With each order somewhere along that frontier some unit of a great organism would respond.  The reserves from this position would be transferred to that; such a position would be felt out before dark by a reconnaissance in force, however costly; the rapid-firers of the 19th Division would be transferred to the 20th; despite the 37th Brigade’s losses, it would still form the advance; General So-and-So would be superseded after his failure of yesterday; Colonel So-and-So would take his place as acting major-general; more care must be exercised in recommendations for bronze crosses, lest their value so depreciate that officers and men would lack incentive to win them.

Marta was having a look behind the scenes at the fountainhead of great events.  Power! power!  The absolute power of the soldier in the saddle, with premier and government and all the institutions of peace only a dim background for the processes of war!  Opposite her was a man who could make and unmake not only generals but even the destinies of peoples.  By every sign he enjoyed his power for its own sake.  There must be a chief of the five millions, which were as a moving forest of destruction, and here was the chief, his strength reflected in the strong muscles of his short neck as he turned his head to listen to Turcas.  Marta recalled the contrast between Westerling and Lanstron as they faced each other after the wreck of the aeroplane ten years ago:  the iron invincibility of the elder’s sturdy, mature figure and the alert, high-strung invincibility of the slighter figure of the younger man.

“The evidence you asked for in that Mallin mutiny case,” said Turcas, indicating the only remaining paper.

“Yes, I want to go into that—­it’s a question of policy,” said Westerling.

He had taken up the paper thoughtfully after Turcas withdrew, when he looked up to Marta in answer to a movement in her chair.  She had bent forward in a pose that freed her figure from the chair-back in an outline of suppleness and firmness; her lips were parted, showing a faint line of the white of her teeth, and he caught her gazing at him in a kind of wondering admiration.  But she dropped her eyelids instantly and said deliberately, less to him than to herself: 

“You have the gift!”

No tea-table flattery that, he knew; only the reflection of a fact whose existence had been borne in on her by observation.

“The gift?  How?” he inquired, speaking to the fringe of hair that half hid her lowered face.

She looked up, smiling brightly.

“You don’t know what gift!  Not the pianist’s!  Not the poet’s!” (Oh, to save Hugo!  The method she had chosen to save him, alien to all her impulses, born of the war’s stress on her mind, seemed the wise one in view of her knowledge of the man before her) “Why, of course, the supreme gift of command!  The thing that made you chief of staff!  And the war goes well for you, doesn’t it?”