Part 30

"You remember the nigger's definitions of verse and prose, don't you? '_Go up mill-dam, fall down slam! dat verse. Go up mill-dam, fall down whoppo, dat blank verse._' Prussian military authority may hold, that between spying on the enemy before the Army and spying on the Army before the enemy, there is as little distinction. Though they'd think differently at the Horse Guards, thank the Lord! By the way, with regard to that gaunt, long-legged Lieutenant-Colonel of Uhlans of the Landwehr who claimed to know something of you, rather luckily for your ambitions!--where did you come across him? '_An English schoolboy,' he called you, 'crazy to see War!_'"

P. C. Breagh explained:

"He did know something of me, sir!--though it was the merest chance--our meeting. Until a week ago he was a teacher of English at the Berners Street Institute of Languages, and lodged at my landlady's. And they recalled him to Berlin a few hours before the Declaration of War."

XXXV

It was the Doctor's turn to whistle.

"Phew! So that's how they spy out and trap deserters from their Reserve and _Landwehr_. Clever--uncommonly! Possibly it's not business to tell you, but you've given away a genuine bit of information. And as a lesson in caution for the future, I shall annex your nugget--do you hear? In return--I've a pass for an extra groom who has shot the moon with three weeks' double pay in advance, the cowardly beggar! And--supposing you're not too proud--I'll take you with me as far as Mayence."

"I don't know how to thank you, sir!"

"Leave thanking for the present." He pulled out the gold chronometer, secured by its twisted thong. "Ten o'clock, and here come Towers and Brotherton, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, '_with a kind of confession in their looks which their modesties have not craft enough to color_.' No news to be had? No starting for Mayence before twelve sharp, in spite of honied entreaties lavished on the authorities?"

"Deuce a scrap!"

"Devil a minute!"

They threw themselves upon chairs, hot, dusty and panting. They had got their papers back, countersigned, from a kind of understrapper, after, to do him justice, very little delay. But of intelligence, not a modicum was obtainable, except that the Emperor was said to be close to the frontier near Saarbrück at the head of the Imperial Guards.

"Though they've been saying that for forty-eight hours," grumbled Tower, "and I'm dam' if I call it anything but Ancient History."

At which candid confession the Doctor's mouth twitched under the thick, curling mustache of rusty iron-gray. He said, his quick eye noting an excited stir and bustle about the thronged entrance of the hotel, and the crowding of officers about another, who had a paper in his hand:

"Those officers have heard--something that is not Ancient History. And look at the fellows who were eating at the tables in the windows; they've something tastier to discuss now than the landlord's indifferent grub!"

It was true. In the long dining-room, in the restaurant, and in the reading-room, which had been converted into a temporary coffee-room, men were swarming like bees and buzzing like them, while detached, staccato sentences shaped out of the buzz.

"Saarbrück ... Spicheren ... Frossard ... Colonel von Pestel...."

"Something up...." Towers adjusted his eyeglass. Brotherton, catching a sentence shouted by an officer of a _jäger_ battalion to another green-coat leaning from a window on the second-floor, jumped as though he had been prodded with a bayonet, and turned a flaming face upon his friend:

"A telegram has come in... There has been serious fighting at Saarbrück. Did they lie to us at the station, then? Officers and gentlemen----"

"Softly, Chris!" The Doctor's hand upon his arm checked him on the verge of a fiery outburst. "I fancy they've a right to hold back intelligence dispatched from Headquarters when the senders mark the wire '_Delay_.'"

"No doubt, but I had better interview the Commandant. Details would be worth having!" said Brotherton, adding with a peculiar smile, "Or at least I, in my inexperience, am inclined to think so."

Came the quick answer:

"You can have details now--without troubling the Commandant! Full--well, as fully as I got them--under a strict undertaking of secrecy for four hours--at six o'clock this morning!"

Brotherton turned as ashen-pale as he had hitherto been crimson. Towers called out gleefully, as active little thrills of excitement coursed down P. C. Breagh's spine:

"Bravo, Doctor! And you had it up youi sleeve all the time. 'Unfold, thou man of 'orrid mystery!' as Miss Le Grange says at Astley's in the _Specter's Bride_."

"There's not so much to unfold. But from, eight thousand to ten thousand French troops made an attack on Saarbrück yesterday. Some battalions of the 8th Prussian Army Corps had augmented the original garrison, and their nearest support was at Lebach, five miles to the rear. A mitrailleuse-battery and some field-guns posted on the Keppertsberg drove the Blue Uniforms out of the town!"

Towers said: "Then why the deuce..." and broke off. Brotherton gloomed heavily. The Doctor went on:

"The Emperor and the Prince Imperial were on the heights, with the Imperial Staff, to see the show--an astonishing spectacle it must have been. Frossard, in the center with supports drawn from the Second Corps--Marshal Bazaine on the right, with troops picked from the Third. And in command of the Fifth Corps, De Failly, who crossed the river at Saarguemines."

Queried Tower:

"And when the big bow-wow had made the little one drop the bone, he didn't stick to it?"

The Doctor returned:

"No--and that's the puzzle of the whole affair. The whole glorious display resolved itself into a cannonade, with occupation of the heights on the left bank, and nothing further. Though the French foreposts actually occupied the three bridges and held the town."

Tower said, his pale eyes sharp with intelligence:

"Bet you a tenner it was done for the boy. Got up to blood the young'un--cockerel of the Walk Imperial. Geewhillikins!--What telegrams Nap must have fired off to St. Cloud!"

"They'll have read them in Berlin and London long before they get to us," said the Doctor, shrugging. "Where are you off to, Brotherton?"

Brotherton returned--and the tone was offensive, if the words were not:

"To do what my senior Special does not appear to think necessary--wire the news to Printing House Square."

The elder answered with a good-humored twinkle:

"Why, that was done hours back, by grace of the authorities. They bridled my tongue, but left my pen unhampered. Knowing, of course, that the British Public must wait for its news until breakfast-time to-morrow. Were you speaking to me, Brotherton?"

The Major was saying in a voice as little like his own as the livid mask of rage he turned on the Doctor resembled his ordinarily calm and placid visage:

"I was addressing you, though it pleased you not to hear me. I was asking you what you meant, by G----! in stealing a march on the man you've called your friend?"

The Doctor's eyes blazed behind their gold-rimmed glasses. Anger darkened his handsome sunburnt face. He drew himself up and said, speaking simply and with dignity:

"How do you infer that I have 'stolen a march on you'? By taking the apology they give one here for a cold tub at cockcrow and going over to the Hauptmann's office with our papers while you and Tower were sleeping like----"

"Like dormice, by Gad!" put in Tower. "And so we were. And it's a case of the early bird--and not the first time, I'll swear--by thousands! And, Brotherton--you ought to apologize. You were simply infernally rude just now!"

Said the Major loftily:

"I gave it as my opinion that I had been dealt with unfairly. I do not withdraw the words I used. But I comprehend that my senior in the service of the paper is not anxious to share the credit of the earliest intelligence with regard to what is taking place on the frontier just now."

"For God's sake, Chris, don't say what you'll be sorry for!"

"I'll say what I think, to you, sir, or to the King of Prussia!"

The gray-bearded, strongly-featured face, with the look of generous sorrow on it, and the younger, fairer, handsomer face, with the stamp of arrogance and vanity and pride marring its manly beauty, confronted each other in silence, until, with an impatient snarl, Brotherton swung round upon his heel.

"Look here!--look here!--where the merry hell are you off to?" Tower spluttered, grabbing at the sleeve of the splendid scarlet tunic. "Not going to part company for a misunderstanding--hey?"

"I am going to part company," Brotherton returned bitterly, freeing himself from the detaining hand, "since the jealousy that hampered me in my military career threatens to mar my prospects now. Where I am going to I cannot tell you--probably you will hear from me, but I cannot promise it. Good-bye! Or--if you prefer it--_Auf wiedersehen_!"

He shook hands with Tower, nodded coldly to the astonished P. C. Breagh, formally saluted the Doctor, who returned with a slight bow, picked up his cap and cloak and strode away over the sun-dried grass and the hot yellow gravel, making for the gaudily painted iron gates that ended the drive.

"Oh, Chris, man-alive, and am I jealous of ye?" said the Doctor, his spectacles dewy with irrepressible laughter, as the gallant figure in its gorgeous scarlet and golden trappings was swallowed in a crowd of blue uniforms: "If you'd waited another minute, I'd have told you of something else your senior in the service of the paper by seventeen years, some odd days, and a minute or two isn't anxious to share with you, and that is a reputation for not being a hot-headed, unreasonable young ass!"

"He's making a bee-line for the Railway Station," said Tower, wiping his heated forehead with a gaudily-hued silk handkerchief, "and if he comes across any of those Transport swells there'll be the deuce to pay. He's got the bit in his teeth and his tail tight down over the ribbons, by George!--and he'll kick the trap to pieces and lame himself to a dead certainty. Shall I go after him and try to _soother_ him down a bit?"

The Doctor shrugged assent.

"If you think 'twill be any good! ... Meanwhile I have to write a letter or two, and pack, or rout my man out of the servants' quarters to do it. As for you, my boyo!"--he turned on P. C. Breagh a keen, humorous glance that summoned up blushes to mantle under the railway grime--"a wash and brush-up will do you no harm, and besides--my absconding Berliner isn't described on his passport as a mulatto!"

Tower came back in half an hour, reporting failure in the attempt to pacify Brotherton, who nevertheless joined the Doctor's little party at the station, having apparently recovered his serenity of temper, and abandoned his determination to forswear his senior's company.

Beer, coffee, bread and meat were still being lavishly distributed among the troops continually parading for departure, and the train-loads of soldiers passing through. And the exodus of panic-stricken visitors, flying from the little up-Rhine watering places, in apprehension of the arrival of the Emperor with his mitrailleuses, continued; until, in another hour, the shrunken finger of the Warlock wagged, and thenceforth the Rhine Valley Railways were totally blocked for civilian passengers, and given over to the transport of men and munitions of war.

Presently, when a train of coal-trucks from Kreuznach came jolting into Bingen, bearing on their sable flanks the chalk hieroglyphics that signified their official emptiness, P. C. Breagh was destined to behold personages of the loftiest rank and the utmost exclusiveness, German Serene Highnesses, Austrian Duchesses, and English peeresses, with their children and lap-dogs, their maids, _chefs_, coachmen, lackeys, and grooms, packed into these grimy vehicles without precedence or selection, or any seating-accommodation other than that afforded by an empty sack or an armful of straw.

The troop-train conveying the mounted gendarmerie of the Third Army Corps--huge men equipped as dragoons--to Mayence, afforded accommodation to the men, horses and vans of the Doctor's party. Long before the fortifications came in sight the roads were blotted out by marching columns, and the fields were dotted with moving transport-trains.

At Mayence, whose stone-paved streets were roaring with the passage of iron-shod wheels, the trampling of iron-shod hoofs, and the measured tramping of infantry battalions, the Doctor, stepping from the train, was seized upon by friends. Yet after the first eager interchange of interrogations and answers, he found time to bestow a parting hand-grip on Carolan and a final word of advice.

"And--put this in your pocket--it'll be a help to you if it doesn't hang you. They're lithographed by the Prussian War Department, and every German officer has one. And here's something else, a lot more use than the revolver those chaps stole from you. You'll know better than to use it unless in case of need!"

This was a folding pocket-map of the Eastern Departments of France, with certain military routes very nicely marked in red upon it. While the something else proved to be a wicker-covered metal pocket-flask, containing about half-a-pint of the whisky of Kinahan.

The donor added:

"Remember, train your memory to pigeon-hole things for later description, and never be caught taking notes, or fighting on a side! And--be on your guard with women, pretty ones especially. And--there's a scrap of paper in the pocket of the map-cover, may come in handy, at a pinch. No, no thanks! General von Reigen, that's the light blue Würtemburg Hussar officer talking to Tower--tells me Moltke and his staff are quartered at the Hotel de Holland. If so, the King won't be far off. He thinks Bismarck has gone to a house outside the town, but he can't swear to it. There goes a carriage with the Red Prince's big buck-nigger on the box. Shows his Highness must be somewhere hereabouts. As for the Crown Prince, nobody will say anything. He's marching--with an end in view. And they say the French are shooting uncommonly badly--and that half of the Reserve men don't know how to use their chassepots. Well, they'll have practice enough before long. Good luck, and good-bye!"

The "scrap of paper," upon later examination, proved to be a five-pound note, placed there by the hand that later penned those wonderful war-letters--under a wayside hedge, at a corner of a plank bivouac-table, on the zinc counter of a wine-shop filled with carousing soldiers--at the ebony and tortoiseshell _éscritoire_ of Madame la Marquise, in the boudoir of the château that had been so sorely battered by those big potatoes of Moltke's.

Kind little, great man; a whole chestful of Orders had no power to chill the big warm heart that prompted your many deeds of generosity. It molders in a coffin now, and the decorations are dimming with dust in a glass-topped box. But beyond the Veil that parts the seen from the unseen world, I like to think that there were waiting for you rewards and honors, in comparison with which the most coveted earthly insignia were vilest dirt and dross.

XXXVI

Said the sutler-woman, whose coarse black hair was powdered white as any lady's of the early eighteenth century, smearing the dust from the peonies of her cheeks with a brawny arm that was dusty as any miller's:

"Young man, if thou stick to thy word, and take good care of the jackass, remembering the sharp nail-spike in the end of the whip-butt if he tries to kick or bite--I'll creep in under the tilt and take a forty-winks. Lord be thanked! my legs are sound, but they ache a bit!"

The jackass, who boasted the not inglorious name of "Rumschottel," laid back his ears viciously at his mistress's reference to the persuasive spike in the whip-butt, and the young man addressed by his temporary employer nodded in assent without opening his lips. For the dust in which the little tilt-cart moved was almost solid, being kicked up by the Seventh Corps of the Second Army of Germany, in line of march through the Haardt Wald by Kaiserslautern.

The sutler-woman's young man had marched with the Fifth Corps from Mayence by Oppenheim and Alzey, and had picked up an American tourist who knew of a short cut to Kaiserslautern, and had mislaid the Army Corps in trying to find it. Staffs, squadrons, batteries, battalions, transport and baggage had vanished like smoke among these vineyard-and-forest-clad hills, these pine-jacketed gorges, these roads that ran between natural ramparts of granite, or passed through quaint villages tucked under hillsides crimson and gold with laden appletrees, and dominated by ancient castles perched on towering platforms of rock.

Scenery palls when the thigh-bones seem wearing through their sockets; when the stomach complains for very emptiness, and there are bloody blisters inside the ragged socks. The American who had been so cocksure about the road to Kaiserslautern was lying up under a peasant's penthouse-thatch, at a twenty-mile distant village, drinking Kirsch, nursing his own skinless heels, and reading up "Murray." His late companion had refused to give in, and perseverance had won its reward. Sixty miles or so above Kreuznach, where the main road forks right and left, climbing the shoulders of the Nahe Valley, he had met the Ninth Corps of the Second Army marching up from Bingen, and hobbled at the heels of one of the dusty battalions until he could hobble no more.

The sutler-woman had come upon him sitting pumped-out by the wayside, had sold him bread, coffee and sausage, doctored his blisters, supplied him with tallowed strips of linen to replace his wornout socks, earned his gratitude, and displayed no reluctance to profit by her philanthropy, when he had volunteered to help lead the jackass as far as Kaiserslautern. True, he spoke a most vile jargon, but you cannot have everything. And the weather was so beautifully dusty, thought the sutler-woman, that an assistant would certainly be of use. Without the dust that clogs the human throat, the trade in liquid lubricants would be less roaring. And the tilt-cart contained, beside other marching-requisites, a twenty-gallon barrel of rather luke-warm beer.

The young man nodded again as the cart-shafts tilted in the hame-straps, and a command to throw his weight on the front-board was issued from behind. There was a good deal of creaking as he obeyed. A heavy weight suddenly added to the jackass's load made Rumschottel look malevolently round his near-side blinker, and display an upper row of long orange-colored teeth in testimony of his desire to bite. Then his driver slid off the board, took the rope reins, and continued to trudge beside him, keeping well to the low hedgerow so as to leave a clear space between the sutler's cart and the seemingly endless column of dusty infantrymen, striding steadily forward through a blazing August noon.

Ahead, where black-and-white and white-and-black lance-pennons flickered at the turn of the road below a steep hill-shoulder covered with bronzing vineyards heavy with purpling grapes, the light-blue of a Prussian Dragoon regiment and the facings of a squadron of Red Uhlans showed through the thick coating of dust that clung to horse and man. But the dark uniforms of a succeeding battery of Horse Artillery and the indigo or rifle-green of the battalions that marched with the needle-gun, had long ago given place to a pervasive whitey-brown.

Schmidt, Klaus, and Klein were pressing on in spite of dust and an eighty-five-in-the-shade thermometer, you must understand, so as not to get left out of the fighting that must be going on ahead. For the First and Second Corps of the Second Army, with the Headquarters Staff, were known to have reached Homburg, and on the previous night the Army of the Crown Prince had bivouacked behind the Klingbach, south of Landau.... Five or six in the morning, supposing him to have marched at dawn, would see him well across the frontier. And scouts on the hills had heliographed and flag-signaled the arrival of Imperial battalions and artillery at Wissembourg, and blue Baden Dragoons reported a cavalry camp at Selz. For all they knew, "Unser Fritz" and the Napoleon were even then at grips.

So they marched--as they had marched since they detrained at Bingen, swinging starkly on under the weight of the knapsack, eighty rounds of ammunition, rolled great-coat, camp-kettle, sword, spade, water-bottle, haversack and bread-roll, or half-a-dozen flint-hard brown biscuits threaded together on a bit of string.

Men sweated and blistered under the relentless sun, but not many fell out, and there were very few severe cases of sunstroke, these for the most part falling to the lot of Reservists. And in the hottest part of the day a plump of thunder broke among the hills eastward, and a deluge that followed turned the dust on them to paste. Then the sun came out again and baked the paste hard; and the sutler-woman stuck her head out between the front flaps of the cart-tilt, and told her young man to pull up for a bit of a rest and a snack.

So P. C. Breagh unharnessed Rumschottel, and the jackass rolled in a sandy hollow in asinine fashion, and rose up braying and refreshed. Then, quite mildly submitting to be hobbled by his mistress, he fell-to upon a patch of thistles that the battery-wheels had spared. And the sutler-woman, who answered to the name of Krumpf, produced black bread and cheese, with peppery sausage of Brunswick, and a mighty tin bottle of cold milk-coffee, from the depths of her vehicle, and liberally dispensed of these refreshments to her servitor. She partook of them herself, largely, lacing her own mug of coffee out of a private bottle of _schnaps_.

"_Herr Je!_" she grumbled presently, "what is he gaping at?" For her young man had finished eating, and was absorbed in watching marching legs.... She added, snorting scornfully: "We might sit here and sleep for three hours, and they would still be going by when we woke up.... Horses' legs and men's legs, just as though they had got clockwork inside them.... It was so in Schleswig-Holstein, and it will be so in France. And what the Danes got the French will get, and that will be a thumping!" She nodded directly afterward and dozed heavily, leaning her broad back against the wheel of her cart.

Perhaps she slept a quarter-of-an-hour while the dusty men marched by, four abreast, without slackening pace or changing step. They had hard-featured, serious, intelligent faces for the most part, thought P. C. Breagh, though here and there was a visage that bore the stamp of vice upon it, or was pimply with drink, or brutal, or merely sly. They had ceased to sing, though their bivouac of the night before had been patriotically vocal; the dusty instruments of the bandsmen came less frequently out of their dustier bags. They marched for the most part in silence, though the trampling of their feet made the solid ground reverberate.