’There was a wind about as strong as the flood, and I found we were pounding against every conceivable buoyant object that had been between us and the sea.  The only light in the world now came from our lamps, the steam became impenetrable at a score of yards from the boat, and the roar of the wind and water cut us off from all remoter sounds.  The black, shining waters swirled by, coming into the light of our lamps out of an ebony blackness and vanishing again into impenetrable black.  And on the waters came shapes, came things that flashed upon us for a moment, now a half-submerged boat, now a cow, now a huge fragment of a house’s timberings, now a muddle of packing-cases and scaffolding.  The things clapped into sight like something shown by the opening of a shutter, and then bumped shatteringly against us or rushed by us.  Once I saw very clearly a man’s white face....

’All the while a group of labouring, half-submerged trees remained ahead of us, drawing very slowly nearer.  I steered a course to avoid them.  They seemed to gesticulate a frantic despair against the black steam clouds behind.  Once a great branch detached itself and tore shuddering by me.  We did, on the whole, make headway.  The last I saw of Vreugde 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.’