st the barrels of one of the telescopes. With his long
dust-colored coat and the lacings of violent scarlet upon his cap and
his upturned collar he made you think of one of those big gray African
parrots that talk so fluently and bite so viciously. But when, getting
nimbly up, he turned to greet us and be introduced the resemblance
vanished.

There was nothing of the parrot about him now, Here was a man part watch
dog and part hawk. His cheeks and the flanges of his nostrils were
thickly hair-lined with those little red-and-blue veins that are to be
found in the texture of good American paper currency and in the faces of
elderly men who have lived much out-of-doors during their lives. His
jowls were heavy and pendulous like a mastiff's. His frontal bone came
down low and straight so that under the flat arch of the brow his small,
very bright agate-blue eyes looked out as from beneath half-closed
shutters. His hair was clipped close to his scalp and the shape of his
skull showed, rounded and bulgy; not the skull of a thinker, nor yet the
skull of a creator, just the skull of a natural-born fighting man. The
big, ridgy veins in the back of his neck stood out like window-cords
from a close smocking of fine wrinkles. The neck itself was tanned to a
brickdust red. A gnawed white mustache bristled on his upper lip. He
was tall without seeming to be tall and broad without appearing broad,
and he was old enough for a grandfather and spry enough for his own
grandchild. You know the type. Our Civil War produced it in number.

At his throat was the blue star of the Order of Merit, the very highest
honor a German soldier can win, and below it on his breast the
inevitable black-and-white striped ribbon. The one meant leadership and
the other testified to individual valor in the teeth of danger. It was
Excellency von Zwehl, commander of the Seventh Reserve Corps of the
Western Army, the man who took Maubeuge from the French and English, and
the man who in the same week held the imperiled German center against
the French and English.

We lunched with the General and his staff on soup and sausages, with a
rare and precious Belgian melon cut in thin, salmon-tinted crescents to
follow for dessert. But before the lunch he took us and showed us,
pointing this way and that with his little riding whip, the theater
wherein he had done a thing which he valued more than the taking of a
walled city. Indeed there was a certain el