“They 'ad it.”
“But why did they start the War?”
“They couldn't stop theirselves. 'Aving them airships made 'em.”
“And 'ow did the War end?”
“Lord knows if it's ended, boy,” said old Tom. “Lord knows if it's ended. There's been travellers through 'ere—there was a chap only two summers ago—say it's goin' on still. They say there's bands of people up north who keep on with it and people in Germany and China and 'Merica and places. 'E said they still got flying-machines and gas and things. But we 'aven't seen nothin' in the air now for seven years, and nobody 'asn't come nigh of us. Last we saw was a crumpled sort of airship going away—over there. It was a littleish-sized thing and lopsided, as though it 'ad something the matter with it.”
He pointed, and came to a stop at a gap in the fence, the vestiges of the old fence from which, in the company of his neighbour Mr. Stringer the milkman, he had once watched the South of England Aero Club's Saturday afternoon ascents. Dim memories, it may be, of that particular afternoon returned to him.
“There, down there, where all that rus' looks so red and bright, that's the gas-works.”
“What's gas?” asked the little boy.
“Oh, a hairy sort of nothin' what you put in balloons to make 'em go up. And you used to burn it till the 'lectricity come.”
The little boy tried vainly to imagine gas on the basis of these particulars. Then his thoughts reverted to a previous topic.