October the First Is Too Late

Chapter Eight: Allegro Molto e con Brio

As soon as we returned to the house John was collared by one of the service officers. I had spotted a piano earlier in the day. I went to see if there was any chance of my being able to play. Luckily the room with the piano was unoccupied so I shut the door and began to run my fingers over the keyboard. I was horribly out of shape and the first few minutes were pretty bad. I can’t remember exactly what I played. Fragments here and there mixed in with a lot of improvisation. I was pretty wound up. For me this was the best way to get any tensions out of my system.

I became aware that someone had entered the room. It was the Prime Minister.

‘I hope you don’t mind my playing a bit. There didn’t seem to be anybody about.’

‘Not in the least. It’s a relief to hear something different from this appalling situation we’re in.’

‘Is it true then? About Europe I mean?’

‘There doesn’t seem to be any doubt about it. Evidence is coming in from all directions. By radio, and by ships coming into port. The whole thing’s a fantastic chaos. Whenever a ship comes in, both sides, those on board and those on shore, think the other is completely mad.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘That’s what we’re going to decide. We must put an end to it somehow.’

‘Sinclair thinks the situation is real. So far as the soldiers in France are concerned it’s real, nothing different from what it was.’

‘I don’t know which is the more surprising thing, the facts, the situation, or the whole psychology of my own position. It’s all completely changed.’

‘I can see everything’s changed, but what especially worries you?’

‘Well, it’s not unlike a rather delightful and remarkable story I once heard. About a wagon train crossing the United States during the last century. Two children happened to survive an Indian attack, their parents and friends being killed. One was a boy of twelve, the other a girl of three. The little boy took on the responsibility of getting his sister to California, and somehow succeeded. A complete change from dependence to responsibility. For the last two decades we’ve been drifting here in Britain in a thoroughly aimless fashion. There was nothing we could do to have any real effect on the world. After the responsibilities of the nineteenth century we’d suddenly become peripheral. Of course we’ve been pretending, I’ve been pretending, that we could have influence in other countries, and so influence the course of events. But it was a pretence really designed to keep up our own self-respect. Now everything’s suddenly changed, just as it did for those two children. It seems as if what’s happening in Europe, and what’s going to happen, depends utterly and completely on us.’

The Prime Minister paced rapidly up and down the room. There was suddenly a decisive air about him, an attitude far removed from the bumbling policies of the last few years.

The number of visitors at Chequers had increased sharply during the afternoon. In addition to the politicians and the military there were now economists and two professors of history from Oxford. Messages from the outside world were constantly arriving, replies were constantly being sent. A buffet supper had been arranged. We took platefuls of food to a long table, sat down, and the discussion began. The Home Secretary said an immediate policy decision must be made, within the hour.

‘We’ve reached the stage where something really definite must be said to the people. It can’t be very long before the truth gets known. The strong westerly winds of the last few days have dropped. People in the south, particularly in Kent, can actually hear the gunfire in Flanders.’

The Prime Minister agreed to make an appearance on television, to make a frank statement about the whole position. Messages to the BBC and ITV were instantly dispatched.

Then the meeting got down to the problem in everybody’s mind, how to stop the tragedy in France. Not a single person round the table had any thoughts otherwise. At all costs the disastrous attacks of early October, the attacks inevitably leading to the mud of Passchendaele, had to be prevented.

With the superior technology of 1966 it was at first sight easy to force a dictated peace on all the combatants. But how could the deadly weapons of the post-nuclear era be explained to minds still immersed in the second decade of the century? A simple display of force would be almost meaningless. Nor was there any prospect of peace being imposed through conventional weapons. In fact the conventional weapons at the disposal of the Prime Minister and his colleagues were negligible in total weight compared to the weapons possessed by the European armies. Guns and tanks were now vastly more refined, it was true, but their numbers were far too small to have any real effect. Only with planes and bombs could anything be done in this line. The air marshals confidently asserted that with complete mastery of the air it would be possible to destroy railway communications on the German side. In this way it would be possible to cut off all supplies to the German side of the fighting line. It was generally agreed, however, that this would only be done as a last resort, if the Germans were unwilling to take an immediately negotiated peace seriously.

The historians were called in at this point, to assess the German attitude to the war in 1917. There was a lot of talk about German political parties, the Social Democrats, the Centre, about the army and the Junkers. Surprisingly perhaps, the opinion was that negotiation might be easiest with the Junkers. It was said their chief motive in fighting the war, besides maintaining the prestige of the German army, was to hold on to their estates in East Germany. The Social Democrats were apparently wrong in the head, expansionist in outlook, and the Centre was worse than impossible.

The French position was plainly tricky. Their country had been violated, their army was passing through a difficult psychological phase, and their only dream was the eventual defeat of Germany. It was open to question whether the French would take kindly to a negotiated peace. The Prime Minister must visit Paris without delay, it was agreed.

At this point the problem of communication with the continent came in for discussion. It was pointed out that the first planes sent from Britain had failed to return. Perhaps the crew members had been taken for madmen, or perhaps the planes had been shot down? I saw the hint of a smile on John’s face and knew he had a different explanation. Later he told me those planes had simply flown into—nothingness, before the different zones of the Earth were fully joined.

The opinion was that there would be no difficulty in landing in France provided a strong force of planes was sent. Then the problem of what to do about the British army came up for discussion. This was a matter of some delicacy. Yet even the Chief of Staff agreed that the commanding officers, particularly Sir Douglas Haig, must be recalled without delay. This would be a matter of difficulty, it was realized. The simplest method might be a letter purporting to come from Lloyd George, which would involve forging the old gaffer’s signature. Arrangements were immediately put in hand.

Lastly it was agreed to mount an intense psychological campaign. Scores of heavy transport planes would be sent over the fighting line with thousands of tons of leaflets. There would be leaflets for the British, the French, and the Germans. They would say the same thing, they would tell the common soldier to stop it, not to fire another shot, another shell. This would be on the full authority of the British government.

As I heard these preparations being put in train I wondered to myself what it was that had changed in the British government between 1917 and 1966. Here was the Prime Minister in much the position Lloyd George had been in in 1917. Yet, whereas Lloyd George’s thoughts had been wholly on how to prosecute the war more efficiently, we were now discussing it on the basis of an instant ceasefire. Nobody around the table had the slightest doubt of what must be done. I saw the difference came from the condition of our minds. In 1917, 1917 in Britain, nobody had been able to think outside the war situation. No doubt everybody wanted the war to stop. Yet everybody in 1917 had lacked the confidence to take the necessary steps. In 1966 our minds were completely outside that situation.

Everybody now had an inner confidence that the situation could be dealt with, somehow. This confidence, I saw, came from the technology of 1966. If our high-speed planes had been taken away, if there were no nuclear weapons in the background, if our industries were not enormously more efficient than the European ones, then we might have found ourselves thinking differently. Our escape from the mentality of 1917 really came from a lack of the fear that haunted the British government in 1917.

When the economists began to speak I realized that our situation in the long term wasn’t any too favourable, however. Our technology depended to a considerable extent on large imports of oil. These would no longer be forthcoming, if the world of 1917 existed also in the Middle East. Here it transpired that absolutely nothing had come from the armies in the East, nothing from Egypt or from Mesopotamia. It was agreed this should be looked into forthwith. There would have to be a large-scale conversion back to coal as an energy source. And our coal reserves in 1966 were not too good. Above all, where would we get food imports? With the United States and Canada out of the picture, there was no simple answer to this question. Nothing was known yet about Australia. So there was still some hope of food from the Antipodes. But this was only a hope. It was manifest that the only satisfactory policy for the world of the future was to use the manpower of Europe. With the war ended, every available part of Europe must be put to food production. Oil production must be started in the Middle East without further delay.

I wasn’t clear where John and I would come into this picture. When the meeting broke up for a short rest, at about nine o’clock, John got me on one side. He told me he had made arrangements, with the Prime Minister’s approval, to get a survey of the world started. If it was 1917 in Europe, about 1750 in North America, there was no telling what it was on the rest of the Earth.

We would use one of the big long-distance planes, at any rate in the first instance. We would make a survey for possible landing places. If there were none, then at a later stage we would have to use flying boats, which could quickly be made available for our use. With these we could land on water, more or less as we pleased, provided the weather was fine. All this was clearly an excellent idea and I was not at all disappointed to be in on it. Yet the situation in Europe, its inner psychology, fascinated me. I hoped we would remain fairly close to events as they developed.

The Prime Minister left to make his speech to the nation. Everybody crowded around a television set as the time for the telecast at last came up. It was a good clear account of the situation, gravely delivered. I could not help wondering what the effect would be on the average viewer. Two months ago it would have seemed raving madness. But now the people would be partially prepared for it. I remembered the crowds back at London airport the previous evening. For all I knew, an end to uncertainty would prove more a relief than otherwise.

We also watched the programme which followed the Prime Minister. With their usual pertinacity, the news agencies must already have discovered the truth. A BBC team of commentators had managed to get across to France. Well-known faces appeared. They had lost their usual smooth technical competence. Wild and distraught now, they were with the British army at Ypres.

We learnt that most of their number had been arrested by the army authorities but a film of what they had found there had been smuggled out of France, presumably with the aid of a light aircraft. To me, the First World War has always had the aspect of a nightmare viewed from the comforting light of the day. Here it was displayed in all its nightmare qualities with the urgency of the present about it. The camera spared us neither the mud, nor the shellfire, nor the wounded and the dead. There were interviews with the living, conjuring up visions of hell. Then quite suddenly it was all over. With mature perception, the BBC announced a complete closure of all its services for the night; for nothing in the way of a normal programme could possibly have followed what we had just seen.

The next day there was an outcry from the Press. The Times demanded that whatever was going on in France must be stopped, instantly, without delay. The cry was echoed on every hand. It was clear that action must be swift and immediately effective if the government was to survive even for a week. The irony of the change in outlook of the British people over fifty years escaped almost everyone.

For the next month little useful work was done by the population at large. Most people spent a large part of their time within range of a television set. Everybody in any way immediately involved in the crisis itself worked, however, with a furious intensity. The day after our conference at Chequers we were told to proceed on our voyages of exploration. So we were back to London airport, back with our Australian friend and his plane. We took off early on the morning of September 21st, as the date was here in Britain. Our mission was to proceed east, to the battlefront between the German and Russian armies. It occurred to me that the Tsar was still in power in Russia, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had not yet appeared. This would have given great satisfaction to the Americans if they had been there to appreciate it. Of course there was still Hawaii. This was another ironical situation, for the fiftieth state had suddenly become the first.

I wondered whether the pilot would make a deliberate excursion into northern France. I was rather glad he did not. I needed no further convincing about what was going on there. We were soon across the North Sea and over the southern part of Denmark. Then we headed more or less due east. At our height we were quite immune from any primitive anti-aircraft fire. Our immediate objective was Berlin. Although we had no radio guidance, apart from the fixes which we got from stations back in Britain, we found the city without undue difficulty. There, thirty thousand feet below us, was the city of the Kaisers. War stricken now, its people ill-clad and hungry, dreading the approach of winter, the fourth winter of war. Twenty-five years earlier we should have been dropping bombs. Today we dropped some twenty tons of leaflets which had been printed in a high priority rush job the previous day. I was fascinated by the thought of what the people would think when they read:

There followed a precise statement of the numbers of the dead, wounded, and missing. They were given month by month, for the different battlefronts. To the authorities in Germany they would appear quite fantastically accurate, for they had been compiled from the Germans’ own postwar records. The leaflets fluttering down through the air below us were likely to prove vastly more effective than a plane load of bombs could ever be. There would also be the fantasy generated by the sight from the ground of our plane, monstrous by the standards of 1917. The shattering effect of all these factors was clear to me.

Clouds gathered as we flew further east. We could see nothing of what lay below. Our mission was to discover the state of things in Russia, if possible to report on the eastern battlefront. To do this it would be necessary to go down to lower altitudes to break through the cloudbank which now obscured our view. There seemed no particular reason to fear anti-aircraft fire.

We must have been somewhere near the Russian border when the pilot set us on a gentle glide. To begin with it was very much the same as it had been coming into London airport on our flight from Hawaii. There we had come down on to a sea of clouds, had gone quite quickly through it, and had at last come out with a clear view of the ground. It had been exactly what we expected and hoped it would be. Now as we came out through the clouds we saw a great flat plain stretching away in all directions, brown and desolate, without the slightest trace of vegetation. It was a wilderness of bare rock.

We flew on towards the east. An hour later we were somewhere over the position of Moscow. The clouds were clearing. To our astonishment what looked like a vast ocean lay ahead. Yet it was an ocean such as none of us had seen before. As we came clear of the clouds we were dazzled by an intense light from below, coming from the direction of the Sun. The ground was evidently a far better reflector than the waters of the oceans. Compared to the intense light towards the south, the north was dark, a dark purple. Once we had learnt to avoid the southern glare we were amazed by the profusion of colours the sunlight was bringing out in the material below us.

We came down low, to about five hundred feet on the altimeter. Still we could see nothing but a smooth plain. There were no familiar landmarks from which we could judge our height, it all looked the same from any height. There were no trees, houses, no rocks or boulders, nothing.

Still we flew on. Two hours later we were over what should have been the Ural mountains. The level plain was unbroken. There was neither hill nor valley. There was always the iridescent plain below us. We discussed the possibility of landing. There was no problem about finding a flat place, it was all flat. What we didn’t know was whether the surface was firm or soft. If it were soft we should simply bog in. Take-off would be impossible even if the pilot managed the landing safely. To be marooned in this trackless waste was certain death. We were well into Siberia by now, more than a thousand miles from the nearest inhabitation. We could never cross this great plain on foot. Nor was it easy to see how we could possibly be rescued if we got ourselves into trouble. If a landing was impossible for us, it would be impossible for any plane sent out to our help. Yet we all felt something had to be done. Somehow we had to find out what this thing below us was. We could go back to base, of course, and make plans for tomorrow, or for the following week, but it was hard to see how this would get us any further.

One thing was favourable, there was almost no wind. This meant we could go down in a smooth gentle glide if we wanted to. Our Australian pilot was not to be put off. ‘I’m going to have a crack at the bastard,’ he said. ‘We’ll go down until our wheels touch, then I’ll bring her up again. We ought to be able to tell from the hydraulic shock on the wheels whether we’re dealing with soft or hard ground.’

Now we were down to a thousand feet, then quickly down to five hundred. The last seconds seemed interminably long. The jolt was much harder than I expected, really because the pilot didn’t quite know where the surface was. As we came up again it needed no examination of the hydraulic system to know that we had hit hard ground.

Our line was to the north so as to avoid the glare of the Sun. After stabilizing the aircraft and checking the instruments we came down again. This time we made a normal landing. There would be nobody here to wheel a flight of steps out to the plane. We would have to hang a ladder of some sort. The crew got out a lightweight metal job. I was glad of this, because the rigidity of the metal would make the climb back into the plane reasonably easy. We opened the front hatch and let out the ladder. A couple of minutes later I was swinging down it.

I stepped gingerly on to the ground, then away from the ladder, and down on to my hands and knees. I ran a hand over the surface. It was completely smooth. I tried to dig into it with a fingernail, but it was quite resistant. The colours were more vivid down here. By turning round in a circle from the direction of the Sun in the south to the anti-sun in the north, and then back again in the south, it was possible to go through a whole cycle of changes. It was a vivid yellow towards the Sun, then green as one swivelled round towards the west, then a pale blue in the north-west, purple in the north, and back through the same colours in a reverse order as one turned through east to the south again. It was the same wherever one stood.

I walked away from the plane to a distance of about three hundred yards. The difference between looking towards the plane and looking away from it was quite fantastic. Looking away from it one had no impression of scale whatsoever. It was impossible to know whether you were looking ten yards, a hundred yards, or even a hundred miles. The effect was bewildering and distinctly frightening. It was far more weird than the kind of white-out you sometimes get on a snowfield in the mountains. Yet as soon as you turned round, there was the plane—the whole scene jumped instantly into scale.

John came up to me.

‘What do you make of it?’ I asked.

‘It’s a kind of glass. We’re on a huge glass plain stretching for thousands of miles.’

‘But how, how the hell did it happen?’

‘Heat. Heat from outside. The surface has been melted and fused. It’s a kind of glass, rather like a tektite. Except it’s much more homogeneous, and far less brittle.’

‘You said heat from the outside. What could cause that?’

‘It’s a bit like the glass you get after the explosion of a nuclear weapon. But there doesn’t seem to be any radioactivity, from the Geiger counters in the plane.’

This explained the equipment I had seen John fiddling with during the flight.

‘How far do you think it goes?’

‘God knows. Perhaps all the way to China.’

‘That’s going to take out a big slice of the land area.’

‘You know it’s very strange….’

John stopped, as he always did, when he was in the middle of some important statement. Now he went on, ‘How smooth it all is. You’d expect the surface to be scratched, by blown sand or bits of grit. It should have a sort of sand-blasted, matt finish.’

‘You think that’s important?’

‘Well, it must mean there’s never been any bits of sand or grit, there’s no other explanation. The point I think is that everything’s been melted, every damn last bit of surface rock. Nothing was left over.’

‘If we follow up your idea about different parts of the Earth belonging to different ages, do you think this could refer to a time after a disastrous nuclear war?’

‘It could, I suppose. If it were a few centuries or more afterwards, I suppose the radioactivity would mostly have died down. We’d better dig up a chunk of the stuff and take it back with us for analysis. That should tell us if there’s any long-lived artificial radioactivity in it. Probably it isn’t much good speculating until we know the facts.’

When we attempted to quarry the material we found the ground quite extraordinarily hard. We laughed at our fears about making a landing. The whole plain, millions of square miles of it, was just one ideal, perfect airstrip.

It began to grow chilly as the Sun fell lower in the west. We decided to eat a meal before taking off. After a short argument it was decided to have it out of doors. The food was handed down the ladder by the crew. Soon we were munching sandwiches and drinking hot coffee. We took a last walk around the plane. A quarter of an hour later we were back in the air. Turned towards the Sun we were on our homeward journey.

We managed just about to hold our own with the rotation of the Earth, so the Sun maintained its position pretty well constant in the sky as we flew westward. Scattered clouds began to appear, then there was a thicker cover below us. An hour and a half later we were back over eastern Germany. I wondered what furious interchange of messages was going on down there, what diplomatic activity.

It was about six o’clock when we landed at London airport. We were almost smothered by reporters and cameramen. A posse of police managed to make a way for us. It occurred to me that not one of the newshounds around us could have suspected, eerie and odd as this new world might seem to them, that we had come back from something still stranger and more remote.

We discovered there was no possibility of getting the plane serviced soon enough for us to be able to make another exploratory voyage the following day. So I returned for the night to my own apartments in London. I found Alex Hamilton glued to the television set. He asked me what I knew about the situation. I told him a little, not too much. Then I asked him for his opinion. He said it was very interesting that, with America out of the way and with Europe back in 1917, we were way ahead of Webern and Schoenberg. All we had to do was to murder all the musicians in Britain, to destroy all the libraries, and we would be made. I said I thought he was completely on the wrong lines. These new events called for an epic style, not for abstractionalism. At this he fell into one of his laughing fits. ‘So you’re thinking of reviving the Cologne piece.’

I said I was thinking of much more than that, but along the same lines. In fact I was bursting with ideas and would be glad of the following day to jot a few things down.

I made dinner while Alex went on watching TV. Afterwards we both watched it. The BBC seemed to have moved into France en bloc. They reported that the Prime Minister had seen the French Prime Minister, Monsieur Briand. According to the reports the French were proving difficult. They were insisting that honour be satisfied. Then we learnt the Germans were sending their Foreign Minister to London, a man of the name of Kuhlmann. The British commanders in the field had been replaced by modern officers who were preparing a general retreat from the trenches.

At this stage I must put my own experiences aside in order to relate at secondhand how it came about that the war situation in France simply collapsed like a pack of cards. First the men themselves, the ordinary fighting soldiers. In the last months of 1917 they were in a curious psychological state of mind. They had come to see the trenches as the real world, they had come to regard the situation back home as an unreal dream. It was as though they had walked out of the ordinary world into hell and now hell was the place which really counted. If they thought at all of the people back home, then apart from their families it was with a dull sullen hatred. This was true as much on the one side as the other. So when instructions came to cease from the horrible slaughter the men had not the slightest compunction about obeying. It was what they wanted anyway. It had been the outside that had been impelling them. Suddenly it seemed as if a miracle had happened somehow on the outside, which was the way it had to be. What they had gone through could only be made good by a miracle. They had paid enough in agony for any miracle. If there was little element of rationality in this point of view it was backed by intense emotion. To the men it was a heaven-sent deliverance. The psychological effect of discovering a hiatus of fifty years seemed more or less in tune with the horrors of the battlefield itself.

On the German side there was little will to continue the fight. Kuhlmann had in any case been on the point of proposing peace terms himself, similar to those which the British government now suggested. And the German High Command was shaken to its roots by the situation in the east and south. Nothing at that stage was known in Germany of the existence of the huge Plain of Glass, but all communication with the East had mysteriously ceased. The railway tracks to the east continued normally to Warsaw and somewhat beyond that. Every town, every village, down to the smallest hamlet, seemed to be entirely normal up to a certain point. Then it all simply vanished. The railway tracks ceased. The vegetation ceased. Not a single person could be found. It was just a complete desert. Those who knew these facts, and there were not many at this stage, had the bottom knocked out of their self-confidence. Hindenburg and Ludendorff knew of course, as did most of the High Command. It could only mean that what was being said in the west, in Britain, was true. Added to the already bad state of the war, to the privations in Germany, it was decisive. It was agreed that Hindenburg should travel to London for the proposed conference.

A cease fire was already in effect by the time the conference was held. The biggest card in the hand of the British government was of course the military weapons of 1966. The immediate problem was to bring the strength of those weapons over to the German mind. An actual physical demonstration was to be avoided if at all possible. But in the game of political manœuvre it is known, at least in the world of 1966 it was known, that even the strongest­ card will have no effect unless you take steps to acquaint your opponents of its existence. There is little point in keeping a card secret and then playing it as a sudden surprise. Almost exactly the reverse. Playing a strong card always alters a situation so it is never the same at the end as it was at the beginning.

The problem was solved in a simple fashion. It was solved by using one of the most remarkable feats of 1966, but one quite unmilitary in character. It was done simply with a high fidelity gramophone. Delegates from the continent were ushered through a room in which an old-fashioned tinny machine, the sort you wind up, with a little horn, was playing. It wheezed out its feeble sounds as the delegates assembled in the conference room. The delegates were at first surprised at this apparent eccentricity. Then they were shattered by a sudden switch to full volume on the 1966 equipment.

All that needed to be done was to draw a simple analogy. The Prime Minister just pointed out that the weapons of his own day, of 1966, bore the same relation to the weapons being used in France, as did this new powerful gramophone to the little whining horn of 1917. He asked the German staff officers to compare their own weapons with those of the year 1860. Then perhaps they would understand how things stood. He wasn’t telling them this in order to claim a victory. He wasn’t interested in a victory as they would understand it. The important thing was to get down to a discussion of acceptable peace terms. All that was needed was a rational, reasonable approach to the problem. It was rather like a headmaster scolding a group of naughty boys.

Two days after our first flight of exploration we made a second one. Our aim was to discover the state of affairs in the Mediterranean, the Near East, and the Middle East. Our plan was to fly out over the Balkans, then over Turkey, Armenia, into Persia, and back via Palestine, Greece, and Italy. We wanted to find out how far to the south the great Plain of Glass extended. It was the same crew and personnel as before.

As we climbed aboard the plane I was in a divided state of mind. I had a host of musical ideas hammering away in my brain, but I was dead set to make the trip for I was utterly fascinated by the strange new geography of the Earth. Also I was baffled and intrigued by the psychological problems that were going to occur when the men from 1917 came home to the world of 1966. How were the two worlds to collaborate with each other? What would happen when a man, perhaps of thirty, back from the trenches, met his own son in the year 1966, his son at the age of sixty. And how of the strangest cases of all, those in which a man appeared twice, both young and old? Questions such as these seemed so weird and singular that I would have been astonished to learn as I walked up the steps into the aircraft that I was on the verge of a trip which would take me still farther away from the sane, stable world of a month ago. I still had no conception of how deep the waters were to run.