e blare of
a trumpet disturbed his reveries, reveries which were apt to rankle until
among his satellites went the word that the Eater-of-men was possessed by
the demon once more.

After he had elegantly finished a small cup of cafe cognac and a
cigarette, Sergeant Schultz strutted up, saluted, and at a nod from zu
Pfeiffer handed a document to the Kommandant, a roster of the chiefs who
had submitted with the approximate number of their followers. Officially
there were five chiefs with some six thousand men who had nominally
accepted the new ruler, each one of whom had to leave as hostage for his
fidelity a son, who lived under guard in the village beneath the guns.

Zu Pfeiffer needed the extra companies and white men to establish stations
at various points with the object of gradually extending the sphere of
military occupation. Zu Pfeiffer left nothing, as far as he could foresee,
to chance; his maxim was to conserve his force to the utmost, to attain
his objective at the least possible cost in men and material. The policy
of terrorisation was based on the reasoning that eventually
schrecklichkeit saved both the conqueror and the conquered bloodshed and
trouble; for if the enemy were not so impressed with the fact that all
resistance was utterly useless, he would resort to the sporadic risings
which would entail more slaughter on both sides. Zu Pfeiffer, acting on
the teachings of the German masters, sought to make war psychologically as
well as militarily, economically as well as geographically. Hence his
dramatic step in the overthrow of the idol in person, and the care with
which he planned to impress each chief and native with his omnipotence and
magic. This system of the application of political science as well as of
military science, of course, was sound, save for a temperamental error:
the lack of sufficient imagination to realize the unknown quantity of
chance, the inevitable mistake of military scientists who are loath to
admit the artist to their counsels, exemplified by men of genius, such as
Napoleon and Leonardo da Vinci, who were both mathematicians and artists.

In zu Pfeiffer's case, as in others of his type, the motivating principle
was not bourgeois greed of material gain for himself; gain he could afford
to despise in his wealth; such would have been contrary to the code of a
gentleman. While he had not hesitated for a moment to destroy his rival,
Birnier, he would not touch with one finger any of