The violet melted into an inky blue; silence, vast, heavy, prevailed—silence where the millions lay on their arms. Even the guns in the distance had ceased their echoing rumble. He felt the power of her presence and of the moment. It was she who had given the information that had enabled him to confound the scepticism of the staff by the easy taking of Bordir. Through her he might repeat Bordir in a larger way at Engadir, proving his theories of frontal attack. His courage of initiative would shine out against the background of his staff's scepticism as a light to the world's imagination. The first great man in forty years; the genius of the new system of tactics to meet the demands of a new age as Napoleon had met those of his, Grant of his, and Von Moltke of his! Engadir taken, and his place on Valhalla would be secure.
The very silence with its taut expectancy was of his planning. Alone with her he waited for the thunders of his planning that were to break it. The sky merged into the shadows of the landscape that spread and thickened into blackness. Out of the drawn curtains of night broke an ugly flash and farther up the slope spread the explosive circle of light of a bursting shell.
"The signal!" he exclaimed.
Right and left the blasts spread along the Gray lines and right and left, on the instant, the Browns sent their blasts in reply. Countless tongues of flame seemed to burst from countless craters, and the range to rock in a torment of crashes. In the intervening space between the ugly, savage gusts from the Gray gun mouths, which sent their shells from the midst of exploding Brown shells, swept the beams of the Brown search-lights, their rays lost like sunlight in the vortex of an open furnace door.
"Splendid! splendid!" exclaimed Westerling, in a sweep of emotion at the sight that had been born of his command. "Five thousand guns on our side alone! The world has never seen the equal of this!"
"Five thousand guns!" Marta was thinking. What wouldn't their cost have bought in books, in gardens, and in playgrounds! Every shot the price of a year's schooling for a child!
"You see, we are pounding them along the whole frontier quite impartially, so they shall not know where we are going to press home the attack!" he continued.
"But they do know! I've told them!" shot the burning arrow of mockery through Marta's brain.
"Their search-lights are watching for the infantry—and we shall press the infantry forward, too," he added; "everywhere we make a show of fight!"
Then it occurred vividly to her, as a sudden discovery in the midst of the blinding display, that this was not a kind of chaos like that of the beginning of the world, not nature's own elemental debauch, but men firing guns and men waiting for the charge under that spray of death-dealing missiles.