e bij
Vrede before the night swallowed it, was almost dead astern of us....'

Section 9

Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had been badly
strained, and his men were pumping or baling in relays. He had got about
a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose boat had capsized near him, and
he had three other boats in tow. He was afloat, and somewhere between
Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but he could not tell where. It was a day that
was still half night. Gray waters stretched in every direction under a
dark gray sky, and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, in
many cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the upper third
of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted a dimly seen
flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned, furniture, rafts,
timbering, and miscellaneous objects.

The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there did a
dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box or chair or
such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was not till the Thursday
that the dead came to the surface in any quantity. The view was bounded
on every side by a gray mist that closed overhead in a gray canopy. The
air cleared in the afternoon, and then, far away to the west under great
banks of steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of the atomic bombs
came visible across the waste of water.

They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London sunsets. 'They
sat upon the sea,' says Barnet, 'like frayed-out waterlilies of flame.'

Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the track
of the canal, in helping people who were adrift, in picking up derelict
boats, and in taking people out of imperilled houses. He found other
military barges similarly employed, and it was only as the day wore on
and the immediate appeals for aid were satisfied that he thought of food
and drink for his men, and what course he had better pursue. They had a
little cheese, but no water. 'Orders,' that mysterious direction, had at
last altogether disappeared. He perceived he had now to act upon his own
responsibility.

'One's sense was of a destruction so far-reaching and of a world so
altered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and expect to find
things as they had been before the war began. I sat on the quarter-deck
with Mylius my engineer and Kemp and two others of the non-commissioned
officers, and we consulted upon our line of action. We