"We are not limited as to colonels, either," he answered. "We must think ourselves lucky, I suppose, that he went no higher than a colonel. There was a moment when I thought he was going very much higher to the very top, Von Wetten. For, make no mistake, that young man knows his value."
Von Wetten frowned undecidedly. "The top," he repeated. "There is only one top. You can't mean?"
The Baron took the word from his mouth. "Yes," he said, "the Emperor. I thought for a while he was going to demand that. And do you know what I should have answered?"
Von Wetten threw up his head and his face cleared. "Of course I know," he said. "You'd have cut the dirty traitor down where he stood!"
The Baron did not move. "No," he said. "I should have accepted those terms also, Von Wetten."
The Baron's hand rested on the edge of the table in front of Herr Haase; he sat, staring at it, a piece of human furniture on the stage of a tragedy. The other two confronted each other above his patient and useful head. He would have liked to look from one to the other, to watch their faces, but he was too deeply drilled for that. He heard Von Wetten's voice with a quaver in it.
"Then things are going as badly as all that?"
"Yes," answered the Baron. "Badly! It is not just this battle that is going on now in France; it strikes deeper than that. The plan that was to give us victory has failed us; we find ourselves, with a strength which must diminish, fighting an enemy whose strength increases. We must not stop at anything now; what is at stake is too tremendous."
"But—."
The Baron hushed him. "Listen, Von Wetten," he said. "I will be patient with you. I do not speak to you of of the Idea of which Germany and Prussia are the body and the weapon. No; but have you ever realized that you, yes, you! belong to the most ridiculed, most despised nation on earth? That your countrywomen furnish about eighty per cent. of the world's prostitutes; that a German almost anywhere is a waiter, or a sausage-manufacturer, or a beer-seller, the butt of comic papers in a score of languages? All that has not occurred to you, eh?