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Young Scott, stooping in order to keep his head covered well, started down the trench. The artillery fire was at its height. The waves of air followed one another with great violence, and the fumes of picric acid and of other acids that he did not know became very strong. But he scarcely noticed it.
We selected one whose head looked like a parcel of blood-sodden bandages. We carried him into the theatre and laid him on to the table. The bandages were unwound. The man's hair was matted and caked with gore. There were three deep gashes in the skull. The head was washed and shaved and then painted with picric acid.
There was only one drop of sweet in their cup of bitter. Harry, poking about among the ruins of the deserted camp, had discovered several cans of gasoline that the raiders had overlooked. They formed sufficient fuel with the picric cakes that Frank still had a supply of, to drive the big aeroplane for several hundred miles if the wind conditions were favorable.
Armies could be annihilated, granite and steel would be as tinder before a bomb or torpedo of picric acid dropped from the clouds. On the 10th of August, a little after five o'clock, Jack left Lorraine on the terrace at Morteyn to try once more to see the marquis for Lorraine's sake.
To make himself still more agreeable, he turned back the rags on which he had slept, and brought to the light a round, black object, like a small cannon-ball, which he informed me was the picric bomb that was to scatter destruction among my English friends, for whom he expressed the greatest possible loathing and contempt.
Picric acid is a crystalline bitter product extracted from coal-tar, and forming, in combination with potash, a yellow salt known as picrate of potash. The explosive power of this substance is inferior to that of gun-cotton or of dynamite, but far greater than that of ordinary gunpowder; one grain of picric powder producing an effect equal to that of thirteen grains of common powder.
Herr Albert assisted and advised the Military Attaché in making these contracts, arranged the financing of the enterprise later on, and worked at its development after Herr von Papen's departure. Still more successful were the efforts to remove from the market the surplus benzol, which is the raw product for the production of picric acid.
Indigo is such a dye, and so are Magenta, Aniline Black, Aniline Violet, picric acid, Ultramarine Blue, and so on. Ultramarine is not, it is true, confined to blue; you can get Ultramarine Green, and even rose-coloured Ultramarine; but still, in the hands of the dyer, each shade remains as it came from the colour-maker, and so Ultramarine is a monogenetic colour.
There is no use in indulging in heroics. They are not wanted. But an incendiary article is part and parcel of the murderous act. You may put picric acid in the ink and pen, just as much as in any steel bomb. I have one or two extracts here with which I will not trouble you.
"The colour of the face is easily altered," said Kennedy. "A little picric acid will do that. The ingenious rogue Sarcey in Paris eluded the police very successfully until Dr. Charcot exposed him and showed how he changed the arch of his eyebrows and the wrinkles of his face. Much is possible to-day that would make Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau look clumsy and antiquated."
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