Zealous hands dragged the presumptuous speaker back, as the venerable expert in war doffed his spiked helmet, and said, popping his auburn-wigged head out of the brougham window:
"Where Count Bismarck is needed there he will be, depend on it! Now, children, let me get back to my maps!"
"Tell us first how things are going in France yonder?" bellowed another Berliner, and the great Field-Marshal answered, pointing the jest with his keenest twinkle:
"You want to know how things are going there? Well, the wheat has suffered from the drought, but acorns and potatoes promise to be plentiful, and pumpkins will be big this year!"
And the crowd, splitting with laughter, made way for the brougham of the Chief of the General Staff, and the joke was sown broadcast over Germany before the end of half an hour. For were not Moltke's acorns the oblong, round-ended bullets of the Prussian needle-gun, as his potatoes were the shrapnel shell cast by the six-pounder steel breech-loaders designed by Krupp for the Prussian field-artillery, and the big pumpkins the seventeen-pound projectiles fired by the siege-guns of nine centimeters' bore? ...
The massive ribs that had acted as buffers between P. C. Breagh and the battering onslaughts of the crowd shook with laughter as the brougham moved on through a lane that continuously opened in the mass of bodies and closed when it had passed.... Then their owner settled the wide-leaved felt hat more firmly on his head, and said in well-bred, fluent English, turning his heavily-jowled face and powerful, fiery-blue eyes on P. C. Breagh, who was thanking him in his best German for his timely assistance:
"Do not thank me so effusively. I have a habit of sometimes saving a man's life! Yours happened to be in peril; there is no need to say more!"
The clear incisive tones had an inflection that was almost contemptuous, yet a smile, curving the heavy mustache, showed the small and well-preserved teeth it shadowed, as he added in his admirable English, fastening a button of the thin black waterproof cloak which had been disarranged in the recent struggle sufficiently to show that it covered some sort of military uniform:
"Save this,—that I happen to possess a son about your age, and should not care to lose him!"
And with this he was gone, leaving P. C. Breagh breathless with the greatness of the adventure that had befallen him. For the owner of the bulldog face with the fierce blue eyes blazing over their heavy orbital pouches, was the unpopular Minister who had been booed by the Ultramontane and Socialist students three years before, as the Berlin express-train passed through the station of Schwärz-Brettingen—the all-powerful Chancellor, who was meant when diplomats and Press leader-writers referred to "Prussia."