d
soldier-cyclists would come drifting along, and such encounters became
more frequent as he got out of Wales into England. Amidst all this
wreckage they were still campaigning. He had had some idea of resorting
to the workhouses for the night if hunger pressed him too closely, but
some of these were closed and others converted into temporary hospitals,
and one he came up to at twilight near a village in Gloucestershire
stood with all its doors and windows open, silent as the grave, and, as
he found to his horror by stumbling along evil-smelling corridors, full
of unburied dead.

From Gloucestershire Bert went northward to the British aeronautic park
outside Birmingham, in the hope that he might be taken on and given
food, for there the Government, or at any rate the War Office, still
existed as an energetic fact, concentrated amidst collapse and social
disaster upon the effort to keep the British flag still flying in
the air, and trying to brisk up mayor and mayor and magistrate and
magistrate in a new effort of organisation. They had brought together
all the best of the surviving artisans from that region, they had
provisioned the park for a siege, and they were urgently building a
larger type of Butteridge machine. Bert could get no footing at this
work: he was not sufficiently skilled, and he had drifted to Oxford when
the great fight occurred in which these works were finally wrecked. He
saw something, but not very much, of the battle from a place called
Boar Hill. He saw the Asiatic squadron coming up across the hills to the
south-west, and he saw one of their airships circling southward again
chased by two aeroplanes, the one that was ultimately overtaken, wrecked
and burnt at Edge Hill. But he never learnt the issue of the combat as a
whole.

He crossed the Thames from Eton to Windsor and made his way round the
south of London to Bun Hill, and there he found his brother Tom, looking
like some dark, defensive animal in the old shop, just recovering from
the Purple Death, and Jessica upstairs delirious, and, as it seemed to
him, dying grimly. She raved of sending out orders to customers, and
scolded Tom perpetually lest he should be late with Mrs. Thompson's
potatoes and Mrs. Hopkins' cauliflower, though all business had long
since ceased and Tom had developed a quite uncanny skill in the snaring
of rats and sparrows and the concealment of certain stores of cereals
and biscuits from plundered grocers' shops. Tom