The rabbi was still smiling, as if he was thinking: “As for me, I remain.”
M. Gilbert made a sign. Commands rang out, and everybody stood at the salute.
FIGURES
No, my dear fellow, the war hasn’t changed everybody.
You didn’t know M. Perrier-Langlade?
He was what we should call a great organiser—a man who might, for instance, hit upon a spot where everything was going on all right, and everyone knew his job and was busy at it. But to M. Perrier-Langlade, who had very original views as to what was practical, everything was going quite wrong. Objects had at once to be moved from their places and jobs had to be exchanged. He walked with a stick in his right hand—his working tool—which he waved like a fencer or an orchestral conductor: he tapped everybody with this annoying stick, and commands fell from him like hail from a cloud. One works-section which his genius had reorganised was several weeks before it could be set going again with anything like its old smoothness. M. Perrier-Langlade had ideas: and that is an event of momentous importance. For ordinary mortals, you know, can never pretend to ideas: these are the preserve of the great. And the height of M. Perrier-Langlade’s ingenuity was to think that the suggestions we had all been wanting to work out were entirely his own. But that again did not lead to efficiency; for this rare mind was ever open to the latest thing in ideas—showing, let us admit, a very generous disposition. He bent to every gust of wind. He was indeed so unpractical that his sense of the relation between thought and action was of the haziest. But that of course is the penalty of an exalted position, and in other respects M. Perrier-Langlade was a great organiser.
He loved figures. Let us do him this justice: he handled them with the freedom of an expert. He saw in them a deep meaning which always escaped our unmathematical minds.
M. Perrier-Langlade I had only seen from a distance—and on rare occasions; but at last I was to talk to him. What am I saying!—I am presuming a great deal: you know what my rank is—well, then, I was at last to be admitted to the presence of M. Perrier-Langlade, to hear him discourse, to profit by the kind of education which the most insignificant of his utterances and movements were able to bestow.
It occurred last winter, during the weeks of intense cold. For a fortnight it had been blowing—a sharp, despairing, cold east wind.
The cold and the wind had given rise to an epidemic of fires on the front. The little stoves had been stuffed to their fullest capacity, and they crackled and smoked convulsively, and the corners of sheds sometimes caught their fever. A flame stuck its nose outside: the wind snapped at it, twisted, stretched it, swelled it like a sail, and most often it cost five or six thousand francs in wood, paper, canvas, and other materials. When the Germans saw it happening within gunshot distance, they despatched a few explosives with the charitable object of helping on its sinister designs. It’s what you must expect, you know. You either make or you don’t make war. And the miserable world has made it—there’s no shadow of doubt about that.