“Confident! Why not? Those wretched little piou-pious”—a slang term for the French infantry—“will run long before they see the whites of our eyes.”
“I haven’t met any French regiments since I was a youngster; but I believe France is far better organised now than in 1870,” was the noncommittal reply.
Von Halwig threw out his right arm in a wide sweep. “We shall brush them aside—so,” he cried. “The German army was strong in those days; now it is irresistible. You are a soldier. You know. To-night’s papers say England is wavering between peace and war. But I have no doubt she will be wise. That Channel is a great asset, a great safeguard, eh?”
Again Dalroy changed the subject. “If it is a fair question, when do you start for the front?”
“To-morrow, at six in the morning.”
“How very kind of you to spare such valuable time now!”
“Not at all! Everything is ready. Germany is always ready. The Emperor says ‘Mobilise,’ and, behold, we cross the frontier within the hour!”
“War is a rotten business,” commented Dalroy thoughtfully. “I’ve seen something of it in India, where, when all is said and done, a scrap in the hills brings the fighting men alone into line. But I’m sorry for the unfortunate peasants and townspeople who will suffer. What of Belgium, for instance?”
“Ha! Les braves Belges!” laughed the other. “They will do as we tell them. What else is possible? To adapt one of your own proverbs: ‘Needs must when the German drives!’”
Dalroy understood quite well that Von Halwig’s bumptious tone was not assumed. The Prussian Junker could hardly think otherwise. But the glances cast by the Guardsman at the silent figure seated near the window showed that some part of his vapouring was meant to impress the feminine heart. A gallant figure he cut, too, as he stood there, caressing his Kaiser-fashioned moustaches with one hand while the other rested on the hilt of his sword. He was tall, fully six feet, and, according to Dalroy’s standard of physical fitness, at least a stone too heavy. The personification of Nietzsche’s Teutonic “overman,” the “big blonde brute” who is the German military ideal, Dalroy classed him, in the expressive phrase of the regimental mess, as “a good bit of a bounder.” Yet he was a patrician by birth, or he could not hold a commission in the Imperial Guard, and he had been most helpful and painstaking that night, so perforce one must be civil to him.