ssion 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 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 ruminat