He was not defrauded of his hope. No disagreeable sight ever again marred his pleasure when, with his favorite Havana between his teeth, he gazed past the long row of his subordinates out on the street. No one ever went by without casting a shy, deferential side-glance at the omnipotent director of battles, who sat there like any other ordinary human being, sipping his coffee, although he was the celebrated General X, unlimited master of hundreds of thousands of human lives, the man the papers liked to call the "Victor of ——." There was not a human being in the town whose fate he could not have changed with one stroke of his pen. There was nothing he could not promote or destroy as he saw fit. His good will meant orders for army supplies and wealth, or distinction and advancement; his ill will meant no prospects at all, or an order to march along the way that led to certain death.
Leaning back comfortably in the large wicker chair, a chair destined in all likelihood some day to become an object of historic interest, the Powerful One jested gaily with the wife of his adjutant. He pointed to the street, where the crowds surged in the brilliant sunshine, and said with a sort of satisfied, triumphant delight in his tone:
"Just look! I should like to show this picture to our pacifists, who always act as though war were nothing but a hideous carnage. You should have seen this hole in peace times. It was enough to put you to sleep. Why, the porter at the corner is earning more to-day than the biggest merchant used to earn before the war. And have you noticed the young fellows who come back from the front? Sunburnt, healthy and happy! Most of them before the war were employed in offices. They held themselves badly and were dissipated and looked cheesy. I assure you, the world has never been so healthy as it is now. But if you look at your newspapers, you read about a world-catastrophe, about a blood-drained Europe, and a whole lot of other stuff."
He raised his bushy white eyebrows until they reached the middle of his bulging forehead, and his small, piercing black eyes skimmed observantly over the faces of those present.
His Excellency's pronouncement was a suggestion to the others and was immediately taken up. At every table the conversation grew animated, the benefits of the war were told over, and the wits cracked jokes at the expense of the pacifists. There was not a single man in the whole assemblage who did not owe at least two blessings to the war: financial independence and such munificence of living as only much-envied money magnates have allotted to them in times of peace. Among this circle of people the war wore the mask of a Santa Claus with a bag full of wonderful gifts on his back and assignments for brilliant careers in his hand. To be sure here and there a gentleman was to be seen wearing a crêpe-band on his sleeve for a brother or a brother-in-law who, as officer, had seen that other aspect of the war, the Gorgon's face.
Yet the Gorgon's face was so far away, more than sixty miles in a bee-line, and an occasional excursion in its vicinity was an exciting little adventure, a brief titillation of the nerves. Inside an hour the automobile raced back to safety, back to the bath-tub, and you promenaded asphalt streets again in shining pumps. So, who would refrain from joining in the hymn of praise to His Excellency?
The mighty man contentedly listened a while longer to the babel of voices aroused by what he had said, then gradually sank back into his reflections, and gazed ahead of him seriously. He saw the sunbeams sifting through the thick foliage and glittering on the crosses and stars that covered the left half of his chest in three close rows. It was a magnificent and complete collection of every decoration that the rulers of four great empires had to bestow upon a man for heroism, contempt of death, and high merit. There was no honor left for the Victor of —— still to aspire to. And only eleven short months of war had cast all that at his feet. It was the harvest of but a single year of war. Thirty-nine years of his life had previously gone in the service in tedious monotony, in an eternal struggle with sordid everyday cares. He had worn himself out over all the exigencies of a petty bourgeois existence, like a poor man ashamed of his poverty, making pathetic efforts to conceal a tear in his clothes and always seeing the telltale hole staring out from under the covering. For thirty-nine years he had never swerved from disciplining himself to abstemiousness, and there was much gold on his uniform, but very little in his pocket. As a matter of fact, he had been quite ready for some time to quit. He was thoroughly tired of the cheap pleasure of tyrannizing over the young officers on the drill ground.
But then the miracle occurred! Over night the grouchy, obscure old gentleman changed into a sort of national hero, a European celebrity. He was "the Victor of ——!" It was like in a fairy tale, when the good fairy appears and frees the enchanted prince from his hideous disguise, and he emerges in his glowing youth, surrounded by knights and lackeys, and enters his magnificent castle.
To be sure the miracle had not brought the general the glow of youth. But it put elasticity into him. The eventful year had given him a shaking up, and his veins pulsed with the joy of life and the energy for work of a man in his prime. It was as a sovereign that he sat there in the shadow of the plane-trees, with good fortune sparkling on his chest and a city lying at his feet. Nothing, not a single thing, was lacking to make the fairy tale perfect.
In front of the coffee-house, guarded by two sturdy corporals, rested the great grey beast, with the lungs of a hundred horses in its chest, awaiting the cranking-up to rush its master off to his castle high above town and valley. Where were the days when, with his general's stripes on his trousers, he took the street-car to his home, befitting his station in life, a six-room apartment that was really a five-room apartment plus a closet? Where was all that? Centuries had given their noblest powers, generations had expended their artistic skill in filling the castle requisitioned for His Excellency, the Commander-in-Chief of the ——th Army, with the choicest treasure. Sun and time had done their best to mellow the dazzle of the accumulated wealth till it shone in subdued grandeur as through a delicate veil. Any man master in that house, who mounted those broad steps and shouted his wishes in those aristocratic rooms, necessarily felt like a king and could not take the war in any other way than as a glorious fairy tale.