time of peace, he was by way of being a collector of and dealer in art
objects at Munich. Somebody else mentioned big-game shooting. For five
minutes, then, or such a matter, the ways of big game and the ways of
shooting it held the interest of half a dozen men at our curve of the
table.

In such an interlude as this the listener might almost have lulled
himself into the fancy that, after all, there was no war; that these
courteous, gray-coated, shoulder-strapped gentlemen were not at present
engaged in the business of killing their fellowmen; that this building
wherein we sat, with its florid velvet carpets underfoot and its
too-heavy chandeliers overhead, was not the captured chateau of the
governor of a French province; and that the deep-eyed, white-fleeced,
bull-voiced old man who sat just opposite was not the commander of
sundry hundreds of thousands of fighting men with guns in their hands,
but surely was no more and no less than the elderly lord of the manor,
who, having a fancy for regimentals, had put on his and had pinned some
glittering baubles on his coat and then had invited a few of his friends
and neighbors in for a simple dinner on this fine evening of the young
autumn.

Yet we knew that already the war had taken toll of nearly every man in
uniform who was present about this board. General von Heeringen's two
sons, both desperately wounded, were lying in field hospitals--one in
East Prussia, the other in northern France not many miles from where we
were. His second in command had two sons--his only two sons--killed in
the same battle three weeks before. When, a few minutes earlier, I had
heard this I stared at him, curious to see what marks so hard a stroke
would leave on a man. I saw only a grave middle-aged gentleman, very
attentive to the consul who sat beside him, and very polite to us all.