Anti-Ice

Epilogue A LETTER TO A SON

November 4, 1910

Sylvan, Sussex

My Dear Edward,

I trust this parcel finds you as it leaves me: that is, in good health and spirits.

No doubt you will be surprised, on opening this latest package from home, to find the customary missive from your dear mother replaced by these few pages of scrawl from myself. And I hope you will forgive me if I omit the usual bulletin of news of home; of these matters I will only say that we all remain hale and hearty, and miss you tremendously.

My intention in writing to you is to try in my own inadequate way to make up for the deficiencies in understanding which should exist between us as father and son. I accept full blame for this; and you may have realized that our last lengthy conversation before your posting to Berlin—you remember: that affair of pipes, whiskey and carpet slippers before a dying fire, late one Saturday evening—was an earlier attempt to break through this barrier between us. I failed, of course. And yet, in the purity of your anger that evening, how my heart was rent to see in you so much of myself, the self of thirty or forty years ago!

Let me simply say this. I am your father. I do not regard myself as a coward, or less than a patriot. You need have no shame on that score, I assure you. But my views on the coming conflict with Prussia are clearly not ideas you feel able to share.

I have no desire to impose my philosophy on you; you are an Officer in the finest army in the world, and I am very proud of you. But I want you to understand me. When war comes—as I believe is inevitable—then, praying God preserve you, it will assuredly change you, for better or worse; and I want to try, one last time, to explain myself—my life, since those fateful days of 1870—to the young man I have raised.

You have read my own manuscript account of the adventures which befell me forty years ago—as well as the more polished rendering by Sir George Holden. George, before his untimely death from an illiberal intake of port and other substances, managed to parlay his experiences into a lucrative and rewarding career. He made his fortune, of course, with his scientific romance The New Carthage, whose premise was the discovery of anti-ice by the inhabitants of that ancient city, and their subsequent and spectacular revenge on their enemies, the Romans. The critics thought it “a smooth read but hardly plausible” …which was exactly the judgment of Josiah Traveller when he threw Holden the idea all those years ago aboard the Phaeton!

I begrudge George none of his windfall earnings—good luck to the fellow—but such self-publicity was not for me.

After my return to England in the aftermath of the use of that first Gladstone Shell, I resigned my post in London and returned home to Sussex. I studied, took my articles and have since worked quietly—and as far as possible anonymously—as a solicitor of no more than modest achievements in the local area.

But I have watched the unraveling of global events following that cataclysmic autumn; and it has seemed to me sometimes that human affairs have unfolded like a shabby flower about the single, dazzling point of light that was the Gladstone Shell.

I will not dwell on what I saw of the devastation of Orléans. I pray God you are spared such sights, Edward. But perhaps your career will take you to that ghastly site where the Prince Albert still rests, immobile since receiving its little gift from the Prussian artillery, a rusting monument to another war.

The Shelling marked the end of the European war, of course; if a new fear of British intervention were not sufficient, I believe the will to fight of those men who had been gathered on the plains of the Loire was expunged by their salvage work amid the stink of Orléans. I remember watching the Prussian columns form up, filthy, slow and solemn, to make for home; and I knew then that here was one generation for whom war was done.

Edward, it shocks me now to see references to the Shelling of Orléans as if it were some great triumph for Britain. It was an accident—the Shell was not even aimed at the city—and the fact that the intervention achieved so many of Gladstone’s ends is due only to the sheer horror and scale of the carnage that was wrought.

A formal settlement between France and Prussia was reached, under British chairmanship, at the Congress of Tours during the spring of 1871. After such a costly reverse Bismarck’s ambitions to unify Germany were perforce abandoned, and that wily old gentleman struggled to maintain his own position of influence and power. (But survive he did, of course.) Thus today Germany remains a cozy mish-mash run by princelings and dukes, with the eagle of Prussia pent up in one corner; and this is surely preferable, in British eyes, to the great middle-European German Power which might otherwise have emerged.

Meanwhile in France the new provisional government, under Gambetta, welcomed British assistance in quelling the continuing rebellious unrest in Paris; and Gambetta even engaged the advice of eminent English parliamentarians in drawing up a constitution for a new Third Empire. And so it is that a Parliament—indistinguishable in every key particular from the Mother of Parliaments in Manchester—now meets daily in Paris herself, and for four decades the British-style constitutional settlement which underlies all this has filtered down into every nook of French society.

Yes, we have a Europe settled as the most fair and scrupulous—British—statesman of 1860 might have requested it; and to back it all up we have garrisons scattered through such traditional danger spots as Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine, Denmark—and even on the outskirts of Berlin herself. We may not have built the Norman fortresses dreamed of by the Sons of Gascony, but nevertheless we can say we have achieved a British Europe.

And if all this political and military dominance were not sufficient, there is the continuing wonder of anti-ice technology. The Light Rail network spreads ever deeper into the Continent, and air-boats for both passengers and freight, large enough to swallow the dear old Phaeton, skim daily above the clouds, bringing Manchester and Moscow no more than a few hours apart. Trans-atmospheric broughams flit between Earth and Moon, and every year the Royal Geographical Society regales us with accounts of the exploits of its newest explorers, in Traveller Crater and among the Phoebean rock animals.

And, of course, in silos hidden under Kentish fields, the Gladstone Shells await, one for every European city.

It is strange to recall now that Josiah Traveller believed—at the very end of his life—that, with the exhaustion of the known supply of anti-ice at the South Pole, the exploitation of that substance would, for good or ill, come to an end… How ironic it is that in his last, desperate act he should have shown humankind how to reach out greedy hands to more anti-ice—more than he himself could have imagined—a supply so large that it could be considered practically inexhaustible!

Who would have imagined that the Little Moon should be composed almost entirely of anti-ice? It was clear immediately to observing astronomers that an explosion of the magnitude generated by the Phaeton’s final impact could only be the result of an anti-ice detonation. The scientists now understand that the Little Moon is a fragment of that comet which destroyed itself in scouring out Traveller Crater on the Moon—a fragment which fell into orbit around Earth—perhaps after several bruising, but slowing, scrapings along the roof of Earth’s air. All this happened in the eighteenth century, the savants say; and so at the same time as the Australian aboriginals were watching another fragment of the comet streak across their skies to Antarctica, the Little Moon settled into the skies of Earth.

So an immense supply of anti-ice energy circles the Earth, kept from melting and exploding by its own rapid rotation and its frequent sojourns into Earth’s shadow.

Once Traveller had inadvertently shown the way, the remaining Earthbound stocks of ice were used to build new Phaetons, just able to reach the Little Moon and return with precious Dewars full of frozen power. And now every European can watch the tiny sparks which are British orbital boats endlessly climbing to the Little Moon and falling back into the pool of air, further consolidating our power.

How poor Traveller would have hated to see this outcome! I often wonder if, in those final moments as that awful light burned through the aluminum walls of the Phaeton, he understood the implications of what he had done. I pray that he did not; that his great, inventive brain was stilled long before the final destruction of his ship, the thwarting of his purpose…

But I digress.

Edward, I return to the subject of our debate that Saturday evening. Is the world a better place for this Pax Britannica which we have imposed with our anti-ice and our industry and administration?

My answer must be, sadly: no. Not even, in the end, for us British ourselves.

I know your fascination with politics is sketchy at best, Edward, but even you must have followed the recent ghastly developments at home, such as the strikes against Balfour’s new food taxes—taxes which seem specifically designed to hammer the disenfranchised poor—and the brutal suppression of those strikes by Churchill’s troops.

Not for centuries has England seethed with revolt in this manner. How have we British, with our talent for accommodation and compromise, come to this pass? For, historically, the British way has been to give a little to avert bloodier discontent. For instance, perhaps further reform of Parliament—like Disraeli’s failed reform of the 1860s—would, however partial, have served as a sop, to relieve this new pressure for change. A compromise now might be for Balfour to take in some ideas from this Welsh chap David Lloyd George, who advocates tax reforms aimed at the super-rich and the landowners. Yes, Edward; I mean Lloyd George the rabble-rouser and recent convict! Are you shocked? Well, perhaps if such men were invited to contribute to the government we should find a happier solution.

But in Britain today we have no room for accommodation, however slight. Edward, this is the malevolent influence of anti-ice and the new technologies, which have given such power to the industrialists—at the expense of other unrepresented sections of our society. We have changed for the worse, and now—as a Frenchman of my acquaintance once predicted—we are in danger of being torn apart by our own contradictions.

I do not expect you to agree with any of this: merely to respect my views for what they are.

The picture is scarcely happier abroad.

Let us take France. Edward, I know the French. Do you suppose they have accepted the imposition of a British parliament? I will tell you it sticks in their throats, much as their dry French bread sticks in mine. I have no case to make here about the merits or imperfections of the British system. My point is only that it is not French; should we not therefore have allowed our Gallic cousins to continue their groping toward a constitutional settlement which might address the issues of their own national character and past? But we did not; and so the French dream on, of the glorious days of their Revolution, and of their precious Bonaparte.

As for Prussia, there is that wily old fox Prince Otto von Schцnhausen Bismarck, still ruling the Berlin roost at the age of ninety-five. The new Emperor, the second William, is putty in Bismarck’s liver-spotted hands.

For a long time it was argued that Bismarck had become a friend, if a reluctant one, of the British—for consider the trade and cultural exchanges which have proceeded in the intervening decades between our two nations.

But surely recent events—principally Bismarck’s disgraceful intervention in the question of the Austrian succession, so reminiscent of the intervention in Spanish royal affairs by which he provoked his earlier war with France—have proved the lie of this.

Bismarck has played out the intervening decades like the opportunist and devious politician he is; and by a series of ruses, feints and stratagems has maintained his own position in Prussia, and Prussia’s position in Europe.

Bismarck is no friend of Britain. Britain stopped him achieving his life’s goal: the unification of Germany. It is as if Bismarck refuses to die until this goal is achieved—or at least until Manchester is rendered impotent to intervene.

Now he is ready to strike. And we await the new Ems telegram which will provoke the armed conflict with Britain. What role will France adopt? If the Prussian goal is the scrubbing of British influence from the plains of Europe, then the best we can hope for is that the Frenchies stay neutral. Let us not forget the ghosts of Orléans… And it does not help that the present French foreign minister is one Frédéric Bourne.

But surely, you insist, even now Bismarck is only testing our nerve. Surely he will never risk calling down a rain of anti-ice fire on his own countrymen.

But he will, I say. For, Edward, I believe that Bismarck now has anti-ice weapons of his own with which to reply; the security of our stock of anti-ice, however thorough, cannot have remained inviolate for all these decades. The Prussian weapons will be every bit as powerful as Britain’s—or more so, given the application of Prussian military ingenuity.

What, then, will be the outcome?

A new Balance of Power might emerge, I suppose: a face-down between two states, Britain and Prussia, each bristling with anti-ice weaponry, each deterred from further warfare by the devastating capability of the other… Will this Balance guarantee peace? Perhaps. But these past decades of British hegemony will not be easily forgiven in the halls of Europe. Recall the address to the Commonwealth of His Majesty at the dawn of the new century, in which he described the future. A thousand years of British power… the shadow of the Union Flag stretching across the centuries—such ranting has only added to the stockpile of disaster which awaits ourselves or our descendants.

Edward, I fear war is now inevitable. The embittered old men of Berlin and Paris will scarce blink an eye at the destruction of their own populace, if it means the erasure of Britain from the European map; and so, deceived by our own vain and arrogant complacency, we face a darker war than man has yet seen.

I pray that you now understand my fear and dread; and I pray, of course, that we all survive the coming days of darkness, and are reunited at last in the sunlight of a better and more just world.

I Remain, With Love,

Your Devoted Father

NED VICARS