Mayor Orden asked, “But suppose they don’t want to be safe?”
“Then you must think for them.”
Orden said, a little proudly, “My people don’t like to have others think for them. Maybe they are different from your people. I am confused, but that I am sure of.”
Now Joseph came in quickly and he stood leaning forward, bursting to speak. Madame said, “What is it, Joseph? Get the silver box of cigarettes.”
“Pardon, Madame,” said Joseph. “Pardon, Your Excellency.”
“What do you want?” the Mayor asked.
“It’s Annie,” he said. “She’s getting angry, sir.”
“What is the matter?” Madame demanded.
“Annie doesn’t like the soldiers on the back porch.”
The colonel asked, “Are they causing trouble?”
“They are looking through the door at Annie,” said Joseph. “She hates that.”
The colonel said, “They are carrying out orders. They are doing no harm.”
“Well, Annie hates to be stared at,” said Joseph.
Madame said, “Joseph, tell Annie to take care.”
“Yes, Madame,” and Joseph went out.
The colonel’s eyes dropped with tiredness. “There’s another thing, Your Excellency,” he said. “Would it be possible for me and my staff to stay here?”
Mayor Orden thought a moment and he said, “It’s a small place. There are larger, more comfortable places.”
Then Joseph came back with the silver box of cigarettes and he opened it and held it in front of the colonel. When the colonel took one, Joseph ostentatiously lighted it. The colonel puffed deeply.
“It isn’t that,” he said “We have found that when a staff lives under the roof of the local authority, there is more tranquility.”
“You mean,” said Orden, “the people feel there is collaboration involved?”
“Yes, I suppose that is it.”
Mayor Orden looked hopelessly at Doctor Winter, and Winter could offer him nothing but a wry smile. Orden said softly, “Am I permitted to refuse this honor?”
“I’m sorry,” the colonel said “No. These are the orders of my leader.”
“The people will not like it,” Orden said.
“Always the people! The people are disarmed. The people have no say.”
Mayor Orden shook his head. “You do not know, sir.”
From the doorway came the sound of an angry woman’s voice, and a thump and a man’s cry. Joseph came scuttling through the door. “She’s thrown boiling water,” Joseph said. “She’s very angry.”
There were commands through the door and the clump of feet. Colonel Lanser got up heavily. “Have you no control over your servants, sir?” he asked.
Mayor Orden smiled. “Very little,” he said. “She’s a good cook when she is happy. Was anyone hurt?” he asked Joseph.
“The water was boiling, sir.”
CHAPTER II
Upstairs in the little palace of the Mayor the staff of Colonel Lanser made its headquarters. There were five of them besides the colonel. There was Major Hunter, a haunted little man of figures, a little man who, being a dependable unit, considered all other men either as dependable units or as unfit to live. Major Hunter was an engineer, and except in case of war no one would have thought of giving him command of men. For Major Hunter set his men in rows like figures and he added and subtracted and multiplied them. He was an arithmetician rather than a mathematician. None of the humor, the music, or the mysticism of higher mathematics ever entered his head. Men might vary in height or weight or color, just as 6 is different from 8, but there was little other difference. He had been married several times and he did not know why his wives became very nervous before they left him.
Captain Bentick was a family man, a lover of dogs and pink children and Christmas. He was too old to be a captain, but a curious lack of ambition had kept him in that rank. Before the war he had admired the British country gentleman very much, wore English clothes, kept English dogs, smoked in an English pipe a special pipe mixture sent him from London, and subscribed to those country magazines which extol gardening and continually argue about the relative merits of English and Gordon setters. Captain Bentick spent all his holidays in Sussex and liked to be mistaken for an Englishman in Budapest or Paris. The war changed all that outwardly, but he had sucked on a pipe too long, had carried a stick too long, to give them up too suddenly. Once, five years before, he had written a letter to the Times about grass dying in the Midlands and had signed it Edmund Twitchell, Esq.; and, furthermore, the Times had printed it.
If Captain Bentick was too old to be a captain, Captain Loft was too young. Captain Loft was as much a captain as one can imagine. He lived and breathed his captaincy. He had no unmilitary moments. A driving ambition forced him up through the grades. He rose like cream to the top of milk. He clicked his heels as perfectly as a dancer does. He knew every kind of military courtesy and insisted on using it all. Generals were afraid of him because he knew more about the deportment of a soldier than they did. Captain Loft thought and believed that a soldier is the highest development of animal life. If he considered God at all, he thought of Him as an old and honored general, retired and gray, living among remembered battles and putting wreaths on the graves of his lieutenants several times a year. Captain Loft believed that all women fall in love with a uniform and he did not see how it could be otherwise. In the normal course of events he would be a brigadier-general at forty-five and have his picture in the illustrated papers, flanked by tall, pale, masculine women wearing lacy picture hats.
Lieutenants Prackle and Tonder were snot-noses, undergraduates, lieutenants, trained in the politics of the day, believing the great new system invented by a genius so great that they never bothered to verify its results. They were sentimental young men, given to tears and to furies. Lieutenant Prackle carried a lock of hair in the back of his watch, wrapped in a bit of blue satin, and the hair was constantly getting loose and clogging the balance wheel, so that he wore a wrist watch for telling time. Prackle was a dancing-partner, a gay young man who nevertheless could scowl like the Leader, could brood like the Leader. He hated degenerate art and had destroyed several canvases with his own hands. In cabarets he sometimes made pencil sketches of his companions which were so good that he had often been told he should have been an artist. Prackle had several blond sisters of whom he was so proud that he had on occasion caused a commotion when he thought they had been insulted. The sisters were a little disturbed about it because they were afraid someone might set out to prove the insults, which would not have been hard to do. Lieutenant Prackle spent nearly all his time off duty daydreaming of seducing Lieutenant Tonder’s blond sister, a buxom girl who loved to be seduced by older men who did not muss her hair as Lieutenant Prackle did.
Lieutenant Tonder was a poet, a bitter poet who dreamed of perfect, ideal love of elevated young men for poor girls. Tonder was a dark romantic with a vision as wide as his experience. He sometimes spoke blank verse under his breath to imaginary dark women. He longed for death on the battlefield, with weeping parents in the background, and the Leader, brave but sad in the presence of the dying youth. He imagined his death very often, lighted by a fair setting sun which glinted on broken military equipment, his men standing silently around him, with heads sunk low, as over a fat cloud galloped the Valkyries, big-breasted, mothers and mistresses in one, while Wagnerian thunder crashed in the background. And he even had his dying words ready.
These were the men of the staff, each one playing war as children play “Run, Sheep, Run.” Major Hunter thought of war as an arithmetical job to be done so he could get back to his fireplace; Captain Loft as the proper career of a properly brought-up young man; and Lieutenants Prackle and Tonder as a dreamlike thing in which nothing was very real. And their war so far had been play—fine weapons and fine planning against unarmed, planless enemies. They had lost no fights and suffered little hurt. They were, under pressure, capable of cowardice or courage, as everyone is. Of them all, only Colonel Lanser knew what war really is in the long run.
Lanser had been in Belgium and France twenty years before and he tried not to think what he knew—that war, is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds. Lanser told himself he was a soldier, given . orders to carry out. He was not expected to question or to think, but only to carry out orders; and he tried to put aside the sick memories of the other war and the certainty that this would be the same. This one will be different, he said to himself fifty times a day; this one will be very different.