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 intervening lumps of smashed-up masonry.  Her hand touched something wet, and after one convulsive movement she became rigid.

It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head and shoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness and a pool of shining black....