by H. G. Wells
embody enthusiasm. Barnet says, 'We talked of Them. THEY are
sending us up into Luxembourg. THEY are going to turn the
Central European right.'
Behind the veil of this vagueness the little group of more or
less worthy men which constituted Headquarters was beginning to
realise the enormity of the thing it was supposed to control…
In the great hall of the War Control, whose windows looked out
across the Seine to the Trocadero and the palaces of the western
quarter, a series of big-scale relief maps were laid out upon
tables to display the whole seat of war, and the staff-officers
of the control were continually busy shifting the little blocks
which represented the contending troops, as the reports and
intelligence came drifting in to the various telegraphic bureaux
in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller apartments there were
maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for example, the
reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav commanders were
recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps, as upon
chessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard
and the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world
supremacy against the Central European powers. Very probably he
had a definite idea of his game; very probably he had a coherent
and admirable plan.
But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new
strategy of aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy
that Holsten had opened for mankind. While he planned
entrenchments and invasions and a frontier war, the Central
European generalship was striking at the eyes and the brain. And
while, with a certain diffident hesitation, he developed his
gambit that night upon the lines laid down by Napoleon and
Moltke, his own scientific corps in a state of mutinous activity
was preparing a blow for Berlin. 'These old fools!' was the key
in which the scientific corps was thinking.
The War Control in Paris, on the night of July the second, was an
impressive display of the paraphernalia of scientific military
organisation, as the first half of the twentieth century
understood it. To one human being at least the consulting
commanders had the likeness of world-wielding gods.
She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute,
and she had been engaged in relay with other similar women to
take down orders in duplicate and hand them over to the junior
officers in attendance, to be forwarded and filed. There had
come a lull, and she had been sent out from the dictating room to
take the air upon the terrace before the great hall and to eat
such scanty refreshment as she had brought with her until her
services were required again.
From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view
not only of the wide sweep of the river below her, and all the
eastward side of Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to Saint Cloud,
great blocks and masses of black or pale darkness with pink and
golden flashes of illumination and endless interlacing bands of
dotted lights under a still and starless sky, but also the whole
spacious interior of the great hall with its slender pillars and
gracious arching and clustering lamps was visible to her. There,
over a wilderness of tables, lay the huge maps, done on so large
a scale that one might fancy them small countries; the messengers
and attendants went and came perpetually, altering, moving the
little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of men, and
the great commander and his two consultants stood amidst all
these things and near where the fighting was nearest, scheming,
directing. They had but to breathe a word and presently away
there, in the world of reality, the punctual myriads moved. Men
rose up and went forward and died. The fate of nations lay behind
the eyes of these three men. Indeed they were like gods.
Most godlike of the three was Dubois. It was for him to decide;
the others at most might suggest. Her woman's soul went out to
this grave, handsome, still, old man, in a passion of instinctive
worship.
Once she had taken words of instruction from him direct. She had
awaited them in an ecstasy of happiness-and fear. For her
exaltation was made terrible by the dread that some error might
dishonour her…
She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating
minuteness of an impassioned woman's observation.
He said little, she remarked. He looked but little at the maps.
The tall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm
of ideas, conflicting ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting
of the little red, blue, black, and yellow pieces on the board,
and wanted to draw the commander's attention to this and that.
Dubois listened, nodded, emitted a word and became still again,
brooding like the national eagle.
His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she
could not see his eyes; his moustache overhung the mouth from
which those words of decision came. Viard, too, said little; he
was a dark man with a drooping head and melancholy, watchful
eyes. He was more intent upon the French right, which was feeling
its way now through Alsace to the Rhine. He was, she knew, an
old colleague of Dubois; he knew him better, she decided, he
trusted him more than this unfamiliar Englishman…
Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in
profile; these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered
years ago. To seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse
to hurry-itself a confession of miscalculation; by attention to
these simple rules, Dubois had built up a steady reputation from
the days when he had been a promising junior officer, a still,
almost abstracted young man, deliberate but ready. Even then men
had looked at him and said: 'He will go far.' Through fifty
years of peace he had never once been found wanting, and at
manoeuvres his impassive persistence had perplexed and hypnotised
and defeated many a more actively intelligent man. Deep in his
soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery about the
modern art of warfare, the key to his career. And this discovery
was that NOBODY KNEW, that to act therefore was to blunder, that
to talk was to confess; and that the man who acted slowly and
steadfastly and above all silently, had the best chance of
winning through. Meanwhile one fed the men. Now by this same
strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious unknowns of the
Central European command. Delhi might talk of a great flank march
through Holland, with all the British submarines and hydroplanes
and torpedo craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it; Viard
might crave for brilliance with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes,
and ski-men among the Swiss mountains, and a sudden swoop upon
Vienna; the thing was to listen-and wait for the other side to
begin experimenting. It was all experimenting. And meanwhile he
remained in pro
file, with an air of assurance-like a man who
sits in an automobile after the chauffeur has had his directions.
And every one about him was the stronger and surer for that quiet
face, that air of knowledge and unruffled confidence. The
clustering lights threw a score of shadows of him upon the maps,
great bunches of him, versions of a commanding presence, lighter
or darker, dominated the field, and pointed in every direction.
Those shadows symbolised his control. When a messenger came from
the wireless room to shift this or that piece in the game, to
replace under amended reports one Central European regiment by a
score, to draw back or thrust out or distribute this or that
force of the Allies, the Marshal would turn his head and seem not
to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who approves a
pupil's self-correction. 'Yes, that's better.'
How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how
wonderful it all was. This was the brain of the western world,
this was Olympus with the warring earth at its feet. And he was
guiding France, France so long a resentful exile from
imperialism, back to her old predominance.
It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be
privileged to participate…
It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal
devotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact,
punctual. She must control herself…
She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when
the war would be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this
harshness, this armour would be put aside and the gods might
unbend. Her eyelids drooped…
She roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night
outside was no longer still. That there was an excitement down
below on the bridge and a running in the street and a flickering
of searchlights among the clouds from some high place away beyond
the Trocadero. And then the excitement came surging up past her
and invaded the hall within.
One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of
the room, gesticulating and shouting something.
And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn't
understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed
machinery and cables of the ways beneath, were beating-as pulses
beat. And about her blew something like a wind-a wind that was
dismay.
Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child
might look towards its mother.
He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but
that was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand
gauntly gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too
manifestly disposed to drag him towards the great door that
opened on the terrace. And Viard was hurrying towards the huge
windows and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent forward
and with eyes upturned.
Something up there?
And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.
The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against
the masonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping
down through the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two
of them, there had already started curling trails of red…
Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through
moments that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl
down towards her.
She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the
world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening,
all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out
about her and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting
pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly
flight of huge angular sheets of glass. She had an impression of
a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddened living thing
that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst a chaos of
falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earth furiously,
that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing rabbit…
She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.
She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that
a little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She
tried to raise herself and found her leg was very painful. She
was not clear whether it was night or day nor where she was; she
made a second effort, wincing and groaning, and turned over and
got into a sitting position and looked about her.
Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of
a vast uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing
had been destroyed.
At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous
experience.
She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world,
a world of heaped broken things. And it was lit-and somehow
this was more familiar to her mind than any other fact about
her-by a flickering, purplish-crimson light. Then close to her,
rising above a confusion of debris, she recognised the Trocadero;
it was changed, something had gone from it, but its outline was
unmistakable. It stood out against a streaming, whirling uprush
of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled Paris and the Seine
and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful, luminous
organisation of the War Control…
She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she
lay, and examined her surroundings with an increasing
understanding…
The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the
river. Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water,
from which these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps
of vapour came into circling existence a foot or so from its
mirror-surface. Near at hand and reflected exactly in the water
was the upper part of a familiar-looking stone pillar. On the
side of her away from the water the heaped ruins rose steeply in
a confused slope up to a glaring crest. Above and reflecting
this glare towered pillowed masses of steam rolling swiftly
upward to the zenith. It was from this crest that the livid glow
that lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind
connected this mound with the vanished buildings of the War
Control.
'Mais!' she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite
motionless for a time, crouching close to the warm earth.
Then presently this dim, broken human thing began to look about
it again. She began to feel the need of fellowship. She wanted
to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate her experience.
And her foot hurt her atrociously. There ought to be an
ambulance. A little gust of querulous criticisms blew across her
mind. This surely was a disaster! Always after a disaster there
should be ambulances and helpers moving about…
She craned her head. There was something there. But everything
was so still!
'Monsieur!' she cried. Her ears, she noted, felt queer, and
she
began to suspect that all was not well with them.
It was terribly lonely in this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps
this man-if it was a man, for it was difficult to see-might for
all his stillness be merely insensible. He might have been
stunned…
The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a
moment every little detail was distinct. It was Marshal Dubois.
He was lying against a huge slab of the war map. To it there
stuck and from it there dangled little wooden objects, the
symbols of infantry and cavalry and guns, as they were disposed
upon the frontier. He did not seem to be aware of this at his
back, he had an effect of inattention, not indifferent attention,
but as if he were thinking…
She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was
evident he frowned. He frowned slightly, he had an air of not
wanting to be disturbed. His face still bore that expression of
assured confidence, that conviction that if things were left to
him France might obey in security…
She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer.
A strange surmise made her eyes dilate. With a painful wrench
she pulled herself up so that she could see completely over the
intervening lumps of smashed-up masonry. Her hand touched
something wet, and after one convulsive movement she became
rigid.
It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head
and shoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness
and a pool of shining black…
And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled,
and a rush of hot water came pouring over her. Then it seemed to
her that she was dragged downward…
Section 3
When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and
the black hair close-cropped en brosse, who was in charge of the
French special scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster
to the War Control, he was so wanting in imagination in any
sphere but his own, that he laughed. Small matter to him that
Paris was burning. His mother and father and sister lived at
Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had ever had, and it was
poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen. He slapped his
second-in-command on the shoulder. 'Now,' he said, 'there's
nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them