“Gilbert,” he repeated, “do you understand?” Then he fell unconscious across the general's breast.
CHAPTER XXX. THE BEGINNING AND THE END.
“I gave—no matter what I gave—I win.”
The careful student will find in the back numbers of the Deutsche Rundschau, that excellent family magazine, the experiences of a German military doctor with the army of General von der Tann. The story is one touched by that deep and occasionally maudlin spirit of sentimentality which finds a home in hearts that beat for the Fatherland. Its most thrilling page is the description of the finding, by the narrator, of the body of a general officer during a sharp night engagement, across which body was lying a wounded cavalry colonel, who had evidently devoted himself to the defence of his comrade in arms.
The reminiscent doctor makes good use of such compound words as “brother-love” and “though-superior-in-rank-yet-comrade-in-arms-and-companions-in-death-affectionate,” which linguistic facility enables the German writer to build up as he progresses in his narration words of a phenomenal calibre, and bowl the reader over, so to speak, at a long range. He finishes by mentioning that the general was named Gilbert, a man of colossal engineering skill, while the wounded officer was the Count Lory de Vasselot, grandson of one of Napoleon's most dashing cavalry leaders. The doctor finishes right there, as the Americans say, and quite forgets to note the fact that he himself picked up de Vasselot under a spitting cross-fire, carried him into his own field hospital and there tended him. Which omission proves that to find a brave and kind heart it is not necessary to consider what outer uniform may cover, or guttural tongue distinguish, the inner man.
Lory was shot in two places again, and the doctors who attended him laughed when they saw the old wounds hardly yet healed. He would be lame for years, they said, perhaps for life. He had a bullet in his right shoulder and another had shattered his ankle. Neither was dangerous, but his fighting days were done, at all events for this campaign.
“You will not fight against us again,” said the doctor, with a smile on his broad Saxon features, and in execrable French, which was not improved by the scissors that he held between his lips.
“Not in this war, perhaps,” answered the patient, hopefully.