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The War in the Air Chapter 11 Parts 1-3 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter eleven, Parts one, two, and three of War in
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  Speaker 1: the Air. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings
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  Speaker 1: are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer,
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  Speaker 1: please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by Karina Schultz. War
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  Speaker 1: in the Air by H. G. Wells, Chapter eleven, Parts one, two,
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  Speaker 1: and three. Chapter eleven, The Great Collapse, Part one, and
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  Speaker 1: now the whole fabric of civilization was bending and giving,
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  Speaker 1: and dropping to pieces and melting in the furnace of
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  Speaker 1: the war. The stages of the swift and universal collapse
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  Speaker 1: of the financial and scientific civilization with which the twentieth
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  Speaker 1: century opened followed each other very swiftly, so swiftly that
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  Speaker 1: upon the foreshortened page of history they seem altogether to overlap.
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  Speaker 1: To begin with, one sees the world nearly at a
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  Speaker 1: maximum wealth and prosperity to its inhabitants. Indeed, it seemed
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  Speaker 1: also at a maximum of security. When now in retrospect,
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  Speaker 1: the thoughtful observer surveys the intellectual history of this time,
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  Speaker 1: when one reads its surviving fragments of literature, its scraps
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  Speaker 1: of political oratory, the few small voices that chance has
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  Speaker 1: selected out of a thousand million utterances to speak to
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  Speaker 1: later days. The most striking thing of all this web
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  Speaker 1: of wisdom and error is surely that hallucination of security.
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  Speaker 1: To men living in our present world state orderly, scientific
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  Speaker 1: and secured, nothing seemed so precarious, so giddily dangerous, as
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  Speaker 1: the fabric of the social order with which the men
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  Speaker 1: of the opening of the twentieth century were content to us.
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  Speaker 1: It seems that every institution and relationship was the fruit
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  Speaker 1: of haphazard and tradition, and the manifest sport of chance.
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  Speaker 1: Their laws each made for some separate occasion, and having
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  Speaker 1: no relation to any future needs. Their customdems illogical, their
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  Speaker 1: education aimless and wasteful. Their method of economic exploitation indeed
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  Speaker 1: impresses a trained and informed mind as the most frantic
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  Speaker 1: and destructive scramble. It is possible to conceive their credit
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  Speaker 1: and monetary system resting on an unsubstantial tradition of the
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  Speaker 1: worthiness of gold seems a thing almost fantastically unstable. And
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  Speaker 1: they lived in planless cities, for the most part dangerously congested.
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  Speaker 1: Their rails and roads and population were distributed over the
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  Speaker 1: earth in the wanton confusion. Ten thousand irrelevant considerations had made.
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  Speaker 1: Yet they thought confidently that this was a secure and permanent,
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  Speaker 1: progressive system, and on the strength of some three hundred
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  Speaker 1: years of change and irregular improvement, answered the doubter, with
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  Speaker 1: things have always gone well. We'll worry through. But when
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  Speaker 1: we contrast the state of man in the opening of
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  Speaker 1: the twentieth century with the condition of any previous period
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  Speaker 1: in his history, then perhaps, Alps, we may begin to
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  Speaker 1: understand something of that blind confidence. It was not so
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  Speaker 1: much a reasoned confidence as the inevitable consequence of sustained
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  Speaker 1: good fortune. By such standards as they possessed, things had
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  Speaker 1: gone amazingly well for them. It is scarcely an exaggeration
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  Speaker 1: to say that, for the first time in history, whole
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  Speaker 1: populations found themselves regularly supplied with more than enough to eat.
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  Speaker 1: And the vital statistics of the time witness to an
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  Speaker 1: amelioration of hygienic conditions rapid beyond all precedent, and to
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  Speaker 1: a vast development of intelligence and ability in all the
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  Speaker 1: arts that make life wholesome. The level and quality of
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  Speaker 1: the average education had risen tremendously, and at the dawn
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  Speaker 1: of the twentieth century, comparatively few people in Western Europe
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  Speaker 1: or America were unable to read or write. Never before
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  Speaker 1: had there been such reading masses. There was wide social security.
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  Speaker 1: A common man might travel safely over three quarters of
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  Speaker 1: the habital globe, could go round the Earth at a
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  Speaker 1: cost of less than the annual earnings of a skilled artisan,
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  Speaker 1: compared with the liberality and comfort of the ordinary life
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  Speaker 1: of the time. The order of the Roman Empire under
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  Speaker 1: the Antonines was local and limited, and every year, every
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  Speaker 1: month came some new increment to human achievement. A new country,
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  Speaker 1: opened up, new mines, new scientific discoveries, a new machine.
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  Speaker 1: For those three hundred years, indeed, the movement of the
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  Speaker 1: world seemed wholly beneficial to mankind. Men said, indeed, that
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  Speaker 1: moral organization was not keeping pace with physical progress, but
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  Speaker 1: few attached any meaning to these phrases, the understanding of
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  Speaker 1: which lies at the basis of our present safety. Sustaining
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  Speaker 1: and constructive forces did, indeed, for a time, more than
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  Speaker 1: balance the maligned drift of chance and the natural ignorance, prejudice,
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  Speaker 1: blind passion, and wasteful self seeking of mankind. The accidental
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  Speaker 1: balance on the side of progress was far slighter, and
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  Speaker 1: infinitely more complex and delicate in its adjustments than the
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  Speaker 1: people of that time suspected, but that did not alter
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  Speaker 1: the fact that it was an effective balance. They did
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  Speaker 1: not realize that this age of relative good fortune was
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  Speaker 1: an age of immense but temporary opportunity for their kind.
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  Speaker 1: They complacently assumed a necessary progress toward which they had
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  Speaker 1: no moral responsibility. They did not realize that this security
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  Speaker 1: of progress was a thing still to be won or lost,
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  Speaker 1: and that the time to win it was a time
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  Speaker 1: that had passed. They went about their affairs energetically enough,
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  Speaker 1: and yet with a curious idleness towards those threatening things.
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  Speaker 1: No one troubled over the real dangers of mankind. They
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  Speaker 1: saw their armies and navies grow larger and more portentious,
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  Speaker 1: some of their ironclads, at the last cost as much
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  Speaker 1: as the whole annual expenditure upon advanced education. They accumulated
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  Speaker 1: explosives and the machinery of destruction. They allowed their national
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  Speaker 1: traditions and jealousies to accumulate. They contemplated a steady enhancement
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  Speaker 1: of race hostility as the races drew closer, without concern
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  Speaker 1: or understanding, and they permitted the growth in their midst
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  Speaker 1: of an evil spirited press mercenary and unscrupulous, incapable of good,
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  Speaker 1: and powerful for evil. The state had practically no control
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  Speaker 1: over the press at all. Quite heedlessly, they allowed this
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  Speaker 1: torch paper to lie at the door of their war
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  Speaker 1: magazine for any spark to fire. The precedents of history
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  Speaker 1: were all one tale of the collapse of civilizations. The
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  Speaker 1: dangers of the time were manifest. One is incredulous now
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  Speaker 1: to believe they could not see. Could mankind have prevented
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  Speaker 1: this disaster of the war in the air? An idle
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  Speaker 1: question that as idle as to ask. Could mankind have
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  Speaker 1: prevented the decay that turned to Syria and Babylon to
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  Speaker 1: empty deserts, or the slow decline and fall, the gradual
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  Speaker 1: social disorganization, phase by phase that closed the chapter of
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  Speaker 1: the Empire of the West. They could not because they
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  Speaker 1: did not they had not the will to arrest it.
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  Speaker 1: What mankind could achieve with a different will is a
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  Speaker 1: speculation as idle as it is magnificent. And this was
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  Speaker 1: no slow decadence that came to the Europeanized world. Those
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  Speaker 1: other civilizations rotted and crumbled down. The Europeanized civilization was,
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  Speaker 1: as it were, blown up within the space of five years,
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  Speaker 1: it was altogether disintegrated and destroyed up to the very
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  Speaker 1: eve of the war. In the air, one sees a
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  Speaker 1: spacious spectacle of incessant advance, a world wide security, enormous
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  Speaker 1: areas with highly organized industry and settled populations, gigantic cities
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  Speaker 1: spreading gigantically, the seas and oceans dotted with shipping, the
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  Speaker 1: land netted with rails and open ways. Then suddenly the
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  Speaker 1: German air fleets sweep across the scene, and we are
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  Speaker 1: in the beginning of the end. Part two. This story
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  Speaker 1: has already told of the swift rush upon New York,
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  Speaker 1: of the first German air fleet, and of the wild,
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  Speaker 1: inevitable orgy of inconclusive destruction that ensued behind it. A
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  Speaker 1: second air fleet was already swelling at its gasometers when
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  Speaker 1: England and France, and Spain and Italy showed their hands.
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  Speaker 1: None of these countries had prepared for aeronautic warfare on
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  Speaker 1: the magnificent scale of the Germans. But each guarded secrets,
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  Speaker 1: each in a measure, was making ready, and a common
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  Speaker 1: dread of German vigor and that aggressive spirit Prince Carl
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  Speaker 1: Albert embodied had long been drawing these powers together in
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  Speaker 1: secret anticipation of some such attack. This rendered their prompt
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  Speaker 1: co operation possible, and they certainly co operated promptly. The
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  Speaker 1: second aerial power in Europe at this time was France.
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  Speaker 1: The British, nervous for their Asiatic empire and sensible of
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  Speaker 1: the immense moral effect of the airship upon half educated populations,
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  Speaker 1: had placed their aeronautic parks in North India and were
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  Speaker 1: able to play but a subordinate part in the European conflict. Still,
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  Speaker 1: even in England, they had nine or ten big navigables,
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  Speaker 1: twenty or thirty smaller ones, and a variety of experimental aeroplanes.
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  Speaker 1: Before the fleet of Prince Carl Albert had crossed England.
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  Speaker 1: While Bert was still surveying Manchester in bird's eye view,
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  Speaker 1: the diplomatic exchanges were going on that led to an
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  Speaker 1: attack upon Germany. A heterogeneous collection of navigable balloons of
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  Speaker 1: all sizes and types gathered over the Bernese Oberland, crushed
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  Speaker 1: and burnt the twenty five Swiss airships that unexpectedly resisted
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  Speaker 1: this concentration in the Battle of the Alps, and then
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  Speaker 1: leaving the Alpine glaciers and valleys strewn with strange wreckage
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  Speaker 1: divided into two fleets and set itself to terrorize Berlin
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  Speaker 1: and destroy the Franconian Park, seeking to do this before
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  Speaker 1: the second air fleet could be inflated. Both over Berlin
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  Speaker 1: and Franconia. The assailants, with their modern explosives, effected great
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  Speaker 1: damage before they were driven off. In Franconia, twelve fully
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  Speaker 1: distended and five partially filled and manned giants were able
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  Speaker 1: to make head against and at last, with the help
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  Speaker 1: of a squadron of drachnflagger from Hamburg, defeat and pursue
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  Speaker 1: the attack and to relieve Berlin. And the Germans were
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  Speaker 1: straining every nerve to get an overwhelming fleet in the
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  Speaker 1: air and were already raiding London and Paris when the
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  Speaker 1: advanced fleets from the Asiatic air parks, the first intimation
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  Speaker 1: of a new factor in the conflict were reported from
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  Speaker 1: Burma and Armenia. Already the whole financial fabric of the
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  Speaker 1: world was staggering when that occurred, with the destruction of
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  Speaker 1: the American fleet in the North Atlantic and the Smashing
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  Speaker 1: conflict that ended the naval existence of Germany in the
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  Speaker 1: North Sea, with the burning and wrecking of billions of
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  Speaker 1: pounds worth of property in the Four Cardinals city the world,
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  Speaker 1: the fact of the hopeless costliness of war came home
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  Speaker 1: for the first time, came like a blow in the
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  Speaker 1: face to the consciousness of mankind. Credit went down in
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  Speaker 1: a wild whirl of selling everywhere appeared a phenomenon that
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  Speaker 1: had already, in a mild degree, manifested itself in preceding
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  Speaker 1: periods of panic, a desire to secure and hoard gold
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  Speaker 1: before prices reached bottom. But now it spread like wildfire.
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  Speaker 1: It became universal. Above was visible conflict and destruction. Below,
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  Speaker 1: something was happening far more deadly and incurable to the
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  Speaker 1: flimsy fabric of finance and commercialism in which men had
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  Speaker 1: so blindly put their trust. As the airships fought above,
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  Speaker 1: the visible gold supply of the world vanished below, an
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  Speaker 1: epidemic of private cornering and universal distrust swept the world.
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  Speaker 1: In a few weeks, Money, except for depreciated paper, vanished
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  Speaker 1: into vaults, into holes, into the walls of houses, into
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  Speaker 1: ten million hiding places. Money vanished, and at its disappearance,
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  Speaker 1: trade and industry came to an end. The economic world
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  Speaker 1: staggered and fell dead. It was like the stroke of
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  Speaker 1: some disease. It was like the water vanishing out of
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  Speaker 1: the blood of a living creature. It was a sudden,
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  Speaker 1: universal coagulation of intercourse. And as the credit system that
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  Speaker 1: had been the living fortress of the scientific civilization reeled
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  Speaker 1: and fell upon the millions it had held together in
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  Speaker 1: economic relationship. As these people, perplexed and helpless, faced this
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  Speaker 1: marvel of credit utterly destroyed, the airships of Asia, countless
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  Speaker 1: and relentless, poured across the heavens, swooped eastward to America
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  Speaker 1: and westward to Europe. The page of history becomes a
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  Speaker 1: long crescendo of battle. The main body of the British
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  Speaker 1: Indian air fleet perished upon a pyre of blazing antagonists
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  Speaker 1: in Burma. The Germans were scattered in the Great Battle
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  Speaker 1: of the Carpathians. The vast eninsula of India burst into
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  Speaker 1: insurrection and civil war. From end to end, and from
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  Speaker 1: Gobi to Morocco, rose the standards of the Jihad. For
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  Speaker 1: some weeks of warfare and destruction, it seemed as though
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  Speaker 1: the Confederation of Eastern Asia must needs conquer the world.
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  Speaker 1: And then the jury built modern civilization of China too
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  Speaker 1: gave way under the strain The teeming and peaceful population
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  Speaker 1: of China had been westernized during the opening years of
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  Speaker 1: the twentieth century with the deepest resentment and reluctance. They
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  Speaker 1: had been dragooned and disciplined under Japanese and European influence
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  Speaker 1: into an acquiescence with sanitary methods, police controls, military service,
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  Speaker 1: and wholesale process of exploitation against which their whole tradition rebelled.
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  Speaker 1: Under the stresses of the war, their endurance reached the
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  Speaker 1: breaking point. The whole of China rose an incoherent revolt,
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  Speaker 1: and the practical destruction of the central government at Pequin
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  Speaker 1: by a handful of Britain, Wish and German airships that
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  Speaker 1: had escaped from the main battles rendered that revolt invincible,
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  Speaker 1: and Yokohama appeared barricades, the Black Flag and the social revolution.
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  Speaker 1: With that, the whole world became a welter of conflict,
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  Speaker 1: so that a universal social collapse followed, as it were
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  Speaker 1: a logical consequence upon world wide war. Wherever there were
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  Speaker 1: great populations, great masses of people found themselves without work,
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  Speaker 1: without money, and unable to get food. Famine was in
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  Speaker 1: every working class quarter in the world within three weeks
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  Speaker 1: of the beginning of the war. Within a month there
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  Speaker 1: was not a city anywhere in which the ordinary law
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  Speaker 1: and social procedure had not been replaced by some form
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  Speaker 1: of emergency control, in which firearms and military executions were
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  Speaker 1: not being used to keep order and prevent violence. And
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  Speaker 1: still in the poorer quarters, and in the populous districts,
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  Speaker 1: and even here and there already among those who had
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  Speaker 1: been wealthy, famine spread. Part three. So what historians have
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  Speaker 1: come to call the phase of the emergency committees sprang
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  Speaker 1: from the opening phase and from the phase of social collapse.
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  Speaker 1: Then followed a period of vehement and passionate conflict against disintegration.
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  Speaker 1: Everywhere the struggle to keep order and to keep fighting
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  Speaker 1: went on, and at the same time the character of
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  Speaker 1: the war altered through the replacement of the huge, gas
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  Speaker 1: filled airships by flying machines as the instruments of war.
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  Speaker 1: So soon as the big fleet engagements were over, the
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  Speaker 1: Asiatics endeavored to establish, in close proximity to the more
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  Speaker 1: vulnerable points of the countries against which they were acting,
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  Speaker 1: fortified centers from which flying machine raids could be made.
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  Speaker 1: For a time they had everything their own way in
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  Speaker 1: this and then, as this story has told, the lost
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  Speaker 1: secret of the Butteridge machine came to light, and the
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  Speaker 1: conflict became equalized and less conclusive than ever. For these
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  Speaker 1: small flying machines, ineffectual for any large expedition or conclusive attack,
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  Speaker 1: were horribly convenient for guerrilla warfare. Rapidly and cheaply made,
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  Speaker 1: easily used, easily hidden. The design of them was hastily
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  Speaker 1: copied and printed in Pinkerville and scattered broadcast over the
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  Speaker 1: United States, and copies were sent to Europe and there reproduced.
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  Speaker 1: Every man, every town, every parish that could was exhorted
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  Speaker 1: to make and use them. In a little while. They
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  Speaker 1: were being constructed not only by governments and local authorities,
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  Speaker 1: but by robber bands, by insurgent committees, by every type
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  Speaker 1: of private person. The peculiar social destructiveness of the Butteridge
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  Speaker 1: machine lay in its complete simplicity. It was nearly as
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  Speaker 1: simple as a motor bicycle. The broad outlines of the
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  Speaker 1: earlier stages of the war disappeared under its influence. The
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  Speaker 1: spacious antagonism of nations and empires and races vanished in
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  Speaker 1: a seething mass of detailed conflict. The world passed at
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  Speaker 1: a stride from a unity and simplicity broader than that
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  Speaker 1: of the Roman Empire at its best, to as social
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  Speaker 1: fragmentation as complete as the robber barren period of the
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  Speaker 1: Middle Ages. But this time for a long descent down
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  Speaker 1: gradual slopes of disintegration, comes a fall, like a fall
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  Speaker 1: over a cliff. Everywhere were men and women perceiving this,
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  Speaker 1: and struggling desperately to keep, as it were, a hold
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  Speaker 1: upon the edge of the cliff. A fourth phase follows
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  Speaker 1: through the struggle against chaos. In the wake of the famine,
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  Speaker 1: came now another old enemy of humanity, the pestilence, the
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  Speaker 1: purple death. But the war does not pause. The flags
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  Speaker 1: still fly, fresh air fleets rise new forms of airship,
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  Speaker 1: and beneath their swooping struggles, the world darkens, scarcely heated
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  Speaker 1: by history. It is not within the design of this
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  Speaker 1: book to tell what further story to tell how the
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  Speaker 1: war in the air kept on through the sheer inability
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  Speaker 1: of any of them authorities to meet and agree and
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  Speaker 1: end it, until every organized government in the world was
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  Speaker 1: as shattered and broken as a heap of China beaten
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  Speaker 1: with a stick. With every week of those terrible years,
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  Speaker 1: history becomes more detailed and confused, more crowded and uncertain,
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  Speaker 1: not without great and heroic resistance. With civilization borne down
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  Speaker 1: out of the bitter social conflict below, rose patriotic associations,
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  Speaker 1: brotherhoods of order, city mayors, princes, provisional committees, trying to
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  Speaker 1: establish an order below and to keep the sky above.
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  Speaker 1: The double effort destroyed them, And as the exhaustion of
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  Speaker 1: the mechanical resources of civilization clears the heavens of airships,
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  Speaker 1: at last, altogether anarchy, famine, and pestilence are discovered triumphant below,
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  Speaker 1: the great nations and empires have become but names in
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  Speaker 1: the mouths of men. Everywhere there are ruins and unburied dead,
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  Speaker 1: and shrunken, yellow faced survivors in immortal apathy. Here there
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  Speaker 1: are robbers, here vigilance committees, and here guerrilla bands, ruling
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  Speaker 1: patches of exhausted territory. Strange federations and brotherhoods form and dissolve,
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  Speaker 1: and religious fanaticisms begotten of despair gleam in famine bright eyes.
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  Speaker 1: It is a universal dissolution. The fine order and welfare
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  Speaker 1: of the earth have crumpled like an exploded bladder. In
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  Speaker 1: five short years, the world and the scope of human
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  Speaker 1: life have undergone a retrogressive change as great as that
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  Speaker 1: between the age of the Antonines and the Europe of
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  Speaker 1: the ninth century. End of Chapter eleven, Parts one, two,
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  Speaker 1: and three