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In the intervals between these waves of military traffic we had the road to ourselves, except for the flashing past of despatch-bearers on motor-cycles and of hideously hooting little motors carrying goggled officers in goat-skins and woollen helmets. The villages along the road all seemed empty not figuratively but literally empty.
The Civil War was not lacking in its daring and interesting adventures of scouts, spies, despatch-bearers, and others of that interesting tribe whose field of operations lies between the armies in the field, and whose game is played with life as the stake, this being fair prey for the bullet if pursued, and often for the rope if captured.
The general in command is in a good humour over the record. Despatch-bearers gallop at all hours of the day and night through Pont du Sable's single street. The band plays daily in the public square. Sunburned soldiers lug sacks of provisions and bundles of straw out to five hundred more men bivouacked on the dunes.
The majestic grandeur of the evolutions of the celestial hosts, the inconceivable vastness of the fields of space in which they are executed, the countless numbers, the immeasurable distances, the involved convolutions, the flocking and the scattering, the interpenetrating marches and countermarches, the strange community of impulsion affecting stars that are wide apart in space and causing them to traverse the general movement about them like aides and despatch-bearers on a battle-field all these arouse an intensity of interest which is heightened by the mystery behind them.
Between Dantzig and Konigsberg they had indeed found a few travellers going eastward despatch-bearers seeking Murat spies going northwards to Tilsit, and General Yorck still in treaty with his own conscience a prominent member of the Tugendbund, wondering, like many others, if there were any virtue left in the world.
The Staff are lodged in a house considerably the worse for German occupancy, where offices have been improvised by means of wooden hoardings, and where, sitting in a bare passage on a frayed damask sofa surmounted by theatrical posters and faced by a bed with a plum-coloured counterpane, we listened for a while to the jingle of telephones, the rat-tat of typewriters, the steady hum of dictation and the coming and going of hurried despatch-bearers and orderlies.
As matter of fact, this time again, as on several occasions before, he beat the Government and its official despatch-bearers, and all his fellow correspondents. How did he do it? While other knights of the pen confided their missives to the purser of the despatch steamer, Arago, Carleton put his in the hands of a passing stranger, who was going North.
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