"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 bra.s.s switch with its b.u.t.ton 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 b.u.t.ton, 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 pa.s.sed from him. He seemed overwhelmed at the momentousness of the act which he was about to perform. Slowly his index finger crept toward the b.u.t.ton 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 h.e.l.l with peace!" he bellowed, turning back his watch until the minute hand pointed to five minutes to twelve. "To h.e.l.l with peace, I say! Press the b.u.t.ton, 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 gla.s.s upon the table. With a roar like the fall of a skysc.r.a.per the first sh.e.l.l 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.
"G.o.d have mercy upon us!" murmured the others.
Rigid with fear, they stood staring with open mouths at the sh.e.l.l that seemed to have selected them for the object of its flight.
"G.o.d 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 sh.e.l.l approached nearer to the walls than its preceding brother, none reached the ramparts. For with the discharge of the eighth sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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-Na.s.sau and a private of artillery, was doing picket duty. The moonlight turned the broad highroad toward epernay 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 epernay. 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 hoa.r.s.ely, 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 debris 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 ma.s.ses 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 gla.s.s 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.
XII
The shabby-genteel little houses of the Appian Way, in Cambridge, whose window-eyes with their blue-green lids had watched Bennie Hooker come and go, trudging back and forth to lectures and recitations, first as boy and then as man, for thirty years, must have blinked with amazement at the sight of the little professor as he started on the afterward famous Hooker Expedition to Labrador in search of the Flying Ring.
For the five days following Thornton"s unexpected visit Bennie, existing without sleep and almost without food save for his staple of ready-to-serve chocolate, was the centre of a whirl of books, logarithms, and calculations in the University Library, and const.i.tuted himself an unmitigated, if respected, pest at the Cambridge Observatory.
Moreover--and this was the most iconoclastic spectacle of all to his conservative pedagogical neighbours in the Appian Way--telegraph boys on bicycles kept rushing to and fro in a stream between the Hooker boarding-house and Harvard Square at all hours of the day and night.
For Bennie had lost no time and had instantly started in upon the same series of experiments to locate the origin of the phenomena which had shaken the globe as had been made use of by Professor von Schwenitz at the direction of General von Helmuth, the Imperial German Commissioner for War, at Mainz. The result had been approximately identical, and Hooker had satisfied himself that somewhere in the centre of Labrador his fellow-scientist--the discoverer of the Lavender Ray--was conducting the operations that had resulted in the dislocation of the earth"s axis and r.e.t.a.r.dation of its motion. Filled with a pure and unselfish scientific joy, it became his sole and immediate ambition to find the man who had done these things, to shake him by the hand, and to compare notes with him upon the now solved problems of thermic induction and of atomic disintegration.
But how to get there? How to reach him? For Prof. Bennie Hooker had never been a hundred miles from Cambridge in his life, and a journey to Labrador seemed almost as difficult as an attempt to reach the pole. Off again then to the University Library, with pale but polite young ladies hastening to fetch him atlases, charts, guidebooks, and works dealing with sport and travel, until at last the great scheme unfolded itself to his mind--the scheme that was to result in the perpetuation of atomic disintegration for the uses of mankind and the subsequent alteration of civilization, both political and economic. Innocently, ingeniously, ingenuously, he mapped it all out. No one must know what he was about.
Oh, no! He must steal away, in disguise if need be, and reach Pax alone.