the idea of a military peacock, a peacock who was carrying his
tail spread out on to his breast. He had cold, gentle, blue eyes, and
the scar from a sword-cut, which he had received in the war with
Austria; he was said to be an honorable man, as well as a brave officer.

The captain, a short, red-faced man, who was tightly girthed in at the
waist, had his red hair cropped quite close to his head, and in certain
lights he almost looked as if he had been rubbed over with phosphorus.
He had lost two front teeth one night, though he could not quite
remember how, and this made him speak so that he could not always be
understood, and he had a bald patch on the top of his head, which made
him look rather like a monk, with a fringe of curly, bright, golden hair
round the circle of bare skin.

The commandant shook hands with him, and drank his cup of coffee (the
sixth that morning), at a draught, while he listened to his
subordinate's report of what had occurred; and then they both went to
the window, and declared that it was a very unpleasant outlook. The
major, who was a quiet man, with a wife at home, could accommodate
himself to everything; but the captain, who was rather fast, who was in
the habit of frequenting low resorts, and who was much given to women,
was mad at having been shut up for three months in the compulsory
chastity of that wretched hole.

There was a knock at the door, and when the commandant said: "_Come
in_," one of their automatic soldiers appeared, and by his mere presence
announced that breakfast was ready. In the dining-room, they met three
other officers of lower rank: a lieutenant, Otto von Grossling, and two
sub-lieutenants, Fritz Scheunebarg, and Baron von Eyrick, a very short,
fair-haired man, who was proud and brutal towards men, harsh towards
prisoners, and as violent as a rifle.

Since he had been in France, his comrades had called him nothing but
Mademoiselle Fifi. They had given him that nickname on account of his
dandified style and small waist, which looked as if he wore stays, of
his pale face, on which his budding moustache scarcely showed, and on
account of the habit he had acquired of employing the French expression,
_fi, fi donc_, which he pronounced with a slight whistle, when he wished
to express his sovereign contempt for persons or things.

The dining-room of the chateau was a magnificent long room, whose fine
old mirrors, that were cracked by pistol bullets, and whose Flemish