"I understand," said the War Minister joyfully, "that we should be the party attacked first. And we shall be, and we shall win! Our God of old lives, and will not let us perish!"
"Has Your Excellency nothing to say to me?" asked the Chancellor, fixing his great eyes on the face of Moltke, now radiant with childlike happiness.
"Were I a poet," returned the joyous old artist in war, seizing the hand outstretched to him across the table, and wringing it between both his own, "I should crown you with a wreath of laurel inscribed 'Hail to thee, Guardian of Prussia's honor!' or something of that kind. Being what I am, I say that you are what my English nephews would call 'a trump!' As you said this morning when you quitted Varzin, 'War Is Inevitable!'" He added, hitting himself a resounding thump in the chest: "And if I may but live to lead our armies in such a war—then the devil may come directly we have conquered these Frenchmen and fetch away this crumbling old carcass!" He added, with a change to gravity: "I do not say my soul, for I am a decent Christian. Hey, look here, our dinner has got cold!"
It was true; the viands were stagnant in the dishes. The fillet sat in the center of a stagnant lake of congealed gravy; the roasted lamb, reduced by the onslaughts of the Chancellor to a partial skeleton, was covered with a frosting of rich white fat. He said, with a laugh that clattered against walls and ceiling like a discharge of musketry, and reaching for the bell that would summon Bucher:
"It does not matter; my cook has always a second menu ready in case of delays or accidents. While Bucher communicates to our Embassies and the European Press Agencies the concentrated essence of His Majesty's telegram—while hundreds of thousands of handbills are being printed that shall disseminate the text throughout Germany, and Busch writes the articles that shall put the needful complexion on this affair—we will order up the Moet and Chandon White Star—I am thirsty after so much talking!—and eat our dinner again!"
XXVII
Ever since the King, returning from the baths of Ems, had been met at the railway-station by his Under-Secretary of State bearing France's declaration of war,—a huge, orderly crowd, compact of all classes and callings, had ceaselessly rolled through the streets of Berlin, chanting with its thousands of sturdy lungs "Heil dir im Siegerkranz" and the "Wacht am Rhein" until its patriotic fervor reached a state of ebullition only to be relieved by volleys of cheers.
Jammed in the solid mass of bodies blackening the Unter den Linden and packing the Opera-Platz to suffocation,—until the bronze equestrian statue of the Great Friedrich, opposing the eastern courtyard gateway of the small stuccoed Palace, reared above a tossing sea of heads,—P. C. Breagh tasted the raptures of emancipation from the mill-round, and drank in news at every pore.
For this was life in earnest.... With the red-hot cigar-end of a corpulent merchant burning the back of his neck, and the crook of a market woman's blue-cotton umbrella imperiling his left eye; while the sword-hilt of a gigantic Sergeant of Uhlans insinuated itself between his third and fourth ribs on the right side, and the huge flaxen chignon of a servant-girl, armed with a capacious market-basket crammed with meat, fish, and vegetables for family consumption, bobbed itself into his mouth whenever he opened that feature to cheer, or gasp for air, heavily burdened with the fumes of beer, schnaps, herring-salad, garlic, sauerkraut, and perspiring humanity, he was happier than ever he had been before.