The Last Shot | Page 7

a bunch of flowers."
"Do! What fun!" she cried, as the car started.
"The field-marshal was Partow, their chief of staff?" Westerling asked.
"Yes," said Mrs. Galland. "I remember when he was a young infantry
officer before the last war, before he had won the iron cross and
become so great. He was not of an army family--a doctor's son, but
very clever and skilful."
"Getting a little old for his work!" remarked Westerling. "But
apparently he is keen enough to take a personal interest in anything
new."
"Wasn't it thrilling and--and terrible!" Marta exclaimed.
"Yes, like war at our own door again," replied Mrs. Galland, who knew
war. She had seen war raging on the pass road. "Lanstron, the young
man said his name was," she resumed after a pause. "No doubt the

Lanstrons of Thorbourg. An old family and many of them in the army."
"The way he refused to give in--that was fine!" said Marta.
Westerling, who had been engrossed in his own thoughts, looked up.
"Courage is the cheapest thing an army has! You can get hundreds of
young officers who are glad to take a risk of that kind. The thing is,"
and his fingers pressed in on the palm of his hand in a pounding gesture
of the forearm, "to direct and command--head work--organization!"
"If war should come again--" Marta began. Mrs. Galland nudged her. A
Brown never mentioned war to an officer of the Grays; it was not at all
in the accepted proprieties. But Marta rushed on: "So many would be
engaged that it would be more horrible than ever."
"You cannot make omelets without breaking eggs," Westerling
answered with suave finality.
"I wonder if the baron ever said that!" Marta recollected that it was a
favorite expression of the fat, pompous little man. "It sounds like the
baron, at all events."
Westerling did not mind being likened to the baron. It was a
corroboration of her prophecy. The baron must have been a great leader
of men in his time.
"The aeroplane will take its place as an auxiliary," he went on, his mind
still running on the theme of her prophecy, which the meeting with
Lanstron had quickened. "But war will, as ever, be won by the bayonet
that takes and holds a position. We shall have no miracle victories,
no--"
There he broke off. He did not accompany Mrs. Galland and Marta
back to the house, but made his adieus at the garden-gate.
"I'm sure that I shall never marry a soldier!" Marta burst out as she and
her mother were ascending the steps.

"No?" exclaimed Mrs. Galland with the rising inflection of a placid
scepticism that would not be drawn into an argument. Another of
Marta's explosions! It was not yet time to think of marriage for her. If it
had been Mrs. Galland would not have been so hospitable to Colonel
Westerling. She would hardly have been, even if the colonel had been
younger, say, of Captain Lanstron's age. Though an officer was an
officer, whether of the Browns or the Grays, and, perforce, a gentleman
to be received with the politeness of a common caste, every beat of her
heart was loyal to her race. Her daughter's hand was not for any Gray.
Young Lanstron certainly must be of the Thorbourg Lanstrons, she
mused. A most excellent family! Of course, Marta would marry an
officer. It was the natural destiny of a Galland woman. Yet she was
sometimes worried about Marta's whimsies. She, too, could wonder
what Marta would be like in five years.

II
TEN YEARS LATER
Does any man of power know whither the tendencies of his time are
leading him, or the people whom he leads whither they are being led?
Had any one of these four heroes of the Grays in their heavy gilt frames
divined what kind of a to-morrow his day was preparing? All knew the
pass of La Tir well, and if all had not won decisive battles they would
have been hung in the outer office or even in the corridors, where a line
of half-forgotten or forgotten generals crooked down the stairways into
the oblivion of the basement. That unfortunate one whom the first
Galland had driven through the pass was quite obscured in darkness.
He would soon be crowded out to an antique shop for sale as an
example of the portrait art of his period.
The privileged quartet on that Valhalla of victories, the walls of the
chief of staff's room, personified the military inheritance of a great
nation; their names shone in luminous letters out of the thickening
shadows of the past, where those of lesser men grew dimmer as their
generations receded into history. He in the steel corselet, with high

cheek-bones, ferret, cold eyes,