Its profound effect was not on the German army at all, but on the French. That was the tragedy.

And it was the reason for Roland de Cygne’s secret mission that day. A terrible mission he had never dreamed in his life that he would ever have to perform.

For unbeknownst to her allies and her enemies, right across the Western Front, the brave army of France had mutinied.

If Roland de Cygne was the guardian of a secret that June day, Marc Blanchard was guarding three. Two he had possessed since a week ago. They had caused him great agony of mind. This evening, he was going to talk to his Aunt Éloïse before making the decision about what to do.

The third he had learned that morning.

The meeting was so secret that it had not been held in any government office, but in a private apartment in an undistinguished street north of the boulevard des Batignolles. There were several government men, an important building contractor, an Italian lighting engineer named Jacopozzi, and several others. He wondered why they had invited him. Perhaps because, these days, they thought of him as both a designer and a businessman. Whatever the reason, he was flattered that they trusted him.

They gathered in the dining room of the apartment. It was a representative of the prime minister himself who opened the meeting.

“Messieurs, we are here to consider a most important project, and I must ask you never to divulge what we are going to discuss.

“Today we believe that Paris may face a new and terrible threat. It is a threat that London has already faced, and it is a threat that will only grow with time. I am speaking, naturally, of aerial bombing.” He paused for effect. “In the three years since this war began, many aspects of the military effort have altered; but the transformation of war in the air has been astounding. When we began, there were a few planes, mostly for reconnaissance, and if bombs were used, they were usually grenades or adapted shells dropped by hand by the pilots or copilots of those small open planes.

“Now, however, the German Gotha bombers are large, they carry a payload of over two thousand pounds, and they can fly at over twenty thousand feet where it is hard, if not impossible, for our fighters to attack them.

“I need not tell anyone here the supreme importance of Paris—its history, its art and its culture, for France and for the world. Paris must be protected. But we are not so far from the German lines. Fleets of Gotha bombers, making night raids, night after night, could do appalling damage—for let us remember that we are speaking not only of the explosions, but of the fires that may follow them. We can fire up into the sky. Our gallant fighters can go up to tackle the bombers, but all the evidence so far suggests that large bombing raids would be hard to stop. And so, if we cannot stop them, we must deceive them.”