becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it
was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before
the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could
carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to
wreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody;
the children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as the
Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the paraphernalia and
pretensions of war.

It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce between
the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand, and the world
of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men of a later time
can hope to understand this preposterous state of affairs. Social
organisation was still in the barbaric stage. There were already great
numbers of actively intelligent men and much private and commercial
civilisation, but the community, as a whole, was aimless, untrained and
unorganised to the pitch of imbecility. Collective civilisation, the
'Modern State,' was still in the womb of the future....

Section 6

But let us return to Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre and its account
of the experiences of a common man during the war time. While these
terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were happening in Paris
and Berlin, Barnet and his company were industriously entrenching
themselves in Belgian Luxembourg.

He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day's journey through the
north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid phrases. The country
was browned by a warm summer, the trees a little touched with autumnal