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

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

exaltation was made terrible by the dread that some error might

dishonour her…

She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating

minuteness of an impassioned woman's observation.

He said little, she remarked. He looked but little at the maps.

The tall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm

of ideas, conflicting ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting

of the little red, blue, black, and yellow pieces on the board,

and wanted to draw the commander's attention to this and that.

Dubois listened, nodded, emitted a word and became still again,

brooding like the national eagle.

His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she

could not see his eyes; his moustache overhung the mouth from

which those words of decision came. Viard, too, said little; he

was a dark man with a drooping head and melancholy, watchful

eyes. He was more intent upon the French right, which was feeling

its way now through Alsace to the Rhine. He was, she knew, an

old colleague of Dubois; he knew him better, she decided, he

trusted him more than this unfamiliar Englishman…

Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in

profile; these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered

years ago. To seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse

to hurry-itself a confession of miscalculation; by attention to

these simple rules, Dubois had built up a steady reputation from

the days when he had been a promising junior officer, a still,

almost abstracted young man, deliberate but ready. Even then men

had looked at him and said: 'He will go far.' Through fifty

years of peace he had never once been found wanting, and at

manoeuvres his impassive persistence had perplexed and hypnotised

and defeated many a more actively intelligent man. Deep in his

soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery about the

modern art of warfare, the key to his career. And this discovery

was that NOBODY KNEW, that to act therefore was to blunder, that

to talk was to confess; and that the man who acted slowly and

steadfastly and above all silently, had the best chance of

winning through. Meanwhile one fed the men. Now by this same

strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious unknowns of the

Central European command. Delhi might talk of a great flank march

through Holland, with all the British submarines and hydroplanes

and torpedo craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it; Viard

might crave for brilliance with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes,

and ski-men among the Swiss mountains, and a sudden swoop upon

Vienna; the thing was to listen-and wait for the other side to

begin experimenting. It was all experimenting. And meanwhile he

remained in profile, with an air of assurance-like a man who

sits in an automobile after the chauffeur has had his directions.

And every one about him was the stronger and surer for that quiet

face, that air of knowledge and unruffled confidence. The

clustering lights threw a score of shadows of him upon the maps,

great bunches of him, versions of a commanding presence, lighter

or darker, dominated the field, and pointed in every direction.

Those shadows symbolised his control. When a messenger came from

the wireless room to shift this or that piece in the game, to

replace under amended reports one Central European regiment by a

score, to draw back or thrust out or distribute this or that

force of the Allies, the Marshal would turn his head and seem not

to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who approves a

pupil's self-correction. 'Yes, that's better.'

How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how

wonderful it all was. This was the brain of the western world,

this was Olympus with the warring earth at its feet. And he was

guiding France, France so long a resentful exile from

imperialism, back to her old predominance.

It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be

privileged to participate…

It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal

devotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact,

punctual. She must control herself…

She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when

the war would be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this

harshness, this armour would be put aside and the gods might

unbend. Her eyelids drooped…

She roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night

outside was no longer still. That there was an excitement down

below on the bridge and a running in the street and a flickering

of searchlights among the clouds from some high place away beyond

the Trocadero. And then the excitement came surging up past her

and invaded the hall within.

One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of

the room, gesticulating and shouting something.

And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn't

understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed

machinery and cables of the ways beneath, were beating-as pulses

beat. And about her blew something like a wind-a wind that was

dismay.

Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child

might look towards its mother.

He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but

that was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand

gauntly gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too

manifestly disposed to drag him towards the great door that

opened on the terrace. And Viard was hurrying towards the huge

windows and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent forward

and with eyes upturned.

Something up there?

And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.

The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against