THE TWO PRINCES
John sat with the other prisoners for more than two hours listening to the thunder of the great battle or rather series of battles which were afterwards classified under the general head the Battle of the Marne. He was not a soldier, merely a civilian serving as a soldier, but he had learned already to interpret many of the signs of combat. There was an atmospheric feeling that registered on a sensitive mind the difference between victory and defeat, and he was firm in the belief that as yesterday had gone today was going. Certainly this great German army which he believed to be in the center was not advancing, and something of a character most menacing was happening to the wings of the German force. He read it in the serious, preoccupied faces of the officers who passed near. There was not a smile on the face of the youngest of them all, but deepest anxiety was written alike on young and old.
John and Fleury sat together at the edge of the brook, and for a while forgot their chagrin at not being on the battle line. The battle itself which they could not see, but which they could hear, absorbed them so thoroughly that they had no time to think of regrets.
John had thought that man's violence, his energy in destruction on the first day could not be equalled, but it seemed to him now that the second day surpassed the first. The cannon fire was distant, yet the waves of air beat heavily upon them, and the earth shook without ceasing. Wisps of smoke floated toward them and the air was tainted again with the acrid smell of burned gunpowder.
"You're a mountaineer, Fleury, you told me," said Scott, "and you should be able to judge how sound travels through gorges. I suppose you yodel, of course?"
"Yodel, what's that?"
"To make a long singing cry on a peak which is supposed to reach to somebody on another peak who sends back the same kind of a singing cry. We have a general impression in America that European mountaineers don't do much but stand in fancy costumes on crests and ridges and yodel to one another."
"It may have been so once," said the young Savoyard, "but this is a bad year for yodeling. The voice of the cannon carries so far that the voice of man doesn't amount to much. But what sound did you want me to interpret?"
"That of the cannon. Does its volume move eastward or westward? I should think it's much like your mountain storms and you know how they travel among the ridges."
"The comparison is just, but I can't yet tell any shifting of the artillery fire. The wind brings the sound toward us, and if there's any great advance or retreat I should be able to detect it. I should say that as far as the second day is concerned nothing decisive has happened yet."