The Last Shot

present he enjoyed his position as a bachelor who was the most favored man in the army too much to think of marriage. This did not imply an absence of fondness for women; rather the contrary. He li

and those purring kittens who live in small flats. Both afforded him diversion. A woman had been the most telling influen

motion; and while the other people whom he had known at La Tir were the vaguest shadows of personalities, her picture was as definite in detail as when she said: "You have the will! You have the ambition!" She had recognized in him the power that he felt; foreseen his ascent to the very apex of the pyramid. She

the prophecy. Had he heard the remark of a great manufacturer to the banker at his side in a passing limousine, "There goes the greatest captain of industry of us all!" Westerling would only have thought: "Certainly. I am c

understand. Reading books was one of the faults of Turcas, his assistant. No bookish soldier, he knew, had ever been a great general. He resented the growing power of these leaders of the civil world, taking distinction away from

About things which they did not understand, when they Should obey the orders of their superiors. Of late, their clatter had been about the extra taxes for the rec

he 128th, which he had ordered that afternoon to the very garrison at South La Tir that he had once commanded, was marching through the main avenue.

otor horns, the screech of small boys' velocipedes on the paths of the park; while they themselves were silent, except for the rhythmic tramp of the military shoes of id

, nothing seemed so resolutely dependable as this column of soldiers. They were the last word in filling human tissue into a mould for a set task. Where these came from we

ersal radicalism. And his car had to stop to let them pass. For an instant the indignation of military autocracy rose strong within him at sight of the national colors in such company. But he noted how naturally the men kept step; the solidarity of their movement. The

had any significance. Yes, the old human impulses would predominate and the only enemy would be on the other side o

the appeal of another: to live to see the guns and rifles that had fired only blank cartridges in practice pouring out shells and bullets, and all the battalions that had played at sham war in man[oe]uvres engaged in real war, under his direction. He saw his columns sweeping up the slopes of the Brown range. Victory was certain. He