"I stake my
life!" he cried hoarsely, striking his fist on the table.

"You stake your life!" repeated the premier with slow emphasis.

"Bravado hardly becomes a chief of staff. His place is not under fire,"
Westerling explained. "However, I mean to make my headquarters at La
Tir, immediately we have taken it, for the effect of having the leader
of the army promptly established on conquered territory."

"I understand that," replied the premier. "But still you stake your
life? That is the greatest thing a man has to stake. You stake your life
on victory?" he demanded fiercely.

"I do!" said Westerling. "Yes, my life. We cannot fail!"

"Then it will be war, if the people want it!" said the premier. "I shall
not resist their desire!" he added in his official manner, at peace with
his conscience.

XIV

IN PARTOW'S OFFICE

Partow was a great brain set on an enormous body. Partow's eyes had the
fire of youth at sixty-five, but the pendulous flesh of his cheeks was
pasty. Partow was picturesque; he was a personality with a dome forehead
sweeping back nobly to scattered and contentious, short gray hairs.
Jealousy and faction had endeavored for years to remove him from his
position at the head of the army on account of age. New governments
decided as they came in that he must go, and they went out with him
still in the saddle. He worked fourteen hours a day, took no holidays
and little exercise, violated the rules of health, and never appeared at
gold-braid functions. The business of official display, as he said
pungently, he delegated to that specialist, his handsome vice-chief of
staff.

He had set up no silhouette of a charging soldier peppered with bullet
marks on the wall of his office, for this was a picture that he carried
in his mind. Pertinent to his own taste, under the glance of the
portraits of the old heroes, was a little statuette of a harvester
called Toil on his desk.

"That's the fellow we're defending," he would say, becoming almost
rhapsodical. "I like to think back to him. He's the infantry before you
put him in uniform."

Let officers apply themselves with conspicuous energy and they heard
from a genial Partow; let officers only keep step and free of courts
martial, and they heard from a merciless taskmaster. Resign, please, if
you like a leisurely life, he told the idlers; and he had a way of
making them so uncomfortable that they would take the advice. Among the
sons of rest who had