"If they are apprised of our plan and are able to concentrate more artillery than our guns can silence, the losses will be demoralizing," he observed.
Westerling threw up his head, frowning down the objection.
"Suppose they amount to half the forces that we send in!" he exclaimed. "Isn't the position, which means the pass and the range, worth it?"
"Yes, if we both take and hold it; not if we fail," replied Turcas, quite unaffected by Westerling's manner.
"Failure is not in my lexicon!" Westerling shot back. "For great gains there must be great risks."
"We prepare for the movement, Your Excellency," answered Turcas.
It was a steel harness of his own will that Westerling wore, without admitting that it galled him, and he laid it off only in Marta's presence. With her, his growing sense of isolation had the relief of companionship. She became a kind of mirror of his egoism and ambitions. He liked to have her think of him as a great man unruffled among weaker men. In the quiet and seclusion of the garden, involuntarily as one who has no confidant speaks to himself, reserving fortitude for his part before the staff, while she, under the spell of her purpose, silently, with serene and wistfully listening eyes, played hers, he outlined how the final and telling blow was to be struck.
"We must and we shall win!" he kept repeating.
Through a rubber disk held to his ear in the closet of his bedroom a voice, tremulous with nervous fatigue, was giving Lanstron news that all his aircraft and cavalry and spies could not have gained; news worth more than a score of regiments; news fresh from the lips of the chief of staff of the enemy. The attack was to be made at the right of Engadir, its centre breaking from the redoubt manned by Fracasse's men.