The War Control in Paris, on the night of July the second, was
an impressive display of the paraphernalia of scientific military
organisation, as the first half of the twentieth century understood it.
To one human being at least the consulting commanders had the likeness
of world-wielding gods.

She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute, and
she had been engaged in relay with other similar women to take down
orders in duplicate and hand them over to the junior officers in
attendance, to be forwarded and filed. There had come a lull, and she
had been sent out from the dictating room to take the air upon the
terrace before the great hall and to eat such scanty refreshment as she
had brought with her until her services were required again.

From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view not only
of the wide sweep of the river below her, and all the eastward side of
Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to Saint Cloud, great blocks and masses
of black or pale darkness with pink and golden flashes of illumination
and endless interlacing bands of dotted lights under a still and
starless sky, but also the whole spacious interior of the great hall
with its slender pillars and gracious arching and clustering lamps was
visible to her. There, over a wilderness of tables, lay the huge maps,
done on so large a scale that one might fancy them small countries; the
messengers and attendants went and came perpetually, altering, moving
the little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of men, and the
great commander and his two consultants stood amidst all these things
and near where the fighting was nearest, scheming, directing. They had
but to breathe a word and presently away there, in the world of reality,
the punctual myriads moved. Men rose up and went forward and died. The