The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [518]
Once more his audience stirred and muttered: ‘Hear! hear!’ with the exception of the Major who ground his teeth and scratched his bare knee which had just been bitten by some insect.
‘Out of 354 incendiary bombs on London only eight caused fatal casualties. The maximum number that fell during one raid was 258 and these were distributed over a wide area averaging seven bombs per square mile …’
‘Seven bombs per square mile! Where on earth has the old blighter got all this from?’ wondered the Major knocking out his pipe into an ashtray which had been filled with water to prevent the ash being blown about by the fan overhead. He stifled a yawn. Lunch, combined with Mr Bridges’ statistics, had made him drowsy. It was hot here, too, despite the generous dimensions of the room. How he loved the tropical Victorian architecture of the Cricket Club with its vast rooms, high ceilings and ornamented balconies! Behind his chair a segment of the green padang could be seen through the window which was angled to face, not the Eurasian Club at the far end of the ground, but the Esplanade and the sea. In the small area of the field that was visible from where he sat a little group of Tamil groundsmen were peacefully at work moving the practice nets a few feet seawards to a fresh patch of turf. No doubt cricket would continue despite the bombing; important matches could not be expected to wait until the Japanese had been dealt with. While the Major was trying to recall whether the annual Civil Service and Law versus the Rest (Gentlemen v. Players some cynic had called it) had yet taken place, there came unbidden to his mind the recollection of a girl being shot at a cricket match in College Park, oh, years ago. He had read about it in the Irish Times: a young woman of twenty or so who had been watching the Gentlemen of Ireland playing the Army. Some Sinn Feiner had fired a revolver through the park railings and taken to his heels; the bullet, aimed at one of the Army officers, had struck her on the temple. She had been engaged to be married, too, if he recalled correctly; an innocent young girl killed by a scampering fanatic in a cloth cap. This recollection, echoing back over two decades, still had the power to numb the Major with indignation and despair. The uselessness of it!
‘The total number of casualties in England from aerial attack during the Great War was 1,414 killed and 3,416 wounded … Material damage costing three million pounds was produced by 643 aircraft dropping 8,776 bombs which weighed a total of 270 tons!’
This paroxysm of statistics was delivered with such vigour that it caused someone inopportunely to murmur: ‘Hear! hear!’ but the Major, profiting from the fact that Mr Bridges had once again glared round the table and lost his place, seized his chance.
‘We’re all grateful, I’m sure, to Mr Bridges who has spared no effort of research into the last war. The point he is trying to make, I believe, is that a great gulf exists between the bombing methods of then and now … What we must decide is how best to combat by our civil defence procedure the modern methods of which we had a sample in the early hours of this morning. And in any case …’
But here he was obliged to stop for Mr Bridges had now succeeded in hunting down his lost place and capturing it on the page with a long ivory fingernail: this permitted him to display indignation at the Major’s interruption. He still had a great deal to say! He still had to delve into the question of the Zeppelin raids on London in 1915 and 1916! The question he wanted to consider was whether the amount of damage caused varied according to the amount of cloud cover. ‘For example, on 31 May 1915, a fine moonlit night, Zeppelin LZ 38 dropped eighty-seven