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