"No more generals on horseback," he muttered. "My man may ride when it is necessary, but he must know how to walk, too. I want one—I wonder if I know him—who 'stands so you can't dislodge him' and who 'knows his men.' Perhaps they have given me the answer to it all. Perhaps, after all, I can find him. Perhaps. And 'where he wants to go'—was that the word?" He pored over the toys. The woman went back to her knitting. The click of needles or the noise of a tool raised or laid down was the only sound heard in the shop.
"Are you buying the soldiers for your boys? It's wonderful how they take to them these days." The voice of the cabinet-maker broke the stillness. He repeated the question before the Man heard. And even then the answer was slow in coming.
"I have but one boy to buy toys for—now," said the man, at length. "The other one—that is left—is too old. And, in spite of all, the child must be made happy."
He turned again to the soldiers as if they contained the answer to some question. His eyes fell again upon the captain. He nodded as though he recognized some one. "I believe I—know," he thought, half-fearfully. "He 'stands so you can't dislodge him'—he 'doesn't know what it is to be afraid'—he 'walks about among his men'—he 'knows them.'" The man seized the officer almost fiercely and held it in his big hand.
"I will put him there. He will stand. And"—his face lit up with sudden fire—"and 'where he wants to go' he shall go, please God!"
He swept the soldiers into a heap and pushed them from him, waiting impatiently while Mrs. Schotz deftly made them up into a parcel. But when that was done he still lingered. Suddenly he turned to Joseph Schotz with a sort of desperation.
"Did he never—waver—your Napoleon—even when he watched thousands of you—even men with children—die, and die because he placed you there—bound in the shambles?"
The cabinet-maker raised his head from his work in surprise. The inexplicable agony in the face of the other man brought an unusual thoughtfulness into the peasant's face.
"I do not know"—he hesitated—"I am not sure. He must have felt—but no one ever saw him. He could not stop. There was not a moment when, if he had halted—even to pity—all the great Thing he was building would not have fallen about his ears—and carried all France down with it. No, he could not stop. If he had been of those who falter"—here Schotz shrugged his shoulders with the gesture of the Frenchmen he had fought among—"Buonaparte should not have played the game of war."