chateau of the
governor of a French province; and that the deep-eyed, white-fleeced,
bull-voiced old man who sat just opposite was not the commander of
sundry hundreds of thousands of fighting men with guns in their hands,
but surely was no more and no less than the elderly lord of the manor,
who, having a fancy for regimentals, had put on his and had pinned some
glittering baubles on his coat and then had invited a few of his friends
and neighbors in for a simple dinner on this fine evening of the young
autumn.

Yet we knew that already the war had taken toll of nearly every man in
uniform who was present about this board. General von Heeringen's two
sons, both desperately wounded, were lying in field hospitals--one in
East Prussia, the other in northern France not many miles from where we
were. His second in command had two sons--his only two sons--killed in
the same battle three weeks before. When, a few minutes earlier, I had
heard this I stared at him, curious to see what marks so hard a stroke
would leave on a man. I saw only a grave middle-aged gentleman, very
attentive to the consul who sat beside him, and very polite to us all.

Prince Scharmberg-Lippe, whom we had passed driving away from the
Prefecture in his automobile as we drove to it in ours, was the last of
four brothers. The other three were killed in the first six weeks of
fighting. Our own companion, Captain Mannesmann, heard only the day
before, when we stopped at Hirson--just over the border from Belgium--
that his cousin had won the Iron Cross for conspicuous courage, and
within three days more was to hear that this same cousin had been sniped
from ambush during a night raid down the left wing.

Nor had death been overly stingy to the members of the Staff itself. We
gathered as much from chance remarks. And so, as it came to be eight
o'clock, I caught myself watching certain vacant chairs at our table and
at the two smaller tables in the next room with a strained curiosity.

One by one the vacant chairs filled up. At intervals the door behind me
would open and an officer would clank in, dusted over with the sift of
the French roads. He would bow ceremoniously to his chief and then to
the company generally, slip into an unoccupied chair, give an order over
his shoulder to a soldier-waiter, and at once begin to eat his dinner
with the air of a man who has earned it. After a while there was but
one place vacant at our table; it was next