The Man of Iron

by Richard Dehan

LXVI

Versailles, always a town of martial music. Royal or Imperial fanfares of brass, and welcoming salutes of deep-voiced cannon, had been—since a day early in October, when the girdle of iron and steel had closed about Paris—resonant with Prussian bugle calls and throbbing with Prussian drums.

From dusk to dawn the electric search ray now mounted on the summit of the Arc de Triomphe, as the broad wheeling beams from Vanves, Issy, Mont Valérien, and the whole ring of forts that guarded the great, magnificent, menaced capital, whitened earth and sky in token of the unsleeping vigilance of the Parisians, and their ceaseless expectation of a German night attack, even as the long indicatory fingers of brilliant blue-white light, stretching from the ridge of St. Cloud and from the heights of Clamart, from Marly, Vanesse, Epinal, Noiseau, Choisy, and Bourget—no less than the formidable battery of big guns on the Place d'Armes, with their muzzles placed so as to sweep the avenues radiating from the Château—betokened the invaders' anticipations of yet another sortie.

Ah, why had there been no sortie earlier than that abortive effort toward Chevilly on the thirtieth of September? There were, at the beginning of the Investment, no more than 180,000 German troops of the Crown Prince's Army encircling Paris. Up to the tenth of October what a triumphant turning of the tables might have been effected by a vigorous sally, effectively carried out!

Huge German forces were engaged in the sieges of Metz and Strasburg, Belfort and Soissons, Schelsstadt and Verdun. General von der Tann was engaged with the Army of the Loire near Artenay. The stubborn resistance of Orleans kept an Army Corps of the Red Prince extremely busy. The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, with the right wing of the Prussians' covering army south of Paris, was actively engaged with the French at Dreux and Le Mans.

And there were 55,000 troops of the Line within the walls of Paris; there were 105,000 Mobiles—not fighters to be sneezed at. There were 30,000 National Guards—perhaps too soft in muscle and well-developed in the region of the corporation to be very effective—pitted against such seasoned warriors as Schmidt, Klaus, Kraus, and Klein. But add to these, 25,000 Marines, Douaniers, Gardes-Champêtres and Forestiers, and there you had a force of 485,000 trained Frenchmen, asking nothing better than to sally out by St. Denis, Villejuif, and Charenton, cut the line of investment north, clear the blocked road south, effect a junction with the Army of the Loire, destroy the Warlock's subtlest combinations, promptly raise the Siege of Paris, and deliver France from the invader.

What was Trochu, Military Governor of Paris, thinking about? What were MM. Ducrot and Vinoy doing, to delay until the garrison and fortress of Strasburg were surrendered, until the Capitulation of Metz on the twenty-seventh of October, and the fall of Verdun on the seventh of November, had released the main Army of the Red Prince for the strengthening of that steel and iron girdle that lay outside the defiant ring of forts? The tentative sally of the twenty-ninth of November was foredoomed to failure from the outset. No wonder Trochu and his plans furnished hungry Parisians with abundant food for mockery, when the Specter of Famine brooded over the City on the Seine. Narrow-eyed and tight-lipped, cold, sinister, and mysterious, the man was a mere bag of wind, when all was said and done.

Meanwhile, the great bronze muzzle-loaders of the Forts of Mont Valérien, Issy, Montrouge, Vanves, and Charenton, St. Denis and its twin sisters, roared at intervals throughout each day, raining common shell, chain shot, solid ball, and shrapnel into the lines of the investing host. But the trenching and battery-making went on steadily; the high-walled farmyards and gardens of country houses in the environs were being converted into emplacements for artillery of the largest caliber. Already several of Krupp's stupendous siege-howitzers, with muzzles cocked at angles of forty-five, demonstrated the possibilities of the bombardment for which the German Press daily shrieked.

"Not for the reduction of the military defenses, but to produce by the exercise of sheer terror, bodily suffering, and destruction of private property, such an effect upon the unarmed multitudes—subjected to a hail of incendiary shells within their encircling ring of walls and fortresses—as to compel the chiefs of the Government and garrison to come to terms at command of the popular voice."

Thus the leader-writers of the Berliner Zeitung and other journals—peaceful-looking, stout men, with full beards and short-sighted eyes behind spectacles—wrote, as though they longed to dip their quills in newly shed French blood.

"It is sad, very sad," said the Warlock, vexed for once, "that the siege trains conveying more than 100,000 hundred-weights of ammunition cannot be brought over a single line of rails with sufficient quickness to gratify these excellent gentlemen.... Yet for the present we can do no more than invest the place and wait for the means of attacking it. The process of starving out is, as the mighty fortress of Metz has shown, a very slow one. But as the loud voices of one hundred and one guns have already proclaimed to our Berliners—the empty stomach triumphs over the most obstinate resistance. We now require an army to guard 300,000 prisoners of War! Since the Babylonian Captivity the world has not heard the like! And yet the chamber prattlers and the journalists accuse us of tardiness. Already from several anonymous quarters have reproachful or ridiculing letters reached me. One even contains a villainous comic verse, which I am told is sung in the music halls in Berlin."

And the great tactician read, with the expression of one who savors the bouquet of sulphureted hydrogen or asafetida:

"Guter Moltke, gehst so stumm?
Immer um das Ding herum:
Bester Moltke, sei nicht dumm,
Mach' doch endlich: Bumm, bumm, bumm!"

And he tore up the rude verses in indignation and threw them into the waste-paper basket of the Prussian Great Headquarters at the Palais de Justice, on the right of the Prefecture, and strode downstairs, too much out of tune to hum.

To have been called slow and stupid, and affectionately urged to hurry up and make an end of things with bang, bang, banging!... He was almost glad that his departed Mary was not alive to know of the humiliation inflicted by these scurrilous rhymesters on her beloved old man.

It was an unfortunate moment chosen by a new junior assistant aide-de-camp upon the Chieftain's personal staff, for tendering a request for leave of absence until the following day.

"What, what?... You have barely entered upon your new and important duties, the wine in which your comrades of the Guard pledged you is still bubbling in your veins.... Is it another congratulatory banquet, or a supper tête-à-tête ... Am I right?" The Warlock's keen glance glittered between his lashless eyelids at the tall, fair-headed young officer standing rigidly before him. "Prut! that reminds me!..." he added. "In whose company did I see you lunching only yesterday at one of the little round tables in the ante-chamber of the dining salle at the Hôtel des Réservoirs?"

Said Valverden, his blue eyes meeting the sharp gray glance with a charming candor:

"Excellency, the lady is the recently married wife of a Roumanian noble. Her name, if Your Excellency desires to know it, is Madame de Straz."

Said the Field Marshal with an acute look and a dry intonation:

"In Berlin, not so long ago, she called herself something else!"

Valverden answered, with a conscious side glance at the twist of silver braid that marked his rank of Captain:

"Her first husband was killed in action with his regiment at Gravelotte. She is now legally married to M. de Straz."

Moltke took snuff and said laconically:

"She has not taken long in changing her state."

Valverden began, rather lamely:

"Madame had virtually been separated from M. de Bayard——"

Like a bayonet thrust came the retort:

"Since your Cousin Max ran away with her from Paris, fourteen years ago! The woman is an adventuress, whom you will be wise to avoid."

Valverden answered, with his disarming look of frankness:

"Your Excellency, I was applied to by the person you mention for advice in a matter of serious urgency. Madame de Straz has unhappily lost all trace of the whereabouts of her daughter, Mademoiselle de Bayard.... She has entreated me to solicit for her an audience with Your Excellency, in the hope that you might aid her to recover the young girl."

The War Eagle croaked, ruffling his feathers with indignation:

"Does the woman suppose that I have got the unfortunate young creature in my pocket? Or does she suspect you of knowing where she is to be found?"

Valverden said, hastily and flushing:

"Your Excellency, upon my honor, I have never seen the girl!"

The Warlock tucked away his snuff box and pointed the terrible withered finger at the left side of the young man's bosom, where hung upon a broad black, white-bordered ribbon a cross of dark metal, edged with a narrow line of silver, and bearing a crown and the letter "W." A terrible grating voice said, and with all his cool effrontery Valverden quailed at the words and the stern look that accompanied them:

"To you, young man, upon whom the Second Class of the Iron Cross has been conferred by the hand of your Crown Prince, for daring and gallantry upon the war field—no more I say than this: Do nothing to disgrace the wearer of that decoration—which should be sacred in your eyes...." He added: "The leave you ask is granted. Until twelve noon to-morrow, Captain von Herding will take your place."

And His Excellency the Field Marshal returned his aide-de-camp's salute and wheeled sharply, and had taken a couple of strides across the vestibule, when he halted to ask:

"This girl you speak of—how came she lost?..."

Said Valverden, hesitating slightly:

"According to Madame her mother, the ladies were on a visit to Rethel during the time when the Prince Imperial of the French was staying at the Prefecture. They had obtained an audience of the Prince.... Madame de Straz was prevented by illness from accompanying her daughter.... The young lady—Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard—has never been seen since."

The lean neck and spare features of the greatest of strategists became suffused with indignant scarlet. He said:

"The mother is a trollop of the very first water. She took the girl to the Prefecture—why did she contrive an interview? She sends her up alone—she declares that she has never since seen her.... Pfui!... The affair, in my nostrils, fairly stinks of vulgar intrigue. Have no more to do with it—though the unlucky girl is no doubt to be pitied.... I will speak to His Excellency, Count Bismarck, who has agents in Rethel."

And he steamed across the marble vestibule of the great hall of the Palais de Justice, crossed the Place des Tribunaux, and vanished into the Prefecture, over whose entrance hung the Hohenzollern banner and the Prussian standard, that was very soon to show a stripe of red beside the black and white....

For the hitherto recalcitrant States of Baden and Hesse had joined the Bund. The King of Saxony had signed,—Würtemburg would sign the treaty of Federation shortly. There were prospects of a definite settlement with the King of Bavaria. The ambition of the Man of Iron was shortly to be realized.... Bismarck was to rule a German Emperor!

You might have seen him, upon this bland November morning that had succeeded a night of shrieking northerly gusts and driving pelts of sleety rain, walking with the Count Hatzfeldt in the garden of the Tessier mansion in the Rue de Provence. The house immediately opposite had now been converted into a guard post. Sentries in the uniforms of the Green Jaegers were on duty at the gates. Over the principal entrance hung the black and white Prussian standard.

The sky was deep blue, with argosies of white clouds sailing toward the northeast. The leaves that yet remained upon the elms and poplars shone in the sunshine like newly minted gold. Those that the gale had stripped lay in wet drifts upon the grass and gravel, though the three oak trees on the pleasance yet retained their suits of crisping russet brown.

To the right, at the rear of the house, a young man servant was sweeping away the leaves that adhered to the narrow terrace of steps running round three sides of the building. The swish of his birch broom punctuated the sentences of the newspaper article being read by Hatzfeldt to his Chief.

It was the continuation of the article in the Berliner Zeitung that had roused the ire of the Warlock a little while before.

"Unanimously," it concluded, "and in the interests of Humanity, we demand that this measure be taken at once. We reprehend in the sternest terms, not only those military commanders who are in favor of procrastination. We cry in the ears of the Chancellor-and-Minister-President, Count Bismarck himself, who is credited with being the main factor in this policy of delay: Mene, mene, tekel upharsin!—'Thou art weighed in the balance, and found to want!'"

Said the Man of Iron to Hatzfeldt:

"Did I not know that my wife regards women who enter the lists of journalism as unsexed, and outcasts beyond the hope of redemption, I should be inclined to believe she had written this." He added: "I have often been accused of inhumanity, but to be reproached for an excess of tenderness is something quite new to me. How shall we reassure these excitable gentlemen? Buschlein"—he referred to his Press article-writer, the rotund author of the famous "Recollections"—"Buschlein shall write that he has authority from Count Bismarck to state that his universally credited predilections for slaughter have not been blunted by recent experiences, and that he much approves of the bombardment idea, but that he has no control over those high military functionaries who command His Majesty's investing forces, and is not accustomed to be consulted by them."

He spat and resumed:

"Private correspondents worry me to know whether I am really averse to the bombardment, and why I won't allow firing into the town? What pernicious rubbish! They will be blaming me next for all losses during the investment. Which are not small; for in little skirmishes, and during the short time occupied by those abortive sorties, we have lost more troops than we should have done had we regularly stormed the place."

He added, looking humorously at Hatzfeldt, whose handsome, débonnaire countenance invariably fell at any reference to a bombardment:

"By the way, another balloon has been taken with letters from Paris, some of which I have already read, and a Figaro of yesterday's date. It has been decreed by the French Government that all wine and provisions are to be taken away from private people, as the poorer classes have already begun to fricassee their dogs and pussy cats. So your American father-in-law will have to look out for his cellar—an excellently stocked one, as I have heard from you. And your wife's famous mouse-gray ponies will probably be made into cutlets—a pretty piece of intelligence for your next letter to Madame!"

"Ah!... for Heaven's sake, Your Excellency!" cried Hatzfeldt, with ruefully elevated eyebrows, "I implore you not to conjure up the image of my wife's indignation and despair. Every letter I receive from her begins and ends with her precious ponies."

The Minister appended:

"Her mother, father, and her brother, Henry, who is living at their estate of Petit Val, near Marly—I think you told me—being sandwiched in between the little beasts."

They were pacing the garden paths. The Chancellor had recently risen, and seemed inclined to be in a jesting mood. He continued, throwing away the butt of a finished cigar:

"I must be careful, or the Countess will send me no more pâté of pheasants, or sausages. Pray tell her, with my compliments, that both were excellently fresh and good.... Did you notice written on my table card that the Mayor of Versailles is to have a ten-minute interview before M. Thiers arrives at half-past twelve? If I have not polished off the Republican official before Thiers toddles up the doorsteps with his portfolio under his short arm, and his gold spectacles twinkling, engage him in conversation below here for an instant—do not send him up straightway to the torture cell." Thus the Minister had christened the small room adjoining his private apartment. He went on: "I do not want him to go down to Sèvres with his white flag and his escort, and meet Jules Favre with a string of tales about our orgies and revelings, of the enormous expense of which the Mayor is coming to complain."

"What insolence!" commented Hatzfeldt.

"It seems," continued the Minister, "that we all cost the town too much to keep, the chief offenders being the grand ducal and princely personages at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. Of course, one knows that the Tinsel Rabble eat and drink a great deal more than they require, and waste much more than they consume. But to a Frenchman, one cannot admit as much. So I shall tell the Mayor that he must apply to the French Government at Tours for permission to raise a substantial money loan, and as M. Thiers has only just come from there, he would naturally buttonhole the old gentleman if he encountered him. Which—as our plump, neatly shaved old Professor is as timid as a hare and as soft as a baby—would discompose him very horribly...." He continued: "He is dying to make peace with us, because there will soon be famine in Paris. Imagine how I caught him out when I told him yesterday: 'Monsieur, you have only visited the city for a few hours. We know better about the contents of its magazines than you do. They have ample provisions to last until the end of January....' What a look of incredulity! I had only been feeling his pulse, as it were.... His amazement told me what I most wanted to know. What a man to make a bargain about an armistice, an invalidy civilian, who cannot conceal his feelings! Who lets himself be put out of countenance and pumped!—actually pumped!"

He turned aside to cough and hawk and expectorate copiously.... "There!" he said, wiping his mustache vigorously with a large white cambric handkerchief. "You see what it is to have a stomach as sensitive as mine is.... That injustice done me in the Berliner Zeitung with reference to the bombardment has caused an overflow of bile, by which I was already incommoded. Thiers will be certain to remain closeted with me for two hours. He is nothing if not expansive and flowery, and redundant. I shall not be able to get on horseback before three o'clock, and we dine at six." He went on, punctuating the sentence with more coughs and hawkings: "And as our table is to be graced—tchah!—by a huge trout pasty, a love gift to the Chancellor of the—hah!—Confederation, from a Berlin restaurant keeper who throws into the bargain—ahah!—a cask of Vienna March beer and his photograph, taken with his wife and—brr'r!"

He turned aside and spat vigorously, before ending, resuming, as he used the big white handkerchief:

"One would desire to do justice to a gift so welcome.... More bile!... I spat like this half the night through.... Decidedly I am not as well as when we galloped along the highroads with the Great Headquarters Staff.... I have wondered: Do I eat too much? Does this sedentary life conduce to indigestion?" He spat again, and answered himself: "How can it be so, when I breakfast on a couple of eggs with dry toast, and a cup of tea without milk? I don't lunch—lunch is a mockery of a meal—but in the evening I make a hearty dinner. With beer and champagne in plenty, and wash all down with half a dozen cups of tea. Then I go to bed—as you know, never before midnight. There's a doze—and I waken up with my brain as bright as daylight—all sorts of things running through it, and my mouth full of this bitter—faugh!"

"Your Excellency will need a fresh handkerchief," said Hatzfeldt, slightly shuddering, as the Chancellor vigorously crumpled the soiled cambric into a ball. "Shall I send Your Excellency's servant to fetch another?"

"No, no! As it happens, I have sent Grams out. And Engelberg is busy. There is Madame Charles's factotum!" He called in French: "Hola, Jean Jacques! Approach, my brave young man!"

His full blue eyes, their whites now red-veined and biliously injected, had turned to where the strongly built young male servant was still sweeping the steps of the rear of the house. Cropped to the scalp, you saw the fellow attired in a well-worn morning jacket of striped linen, a blue waistcoat and tight blue cloth trousers, yellow piped at the side seams. Summoned by an imperative word and gesture, he knocked the damp leaves off his broom, stood it up against the side of the conservatory, and shambled to where the Chancellor was standing, muttering with a downcast air and a furtive, sulky look:

"Ouiche, Monseigneur?... What is it Monseigneur desires?"

Said the Minister, with a smile that curved the great mustache and showed the white, square teeth that a young man might have envied:

"Monseigneur desires that without delay the brave Jean Jacques would betake him to the kitchen, and desire Madame Charles Tessier of her goodness to favor Monseigneur with a clean handkerchief.... Perhaps two would be better.... Ask for two, Jean Jacques, and compel thy legs to rapid motion, for to croquer le marmot is not a favorite pastime with Monseigneur! Comprehend you?"

Jean Jacques replied in his extraordinary patois, with a bow of the clumsiest:

"Ouiche, Monseigneur!"

"De quel pays sont vous?" asked Hatzfeldt curiously.

Jean Jacques responded with sulky unwillingness:

"La Suisse, Monsieur!"

Hatzfeldt said, as the young man returned to the scene of his abandoned labors, picked up his broom, and went round the end of the conservatory toward the kitchen quarters:

"There are Frenchmen who call themselves Belgians or Swiss because they are too funky to fight!"

Said the Minister:

"Madame Charles Tessier, who knows all about this fellow, describes him as a native of Neufchâtel. Here she comes herself, bringing my handkerchiefs. Thank you a thousand times, Madame! But why inconvenience yourself?"

Madame Charles, whose black hair, heavily streaked with white, was crowned with a dreadful lace cap with lappets, parted in the middle, and brushed down in two old-fashioned festoons on either side of her haggard white wedge of a face, shrilled in her raucous voice that it was no trouble whatever.... The laundress's basket with Monseigneur's clean linen had but that moment come in.

Madame Charles wore a gray poplin gown of rich, stiff, antique material, trimmed with black gimp upon the gores, round the bottom of the expansive skirt, and upon the sleeves and waist. It had been discovered in a wardrobe belonging to the mother of M. Charles Tessier. She had on one of Madame's black silk aprons, a pair of her black silk mittens, and the black chenille net adorned with steel beads that confined her back hair had housed the iron gray curls of her respected mother-in-law. Over her narrow shoulders hung the inevitable white woolen shawl.

She curtsied deeply to the Chancellor and slightly to Count Hatzfeldt, and went on into the garden, and disappeared round the corner of the ivy-bordered path. Seen thus in the searching daylight, the elevation and forward thrust of the left shoulder that lent her gait its unpleasant peculiarity, and the curvature in the lower part of the spine were even more painfully apparent. It occurred to her as she moved away from the two men, whose eyes, reluctantly or curiously, were following her, that to ape this deformity so persistently might be to bring it in reality upon herself.

She shivered a little, despite the bland warmth of the November sunshine. Round the corner of the green glass conservatory, well out of sight of those who walked in the garden, Jean Jacques Potier was shivering, too.

When the Chancellor had coughed and spat and spat again, the knees of Jean Jacques had shaken beneath him. His heart had sunk like a leaden plummet, and the sweat of terror had started on his skin.

He was afraid—horribly afraid. Not for himself, but for another. There was no knowing. The thing he feared might happen at any time.

"Throw but a stone—the giant dies!..."

He could hear now the very voice in which she had added: "See you well, it is I who am going to throw that stone!"

He had expended all the eloquence he possessed with the object of turning Juliette from her purpose. He did not know whether he had succeeded. She would give him no promise. She was sphinxlike, inscrutable.... You could never feel sure that in the middle of the night there would not be a cry—and then a commotion of running feet upon the stairs, and then—the arrest, and the accusation. He had made up his mind to say, when that happened: "It was my doing. She knew nothing about it. It was I who put poison in the food of this man!"

Then he would be taken out and shot. It would be done instantly, whether the owner of the life that had been attempted died or got well. Perhaps the man would not die? He had an iron constitution and the frame of a Titan. But sometimes he looked weary and haggard and bilious. And when he spat as just now, and pulled wry mouths over the bitter stuff he expectorated, the heart of P. C. Breagh would sink to the pit of his stomach, and his legs would shake under him, as they were shaking now.