The Last Shot | Page 8

XIV. curls, whose intrigues won for her husband command of the army, for another province? It was whispered, too, that the military glory of him of the Marshal Ney physiognomy was due to the good fortune of a senile field-marshal for an opponent. But no matter. These gentlemen had seen the enemy fly. They had won. Therefore, they were the supermen of sagas who incarnate a people's valor.
The Browns gratified their own sense of superiority, in turn, by admiration of the supermen who had vanquished the Gray generals consigned to the oblivion of the basement. In their staff building, the first Galland occupied a prominent position in the main hall; while in the days of Marta's old baron heroes did not have their portraits painted for want of painters, and the present nations had consisted only of warring baronies and principalities.
They must have been rather lonely, these immortals in the Gray Valhalla, as His Excellency the chief of staff was seldom in his office. His Excellency had years, rank, prestige. The breast of his uniform sagged with the weight of his decorations. He appeared for the army at great functions, his picture was in the shop-windows. Hedworth Westerling, the new vice-chief of staff, was content with this arrangement. His years would not permit him the supreme honor. This was for a figurehead, while he had the power.
His appointment to the staff ten years ago had given him the fields he wanted, the capital itself, for the play of his abilities. His vital energy, his impressive personality, his gift for courting the influences that counted, whether man's or woman's, his astute readiness in stooping to some measures that were in keeping with the times but not with army precedent, had won for him the goal of his ambition. He had passed over the heads of older men, whom many thought his betters, rather ruthlessly. Those who would serve loyally he drew around him; those who were bitter he crowded out of his way.
The immortals would have been still more lonely, or at least confused, in the adjoining room occupied by Westerling. There the walls were hung with the silhouettes of infantrymen, such as you see at manoeuvres, in different positions of firing, crouching in shallow trenches, standing in deep trenches, or lying flat on the stomach on level earth. Another silhouette, that of an infantryman running, was peppered with white points in arms and legs and parts of the body that were not vital, to show in how many places a man may be hit with a small-calibre bullet and still survive.
The immortals had small armies. Even the mustache and imperial had only three hundred thousand in the great battle of the last war. In this day of universal European conscription, if Westerling were to win it would be with five millions--five hundred thousand more than when he faced a young Brown officer over the wreck of an aeroplane--including the reserves; each man running, firing, crouching, as was the figure on the wall, and trying to give more of the white points that peppered the silhouette than he received.
Now Turcas, the assistant vice-chief of staff, and Bouchard, chief of the division of intelligence, standing on either side of Westerling's desk, awaited his decisions on certain matters which they had brought to his attention. Both were older than Westerling, Turcas by ten and Bouchard by fifteen years.
Turcas had been strongly urged in inner army circles for the place that Westerling had won, but his manner and his inability to court influence were against him A lath of a man and stiff as a lath, pale, with thin, tightly-drawn lips, quiet, steel-gray eyes, a tracery of blue veins showing on his full temples, he suggested the ascetic no less than the soldier, while his incisive brevity of speech, flavored now and then with pungent humor, without any inflection in his dry voice, was in keeping with his appearance. He arrived with the clerks in the morning and frequently remained after they were gone. His life was an affair of calculated units of time; his habits of diet and exercise all regulated for the end of service. His subordinates, whose respect he held by the power of his intellect, said that his brain never tired and he had not enough body to tire. He was one of the wheels of the great army machine and loved the work for its own sake too well to be embittered at being overshadowed by a younger man. As a master of detail Westerling regarded him as an invaluable assistant, with certain limitations, which were those of the pigeonhole and the treadmill.
As for Bouchard, nature had meant him to be a wheel-horse. He had never had any hope of being chief of staff. Hawk-eyed, with a great beak