XI

The moon rose over sleeping Paris, silvering the silent reaches of the

Seine, flooding the deserted streets with mellow light, yet gently

retouching all the disfigurements of the siege. No lights illuminated

the cafés, no taxis dashed along the boulevards, no crowds loitered in

the Place de l'Opéra or the Place Vendôme. Yet save for these facts it

might have been the Paris of old time, unvisited by hunger, misery, or

death. The curfew had sounded. Every citizen had long since gone within,

extinguished his lights, and locked his door. Safe in the knowledge that

the Germans' second advance had been finally met and effectually blocked

sixty miles outside the walls, and that an armistice had been declared

to go into effect at midnight, Paris slumbered peacefully.

Beyond the pellet-strewn fields and glacis of the second line of defence

the invader, after a series of terrific onslaughts, had paused,

retreated a few miles and intrenched himself, there to wait until the

starving city should capitulate. For four months he had waited, yet

Paris gave no sign of surrendering. On the contrary, it seemed to have

some mysterious means of self-support, and the war office, in daily

communication with London, reported that it could withstand the

investment for an indefinite period. Meantime the Germans reintrenched

themselves, built forts of their own upon which they mounted the siege

guns intended for the walls, and constructed an impregnable line of

entanglements, redoubts, and defences, which rendered it impossible for

any army outside the city to come to its relief.

So rose the moon, turning white the millions of slate roofs, gilding the

traceries of the towers of Notre Dame, dimming the searchlights which,

like the antennæ of gigantic fireflies, constantly played round the city

from the summit of the Eiffel Tower. So slept Paris, confident that no

crash of descending bombs would shatter the blue vault of the starlit

sky or rend the habitations in which lay two millions of human beings,

assured that the sun would rise through the gray mists of the Seine upon

the ancient beauties of the Tuilleries and the Louvre unmarred by the

enemy's projectiles, and that its citizens could pass freely along its

boulevards without menace of death from flying missiles. For no shell

could be hurled a distance of sixty miles, and an armistice had been

declared.

* * * * *

Behind a small hill within the German fortifications a group of officers

stood in the moonlight, examining what looked superficially like the

hangar of a small dirigible. Nestling behind the hill it cast a black

rectangular shadow upon the trampled sand of the redoubt. A score of

artisans were busy filling a deep trench through which a huge pipe led

off somewhere--a sort of deadly plumbing, for the house sheltered a

monster cannon reënforced by jackets of lead and steel, the whole

encased in a cooling apparatus of intricate manufacture. From the open

end of the house the cylindrical barrel of the gigantic engine of war

raised itself into the air at an angle of forty degrees, and from the

muzzle to the ground below it was a drop of over eighty feet. On a track

running off to the north rested the projectiles side by side, resembling

in the dim light a row of steam boilers in the yard of a locomotive

factory.

"Well," remarked one of the officers, turning to the only one of his

companions not in uniform. "'Thanatos' is ready."

The man addressed was Von Heckmann, the most famous inventor of military

ordnance in the world, already four times decorated for his services to

the Emperor.

"The labour of nine years!" he answered with emotion. "Nine long years

of self-denial and unremitting study! But to-night I shall be repaid,

repaid a thousand times."

The officers shook hands with him one after the other, and the group

broke up; the men who were filling the trench completed their labours

and departed; and Von Heckmann and the major-general of artillery alone

remained, except for the sentries beside the gun. The night was balmy

and the moon rode in a cloudless sky high above the hill. They crossed

the enclosure, followed by the two sentinels, and entering a passage

reached the outer wall of the redoubt, which was in turn closed and

locked. Here the sentries remained, but Von Heckmann and the general

continued on behind the fortifications for some distance.

"Well, shall we start the ball?" asked the general, laying his hand on

Von Heckmann's shoulder. But the inventor found it so hard to master his

emotion that he could only nod his head. Yet the ball to which the

general alluded was the discharging of a fiendish war machine toward an

unsuspecting and harmless city alive with sleeping people, and the

emotion of the inventor was due to the fact that he had devised and

completed the most atrocious engine of death ever conceived by the mind

of man--the Relay Gun. Horrible as is the thought, this otherwise normal

man had devoted nine whole years to the problem of how to destroy human

life at a distance of a hundred kilometres, and at last he had been

successful, and an emperor had placed with his own divinely appointed

hands a ribbon over the spot beneath which his heart should have been.

The projectile of this diabolical invention was ninety-five centimetres

in diameter, and was itself a rifled mortar, which in full flight,

twenty miles from the gun and at the top of its trajectory, exploded in

mid-air, hurling forward its contained projectile with an additional

velocity of three thousand feet per second. This process repeated

itself, the final or core bomb, weighing over three hundred pounds and

filled with lyddite, reaching its mark one minute and thirty-five

seconds after the firing of the gun. This crowning example of the human

mind's destructive ingenuity had cost the German Government five million

marks and had required three years for its construction, and by no means

the least of its devilish capacities was that of automatically reloading

and firing itself at the interval of every ten seconds, its muzzle

rising, falling, or veering slightly from side to side with each

discharge, thus causing the shells to fall at wide distances. The

poisonous nature of the immense volumes of gas poured out by the

mastodon when in action necessitated the withdrawal of its crew to a

safe distance. But once set in motion it needed no attendant. It had

been tested by a preliminary shot the day before, which had been

directed to a point several miles outside the walls of Paris, the effect

of which had been observed and reported by high-flying German aeroplanes

equipped with wireless. Everything was ready for the holocaust.

Von Heckmann and the general of artillery continued to make their way

through the intrenchments and other fortifications, until at a distance

of about a quarter of a mile from the redoubt where they had left the

Relay Gun they arrived at a small whitewashed cottage.

"I have invited a few of my staff to join us," said the general to the

inventor, "in order that they may in years to come describe to their

children and their grandchildren this, the most momentous occasion in

the history of warfare."

They turned the corner of the cottage and came upon a group of officers

standing by the wooden gate of the cottage, all of whom saluted at their

approach.

"Good evening, gentlemen," said the general. "I beg to present the

members of my staff," turning to Von Heckmann.

The officers stood back while the general led the way into the cottage,

the lower floor of which consisted of but a single room, used by the

recent tenants as a kitchen, dining-room, and living-room. At one end of

a long table, constructed by the regimental carpenter, supper had been

laid, and a tub filled with ice contained a dozen or more quarts of

champagne. Two orderlies stood behind the table, at the other end of

which was affixed a small brass switch connected with the redoubt and

controlled by a spring and button. The windows of the cottage were open,

and through them poured the light of the full moon, dimming the

flickering light of the candles upon the table.

In spite of the champagne, the supper, and the boxes of cigars and

cigarettes, an atmosphere of solemnity was distinctly perceptible. It

was as if each one of these officers, hardened to human suffering by a

lifetime of discipline and active service, to say nothing of the years

of horror through which they had just passed, could not but feel that in

the last analysis the hurling upon an unsuspecting city of a rain of

projectiles containing the highest explosive known to warfare, at a

distance three times greater than that heretofore supposed to be

possible to science, and the ensuing annihilation of its inhabitants,

was something less for congratulation and applause than for sorrow and

regret. The officers, who had joked each other outside the gate, became

singularly quiet as they entered the cottage and gathered round the

table where Von Heckmann and the general had taken their stand by the

instrument. Utter silence fell upon the group. The mercury of their

spirits dropped from summer heat to below freezing. What was this thing

which they were about to do?

Through the windows, at a distance of four hundred yards, the pounding

of the machinery which flooded the water jacket of the Relay Gun was

distinctly audible in the stillness of the night. The pressure of a

finger--a little finger--upon that electric button was all that was

necessary to start the torrent of iron and high explosives toward Paris.

By the time the first shell would reach its mark nine more would be on

their way, stretched across the midnight sky at intervals of less than

eight miles. And once started the stream would continue uninterrupted

for two hours. The fascinated eyes of all the officers fastened

themselves upon the key. None spoke.

"Well, well, gentlemen!" exclaimed the general brusquely, "what is the

matter with you? You act as if you were at a funeral! Hans," turning to

the orderly, "open the champagne there. Fill the glasses. Bumpers all,

gentlemen, for the greatest inventor of all times, Herr von Heckmann,

the inventor of the Relay Gun!"

The orderly sprang forward and hastily commenced uncorking bottles,

while Von Heckmann turned away to the window.

"Here, this won't do, Schelling! You must liven things up a bit!"

continued the general to one of the officers. "This is a great occasion

for all of us! Give me that bottle." He seized a magnum of champagne

from the orderly and commenced pouring out the foaming liquid into the

glasses beside the plates. Schelling made a feeble attempt at a joke at

which the officers laughed loudly, for the general was a martinet and

had to be humoured.

"Now, then," called out the general as he glanced toward the window,

"Herr von Heckmann, we are going to drink your health! Officers of the

First Artillery, I give you a toast--a toast which you will all remember

to your dying day! Bumpers, gentlemen! No heel taps! I give you the

health of 'Thanatos'--the leviathan of artillery, the winged bearer of

death and destruction--and of its inventor, Herr von Heckmann. Bumpers,

gentlemen!" The general slapped Von Heckmann upon the shoulder and

drained his glass.

"'Thanatos!' Von Heckmann!" shouted the officers. And with one accord

they dashed their goblets to the stone flagging upon which they stood.

"And now, my dear inventor," said the general, "to you belongs the

honour of arousing 'Thanatos' into activity. Are you ready, gentlemen? I

warn you that when 'Thanatos' snores the rafters will ring."

Von Heckmann had stood with bowed head while the officers had drunk his

health, and he now hesitatingly turned toward the little brass switch

with its button of black rubber that glistened so innocently in the

candlelight. His right hand trembled. He dashed the back of his left

across his eyes. The general took out a large silver watch from his

pocket. "Fifty-nine minutes past eleven," he announced. "At one minute

past twelve Paris will be disembowelled. Put your finger on the button,

my friend. Let us start the ball rolling."

Von Heckmann cast a glance almost of disquietude upon the faces of the

officers who were leaning over the table in the intensity of their

excitement. His elation, his exaltation, had passed from him. He seemed

overwhelmed at the momentousness of the act which he was about to

perform. Slowly his index finger crept toward the button and hovered

half suspended over it. He pressed his lips together and was about to

exert the pressure required to transmit the current of electricity to

the discharging apparatus when unexpectedly there echoed through the

night the sharp click of a horse's hoofs coming at a gallop down the

village street. The group turned expectantly to the doorway.

An officer dressed in the uniform of an aide-de-camp of artillery

entered abruptly, saluted, and produced from the inside pocket of his

jacket a sealed envelope which he handed to the general. The interest of

the officers suddenly centred upon the contents of the envelope. The

general grumbled an oath at the interruption, tore open the missive, and

held the single sheet which it contained to the candlelight.

"An armistice!" he cried disgustedly. His eye glanced rapidly over the

page.

"_To the Major-General commanding the First Division of Artillery,

Army of the Meuse:_

"An armistice has been declared, to commence at midnight, pending

negotiations for peace. You will see that no acts of hostility

occur until you receive notice that war is to be resumed.

"VON HELMUTH,

"Imperial Commissioner for War."

The officers broke into exclamations of impatience as the general

crumpled the missive in his hand and cast it upon the floor.

"_Donnerwetter!_" he shouted. "Why were we so slow? Curse the

armistice!" He glanced at his watch. It already pointed to after

midnight. His face turned red and the veins in his forehead swelled.

"To hell with peace!" he bellowed, turning back his watch until the

minute hand pointed to five minutes to twelve. "To hell with peace, I

say! Press the button, Von Heckmann!"

But in spite of the agony of disappointment which he now acutely

experienced, Von Heckmann did not fire. Sixty years of German respect

for orders held him in a viselike grip and paralyzed his arm.

"I can't," he muttered. "I can't."

The general seemed to have gone mad. Thrusting Von Heckmann out of the

way, he threw himself into a chair at the end of the table and with a

snarl pressed the black handle of the key.

The officers gasped. Hardened as they were to the necessities of war, no

act of insubordination like the present had ever occurred within their

experience. Yet they must all uphold the general; they must all swear

that the gun was fired before midnight. The key clicked and a blue bead

snapped at the switch. They held their breaths, looking through the

window to the west.

At first the night remained still. Only the chirp of the crickets and

the fretting of the aide-de-camp's horse outside the cottage could be

heard. Then, like the grating of a coffee mill in a distant kitchen when

one is just waking out of a sound sleep, they heard the faint, smothered

whir of machinery, a sharper metallic ring of steel against steel

followed by a gigantic detonation which shook the ground upon which the

cottage stood and overthrew every glass upon the table. With a roar like

the fall of a skyscraper the first shell hurled itself into the night.

Half terrified the officers gripped their chairs, waiting for the second

discharge. The reverberation was still echoing among the hills when the

second detonation occurred, shortly followed by the third and fourth.

Then, in intervals between the crashing explosions, a distant rumbling

growl, followed by a shuddering of the air, as if the night were

frightened, came up out of the west toward Paris, showing that the

projectiles were at the top of their flight and going into action. A

lake of yellow smoke formed in the pocket behind the hill where lay the

redoubt in which "Thanatos" was snoring.

On the great race track of Longchamps, in the Bois de Boulogne, the vast

herd of cows, sheep, horses, and goats, collected together by the city

government of Paris and attended by fifty or sixty shepherds especially

imported from _les Landes_, had long since ceased to browse and had

settled themselves down into the profound slumber of the animal world,

broken only by an occasional bleating or the restless whinnying of a

stallion. On the race course proper, in front of the grandstand and

between it and the judge's box, four of these shepherds had built a

small fire and by its light were throwing dice for coppers. They were

having an easy time of it, these shepherds, for their flocks did not

wander, and all that they had to do was to see that the animals were

properly driven to such parts of the Bois as would afford proper

nourishment.

"Well, _mes enfants_," exclaimed old Adrian Bannalec, pulling a

turnip-shaped watch from beneath his blouse and holding it up to the

firelight, "it's twelve o'clock and time to turn in. But what do you say

to a cup of chocolate first?"

The others greeted the suggestion with approval, and going somewhere

underneath the grandstand, Bannalec produced a pot filled with water,

which he suspended with much dexterity over the fire upon the end of a

pointed stick. The water began to boil almost immediately, and they were

on the point of breaking their chocolate into it when, from what

appeared to be an immense distance, through the air there came a curious

rumble.

"What was that?" muttered Bannalec. The sound was followed within a few

seconds by another, and after a similar interval by a third and fourth.

"There was going to be an armistice," suggested one of the younger

herdsmen. He had hardly spoken before a much louder and apparently

nearer detonation occurred.

"That must be one of our guns," said old Adrian proudly. "Do you hear

how much louder it speaks than those of the Germans?"

Other discharges now followed in rapid succession, some fainter, some

much louder. And then somewhere in the sky they saw a flash of flame,

followed by a thunderous concussion which rattled the grandstand, and a

great fiery serpent came soaring through the heavens toward Paris. Each

moment it grew larger, until it seemed to be dropping straight toward

them out of the sky, leaving a trail of sparks behind it.

"It's coming our way," chattered Adrian.

"God have mercy upon us!" murmured the others.

Rigid with fear, they stood staring with open mouths at the shell that

seemed to have selected them for the object of its flight.

"God have mercy on our souls!" repeated Adrian after the others.

Then there came a light like that of a million suns....

Alas for the wives and children of the herdsmen! And alas for the herds!

But better that the eight core bombs projected by "Thanatos" through the

midnight sky toward Paris should have torn the foliage of the Bois,

destroyed the grandstands of Auteuil and Longchamps, with sixteen

hundred innocent sheep and cattle, than that they should have sought

their victims among the crowded streets of the inner city. Lucky for

Paris that the Relay Gun had been sighted so as to sweep the metropolis

from the west to the east, and that though each shell approached nearer

to the walls than its preceding brother, none reached the ramparts. For

with the discharge of the eighth shell and the explosion of the first

core bomb filled with lyddite among the sleeping animals huddled on the

turf in front of the grandstands, something happened which the poor

shepherds did not see.

The watchers in the Eiffel Tower, seeing the heavens with their

searchlights for German planes and German dirigibles, saw the first core

bomb bore through the sky from the direction of Verdun, followed by its

seven comrades, and saw each bomb explode in the Bois below. But as the

first shell shattered the stillness of the night and spread its

sulphureous and death-dealing fumes among the helpless cattle, the

watchers on the Tower saw a vast light burst skyward in the far-distant

east.

* * * * *

Two miles up the road from the village of Champaubert, Karl Biedenkopf,

a native of Hesse-Nassau and a private of artillery, was doing picket

duty. The moonlight turned the broad highroad toward Épernay into a

gleaming white boulevard down which he could see, it seemed to him, for

miles. The air was soft and balmy, and filled with the odour of hay

which the troopers had harvested "on behalf of the Kaiser." Across the

road "Gretchen," Karl's mare, grazed ruminatively, while the picket

himself sat on the stone wall by the roadside, smoking the Bremen cigar

which his corporal had given him after dinner.

The night was thick with stars. They were all so bright that at first he

did not notice the comet which sailed slowly toward him from the

northwest, seemingly following the line of the German intrenchments from

Amiens, St.-Quentin, and Laon toward Rheims and Épernay. But the comet

was there, dropping a long yellow beam of light upon the sleeping hosts

that were beleaguering the outer ring of the French fortifications.

Suddenly the repose of Biedenkopf's retrospections was abruptly

disconcerted by the distant pounding of hoofs far down the road from

Verdun. He sprang off the wall, took up his rifle, crossed the road,

hastily adjusted "Gretchen's" bridle, leaped into the saddle, and

awaited the night rider, whoever he might be. At a distance of three

hundred feet he cried: "Halt!" The rider drew rein, hastily gave the

countersign, and Biedenkopf, recognizing the aide-de-camp, saluted and

drew aside.

"There goes a lucky fellow," he said aloud. "Nothing to do but ride up

and down the roads, stopping wherever he sees a pleasant inn or a pretty

face, spending money like water, and never risking a hair of his head."

It never occurred to him that maybe his was the luck. And while the

aide-de-camp galloped on and the sound of his horse's hoofs grew fainter

and fainter down the road toward the village, the comet came sailing

swiftly on overhead, deluging the fortifications with a blinding

orange-yellow light. It could not have been more than a mile away when

Biedenkopf saw it. Instantly his trained eye recognized the fact that

this strange round object shooting through the air was no wandering

celestial body.

"_Ein Flieger!_" he cried hoarsely, staring at it in astonishment,

knowing full well that no dirigible or aeroplane of German manufacture

bore any resemblance to this extraordinary voyager of the air.

A hundred yards down the road his field telephone was attached to a

poplar, and casting one furtive look at the Flying Ring he galloped to

the tree and rang up the corporal of the guard. But at the very instant

that his call was answered a series of terrific detonations shook the

earth and set the wires roaring in the receiver, so that he could hear

nothing. One--two--three--four of them, followed by a distant answering

boom in the west.

And then the whole sky seemed full of fire. He was hurled backward upon

the road and lay half-stunned, while the earth discharged itself into

the air with a roar like that of ten thousand shells exploding all

together. The ground shook, groaned, grumbled, grated, and showers of

boards, earth, branches, rocks, vegetables, tiles, and all sorts of

unrecognizable and grotesque objects fell from the sky all about him. It

was like a gigantic and never-ending mine, or series of mines, in

continuous explosion, a volcano pouring itself upward out of the bowels

of an incandescent earth. Above the earsplitting thunder of the eruption

he heard shrill cries and raucous shoutings. Mounted men dashed past him

down the road, singly and in squadrons. A molten globe dropped through

the branches of the poplar, and striking the hard surface of the road at

a distance of fifty yards scattered itself like a huge ingot dropped

from a blast furnace. Great clouds of dust descended and choked him. A

withering heat enveloped him....

It was noon next day when Karl Biedenkopf raised his head and looked

about him. He thought first there had been a battle. But the sight that

met his eyes bore no resemblance to a field of carnage. Over his head he

noticed that the uppermost branches of the poplar had been seared as by

fire. The road looked as if the countryside had been traversed by a

hurricane. All sorts of débris filled the fields and everywhere there

seemed to be a thick deposit of blackened earth. Vaguely realizing that

he must report for duty, he crawled, in spite of his bursting head and

aching limbs, on all fours down the road toward the village.

But he could not find the village. There was no village there; and soon

he came to what seemed to be the edge of a gigantic crater, where the

earth had been uprooted and tossed aside as if by some huge convulsion

of nature. Here and there masses of inflammable material smoked and

flickered with red flames. His eyes sought the familiar outlines of the

redoubts and fortifications, but found them not. And where the village

had been there was a great cavern in the earth, and the deepest part of

the cavern, or so it seemed to his half-blinded sight, was at about the

point where the cottage had stood which his general had used as his

headquarters, the spot where the night before that general had raised

his glass of bubbling wine and toasted "Thanatos," the personification

of death, and called his officers to witness that this was the greatest

moment in the history of warfare, a moment that they would all remember

to their dying day.