H. Wells - The World Set Free

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 knowledgeand 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, thoughtthe 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 herselfup to fantastic dreams, dreamsof 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 herselfwith 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 disposedto 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 sawthree 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 beingwas paralysed, she hung through

moments that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl

down towards her.

She felttorn out of the world. There was nothing else in the

world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening,

all-embracing, continuingsound. 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 wakingup 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 herselfand 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 sawto 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 mindthan any other fact about

her-by a flickering, purplish-crimson light. Then close to her,

rising above a confusionof 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 herselfa 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 existencea 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 confusedslope 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 feelthe need of fellowship. She wanted

to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relateher 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 helpersmoving about…

She craned her head. There was something there. But everything

was so still!

'Monsieur!' she cried. Her ears, she noted, feltqueer, and she