The Absolute at Large

had got a firm hold on Saxony, and had occupied even the neutral territory of Czechoslovakia. The City of Prague was, by a peculiar coincidence, under the command of the Swedish Major-General Wrangel, possibly a descendant of the general of the same name who figured in the Thirty Years’ War. On the other hand, the Crusaders had made themselves masters of Holland, which they had flooded by breaking the dykes and letting in the sea, as well as of Hanover and Holstein as far as Lübeck, whence they were making inroads on Denmark. No quarter was given in the fighting. Cities were razed to the ground, the men killed, and women up to the age of fifty violated. But the first things destroyed in every case were the enemy Karburators. Contemporaries of these inordinately bloody struggles assure us that supernatural powers were fighting on both sides. Often it seemed as though an invisible hand seized hostile aircraft and dashed them to the ground, or intercepted in its flight a fifty-four centimetre projectile weighing a ton and hurled it back upon its own ranks. Particularly horrible were the scenes enacted during the destruction of the Karburators. As soon as the enemy position was occupied, there ensued an invisible but desperate struggle round the local Karburators. At times it was like a cyclone which wrecked and scattered the whole building in which an atomic boiler stood, like someone blowing on a heap of feathers. Bricks, timbers and tiles flew round in wild confusion, and the contest usually ended in a frightful explosion which felled every tree and structure within a radius of twelve kilometres and scooped out a crater over two hundred metres deep. The force of the detonation naturally varied according to the size of the exploding Karburator.

Suffocating gases spread over a radius of three hundred kilometres, utterly blasting all vegetation; however, as these creeping clouds several times turned back upon their own ranks⁠—through the strategical intervention of supernatural powers⁠—this very unreliable method of warfare was abandoned. It was apparent that while the Absolute attacked on one side, it also defended itself on the other. It introduced unheard-of weapons into warfare⁠—earthquakes, cyclones, showers of sulphur, inundations, angels, pestilence, famines, plagues of locusts, etc.⁠—till there was no alternative but to alter the art of military strategy altogether. Mass attacks, permanent entrenchments, open order, strong points, and suchlike nonsense, were abandoned; every soldier received a knife, some cartridges, and some bombs, and with these he went off on his own to kill any soldier who wore on his breast a cross of a different colour. It was not a matter of two armies confronting each other. There was simply a particular country which was the battlefield, and there the two armies moved about promiscuously, killing one another off, man for man, until finally it became clear to whom that country now belonged. It was a terribly murderous method, to be sure, but it had ultimately, in the long run, a certain conclusiveness.

Such was the situation in Central Europe. At the beginning of April the Protestant armies were entering Austria and Bavaria by way of Czechoslovakia, while the Catholics were overrunning Denmark and Pomerania. Holland, as already stated, had completely vanished from the map of Europe.

In Italy internal warfare was raging between the parties of Urban and Martin: meanwhile Sicily fell into the hands of the Greek Evzones. The Portuguese occupied Austria and Castile, but lost their own Estramadura; in the South as a whole the war was waged with quite exceptional ferocity.

England had been fighting on Irish soil and then in the colonies. By the beginning of April she held only the coastline of Egypt. The other colonies had been lost, and the settlers killed by the natives. With the aid of the Arabian, Sudanese, and Persian armies the Turks had overwhelmed the entire Balkan region, and had made themselves masters of Hungary, when the schism broke out between the Shiahs and the Sunnis on what was apparently a very important question concerning Ali, the fourth Caliph. Both sects pursued each other from Constantinople to the Carpathians with a zeal and bloodthirstiness which unfortunately also vented itself upon the Christians. And so in this part of Europe things were worse than anywhere else.

Poland vanished, being wiped out of existence by the Russian armies. The Russian hosts then turned to face the Yellow invasion which was sweeping northward and westward. Meanwhile ten Japanese army corps had been landed in North America.

You will notice that no mention has yet been made of France, the chronicler having reserved that country for Chapter XXIV.

XXIV

The Napoleon of the Mountain Brigade

Bobinet, if you please, Toni Bobinet, the twenty-two-year-old lieutenant of mountain artillery, attached to the garrison of Annecy (Haute Savoie), but at present on six weeks’ manoeuvres on the Needles (Les Aiguilles), from which on a clear day one can see in the west the lakes of Annecy and Geneva, and in the east the blunted ridge of the Bonne Montagne and the peaks of Mont Blanc⁠—do you know your way about now? Well, then, Lieutenant Toni Bobinet sat on a boulder and tugged at his tiny moustache, first because he was bored, and secondly because he had read a newspaper two weeks old right through for the fifth time, and was now thinking things over.

At this point the chronicler ought to follow the meditations of the prospective Napoleon, but in the meantime his glance (the chronicler’s, that is) has slid along the snow-covered slopes to the gorge of the Arly, where the thaw has already set in, and where his eye is caught and held by the tiny little towns of Mégève, Flumet, and Ugines, with their pointed churches looking like toys. Ah, the memories of long-vanished childhood! The castles in the air one reared with one’s box of bricks!

Meanwhile Lieutenant Bobinet⁠ ⁠… but no. Let us abandon any attempt to psychologize great men, to express the titanic idea in the