The outline of a building seemed familiar.  It was an abandoned chapel; he knew he was in St. Martin’s Street.  He was about to pull Christine into the shelter of the front of the chapel, when something happened for which he could not find a name.  True, it was an explosion.  But the previous event had been an explosion, and this one was a thousandfold more intimidating.  The earth swayed up and down.  The sound alone of the immeasurable cataclysm annihilated the universe.  The sound and the concussion transcended what had been conceivable.  Both the sound and the concussion seemed to last for a long time.  Then, like an afterthought, succeeded the awful noise of falling masses and the innumerable crystal tinkling of shattered glass.  This noise ceased and began again....

G.J. was now in a strange condition of mild wonder.  There was silence in the dark solitude of St. Martin’s Street.  Then the sound of guns supervened once more, but they were distant guns.  G.J. discovered that he was not holding Christine, and also that, instead of being in the middle of the street, he was leaning against the door of a house.  He called faintly, “Christine!” No reply.  “In a moment,” he said to himself, “I must go out and look for her.  But I am not quite ready yet.”  He had a slight pain in his side; it was naught; it was naught, especially in comparison with the strange conviction of weakness and confusion.

He thought: 

“We’ve not won this war yet,” and he had qualms.

One poor lamp burned in the street.  He started to walk slowly and uncertainly towards it.  Near by he saw a hat on the ground.  It was his own.  He put it on.  Suddenly the street lamp went out.  He walked on, and stepped ankle-deep into broken glass.  Then the road was clear again.  He halted.  Not a sign of Christine!  He decided that she must have run away, and that she would run blindly and, finding herself either in Leicester Square or Lower Regent Street, would by instinct run home.  At any rate, she could not be blown to atoms, for they were together at the instant of the explosion.  She must exist, and she must have had the power of motion.  He remembered that he had had a stick; he had it no longer.  He turned back and, taking from his pocket the electric torch which had lately come into fashion, he examined the road for his stick.  The sole object of interest which the torch revealed was a child’s severed arm, with a fragment of brown frock on it and a tinsel ring on one of the fingers of the dirty little hand.  The blood from the other end had stained the ground.  G.J. abruptly switched off the torch.  Nausea overcame him, and then a feeling of the most intense pity and anger overcame the nausea. (A month elapsed before he could mention his discovery of the child’s arm to anyone at all.) The arm lay there as if it had been thrown there.  Whence had it come?  No doubt it had come from over the housetops....