Part 29

He was horribly sore at the treatment received from Valverden. Susceptible of hero-worship, warm and sincere in feeling, he had taken a liking to the brilliant youngster, three years his junior, his superior in social status and in cynical knowledge of the world. Was it disgraceful to belong to the Prussian Diplomatic Secret Intelligence Department, that ramifying spider-web of invisible wires, reaching to the uttermost Kingdoms of the civilized globe, and emanating from the Chancellory in the Friedrichstrasse, Berlin?

The Army had its secret agents, an army of them, by Jingo! Had not scraps of conversation reached the ears of P. C. Breagh no later than the previous day, relative to a certain dandy Colonel of Prussian Field Artillery, who for the past two years had filled the well-paid post of lace and ribbon Department Manager at the Paris Bon Marche.

Then why on earth.... But at this juncture the Halt Inspector returned with the Commandant, a white-whiskered, potty officer, in blue infantry uniform with distinctive white shoulder-straps, beside whom stalked a tall, middle-aged Colonel of Uhlans, whose pale eyes, unshaded by the tufted schlapka, glittered through steel-rimmed glasses, whose teeth were clenched on a familiar meerschaum--and whose gaunt, broad-shouldered figure looked better in the dark blue cavalry uniform with its yellow plastron and white cross-belt, than in Herr von Rosius's Berlin-made private clothes.

For it was undoubtedly Miss Ling's quiet-mannered first-floor lodger, who had resigned his post of teacher at the Berners Street Institute of Languages when the wire had come from Headquarters, bidding him come back and be a cog-wheel in Moltke's big war-machine. What Mr. Knewbit would have called "the blank expression" appeared behind his spectacles when they showed him his young fellow-lodger from Coram Street. But he paused when the Commandant halted and began to ask questions--which Carolan answered in the German so frequently tested on Herr von Rosius.

"How came you to travel from Berlin in a train set apart for the use of the Guard Infantry? Show me your _Legitimations-Kart_ and military ticket, if you have one!--You have neither? ... Then how did you, against the regulations, obtain permission of the authorities to enter a _militär-zug_? It is inconceivable that you should have managed to conceal yourself without connivance of some kind!"

Things were getting close to the Chancellory half-sheet, but it would never be displayed with the consent of P. C. Breagh. He had wild ideas of feigning idiocy, of appealing to Von Rosius, but the first resource savored of the theater too strongly for adoption, and the second--one glance at the hard, ignoring eyes behind the steel-rimmed glasses disposed of that for good.

At his wits' end, a loud, genial voice hailed him in the English language, flavored with the County Dublin brogue.

"By the powers! and there's the face I'm looking for. Longer by a yard than it was when you capped me at Berlin. Faith! and I stared at you with all my eyes, wondering where in the world I'd last beheld ye? Till Chris Brotherton quizzed me and I bet him five shillings the place was Fleet Street. Now, on your honor, was it? Speak, or forever after hold your tongue!"

"Not quite Fleet Street, sir, but hardly a stone's throw from it!" A great wave of unreasonable hope lifted the sinking heart of P. C. Breagh.

The big, warm voice and the kind, bright glance that had wrought the miracle, belonged to a stout little bearded gentleman of fifty, topped with a hard gray Derby, and attired in a pepper-and-salt cutaway coat, brown holland vest and neat white hunting-stock, gray Bedford cords and shiny black spurred Blucher boots. Had you met him cantering on some plump and well-fed cob along a green lane in the Mother Country, you would have taken him--but for the revolver-pouch that depended from a neat black leather belt, and the wallet that, with its companioning field-glass, was slung across his shoulders--for a hard-riding country surgeon or solicitor, of the good old English kind. But P. C. Breagh knew better, and his drab world changed to rose-color, as the big voice rolled from the capacious chest:

"Hardly a minute's ... Hold on! For the life of you, don't refresh my memory! What would it be to find one's mental legs getting shaky at the start of a new campaign! Not a stone's throw from Fleet Street, did you say? ... By the Beadle of Old Trinity! if you don't mean the Maze at Hampton Court or the Nevski Prospect at Petersburg, or the garden of the Dilkusha at Lucknow, you're talking of Printing House Square! Am I right now?"

"You've hit the nail, sir! You were walking arm-in-arm with Mr. Sala--and I'd been introduced to him before, luckily! and he remembered my name and presented me to you!"

"And I'm five shillings the richer by the meeting. For if Chris Brotherton dares to say the _Thunderbolt_ office and Fleet Street are anything but synonymous, he's a bolder man than I take him to be. But I'm interrupting a conversation...." He broke off, saluting the official. "Pray accept my apologies, _Herr_ Commandant, I'll wait while you finish with my young friend."

The Commandant stiffly returned the genial salute before he wheeled and walked off with the Inspector and Von Rosius, who, while the king of British War Correspondents chatted with his glowing vassal, had exchanged a few sentences with these personages apart. Then said the kindly little gentleman, with a humorous twirl of the eye at the three:

"I claimed your acquaintance because I saw you nearing the jaws of a German guardroom. Though I fancy you'd a friend at Court in that Uhlan Colonel there! ... I heard him tell the Commandant that he'd no earthly idea how you got here, but you were simply an English schoolboy who was crazy to see a war. And the Commandant said something about turning tail at the first whistle of a _Bombensplitter_--that's a shell-splinter. Though I'm pretty certain by the cut of your jib you'd do nothing of the kind!"

He added, as a familiar shout of "Entrain!" and a bugle-call brought the platform leg-stretchers scampering to their places and the long train of gray-painted wagons, officers' horse-boxes and baggage trucks, clanked into motion again:

"Your friends of the Guard have gone without you. Kreuznach will be their detraining-point--that's all I can tell you. For the reason--and it's an uncommonly sound one!--that the newly mobilized men of the infantry battalions want a march to limber their joints and stretch their new boots a bit. Begad! my own brogues would be the better of a day or two on the trees. But rheumatism and corns are the price one pays for experience--and the privilege of talking like a daddy to harum-scarum gossoons like yourself. You've no business to be here, boyo! but since you are--use your eyes and brains to observe with--never be ashamed of running away when you can get out of danger by doing it! and for your mother's sake, if she's living--don't be dragged into fighting on a side. Forget that you have a revolver, if that bulge under your jacket means that you carry one,--and keep your temper cool and your opinions strictly neutral, if a fellow with a drop of Irish blood in him can! Twit me with Bull Run, now, and you'll get the historic answer: 'Do as I advise you to do, not what I do!'"

He pulled out the battered gold hunting-watch at the end of its short, strong leather guard, and glanced at it, saying with a sigh of relief:

"Seven o'clock. Breakfast ought to be ready at the Victoria--barrack of a hostelry, packed with cocky Prussian officers. Suppose you come back there with me and have a bite and sup?"

Dazzling prospect! to a young man given to hero-worship, which the historian of "Cromwell" had positively asserted to be good for youthful bodies and souls. P. C. Breagh would have given a great deal if Valverden could have heard the invitation.... However, it was more likely than not that he had beheld the object of his scorn in familiar conversation with the most famous of British War Correspondents, as the gray-painted troop-train carried him away.

XXXIV

That was an enchanted walk for P. C. Breagh, back to the big, bare, barrack-like Victoria. It was the Doctor's generous amends for an unintentional slight. Two days previously, at the Potsdam Railway Station, Berlin, when a companion had said to him: "Who's the enthusiastic young admirer who kowtowed to you? English, I should say, and you cut him unmercifully,"--he had answered, out of the whirl of great affairs:

"I've no notion; but I'll make amends if ever he crosses my path again. It's not my way to hurt a boy."

"Bet you five bob he hails from Fleet Street," the friend had cried; and the Doctor had answered:

"If so, he has a claim on me I'm not going to deny."

Dust underfoot made the tread fall as on velvet. Dust in the air parched the throat and got in the eyes. And the incessant rolling of the Prussian side-drums, lanced through with signal whistles and sharp bugle-calls, made the hot baked atmosphere quiver, and the play of early sunshine on myriads of brass helmet-spikes made the eyes water and blink, as the battalions of blue infantry that had marched into Bingen on the previous day mustered from their billets, were entrained and conjured away; and other battalions that had marched fifteen miles since cock-crow tramped in with the thick white dust turned to mud upon them by the heavy Rhineland dews that had soaked their boots and damped their uniforms, halted but to breakfast--and were off, almost on the heels of the first.

Division after Division of Cavalry--Uhlans in light or dark blue piped with red, and shiny black Lancer _schapkas_, Cuirassiers in white uniforms, with steel breast and back plates, and steel helmets simple in design as those of Cromwell's Ironsides; light blue Dragoons, Hussars with tufted shakos of miniver, and braided jackets of red, black, green, brown and pale blue, with their flying batteries of Horse Artillery, their proviant columns and ammunition-trains, had been rushed to the frontier with astounding speed. Now the blue deluge of marching men with needle-guns came rolling after. With thunder of heavy siege-trains, with patches of green upon the monotonous blue, that stood for picked battalions of sharpshooters; sons of gamekeepers and forest-rangers; bred from childhood to woodcraft and hunter's lore; experts in the use of the rifle, scouts and trackers of daring and skill.

On the seventeenth of July the Warlock had said to his King, "Give me to the third of August and we are safe." This was the third of August. And the air was thick with something besides dust.

Conscious of this, they talked, the neophyte and the adept discussing things that had happened during the pregnant interval. How Forbes of the _Daily News_, who tramped it up to Saarbrück by the Nahe Valley Road from Kreuznach, had seen the first blood flow, when a couple of infantrymen of the garrison were brought in in a chipped condition, having been sniped at by red-breeched French marksmen across the frontier-line.

With a single battalion of the Hohenzollerns, the 7th Regiment of Rhineland Uhlans had hitherto constituted Saarbrück's garrison. And the French being reported in force at Forbach, some fifteen or sixteen thousand men being said to be strung out along the frontier, a detachment of Uhlans with spare troop-horses had ridden into Neunkirchen on the morning of the twenty-fourth of July, and borrowed from the collieries a dozen stout miners, armed with picks, and supplied with blasting cartridges, fuses, and so on. These grimy stalwarts they tied on troop-horses; crossed the frontier, and blew up the viaduct on the railway-line branching from the Forbach-Metz railway near Cocheren and connecting Metz with Saarguemines, Bitche, Hagenau and Strasbourg.

Thenceafter, nothing of note happened until the twenty-eighth of July, when the Emperor Napoleon III. entered Metz with his Staff and the heir to the Throne Imperial, and formally took command of the seven _corps d'armée_ known as the "Army of the Rhine." Upon the same day, a party of the Hohenzollerns, commanded by an N.C.O., reconnoitering on the right front, flushed a French _vidette_, in a wood covering a knoll of rising ground, over the top of which went the imaginary frontier-line.

Being shot at, the Hohenzollerns retired to garrison. But about regimental soup-time, twelve or thereabouts, a battery of six French field-pieces came over the slope of the Spicherenberg heights, getting into position on a plateau half-way down.

And while the Prussian drummers beat to arms; while the Hohenzollerns hastily posted their four companies, one on each of the town's three bridges, and sent one forward on the heels of a squadron of Uhlans, up the Forbach Road, which runs through Saarbrück, rising as it trends to the west;--while the rest of the Uhlans stood to their horses in the Markt-platz, and the civilian population stopped to look on, or scuttled for cover, six shells were fired, three of them hitting a little beerhouse on the hill-brow, just off the Forbach Road--and the Imperial cannonade was over, the artillerists retired, and nothing more had happened,--though the _videttes_ and patrols, Gallic and Teuton, had cracked away at each other from high noon till batlight.

Discussing these things, the adept and the neophyte came to the Victoria, every window of which was crowded with Prussian officers, eating, drinking and smoking, or shouting for breakfast, coffee, beer, wine and tobacco in every key of the human register.

Distracted waiters ran about like ants, and before the packed and roaring caravanserai--keeping guard over one of the little decrepit iron tables that stood under the dusty acacias--a little table that had a fly-spotted cloth upon it, and a great glass basin filled with sugar cubes, and was further adorned with brown rings made by the bottoms of coffee-cups and beer-glasses, were the two friends referred to by P. C. Breagh's Good Samaritan.

One was a handsome, fair-haired, smiling man in the scarlet, yellow-faced, gold-adorned uniform of a crack regiment of British Light Dragoons, "a swell of the haw-haw type" Mr. Ticking would have termed him. With this splendid personage, who was generally referred to as "Major Brotherton," was a shorter, plainer individual with fluffy whiskers, attired as for the sports of the field, in a white, low-crowned felt, large checked tweeds, in which orange and pink predominated, drab leggings and heavily nailed highlows. A Dolland field-glass was slung from his shoulders, and over a neighboring chair lay a huge box-coat, the multitudinous pockets of which appeared to contain his luggage, for a bath-sponge in a rubber bag rolled out of one as he rose up to welcome the leader of the party, and a box of areca-nut tooth-paste, and a hairbrush with a patent collapsible handle had to be shifted before the sponge could be replaced; just as though Mr. Toole had thought out the costume and the comic business for some traveling Briton in a new farce.

You may suppose P. C. Breagh blushing from consciousness of the contrast of his own travel-stained griminess with the Major's dazzling brilliancy, when that personage shook hands with him and said it was going to be a hot day. Introduced by his kindly patron to the sportsman in pink and orange tweeds with:

"Tower, this is a young countryman of mine--picked up at the station--just tumbled out of a troop-wagon full of Guards Infantry----"

The fluffy whiskered sportsman civilly nodded and observed: "And dashed good luck for him!" He added: "Doctor, if you recognized your baggage-van by that confounded goat you've had painted on it, I'll admit it's served some purpose besides frightening German crows!"

"Begad! it frightened me when I saw it on the siding this morning!" avowed the genial Doctor. "But how was I to know that the Berlin painter who undertook to copy the crest from my family coat-of-arms had got a magnifying eye?"

Said the man in cavalry uniform, smoothing his drooping mustache, and speaking with the drawl of Robertsonian comedy:

"At any rate, the size of the animal testifies to the antiquity of your race, and so on. For in prehistoric days, I take it, goats were as big as cows are now!"

"My thanks to you, Brotherton, for supplying so plausible an explanation. I'll salve my pride of pedigree with it next time I'm taken for a traveling quack, and Prussian soldiers suffering with indigestion apply to me for pills and black-dose." He added, with his pleasant laugh, catching P. C. Breagh's glance of incredulity: "Actual fact, and no embroidery, I assure you! You understand that to emphasize the strictly pacific nature of my calling, I'm exploiting my honorary degree for all it's worth!" He added, rather pointedly addressing the handsome cavalryman, "I've no special ambition to be shot as a combatant!"

"Nor have I," said the man in sporting checks, warmly. "And, Brotherton, my dear fellow, if this 'ere 'umble individual may add his advice to the counsel you've already had from the man, by Jove! who of all men knows best what he's talkin' about, you'll stow that 'ere lady-killing uniform, and the silver helmet with the flowin' plume away in some spare portmanteau, and leave 'em with your saber and the dazzlin' horse-furniture you showed me this morning in charge of the landlord here, until you come back from the war-path safe and sound. Am I talking 'oss sense, Doctor?"

"Indeed you are, Tower!" agreed the Doctor. "And, Chris, if you'll listen to him, I'll be eternally grateful to you, for your own sake. You've too much of what Tower and the Yankees call 'horse sense' not to know you're handicapped as a war correspondent by your glorious panoply!"

The Major smiled, and said, smoothing the drooping mustache with a fine white hand that wore a diamond-set signet:

"You can't blame me for thirsting to carry the harness I've worn in sham fights for nearly half my lifetime, where bullets are flying in real earnest?"

"Not a bit, dear fellow," said the Doctor, with a twinkle, "so long as you thirst to do it and don't! That letter 'R' on your shoulder-cord is hardly big enough to serve as cover where those bullets are plentiful. And with your influence, prospects in life, and position, you'd be an ingrate to Fate if you were anxious to die at thirty-four."

Said Brotherton, knitting his fair eyebrows over the restless fire in his handsome eyes:

"Influence has been my bane, and the two other things have stood in my light ever since I was an urchin in knickerbockers. I've been Queen's page, and Prince's Equerry, and _aide-de-camp_ on the Duke's Staff, and I've never seen an army in the field, or smelt powder, except at Aldershot, or Shorncliffe, or the Curragh of Kildare, or at carbine-practice. What luck do you call that?"

"Dashed hard!" said Tower.

Brotherton went on:

"I was a callow cadet at Sandhurst when the Regiment covered itself with glory at Balaclava, and as it has seen no active service since--I've had no chance to find out whether I'm a real soldier, or a kid-glove one."

"Why not have exchanged----" began Tower. The Major shook his head.

"It wasn't to be done, for a very solid reason. My father, who served with Redlett's Brigade in the Crimea, was killed on Balaclava Day; and I was an only son. And my mother was a confidential Lady-in-Waiting, and knew where to apply, by Jove! when my youthful ambition was to be cold-watered.... And now that the dear soul has gone, and I'm on the Retired list--after fifteen years of Windsor, Buckingham Palace, Whitehall, Pall Mall and Hyde Park--out breaks the war that I've been sighing for. And, after hovering about the _Thunderbolt_ office till every printer's devil knows me by name, and cooling my heels on the doorstep of your chambers in the Albion so persistently that your housekeeper believed me a bailiff with a writ--I managed to knock over Opportunity on the wing--and secured, thanks to you, Doctor! the chance of my life!"

He stood up, a handsome, martial figure in his scarlet and golden uniform, his eyes ablaze under the silver, gold-starred, white-plumed helmet, his fine face flushed with the battle-lust. And as he stretched out his hand across the spotty tablecloth, the feasting flies rose in a buzzing cloud.

"And glad am I if word of mine helped to get that chance for you, and you know it, Chris, and that it's a pleasure to have you with me," said the genial voice, as the Doctor took the offered hand. "But the military array, my dear fellow! The wampum and war-paint--that's what I kick at, with my gouty toe of fifty-two." He added: "But here comes the waiter with the coffee and eggs, and bread and butter, and something like the cold sliced ham I'm dying for--if only it doesn't happen to be raw! So sit down and we'll fortify ourselves against possible short-commons at Mayence. For that's where the King is, with Moltke and the Great Headquarters. And that's the destination we take rail for at twelve noon."

He added, as Brotherton and Tower started in their chairs, and P. C. Breagh quivered like a fox-terrier shown a rat: "As for the other chiefs, the Red Prince is--no one seems able to tell where--and the Crown Prince is on the frontier. Maybe we'll hear of him at Wissembourg by-and-by!"

"We should be there ourselves, in the thick of it," asserted Brotherton, savagely slashing at a pallid pat of butter, as Tower poured boiling milk and coffee into cups half-an-inch thick.

"We would be, Chris, me dear man!" said the Doctor, liberally piling slices of cold veal and ham-sausage on his guests' plates, cutting bread and passing the pickles, "if the authorities panted to have English correspondents at their elbows while they're posting their pawns and pieces for the opening game!"

Brotherton retorted with a touch of pomposity:

"You take it lightly, sir. But for the honor of our profession, we should extort recognition at the hands of these foreigners. We should, as representatives of a great Power, submit to no belittling. Wielding as we do----"

"Keep all that toffee for the speechmaking end of a Newspaper Press dinner, Chris, my boy," drolled the Doctor. "Sure, 'tis we ourselves are the foreigners here--hard as it is of conception to a true-born Briton. And--since we're permitted on sufferance to accompany the forces of United Germany--the least we can do is to extract the necessary information painlessly!"

"But, my God! when I think of what may be doing at this moment!" broke out Brotherton, hitting the table, "I feel as if I should go stark, staring crazy! Have I sacrificed what I have sacrificed--and--and borne what I have borne, to trot like a stray tyke at the tail of a moving Army--picking up such scraps as may be thrown me from day to day? I tell you, sir, the mere idea is horrible to me! I cannot put it more mildly. My blood is not yet chilled by age, or my susceptibilities blunted...." He pushed away his plate and rose, pulling his gloves from his belt, and taking up the cloak that had been thrown over a neighboring chair. "I will ask you to excuse me! I have not yet received my papers back from the Halt Commandant. I will call upon him now!"

"Come with you, if you've no objection to walking in civilian company?" said Tower, swallowing a mouthful, emptying his coffee-cup, and reaching for the white felt hat and the box-coat.