that some error might dishonour her....

She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating
minuteness of an impassioned woman's observation.

He said little, she remarked. He looked but little at the maps. The
tall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm of ideas,
conflicting ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting of the little
red, blue, black, and yellow pieces on the board, and wanted to draw the
commander's attention to this and that. Dubois listened, nodded, emitted
a word and became still again, brooding like the national eagle.

His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she could
not see his eyes; his moustache overhung the mouth from which those
words of decision came. Viard, too, said little; he was a dark man with
a drooping head and melancholy, watchful eyes. He was more intent upon
the French right, which was feeling its way now through Alsace to the
Rhine. He was, she knew, an old colleague of Dubois; he knew him better,
she decided, he trusted him more than this unfamiliar Englishman....

Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in profile;
these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered years ago. To
seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse to hurry--itself a
confession of miscalculation; by attention to these simple rules,
Dubois had built up a steady reputation from the days when he had been
a promising junior officer, a still, almost abstracted young man,
deliberate but ready. Even then men had looked at him and said: 'He
will go far.' Through fifty years of peace he had never once been found
wanting, and at manoeuvres his impassive persistence had perplexed and
hypnotised and defeated many a more actively intelligent man. Deep in
his soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery about the modern
art of warfare, the key to his career. And this discovery was that
NOBODY KNEW, that to act therefore was to blunder, that to talk was to
confess; and that the man who acted slowly and steadfastly and above all
silently, had the best chance of winning through. Meanwhile one fed
the men. Now by this same strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious
unknowns of the Central European command. Delhi might talk of a great
flank march through Holland, with all the British submarines and
hydroplanes and torpedo craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it;
Viard might crave for brilliance with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes,
an