Essential Science Fiction Novels - Volume 10. Edward Bellamy

the straw through.

      “It wasn’t half smelling before,” remarked Mrs. Blahous, full of interest.

      “Smelling,” said Blahous, nodding.

      “How can it help smelling? There’s no tobacco left in the world now. The last packet I had was the one my son the Professor sent me—let me see, that was in ’49, wasn’t it?”

      “That was just four years ago come Easter.”

      “So ’twas,” said Grandfather Blahous. “We’re getting an old man now. Very, very old.”

      “And what I want to know,” began Mrs. Prouzova, “is what’s all this awful to-do about nowadays?”

      “What to-do?”

      “Well, this war, I mean.”

      “Aye, yes, Heaven knows what it’s about,” said Blahous, blowing down his pipe until it gurgled. “That’s what nobody knows, aunt. They say it’s about religion—that’s what they tell me.”

      “What sort of religion?”

      “Oh, ours or the Swiss—nobody knows which. It’s so as there’ll be only one religion, they say.”

      “Well, we used to have only one religion before.”

      “But other places had a different one, aunt. They say there was orders from above that there must be only one.”

      “What sort of orders? Where from?”

      “Nobody knows. They say there were once machines that had religion inside them. It was hidden in a sort of long boiler.”

      “And what were the boilers for?”

      “Nobody knows. Just a sort of boilers. And they say that God appeared to people to make them believe. There was a lot in those days, aunt, that didn’t believe. One has to believe in something; what’s the use? If people had only believed, God wouldn’t have appeared to them. So it was only their godlessness that made Him come into the world, see, aunt?”

      “Well, yes, but what did this awful war begin for?”

      “Nobody knows. People say that the Chinese or the Turks began it. They say that they brought their own God with them in those boilers. They’re supposed to be terrible religious, the Turks and the Chinese. And so they wanted us to believe the way they did.”

      “But why should we?”

      “That’s it, nobody knows. If you ask me, the Prussians started it. And the Swedes, too.”

      “Lord, Lord!” lamented Mrs. Prouzova. “And the prices things are now! Fifteen hundred for a candle!”

      “And what I say,” maintained old Blahous, “is the Jews started the war so as to make money out of it. That’s what I say.”

      “We could do with some rain,” observed Mrs. Blahous. “The potatoes are far too small. Like nuts.”

      “It’s my belief,” Blahous went on, “that people just invented that about the Lord God, so as to have someone to blame things on. That was all made up. They wanted a war and they wanted an excuse. It was all a put-up job.”

      “Who did it, then?”

      “Nobody knows. What I say is, it was all fixed up with the Pope and the Jews and the whole lot of them. Those . . . those . . . Kalburators!” shouted Grandfather Blahous, in great excitement. “I’d like to say it to their faces! Why, did anybody need a new Lord God? The old one was good enough for us country people. There was just enough of Him, and He was good, and honest and upright. He didn’t show himself to anybody, but we had peace instead. . . .”

      “What are you asking for your eggs, Prouzova?”

      “I’m getting two thousand each at present.”

      “They say they’re asking three in Trutnov.”

      “And I tell you,” declared old Blahous vehemently, “it was bound to come. People were cross with each other even then. Why, your husband that’s dead now, Prouzova, God rest his soul, was a spiritualist or medium or something in those days. And one time I said to him just in fun, ‘I say, Prouza, you might call back that evil spirit that’s just escaped from me.’ And he lost his temper, and from that day to the day of his death he never spoke a word to me again. Yet he was my neighbour, mind you, aunt. And look at Tony Vlcek. He always swore by those foxfates that you fertilize with, and if anyone didn’t believe in them, he’d keep on going for him like mad. And my son, the Professor, tells me it’s the same wherever you go. If anyone sets his mind on anything, he must have everybody else believe in it. And he won’t let anyone alone. That’s how it’s all come about.”

      “Yes, yes,” said Aunt Prouzova, yawning. “What’s the use of it all?”

      “Ah, yes,” sighed Mrs. Blahous.

      “That’s the way things are in this world,” added Mrs. Prouzova.

      “And you women would like to go on cackling all day long,” Grandfather Blahous concluded peevishly, and tottered off into the house.

      . . . And the earth shook with the clash of armies, and thinkers in every camp confidently asserted that “a brighter day was dawning.”

      XXIX

      THE LAST BATTLE

      In the autumn of 1953 the Greatest War was drawing to a close. There were no armies left. The armies of occupation, cut off for the most part from their homes, were dwindling away and gradually vanishing like water in the sand. Self-appointed generals marched from town to town, or rather from heap to heap of ruins, at the head of five men, one a drummer, one a thief, one a schoolboy, one a man with a gramophone, and one of whom nobody knew anything. They went about collecting contributions or arranging benefit performances “in aid of the wounded and their widows and orphans.” No one knew by now how many warring camps there were.

      Amid this universal and indescribable collapse the Greatest War drew to its close. The end came so unexpectedly that no one nowadays can tell just where the last so-called decisive battle was fought. Historians are still at variance as to which engagement marked the close and extinction of the world-conflagration. Certain of them (such as Dührich, Assbridge, and more particularly Moroni) are inclined to the view that it was the battle of Lintz. In these extensive operations sixty soldiers were engaged, representing eleven hostile camps. The conflict broke out in the large saloon of the Rose Inn, the immediate cause being the waitress Hilda (as a matter of fact it was Marena Ruzickova of Novy Bydzov). Giuseppe, the Italian, proved victorious and carried Hilda off; but since she ran away next day with a Czech called Vaclav Hruska, this too was not a decisive battle.

      The historian Usinski records a similar battle at Gorochovky, Leblond a skirmish at Les Batignolles, and Van Goo a fight near Nieuport; but it would seem that local patriotism influenced them more directly than genuinely historical motives. In short, no one knows which was the last battle of the Greatest War. Nevertheless, it can be determined with considerable certitude from documents that are striking in their agreement, i.e. the series of prophecies that appeared before the Greatest War.

      For example, a prophecy printed in Swabian characters had been preserved since 1845, foretelling that in a hundred years “terrible times will come, and many armed men will fall in battle,” but that “in a hundred months thirteen nations would meet in the field under a birch-tree, and slaughter each other in a desperate struggle,” which would be followed by fifty years of peace.

      In the year 1893 the Turkish prophetess Wali Schön (?) predicted that “five times twelve years would pass ere peace would reign over the whole world; in that year thirteen emperors would make war upon each other and would meet in battle under a birch-tree. Then there would be peace, such a peace as there had never been before and never would be again.”

      The