casualties already high in the millions.
All over North America, all over Europe, all over the Russian Empire there were flashes that paled the sun, heat-waves that seared, and set on fire, whole countrysides. Monstrous plumes were writhing up into the sky, shedding ashes, dust, and death.
My grandfather was immediately obsessed by his duty—his obligation to get back somehow to his post, which was that section of the British Service located in northern Canada. For two days he spent nearly all his time in Kingston, badgering the authorities, and anyone else he could find.
There were plenty of aircraft there, plenty of all kinds, large airliners, crowded freighters, small, owner-flown machines, but they were all coming from the north; most of them pausing only to refuel, and then fleeing on, like migrating birds, to the south. Nothing took off for the north.
Communications were chaotic. No one could tell what fields were still available, still less how long they would remain so. Pilots resolutely refused to take the risk, even for large sums, and the airport authorities backed them up by refusing to sanction any northward flights with an impregnability against which my grandfather, and numbers of anxious United States citizens battered in vain.
On the evening of the second day, however, he succeeded in buying someone out of a seat on a south-bound aircraft, and set off with the intention of making a circuit via Port Natal, in Brazil, Dakar, and Lisbon, and so to England where he hoped to be able to find a service machine to get him to Canada. In point of fact, he arrived at Freetown, Sierra Leone, about eight days later, and got no further. News there was still scarce and contradictory, but there was enough of it to convince not merely pilots, but everyone else, that even if an aircraft should safely get through, a landing almost anywhere in Europe would mean delayed, if not immediate, suicide.
It took him two months to get home again to Jamaica, by which time, of course, the Northern War was almost history.
It was, however, such recent history that the non-combatants were still numbed by the shock. The near-paralysis
