and attendants went and came perpetually, altering, moving the little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of men, and the great commander and his two consultants stood amidst all these things and near where the fighting was nearest, scheming, directing.  They had but to breathe a word and presently away there, in the world of reality, the punctual myriads moved.  Men rose up and went forward and died.  The fate of nations lay behind the eyes of these three men.  Indeed they were like gods.

Most godlike of the three was Dubois.  It was for him to decide; the others at most might suggest.  Her woman’s soul went out to this grave, handsome, still, old man, in a passion of instinctive worship.

Once she had taken words of instruction from him direct.  She had awaited them in an ecstasy of happiness—­and fear.  For her exaltation was made terrible by the dread that some error might dishonour her....

She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating minuteness of an impassioned woman’s observation.

He said little, she remarked.  He looked but little at the maps.  The tall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm of ideas, conflicting ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting of the little red, blue, black, and yellow pieces on the board, and wanted to draw the commander’s attention to this and that.  Dubois listened, nodded, emitted a word and became still again, brooding like the national eagle.

His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she could not see his eyes; his moustache overhung the mouth from which those words of decision came.  Viard, too, said little; he was a dark man with a drooping head and melancholy, watchful eyes.  He was more intent upon the French right, which was feeling its way now through Alsace to the Rhine.  He was, she knew, an old colleague of Dubois; he knew him better, she decided, he trusted him more than this unfamiliar Englishman....

Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in profile; these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered years ago.  To seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse to hurry—­itself a confession of miscalculation; by attention to these simple rules, Dubois had built up a steady reputation from the days when he had been a promising junior officer, a still, almost abstracted young man, deliberate but ready.  Even then men had looked at him and said:  ’He will go far.’  Through fifty years of peace he had never once been found wanting, and at manoeuvres his impassive persistence had perplexed and hypnotised and defeated many a more actively intelligent man.  Deep in his soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery about the modern art of warfare, the key to his career.  And this discovery was that nobody knew, that to act therefore was to blunder, that to talk was to confess; and that the man who acted slowly and steadfastly and above all silently, had the best chance of winning