Those iron vespers lasted, I should say, for the better part of an hour.  When they were ended we went indoors.  Everybody was assembled in the long hall of the Prefecture, and a young officer was smashing out marching songs on the piano.  The Berlin artist made an art gallery of the billiard table and was exhibiting the water-color sketches he had done that day—­all very dashing and spirited in their treatment, though a bit splashy and scrambled-eggish as to the use of the pigments.

A very young man, with the markings of a captain on shoulder and collar, came in and went up to General von Heeringen and showed him something—­ something that looked like a very large and rather ornamental steel coal scuttle which had suffered from a serious personal misunderstanding with an ax.  The elongated top of it, which had a fluted, rudder-like adornment, made you think of Siegfried’s helmet in the opera; but the bottom, which was squashed out of shape, made you think of a total loss.

When the general had finished looking at this object we all had a chance to finger it.  The young captain seemed quite proud of it and bore it off with him to the dining room.  It was what remained of a bomb, and had been loaded with slugs of lead and those iron cherries that are called shrapnel.  A French flyer had dropped it that afternoon with intent to destroy one of the German captive balloons and its operator.  The young officer was the operator of the balloon in question.  It was his daily duty to go aloft, at the end of a steel tether, and bob about for seven hours at a stretch, studying the effects of the shell fire and telephoning down directions for the proper aiming of the guns.  He had been up seven hundred feet in the air that afternoon, with no place to go in case of accident, when the Frenchman came over and tried to hit him.  “It struck within a hundred meters of me,” called back the young captain as he disappeared through the dining-room doorway.  “Made quite a noise and tore up the earth considerably.”

“He was lucky—­the young Herr Captain,” said Von Scheller—­“luckier than his predecessor.  A fortnight ago one of the enemy’s flyers struck one of our balloons with a bomb and the gas envelope exploded.  When the wreckage reached the earth there was nothing much left of the operator—­ poor fellow!—­except the melted buttons on his coat.  There are very few safe jobs in this army, but being a captive-balloon observer is one of the least safe of them all.”

I had noted that the young captain wore in the second buttonhole of his tunic the black-and-white-striped ribbon and the black-and-white Maltese Cross; and now when I looked about me I saw that at least every third man of the present company likewise bore such a decoration.  I knew the Iron Cross was given to a man only for gallant conduct in time of war at the peril of his life.

A desire to know a few details beset me.  Humplmayer, the scholarly art dealer, was at my side.  He had it too—­the Iron Cross of the first class.