Frankenstein in England

by H. M. TOMLINSON

1

WHEN wakened, we could hear nothing beyond the blackout, but were told we had better dress. Why? An air raid is nothing new. It is soon over now, and is only worth watching if you enjoy a display of man’s aptitude for the hellish. Most of us hate it, and with reason. Man is not only a fool, but the only damned fool in all creation, as is well known. Why dress? “Well, I’ve seen five of them pass my bedroom window, and I cannot make it out.”

What, seen them? The enemy is nearly always heard at night, but a sight of him is rare. And five? Yes, we were assured — and our daughter has great experience in the details of raids — five, and all low, and each caught in the searchlights.

Strange. What in the name of the diabolical was going on, if five were seen, all of them at no great height, in fifteen minutes? In war, it is better to respect a difference until you know its name. A window of the room was opened, and we watched for whatever the dark might disclose. For a minute we looked out on an overcast, moonless, summer midnight. That was all. It was still and warm, and the scent of the moist garden came up to remind us of a tranquil once-upon-a-time. We began to wonder whether we had been unduly apprehensive, whether things had been seen which were not there, for your senses become much too acute, after five years of war, plus the Zeppelin nights of that other war.

What was that? A searchlight beyond the dark shoulder of a down, sweeping the keels of clouds, caught a golden shape in its beam, held it, and passed it on to nearer beams. It became caught in a mesh of lights. It did not seem to care. It sped fast towards us, fast and straight. It held at great speed a direct and level course; no swerving, no dodging. A reckless pilot. Then the fireworks began. Colored tracers followed the brilliant specter along, streaming into it, as it hurried in a glowing intersection of rays. A rocket gun went for it, and we saw it no more. But another of them was in sight, and was behaving with the same senseless indifference to danger. I drew the ladies away.

That was no honest bomber. Something odd had begun. What was it? There were occasional shocks that were not of our guns. We sought the innermost recess in the house, and waited. But not for long. Yet another was heard approaching, and its increasing roar told us we were in its track. Its note was something new, too. Anything new in war, while you wait in a confined space, speculating over the nature of a mysterious horror, inordinately protracts the night. There was nothing we could do, though; nothing except stay where we were, and begin to count, when another roar was heard in the distance. I discovered that if I could reach twenty, counting slowly, our house was passed over.

I did much counting that night, while waiting for daylight. By daylight, of course, the nuisance would end. It never waits for sunup these days. The sun seemed to be late, however, for the roaring and rushing outside went on unabated. It never occurred to me that this menace, whatever it was, might care as little for the sun as for searchlights; but one’s mind, on a sleepless night in a cupboard under the stairs, does not do its best for you. It has no time, while calculating the chances in inexplicable sounds; and again, when the cupboard jumps, so do you.

A moment came when I fancied I could see the dim wall of the stairway; and soon there was no doubt of it. There it stood, quite calm. The suggestion of familiar things coming through, in the dawn of another day, when the crisis of the night is nearly past, gives a sense of security. Though how illusory are the reports of our senses! We have discovered we really are transient; that in the twinkling of an eye —

Six o’clock came — no need now for the electric torch — but the noises went on. This was overdoing it. There was no sense in this. It was illmanners, and I began to grow angry; yet anger without a visible object, I reflected, will only make me as insane as the night has been. While thinking this, I saw mother and daughter suddenly cower and cover their faces; their ears are far better than mine.

I began to count. The roaring grew in volume, grew inimical, then abruptly ceased. A crash followed almost at once which shook the bones.

Well, there we still were, anyhow. I was sure a plane had fallen at our front gate, and went to do what I could. When I looked out, our pleasant road, with its trees and shrubberies and shy house-fronts, was empty in a pallid morning to its bend just below me. Nothing had happened. A little later the call came for which we had been waiting: “All clear!”

2

OUR daughter, relieved that this was over, though still puzzled by the incidents of the night, departed for her business, as usual. My wife and I assumed that we had now only a common day of wartime to manage. Our girl was back at the door almost at once. What she had seen at the bottom of the road was too much for her, without a space in which to recover. Moreover, she had to warn us. Hitler’s secret weapon was in use. What took my eye as much as the havoc, when I went to see it, was the quiet patience of our neighbors, removing armfuls of trifling objects from the wreckage of homes. There was just enough left of that pleasing corner for me to recognize it, Scveral villas had gone, and those around were like a corner of France, near the front line, in the old bad days.

War, I could see, was expanding itself; it was decidedly progressive; soon the front line in war would be all degrees of latitude and longitude, and a cradle anywhere on earth would have to face the matter like a battleship. A pine tree I was wont to admire every morning was snapped off at its base, and had fallen on the rose beds of a villa whose cavity walls, so well built, had been entered by blast, with ballooning effects. The oddities of blast some day will suffice as a subject, for they can be fantastic. At the same time, they can be alarming. I noted with dislike the distance it could carry, while yet overlooking nearer objects, as if they were too contemptible to be destroyed. A cheerful policeman stood by the central wreckage, and told me that not a soul had been hurt, bad as it looked. “A man, his wife, and baby came out of that alive,” he said, pointing to a tangle of rafters projecting from a mass of gray rubble. They had been underground in a shelter.

Yes, but they do not always come out alive. Not always. I am aware that the official comments on the pilotless plane, which is an aerial torpedo, are just. It does not make days and nights as full of calamity as those of 1940-1941. It is not so dreadful, and it does not interrupt military routine, but it is certainly more unexpected and horrible. The crew of a bomber can be frightened, but the pilotless plane is Frankenstein. It is inhuman; and to see it low in the sky, coming at you in daylight, hurtling and fussing along with its tail of flame, bringing blind death, is as if one’s heart now were sure that Chaos had come again. No doubt about it this time. The mind is shocked by this last proof of the mechanical forces that have been evoked; there Overhead flies headlong one of the harbingers of doom. You crouch by a wall to leeward, and wait for the burst.

When this happens in a familiar street, whose gardens have advised you for years of the course of the seasons, the arrival there of Frankenstein changes the old values of existence. We see today that the progress of industrial civilization has not been to establishment but to disruption. Evil has been released, and is at large, as a benefit of scientific discovery. Why deny it, when its victims are being removed from the ruin of a child’s hostel, from a school, from a hospital, from a church? There is no pretense that this thing can be aimed at military objects. It is an instrument of blind malice, an aimless destroyer. Some fools in the British Parliament cried no, the other day, annoyed when there was candor about the meaning of this latest abomination. But do not some of us remember that it was a feat for rejoicing over, when an airplane first crossed the English Channel; and a little later the Atlantic? And that was only the other day.

Bigger and better Frankensteins? Isn’t it time we roused to the way that industry and cleverness, divorced from humanity, are shaping our lives? The truth is, we are not free men. We are very far from being that. I don’t suppose slaves at any period in history suffered the restraints and fears which condition our free and civilized communities. As things are with us, the pygmies of the Congo and the savages of the Amazon forests have more happiness and security in their days. So of what worth are our civility and polish? We had better think anew, and look for a means to save ourselves.

3

IT in the little betrayals that the insecurity of our establishment is shown. At high noon yesterday, a beautiful day of summer, I was in a bus in a high street. There was no need for me to look out to see where we were, but a sudden suspicion — a bus drowns most other sounds — made me do so. I got up. People were scattering on the sidewalks. They were flat on their stomachs on the paving. One woman on her hands and knees, still clasping her market basket, was gazing up at heaven. You would never forget the look in her eyes, had you seen it. One of the beasts was dropping over us. The bus brought up with a jolt. You can live a long time in five seconds. Then it came. A column of brown smoke shot up from a side turning. Glass cascaded. The bus still waited, for rescue parties were already speeding across the street to the scene. Then the street resumed its normal flow. But would you expect a man’s thoughts to resume their usual flow?

Again, only the other day, I stooped to rescue Coleridge from the splinters of glass, brickbats, and shattered woodwork on the floor of my own room. All our rooms were like it. We were open to the weather. I do not complain. We are lucky, so far. Beyond the end of the garden two villas, for years a feature of our outlook, had disappeared, and some of their people with them; those near-by wrecks were the really disheartening signs.

As we moved about our home, assessing its hurt, my wife was silent. I expected something different, for she has, for long, given some good things great care. She would express a stern opinion presently, I supposed. I was looking at the rubbish and glass on her favored Oriental carpet when she made her first comment. She was not looking at it. She was pointing in sorrow to the place where our neighbors’ homes had been, but did not speak. Then she glanced down. “We must get this mess cleared up,”she said, and went promptly for the household tools.

But how are we going to get this mess cleared up? And are we not altogether too patient with evil? I think Americans had better know that on this side of the Atlantic a once kindly distinction made by us between Nazis and Germans has gone. Quite gone. The Germans, who are the most industrious and painstaking people in Europe, are evidently dangerous; they are both sentimental and emotional, and so the easiest of fools, politically. Their ideas are not yours, and not mine. We shall never be sure of what they will do next. I do not say we hate them. Hate is waste. We see that hate and pride have corrupted Germany. Nor is vengeance for us to dispense. We are not good enough for that. We are also aware there are nice Germans, but we note they have no influence whatever on the mass of their people, who appear to have been moonstruck for ten years past.

In any country but Germany, Hitler would have aroused interest but as a wild ass, rather larger than the usual run of them; and they breed everywhere. In Germany, however, divinity is accorded to his deafening voice. When a numerous, ingenious, and energetic people accept such a figure as a substitute for law, and disclaim responsibility for the consequences of the lashing of his hoofs, then it is plain they cannot be dealt with as one would deal with rational folk who understand the ground you and I stand on. Not, anyhow, if we would be on the safe side. In settling with the Germans, we must remember to be kind first and last to the rest of our fellows on earth. Peace to men of good will. Any other sentiment for guidance would be suicidal.