Peter recalled what Fallows had said: that properly fathered this peasantry might be led into a citizenship and virtue that would change the world. Instead they were to be impregnated with every crime. With such thoughts Peter felt the spirit of Berthe Wyndham awake in his mind.
Seven days and not a breath from the outer world. The correspondents were allowed to move in and out of Kohlvihr's headquarters; and, though they paid richly for everything, were treated well, and regarded as guests by the staff officers. Peter had met Kohlvihr in Warsaw before the thought of war—a good-tempered, if dull and bibulous old man, he had seemed in the midst of semi-civilian routine; but a different party here afield. Peter recalled the saying of old sailors that you never know a skipper until you ship under him.
Moments of evening, in the sharp hazes of wood smoke, when the whole army seemed nestling into itself, laughing, covering its nostalgia, putting on its strength, Peter met in certain moments the advisability of turning his back upon Boylan and Spenski and Samarc. The extraordinary nature of Berthe Wyndham would flood home to him, as to one to whom it belonged, very dear but very far.... He would smile when he thought of The States and the Old Man.... “He thinks I'm clutched in the ripping drama and waiting for blood,” he muttered, “that I am burning to stop the breath of the outer world with my story of gore and conquest.... But I'm eating his bread. I won't betray. There must be a wise way to feed the red melodramatic receptivity of the cities and at the same time to tell the real story.”
He stood in the midst of square miles of men and military engines. On every road other Russian forces moved southward and to the southeast. The railroads groaned with troops, for the most part in a better state of preparation than Kohlvihr's division. Rumors reached the staff, as they neared the Galician border, that the Austrian fields below were already bleeding; finally word came, as they turned eastward, that they were to entrain at Fransic and make a junction with the main Russian columns preparing to invade Galicia from the northeast.
On the night before they entered Fransic, Mowbray awoke, and saw a figure sitting in the doorway of the little hut assigned them for quarters. It was Spenski, his face upturned in the starlight. He sat so still that Peter slipped out from the blankets (which covered Boylan as well) and took his place beside the lens-maker. Spenski was facing the east. The street of the little hill town lost itself in a sharp declivity just ahead; the nearer huts were low. The whole east was naked to the horizon and an indescribable glory of starlight.
“Aren't they amazing?” Spenski whispered. “It must be nearly morning, for those are the winter stars. I think they must have wakened me up. Do you know them?”
“Just the first magnitudes. They are more brilliant than I have ever known.”
Orion and a great kite of suns stood out with new and flashing power.
“I never saw that huge W before—” said Peter.
“You don't mean Cassiopeia? Her chair isn't there, but over to the north—”