The subsequent chapters of Barnet's narrative do but supply body to
this tragic possibility. He gives a series of vignettes of civilisation,
shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found the Belgian hills
swarming with refugees and desolated by cholera; the vestiges of the
contending armies keeping order under a truce, without actual battles,
but with the cautious hostility of habit, and a great absence of plan
everywhere.
Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were rumours
of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoy
and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes. There was the report
of an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and Japanese, and of some huge
revolutionary outbreak in America. The weather was stormier than men had
ever known it in those regions, with much thunder and lightning and wild
cloud-bursts of rain....
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE ENDING OF WAR
Section 1
On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding two
long stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to Bellinzona, and
southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is very
beautiful in springtime with a great multitude of wild flowers. More
particularly is this so in early June, when the slender asphodel Saint
Bruno's lily, with its spike of white blossom, is in flower.
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