I awakened the two runners.
"Henriquez, go to the third section, tell the adjutant to see to the relief of the second platoon and report to Lieutenant Vignerte. Damestoy, go to the second section and tell the section officer to do the same for the first platoon. He mustn't forget the two o'clock patrol. It will be supplied by the eleventh squad, Corporal Toulet. Got that? Come, look sharp!"
The two men climbed out. For two seconds the patch of blue sky was hidden.
A weird, soundless night. A stray rifle shot at long intervals. The guns silent.
Vignerte resumed his story.
HAVE you ever read Baron von Heidenstamm? Meyer Forster has borrowed something for it from Tolstoy—the whole chapter on the race for the Emperor's Cup is taken from Anna Karenina—and a good deal, unfortunately, from our Octave Feuillet. Still, you shouldn't miss the description of Hanover, life in a German garrison town, and the royal park in snow. The impressions you get are very much what I felt on my arrival at Lautenburg at ten o'clock on the morning of Sunday, October 26th, 1913.
For the previous eight hours I had been watching the gradual displacement of the Walpurgis Harz, shrouded to the south in copper-coloured clouds by a fertile but ugly, featureless plain. When the train had crossed the Aller the country became more undulating. Foaming in its basaltic bed appeared the winding river Melna which joins the Aller some forty miles below Lautenburg. I was nearing my destination.
The sky was dull and grey. The town, clinging to the slopes of a hill in a bend of the Melna, had a certain resemblance to Pau, or, rather, Saint-Gaudens, thanks to its red-brick houses. Crowning all, in a distant clump of trees, I saw an old tower. The Castle, I thought.
Like a horse with its head for home the train put on steam. We ran along and over a number of streams gliding between willow-lined banks. The white patches where the water ran over boulders and the swaying of the vegetation spoke of the gentle murmur we could not hear. You would call it clean, peaceful country, not unlike the Ile-de-France; yes, a country you could live and be happy in.
Lautenburg station, on the other hand, was frankly monstrous, a smaller but more extravagant copy of the famous station of Metz. But before I had time to take in the details, I heard an obsequious murmur of: "Professor Vignerte?" from a man in a peaked cap who took my ticket.