"I don't know that your baseball metaphor is exactly right, Philip, but your heart is certainly in the proper place. When do we get to France?"
"Don't talk about that yet, because it's impossible to approximate. This smooth track will not go on forever. It's lasted longer than usual already. Then, we'll have to eat, later on. There's food here in a tiny locker that you can't see, but it may be better for us to drop down to the earth when we eat. Besides, while we're sailing through the sky, I'd like to observe as much as I can of this German mobilization and take the news of it to France. That, of course, leaves you out of consideration, John, but I'm bound to do it."
"Don't regard me. I've no right to ask anything of you. I'm a guest or a prisoner, and in either capacity it behooves me to take what comes to me."
"But I got you into it, and so I feel obligations, but, heavy as they are, they're not heavy enough to keep me from seeing what I can see. I told you that we were going toward France, but we're not taking the direct course. I mean to fly over the ancient city of Nuremburg, and then over Frankfort-on-the-Main. Look out, now, John, we're going to drop fast!"
The machine descended rapidly in a series of wide spirals, until it was within seven or eight hundred feet of the earth.
"Look down now," said Lannes, "and without the glasses you can see a town."
But he had taken the glasses himself, and while he held one hand on the steering rudder he made a long and attentive examination of the place, and of low works about it, which he knew contained emplacements for cannon.
"It's a fortified town and a center for mobilization," he said. "All day long the recruits have been pouring in here, responding to the call. They receive their uniforms, arms and ammunition at that big barracks on the hill, and tomorrow they take the trains to join the giant army which will be hurled on my France."
John heard a sigh. Lannes was afraid after all that the mighty German war machine, the like of which the world had never seen before would crush everything.
"It will be hard to stop that army," he could not keep from saying.