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 elemental boy-like bearing of
pride in him as he told us the story. If I am right in my dates the
defenses of Maubeuge caved in under the batterings of the German Jack
Johnsons on September sixth and the citadel surrendered September
seventh. On the following day, the eighth, Von Zwehl got word that a
sudden forward thrust of the Allies threatened the German center at
Laon. Without waiting for orders he started to the relief. He had
available only nine thousand troops, all reserves. As many more shortly
re-enforced him. He marched this small army--small, that is, as armies
go these Titan times--for four days and three nights. In the last
twenty-four hours of marching the eighteen thousand covered more than
forty English miles--in the rain. They came on this same plateau, the
one which we now faced, at six o'clock of the morning of September
thirteenth, and within an hour were engaged against double or triple