though I don’t think
I believed you then.... How long is it going to last?”

“God knows,” said Markham, with his mouth full of biscuit. “We shall
have had enough of it—both sides—before very long; but it’s one thing to
march into hell with your head up and another to find a way out....
There’s only one thing I’m fairly certain about—I ought to have been
strangled at birth.”

Theodore stared at him, not sure he had caught the last words.

“You ought to——?”

“Yes—you heard me right. If the human animal must fight—and nothing
seems to stop it—it should kill off its scientific men. Stamp out the
race of ’em, forbid it to exist.... Holt was also right that evening,
fundamentally. You can’t combine the practice of science and the art of
war; in the end, it’s one or the other. We, I think, are going to prove
that—very definitely.”

“And when you’ve proved it—we stop fighting?”

Markham shrugged his shoulders, thrust aside his plate and filled his
pipe.

“Curious, the failure to understand the influence on ourselves of what
we make and use. We just make and use and damn the consequence.... When
Lavoisier invented the chemical balance, did he stop to consider the
possibilities of chemical action in combination with outbursts of human
emotion? If he had...!”

In the silence that followed they heard the chiming of
three-quarters—and there flashed inconsequently into Theodore’s memory,
a vision of himself, a small boy with his hand in his mother’s, staring
up, round-eyed, at Big Ben of London—while his mother taught him the
words that were fitted to the chime.

                         Lord—through—this—hour
                         Be—Thou—our—guide,
                         So—by—Thy—power
                         No—foot—shall—slide.

... That, or something like that.... Odd, that he should remember them
now—when for years he had not remembered.... “Lord—through—this—hour——”

He realized suddenly that Markham was speaking—in jerks, between pulls
at his pipe. “... And the same with mechanics—not the engine but the
engine plus humanity. Take young James Watt and his interest in the lid
of a tea-kettle! In France, by the way, they tell the same story of
Papin; but, so far as the rest of us are concerned it doesn’t much
matter who first watched the lid of a kettle with intelligence—the point
is that somebody watched it and saw certain of its latent possibilities.
Only its more immediate possibilities—and we may take it for granted
that amongst those which he did not foresee were the most important. The
industrial system—the drawing of men into crowds where they might feed
the machine and be fed by it—the shrinkage of the world through the use
of mechanical transport. That—the shrinkage—when we first saw it coming,
we took to mean union of peoples and the clasping of distant
hands—forgetting that it also meant the cutting of distant throats....
Yet it might have struck us that we are all potential combatants—and the
only known method of preventing a fight is to keep the combatants apart!
These odd, simple facts that we all of us know—and lose sight of ... the
drawing together of peoples has always meant the clashing of their
interests ... and so new hatreds. Inevitably new hatreds.”

Theodore quoted: “‘All men hate each other naturally’.... You believe
that?”

“Of individuals, no—but of all communities, yes. Is there any form of
the life collective that is capable of love for its fellow—for another
community? Is there any church that will stand aside that another church
may be advantaged? ... You and I are civilized, as man and man; but
collectively we are part of a life whose only standard and motive is
self-interest, its own advantage ... a beast-life, morally. If you
understand that, you understand to-night ... Which demands from us
sacrifices, makes none itself.... That’s as far as we have got in the
mass.”

Through the half-open window came the hum and murmur of the crowd that
waited for the hour.... Theodore stirred restlessly, conscious of the
unseen turning of countless faces to the clock—and aware, through the
murmur, of the frenzied little beating of his watch.... He hesitated to
look at it—and when he drew it out and said “Five minutes more,” his
voice sounded oddly in his ears.

“Five minutes,” said Markham.... He laughed suddenly and pushed the
bottle across the table. “Do you know where we are now—you and I and all
of us? On the crest of the centuries. They’ve carried us a long roll
upwards and now here we are—on top! In five more minutes—three hundred
little seconds—we shall hear the crest curl over.... Meanwhile, have a
drink!”

He checked himself and held up a finger. “Your watch is slow!”

The hum and murmur of the crowd had ceased and through silence unbroken
came the prayer of the Westminster chime.

                         Lord—through—this—hour
                         Be—Thou—our—guide,
                         So—by—Thy—power
                         No—foot—shall—slide.

There was no other sound for the twelve booming strokes of the hour: it
was only as the last beat quivered into silence that there broke the
moving thunder of a multitude.

“Over!” said Markham. “Hear it crash?... Well, here’s to the
centuries—after all, they did the best they knew for us!”




                                   V


The war-footing arrangements of the Distribution Office included a
system of food control involving local supervision; hence provincial
centres came suddenly into being, and to one of these—at York—Theodore
Savage was dispatched at little more than an hour’s notice on the
morning after war was declared. He telephoned Phillida and they met at
King’s Cross and had ten hurried minutes on the platform; she was still
eager and excited, bubbling over with the impulse to action—was hoping
to start training for hospital work—had been promised an opening—she
would tell him all about it when she wrote. Her excitement took the
bitterness out of the parting—perhaps, in her need to give and serve,
she was even proud that the sacrifice of parting was demanded of her....
The last he saw of her was a smiling face and a cheery little wave of
the hand.

He made the journey to York with a carriageful of friendly and talkative
folk who, in normal days, would have been strangers to him and to each
other; as it was, they exchanged newspapers and optimistic views and
grew suddenly near to each other in their common interest and
resentment.... That was what war meant in those first stirring
days—friendliness, good comradeship, the desire to give and serve, the
thrill of unwonted excitement.... Looking back from after years it
seemed to him that mankind, in those days, was finer and more gracious
than he had ever known it—than he would ever know it again.

                  *       *       *       *       *

The first excitement over, he lived somewhat tediously at York between
his office and dingily respectable lodgings; discovering very swiftly
that, so far as he, Theodore Savage, was concerned, a state of
hostilities meant the reverse of alarums and excursions. For him it was
the strictest of official routine and the multiplication of formalities.
His hours of liberty were fewer than in London, his duties more
tiresome, his chief less easy to get on with; there was frequent
overtime, and leave—which meant Phillida—was not even a distant
possibility. For all his honest desire of service he was soon frankly
bored by his work; its atmosphere of minute regularity and insistent
detail was out of keeping with the tremor and uncertainty of war, and
there was something æsthetically wrong about a fussy process of
docketing and checking while nations were at death grips and the fate of
a world in the balance.... His one personal satisfaction was the town,
York itself—the walls, the Bars, and above all the Minster; he lodged
near the Minster, could see it from his window, and its enduring dignity
was a daily relief alike from the feverish perusal of war news, his
landlady’s colour-scheme and taste in furniture and the fidgety trifling
of the office.

In the evening he read many newspapers and wrote long letters to
Phillida; who also, he gathered, had discovered that war might be
tedious. “We haven’t any patients yet,” she scribbled him in one of her
later letters, “but, of course, I’m learning all sorts of things that
will be useful later on, when we do get them. Bandaging and making
beds—and then we attend lectures. It’s rather dull waiting and bandaging
each other for practice—but naturally I’m thankful that there aren’t
enough casualties to go round. Up to now the regular hospitals have
taken all that there are—‘temporaries’ like us don’t get even a look
in.... The news is really splendid, isn’t it?”

There were few casualties in the beginning because curiously little
happened; Western Europe was removed from the actual storm-centre, and
in England, after the first few days of alarmist rumours concerning
invasion by air and sea, the war, for a time, settled down into a
certain amount of precautionary rationing and a daily excitement in
newspaper form—so much so that the timorous well-to-do, who had retired
from London on the outbreak of hostilities, trickled back in increasing
numbers. Hostilities, in the beginning, were local and comparatively
ineffective; one of the results of the limitation of troops and
armaments enforced by the constitution of the League was to give to the
opening moves of the contest a character unprepared and amateurish. The
aim, on either side, was to obtain time for effective preparation, to
organize forces and resources; to train fighters and mobilize chemists,
to convert factories, manufacture explosive and gas, and institute a
system of co-operation between the strategy of far-flung allies. Hence,
in the beginning, the conflict was partial and, as regards its strategy,
hesitating; there were spasms of bloody incident which were deadly
enough in themselves, but neither side cared to engage itself seriously
before it had attained its full strength.... First blood was shed in a
fashion that was frankly mediæval; the heady little democracy whose
failure to establish a claim in the Court of Arbitration had been the
immediate cause of the conflict, flung itself with all its
half-civilized resources upon its neighbour and enemy, the victorious
party to the suit. Between the two little communities was a treasured
feud which had burst out periodically in defiance of courts and
councils; and, control once removed, the border tribesmen gathered for
the fray with all the enthusiasm of their rude forefathers, and raided
each other’s territory in bands armed with knives and revolvers. Their
doings made spirited reading in the press in the early days of the
war—before the generality of newspaper readers had even begun to realize
that battles were no longer won by the shock of troops and that the
root-principle of modern warfare was the use of the enemy civilian
population as an auxiliary destructive force.

Certain states and races grasped the principle sooner than others, being
marked out for early enlightenment by the accident of geographical
position. In those not immediately affected, such as Britain, censorship
on either side ruled out, as impossible for publication, the extent of
the damage inflicted on allies, and the fact that it was not only in
enemy countries that large masses of population, hunted out of cities by
chemical warfare and the terror from above, had become nomadic and
predatory. That, as the struggle grew fiercer, became, inevitably, the
declared aim of the strategist; the exhaustion of the enemy by burdening
him with a starving and nomadic population. War, once a matter of armies
in the field, had resolved itself into an open and thorough-going effort
to ruin enemy industry by setting his people on the run; to destroy
enemy agriculture not only by incendiary devices—the so-called
poison-fire—but by the secondary and even more potent agency of starving
millions driven out to forage as they could.... The process, in the
stilted phrase of the communiqué, was described as “displacement of
population”; and displacement of population, not victory in the field,
became the real military objective.

To the soldier, at least, it was evident very early in the struggle that
the perfection of scientific destruction had entailed, of necessity, the
indirect system of strategy associated with industrial warfare;
displacement of population being no more than a natural development of
the striker’s method of attacking a government by starving the
non-combatant community. The aim of the scientific soldier, like that of
the soldier of the past, was to cut his enemy’s communications, to
intercept and hamper his supplies; and the obvious way to attain that
end was by ruthless disorganization of industrial centres, by letting
loose a famished industrial population to trample and devour his crops.
Manufacturing districts, on either side, were rendered impossible to
work in by making them impossible to live in; and from one crowded
centre after another there streamed out squalid and panic-stricken
herds, devouring the country as they fled. Seeking food, seeking refuge,
turning this way or that; pursued by the terror overhead or imagining
themselves pursued; and breaking, striving to separate, to make
themselves small and invisible.... And, as air-fleets increased in
strength and tactics were perfected—as one centre of industry after
another went down and out—the process of disintegration was rapid. To
the tentative and hesitating opening of the war had succeeded a fury of
widespread destruction; and statesmen, rendered desperate by the sudden
crumbling of their own people—the sudden lapse into primitive
conditions—could hope for salvation only through a quicker process of
“displacement” on the enemy side.

There were reasons, political and military, why the average British
civilian, during the opening phases of the struggle, knew little of
warfare beyond certain food restrictions, the news vouchsafed in the
communiqués and the regulation comments thereon; the enemy forces which
might have brought home to him the meaning of the term “displacement”
were occupied at first with other and nearer antagonists. Hence
continental Europe—and not Europe alone—was spotted with ulcers of
spreading devastation before displacement was practised in England.
There had been stirrings of uneasiness from time to time—of uneasiness
and almost of wonder that the weapon she was using with deadly effect
had not been turned against herself; but at the actual moment of
invasion there was something like public confidence in a speedy end to
the struggle—and the principal public grievance was the shortage and
high price of groceries.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Whatever he forgot and confused in after days—and there were stretches
of time that remained with him only as a blur—Theodore remembered very
clearly every detail and event of the night when disaster began. Young
Hewlett’s voice as he announced disaster—and what he, Theodore, was
doing when the boy rapped on the window. Not only what happened, but his
mood when the interruption came and the causes of it; he had suffered an
irritating day at the office, crossed swords with a self-important chief
and been openly snubbed for his pains. As a result, his landlady’s
evening grumble on the difficulties of war-time housekeeping seemed
longer and less bearable than usual, and he was still out of tune with
the world in general when he sat down to write to Phillida. He
remembered phrases of the letter—never posted—wherein he worked off his
irritation. “I got into trouble to-day through thinking of you when I
was supposed to be occupied with indents. You are responsible, Blessed
Girl, for several most horrible muckers, affecting the service of the
country.... Your empty hospital don’t want you and my empty-headed boss
don’t want me—oh, lady mine, if I could only make him happy by sacking
myself and catching the next train to London!” ... And so on and so
on....

It was late, nearing midnight, when he finished his letter and, for want
of other occupation, turned back to a half-read evening paper; the
communiqués were meagre, but there was a leading article pointing out
the inevitable effect of displacement on the enemy’s resources and
morale, and he waded through its comfortable optimism. As he laid aside
the paper he realized how sleepy he was and rose yawning; he was on his
way to the door, with intent to turn in, when the rapping on the window
halted him. He pulled aside the blind and saw a face against the
glass—pressed close, with a flattened white nose.

“Who’s that?” he asked, pushing up the window. It was Hewlett, one of
his juniors at the office, out of breath with running and excitement.

“I say, Savage, come along out. There’s no end going on—fires, the whole
sky’s red. They’ve come over at last and no mistake. Crashaw and I have
been watching ’em and I thought you’d like to have a look. It’s worth
seeing—we’re just along there, on the wall. Hurry up!”

The boy was dancing with eagerness to get back and Theodore had to run
to keep up with him. He and Crashaw, Hewlett explained in gasps, had
spent the evening in a billiard-room; it was on their way back to their
diggings that they had noticed sudden lights in the sky—sort of
flashes—and gone up on the wall to see better.... No, it wasn’t only
searchlights—you could see them too—sudden flashes and the sky all red.
Fires—to the south. It was the real thing, no doubt about that—and the
only wonder was why they hadn’t come before.... At the head of the steps
leading up to the wall were three or four figures with their heads all
turned one way; and as Hewlett, mounting first, called “Still going on?”
another voice called back, “Rather!”

They stood on the broad, flat wall and watched—in a chill little wind.
The skyline to the south and south-west was reddened with a glow that
flickered and wavered spasmodically and, as Hewlett had said, there were
flashes—the bursting of explosive or star-shells. Also there were
moments when the reddened skyline throbbed suddenly in places, grew
vividly golden and sent out long fiery streamers.... They guessed at
direction and wondered how far off; the wind was blowing sharply from
the north, towards the glow; hence it carried sound away from them and
it was only now and then that they caught more than a mutter and rumble.

As the minutes drew out the news spread through the town and the
watchers on the wall increased in numbers; not only men but women,
roused from bed, who greeted the flares with shrill, excited “Oh’s” and
put ceaseless questions to their men folk. Young Hewlett, at Theodore’s
elbow, gave himself up to frank interest in his first sight of war;
justifying a cheerfulness that amounted to enthusiasm by explaining at
intervals that he guessed our fellows were giving ’em what for and by
this time they were sorry they’d come.... Once a shawled woman demanded
tartly why they didn’t leave off, then, if they’d had enough? Whereat
Hewlett, unable to think of an answer, pretended not to hear and moved
away.

Of his own sensations while he watched from the wall Theodore remembered
little save the bodily sensation of chill; he saw himself standing with
his back to the wind, his shoulders hunched and the collar of his coat
turned up. The murmur of hushed voices remained with him and odd
snatches of fragmentary talk; there was the woman who persisted
uneasily, “But you can’t ’ear ’em coming with these ’ere silent
engines—why, they might be right over us naow!” And the man who answered
her gruffly with “You’d jolly well know if they were!” ... And perpetual
conjecture as to distance and direction of the glow; disputes between
those who asserted that over there was Leeds, and those who scoffed
contemptuously at the idea—arguing that, if Leeds were the centre of
disturbance, the guns would have sounded much nearer.... Petty talk, he
remembered, and plainly enough—but not how much he feared or foresaw. He
must have been anxious, uneasy, or he would not have stood for long
hours in the chill of the wind; but his definite impressions were only
of scattered, for the most part uneducated, talk, of silhouetted figures
that shifted and grouped, of turning his eyes from the lurid skyline to
the shadowy rock that in daylight was the mass of the cathedral.... In
the end sheer craving for warmth drove him in; leaving Hewlett and
Crashaw deaf to his reminder that the office expected them at nine.

                  *       *       *       *       *

With the morning came news and—more plentifully—rumour; also, the wind
having dropped, a persistent thunder from the south. Industrial
Yorkshire, it was clear, was being subjected to that process of human
displacement which, so far, it had looked on as an item in the daily
communiqué; the attack, moreover, was an attack in force, since the
invaders did not find it needful to desist with the passing of darkness.
Rumour, in the absence of official intelligence, invented an enveloping
air-fleet which should cut them off from their base; and meanwhile the
thunder continued....

This much, at least, was shortly official and certain: nearly all rail,
road and postal communication to the south was cut off—trains had ceased
to run Londonwards and ordinary traffic on the highways was held up at
barriers and turned back. Only military cars used the roads—and returned
to add their reports to those brought in by air-scouts; but as a rule
the information they furnished was for official enlightenment only, and
it was not till the refugees arrived in numbers that the full meaning of
displacement was made clear to the ordinary man.

It was after the second red night that the refugees appeared in their
thousands—a horde of human rats driven out of their holes by terror, by
fire and by gas. Whatever their status and possessions in the life of
peace, they came with few exceptions on foot; as roads, like railways,
were a target for the airman, the highway was avoided for the by-path or
the open field, and the flight from every panic-stricken centre could be
traced by long wastes of trampled crops. There were those who, terrified
beyond bearing by the crash of masonry and long trembling underground,
saw safety only in the roofless open, refused to enter houses and
persisted in huddling in fields—unafraid, as yet, of the so-called
poison-fire which had licked up the crops in Holderness and the
corn-growing district round Pontefract.... Leeds, for a day or two, was
hardly touched; but with the outpouring of fugitives from Dewsbury,
Wakefield, Halifax and Bradford, Leeds also began to vomit her terrified
multitudes. A wave of vagrant destitution rushed suddenly and blindly
northward—anywhere away from the ruin of explosive, the flames and death
by suffocation; while authority strove vainly to control and direct the
torrent of overpowering misery.

It was in the early morning that the torrent reached York and rolled
through it; overwhelming the charity, private and public, that at first
made efforts to cope with the rush of misery. Theodore’s room for a time
was given up to a man with bandaged eyes and puffed face whom his wife
had led blindfold from Castleford. The man himself sat dumb and
suffering, breathing heavily through blistered lips; the woman raged
vulgarly against the Government which had neglected to supply them with
gas-masks, to have the place properly defended, to warn people! “The
bloody fools ought to have known what was coming and if her man was
blinded for the rest of his life it was all the fault of this ’ere
Government that never troubled its blasted ’ead as long as it drew its
money.” ... That was in the beginning, before the flood of misery had
swollen so high that even the kindliest shrank from its squalid menace;
and Theodore, because it was the first he heard, remembered her story
when he had forgotten others more piteous.

Before midday there was only one problem for local authority, civil and
military—the disposal of displaced population; that is to say, the
herding of vagrants that could not all be sheltered, that could not all
be fed, that blackened fields, choked streets, drove onward and sank
from exhaustion. The railway line to the north was still clear and, in
obedience to wireless instructions from London, trains packed with
refugees were sent off to the north, with the aim of relieving the
pressure on local resources. Disorganization of transport increased the
difficulty of food supply and even on the first day of panic and
migration the agricultural community were raising a cry of alarm. Blind
terror and hunger between them wrought havoc; fields were trampled and
fugitives were plundering already—would plunder more recklessly
to-morrow.

All day, all night, displaced humanity came stumbling in panic from the
south and south-west; spreading news of the torment it had fled from,
the dead it had left and the worse than dead who still crouched in an
inferno whence they could not summon courage to fly. The railways could
not deal with a tithe of the number who clamoured to be carried to the
north, into safety; by the first evening the town was well-nigh eaten
out, and householders, hardening their hearts against misery, were
bolting themselves in, for fear of misery grown desperate. While out in
the country farmers stabled their live-stock and kept ceaseless watch
against the hungry.

All day the approaches to the station were besieged by those who hoped
for a train; and, on the second night of the invasion, Theodore, sent by
his chief with a message to the military transport officer, fought his
way through a solid crowd on the platform—a crowd excluded from a train
that was packed and struggling with humanity. A crowd that was squalid,
unreasoning and blindly selfish; intent only on flight and safety—and
some of it brutally intent. There were scuffles with porters and
soldiers who refused to open locked doors, angry hootings and wild
swayings backward and forward as the train moved out of the station;
Theodore’s efforts to make his way to the station-master’s office were
held to be indicative of a desire to travel by the next train and he was
buffeted aside without mercy. There was something in the brute mass of
terror that sickened him—a suggestion already of the bestial, the
instinctive, the unhuman.

The transport officer looked up at him with tired, angry eyes and
demanded what the hell he wanted?... Whereat Theodore handed him a
typewritten note from a punctilious chief and explained that they had
tried to get through on the telephone, either to him or the
station-master, but——

“I should rather think not,” said the transport officer rudely. “We’ve
both of us got more important things to worry about than little
Distribution people. The telephone clerk did bring me some idiotic
message or other, but I told him I didn’t want to hear it.”

He glanced at the typewritten note—then glared at it—and went off into a
cackle of laughter; which finally tailed into blasphemy coupled with
obscene abuse.

“Seen this?” he asked when he had sworn himself out. “Well, at any rate
you know what it’s about. The —— has sent for particulars of to-morrow’s
refugee train service—wants to know the number and capacity of trains to
be dispatched to Newcastle-on-Tyne. Wants to enter it in duplicate, I
suppose—and make lots and lots and lots of carbon copies. God in
Heaven!”—and again he sputtered into blasphemy.... “Well, I needn’t
bother to write down the answer; even if you’ve no more sense than he
has, you’ll be able to remember it all right. It’s nil to both
questions; nil trains to Newcastle, nil capacity. So that’s that!...
What’s more—if it’s any satisfaction to your darned-fool boss to know
it—we haven’t been sending any trains to Newcastle all day.”

“But I thought,” began Theodore—wondering if the man were drunk? He was,
more than slightly—having fought for two days with panic-stricken devils
and helped himself through with much whisky; but, drunk or not, he was
sure of his facts and rapped them out with authority.

“Not to Newcastle. The first two or three got as far as Darlington—this
morning. There they were pulled up. Then it was Northallerton—now we
send ’em off to Thirsk and leave the people there to deal with ’em. You
bet they’ll send ’em further if they can—you don’t suppose they want to
be eaten out, any more than we do. But, for all I know, they’re getting
’em in from the other side.”

“The other side?” Theodore repeated. “What do you mean?” Whereat the
transport officer, grown suddenly uncommunicative, leaned back in his
chair and whistled.

“That’s all I can tell you,” he vouchsafed at length. “Trains haven’t
run beyond Darlington since yesterday. I conclude H.Q. knows the reason,
but they haven’t imparted it to me—I’ve only had my orders. It isn’t our
business if the trains get stopped so long as we send ’em off—and we’re
sending ’em and asking no questions.”

“Do you mean,” Theodore stammered, “that—this—is going on up north?”

“What do you think?” said the transport officer. “It’s the usual trick,
isn’t it?... Start ’em running from two sides at once—don’t let ’em
settle, send ’em backwards and forwards, keep ’em going!... We’ve played
it often enough on them—now we’re getting a bit of our own back....
However, I’ve no official information. You know just as much as I do.”

“But,” Theodore persisted, “the people coming through from the north.
What do they say—they must know?”

“There aren’t any people coming through,” said the other grimly.
“Military order since this morning—no passenger traffic from the north
runs this side of Thirsk. We’ve got enough of our own, haven’t we?...
All I say is—God help Thirsk and especially God help the
station-master!”

He straightened himself suddenly and grabbed at the papers on his table.

“Now, you’ve got what the damn fool sent you for—and I’m trying to make
out my report.”

                  *       *       *       *       *

As Theodore fought his way out of the station and the crowd that seethed
round it, he had an intolerable sense of being imprisoned between two
fires. If he could see far enough to the north—to Durham and the
Tyneside—there would be another hot, throbbing horizon and another
stream of human destitution pouring lamentably into the night.... And,
between the two fires, the two streams were meeting—turning back upon
themselves, intermingling ... in blind and agonized obedience to the
order to “keep ’em going!”... What happened when a train was halted by
signal and the thronged misery inside it learned that here, without
forethought or provision made, its flight must come to an end? At
Thirsk, Northallerton, by the wayside, anywhere, in darkness?... A thin
sweep of rain was driving down the street, and he fancied wretched
voices calling through darkness, through rain. Asking what, in God’s
name, was to become of them and where, in God’s name, they were to
go?... And the overworked officials who could give no answer, seeking
only to be rid of the massed and dreadful helplessness that cumbered the
ground on which it trod!... Displacement of population—the daily,
stilted phrase—had become to him a raw and livid fact and he stood
amazed at the limits of his own imagination. Day after day he had read
the phrase, been familiar with it; yet, so far, the horror had been
words to him. Now the daily, stilted phrase was translated,
comprehensible: “Don’t let ’em settle—keep ’em going.”

                  *       *       *       *       *

Back at the office, he discovered that his errand to the station had
been superfluous; his chief, the man of precedent, order and many carbon
copies, was staring, haggard and bewildered, at a typewritten document
signed by the military commandant.... And obtaining, incidentally, his
first glimpse into a world till now unthinkable—where precedent was not,
where reference was useless and order had ceased to exist.
