A young officer came up through the dusk to find out who
we were, and, having found out, he invited us into the chief house of
the place, and there in a stuffy little French parlor we were introduced
in due form to General d'Elsa, the head of the Twelfth Reserve Corps, it
turned out. Standing in a ceremonious ring, with filled glasses in our
hands, about a table which bore a flary lamp and a bottle of bad native
wine, we toasted him and he toasted us.
He was younger by ten years, I should say, than either Von Heeringen or
Von Zwehl; too young, I judged, to have got his training in the blood-
and-iron school of Bismarck and Von Moltke of which the other two must
have been brag-scholars. Both of them, I think, were Prussians, but
this general was a Saxon from the South. Indeed, as I now recall, he
said his home in peace times was in Dresden. He seemed less simple of
manner than they; they in turn lacked a certain flexibility and grace of
bearing which were his. But two things in common they all three had and
radiated from them--a superb efficiency in the trade at which they
worked and a superb confidence in the tools with which they did the
work.
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