“If I understand you aright,” he said, “you are proposing to murder a large proportion of the population by slow starvation?”
“No. What I am trying to do is to save some millions of them from a certain death. It just depends upon which way you look at it, Biles. But have it your own way if it pleases you.
“Now, gentlemen, the calculation is a simple one. We have enough food to last a population of fifty millions for fourteen weeks. From that we deduct five weeks’ supplies for the whole population; which leaves us with four hundred and fifty million weekly rations. We select five million people whom we decide must survive; and these four hundred and fifty million rations will keep them fed for ninety weeks—say a year and nine months. It will really be longer than that; for I anticipate rather heavy ravages of disease on account of the monotony of the diet and the lack of fresh vegetables. That is in the nature of things; and we cannot evade it.
“That then, is the only alternative. It is, as the Prime Minister has said, a death sentence on by far the greater part of the people in these islands; but I see no way out of the difficulties in which we are involved. It is not we who have passed that sentence. Nature has done it; and all that we can achieve is the rescue of a certain number of the victims. With your help, I propose to undertake that work of rescue.”
I doubt if those sitting round the table had more than the vaguest glimpse of what all this meant. When a death-roll reaches high figures, the mind refuses to grasp its implications. Very few people have any concrete idea of what the words “one million” stand for. We only understood that there was impending a human catastrophe on a scale which dwarfed all preceding tragedies. Beyond that, I know that I, for one, could not force my mind.
“We are thus left with five million survivors,” Nordenholt continued. “But this does not reach the crux of the matter. The nitrogen of the soil has vanished; and it must be replaced if the earth is ever again to bring forth fruits. That task devolves upon mankind, for Nature works too slowly for our purposes. In order to feed these five million mouths—or what is left of them when the food supply runs out—we have to raise crops next year; and to raise these crops we must supply the soil with the necessary nitrogenous material.
“I have consulted men who know”—this seemed to be his only phrase when he referred to his authorities—“and they tell me that it can be done if we bend our whole energies to the task. All the methods of using the nitrogen of the air have been worked out in detail long ago: the Birkeland-Eyde process, Serpek’s method, the Schönherr and the Haber-Le Rossignol processes, as well as nitrolim manufacture and so forth. We have only to set up enough machinery and work hard—very hard—and we shall be able to produce by chemical processes the material which we require. That is what the five million will have to do. There will be no idlers among them. At first it will be work in the dark, for we cannot calculate how much material we require until the agricultural experts have made their experiments upon the soil. But I understand that it is quite within the bounds of possibility that we shall be successful.
“I come now to another point. These five million survivors cannot be scattered up and down the country. They must be brought into a definite area, for two reasons. In the first place, we must have them under our control so that we can make food-distribution simple; and, in the second place, we must be able to protect them from attack. Remember, outside this area there will be millions dying of starvation, and these millions will be desperate. We can take no risks.”
He took a roll from behind his chair and unfolded upon the table a large map of the British Isles marked with patches of colour.
“As to the choice of a segregation area, we are limited by various factors. We shall need coal for the basis of our work; therefore it would suit us best to place our colony near one of the coal-fields. We shall need iron for our new machinery; and it would be best to choose some centre in which foundries are already numerous. We shall need to house our five million survivors and we cannot spend time in building new cities for them. And, finally, we need a huge water-supply for that population. On this map, I have had these various factors marked in colour. In some places, as you see, three of the desiderata are co-existent; but there is only one region in which we find all four conditions satisfied—in the Clyde Valley. There you have coal and iron; there are already in existence enormous numbers of foundries and machine-shops; the city of Glasgow alone is capable of accommodating over a million human beings; and the water-supply is ample. This, I think, is sufficient to direct our choice to that spot.