Above the fort slim tentacles of wireless apparatus spread a tracery against the sky, and a signal tower swam high against the blue. From it sparkled blinding flashes in code. Officers up there were talking business to the Barrier Forts, and the heliographs along the Vosges brilliantly discussed the new business deal with other forts far to the south and east, relaying reports, rumors, and quotations as far as Paris, where the directors’ meeting was being held; and even as far as London, where stockholders and directors were gathered to add up profit and loss, and balance policy against ethics, and reconcile both with necessity.
In London a King, a Prime Minister, and a First Lord of the Admiralty were listening to a Sirdar who was laying down the law by wireless to a President and his Premier.
In St. Petersburg an Emperor was whispering to a priest while the priest consulted the stars. Signs being favorable, they changed the city’s name to Petrograd, which imperial inspiration dealt a violent slap on the Kaiser’s wrist.
Led westward by a Grand Duke, marching Russia bent several million reverent heads, awed by this stroke of autocratic genius, and somebody named a brand of caviar after the Czar of all the Russias. Which holy tribute, however, built no strategic railroads in the West.
Meanwhile, the spinning world swung on around its orbit; tides rose and ebbed; the twin sentinels of the skies relieved each other as usual, and a few billion stars waited patiently for eternity.
Ausone, lying in the sun, was waiting, too, amid its still trees and ripening fields.
In the summer world around, no hint of impending change disturbed the calm serenity of that August afternoon—no sense of waiting, no prophecy of gathering storms. But in men’s hearts reigned the breathless stillness which heralds tempests.
Silently as a kestrel’s shadow gliding over the grass, an ominous shade sped over sunny France, darkening the light in millions of smiling eyes, subduing speech, stilling all pulses, cautioning a nation’s ardent heart and conjuring its ears to listen and its lips to silence.
And, as France sat silent, listening, hand lightly resting on her hilt, came the far cry from beyond the Vosges—the voices of her lost children.