"Pretty well, sir!"
"Pity we get no papers!"
I saw that he was bursting to have a talk, and, by Jove, it would be good policy to get on good terms with my immediate chief once and for all. I need only imitate Playoust; I asked him slyly what he thought was happening.
He needed no persuasion! He was fully aware of the fact that I had not been among his audience the day before, and ingenuously expressed his regret. De Valpic and I, he said, were the two best-read men in the company. He would so much like to exchange ideas with us!
As for exchanging ideas, all I was aiming at was to get him to trot his out ... to get at him in that way. At my request he went to fetch a map of the whole of our eastern frontier.
I led him on to various subjects which I wished to explore, without taking great pains about it: the composition of our army, the probable figure of our effectives, our system of fortified towns.
He replied at length, furnishing information collected and classed without much sense of criticism. He placed the ideas he had gleaned from the special courses for officers, on the same level with those picked up in certain technical reviews, and a great number of commonplaces borrowed from the daily papers.
But he fancied himself particular on the questions of strategy.
The German scheme was done for! Everything was based, you see, on the complicity or, at all events, the passivity of Belgium. They had concentrated four army corps in their camps in advance, Trèves, Malmédy, Atles-Lager. They would have hurled them simultaneously on to the left bank of the Meuse, and they could have gone straight ahead across the flat country. In five days they would have been in the Scheldt, on the way to Valenciennes. They would have reached the valley of the Oise, and from there have gone on to Paris. And it might quite likely have succeeded!...
He warmed to his subject.