XI
The moon rose over sleeping Paris, silvering the silent reaches of theSeine, flooding the deserted streets with mellow light, yet gentlyretouching all the disfigurements of the siege. No lights illuminatedthe cafes, no taxis dashed along the boulevards, no crowds loitered inthe Place de l'Opera or the Place Vendome. Yet save for these facts itmight have been the Paris of old time, unvisited by hunger, misery, ordeath. The curfew had sounded. Every citizen had long since gone within,extinguished his lights, and locked his door. Safe in the knowledge thatthe Germans' second advance had been finally met and effectually blockedsixty miles outside the walls, and that an armistice had been declaredto go into effect at midnight, Paris slumbered peacefully.
Beyond the pellet-strewn fields and glacis of the second line of defencethe invader, after a series of terrific onslaughts, had paused,retreated a few miles and intrenched himself, there to wait until thestarving city should capitulate. For four months he had waited, yetParis gave no sign of surrendering. On the contrary, it seemed to havesome mysterious means of self-support, and the war office, in dailycommunication with London, reported that it could withstand theinvestment for an indefinite period. Meantime the Germans reintrenchedthemselves, built forts of their own upon which they mounted the siegeguns intended for the walls, and constructed an impregnable line ofentanglements, redoubts, and defences, which rendered it impossible forany army outside the city to come to its relief.
So rose the moon, turning white the millions of slate roofs, gilding thetraceries of the towers of Notre Dame, dimming the searchlights which,like the antennae of gigantic fireflies, constantly played round the cityfrom the summit of the Eiffel Tower. So slept Paris, confident that nocrash of descending bombs would shatter the blue vault of the starlitsky 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 uponthe ancient beauties of the Tuilleries and the Louvre unmarred by theenemy's projectiles, and that its citizens could pass freely along itsboulevards without menace of death from flying missiles. For no shellcould be hurled a distance of sixty miles, and an armistice had beendeclared.
* * * * *
Behind a small hill within the German fortifications a group of officersstood in the moonlight, examining what looked superficially like thehangar of a small dirigible. Nestling behind the hill it cast a blackrectangular shadow upon the trampled sand of the redoubt. A score ofartisans were busy filling a deep trench through which a huge pipe ledoff somewhere--a sort of deadly plumbing, for the house sheltered amonster cannon reenforced by jackets of lead and steel, the wholeencased in a cooling apparatus of intricate manufacture. From the openend of the house the cylindrical barrel of the gigantic engine of warraised itself into the air at an angle of forty degrees, and from themuzzle to the ground below it was a drop of over eighty feet. On a trackrunning off to the north rested the projectiles side by side, resemblingin the dim light a row of steam boilers in the yard of a locomotivefactory.
"Well," remarked one of the officers, turning to the only one of hiscompanions not in uniform. "'Thanatos' is ready."
The man addressed was Von Heckmann, the most famous inventor of militaryordnance in the world, already four times decorated for his services tothe Emperor.
"The labour of nine years!" he answered with emotion. "Nine long yearsof 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 groupbroke up; the men who were filling the trench completed their laboursand departed; and Von Heckmann and the major-general of artillery aloneremained, except for the sentries beside the gun. The night was balmyand the moon rode in a cloudless sky high above the hill. They crossedthe enclosure, followed by the two sentinels, and entering a passagereached the outer wall of the redoubt, which was in turn closed andlocked. Here the sentries remained, but Von Heckmann and the generalcontinued on behind the fortifications for some distance.
"Well, shall we start the ball?" asked the general, laying his hand onVon Heckmann's shoulder. But the inventor found it so hard to master hisemotion that he could only nod his head. Yet the ball to which thegeneral alluded was the discharging of a fiendish war machine toward anunsuspecting and harmless city alive with sleeping people, and theemotion of the inventor was due to the fact that he had devised andcompleted the most atrocious engine of death ever conceived by the mindof man--the Relay Gun. Horrible as is the thought, this otherwise normalman had devoted nine whole years to the problem of how to destroy humanlife at a distance of a hundred kilometres, and at last he had beensuccessful, and an emperor had placed with his own divinely appointedhands a ribbon over the spot beneath which his heart should have been.
The projectile of this diabolical invention was ninety-five centimetresin diameter, and was itself a rifled mortar, which in full flight,twenty miles from the gun and at the top of its trajectory, exploded inmid-air, hurling forward its contained projectile with an additionalvelocity of three thousand feet per second. This process repeateditself, the final or core bomb, weighing over three hundred pounds andfilled with lyddite, reaching its mark one minute and thirty-fiveseconds after the firing of the gun. This crowning example of the humanmind's destructive ingenuity had cost the German Government five millionmarks and had required three years for its construction, and by no meansthe least of its devilish capacities was that of automatically reloadingand firing itself at the interval of every ten seconds, its muzzlerising, falling, or veering slightly from side to side with eachdischarge, thus causing the shells to fall at wide distances. Thepoisonous nature of the immense volumes of gas poured out by themastodon when in action necessitated the withdrawal of its crew to asafe distance. But once set in motion it needed no attendant. It hadbeen tested by a preliminary shot the day before, which had beendirected to a point several miles outside the walls of Paris, the effectof which had been observed and reported by high-flying German aeroplanesequipped with wireless. Everything was ready for the holocaust.
Von Heckmann and the general of artillery continued to make their waythrough the intrenchments and other fortifications, until at a distanceof about a quarter of a mile from the redoubt where they had left theRelay Gun they arrived at a small whitewashed cottage.
"I have invited a few of my staff to join us," said the general to theinventor, "in order that they may in years to come describe to theirchildren and their grandchildren this, the most momentous occasion inthe history of warfare."
They turned the corner of the cottage and came upon a group of officersstanding by the wooden gate of the cottage, all of whom saluted at theirapproach.
"Good evening, gentlemen," said the general. "I beg to present themembers 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 therecent tenants as a kitchen, dining-room, and living-room. At one end ofa long table, constructed by the regimental carpenter, supper had beenlaid, and a tub filled with ice contained a dozen or more quarts ofchampagne. Two orderlies stood behind the table, at the other end ofwhich was affixed a small brass switch connected with the redoubt andcontrolled by a spring and button. The windows of the cottage were open,and through them poured the light of the full moon, dimming theflickering light of the candles upon the table.
In spite of the champagne, the supper, and the boxes of cigars andcigarettes, an atmosphere of solemnity was distinctly perceptible. Itwas as if each one of these officers, hardened to human suffering by alifetime of discipline and active service, to say nothing of the yearsof horror through which they had just passed, could not but feel that inthe last analysis the hurling upon an unsuspecting city of a rain ofprojectiles containing the highest explosive known to warfare, at adistance three times greater than that heretofore supposed to bepossible to science, and the ensuing annihilation of its inhabitants,was somethi
ng less for congratulation and applause than for sorrow andregret. The officers, who had joked each other outside the gate, becamesingularly quiet as they entered the cottage and gathered round thetable where Von Heckmann and the general had taken their stand by theinstrument. Utter silence fell upon the group. The mercury of theirspirits dropped from summer heat to below freezing. What was this thingwhich they were about to do?
Through the windows, at a distance of four hundred yards, the poundingof the machinery which flooded the water jacket of the Relay Gun wasdistinctly audible in the stillness of the night. The pressure of afinger--a little finger--upon that electric button was all that wasnecessary 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 ontheir way, stretched across the midnight sky at intervals of less thaneight miles. And once started the stream would continue uninterruptedfor two hours. The fascinated eyes of all the officers fastenedthemselves upon the key. None spoke.
"Well, well, gentlemen!" exclaimed the general brusquely, "what is thematter with you? You act as if you were at a funeral! Hans," turning tothe 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 occasionfor all of us! Give me that bottle." He seized a magnum of champagnefrom the orderly and commenced pouring out the foaming liquid into theglasses beside the plates. Schelling made a feeble attempt at a joke atwhich the officers laughed loudly, for the general was a martinet andhad 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 theFirst Artillery, I give you a toast--a toast which you will all rememberto your dying day! Bumpers, gentlemen! No heel taps! I give you thehealth of 'Thanatos'--the leviathan of artillery, the winged bearer ofdeath and destruction--and of its inventor, Herr von Heckmann. Bumpers,gentlemen!" The general slapped Von Heckmann upon the shoulder anddrained his glass.
"'Thanatos!' Von Heckmann!" shouted the officers. And with one accordthey dashed their goblets to the stone flagging upon which they stood.
"And now, my dear inventor," said the general, "to you belongs thehonour of arousing 'Thanatos' into activity. Are you ready, gentlemen? Iwarn you that when 'Thanatos' snores the rafters will ring."
Von Heckmann had stood with bowed head while the officers had drunk hishealth, and he now hesitatingly turned toward the little brass switchwith its button of black rubber that glistened so innocently in thecandlelight. His right hand trembled. He dashed the back of his leftacross his eyes. The general took out a large silver watch from hispocket. "Fifty-nine minutes past eleven," he announced. "At one minutepast 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 theofficers who were leaning over the table in the intensity of theirexcitement. His elation, his exaltation, had passed from him. He seemedoverwhelmed at the momentousness of the act which he was about toperform. Slowly his index finger crept toward the button and hoveredhalf suspended over it. He pressed his lips together and was about toexert the pressure required to transmit the current of electricity tothe discharging apparatus when unexpectedly there echoed through thenight the sharp click of a horse's hoofs coming at a gallop down thevillage street. The group turned expectantly to the doorway.
An officer dressed in the uniform of an aide-de-camp of artilleryentered abruptly, saluted, and produced from the inside pocket of hisjacket a sealed envelope which he handed to the general. The interest ofthe officers suddenly centred upon the contents of the envelope. Thegeneral grumbled an oath at the interruption, tore open the missive, andheld the single sheet which it contained to the candlelight.
"An armistice!" he cried disgustedly. His eye glanced rapidly over thepage.
"_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 generalcrumpled the missive in his hand and cast it upon the floor.
"_Donnerwetter!_" he shouted. "Why were we so slow? Curse thearmistice!" He glanced at his watch. It already pointed to aftermidnight. His face turned red and the veins in his forehead swelled.
"To hell with peace!" he bellowed, turning back his watch until theminute hand pointed to five minutes to twelve. "To hell with peace, Isay! Press the button, Von Heckmann!"
But in spite of the agony of disappointment which he now acutelyexperienced, Von Heckmann did not fire. Sixty years of German respectfor 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 theway, he threw himself into a chair at the end of the table and with asnarl pressed the black handle of the key.
The officers gasped. Hardened as they were to the necessities of war, noact of insubordination like the present had ever occurred within theirexperience. Yet they must all uphold the general; they must all swearthat the gun was fired before midnight. The key clicked and a blue beadsnapped at the switch. They held their breaths, looking through thewindow to the west.
At first the night remained still. Only the chirp of the crickets andthe fretting of the aide-de-camp's horse outside the cottage could beheard. Then, like the grating of a coffee mill in a distant kitchen whenone is just waking out of a sound sleep, they heard the faint, smotheredwhir of machinery, a sharper metallic ring of steel against steelfollowed by a gigantic detonation which shook the ground upon which thecottage stood and overthrew every glass upon the table. With a roar likethe fall of a skyscraper the first shell hurled itself into the night.Half terrified the officers gripped their chairs, waiting for the seconddischarge. The reverberation was still echoing among the hills when thesecond detonation occurred, shortly followed by the third and fourth.Then, in intervals between the crashing explosions, a distant rumblinggrowl, followed by a shuddering of the air, as if the night werefrightened, came up out of the west toward Paris, showing that theprojectiles were at the top of their flight and going into action. Alake of yellow smoke formed in the pocket behind the hill where lay theredoubt in which "Thanatos" was snoring.
On the great race track of Longchamps, in the Bois de Boulogne, the vastherd of cows, sheep, horses, and goats, collected together by the citygovernment of Paris and attended by fifty or sixty shepherds especiallyimported from _les Landes_, had long since ceased to browse and hadsettled themselves down into the profound slumber of the animal world,broken only by an occasional bleating or the restless whinnying of astallion. On the race course proper, in front of the grandstand andbetween it and the judge's box, four of these shepherds had built asmall fire and by its light were throwing dice for coppers. They werehaving an easy time of it, these shepherds, for their flocks did notwander, and all that they had to do was to see that the animals wereproperly driven to such parts of the Bois as would afford propernourishment.
"Well, _mes enfants_," exclaimed old Adrian Bannalec, pulling aturnip-shaped watch from beneath his blouse and holding it up to thefirelight, "it's twelve o'clock and time to turn in. But what do you sayto a cup of chocolate first?"
The others greeted the suggestion with approval, and going somewhereunderneath the grandstand, Bannalec produced a pot filled with water,which he suspended with much dexterity over the fire upon the end of apoi
nted stick. The water began to boil almost immediately, and they wereon the point of breaking their chocolate into it when, from whatappeared to be an immense distance, through the air there came a curiousrumble.
"What was that?" muttered Bannalec. The sound was followed within a fewseconds by another, and after a similar interval by a third and fourth.
"There was going to be an armistice," suggested one of the youngerherdsmen. He had hardly spoken before a much louder and apparentlynearer detonation occurred.
"That must be one of our guns," said old Adrian proudly. "Do you hearhow much louder it speaks than those of the Germans?"
Other discharges now followed in rapid succession, some fainter, somemuch louder. And then somewhere in the sky they saw a flash of flame,followed by a thunderous concussion which rattled the grandstand, and agreat fiery serpent came soaring through the heavens toward Paris. Eachmoment it grew larger, until it seemed to be dropping straight towardthem 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 thatseemed 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 themidnight sky toward Paris should have torn the foliage of the Bois,destroyed the grandstands of Auteuil and Longchamps, with sixteenhundred innocent sheep and cattle, than that they should have soughttheir victims among the crowded streets of the inner city. Lucky forParis that the Relay Gun had been sighted so as to sweep the metropolisfrom the west to the east, and that though each shell approached nearerto the walls than its preceding brother, none reached the ramparts. Forwith the discharge of the eighth shell and the explosion of the firstcore bomb filled with lyddite among the sleeping animals huddled on theturf in front of the grandstands, something happened which the poorshepherds did not see.
The watchers in the Eiffel Tower, seeing the heavens with theirsearchlights for German planes and German dirigibles, saw the first corebomb bore through the sky from the direction of Verdun, followed by itsseven comrades, and saw each bomb explode in the Bois below. But as thefirst shell shattered the stillness of the night and spread itssulphureous and death-dealing fumes among the helpless cattle, thewatchers on the Tower saw a vast light burst skyward in the far-distanteast.
* * * * *
Two miles up the road from the village of Champaubert, Karl Biedenkopf,a native of Hesse-Nassau and a private of artillery, was doing picketduty. The moonlight turned the broad highroad toward Epernay into agleaming white boulevard down which he could see, it seemed to him, formiles. The air was soft and balmy, and filled with the odour of haywhich the troopers had harvested "on behalf of the Kaiser." Across theroad "Gretchen," Karl's mare, grazed ruminatively, while the pickethimself sat on the stone wall by the roadside, smoking the Bremen cigarwhich his corporal had given him after dinner.
The night was thick with stars. They were all so bright that at first hedid not notice the comet which sailed slowly toward him from thenorthwest, seemingly following the line of the German intrenchments fromAmiens, St.-Quentin, and Laon toward Rheims and Epernay. But the cometwas there, dropping a long yellow beam of light upon the sleeping hoststhat were beleaguering the outer ring of the French fortifications.Suddenly the repose of Biedenkopf's retrospections was abruptlydisconcerted by the distant pounding of hoofs far down the road fromVerdun. He sprang off the wall, took up his rifle, crossed the road,hastily adjusted "Gretchen's" bridle, leaped into the saddle, andawaited the night rider, whoever he might be. At a distance of threehundred feet he cried: "Halt!" The rider drew rein, hastily gave thecountersign, and Biedenkopf, recognizing the aide-de-camp, saluted anddrew aside.
"There goes a lucky fellow," he said aloud. "Nothing to do but ride upand down the roads, stopping wherever he sees a pleasant inn or a prettyface, 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 theaide-de-camp galloped on and the sound of his horse's hoofs grew fainterand fainter down the road toward the village, the comet came sailingswiftly on overhead, deluging the fortifications with a blindingorange-yellow light. It could not have been more than a mile away whenBiedenkopf saw it. Instantly his trained eye recognized the fact thatthis strange round object shooting through the air was no wanderingcelestial body.
"_Ein Flieger!_" he cried hoarsely, staring at it in astonishment,knowing full well that no dirigible or aeroplane of German manufacturebore any resemblance to this extraordinary voyager of the air.
A hundred yards down the road his field telephone was attached to apoplar, and casting one furtive look at the Flying Ring he galloped tothe tree and rang up the corporal of the guard. But at the very instantthat his call was answered a series of terrific detonations shook theearth and set the wires roaring in the receiver, so that he could hearnothing. One--two--three--four of them, followed by a distant answeringboom in the west.
And then the whole sky seemed full of fire. He was hurled backward uponthe road and lay half-stunned, while the earth discharged itself intothe air with a roar like that of ten thousand shells exploding alltogether. The ground shook, groaned, grumbled, grated, and showers ofboards, earth, branches, rocks, vegetables, tiles, and all sorts ofunrecognizable and grotesque objects fell from the sky all about him. Itwas like a gigantic and never-ending mine, or series of mines, incontinuous explosion, a volcano pouring itself upward out of the bowelsof an incandescent earth. Above the earsplitting thunder of the eruptionhe heard shrill cries and raucous shoutings. Mounted men dashed past himdown the road, singly and in squadrons. A molten globe dropped throughthe branches of the poplar, and striking the hard surface of the road ata distance of fifty yards scattered itself like a huge ingot droppedfrom a blast furnace. Great clouds of dust descended and choked him. Awithering heat enveloped him....
It was noon next day when Karl Biedenkopf raised his head and lookedabout him. He thought first there had been a battle. But the sight thatmet his eyes bore no resemblance to a field of carnage. Over his head henoticed that the uppermost branches of the poplar had been seared as byfire. The road looked as if the countryside had been traversed by ahurricane. All sorts of debris filled the fields and everywhere thereseemed to be a thick deposit of blackened earth. Vaguely realizing thathe must report for duty, he crawled, in spite of his bursting head andaching limbs, on all fours down the road toward the village.
But he could not find the village. There was no village there; and soonhe came to what seemed to be the edge of a gigantic crater, where theearth had been uprooted and tossed aside as if by some huge convulsionof nature. Here and there masses of inflammable material smoked andflickered with red flames. His eyes sought the familiar outlines of theredoubts and fortifications, but found them not. And where the villagehad been there was a great cavern in the earth, and the deepest part ofthe cavern, or so it seemed to his half-blinded sight, was at about thepoint where the cottage had stood which his general had used as hisheadquarters, the spot where the night before that general had raisedhis glass of bubbling wine and toasted "Thanatos," the personificationof death, and called his officers to witness that this was the greatestmoment in the history of warfare, a moment that they would all rememberto their dying day.