t the first warning impacts of universal cataclysm. Each day
destruction and hate and disaster grew, the fissures widened between
man and man, new regions of the fabric of civilisation crumbled and gave
way. Below, the armies grew and the people perished; above, the airships
and aeroplanes fought and fled, raining destruction.

It is difficult perhaps for the broad-minded and long-perspectived
reader to understand how incredible the breaking down of the scientific
civilisation seemed to those who actually lived at this time, who in
their own persons went down in that debacle. Progress had marched as it
seemed invincible about the earth, never now to rest again. For three
hundred years and more the long steadily accelerated diastole of
Europeanised civilisation had been in progress: towns had been
multiplying, populations increasing, values rising, new countries
developing; thought, literature, knowledge unfolding and spreading. It
seemed but a part of the process that every year the instruments of war
were vaster and more powerful, and that armies and explosives outgrew
all other growing things....

Three hundred years of diastole, and then came the swift and unexpected
systole, like the closing of a fist. They could not understand it was
systole.

They could not think of it as anything but a jolt, a hitch, a mere
oscillatory indication of the swiftness of their progress. Collapse,
though it happened all about them, remained incredible. Presently some
falling mass smote them down, or the ground opened beneath their feet.
They died incredulous....

These men in the store made a minute, remote group under this immense
canopy of disaster. They turned from one little aspect to another. What
chiefly concerned them was defence against Asiatic raiders swooping for
petrol or to destroy weapons or communications. Everywhere levies were
being formed at that time to defend the plant of the railroads day and
night in the hope that communication would speedily be restored. The
land war was still far away. A man with a flat voice distinguished
himself by a display of knowledge and cunning. He told them all with
confidence just what had been wrong with the German drachenflieger
and the American aeroplanes, just what advantage the Japanese flyers
possessed. He launched out into a romantic description of the Butteridge
machine and riveted Bert's attention. "I SEE that," said Bert, and was
smitten silent by a thought. The man with th