The Winslow mail., 1914-10-24

able land flies and mosquitoes armed
with infection had so far defeated hui
man invasion, and under their protec-
ton the virgin forests remained un.
! touched. Indeed, the whole world.
even in it's most crowded districts, was
| filthy with flies and swarming with
needless insect life to an extent which
map of the world in 1850 would have
| followed seashore and river course so
| closely in it's darker shading as to give
| an impression that homo sapiens was
an amphibious animal. His roads and
| railways lay also along the lower con-
tours, only here and there to pierce
| some mountain barrier or reach some
holiday resort did they Chamber above
| 5000 feet. And across the ocean his
traffic passed in definite lines. There
were hundreds of thousands of square
miles of ocean no ship ever traversed
except by mischance.
| Into the mysteries of the solid globe
| under his feet he had not yet pierced
| for five miles, and it was still not forty
years since, with tragic pertinacity,
he had clambered to the poles of the
earth. The limitless mineral wealth of
the arctic and antarctic circles was
still buried beneath vast accumAla-
tiOns of immemorial ice, and the secret
riches of the inner zones of the crust
were untapped and indeed unsuspect
ed. The higher mountain regions were
known only to a sprinkling of guide
led climbers and the freQuenters of a
few gaunt hotels, and the vast rainless
belts of land that lay across the CONT
Dental masses, from Cobb to Sahara
and along the backbone of America
with their perfect air, their daily baths
Of blazing sunshine, their nights of
cool serenity and glowing stars and
their reservoirs of deep lying water
were as yet only desolations of fear
and death to the common Imagination.
And now, under the shock of the
atomic bombs, the great masses of
population which had gathered into
the enormous. dingy town centers of
| that period were .dispossessed and scat
tered disastrously over the surround
ing rural areas. 1t was as if some
brutal force, grown impatient at last
at mans blindness, had with the de-
iberate intention Of Encouragement
of population upon more wholesome
lines, shaken the world. The great in
dustrial regions and the large cities
that had escaped the bombs were, be
cause of their complete economic col
lapse, in almost as tragic plight as
| those that blaZed, and the countryside
was disOrdered by multitude of wan
| dering and lawless strangers. In some
| parts Of the world famine ragged. and
| in many regions there was plague
| The plains north Of India, which
| had become more and more dependent
for the general welfare on the railways
| and that great system of irrigation
canals which the malignant section of
the patriots had destroyed, were in
state of peculiar distress; whole vii
lagos lay dead together. no man heed
ing, and the very tigers and panthers
| that preyed upon the emaciated sur
vivors crawled back infected into the
| jungle to perish. Large areas of China
| were a prey to brigand bands.
1t is a remarkable thing that no com
| plete contemporary account of the ex
plosion of the atomic bombs survives.
| There are, Of course, innumerable al
lusions and partial records, and it is
from these that subsequent ages must
piece together the image or these dev
astatiOns.
The phenomena, it must be remem-
bered. changed greatly from day to
| day, and even from hour to hour, as
the exploding bomb shifted its posi-
| ton, threw off fragments or came into
contact with water or a fresh texture
| Of SOIL Barnet, who came within
| forty miles of Paris early in October,
! is concerned chiefly with his account
| of the social confusion of the country
side and the problems of his command
| but he speaks of heaped cloud masses
| of steam call along the sky to the
| southwest" and of a red glare beneath
] these at night. Parts of Paris were
Sllll UuIIlllS, anu uuIuUGIS Vi peOple
were camped in the fields even at this
| distance watching over treasured heaps
| of salvaged loot. He speaks, too, of
the distant rumbling of the explosion
-"like trains going over iron bridges .
Other descriptions agree with this;
they all speak Of the continuous rever-
beratiOns' or of the "thudding and
| hamnering," or some such phrase, and
they all testify to a huge pail of steam,
from which rain would fall suddenly
| in torrents and amid which lightning
played. Drawing nearer to Paris. an
observer would have found the sal
wage camps increasing in number and
blocking up the villages, and large
numbers of people, often starving and
aiiing. camping under improvised tents
because there was no place for them to
60 The sky became more and more
densely overcast until at last it blOtted
out the light of day and left nothing
but dull red glare extraordinarily