Lorraine

"No—er—the fact is, I'm not doing much newspaper work now," said Jack.

Grahame was puzzled but bland.

"Tell us, Monsieur Grahame, of what you saw in the Spicheren," said Lorraine. "Is it a very bad defeat? I am sure it cannot be. Of course, France will win, sooner or later; nobody doubts that."

Before Grahame could manufacture a suitable reply—and his wit was as quick as his courtesy—a door opened and Madame de Morteyn entered, sad-eyed but smiling.

Jack jumped up and asked leave to present Mr. Grahame, and the old lady received him very sweetly, insisting that he should make the Château his home as long as he stayed in the vicinity.

A few moments later she went away with Lorraine and her maid, and Jack and Archibald Grahame were left together to sip their Moselle and smoke some very excellent cigars that Jack found in the library.

"Mr. Grahame," said Jack, diffidently, "if it would not be an impertinent question, who is going to run away in this campaign?"

Grahame's face fell; his sombre glance swept the beautiful room and rested on a picture—the "Battle of Waterloo."

"It will be worse than that," he said, abruptly. "May I take one of these cigars? Oh, thank you."

Jack's heart sank, but he smiled and passed a lighted cigar-lamp to the other.

"My judgment has been otherwise," he said, "and what you say troubles me."

"It troubles me, too," said Grahame, looking out of the dark window at the watery clouds, ragged, uncanny, whirling one by one like tattered witches across the disk of a misshapen moon.

After a silence Jack relighted his half-burned cigar.

"Then it is invasion?" he asked.

"Yes—invasion."

"When?"

"Now."

"Good heavens! the very stones in the fields will rise up!"

"If the people did so too it might be to better purpose," observed Grahame, dryly. Then he emptied his glass, flicked the ashes from his cigar, and, sitting erect in his chair, said, "See here, Marche, you and I are accustomed to this sort of thing, we've seen campaigns and we have learned to judge dispassionately and, I think, fairly accurately; but, on my honour, I never before have seen the beginning of such a tempest—never! You say the very stones will rise up in the fields of France. You are right. For the fields will be ploughed with solid shot, and the shells will sow the earth with iron from the Rhine to the Loire. Good Lord, do these people know what is coming over the frontier?"

"Prussians," said Jack.

"Yes, Prussians and a few others—Würtembergers, Saxons, Bavarians, men from Baden, from Hesse, from the Schwarzwald—from Hamburg to the Tyrol they are coming in three armies. I saw the Spicheren, I saw Wissembourg—I have seen and I know."

Presently he opened a fresh bottle, and, with that whimsical smile and frank simplicity that won whom he chose to win, leaned towards Jack and began speaking as though the younger man were his peer in experience and age:

"Shall I tell you what I saw across the Rhine? I saw the machinery at work—the little wheels and cogs turning and grinding and setting in motion that stupendous machine that Gneisenau patented and Von Moltke improved—the great Mobilization Machine! How this machine does its work it is not easy to realize unless one has actually watched its operation. I saw it—and what I saw left me divided between admiration and—well, damn it all!—sadness.

"You know, Marche, that there are three strata of fighting men in Germany—the regular army, the 'reserve,' and the Landwehr. It is a mistake into which many fall to believe that the reserve is the rear of the regular army. The war strength of a regiment is just double its peace strength, and the increment is the reserve. The blending of the two in time of war is complete; the medalled men of 1866 and of the Holstein campaign, called up from the reserve, are welded into the same ranks with the young soldiers who are serving their first period of three years. It is an utter mistake to think of the Prussian army or the Prussian reserves as a militia like yours or ours. The Prussian reserve man has three years active service with his colours to point back to. Have ours? The mobilization machine grinds its grinding in this wise. The whole country is divided into districts, in the central city of each of which are the headquarters of the army corps recruited from that district. Thence is sent forth the edict for mobilization to the towns, the villages, and the quiet country parishes. From the forge, from the harvest, from the store, from the school-room, blacksmiths, farmers, clerks, school-masters drop everything at an hour's notice.

"The contingent of a village is sent to headquarters. On the route it meets other contingents until the rendezvous is reached. And then—the transformation! A yokel enters—a soldier leaves. The slouch has gone from his shoulders, his chest is thrown forward, his legs straightened, his chin 'well off the stock,' his step brisk, his carriage military. They are tough as whip-cord, sober, docile, and terribly in earnest. They are orderly, decent, and reputable. They need no sentries, and none are placed; they never get drunk, they are not riotous, and the barrack gates are never infested by those hordes of soldiers' women."

He paused and puffed at his cigar thoughtfully.

"They are such soldiers as the world has not yet seen. Marching? I saw them striding steadily forward with the thermometer at eighty-five in the shade, with needle-gun, heavy knapsack, eighty rounds of ammunition, huge great-coat, camp-kettle, sword, spade, water-bottle, haversack, and lots of odds and ends dangling about them, with perhaps a loaf or two under one arm. Sunstroke? No. Why? Sobriety. No absinthe there, Mr. Marche."

"We beat those men at Saarbrück," said Jack.

Grahame laughed good-humouredly.

"At Saarbrück, when war was declared, the total German garrison consisted of a battalion of infantry and a regiment of Uhlans. Frossard and his whole corps were looking across at Saarbrück over the ridges of the Spicheren, and nobody had the means of knowing what everybody knows now, the reason, so discreditable to French organization, which prevented him from blowing out of his path the few pickets and patrols, and invading the territory which had its frontier only nominally guarded. I was in Saarbrück at the time, and I had the pleasure of dodging shells there, too. Why, we were all asking each other if it were possible that the Frenchmen did not know the weakness of the land. Our Uhlans and infantry were manipulated dexterously to make a battalion look like a brigade; but we had an army corps in front of us. We held the place by sheer impudence."

"I know it," said Jack; "it makes me ill to think of it."

"It ought to make Frossard ill! Had a French army of invasion pushed on through Saint-Johann on the 2d of August and marched rapidly into the interior, the Germans could not possibly have concentrated their scattered regiments, and it is my firm conviction that Napoleon would have seen the Rhine without having had to fight a pitched battle. Well, Marche, I drink to neither one side nor the other, but—here's to the men with backbones. Prosit!"

They laughed and clinked glasses. Grahame finished his bottle, rose, politely stifled a yawn, and looked humourously at Jack.

"There are two beds in my room; will you take one?" said the young fellow.

"Thank you, I will," said Grahame, "and as soon as you please, my dear fellow."

So Jack led the way and ushered the other into a huge room with two beds, seemingly lost in distant diagonal corners. Grahame promptly kicked off his boots, and sat down on his bed.

"I saw a funny thing in Saarbrück," he said. "It was right in the midst of a cannonade—the shells were smashing the chimneys on the Hotel Hagen and raising hell generally. And right in the midst of the whole blessed mess, cool as a cucumber, came sauntering a real live British swell with a coat adorned with field-glasses and girdle and a dozen pockets, an eye-glass, a dog that seemed dearer to him than life, and a drawl that had not been perceptibly quickened by the French cannon. He-aw-had been going eastward somewhere to-aw-Constantinople, or Saint-Petersburg, or-aw-somewhere, when he-aw-heard that it might be amusing at Saarbrück. A shell knocked a cart-load of tiles around his head, and he looked at it through his eye-glass. Marche, I never laughed so in my life. He's a good fellow, though—he's trotting about with the Hohenzollern Regiment now, and, really, I miss him. His name is Hesketh—"

"Not Sir Thorald?" cried Jack.

"Eh?—yes, that's the man. Know him?"

"A little," said Jack, laughing, and went out, bidding Graham good-night, and promising to have him roused at dawn.

"Aren't you going to turn in?" called Grahame, fearful of having inconvenienced Jack in his own quarters.

"Yes," said the young fellow. "I won't wake you—I'll be back in an hour." And he closed the door, and went down-stairs.

For a few moments he stood on the cool terrace, listening to the movement of the host below; and always the tramp of feet, the snort of horses, and the metallic jingle of passing cannon filled his ears.

The big cuirassier sentinel had been joined by two more, all of the Hundred-Guards. Jack noticed their carbines, wondering a little to see cuirassiers so armed, and marvelling at the long, slender, lance-like bayonets that were attached to the muzzles.

Presently he went into the house, and, entering the smoking-room, met his aunt coming out.

"Jack," she said, "I am a little nervous—the Emperor is still in the dining-room with a crowd of officers, and he has just sent an aide-de-camp to the Château de Nesville to summon the marquis. It will be most awkward; your uncle and he are not friendly, and the Marquis de Nesville hates the Emperor."

"Why did the Emperor send for him?" asked Jack, wondering.

"I don't know—he wishes for a private interview with the marquis. He may refuse to come—he is a very strange man, you know."

"Then, if he is, he may come; that would be stranger still," said Jack.

"Your uncle is not well, Jack," continued Madame de Morteyn; "he is quite upset by being obliged to entertain the Emperor. You know how all the Royalists feel. But, Jack, dear, if you could have seen your uncle it would have been a lesson in chivalry to you which any young man could ill afford to miss—he was so perfectly simple, so proudly courteous—ah, Jack, your uncle is one in a nation!"