d, but it is highly probable that the formation of an aerial
park in this region, from which attacks could be made upon the vast
industrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a flanking raid through Holland
upon the German naval establishments at the mouth of the Elbe, were
integral parts of the original project. Nothing of this was known to
such pawns in the game as Barnet and his company, whose business it
was to do what they were told by the mysterious intelligences at the
direction of things in Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff had
also been transferred. From first to last these directing intelligences
remained mysterious to the body of the army, veiled under the name of
'Orders.' There was no Napoleon, no Caesar to embody enthusiasm. Barnet
says, 'We talked of Them. THEY are sending us up into Luxembourg. THEY
are going to turn the Central European right.'

Behind the veil of this vagueness the little group of more or less
worthy men which constituted Headquarters was beginning to realise the
enormity of the thing it was supposed to control....

In the great hall of the War Control, whose windows looked out across
the Seine to the Trocadero and the palaces of the western quarter, a
series of big-scale relief maps were laid out upon tables to display
the whole seat of war, and the staff-officers of the control were
continually busy shifting the little blocks which represented the
contending troops, as the reports and intelligence came drifting in to
the various telegraphic bureaux in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller
apartments there were maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for
example, the reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav commanders
were recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps, as upon
chessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard and the
Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world supremacy against
the Central European powers. Very probably he had a definite idea of his
game; very probably he had a coherent and admirable plan.

But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new strategy
of aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy that Holsten had
opened for mankind. While he planned entrenchments and invasions and a
frontier war, the Central European generalship was striking at the
eyes and the brain. And while, with a certain diffident hesitation, he
developed his gambit that night upon the lines laid down by Napoleon
and M