大象传媒

It is a mistake to think that an ordinary man of no great education or polish of speech cannot astonish one by revealing things of profundity or show some remarkable insight. After all, those whom Jesus called to be his spokesmen must have been quite rough of speech and habit yet they spread the Gospel of Christ to change the whole world.
I would not say that Fred changed the world, but he certainly gave me a vision of a world that had changed, or rather would change into somewhere that I would rather not be. He painted the picture with no flourish, almost dabbed at it, one might say, but it chilled me鈥�
Those readers who were children before the was must remember that film of H.G.Wells,鈥� 鈥淭hings to Come.鈥� It showed a shining world of the future humanity which technology had made inhuman in its perfection and deadly in its capacity for destruction. People still inhabited that world, but were crammed into the spaces between the machinery as it were.
It was such a world that I saw as I listened to Fred one morning near the end of the war, standing beside him in the command post of an Ack Ack site on the south coast of England. We stood with the morning sun hot on our faces- I was basking in it, but when he had finished his tale there was ice down my back鈥�
And yet, what he told me was simple enough and quite brief. I will not attempt to quote him word for word- that would not work. Instead let me relate what I saw in my mind鈥檚 eye in response to his rough telling.
Fred had been on watch at dawn that morning, looking across the Channel towards France to view the growing light in the east. He had seen a thin line of brightness rise rapidly from the horizon, rise and fade high into the zenith and then as he turned towards London had seen the darkness which still lay over the city shattered by a vivid patch of light that bloomed like a flower then died back.
Fred had seen the new German V2 rockets launched, springing out of the growing dawn to plunge like a knife thrust into the darkness that still lay over England. He had seen it at that crucial few minute when the sun, still just below the horizon, could illuminate the accent of the shining metal skin. Then he had seen the deadly load of explosive shatter London鈥檚 darkness and sleeping people.
What chilled me to the soul when I listened was a vision suddenly of a new world where war was no longer the flinging of grenades, the charging with bayonets fixed across ground, heavy with cordite smoke, the leap of gun barrels spitting their shells at a near enemy, men with blood hot in their veins in furious struggle with others equally urgent with life.
No! I saw instead a war in which shining cylinders filled with eager death slipped with silken ease up through the world鈥檚 skies and down again to bring 鈥攊n an obscene parody of what the bible urges- light to darkness. I saw a world and a war in which bright, beautiful machines of destruction leapt in seconds around our spinning globe to fall upon cowering masses of soft human bodies. I saw the human race busy building the so brilliant devices of its own destruction and I trembled. In the sunlit concrete command post my teeth chattered.
That was before the dropping of the first atom bombs ended the war in the Far East at a stroke. But what made it immediate and personal was the discovery in the field next to our gunsite of a piece of that V2 rocket鈥檚 protective aluminium nose cone. It was as if the bright, bleak, deadly future had knocked at my door like the tap of a death watch beetle in the night.
I saw it and Fred must have seen it too for his eyes were dark with dread. 鈥淲hat are we doing to ourselves Sir,鈥� he whispered. I had no idea then and I do not now鈥�

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