We lunched with the General and his staff on soup and sausages, with a rare and precious Belgian melon cut in thin, salmon-tinted crescents to follow for dessert.  But before the lunch he took us and showed us, pointing this way and that with his little riding whip, the theater wherein he had done a thing which he valued more than the taking of a walled city.  Indeed there was a certain elemental boy-like bearing of pride in him as he told us the story.  If I am right in my dates the defenses of Maubeuge caved in under the batterings of the German Jack Johnsons on September sixth and the citadel surrendered September seventh.  On the following day, the eighth, Von Zwehl got word that a sudden forward thrust of the Allies threatened the German center at Laon.  Without waiting for orders he started to the relief.  He had available only nine thousand troops, all reserves.  As many more shortly re-enforced him.  He marched this small army—­small, that is, as armies go these Titan times—­for four days and three nights.  In the last twenty-four hours of marching the eighteen thousand covered more than forty English miles—­in the rain.  They came on this same plateau, the one which we now faced, at six o’clock of the morning of September thirteenth, and within an hour were engaged against double or triple their number.  Von Zwehl held off the enemy until a strengthening force reached him, and then for three days, with his face to the river and his back to the hill, he fought.

Out of a total force of forty thousand men he lost eight thousand and more in killed and wounded, but he saved the German Army from being split asunder between its shoulder-blades.  The enemy in proportion lost even more than he did, he thought.  The General had no English; he told us all this in German, Von Theobald standing handily by to translate for him when our own scanty acquaintance with the language left us puzzled.

“We punished them well and they punished us well,” he added.  “We captured a group of thirty-one Scotchmen—­all who were left out of a battalion of six hundred and fifty, and there was no commissioned officer left of that battalion.  A sergeant surrendered them to my men.  They fight very well against us—­the Scotch.”

Since then the groundswell of battle had swept forward, then backward, until now, as chance would have it, General von Zwehl once more had his headquarters on the identical spot where he had them four weeks before during his struggle to keep the German center from being pierced.  Then it had been mainly infantry fighting at close range; now it was the labored pounding of heavy guns, the pushing ahead of trench-work preparatory to another pitched battle.

Considering what had taken place here less than a month before the plain immediately before us seemed peaceful enough.