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.
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.
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