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Updated: June 21, 2025
For Lanstron's hand was quivering in Partow's grasp, while his face was that of a man stunned. "But Goerwitz what will he say?" he gasped. "Goerwitz goes to a division in reserve." "And the army! The government! What will they say at such such a jump for a colonel?" "The government leaves all to me from the day war begins.
"Well, we needn't give it out to the press; at least, not until after mature consideration," he declared when they had reached the end of Partow's appeal. "Now we'll hear what the staff has to say for itself after gratifying the wish of a dead man," he added as a messenger gave him another sheet.
Lanstron continued to read to the amazed staff, for Partow's message had looked far into the future. Then there was a P.S., written after the war had begun, on the evening of the day that Marta had gone from tea on the veranda with Westerling to the telephone, in the impulse of her new purpose. "I begin to believe in that dream," he wrote.
Young Lanstron, who wanted to see results, had to earn them. He realized in practice the truth of Partow's saying that there was nothing he had ever learned but what could be of service to him as an officer. What the acrobats had taught him probably saved his life on the occasion of his first flight across the range.
"Yes, it is all there my life's work, my dream, my ambition, my plan!" Lanstron heard the lock slide in the door as Partow went out and he was alone with the army's secrets. As he read Partow's firm handwriting, many parts fell together, many moves on a chess-board grew clear. His breath came faster, he bent closer over the table, he turned back pages to go over them again.
"Forgotten already, like the many other thousandth chances that have failed," he replied cheerfully. "One of the virtues of Partow's steel automatons is that, being tearless as well as passionless, they never cry over spilt milk. And now," he went on soberly, "we must be saying good-by." "Good-by, Lanny? Why, what do you mean?" She was startled.
Tell her that a bearded old behemoth, who can kneel as gracefully as a rheumatic rhinoceros, is on both knees at her feet, kissing her hands and trying his best, in the name of mercy, to keep from breaking into verse of his own composition." Back at the telephone, Lanstron, in the fervor of the cheer and the enthusiasm that had transported his chief, gave Marta Partow's message.
Compliments from subordinates to superiors had not received Partow's favor and, therefore, not Lanstron's. Eccentric old Partow had once disparaged the Napoleonic idea as a fetich which had nothing to do with modern military efficiency, and he had added that if Napoleon were alive to-day nobody would be so prompt to see it as Napoleon himself.
What an easy master capital must be compared to Eugene Partow! But no! If Marta loved it would not matter whether he were bridge builder or army builder. Yes, she was like that. And what right had he to think of marriage? He could not have any home. He was now in the capital; again, along the frontier a vagabond of duty and Partow's orders.
This meant that he would be expected at Partow's office at eight the next morning. He wrote his answer; the orderly saluted and departed at a rapid pace; and then, as a matter of habit of the same kind that makes some men wipe their pens when laying them down, he struck a match and set fire to one corner of the paper, which burned to his fingers' ends before he tossed the charred remains away.
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