Ever since the King, returning from the baths of Ems, had been met at
the railway-station by his Under-Secretary of State bearing France's
declaration of war,--a huge, orderly crowd, compact of all classes
and callings, had ceaselessly rolled through the streets of Berlin,
chanting with its thousands of sturdy lungs "_Heil dir im
Siegerkranz_" and the "_Wacht am Rhein_" until its patriotic fervor
reached a state of ebullition only to be relieved by volleys of
cheers.
Jammed in the solid mass of bodies blackening the Unter den Linden
and packing the Opera-Platz to suffocation,--until the bronze
equestrian statue of the Great Friedrich, opposing the eastern
courtyard gateway of the small stuccoed Palace, reared above a
tossing sea of heads,--P. C. Breagh tasted the raptures of
emancipation from the mill-round, and drank in news at every pore.
For this was life in earnest.... With the red-hot cigar-end of a
corpulent merchant burning the back of his neck, and the crook of a
market woman's blue-cotton umbrella imperiling his left eye; while
the sword-hilt of a gigantic Sergeant of Uhlans insinuated itself
between his third and fourth ribs on the right side, and the huge
flaxen chignon of a servant-girl, armed with a capacious
market-basket crammed with meat, fish, and vegetables for family
consumption, bobbed itself into his mouth whenever he opened that
feature to cheer, or gasp for air, heavily burdened with the fumes of
beer, schnaps, herring-salad, garlic, sauerkraut, and perspiring
humanity, he was happier than ever he had been before.
The King, it was said, was holding a council with his Ministers and
Generals in his study on the ground-floor of his Palace looking on
the Opera-Platz. Presently His Majesty might be expected to come out.
The tall, elderly, white-whiskered officer in the undress uniform of
the Prussian foot-guards--a blue tunic with red facings, silver
buttons and epaulettes--had already appeared upon the balcony of a
window overlooking the Linden, and touched his spiked helmet in
response to the frenzied acclamations of his scarlet, perspiring
subjects, whose staring eyes and open mouths a Berlin dust-storm was
filling with peppery grit.
Presently the King had moved back into the room behind him, and
returned with the Queen, a tall, thin, elegant lady in half-mourning,
who was weeping; people said, because she hated the thought of war,
and had besought her husband, on her knees, to truckle to the
Napoleon at Paris, and thus avert hostilities.
When the royal couple had retired amid plaudits of a somewhat less
enthusiastic kind, the people had demanded the Crown Prince; and the
King had stepped out yet again with his hand on the shoulder of the
heir-apparent, a tall and stalwart man of thirty-nine, with a clear
red-and-white complexion, setting off his well-cut features, kindly
blue eyes, and flowing beard of yellow-brown.
_Unser Fritz!_--his manly good looks and the Order of Merit shining
on his general's uniform had provoked fresh outbursts of patriotic
enthusiasm, in which the gray-powdered foliage of the overrated
linden-trees, limply resting during a sudden lull of the dust-storm,
had been wildly agitated, and the very street-lamps had rocked.
But when the King, turning to his heir, gave him his hand,--when the
son, reverently bending, raised it to his lips, and the father with
manifest emotion embraced him,--there had fallen a silence of
sympathetic emotion.... Then the great martial figure had reared
erect again and, stepping to the front of the balcony, had shouted to
the people:
"_Krieg! Mobil!_"
"Mobilization!... War!..."
All the shouting that had gone before was no more than the squealing
of a kindergarten compared with the mighty roar that greeted these
two pregnant words! The scorching, dusty blue sky-dome, now tinged
with sandy-pink sunset toward the Brandenburg Gate, seemed to quiver
with the upward rush of it. And--not by accident--from the forest of
flagstaffs mounted on the Palace, the Opera House, and the buildings
contingent,--as down the whole length of the Linden to the
Ministerial palaces of the Wilhelm Strasse,--the black-and-white Flag
of Prussia and the Hohenzollern banner of white with the black eagle
and the cross of the old Teuton Order, broke and fluttered on the
sandy breeze.
The National Anthem broke out once more, and the war-song, "_Ich bin
ein Preusse_." The King retired on his son's arm manifestly overcome
with weariness. Still the vast crowd of heated faces, set with
shining eyes, and holed with roaring mouths, persistently turned
toward those ground-floor windows of the Palace. _Something more
yet!_ asked all the gaping mouths and staring eyes.
But the blinds of the monarch's study were pulled down, unmistakably
signifying that all was over for the present.... The central valves
of the great gilded Palace gates were now shut, leaving open only the
smaller carriage-way, through which mounted _aides_ and orderly
officers conveying dispatches presently began to stream. The
carriages of Ministers and other State officials followed these,
while lesser personages, emerging from the exit left for pedestrians,
began to hail cab-drivers from the stand of hackneys on the Linden
side of the Opera House. Swearing, the frustrated Jehus of these
vehicles laid about them with their whips in the endeavor to force
their animals through the solid crowd....
A man went down under the hoofs of a wretched Rosinante. There were
cries for "Police!" and spiked helmets appeared in the crowd. It
surged and swayed.... The guardians of the law had drawn their
cutlasses and were beating their fellow-children of the Fatherland
upon their heads with the flat of these weapons, in the attempt to
effect a junction between the cabs and those who wished to hire them.
Thus the pressure on the flanks, ribs and breast-bone of P. C. Breagh
became suffocating. Lifted from his feet, he was carried backward
and forward by rushes, growing less certain of his own identity as
the roaring in his ears became louder. Just as his eyelids dropped
and he passed out of his own knowledge, a powerful hand caught him by
the coat-collar, and a solid rampart of human flesh interposed
between his lately-drifting body and the waves of the human sea that
raged beyond.
Gulping, P. C. Breagh became aware that he was spread-eagled against
the railings of the Palace courtyard facing the Unter den Linden, and
that a big man in a loose black waterproof rain-cloak and
broad-leaved black felt hat was holding to a railing on each side of
him and warding off the rushes.
"Th-thanks! I'm tremendously obliged!..." he was beginning, when the
swish of the cutlasses and the shrieking of the cutlassed drowned his
voice. Yet another voice, masculine, resonant, and imperious,
dominated all others; it cried:
"The King commands the police to sheath their swords!"
And upon the instant lull in the tumult that followed came another
order:
"His Majesty has work to do for the Fatherland. Let the people
disperse quietly to their homes!"
And the crowd, pacified and quieted, answered, "We will so!" in a
crashing volley of Teutonic gutturals, and began to split up and move
away in sections, singing "_Heil dir im Siegerkranz_" in sonorous
unison. When through the Palace gates came a small and shabby
brougham drawn by a venerable bay, and driven by an elderly coachman
in gray-and-black livery, the sight of whose military cockade evoked
another whirlwind of enthusiasm....
"Moltke! It is our Moltke!" men shouted to one another, and the old
General, who sat alone in the carriage, the lean, stooping,
septuagenarian in the spiked helmet, whose thin, ascetic face was
rosy with suppressed excitement and whose pale blue eyes twinkled
good-humoredly between their narrow lids at the seething ocean of
humanity in which the shabby brougham labored, saluted in
acknowledgment of the cheers.
"Moltke! Long live our Moltke! But where has Otto got to!" hiccuped
an alcoholic seaman, clutching the ledge of the brougham window. He
continued in the midst of a silence born of consternation: "What has
become of the Big Pomeranian? We would have--hic!--carried him home
shoulder-high for this week's--hic!--work he has done!"
Zealous hands dragged the presumptuous speaker back, as the venerable
expert in war doffed his spiked helmet, and said, popping his
auburn-wigged head out of the brougham window:
"Where Count Bismarck is needed there he will be, depend on it! Now,
children, let me get back to my maps!"
"Tell us first how things are going in France yonder?" bellowed
another Berliner, and the great Field-Marshal answered, pointing the
jest with his keenest twinkle:
"You want to know how things are going there? Well, the wheat has
suffered from the drought, but acorns and potatoes promise to be
plentiful, and pumpkins will be big this year!"
And the crowd, splitting with laughter, made way for the brougham of
the Chief of the General Staff, and the joke was sown broadcast over
Germany before the end of half an hour. For were not Moltke's acorns
the oblong, round-ended bullets of the Prussian needle-gun, as his
potatoes were the shrapnel shell cast by the six-pounder steel
breech-loaders designed by Krupp for the Prussian field-artillery,
and the big pumpkins the seventeen-pound projectiles fired by the
siege-guns of nine centimeters' bore? ...
The massive ribs that had acted as buffers between P. C. Breagh and
the battering onslaughts of the crowd shook with laughter as the
brougham moved on through a lane that continuously opened in the mass
of bodies and closed when it had passed.... Then their owner settled
the wide-leaved felt hat more firmly on his head, and said in
well-bred, fluent English, turning his heavily-jowled face and
powerful, fiery-blue eyes on P. C. Breagh, who was thanking him in
his best German for his timely assistance:
"Do not thank me so effusively. I have a habit of sometimes saving a
man's life! Yours happened to be in peril; there is no need to say
more!"
The clear incisive tones had an inflection that was almost
contemptuous, yet a smile, curving the heavy mustache, showed the
small and well-preserved teeth it shadowed, as he added in his
admirable English, fastening a button of the thin black waterproof
cloak which had been disarranged in the recent struggle sufficiently
to show that it covered some sort of military uniform:
"Save this,--that I happen to possess a son about your age, and
should not care to lose him!"
And with this he was gone, leaving P. C. Breagh breathless with the
greatness of the adventure that had befallen him. For the owner of
the bulldog face with the fierce blue eyes blazing over their heavy
orbital pouches, was the unpopular Minister who had been booed by the
Ultramontane and Socialist students three years before, as the Berlin
express-train passed through the station of Schwärz-Brettingen--the
all-powerful Chancellor, who was meant when diplomats and Press
leader-writers referred to "Prussia."
What did he on foot in those packed, roaring thoroughfares, where the
assassin's dagger or revolver might play its part so safely?
Perhaps, like the Third Napoleon, whose peacock bubble of Empire
might now have reached the point of bursting, Count Bismarck believed
in his fortunate star....
Ah! what was that round bright object lying on the pavement? P. C.
Breagh, still dazed with the magnitude of the thing that had befallen
him, stooped and picked, it up.
It was a medal of silver, with the Prussian Eagle enameled in red
upon the obverse, and a name which left no doubt as to the identity
of P. C. Breagh's rescuer. Upon, the reverse was the inscription:
"_Fur Rettung aus Gefahr_"--"For Saving From Danger." With the date
of the 24th June, 1842....
No doubt the Chancellor prized this, the decoration earned at
twenty-four for saving his orderly-groom and another private from
drowning, when serving as _Landwehr_ cavalry officer with the
Stargaard Regiment of Hussars. Well, he should have it back,--but
into no hands but his would P. C. Breagh surrender it,--P. C. Breagh,
who had been cast out with mockery from the editorial offices of one
daily and two evening newspapers, when he had offered--at a rate of
astounding cheapness,--to supply their columns with material drawn
from the experiences of one who had never previously enjoyed an
opportunity of seeing the thing called War.
One Editor had dealt with him drastically, pitching his card into the
waste-paper basket, and saying, "No! Get out with you!" A second
had whistled up a tube and called down a sub-editor, and said to him,
"Look at this!" The third had preached a brief but pithy sermon on
presumption and cocksureness, winding up with the intimation that if
P. C. Breagh ever found himself at the seat of war and in possession
of any experiences worth recording, he might submit them for
consideration if he chose.
These men would never know it, but they were profoundly humiliated.
At least one of them had lost a half-column, striking the note of
personal adventure to the clink of shekels of fine gold. As for Mr.
Knewbit ... P. C. Breagh could almost hear him chuckling--had only to
shut his eyes to see the poker, sketching out headings on the Coram
Street kitchen wall:
"ADVENTURE OF YOUNG ENGLISHMAN.