During that night a carefully-planned course of destruction was followed. Every telegraph and telephone exchange was gutted; the remaining artillery was rendered useless; all the printing machinery of newspapers was wrecked; every aeroplane destroyed and practically all aerodromes burned: and as the trains and motors went northward in the night, bridge after bridge on the line or road was blown up. When morning came, there was a complete stoppage of all the normal channels of communication; and up to the Border, the railways had been put out of action for months. It was the second step in Nordenholt’s plan. Hitherto, I have chronicled his successes; but now I must deal with his single failure. He had intended to persuade the King to take refuge in the Clyde Valley, and had even, I believe, found a residence for him near Glasgow. Here, however, he met with a rebuff. I never learned the details of the interview; but it appears that the King refused to save himself. He felt it his duty to share the fate of his people. Nordenholt pleaded that if the King himself would not come, at least the Prince of Wales might be sent; but here also he failed to carry his point. The Prince point-blank rejected the suggestion. Knowing Nordenholt, I could hardly conceive that his persuasive proposals could fail to take effect; but it was evident that he met with no success. “He understood perfectly,” Nordenholt said to me later. “Both of them thoroughly understood what it meant. I think they felt that a Crown rescued at that price wouldn’t be worth wearing. At any rate, they refused to come North.” CHAPTER VIII The Clyde Valley Hitherto my narrative has had a certain unity; for I have been describing a chain of events, each of which followed naturally from its fore-runners; but now comes a bifurcation. I have explained how the Clyde Valley had been isolated, step by step, from the rest of the country; and when the last food-stores and troops had been brought into the Nitrogen Area, communications between the two districts ceased. From that moment, the two regions had different histories; and I cannot deal with them in an intertwined chronological sequence. I shall therefore continue my account of the Clyde Valley experiment now; and shall deal later with the collapse of civilisation in England. When planning his colony, Nordenholt decided to occupy a belt of country between the Forth and Clyde which contained all the required materials in the form of coal and iron. Other things, such as copper, he brought into the region in quantities which he believed would suffice for months. The frontier included something like a thousand square miles of territory; and within the boundary lay the whole industrial tract of mid-Scotland with its countless pits, mines, foundries, factories, ship-building yards and other resources.