Nor had death been overly stingy to the members of the Staff itself.  We gathered as much from chance remarks.  And so, as it came to be eight o’clock, I caught myself watching certain vacant chairs at our table and at the two smaller tables in the next room with a strained curiosity.

One by one the vacant chairs filled up.  At intervals the door behind me would open and an officer would clank in, dusted over with the sift of the French roads.  He would bow ceremoniously to his chief and then to the company generally, slip into an unoccupied chair, give an order over his shoulder to a soldier-waiter, and at once begin to eat his dinner with the air of a man who has earned it.  After a while there was but one place vacant at our table; it was next to me.  I could not keep my eyes away from it.  It got on my nerves—­that little gap in the circle; that little space of white linen, bare of anything but two unfilled glasses.  To me it became as portentous as an unscrewed coffin lid.  No one else seemed to notice it.  Cigars had been passed round and the talk eddied casually back and forth with the twisty smoke wreaths.

An orderly drew the empty chair back with a thump.  I think I jumped.  A slender man, whose uniform fitted him as though it had been his skin, was sitting down beside me.  Unlike those who came before him, he had entered so quietly that I had not sensed his coming.  I heard the soldier call him Excellency; and I heard him tell the soldier not to give him any soup.  We swapped commonplaces, I telling him what my business there was; and for a little while he plied his knife and fork busily, making the heavy gold curb chain on his left wrist tinkle musically.

“I’m rather glad they did not get me this afternoon,” he said as though to make conversation with a stranger.  “This is first-rate veal—­better than we usually have here.”

“Get you?” I said.  “Who wanted to get you?”

“Our friends, the enemy,” he answered.  “I was in one of our trenches rather well toward the front, and a shell or two struck just behind me.  I think, from their sound, they were French shells.”

This debonair gentleman, as presently transpired, was Colonel von Scheller, for four years consul to the German Embassy at Washington, more lately minister for foreign affairs of the kingdom of Saxony, and now doing staff duty in the ordnance department here at the German center.  He had the sharp brown eyes of a courageous fox terrier, a mustache that turned up at the ends, and a most beautiful command of the English language and its American idioms.  He hurried along with his dinner and soon he had caught up with us.

“I suggest,” he said, “that we go out on the terrace to drink our coffee.  It is about time for the French to start their evening benediction, as we call it.  They usually quit firing their heavy guns just before dark, and usually begin again at eight and keep it up for an hour or two.”