he midst of
the play the actors staggered, dropped, and were still. The figure
runs from my pen. In New York that very thing occurred. Most of
the theatrical audiences dispersed, but in two crowded houses the
company, fearing a panic, went on playing amidst the gloom, and the
people, trained by many a previous disaster, stuck to their seats.
There they sat, the back rows only moving a little, and there, in
disciplined lines, they drooped and failed, nodded, and fell forward
or slid down upon the floor. I am told by Parload--though indeed I
know nothing of the reasoning on which his confidence rests---that
within an hour of the great moment of impact the first green
modification of nitrogen had dissolved and passed away, leaving the
air as translucent as ever. The rest of that wonderful interlude
was clear, had any had eyes to see its clearness. In London it
was night, but in New York, for example, people were in the full
bustle of the evening's enjoyment, in Chicago they were sitting
down to dinner, the whole world was abroad. The moonlight must have
illuminated streets and squares littered with crumpled figures,
through which such electric cars as had no automatic brakes had
ploughed on their way until they were stopped by the fallen bodies.
People lay in their dress clothes, in dining-rooms, restaurants,
on staircases, in halls, everywhere just as they had been overcome.
Men gambling, men drinking, thieves lurking in hidden places, sinful
couples, were caught, to arise with awakened mind and conscience
amidst the disorder of their sin. America the comet reached in the
full tide of evening life, but Britain lay asleep. But as I have
told, Britain did not slumber so deeply but that she was in the
full tide of what may have been battle and a great victory. Up and
down the North Sea her warships swept together like a net about
their foes. On land, too, that night was to have decided great
issues. The German camps were under arms from Redingen to Markirch,
their infantry columns were lying in swathes like mown hay, in
arrested night march on every track between Longuyon and Thiancourt,
and between Avricourt and Donen. The hills beyond Spincourt were
dusted thick with hidden French riflemen; the thin lash of the French
skirmishers sprawled out amidst spades and unfinished rifle-pits
in coils that wrapped about the heads of the German columns,
thence along the Vosges watershed and out across the frontier
near Belfort nearly