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One arrived at Soissons in war time by long avenues, shaded on either side by a double row of stately elms, whose centenary branches stretching upward formed an archway overhead. Then came the last outpost of Army Police, a sentinel stopped you, minutely examined your passports, verified their visés, and finally, all formalities terminated, one entered what might have been the City of Death.
A lieutenant, for instance, will take twenty men out for their daily walk through the surrounding country and after burning a few huts and butchering a pacifico or two, will come back in time for dinner and charge his captain for rations for fifty men and for three thousand cartridges "expended in service." The captain vises his report, and the two share the profits.
The vise-shop contains four heavy benches, with 32 vises attached, giving a capacity for teaching 128 students the course every ten weeks, or 640 in a year of fifty weeks. The forge-shop has eight forges. The foundry has 16 moulding benches, an oven for core baking, and a blast furnace of one-half ton capacity.
Besides, I can put on a pair of slippers. That will be a comfort, for my feet feel as if they were in vises. A cup of tea won't be a bad thing, too." During their walk through the wood Vincent had related the circumstances of the carrying away of Dinah and of her rescue. When he had finished Tony had said: "Well, Massa Wingfield, I don't know what to say to you.
This interesting process was only a few minutes in doing; and, on payment of the customary fee, was handed me "all right" for Venice, bating the innumerable intermediate inspections and visés by the way; for a passport, like a chronometer, must be continually compared with the meridian, and put right. I put my passport into my pocket; but on opening it afterwards, I got a surprise.
I went to Stenton with my capital in my pocket, looking for some stock to open with, and met a man in a hotel who said he was the representative of the Standard Hardware Company. He could let me have everything necessary, he said, at a half of what others would charge. We had dinner together, and he made a list of what I would need files and vises and parts of guns.
On the right side of the house was a large old flower-garden, now just beginning to assert itself anew; on the left were the stable and some out-buildings, with a grassy oval of lawn in the centre of a sweep of drive; in the rear was a kitchen-garden and a field rising to the railroad, for railroads circled all Banbridge in their vises of iron arms.
Two hands, two vises, seized his wrists, and he found himself in the middle of the room, leaving the doorway clear for the workmen. "Chebe, my boy, just listen," said Risler, leaning over him. "I am at the end of my forbearance.
Between these vain pilgrimages, the traveller impatient to leave had to toil on foot to distant railway stations, from which he returned baffled by vague answers and disheartened by the declaration that tickets, when achievable, must also be vises by the police.
Given an hour's notice, these busy men who wore those steel vises clamped upon their ears could disconnect the lines, pull down and reel in the wires, pack the batteries and the exchanges, and have the entire outfit loaded upon automobiles for speedy transmission elsewhere. Having seen what I had seen of the German military system, I could not find it in my heart to doubt this.