re wholesome lines, shaken the world.
The great industrial regions and the large cities that had escaped the
bombs were, because of their complete economic collapse, in almost as
tragic plight as those that blazed, and the country-side was disordered
by a multitude of wandering and lawless strangers. In some parts of the
world famine raged, and in many regions there was plague.... The plains
of north 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 a state of
peculiar distress, whole villages lay dead together, no man heeding, and
the very tigers and panthers that preyed upon the emaciated survivors
crawled back infected into the jungle to perish. Large areas of China
were a prey to brigand bands....

It is a remarkable thing that no complete contemporary account of
the explosion of the atomic bombs survives. There are, of course,
innumerable allusions and partial records, and it is from these that
subsequent ages must piece together the image of these devastations.

The phenomena, it must be remembered, changed greatly from day to day,
and even from hour to hour, as the exploding bomb shifted its position,
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. 'All along the sky to the south-west' and of a
red glare beneath these at night. Parts of Paris were still burning,
and numbers of 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
reverberations,' or of the 'thudding and hammering,' or some such
phrase; and they all testify to a huge pall of steam, from which rain
would fall suddenly in torrents and amidst which lightning played.
Drawing nearer to Paris an observer would have found the salvage camps
increasing in number and blocking up the villages, and large numbers
of people, often starving and ailing, camping under improvised tents
because there was no place for them to go. The sky became more and mor