Part 155

Truly that Philippa had passed, vanished silently even as she had stood there with her eyes on the window; faded, dissolved into thin shadow, leaving, where she had stood, this slender, silent, deep-eyed girl looking at him out of the new and subtle mystery which enveloped her.

He thought that it was he himself who saw her differently and with new eyes; but she herself had changed. And, for the first time, as they passed slowly toward the terrace together, he was conscious of a freshness that seemed to cling to her like a fragrance--and of the beauty of her as she moved beside him, not touching him, keeping clear of contact, her head a trifle bent.

*CHAPTER XXXIII*

Warner, dressing for dinner, stood looking down from his window at the Sais road. Halkett, in his smart but sober field uniform, sat sideways on the window sill, chatting with his friend and surveying the lively panorama below, where, through the fading light, endless columns of motor lorries rolled ponderously eastward.

In every direction bicycle and motor cycle messengers were speeding, north and south on the Sais road, west toward Dreslin by the mill, eastward over cow-paths and sheepwalks, and across the pontoons, or by the school highway and quarry bridge, southeast toward a road crowded with motor lorries, and through that gap in the foothills which narrows into the Pass of the Falcons.

Warner, leisurely buttoning his waistcoat, stood looking out of the window at the scenes passing under the plateau, and listening with the greatest interest to Halkett's comments on these preliminaries for a campaign about to open.

"Then, in your opinion, it is invasion?" he said.

Halkett nodded:

"I can make nothing else of this movement, Warner. Our General, Pau, is at Nancy. What you see down there is part of a perfectly complete and coherent army, and it is certainly moving on the Vosges passes.

"Metz, Strassburg, Colmar, lie beyond; our alpinists are swarming around the Donon. Under it lie the lowlands of Alsace and Lorraine.

"Already we have seized the pass of Saales; Thann and Danemarie are menaced; the valley of the Bruche lies before us, Saarburg and the railroad to Metz invite us.

"Does it not all seem very logical, Warner?"

"It sounds so."

"It is good strategy. The logic is sound logic. If we carry it through, it will be applauded as brilliant strategy.

"The Germans want a decisive battle on French soil in the vicinity of Rheims. If they beat us there, they pivot on Verdun, half-circle on the Oise, and Paris lies before them. They have today a million men within striking distance of the French frontier."

"Are we fully mobilized?"

"Our concentration is slower; we are massing between Bar-le-Duc and Epinal. We have, so far, only seven corps d'armee concentrated, and twenty-one more on the march. But do you know what we have done already?

"Listen; this isn't generally known yet, but we have taken the passes of Bonhomme and Sainte Marie; we have taken Muelhausen----"

"What!"

"Yes, it's ours. More than that, we have entered Dinant. At Mangiennes, Moncel, Lagarde, we drove the Germans. Our line of battle stretches two hundred miles from a point opposite Tongres to Nancy. We smashed the Germans at Altkirch and left them minus thirty thousand men!

"And this great counter-offensive which our General is planning is already exercising such a pressure on their advance toward Brussels that they have begun to detach entire army corps and send them post haste into Alsace. What do you think of that, Warner?"

"Fine!" exclaimed the American. "It's simply splendid, Halkett. You see, we here in the valley couldn't know anything about it. All we had to go by was that the German guns were booming nearer and nearer, that Ausone is in ruins, that Uhlans were riding the country as impudently as though they were patrolling their own fatherland. I tell you, old chap, it's a wonderful relief to me to hear from you what is really going on."

He turned to his mirror, lighted a cigarette, and began to fuss with his tie.

Halkett said, grimly amused:

"Oh, yes, we all ought to feel immensely relieved by capturing a mountain and a couple of unfortified German towns, even if there are today in Europe seventeen million men under arms and seventeen million more in reserve, all preparing to blow each other's heads off."

Warner came back slowly to the windows:

"It is a ghastly situation, Halkett. The magnitude of the cataclysm means nothing to us, so far. Nobody yet has comprehended it. I don't think anybody ever really can--even when it's over and the whole continent is underplowcd and fertilized with dead men from the Channel to the Carpathians--no single mind of the twentieth century is ever going to be able to grasp this universal horror in all its details. In a hundred years, perhaps----" He shrugged, threw away his cigarette, and picked up his evening coat to inspect it before decorating his person with it.

Halkett said: