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Updated: May 21, 2025
"We'll send as heavy a shell fire at their infantry as they send into our redoubts." "Yes; oh, yes!" she replied. "Westerling couldn't say it any better! What difference is there between you? Each at his desk is saying: 'This regiment will die here; that regiment will die there! I bring you word of one human ram going to destruction in order that you may send another to destroy and be destroyed!
This was the irritating thing about him to a soldier, who deprecated all kinds of personal bravado and show as against the efficiency of the modern military machine, when men were supposed to respond to duty in the face of death as automatically as in any business requiring team-work, with an every-day smile like Hugo's on their lips. "Then," Westerling began, and broke off abruptly.
She met Westerling's look steadily, her eyes dark and still and in his the reflection of the vague realization of more than he had guessed in her relations with Hugo. "Well," she breathed to Westerling, "the war goes on!" "That's it! That's the voice!" exclaimed the subaltern in an explosion of recognition.
Westerling had now recovered his. He was again the superman in command. "It is for you and not for us to locate the leak; yes, for you!" he said. "That is all on the subject for the present," he added in a tone of mixed pity and contempt, which left Bouchard freed from the stare of his colleagues and in the miserable company of his humiliation. All on the subject for the present!
She noted Marta's customary quickening interest at mention of Lanstron's name. It had become the talisman of a hope whose fulfilment was always being deferred. "How different Lanny and Westerling are!" Marta exclaimed, the picture of the two men rising before her vision.
"We must not think of that now," she said. "We must think of nothing personal; of nothing but your work until your work is done!" The prompting devil had not permitted a false note in her voice. Her very pallor, in fixity of idea, served her purpose. Westerling drew a deep breath that seemed to expand his whole being with greater appreciation of her.
"They have called out the old men, the fellows of forty-five to fifty, who were supposed to be out of it for good," said the judge's son. "Westerling says they are to guard prisoners and property when we cross the range and start on the march to the Browns' capital. Then all the other men can be on the firing-line and force the war to a mercifully quick end with a minimum loss.
She wondered if Lanny, too, were like that if it were not the nature of all conquerors who could not have their way. It seemed to her that Westerling was beneath the humblest private in his army beneath even that fellow with the liver patch on his cheek who had broken the chandelier in the sport of brutal passion.
But Westerling always used a half concession as a lever to gain a full concession. "I'd really better do it all act out the host and the conqueror!" he declared. "One can't compromise principles." "Oh! Why?" She was distinctly interested, leaning nearer to him and playing a tattoo with one set of fingers on the back of the other hand.
No one knew better than Westerling how to be one when he chose. He was something of an actor. Leaders of men of his type usually are. "Why, yes. Very gladly!" she assented with no undue cordiality and no undue constraint, quite as if there were no war. "It was the Browns who cut the lindens?" he suggested significantly. "They said that it was necessary as part of the defence," she replied.
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