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
tit-for-tat… Strategy and reasons of state-they're over…
Come along, my boy, and we'll just show these old women what we
can do when they let us have our heads.'
He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the
courtyard of the chateau in which he had been installed and
shouted for his automobile. Things would have to move quickly
because there was scarcely an hour and a half before dawn. He
looked at the sky and noted with satisfaction a heavy bank of
clouds athwart the pallid east.
He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and
aeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck away
in barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods. A hawk could not
have discovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun.
But that night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was
handy and quite prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not
a couple of miles away; he was going to Berlin with that and just
one other man. Two men would be enough for what he meant to
do…
He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts
science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of
destruction, and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic
type…
He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming
face. He smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great
pleasures. There was an exotic richness, a chuckling flavour,
about the voice in which he gave his orders, and he pointed his
remarks with the long finger of a hand that was hairy and
exceptionally big.
'We'll give them tit-for-tat,' he said. 'We'll give them
tit-for-tat. No time to lose, boys…'
And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and
Saxony the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless
as a dancing sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass,
flew like an arrow to the heart of the Central European hosts.
It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above
the banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to
plunge at once into their wet obscurities should some hostile
flier range into vision. The tense young steersman divided his
attention between the guiding stars above and the level, tumbled
surfaces of the vapour strata that hid the world below. Over
great spaces those banks lay as even as a frozen lava-flow and
almost as still, and then they were rent by ragged areas of
translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim patches of the
land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw quite
distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps
and signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid
through a boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill.
But if the world was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through
that vapour floor came the deep roar of trains, the whistles of
horns of motor-cars, a sound of rifle fire away to the south, and
as he drew near his destination the crowing of cocks…
The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at
first starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to
east as the dawn came on. The Milky Way was invisible in the
blue, and the lesser stars vanished. The face of the adventurer
at the steering-wheel, darkly visible ever and again by the oval
greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm
beauty which all concentrated purpose gives, and something of the
happiness of an idiot child that has at last got hold of the
matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his
legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained
in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that
would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far
had ever seen in action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential
substance, had been tested only in almost infinitesimal
quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the
thought of great destruction slumbering in the black spheres
between his legs, and a keen resolve to follow out very exactly