“My father made his home in Germany. I offered myself for the service. A man cannot always look at life through empty wine-bottles. Buying and selling are not altogether intellectual pursuits, you will admit. If I had thought that there was any backbone on the other side, I might have gone there on a sporting impulse. All that appealed to me—order, method, strength, iron will—is the property of the Saxon. We may not like it, but we must not dispute it. And I ought not to say such things to you, who are waiting for breakfast. Have you ever breakfasted in camp before, Beatrix?”
He began to lead his horse away from the priest’s cottage to the bivouac of dragoons, and put the question as he went. This half-hour of a subtle and satisfying intimacy might never return. He rejoiced in the comradeship, but from other motives than those which gave her pleasure in it. And she would remember only that she had found a friend.
“No,” she said, looking up to him frankly. “I am a soldier’s wife, and I know nothing about soldiers. If your order and your method and your iron will could help some of these poor people who die in the fields, I would think more of the Saxon. You can never make good the evil of yesterday, never, never, Brandon. What is it in us all that makes us callous to suffering as we are now? When a trooper was killed at Niederbronn a week ago, it was as though one of my own servants had died in our garden. I thought of the poor fellow all night, and prayed for him. Yesterday the dead were everywhere, and we passed them by as though they had been stones. Is it ‘backbone’ that gives us the courage to look at things always through the glasses of self? Why, at this very minute, ought not I to be asking myself how I can help Edmond, and not how I can get to Strasburg?”
He laughed at the unconscious conceit of her thought.
“You can help your husband best by keeping out of harm’s way,” he said. “We are not savages, Beatrix, nor cannibals either, for that matter. Edmond is all the better where he is. He won’t be killed, anyway, and everyone is talking of his fellows and their charge yesterday. Whatever may happen to the rank and file, the officers will be well treated, be sure of that. I wouldn’t mind being in their place at all. They’ll have good quarters, and plenty to eat and drink. When the war’s over—and that’s a matter of a few weeks at the most—they’ll come back whole men, and not as those poor fellows yonder. Is there anything to make you sorry in that prospect?”
They had entered the field of the bivouac then, and he pointed to a row of wounded infantrymen, sitting beneath a tottering wall, which was the last upstanding mark where, yesterday, a prosperous farm had been. All the men were badly hurt, yet all bore their sufferings with unflinching patience. War had obliterated a memory of their nationality. A great Würtemberger nursed the head of a maimed chasseur, and a gunner of France did his best to bind up the shattered hand of one of von Werder’s men. Faint and wan and unattended, these poor fellows made a brave attempt to salute when the officer approached them; nor did one of them utter so much as a single word of complaint.
“Come,” said Brandon, desiring to put a bright face upon it, “and who is looking after your breakfasts, my poor fellows?”
“Ah, Herr Major, if it were so much as a drink of water! I have been here since one o’clock yesterday—since one o’clock! My God, it is nearly twenty hours, and my lips are glued together.”