She helped me to bed and out of my uniform. I fell asleep so heavily that if the next day had not been Sunday I should have missed school. I awoke with a hangover. A sense of depression was relieved when I discovered in one of the top pockets of my uniform jacket a screw of paper filled with two grams of the finest cocaine. A little of this snuffed into both nostrils and I was a new man. I was too late for breakfast, as a smiling, head-shaking Madame Zinovieff informed me, so I took one of my books on electrical engineering and enjoyed a glass or two of weak tea at a nearby café. I read the chapter on the Lundell Protected Ventilated Six-Pole Motor which even by that time was outmoded. The trouble with textbooks is that they tend to reflect what their writers learned twenty years before. This was for me, however, light reading compared to the abstractions I had been absorbing through most of the week. The chapter gave me some ideas for a development of the conventional hoisting-motors then coming into use on some battleships; this in turn led me to theorise about aeroplanes which could be launched from ships without needing a conventional runway. In that little café in Viborgskaya behind the Finland Station on a spring morning in 1916 I invented the modern aircraft carrier. It was nothing more than an exercise. When I had made my sketches and worked out all the mechanics involved, I crumpled up the paper and threw it away. Later I would return to the idea and make better plans, but it will give my readers some hint of how prolific I had become, how casually I had learned to treat advanced conceptions. I returned home for lunch and spent the afternoon studying the specifications of Waygood and Otis Electrical lifts with Rosenbusch Controllers, with a view to the building of an hydraulically operated deck which could be lowered when not in use and raised when the planes came in to land. I also developed a method of mooring airships at sea, also by means of electrical winches, so that the dirigibles could be towed until needed, then carry out bombing raids far beyond their expected range.

If I had taken my plans to the War Office or the Admiralty at that time, the whole course of the War would have changed. Russia would have emerged stronger and triumphant, a leader in modern military and engineering science, the greatest Power of her day. The British-converted tractors, the ‘tanks’, would have been as nothing compared to our airship-bombers and aircraft-carriers. I think I already guessed not only that the people who ran the ministries were corrupt or conservative, but that they were actively interested in making a separate peace with Germany. Had they been able, they would have capitulated eighteen months before the Bolsheviks gave away vast areas of our country. These were not recovered for years, in many cases not until after the Second World War when the old Russian boundaries were restored. In 1916 green and pink areas on the map represented the two largest empires the world has known. The Russians almost lost theirs through the agency of the Duma and the Jews. The British lost theirs through laziness, self-contempt and an exaggerated idea of the ability of savages to understand the principles of Christian decency. Two Empires have been destroyed forever. Only a few vestiges of their culture remain in corners of the world as yet uncorrupted by sentimental liberalism and a wish to placate at any cost the wily, unscrupulous Oriental.

SEVEN