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.
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