ys. No more came.

"Come, general, let us be going!" urged the aide, touching his chief on
the arm.

"Yes, yes!" said Westerling hurriedly.

Francois, who had picked up the coat that had fallen from Westerling's
shoulders with his start at the buzzing, held it while his master thrust
his hands through the sleeves.

"And this is wiser," said the aide, unfastening the detachable insignia
of rank from the shoulders of the greatcoat. "It's wiser, too, that we
walk," he added.

"Walk? But my car!" exclaimed Westerling petulantly.

"I'm afraid that the car could not get through the press in the town,"
was the reply. "Walking is safer."

The absence in him of that quality which is the soldier's real glory,
the picture of this deserted leader, this god of a machine who had been
crushed by his machine, his very lack of stoicism or courage--all this
suddenly appealed to Marta's quick sympathies. They had once drunk tea
together.

"Oh, it was not personal! I did not think of myself as a person or of
you as one--only of principles and of thousands of others--to end the
killing--to save our country to its people! Oh, I'm sorry and,
personally, I'm horrible--horrible!" she called after him in a broken,
quavering gust of words which he heard confusedly in tragic mockery.

He made no answer; he did not even look around. Head bowed and hardly
seeing the path, he permitted the aide to choose the way, which lay
across the boundary of the Galland estate.

They had passed the stumps of the linden-trees and were in the vacant
lot on the other side, when something white fluttered toward him,
rustled by the breeze that carried it, and lay still almost at his feet.
He saw his own picture on the front page of a newspaper, with the
caption, "His Excellency, Field-Marshal Hedworth Westerling, Chief of
Staff of Our Victorious Army." He stared at the picture and the picture
stared at him as if they knew not each other. A racking shudder swept
through him. He turned his face with a kind of resolution, appealing in
its starkness, toward the battle and his glance rested on the battery
and the shattered regiment of infantry in the fields opposite the
Galland gate, under a canopy of shrapnel smoke, bravely holding their
ground.

"I should be there. That is the place for me!" he exclaimed with a trace
of his old forcefulness.

The aide's lips parted as if to speak in protest, but they closed in
silence, while a glance of deep human underst