Labour Bureaux were now partially transformed into enrolment
offices, and were centres of hotly patriotic excitement. 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 fickle emotion of minds without
established ideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it
was with himself, a natural response to collective movement, 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 positive relief.
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 scanty refreshment 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.