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 Moltke, his own scientific corps in a state of mutinous activity was
preparing a blow for Berlin. 'These old fools!' was the key in which the
scientific corps was thinking.