As we climbed up the banks we were aware of certain shelters which were like overgrown rabbit hutches cunningly contrived of wattled faggots and straw sheaves plaited together.  They had tarpaulin interlinings and dug-out earthen floors covered over thickly with straw.  These cozy small shacks hid themselves behind a screen of haws among the scattered trees which flanked an ancient fortification, abandoned many years before, I judged, by the grass-grown looks of it.  Out in front, upon the open crest of the rise, staff officers were grouped about two telescopes mounted on tripods.  An old man—­you could tell by the hunch of his shoulders he was old—­sat on a camp chair with his back to us and his face against the barrels of one of the telescopes.  With his long dust-colored coat and the lacings of violent scarlet upon his cap and his upturned collar he made you think of one of those big gray African parrots that talk so fluently and bite so viciously.  But when, getting nimbly up, he turned to greet us and be introduced the resemblance vanished.

There was nothing of the parrot about him now, Here was a man part watch dog and part hawk.  His cheeks and the flanges of his nostrils were thickly hair-lined with those little red-and-blue veins that are to be found in the texture of good American paper currency and in the faces of elderly men who have lived much out-of-doors during their lives.  His jowls were heavy and pendulous like a mastiff’s.  His frontal bone came down low and straight so that under the flat arch of the brow his small, very bright agate-blue eyes looked out as from beneath half-closed shutters.  His hair was clipped close to his scalp and the shape of his skull showed, rounded and bulgy; not the skull of a thinker, nor yet the skull of a creator, just the skull of a natural-born fighting man.  The big, ridgy veins in the back of his neck stood out like window-cords from a close smocking of fine wrinkles.  The neck itself was tanned to a brickdust red.  A gnawed white mustache bristled on his upper lip.  He was tall without seeming to be tall and broad without appearing broad, and he was old enough for a grandfather and spry enough for his own grandchild.  You know the type.  Our Civil War produced it in number.

At his throat was the blue star of the Order of Merit, the very highest honor a German soldier can win, and below it on his breast the inevitable black-and-white striped ribbon.  The one meant leadership and the other testified to individual valor in the teeth of danger.  It was Excellency von Zwehl, commander of the Seventh Reserve Corps of the Western Army, the man who took Maubeuge from the French and English, and the man who in the same week held the imperiled German center against the French and English.