Westerling realized that the question of marriage as a social
requirement might arise when he should become officially chief of staff
with the retirement of His Excellency the field-marshal. For the present
he enjoyed his position as a bachelor who was the most favored man in
the army too much to think of marriage. This did not imply an absence of
fondness for women; rather the contrary. He liked sitting next to a
beautiful neck and shoulders and having a pair of feminine eyes sparkle
into his at dinner; though, with rare exceptions, not the same neck and
shoulders on succeeding nights. His natural sense of organization
divided women into two classes: those of family and wealth, whom he met
at great houses, and those purring kittens who live in small flats. Both
afforded him diversion. A woman had been the most telling influence in
making him vice-chief of staff; an affair to which gossip gave the
breath of scandal had been an argument against him.
It was a little surprising that the bell that the girl of seventeen had
rung in his secret mind when he was on one of the first rounds of the
ladder, now lost in the mists of a lower stratum of existence, should
ever tinkle again.... Yet he had heard its note in the tone of her
prophecy with each step in his promotion; and while the other people
whom he had known at La Tir were the vaguest shadows of personalities,
her picture was as definite in detail as when she said: "You have the
will! You have the ambition!" She had recognized in him the power that
he felt; foreseen his ascent to the very apex of the pyramid. She was
still unmarried, which was strange; for she had not been bad-looking and
she was of a fine old family. What was she like now? Commonplace and
provincial, most likely. Many of the people he had known in his early
days appeared so when he met them again. But, at the worst, he looked
for an interesting half-hour.
The throbbing activity of the streets of the capital, as his car
proceeded on the way to her hotel, formed an energetic accompaniment to
his gratifying backward survey of how all his plans had worked out from
the very day of the prophecy. Had he heard the remark of a great
manufacturer to the banker at his side in a passing limousine, "There
goes the greatest captain of industry of us all!" Westerling would only
have thought: "Certainly. I am chief of staff. I am at the head of all
your workmen at one time or another!" Had he heard the banker's answer,
"But pretty poor pay, pretty small dividends!" he would have thought:
"Splendid dividends--the dividends of power!"
He had a caste contempt for the men of commerce, with their mercenary
talk about credit and market prices; and also for the scientists,
doctors, engineers, and men of other professions, who spoke of things in
books which he did not understand. Reading books was one of the faults
of Turcas, his assistant. No bookish soldier, he knew, had ever been a
great general. He resented the growing power of these leaders of the
civil world, taking distinction away from the military, even when, as a
man of parts, he had to court their influence. His was the profession
that was and ever should be the elect. A penniless subaltern was a
gentleman, while he could never think of a man hi business as one.
All the faces in the street belonged to a strange, busy world outside
his interest and thoughts. They formed what was known as the public,
often making a clatter About things which they did not understand, when
they Should obey the orders of their superiors. Of late, their clatter
had been about the extra taxes for the recent increase of the standing
forces by another corps. The public was bovine with a parrot's head. Yet
it did not admire the toiling ox, but the eagle and the lion.
As his car came to the park his eyes lighted at sight of one of the
dividends--one feature of urban life that ever gave him a thrill. A
battalion of the 128th, which he had ordered that afternoon to the very
garrison at South La Tir that he had once commanded, was marching
through the main avenue. Youths all, of twenty-one or two, they were in
a muddy-grayish uniform which was the color of the plain as seen from
the veranda of the Galland house.
Around them, in a mighty, pervasive monotone, was the roar of city
traffic, broken by the nearer sounds of the cries of children playing in
the sand piles, the bark of motor horns, the screech of small boys'
velocipedes on the paths of the park; while they themselves were silent,
except for the rhythmic tramp of the military shoes of identical
pattern, as was every article of their clothing and equipment from head
to foot, whose character had been the subject of the weightiest
deliberation of the staff.
How much can a soldier carry and how best carry it easily? What shoes
are the most serviceable for marching and yet cheap? Nothing was so
precise in all their surroundings, nothing seemed so resolutely
dependable as this column of soldiers. They were the last word in
filling human tissue into a mould for a set task. Where these came from
were other boys growing up to take their places. The mothers of the
nation were doing their duty. All the land was a breeding-ground for the
dividends of Hedworth Westerling.
At the far side of the park he saw another kind of dividend--another
group of marching men. These were not in uniform. They were the
unemployed. Many were middle-aged, with worn, tired faces. Beside the
flag of the country at the head of the procession was that of universal
radicalism. And his car had to stop to let them pass. For an instant the
indignation of military autocracy rose strong within him at sight of the
national colors in such company. But he noted how naturally the men kept
step; the solidarity of their movement. The stamp of their army service
in youth could not be easily removed. He realized the advantage of
heading an army in which defence was not dependent on a mixture of
regulars and volunteers, but on universal conscription that brought
every able-bodied man under discipline.
These reservists, in the event of war, would hear the call of race and
they would fight for the one flag that then had any significance. Yes,
the old human impulses would predominate and the only enemy would be on
the other side of the frontier. They would be pawns of his will--the
will that Marta Galland had said would make him chief of staff.
Wasn't war the real cure for the general unrest? Wasn't the nation
growing stale from the long peace? He was ready for war now that he had
become vice-chief, when the retirement of His Excellency, unable to bear
the weight of his years and decorations in the field, would make him the
supreme commander. One ambition gained, he heard the appeal of another:
to live to see the guns and rifles that had fired only blank cartridges
in practice pouring out shells and bullets, and all the battalions that
had played at sham war in manoeuvres engaged in real war, under his
direction. He saw his columns sweeping up the slopes of the Brown range.
Victory was certain. He would be the first to lead a great modern army
against a great modern army; his place as the master of modern tactics
secure in the minds of all the soldiers of the world. The public would
forget its unrest in the thrill of battles won and provinces conquered,
and its clatter would be that of acclaim for a new idol of its old
faith.
V