The officer saluted and hastened to his near-by plane. General Loomis ascended into his helicopter to confer with his staff to draw up in documentary form the surrender, and give the necessary orders relative to lowering of fire that afternoon. He also spoke to the President and to the crowd outside the White House, and then began nervously waiting the crucial moment. About twelve-thirty, however, a remarkable fact forced itself on his attention. Whereas the allied batteries continued to thunder away, the fire from the Orientals became irregular and sporadic. "Celebrating their victory beforehand," the French commander remarked bitterly to his chief. Loomis nodded. "And getting careless, too," another of the Staff added as he saw one of the enemy's detonator bombs disintegrate three or four hundred acres of a Mongolian base encampment fifty miles to the northwest and shoot it a monstrous blazing rocket twenty or thirty miles into the midday sky.
By twelve forty-five the enemy's barrage had fallen completely all along the line. Our battery nevertheless continued until the set time but elicited no answer. Exactly at one General Loomis with two aides stepped into his air-car. He was a picture of grief and despair. Three minutes late the party landed forty miles across the river before the headquarters and armored dining hall of the Oriental General Staff.
Loomis and his officers stepped out of their car and looked about. No one was in sight. Not even a sentry guarded the mess room door. The General paced back and forth a few minutes in indecision.
"Evidently they mean to make us feel our defeat," he said. "They apparently do not even think it further necessary to observe rudimentary diplomatic courtesy. Come on, boys, beggars can't be choosers, as the antique saying goes." He led the way to the dining hall through a window of which a light was seen shining.
"Perhaps if we find his xanthic highness after a good meal he will be inclined to be a bit more lenient," Loomis whispered with a forced laugh, trying to cheer his glum companions.
He opened the unguarded door of the hall. An instant later he reeled back horror-stricken. Instead of a feasting gathering of officers attached to the Mongolian Staff he saw before a feast of men contorted in grotesque shapes by some violent death. Many lay beside the table, some on it, their faces blotched with great, unsightly wheals, their chests bloated until they seemed about to burst. Only one poor wretch had any life left in him—he lay exhausted on the floor with great streams of frothy mucous pouring from his nose and throat.
A possibility dawned in Loomis' mind. He dashed away to search the other mess tents, shouting to his aides to follow suit. It was as he guessed: they had landed in a camp of dead and dying; stricken by some mysterious power. Hope suddenly surged back into his soul. He felt dizzy and faint. Could a similar fate have caused the unaccountable silence of the enemy's cannonade? Even as the thought came to him, he knew it must be so. His marvelous old friend, Dr. Rutledge, had risen to the need of the world and crushed the yellow menace.
Such, truly, had been the case. In a single hour, through the agency of a harmless food, the subtle scientist had crushed a nation. The principle involved had been discovered nearly two centuries before, when it was well-known that if an animal were injected with a small quantity of a protein foreign to his body, a subsequent dose a hundred million times as weak would cause its immediate and violent death. Even the quantity that might be flying in the atmosphere and become dissolved in the fluids of the nose or eyes would act as the most virulent of known poisons. Through the ages, however, the human race had more or less come in contact with all the proteins in their world and hence rarely became highly sensitized to any protein occurring in nature. The terrible toxicity of a protein which had never before occurred in nature and to whose power mankind had never been even partially desensitized had up to the time of Dr. Rutledge only entered the minds of a few scientists. His strategy was the working out of a new maxim: Nature is terrible, but man makes it more so.