"Turn her out, then! Promptly up with the baggage!"
Kunz, thus adjured, gripped the slight arm, not brutally. At the touch, Juliette gave a faint cry, and crouched lower, hiding her face upon the rigid hand she held. And P. C. Breagh saw red, abandoned his groaning cavalryman and leaped for it, slithering down from the summit of his dreadful eyrie with a roll of four-inch bandaging trailing in his wake. Casting caution to the winds, he shouted savagely to the ex-chemist:
"Let the lady go! Take your hand off! Damn you!—do you hear?"
The words, being English, were not comprehended by the Sergeant. For an instant he stared open-mouthed at the unexpected apparition. The next he had bawled out an order to his men, and P. C. Breagh found himself looking down the long brown barrels of a couple of Prussian "needlers," accurately covering the exact area of waistcoat behind which his heart hammered and bumped. There was a creaking of leather then—and with the jingle of steel on steel, the snort of a horse reluctant to be ridden into an alley without turning-space. Over the heads of the Sergeant and his party rose the pricked ears, sagacious eyes, and broad frontlet of a great, gaunt brown mare, ridden by a gigantic field officer, wearing the flat white, yellow-banded forage cap, black pewter-buttoned frock, white cords, and immense spurred jack-boots of the Coburg regiment of White Cuirassiers.
"Whom have we English here? Who called out 'Take your hands off!'"
From under the peak of the white forage-cap the rider's heavy domineering stare took in the huddled feminine figure, the disheveled young man menaced by the Service rifles, and the truculent attitude of Sergeant Schmidt. He lifted a finger, and the "needlers" became vertical. He beckoned with the authoritative digit, and P. C. Breagh drew near. And the sickening horrors of the battlefield faded suddenly from about the Englishman.... He was back in the tobacco-scented study of a house in the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin. And the resonant tones of the man who stood for Prussia in the mind's eye of the world were saying, in Bismarck's well-phrased English:
"Even though you belong to a neutral nation, you should not presume upon the fact too rashly. Had I not been within earshot just now, you would have paid with your life for your interference. German military authority is supreme, and in the execution of its duty not to be turned aside."
P. C. Breagh retorted, tingling to the very finger-tips:
"Your Excellency, I interfered to save this lady from ill-usage."
"She is a Frenchwoman? ... Explain to her," said the resonant voice coldly and brutally, "that even to reach the side of a fallen lover, too much may be risked and lost!"