And as I say, sir, if that line
of escape hadn't opened, before now there might have been a crash,
revolution, panic, social disintegration, famine, and--it is
conceivable--complete disorder. . . . The rails might have rusted on the
disused railways by now, the telephone poles have rotted and fallen,
the big liners dropped into sheet-iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted
cities become the ruinous hiding-places of gangs of robbers. We might
have been brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may
smile, but that had happened before in human history. The world is still
studded with the ruins of broken-down civilisations. Barbaric bands
made their fastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of Hadrian became a
fortress that warred across the ruins of Rome against the Colosseum....
Had all that possibility of reaction ended so certainly in 1940? Is it
all so very far away even now?'
'It seems far enough away now,' said Edith Haydon.
'But forty years ago?'
'No,' said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, 'I think you
underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of the
twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that intelligence
didn't tell--but it was there. And I question your hypothesis. I doubt
if that discovery could have been delayed.
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