nct. It was Marshal Dubois. He was lying
against a huge slab of the war map. To it there stuck and from it there
dangled little wooden objects, the 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.