Final Blackout

THE LIEUTENANT.

He was born in an air-raid shelter-and his first wail was drowned by the shriek of bombs, the thunder of falling walls and the coughing chatter of machine guns raking the sky.

He was taught in a countryside where A was for Anti-aircraft and V was for victory. He knew that Vickers Wellington bombers had flown non-stop clear to China. But nobody thought to tell him about a man who had sailed a carack as far in the opposite direction-a chap called Columbus.

War-shattered officers had taught him the arts of battle on the relief maps of Rugby. Limping sergeants had made him expert with rifle and pistol, light and heavy artillery. And although he could not conjugate a single Latin verb, he was graduated as wholly educated at fourteen and commissioned the same year.

His father was killed on the Mole at Kiel. His uncle rode a flamer in at Hamburg. His mother, long ago, had died of grief and starvation in the wreckage which had been London.

When he was eighteen he had been sent to the front as a subaltern. At twenty-three he was commanding a brigade.

In short, his career was not unlike that of any other high-born English lad born after the beginning of that conflict which is sometimes known as the War of Books-or the War of Creeds, or the War Which Ended War or World wars two, three, four and five. Like any other war, with the exception that he lived through it.

There is little accounting for the reason he lived so long and, having lived, moved up to take the spotlight on the Continental stage for a few seconds out of time. But there is never any accounting for such things.

When officers and men, sick with the hell of it, walked out to find a bullet that would end an unlivable life, he shrugged and carried on. When his messmates went screaming mad from illness and revulsion, he gave them that for which they begged, sheathed his pistol and took over the fragments of their commands. When outfits mutinied and shot their officers in the back, he squared his own and, faced front, carried on.

He had seen ninety-three thousand replacements come into his division before he had been a year on the Continent. And he had seen almost as many files voided over again.

He was a soldier and his trade was death, and he had seen too much to be greatly impressed with anything. Outwardly he was much like half a million others of his rank; inwardly there was a difference. He had found out, while commanding ack-acks in England, that nerves are more deadly than bullets, and so he had early denied the existence of his own, substituting a careless cheerfulness which went strangely with the somber gloom which overhung the graveyard of Europe. If he had nerves, he kept them to himself. And what battles he fought within himself to keep them down must forever go unsung.

Before he had been a year on the Continent, the dread soldier's sickness-that very learned and scientific result of bacteriological warfare, the climax of years of mutating germs unto final, incurable diseases-had caused a quarantine to be placed on all English troops serving across the Channel, just as America, nine years before, had completely stopped all communication across the Atlantic, shortly after her abortive atom war had boomeranged. Hence, he had not been able to return to England.

If he longed for his own land, shell-blasted though it might be, he never showed it. Impassively he had listened each time to the tidings of seven separate revolutions which had begun with the assassination of a king, a crime which had been succeeded by every known kind of political buffoonery culminating in Communism, (for at least that is what they called this ideology, though Marx would have disowned it. And the late, unlamented Stalin would have gibbered incoherently at the heresy of its tenets). And he saw only mirth in the fact that, whereas the crimson banner flew now over London, the imperial standard of the czar now whipped in the Russian breeze.

Seven separate governments, each attacked and made to carry on the war. Nine governments in Germany in only eighteen years. He had let the ribbons and insignia issued him drop into the mud, wishing with all his kind that all governments would collapse together and put an end to this. But that had never happened. The fall of one side netted attack from the organized other. And turn about. Just as the problem of manufacture had unequalized the periods of bombing, so had this served to prolong this war that the brief orgy of atomics, murderously wild, if utterly indecisive, had spread such hatreds that the lingering sparks of decency and forbearance seemed to have vanished from the world. War, as in days of old, had become a thing of hate and loot, for how else was a machine tooled country to get machines and tools which it could no longer generate within itself.

He knew nothing about these international politics-or at least pretended that he did not. He was, however, in close touch with the effects, for such a collapse was always followed by the general advance of the other side. The fall of his own immediate clique in command meant that he, as a soldier, would be attacked; the banishing of the enemies' chief caused him to attack in turn. But war, to him, was the only actuality, for rarely had he known of that thing of which men spoke dreamily and to which they gave the name "peace".

He had seen, in his lifetime, the peak and oblivion of flight, the perfection and extinction of artillery, the birth and death of nuclear physics, the end product of bacteriology, but only the oblivion, extinction, and death of culture.

It had been three years since he had heard an airplane throbbing overhead. As a child, to him they had been as common as birds, if a shade more deadly. They had flown fast and far and then when the crash of atom bombs in guided missiles had finally blotted out three quarters of the manufacturing centers of the world they had flown no more. For the airplane is a fragile thing which cannot exist without replacement parts, without complex fuels, without a thousand aids. Even the assembly of a thousand partly damaged ships into perhaps fifty that would fly did not give a nation more than a few months' superiority in the air. It was quiet, very quiet. The planes had gone.

Once great guns had rumbled along definite lines. But big guns had needed artfully manufactured shells, and when the centers of manufacture had become too disorganized to produce such a complex thing as a shell, firing had gradually sputtered out, jerkily reviving, but fainter each time until it ceased. For the guns themselves had worn out. And when infantry tactics came to take the place of the warfare of fortresses and tanks, those few guns which remained had, one by one, been abandoned, perforce, and left in ruins to a rapidly advancing enemy. This was particularly true of the smaller field guns which had hung on feebly to the last.

It had been four years since he had received his last orders by radio, for there were no longer parts for replacement. And though it was rumored that G.H.Q. of the B.E.F. had radio communication with England no one could really tell. It had been seven years since a new uniform had been issued, three years or more since a rank had been made for an officer.

His world was a shambles of broken townships and defiled fields, an immense cemetery where thirty million soldiers and three hundred million civilians had been wrenched loose from life. And though the death which had shrieked out of the skies would howl no more, there was no need. Its work was done.

Food supplies had diminished to a vanishing point when a power, rumored to have been Russia, had spread plant insects over Europe. Starvation had done its best to surpass the death lists of battle. And, as an ally, another thing had come.

The disease known as soldier's sickness had wiped a clammy hand across the slate of Europe, taking ten times as many as the fighting of the war itself. Death crept silently over the wastes of grass-grown shell holes and gutted cities, slipping bony fingers into the cogs of what organization had survived. From the Mediterranean to the Baltic, no wheel turned for the illness was not one disease germ grossly mutated into a killer which defied penicillin, sulfa, pantomecin, and stereo-rays, it was at least nine illnesses, each one superior to yellow fever or the bubonic plague. The nine had combined amongst themselves to create an infinite variety of manifestations. In far countries, South America, South Africa, Scandinavia, where smoke might have belched from busy chimneys, nearly annihilated nations which had never been combatants had closed their ports and turned to wooden sticks for plows. Their libraries might still bulge with know-how but who could go there to read them? Nations entirely innocent of any single belligerent move in this war, or these many wars, had become, capitals and hamlets alike, weed grown and tumbled ruins to be quarantined a half century or more from even their own people.

But the lieutenant was not unhappy about it. He had no comparisons. When lack of credit and metal and workmen had decreed the abandonment of the last factory, he had received the tidings in the light that artillery had never accomplished anything in tactics, anyway, Napoleon to the contrary. When the last rattling wreck of a plane had become a rusting pile of charred metal, he had smiled his relief. What had planes done but attack objectives they could not hold?

From the records which remain of him, it is difficult to get an accurate description of the man himself, as difficult as it is easy to obtain minute accounts of his victories and defeats. His enemies represent him as having an upsetting and even ghoulish way of smiling, an expression of cheerfulness which...