Patience Wins: War in the Works

by George Manville Fenn

Fancy the horrors of that night! The great dam about which one of my uncles had expressed his doubts when we visited it the previous year, and of which he had spoken as our engine, had given way in the centre of the vast earthen wall like a railway embankment. A little crack had grown and grown—the trickling water that came through had run into a stream, then into a river, and then a vast breach in the embankment was made, and a wall of water had rushed down the valley swiftly as a fast train, carrying destruction before it.

The ruin of that night is historical, and when after a few hours we made our way up the valley, it was to see at every turn the devastation that had been caused. Mills and houses had been swept away as if they had been corks, strongly-built works with massive stone walls had crumbled away like cardboard, and their machinery had been carried down by the great wave of water, stones, gravel, and mud.

Trees had been lifted up by their roots; rows of cottages cut in half; banks of the valley carved out, and for miles and miles, down in the bottom by the course of the little river, the face of the country was changed. Here where a beautiful garden had stretched down to the stream was a bed of gravel and sand; there where verdant meadows had lain were sheets of mud; and in hundreds of places trees, plants, and the very earth had been swept clear away down to where there was only solid rock.

When we reached the great embankment the main part of the water was gone, and in the middle there was the huge gap through which it had escaped.

“Too much water for so frail a dam,” said Uncle Jack sententiously. “Boys, we must not bemoan our loss in the face of such a catastrophe as this.”

We had no right, for to us the flood, exhausted and spread by its eight-mile race, had been our saving, the greater part of our destruction being by fire, for which we should have recompense; while for the poor creatures who had been in an instant robbed of home and in many cases of relatives, what recompense could there be!

The loss of life was frightful, and the scenes witnessed as first one poor creature and then another was discovered buried in sand and mud after being borne miles by the flood, are too painful to record.

Suffice it that the flood had swept down those eight miles of valley, doing incalculable damage, and leaving traces that remained for years. The whole of the loss was never known, and till then people were to a great extent in ignorance of the power that water could exercise. In many cases we stood appalled at the changes made high up the valley, and the manner in which masses of stonework had been swept along. Stone was plentiful in the neighbourhood and much used in building, and wherever the flood had come in contact with a building it was taken away bodily, to crumble up as it was borne along, and augment the power of the water, which became a wave charged with stones, masses of rock, and beams of wood, ready to batter into nothingness every obstacle that stood in its way.

“It seems impossible that all this could be done in a few minutes,” said Uncle Dick.

“No, not when you think of the power of water,” said Uncle Jack quietly. “Think of how helpless one is when bathing, against an ordinary wave. Then think of that wave a million times the size, and tearing along a valley charged with débris, and racing at you as fast as a horse could gallop.”