The Terror

"The Terror" is a fantasy of the 'Great War.' Again the scene of our portent is laid in the rural byways of England, for the most part in a remote and sparsely peopled county of Wales. This, however, is merely the fore-scene, since we are to understand that much the same kind of thing is happening everywhere in Great Britain-a series of terrifying incidents, which are carefully concealed by the authorities, but, we are told, are actually responsible for the long inaction of the British...
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"The Terror" is a fantasy of the 'Great War.' Again the scene of our portent is laid in the rural byways of England, for the most part in a remote and sparsely peopled county of Wales. This, however, is merely the fore-scene, since we are to understand that much the same kind of thing is happening everywhere in Great Britain-a series of terrifying incidents, which are carefully concealed by the authorities, but, we are told, are actually responsible for the long inaction of the British forces on the Western front during the first two years of the war. Thus artfully does the story-teller establish his fiction upon an indubitable fact, fresh in every reader's mind. The British were inactive; we all wondered why at the time, and here, says our deponent, with his crisp reporter's air, is the answer. Death was visiting England, death by mysterious agencies, slaying the workers in munitions factories, bringing down aeroplanes without the firing of a shot-more frightful still, waylaying solitary travellers, laborers in remote fields, cottagers gathering to their supper in the dusk of quiet lanes. So in the Welsh district of Meirion. A child gathering flowers on her familiar cliff vanishes forever; a woman is found dead at the bottom of an old quarry, with a dead sheep beside her; a laborer and his son are found smothered in the slime of a marsh; a whole family of cottagers are found battered to death in the road before their cottage: and so on. In the end the reader's suspicions, which have been gradually aroused and slowly strengthened, are focused and confirmed. The Terror has been nothing less than a mute and universal uprising of the brute creation against the human. Rats, horses, sheep, even pigeons and moths, in their consent of malice or their dreadful numbers, have turned against their natural masters and threatened their very existence. And the British Government, in desperate doubt of the causes, has sternly repressed the publication of the facts. Suddenly, after nearly two years, the Terror ends. But why has it been? By a sort of contagion of hate, which has spread from warring man to the animal world? Or as a sort of flouting of the fallen creature man? The chronicler inclines to the latter opinion, that "the subjects revolted because the king abdicated"; that man's dominance of the animal kingdom had rested on his spiritual quality, and that as long as he maintained that quality, "between him and the animals there was a certain treaty and alliance"; but that having cast away his birthright, he ceased to be a king and became "a sham, an impostor, a thing to be destroyed." In short, the war, as revealer of man's fallibility, has made his world unsafe for him. As for this visitation, it has ceased, but only, we gather, as a first trial of the lower brute against the higher: "They have risen once," concludes the chronicler, "they may rise again."