Chapter I

THE RED AND BLACK AND GOLD STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY ON THE CHANGING MAP OF THE WORLD

~1~

When but a child of seven my uncle placed me in a private school in which one of the so-called redeemed sub-sailors was a teacher of the German language. As I look back now, in the light of my present knowledge, I better comprehend the docile humility and carefully nurtured ignorance of this man. In his class rooms he used as a text a description of German life, taken from the captured submarine. From this book he had secured his own conception of a civilization of which he really knew practically nothing. I recall how we used to ask Herr Meineke if he had actually seen those strange things of which he taught us. To this he always made answer, “The book is official, man’s observation errs.”

~2~

“He can talk it,” said my playmates who attended the public schools where all teaching of the language of the outcast nation was prohibited. They invariably elected me to be “the Germans,” and locked me up in the old garage while they rained a stock of sun-dried clay bombs upon the roof and then came with a rush to “batter down the walls of Berlin” by breaking in the door, while I, muttering strange guttural oaths, would be led forth to be “exterminated.”

On rainy days I would sometimes take my favoured playmates into my uncle’s library where five great maps hung in ordered sequence on the panelled wall.

The first map was labelled “The Age of Nations--1914,” and showed the black spot of Germany, like in size to many of the surrounding countries, the names of which one recited in the history class.

The second map--”Germany’s Maximum Expansion of the First World War--1918”--showed the black area trebled in size, crowding into the pale gold of France, thrusting a hungry arm across the Hellespont towards Bagdad, and, from the Balkans to the Baltic, blotting out all else save the flaming red of Bolshevist Russia, which spread over the Eastern half of Europe like a pool of fresh spilled blood.

Third came “The Age of the League of Nations, 1919--1983,” with the gold of democracy battling with the spreading red of socialism, for the black of autocracy had erstwhile vanished.

The fourth map was the most fascinating and terrible. Again the black of autocracy appeared, obliterating the red of the Brotherhood of Man, spreading across half of Eurasia and thrusting a broad black shadow to the Yellow Sea and a lesser one to the Persian Gulf. This map was labelled “Maximum German Expansion of the Second World War, 1988,” and lines of dotted white retreated in concentric waves till the line of 2041.

This same year was the first date of the fifth map, which was labelled “A Century of the World State,” and here, as all the sea was blue, so all the land was gold, save one black blot that might have been made by a single spattered drop of ink, for it was no bigger than the Irish Island. The persistence of this remaining black on the map of the world troubled my boyish mind, as it has troubled three generations of the United World, and strive as I might, I could not comprehend why the great blackness of the fourth map had been erased and this small blot alone remained.

~3~

When I returned from school for my vacation, after I had my first year of physical science, I sought out my uncle in his laboratory and asked him to explain the mystery of the little black island standing adamant in the golden sea of all the world.

“That spot,” said my uncle, “would have been erased in two more years if a Leipzig professor had not discovered The Ray. Yet we do not know his name nor how he made his discovery.”

“But just what is The Ray?” I asked.

“We do not know that either, nor how it is made. We only know that it destroys the oxygen carrying power of living blood. If it were an emanation from a substance like radium, they could have fired it in projectiles and so conquered the earth. If it were ether waves like electricity, we should have been able to have insulated against it, or they should have been able to project it farther and destroy our aircraft, but The Ray is not destructive beyond two thousand metres in the air and hardly that far in the earth.”

“Then why do we not fly over and land an army and great guns and batter down the walls of Berlin and he done with it?”

“That, as you know if you studied your history, has been tried many times and always with disaster. The bomb-torn soil of that black land is speckled white with the bones of World armies who were sent on landing invasions before you or I was born. But it was only heroic folly, one gun popping out of a tunnel mouth can slay a thousand men. To pursue the gunners into their catacombs meant to be gassed; and sometimes our forces were left to land in peace and set up their batteries to fire against Berlin, but the Germans would place Ray generators in the ground beneath them and slay our forces in an hour, as the Angel of Jehovah withered the hosts of the Assyrians.”