Yet I must add that not all the talk was talk of war.  In peaceful Aix-la-Chapelle, whence we had come, the people knew but one topic.  Here, on the forward frayed edge of the battle line, the men who had that day played their part in battle occasionally spoke of other things.  I recall there was a discussion between Captain von Theobald, of the Artillery, and Major Humplmayer, of the Automobile Corps, on the merits of a painting that filled one of the panels in the big, handsome, overdecorated hall.  The major won, which was natural enough, since, in 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.

Prince Scharmberg-Lippe, whom we had passed driving away from the Prefecture in his automobile as we drove to it in ours, was the last of four brothers.  The other three were killed in the first six weeks of fighting.  Our own companion, Captain Mannesmann, heard only the day before, when we stopped at Hirson—­just over the border from Belgium—­ that his cousin had won the Iron Cross for conspicuous courage, and within three days more was to hear that this same cousin had been sniped from ambush during a night raid down the left wing.