of a general predominance in human affairs on the part of some
one particular state. The memory of the empires of Rome and

Alexander squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human
imagination--it bored into the human brain like some grisly

parasite and filled it with disordered thoughts and violent
impulses. For more than a century the French system exhausted

its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and then the infection
passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the heart and

centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later ages
were to store and neglect the vast insaneliterature of this

obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the
infinite knowingness of the political writer, the cunning

refusals to accept plain facts, the strategic devices, the
tactical manoeuvres, the records of mobilisations and

counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible almost as soon as
it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their

state craftsmen sat with their historical candles burning, and,
in spite of strange, new reflections and unfamiliar lights and

shadows, still wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps of
Europe and the world.

It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions
of men and women outside the world of these specialists

sympathised and agreed with their portentous activities. One
school of psychologists inclined to minimise this participation,

but the balance of evidence goes to show that there were massive
responses to these suggestions of the belligerentschemer.

Primitive man had been a fiercely combative animal; innumerable
generations had passed their lives in tribal warfare, and the

weight of tradition, the example of history, the ideals of
loyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the incitements

of the international mischief-maker. The political ideas of the
common man were picked up haphazard, there was practically

nothing in such education as he was given that was ever intended
to fit him for citizenship as such (that conception only

appeared, indeed, with the development of Modern State ideas),
and it was therefore a comparatively easy matter to fill his

vacant mind with the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion and
national aggression.

For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily
patriotic when presently his battalion came up from the depot to

London, to entrain for the French frontier. He tells of children
and women and lads and old men cheering and shouting, of the

streets and rows hung with the flags of the Allied Powers, of a
real enthusiasm even among the destitute and unemployed. The

Labour Bureaux were now partially transformed into enrolment
offices, and were centres of hotly patrioticexcitement. At

every convenient place upon the line on either side of the
Channel Tunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the

feeling in the regiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by
grim anticipations, was none the less warlike.

But all this emotion was the fickleemotion of minds without
established ideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it

was with himself, a natural response to collectivemovement, and
to martial sounds and colours, and the exhilarating challenge of

vague dangers. And people had been so long oppressed by the
threat of and preparation for war that its arrival came with an

effect of positiverelief.
Section 2

The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the
lower Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct

from the various British depots to the points in the Ardennes
where they were intended to entrench themselves.

Most of the documents bearing upon the campaign were destroyed
during the war, from the first the scheme of the Allies seems to

have been confused, but it is highly probable that the formation
of an aerial park in this region, from which attacks could be

made upon the vast industrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a
flanking raid through Holland upon the German naval

establishments at the mouth of the Elbe, were integral parts of
the original project. Nothing of this was known to such pawns in

the game as Barnet and his company, whose business it was to do
what they were told by the mysterious intelligences at the

direction of things in Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff
had also been transferred. From first to last these directing

intelligences remained mysterious to the body of the army, veiled
under the name of 'Orders.' There was no Napoleon, no Caesar to

embody enthusiasm. Barnet says, 'We talked of Them. THEY are
sending us up into Luxembourg. THEY are going to turn the

Central European right.'
Behind the veil of this vagueness the little group of more or

less worthy men which constituted Headquarters was beginning to
realise the enormity of the thing it was supposed to control....

In the great hall of the War Control, whose windows looked out
across the Seine to the Trocadero and the palaces of the western

quarter, a series of big-scale relief maps were laid out upon
tables to display the whole seat of war, and the staff-officers

of the control were continually busy shifting the little blocks
which represented the contending troops, as the reports and

intelligence came drifting in to the various telegraphic bureaux
in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller apartments there were

maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for example, the
reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav commanders were

recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps, as upon
chessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard

and the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world
supremacy against the Central European powers. Very probably he

had a definite idea of his game; very probably he had a coherent
and admirable plan.

But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new
strategy of aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy

that Holsten had opened for mankind. While he planned
entrenchments and invasions and a frontier war, the Central

European generalship was striking at the eyes and the brain. And
while, with a certain diffident hesitation, he developed his

gambit that night upon the lines laid down by Napoleon and
Moltke, his own scientific corps in a state of mutinous activity

was preparing a blow for Berlin. 'These old fools!' was the key
in which the scientific corps was thinking.

The War Control in Paris, on the night of July the second, was an
impressive display of the paraphernalia of scientific military

organisation, as the first half of the twentieth century
understood it. To one human being at least the consulting

commanders had the likeness of world-wielding gods.
She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute,

and she had been engaged in relay with other similar women to
take down orders in duplicate and hand them over to the junior

officers in attendance, to be forwarded and filed. There had
come a lull, and she had been sent out from the dictating room to

take the air upon the terrace before the great hall and to eat
such scantyrefreshment as she had brought with her until her

services were required again.
From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view

not only of the wide sweep of the river below her, and all the
eastward side of Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to Saint Cloud,

great blocks and masses of black or pale darkness with pink and
golden flashes of illumination and endless interlacing bands of

dotted lights under a still and starless sky, but also the whole
spacious interior of the great hall with its slender pillars and

gracious arching and clustering lamps was visible to her. There,
over a wilderness of tables, lay the huge maps, done on so large

a scale that one might fancy them small countries; the messengers
and attendants went and came perpetually, altering, moving the

little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of men, and
the great commander and his two consultants stood amidst all

these things and near where the fighting was nearest, scheming,
directing. They had but to breathe a word and presently away

there, in the world of reality, the punctual myriads moved. Men
rose up and went forward and died. The fate of nations lay behind

the eyes of these three men. Indeed they were like gods.
Most godlike of the three was Dubois. It was for him to decide;

the others at most might suggest. Her woman's soul went out to
this grave, handsome, still, old man, in a passion of instinctive

worship.
Once she had taken words of instruction from him direct. She had

awaited them in an ecstasy of happiness--and fear. For her