Section 2
My thoughts go into the woods and wildernesses and jungles of theworld, to the wild life that shared man's suspension, and I thinkof a thousand feral acts interrupted and truncated--as it werefrozen, like the frozen words Pantagruel met at sea. Not only menit was that were quieted, all living creatures that breathe the airbecame insensible, impassive things. Motionless brutes and birdslay amidst the drooping trees and herbage in the universal twilight,the tiger sprawled beside his fresh-struck victim, who bled todeath in a dreamless sleep. The very flies came sailing down theair with wings outspread; the spider hung crumpled in his loadednet; like some gaily painted snowflake the butterfly driftedto earth and grounded, and was still. And as a queer contrastone gathers that the fishes in the sea suffered not at all. . . .
Speaking of the fishes reminds me of a queer little inset upon thatgreat world-dreaming. The odd fate of the crew of the submarinevessel B 94 has always seemed memorable to me. So far as I know,they were the only men alive who never saw that veil of green drawnacross the world. All the while that the stillness held above, theywere working into the mouth of the Elbe, past the booms and themines, very slowly and carefully, a sinister crustacean of steel,explosive crammed, along the muddy bottom. They trailed a longclue that was to guide their fellows from the mother ship floatingawash outside. Then in the long channel beyond the forts they cameup at last to mark down their victims and get air. That must havebeen before the twilight of dawn, for they tell of the brightnessof the stars. They were amazed to find themselves not three hundredyards from an ironclad that had run ashore in the mud, and heeledover with the falling tide. It was afire amidships, but no one heededthat--no one in all that strange clear silence heeded that--andnot only this wrecked vessel, but all the dark ships lying aboutthem, it seemed to their perplexed and startled minds must be fullof dead men!
Theirs I think must have been one of the strangest of all experiences;they were never insensible; at once, and, I am told, with a suddencatch of laughter, they began to breathe the new air. None ofthem has proved a writer; we have no picture of their wonder, nodescription of what was said. But we know these men were active andawake for an hour and a half at least before the general awakeningcame, and when at last the Germans stirred and sat up they foundthese strangers in possession of their battleship, the submarinecarelessly adrift, and the Englishmen, begrimed and weary, butwith a sort of furious exultation, still busy, in the bright dawn,rescuing insensible enemies from the sinking conflagration. . . .
But the thought of certain stokers the sailors of the submarinefailed altogether to save brings me back to the thread of grotesquehorror that runs through all this event, the thread I cannot overlookfor all the splendors of human well-being that have come from it.I cannot forget the unguided ships that drove ashore, that wentdown in disaster with all their sleeping hands, nor how, inland,motor-cars rushed to destruction upon the roads, and trains uponthe railways kept on in spite of signals, to be found at last bytheir amazed, reviving drivers standing on unfamiliar lines, theirfires exhausted, or, less lucky, to be discovered by astonishedpeasants or awakening porters smashed and crumpled up into heapsof smoking, crackling ruin. The foundry fires of the Four Townsstill blazed, the smoke of our burning still denied the sky.Fires burnt indeed the brighter for the Change--and spread. . . .