Does any man of power know whither the tendencies of his time are
leading him, or the people whom he leads whither they are being led? Had
any one of these four heroes of the Grays in their heavy gilt frames
divined what kind of a to-morrow his day was preparing? All knew the
pass of La Tir well, and if all had not won decisive battles they would
have been hung in the outer office or even in the corridors, where a
line of half-forgotten or forgotten generals crooked down the stairways
into the oblivion of the basement. That unfortunate one whom the first
Galland had driven through the pass was quite obscured in darkness. He
would soon be crowded out to an antique shop for sale as an example of
the portrait art of his period.
The privileged quartet on that Valhalla of victories, the walls of the
chief of staff's room, personified the military inheritance of a great
nation; their names shone in luminous letters out of the thickening
shadows of the past, where those of lesser men grew dimmer as their
generations receded into history. He in the steel corselet, with high
cheek-bones, ferret, cold eyes, and high, thin nose, its nostrils drawn
back in an aristocratic sniff--camps were evil-smelling in those
days--his casquette resting on his arm, was the progenitor of him with
the Louis XIV. curls; he of the early nineteenth century, with a face
like Marshal Ney's, was the progenitor of him with the mustache and
imperial of the sixties.
It was whispered that the aristocratic sniff had taken to fierce,
no-quarter campaigns in the bitterness of a broken heart. Did the
Grays, then, really owe two of their fairest provinces to the lady who
had jilted him? Had they to thank the clever wife of him of the Louis
XIV. curls, whose intrigues won for her husband command of the army, for
another province? It was whispered, too, that the military glory of him
of the Marshal Ney physiognomy was due to the good fortune of a senile
field-marshal for an opponent. But no matter. These gentlemen had seen
the enemy fly. They had won. Therefore, they were the supermen of sagas
who incarnate a people's valor.
The Browns gratified their own sense of superiority, in turn, by
admiration of the supermen who had vanquished the Gray generals
consigned to the oblivion of the basement. In their staff building, the
first Galland occupied a prominent position in the main hall; while in
the days of Marta's old baron heroes did not have their portraits
painted for want of painters, and the present nations had consisted only
of warring baronies and principalities.
They must have been rather lonely, these immortals in the Gray Valhalla,
as His Excellency the chief of staff was seldom in his office. His
Excellency had years, rank, prestige. The breast of his uniform sagged
with the weight of his decorations. He appeared for the army at great
functions, his picture was in the shop-windows. Hedworth Westerling, the
new vice-chief of staff, was content with this arrangement. His years
would not permit him the supreme honor. This was for a figurehead, while
he had the power.
His appointment to the staff ten years ago had given him the fields he
wanted, the capital itself, for the play of his abilities. His vital
energy, his impressive personality, his gift for courting the influences
that counted, whether man's or woman's, his astute readiness in stooping
to some measures that were in keeping with the times but not with army
precedent, had won for him the goal of his ambition. He had passed over
the heads of older men, whom many thought his betters, rather
ruthlessly. Those who would serve loyally he drew around him; those who
were bitter he crowded out of his way.
The immortals would have been still more lonely, or at least confused,
in the adjoining room occupied by Westerling. There the walls were hung
with the silhouettes of infantrymen, such as you see at manoeuvres, in
different positions of firing, crouching in shallow trenches, standing
in deep trenches, or lying flat on the stomach on level earth. Another
silhouette, that of an infantryman running, was peppered with white
points in arms and legs and parts of the body that were not vital, to
show in how many places a man may be hit with a small-calibre bullet and
still survive.
The immortals had small armies. Even the mustache and imperial had only
three hundred thousand in the great battle of the last war. In this day
of universal European conscription, if Westerling were to win it would
be with five millions--five hundred thousand more than when he faced a
young Brown officer over the wreck of an aeroplane--including the
reserves; each man running, firing, crouching, as was the figure on the
wall, and trying to give more of the white points that peppered the
silhouette than he received.
Now Turcas, the assistant vice-chief of staff, and Bouchard, chief of
the division of intelligence, standing on either side of Westerling's
desk, awaited his decisions on certain matters which they had brought to
his attention. Both were older than Westerling, Turcas by ten and
Bouchard by fifteen years.
Turcas had been strongly urged in inner army circles for the place that
Westerling had won, but his manner and his inability to court influence
were against him A lath of a man and stiff as a lath, pale, with thin,
tightly-drawn lips, quiet, steel-gray eyes, a tracery of blue veins
showing on his full temples, he suggested the ascetic no less than the
soldier, while his incisive brevity of speech, flavored now and then
with pungent humor, without any inflection in his dry voice, was in
keeping with his appearance. He arrived with the clerks in the morning
and frequently remained after they were gone. His life was an affair of
calculated units of time; his habits of diet and exercise all regulated
for the end of service. His subordinates, whose respect he held by the
power of his intellect, said that his brain never tired and he had not
enough body to tire. He was one of the wheels of the great army machine
and loved the work for its own sake too well to be embittered at being
overshadowed by a younger man. As a master of detail Westerling regarded
him as an invaluable assistant, with certain limitations, which were
those of the pigeonhole and the treadmill.
As for Bouchard, nature had meant him to be a wheel-horse. He had never
had any hope of being chief of staff. Hawk-eyed, with a great beak nose
and iron-gray hair, intensely and solemnly serious, lacking a sense of
humor, he would have looked at home with his big, bony hands gripping a
broadsword hilt and his lank body clothed in chain armor. He had a
mastiff's devotion to its master for his chief.
"Since Lanstron became chief of intelligence of the Browns information
seems to have stopped," said Westerling, but not complainingly. He
appreciated Bouchard's loyalty.
"Yes, they say he even burns his laundry bills, he is so careful,"
Bouchard replied.
"But that we ought to know," Westerling proceeded, referring very
insistently to a secret of the Browns which had baffled Bouchard. "Try a
woman," he went on with that terse, hard directness which reflected one
of his sides. "There is nobody like a woman for that sort of thing.
Spend enough to get the right woman."
Turcas and Bouchard exchanged a glance, which rose suggestively from the
top of the head of the seated vice-chief of staff. Turcas smiled
slightly, while Bouchard was graven as usual.
"You could hardly reach Lanstron though you spent a queen's ransom,"
said Bouchard in his literal fashion.
"I should say not!" Westerling exclaimed. "No doubt about Lanstron's
being all there! I saw him ten years ago after his first aeroplane
flight under conditions that proved it. However, he must have
susceptible subordinates."
"We'll set all the machinery we have to work to find one, sir," Bouchard
replied.
"Another thing, we may dismiss any idea that they are concealing either
artillery or dirigibles or planes that we do not know of," continued
Westerling. "That is a figment of our apprehensions. The fact that we
find no truth in the rumors proves that there is none. Such things are
too important to be concealed by one army from another."
"Lanstron certainly cannot carry them in his pockets," remarked Turcas.
"Still, we must be sure," he added thoughtfully, more to himself than to
Westerling, who had already turned his attention to a document which
Turcas had laid on the desk.
"A recommendation by the surgeon-in-chief," said Turcas, "for a new
method of prompt segregation of ghastly cases among the wounded. I have
put it in the form of an order. If reserves coming into action see men
badly lacerated by shell fire it is bound to make them self-conscious
and affect morale."
"Yes," Westerling agreed. "If moving pictures of the horrors of Port
Arthur were to be shown in our barracks before a war, it would hardly
encourage martial enthusiasm. I shall look this over and then have it
issued. It will not be necessary to wait on action of the staff in
council."
Turcas and Bouchard exchanged another glance. They had fresh evidence of
Westerling's tendency to concentrate authority in himself.
"The 128th Regiment has been ordered to South La Tir, but no order yet
given for the 132d, whose place it takes," Turcas went on.
"Let it remain for the present!" Westerling replied.
After they had withdrawn, the look that passed between Turcas and
Bouchard was a pointed question. The 132d to remain at South La Tir! Was
there something more than "newspaper talk" in this latest diplomatic
crisis between the Grays and the Browns? Westerling alone was in the
confidence of the premier of late. Any exchange of ideas between the two
subordinates would be fruitless surmise and against the very instinct of
staff secrecy, where every man knew only his work and asked about no one
else's.
Westerling ran through the papers that Turcas had prepared for him. If
Turcas had written the order for the wounded, Westerling knew that it
was properly done. Having cleared his desk into the hands of his
executive clerk, he looked at the clock. It had barely turned four. He
picked up the final staff report of observations on the late Balkan
campaign, just printed in book form, glanced at it and laid it aside.
Already he knew the few lessons afforded by this war "done on the
cheap," with limited equipment and over bad roads. No dirigibles had
been used and few planes. It was no criterion, except in the effect of
the fire of the new pattern guns, for the conflict of vast masses of
highly trained men against vast masses of highly trained men, with rapid
transportation over good roads, complete equipment, thorough
organization, backed by generous resources, in the cataclysm of two
great European powers.
Rather idly, now, he drew a pad toward him and, taking up a pencil, made
the figures seventeen and twenty-seven. Then he made the figures
thirty-two and forty-two. He blackened them with repeated tracings as he
mused. This done, he put seventeen under twenty-seven and thirty-two
under forty-two. He made the subtraction and studied the two tens.
A swing door opened softly and his executive clerk reappeared with a
soft tread, unheard by Westerling engaged in mechanically blackening the
tens. The clerk, pausing as he waited for a signal of recognition,
observed the process wonderingly. To be absently making figures on a pad
was not characteristic of the vice-chief of staff. When he was absorbed
his habit was to tap the desk edge with the blunt end of his pencil.
"Some papers for your signature, sir," said the clerk as he slipped them
on the blotter in front of Westerling. "And the 132d--no order about
that, sir?" he asked.
"None. It remains!" Westerling replied.
The clerk went out impressed. His chief taking to sums of subtraction
and totally preoccupied! The 132d to remain! He, too, had a
question-mark in his secret mind.
Westerling proceeded with his mathematics. Having heavily shaded the
tens, he essayed a sum in division. He found that ten went into seventy
just seven times.
"One-seventh the allotted span of life!" he mused. "Take off fifteen
years for youth and fifteen after fifty-five--nobody counts after that,
though I mean to--and you have ten into forty, which is one fourth. That
is a good deal. But it's more to a woman than to a man--yes, a lot more
to a woman than to a man!"
The clerk was right in thinking Westerling preoccupied; but it was not
with the international crisis. He had dismissed that for the present
from his thoughts by sending the 128th Regiment to South La Tir. He
might move some other regiments in the morning if advices from the
premier warranted. At all events, the army was ready, always ready for
any emergency. He was used to international crises. Probably a dozen had
occurred in the ten years since he had spoken his adieu to a young girl
at a garden-gate. Over his coffee the name of Miss Marta Galland, in a
list of arrivals at a hotel, had caught his eye in the morning paper. A
note to her had brought an answer, saying that her time was limited,
but she would be glad to have him call at five that afternoon.
Rather impatiently he watched the slow minute-hand on the clock. He had
risen from his desk at four-thirty, when his personal aide, a handsome,
boyish, rosy-cheeked young officer, who seemed to be moulded into his
uniform, appeared.
"Your car is waiting, sir," he said. His military correctness could not
hide the admiration and devotion in his eyes. He thought himself the
most fortunate lieutenant in the army. To him Westerling was, indeed,
great. Westerling realized this.
"This is a personal call," Westerling explained; "so you are at liberty
to make one yourself, if you like," he added, with that magnetic smile
of a genial power which he used to draw men to him and hold them.