The speaker was a youngish man, with a long nose in a long face, somewhat bald upon the brow, a clipped moustache above a long thin mouth. There was something in his manner which suggested not too reputable finance doubled with Monte Carlo and the _coulisses_. He repeated, smacking his hand familiarly upon the back of the distinguished neutral: "In a fortnight--Paris!" He named the famous city with a smack of the lips.
"Undoubtedly, Highness," said the German general, his professional manner replaced by the obsequiousness of the courtier. "The army led by Your Highness cannot fail to conquer."
"Verdun--Paris! This time it will not fail, General." He walked across the room, smacking a riding-switch on his tall, patent-leather hussar boots, and chanting: "_Nach Verdun! Nach Verdun--Paris!_"[14]
The morning of the 21st February, 1916, opened damp and bleak. Over the heavy clay fields of the Woevre plain the mist hung persistently, enclosing all vision in a few hundred yards. Through the obscurity the poplars lining the roads loomed up like ghosts, dripping moisture from each bare twig. In the copses and the larger stretch of woodland known as the Forêt de Spincourt the conglobulated mist fell like rain. From either of the high knolls known as the Twins of Ornes, just south-west of the Forêt de Spincourt, the wooded slopes of the Heights of the Meuse--Merbebois and the Bois de Wavrille--rose dark and indefinite, discernible only when a little puff of the raw east wind, coming up the valley of the Orne, broke a rift in the fog.
The neutral and the German Oberst who was his inseparable companion stood on the more southerly of the twin heights. About them was a group of artillery officers. In their immediate front was the deep dug-out, sod-roofed, where telephonists sat and waited. It was an artillery observation post. The light was yet dim though the wet fog was white. It had been quite dark when the two spectators had made their way over roads deep in mud to this position of vantage.
The journey had been long, for their car had had to squeeze, lurching and slithering, past endless columns of infantry plodding over the atrocious roads. In the darkness those thousands of men had been scarcely more visible than phantoms who sang continuously as they marched, chorusing to the tune set by picked singers at the head of each company. Those who were merely the chorus broke off frequently to shout witticisms at the labouring motor-car. In high spirits, they wagered that they would be the first, after all, to arrive in Verdun.