Part 30

"Come back about ten--I may have a scrap or two of news worth hearing," said the Doctor, with imperturbable good temper; and with a horsey touch of the hat on Tower's part, and a sulkily dignified salute from the Major, the tall soldierly figure in its scarlet and blue and gold, and the less dignified personality in the clothes that might have been worn by Toole in the part of a horsey squire, went away together, over the yellow-burnt grass and the dusty sun-baked gravel, dotted with little breakfasting groups of officers, who had been crowded out of the Hotel.

"I'm glad Tower's gone with him. He's in a frame of mind that won't make for pleasant relations with Prussian transport-officers," quoth the Doctor, looking after the retreating couple with something like a twinkle and something like a sigh. "But he's a grand fellow!--a splendid fellow is Brotherton!--even if he sometimes reminds me of the Quaker wife who said to her husband: 'Friend Timothy, all the world is wrong except thee and me, and thou is a little wrong sometimes, Friend Timothy!'"

And having got rid of his vexation in one gentle gibe at the idiosyncrasy of the petulant Brotherton, he fell to his breakfast again, urging his guest to a renewed attack on the strong ham-sausage and weak coffee, with the words:

"Bad policy--neglecting rations. Must stoke when fuel for the human engine is to be had, if you're going to chronicle the deeds of an army that fights as it marches. And when you've cleaned your plate, and drunk another cup of coffee, you shall tell me why you came here and what you want to do."

He commented, when P. C. Breagh, duly replete, had stated the nature of his aims and ambitions; touching upon his discouragements as briefly as might be:

"War Correspondence! ... Well, I'll admit I guessed that you'd set your heart on something of the kind, when I saw you tumble out of that troop-wagon with a note book sticking out of your jacket-pocket. And so old Knewbit financed? Sporting of him!--and he deserves that his letters should be worth reading. Call 'em 'Experiences of a Tyke at the Tail of an Army.'" He added, his bright brown eyes twinkling through their gold-rimmed glasses. "For that's where you've got to be!"

He lighted a huge cigar, twisted round his green-painted iron chair and sat astride upon it, resting on its rickety back his folded arms, short and strong, with small muscular hands, sunburned like his bearded face and thick bull-neck.

"I am not joking, my young acquaintance. Can't you understand that to keep abreast with even a secondary Staff in the war-field you have to sweat out money at every pore? And--without gold for transport or thalers for _trinkgelt_--or seasoned knowledge to help you even if your pockets were full, what can you accomplish? I tell you frankly--nothing at all! But if you'll follow on the fringe of a Division, marching with the hangers-on and officers' servants--you'll get many a scrap of useful news and many a meaty bone of valuable information tossed to you day by day. And even with the rear of the Army Corps you elect to stick to, you'll sup your fill of raw-head and bloody bones--take the assurance from me. Will you--with the advice?"

The great man was so unassuming in his kindness that the little one hardly grasped the full extent of it, even as he said, blinking as though a cinder of the Lower Rhineland Railroad had got into his eye:

"Yes, sir, and thank you! I shall never forget how good you've been to me!" and got reply:

"You've no business to be here, boyo, but since you are, more by luck than grace, use your eyes and stuff your memory with things worth keeping. Now as my time is precious,--is there anything more you want to know?"

"Only one thing.... I have been puzzled by an--an incident that happened to a--fellow in my own position." P. C. Breagh boggled horribly: "Was regularly set on getting to the Front--hadn't a notion how to set about it--when he--accidentally--managed to get hold of a--kind of official authorization. An informal pass, certifying the bearer as trustworthy--written and signed by Count Bismarck himself...."

"And that wasn't half bad," the Doctor said, knocking the ash off the huge cigar, "for a beginner pretty well, it seems to me!"

Said P. C. Breagh:

"He was tremendously elated at having got the paper. It seemed to smooth away every difficulty. But later, when he found himself in touch with Prussian Army men--they,--not only the gentlemen privates qualifying for commissions, but the common rankers,--dropped him like a hot potato once they knew! And--I'd like to know the reason why they cut me--I mean him?--because they supposed him to belong to the Secret Intelligence Department? '_A spy is--a spy! Excuse me from further conversation!_' His mouth twisted wryly, repeating the hateful words.

"I--understand." The Doctor stroked his beard. "And previously this young Englishman and the rank-and-file of the Guard Infantry"--P. C. Breagh kept as straight an upper-lip as was possible--"had chatted together upon friendly terms?"

"That was it. He had got on splendidly with them--one fellow especially. And--it hurt, being suddenly sent to Coventry!..."

"And does it strike you"--there was infinite sagacity in the clear brown eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses, "that if you had been chatting freely with a supposed equal, about your own position, prospects, and opinions, you would have 'dropped him like a hot potato' if you had suspected him of being commissioned to sound you for French sympathies, predilections, and so forth--on the eve of hostilities with France?"

A light broke in upon the darkness in which Carolan had groped. His eyes became circular, and his mouth shaped for a whistle. He exploded:

"Oh, hang it! I never thought of anything so--so beastly.... I wondered why Valverden shied, supposing me a Secret Information agent, when the Army has shoals of 'em.... But that Government should set such fellows sniffing at the heels of the Army--of course I never thought of that. It's not--cricket, is it, sir?"

The Doctor's hearty laugh pulled round the heads of a breakfasting party of officers not far off. He said, lowering his voice:

"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.