ed nerve
ceased to respond. The very vastness of the horror took away from its
personal appeal. Individuals merged into groups, groups into crowds,
crowds into a universal phenomenon which one soon accepted as the
inevitable detail of every scene. Only here and there, where some
particularly brutal or grotesque incident caught the attention, did the
mind come back with a sudden shock to the personal and human meaning of
it all.

Above all, there was the fate of the children. That, I remember, filled
us with the strongest sense of intolerable injustice. We could have
wept--Mrs. Challenger did weep--when we passed a great council school and
saw the long trail of tiny figures scattered down the road which led from
it. They had been dismissed by their terrified teachers and were
speeding for their homes when the poison caught them in its net. Great
numbers of people were at the open windows of the houses. In Tunbridge
Wells there was hardly one which had not its staring, smiling face. At
the last instant the need of air, that very craving for oxygen which we
alone had been able to satisfy, had sent them flying to the window. The
sidewalks too were littered with men and women, hatless and bonnetless,
who had rushed out of the houses. Many of them had fallen in the
roadway. It was a lucky thing that in Lord John we had found an expert
driver, for it was no easy matter to pick one's way. Passing through the
villages or towns we could only go at a walking pace, and once, I
remember, opposite the school at Tonbridge, we had to halt some time
while we carried aside the bodies which blocked our path.

A few small, definite pictures stand out in my memory from amid that long
panorama of death upon the Sussex and Kentish high roads. One was that
of a great, glittering motor-car standing outside the inn at the village
of Southborough. It bore, as I should guess, some pleasure party upon
their return from Brighton or from Eastbourne. There were three gaily
dressed women, all young and beautiful, one of them with a Peking spaniel
upon her lap. With them were a rakish-looking elderly man and a young
aristocrat, his eyeglass still in his eye, his cigarette burned down to
the stub between the fingers of his begloved hand. Death must have come
on them in an instant and fixed them as they sat. Save that the elderly
man had at the last moment torn out his collar in an effort to breathe,
they might all have been asleep.