f hers that she held
me. She had asked me to go from her, and again in the night-time and with
tears she had asked me to go.

"At last it was the sense of her that roused me from my mood. I turned
upon her suddenly and challenged her to race down the mountain slopes.
'No,' she said, as if I jarred with her gravity, but I was resolved to end
that gravity and made her run--no one can be very grey and sad who is out
of breath---and when she stumbled I ran with my hand beneath her arm. We
ran down past a couple of men, who turned back staring in astonishment at
my behaviour--they must have recognised my face. And half-way down the
slope came a tumult in the air--clang-clank, clang-clank--and we stopped,
and presently over the hill-crest those war things came flying one behind
the other."

The man seemed hesitating on the verge of a description.

"What were, they like?" I asked.

"They had never fought," he said. "They were just like our ironclads are
nowadays; they had never fought. No one knew what they might do, with
excited men inside them; few even cared to speculate. They were great
driving things shaped like spear-heads without a shaft, with a propeller
in the place of the shaft."

"Steel?"

"Not steel."

"Aluminium?"

"No, no, nothing of that sort. An alloy that was very common--as common as
brass, for example. It was called--let me see--" He squeezed his forehead
with the fingers of one hand. "I am forgetting everything," he said.

"And they carried guns?"

"Little guns, firing high explosive shells. They fired the guns backwards,
out of the base of the leaf, so to speak, and rammed with the beak. That
was the theory, you know, but they had never been fought. No one could
tell exactly what was going to happen. And meanwhile I suppose it was very
fine to go whirling through the air like a flight of young swallows, swift
and easy. I guess the captains tried not to think too clearly what the
real thing would be like. And these flying war machines, you know, were
only one sort of the endless war contrivances that had been invented and
had fallen into abeyance during the long peace. There were all sorts of
these things that people were routing out and furbishing up; infernal
things, silly things; things that had never been tried; big engines,
terrible explosives, great guns. You know the silly way of these ingenious
sort of men who make these things; they turn 'em out as beavers build
dams, and with no more