And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled, and a rush of hot water came pouring over her.  Then it seemed to her that she was dragged downward....

Section 3

When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and the black hair close-cropped en brosse, who was in charge of the French special scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster to the War Control, he was so wanting in imagination in any sphere but his own, that he laughed.  Small matter to him that Paris was burning.  His mother and father and sister lived at Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had ever had, and it was poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen.  He slapped his second-in-command on the shoulder.  ‘Now,’ he said, ’there’s nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them tit-for-tat....  Strategy and reasons of state—­they’re over....  Come along, my boy, and we’ll just show these old women what we can do when they let us have our heads.’

He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the courtyard of the chateau in which he had been installed and shouted for his automobile.  Things would have to move quickly because there was scarcely an hour and a half before dawn.  He looked at the sky and noted with satisfaction a heavy bank of clouds athwart the pallid east.

He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and aeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck away in barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods.  A hawk could not have discovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun.  But that night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was handy and quite prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not a couple of miles away; he was going to Berlin with that and just one other man.  Two men would be enough for what he meant to do....

He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of destruction, and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic type....

He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming face.  He smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great pleasures.  There was an exotic richness, a chuckling flavour, about the voice in which he gave his orders, and he pointed his remarks with the long finger of a hand that was hairy and exceptionally big.

‘We’ll give them tit-for-tat,’ he said.  ’We’ll give them tit-for-tat.  No time to lose, boys....’

And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and Saxony the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancing sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow to the heart of the Central European hosts.