H. Wells - The World Set Free

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 knownto 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 continuallybusy 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 stateof 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

understoodit. To one human beingat 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 soulwent 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 ecstasyof 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 seehis 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 knewhim 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 knowall, 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

soulDubois 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