Marta was diverted from this process of killing by piecemeal by a more theatric spectacle.  A brigade commander of the Grays had ticked an order over the wires and it had gone from battery to battery.  Not only many field-guns, which are the terriers of the artillery, but some guns of siege calibre, the mastiffs, in a sudden outburst started a havoc of tumbling walls and cornices in the upper part of the town.

Then an explosion greater than any from the shells shot a hemisphere of light heavenward, revealing a shadowy body flying overhead, and an instant later the heavens were illuminated by a vast circle of flame as the dirigible that had dropped the dynamite received its death-blow.  But already the Brown infantry was withdrawing from the town, destroying buildings that would give cover for the attack in the morning as they went.  Two or three hours after midnight fell a silence which was to last until dawn.  The combatants rested on their arms, Browns saying to Grays, “We shall be ready for the morrow!” and Grays replying:  “So shall we!”

Marta, at her window, her eyes following the movements of the display, now here, now there, found herself thinking of many things, as in the intermissions between the acts of a drama.  She wondered if the groaning, wounded man were crying for water or if he were wishing that some one at home were near him.  She thought of her talk with Lanstron over the telephone and how mad and feminine and feeble it must have sounded to a mind working in the inexorable processes of the clash of millions of men.  She saw his left hand twitching in his pocket, his right hand gripping it to hold it still, on that afternoon when, for the first time, she had understood his injury in the aeroplane accident as the talisman of his feelings—­his controlled feelings!  Always his controlled feelings!

She saw Feller leaning against the moist wall of the dank tunnel, suffering as it had never seemed to her that man could suffer, his agony an irresistible plea.  She saw Westerling, so conscious of his strength, directing his chessmen in a death struggle against Partow.  And he was coming to this house as his headquarters when the final test of the strength of the Titans was made.

She hoped that her mother was still sleeping; and she had seconds when she was startled by her own calmness.  Again, the faces of the children in her school were as clear as in life.  She breathed her gratitude that the procession in which they moved to the rear was hours ago out of the theatre of danger.  In the simplicity of big things, her duty was to teach them, a future generation, no less than Feller’s duty was to the pursuing shadow of his conscience.  She should see war, alive, naked, bloody, and she would tell her children what she had seen as a warning.