Barnet
says, 'We talked of Them. THEY are sending us up into Luxembourg. THEY
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.
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