t at one another. Was this mercy?--from such an enemy? It was
inconceivable!

"Mercy!" I wonder that we dared to think the word. Only an instant
till a whistling shriek marked the coming of death. It was a single
plane--a giant shell--that rode on wings of steel. It came from the
north, and I saw it pass close overhead. Its propeller screamed an
insolent, inhuman challenge. Inhuman--for one glance told the story.
Here was no man-flown plane: no cockpit or cabin, no gunmounts. Only a
flying shell that swerved and swung as we watched. We knew that its
course was directed from above; it was swung with terrible certainty
by a wireless control that reached it from a ship overhead.

Slowly it sought its target: deliberately it poised above it. An instant,
only, it hung, though the moment, it seemed, would never end--then
down!--and the blunt nose crashed into the Government buildings where at
that moment the Chamber of Deputies was in session ... and where those
buildings had been was spouting masonry and fire.

A man had me by the arm; his fingers gripped into my flesh. With his
other hand he was pointing toward the north. "Torpedoes!" he was
saying. "Torpedoes of a size gigantic! _Ah, mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ Save
us for we are lost!"

They came in an endless stream, those blood-red projectiles; they
announced their coming with shrill cries of varying pitch; and they
swung and swerved, as the ships above us picked them up, to rake the
city with mathematical precision.

Incendiary, of course: flames followed every shattering burst. Between
us and the Seine was a hell of fire--a hell that contained unnumbered
thousands of what an instant before had been living folk--men and
women clinging in a last terrified embrace--children whose white faces
were hidden in their mothers' skirts or buried in bosoms no longer a
refuge for childish fears. I saw it as plainly as if I had been given
the far-reaching vision of a god ... and I turned and ran with
stumbling feet where a stairway awaited....

* * * * *

Of that flight, only a blurred recollection has stayed with me. I pray
God that I may never see it more clearly. There are sights that mortal
eyes cannot behold with understanding and leave mortal brain intact.
It is like an anaesthetic at such times, the numbness that blocks off
the horrors the eyes are recording--like the hurt of the surgeon's
scalpel that never reaches to the brain.

Dimly I se