quent chapters of Barnet's narrative do but supply body to
this tragic possibility. He gives a series of vignettes of civilisation,
shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found the Belgian hills
swarming with refugees and desolated by cholera; the vestiges of the
contending armies keeping order under a truce, without actual battles,
but with the cautious hostility of habit, and a great absence of plan
everywhere.

Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were rumours
of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoy
and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes. There was the report
of an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and Japanese, and of some huge
revolutionary outbreak in America. The weather was stormier than men had
ever known it in those regions, with much thunder and lightning and wild
cloud-bursts of rain....

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE ENDING OF WAR

Section 1

On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding two
long stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to Bellinzona, and
southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is very
beautiful in springtime with a great multitude of wild flowers. More
particularly is this so in early June, when the slender asphodel Saint
Bruno's lily, with its spike of white blossom, is in flower. To the
westward of this delightful shelf there is a deep and densely wooded
trench, a great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of which
arise great precipices very high and wild. Above the asphodel fields the
mountains climb in rocky slopes to solitudes of stone and sunlight that
curve round and join that wall of cliffs in one common skyline. This
desolate and austere background contrasts very vividly with the glowing
serenity of the great lake below, with the spacious view of fertile
hills and roads and villages and islands to south and east, and with the
hotly golden rice flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And because
it was a remote and insignificant place, far away out of the crowding
tragedies of that year of disaster, away from burning cities and
starving multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was here
that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest, if
possible, before it was too late, the debacle of civilisation. Here,
brought together by the indefatigable energy of that impassioned
humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at Washington, the chief
Pow