the masonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping
down through the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two
of them, there had already started curling trails of red…
Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through
moments that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl
down towards her.
She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the
world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening,
all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out
about her and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting
pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly
flight of huge angular sheets of glass. She had an impression of
a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddened living thing
that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst a chaos of
falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earth furiously,
that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing rabbit…
She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.
She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that
a little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She
tried to raise herself and found her leg was very painful. She
was not clear whether it was night or day nor where she was; she
made a second effort, wincing and groaning, and turned over and
got into a sitting position and looked about her.
Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of
a vast uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing
had been destroyed.
At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous
She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world,
a world of heaped broken things. And it was lit-and somehow
this was more familiar to her mind than any other fact about
her-by a flickering, purplish-crimson light. Then close to her,
rising above a confusion of debris, she recognised the Trocadero;
it was changed, something had gone from it, but its outline was
unmistakable. It stood out against a streaming, whirling uprush
of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled Paris and the Seine
and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful, luminous
organisation of the War Control…
She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she
lay, and examined her surroundings with an increasing
The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the
river. Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water,
from which these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps
of vapour came into circling existence a foot or so from its
mirror-surface. Near at hand and reflected exactly in the water
was the upper part of a familiar-looking stone pillar. On the
side of her away from the water the heaped ruins rose steeply in
a confused slope up to a glaring crest. Above and reflecting
this glare towered pillowed masses of steam rolling swiftly
upward to the zenith. It was from this crest that the livid glow
that lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind
connected this mound with the vanished buildings of the War
Control.
'Mais!' she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite
motionless for a time, crouching close to the warm earth.
Then presently this dim, broken human thing began to look about
it again. She began to feel the need of fellowship. She wanted
to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate her experience.
And her foot hurt her atrociously. There ought to be an
ambulance. A little gust of querulous criticisms blew across her
mind. This surely was a disaster! Always after a disaster there
should be ambulances and helpers moving about…
She craned her head. There was something there. But everything
was so still!
'Monsieur!' she cried. Her ears, she noted, felt queer, and she
began to suspect that all was not well with them.
It was terribly lonely in this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps
this man-if it was a man, for it was difficult to see-might for
all his stillness be merely insensible. He might have been
stunned…
The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a
moment every little detail was distinct. It was Marshal Dubois.
He was lying against a huge slab of the war map. To it there
stuck and from it there dangled little wooden objects, the
symbols of infantry and cavalry and guns, as they were disposed
upon the frontier. He did not seem to be aware of this at his
back, he had an effect of inattention, not indifferent attention,
but as if he were thinking…
She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was
evident he frowned. He frowned slightly, he had an air of not
wanting to be disturbed. His face still bore that expression of
assured confidence, that conviction that if things were left to
him France might obey in security…
She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer.
A strange surmise made her eyes dilate. With a painful wrench
she pulled herself up so that she could see completely over the