getting
over eight miles of country to a point we could have reached in a motor
omnibus in nine minutes and a half--I did it the next day in that--and
then we made a massed attack upon entrenchments that could have shot us
all about three times over if only the umpires had let them. Then came a
little bayonet exercise, but I doubt if I am sufficiently a barbarian
to stick this long knife into anything living. Anyhow in this battle I
shouldn't have had a chance. Assuming that by some miracle I hadn't been
shot three times over, I was far too hot and blown when I got up to the
entrenchments even to lift my beastly rifle. It was those others would
have begun the sticking....

'For a time we were watched by two hostile aeroplanes; then our own
came up and asked them not to, and--the practice of aerial warfare still
being unknown--they very politely desisted and went away and did dives
and circles of the most charming description over the Fox Hills.'

All Barnet's accounts of his military training were written in the same
half-contemptuous, half-protesting tone. He was of opinion that his
chances of participating in any real warfare were very slight, and
that, if after all he should participate, it was bound to be so entirely
different from these peace manoeuvres that his only course as a rational
man would be to keep as observantly out of danger as he could until he
had learnt the tricks and possibilities of the new conditions. He states
this quite frankly. Never was a man more free from sham heroics.

Section 6

Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest of
masculine youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that for some
time he failed to connect the rush of wonderful new possibilities with
the financial troubles of his family. 'I knew my father was worried,' he
admits. That cast the smallest of shadows upon his delighted departure
for Italy and Greece and Egypt with three congenial companions in one of
the new atomic models. They flew over the Channel Isles and Touraine,
he mentions, and circled about Mont Blanc--'These new helicopters, we
found,' he notes, 'had abolished all the danger and strain of sudden
drops to which the old-time aeroplanes were liable'--and then he went on
by way of Pisa, Paestum, Ghirgenti, and Athens, to visit the pyramids
by moonlight, flying thither from Cairo, and to follow the Nile up
to Khartum. Even by later standards, it must have been a very gleeful
holid