“No army that ever worked as hard in peace as the average manufacturer or bridge-builder was ever beaten in battle if it fought anything like equal numbers,” he said.  “The officer who works hard in the army deserves more credit than he would in any other profession because the incentive for results seems remote.  But what a terrible test of results may be made in a single hour’s action.  There is nothing you have learned or ever will learn that may not be of service to you.  There is no invention, no form of industrial organization that must not be included in the greatest organization of all, whose plant and methods must be up to date in every particular.  To be backward in a single particular may mean disaster—­may mean that the loss of thousands of lives is due to you.  You must have self-control, courage, dash, judgment If you have not kept up, if you are not equal to the test, your inefficiency will mean your shame and your country’s suffering; while efficiency means a clear conscience and your country’s security.”

Thus Partow turned the balance on the side of filial affection.  He kept watch of the boy, but without favoring him with influence.  Young Lanstron, who wanted to see results, had to earn them.  He realized in practice the truth of Partow’s saying that there was nothing he had ever learned but what could be of service to him as an officer.  What the acrobats had taught him probably saved his life on the occasion of his first flight across the range.  The friendships with all sorts of people in his youth were the forerunner of his sympathy with the giant, wall-eyed Stransky who had mutinied on the march.

“Finding enough work to do?” Par tow would ask with a chuckle when they met in these days, for he had made Lanstron both chief of intelligence and chief aerostatic officer.  Young Colonel Lanstron’s was the duty of gaining the secrets of the Gray staff and keeping those of the Brown and organizing up-to-the-moment efficiency in the new forces of the air.

He had remarked truly enough that the injury to his left hand served as a better reminder against the folly of wool-gathering than a string, even a large red string, tied around his finger.  Thanks to skilful surgery working ingeniously with splintered bone and pulpy flesh, there was nothing unpleasant to the eye in a stiffened wrist and scarred knuckles slightly misshapen.  The fingers, incapable of spreading much, were yet serviceable and had a firm grip of the wheel as he rose from the aeroplane station on the Sunday morning after Marta’s return home for a flight to La Tir.

He knew the pattern weaving under his feet as one knows that of his own garden from an overlooking window.  Every detail of the staff map, ravines, roads, buildings, battery positions, was stitched together in the flowing reality of actual vision.  No white posts were necessary to tell him where the boundary between the two nations lay.  The line was drawn in his brain.