Prelude For War

oldest memory, and yet always new; wherever he went and whatever other adventures he found, she was the one unending and exqui­site adventure.

He touched the spun gold of her hair.

'All right,' he said. 'You can have the saxophones.'

And that was when he switched on the radio.

The little dial on the dashboard glowed alight out of the darkness, and for a few seconds there was silence while the set warmed up. And then, with an eerie suddenness, there were no saxophones, but a loud brassy voice speaking in French. The set picked it out of the air in the middle of a sentence, flung it gratingly at them as it rose in a snarling crescendo.

'. . . to crush them like vermin, to destroy them like rats who would carry their plague germs through our fair land! The blood of a million Frenchmen, dead on the fields of glory, cries out to you to show yourselves worthy of their sacrifice. Rise up and arm yourselves against this peril that threatens you from within; stamp out these cowardly paci­fists, these skulking traitors, these godless anarchists, these alien Jews who are betraying our country for a handful of gold. . . . Sons of France, I call you to arms. Fling your­selves into the fight with a song on your lips and glory in your hearts, for only in the blood and fire of battle will our nation be purified and find once more her true soul!'

The brassy voice stopped speaking, and there was an instant's stillness. And then, like a thunderclap, another sound burst in—a hoarse, frenzied howl, shrill and hideous as the clamour of ten thousand hungry wolves maddened by the smell of blood, an inarticulate animal roar that scarcely seemed as if it could have come from human throats. Wild, savage, throbbing with a horrible blood lust, it fouled the peaceful night with visions of flame and car­nage, of mad mindless mobs, of torture and the crash of guns, of shattered broken buildings and the shattered broken bodies of men and women and children. For a full minute it swelled and pulsed on their ears. And then came the music.

It was not saxophones. It was brass and drums. Brass like the voice that had been speaking, blasting its brazen rhythm of ecstatic sacrifice in rasping fanfares that lashed clean through the filmy gloss of civilization to clog the blood with intolerable tension. Drums thudding the mad­dening pulse beats of a modern but more potent voodoo, hammering their insensate strum into the brains until the mind was stunned and battered with their merciless insist­ence. Brass shouting and shrieking its melodic echo of the clash of steel and the scream of human torment. Drums pattering their glib mutter of the rattle of firearms and the rumble of rolling iron. Brass blaring its hypnotic hymn of heroic death. Drums thumping like giant hearts. Brass and drums. Brass and drums. Brass and drums . . .

'Turn it off,' said Patricia sharply, abruptly. 'Stop it, Simon. It's horrible!'

He could feel her shiver.

'No,' he said. 'Listen.'

He was tense himself, his nerves drawn to threads of quivering steel. The music had done that to him. The music went on, drowning out the incoherent voices until there were no more voices but only the crystallized blare and beat that was one voice for all. Brass and drums. And now into it, in rime with it, growing with it, swelling above it, came a new sound—the unmistakable monotonous crunch of booted feet. Left, right, left, right, left. The terrible jug­gernaut tramp of masses of marching men. Legs swinging like synchronized machinery. Heels falling together steadily, heavily, irresistibly, like leaden pile drivers pounding the bruised earth. . . .

The Saint was in one of his queer moments of vision. He went on speaking, his voice curiously low against the background clamour of brass and drums and marching feet:

'Yes, it's horrible; but you ought to listen. We ought to remember what hangs over our peace. . . . I've heard just the same thing before—one night when I was fiddling with the radio and I caught some Nazi anniversary jamboree in Nuremberg. . . . This is