The World Set Free

Section 2

The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the lower Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct from the various British depots to the points in the Ardennes where they were intended to entrench themselves.

Most of the documents bearing upon the campaign were destroyed during the war, from the first the scheme of the Allies seems to have been confused, but it is highly probable that the formation of an aerial park in this region, from which attacks could be made upon the vast industrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a flanking raid through Holland upon the German naval establishments at the mouth of the Elbe, were integral parts of the original project.  Nothing of this was known to such pawns in the game as Barnet and his company, whose business it was to do what they were told by the mysterious intelligences at the direction of things in Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff had also been transferred.  From first to last these directing intelligences remained mysterious to the body of the army, veiled under the name of ‘Orders.’  There was no Napoleon, no Caesar to 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 profile, 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….