ifting, and lugging at heavy and clumsy masses,
the tedious filing and winding of wires, and secondly, the Prince,
urgent and threatening whenever a man relaxed. He would stand over them,
and point over their heads, southward into the empty sky. "The world
there," he said in German, "is waiting for us! Fifty Centuries come to
their Consummation." Bert did not understand the words, but he read the
gesture. Several times the Prince grew angry; once with a man who was
working slowly, once with a man who stole a comrade's ration. The first
he scolded and set to a more tedious task; the second he struck in the
face and ill-used. He did no work himself. There was a clear space near
the fires in which he would walk up and down, sometimes for two hours
together, with arms folded, muttering to himself of Patience and his
destiny. At times these mutterings broke out into rhetoric, into shouts
and gestures that would arrest the workers; they would stare at him
until they perceived that his blue eyes glared and his waving hand
addressed itself always to the southward hills. On Sunday the work
ceased for half an hour, and the Prince preached on faith and God's
friendship for David, and afterwards they all sang: "Ein feste Burg ist
unser Gott."

In an improvised hovel lay Von Winterfeld, and all one morning he raved
of the greatness of Germany. "Blut und Eisen!" he shouted, and then,
as if in derision, "Welt-Politik--ha, ha!" Then he would explain
complicated questions of polity to imaginary hearers, in low, wily
tones. The other sick men kept still, listening to him. Bert's
distracted attention would be recalled by Kurt. "Smallways, take that
end. So!"

Slowly, tediously, the great mast was rigged and hoisted foot by foot
into place. The electricians had contrived a catchment pool and a wheel
in the torrent close at hand--for the little Mulhausen dynamo with its
turbinal volute used by the telegraphists was quite adaptable to water
driving, and on the sixth day in the evening the apparatus was
in working order and the Prince was calling--weakly, indeed, but
calling--to his air-fleet across the empty spaces of the world. For a
time he called unheeded.

The effect of that evening was to linger long in Bert's memory. A red
fire spluttered and blazed close by the electricians at their work, and
red gleams xan up the vertical steel mast and threads of copper wire
towards the zenith. The Prince sat on a rock close by, with his chin
on