This bracing treatment suited his
case so well that at the first rumour of an armistice being signed he
could turn without misgivings to the prosecution of his private warfare.
This time it was to be regular warfare. He dispatched two friends to
Lieutenant D'Hubert, whose regiment was stationed only a few miles away.
Those friends had asked no questions of their principal. "I must pay him
off, that pretty staff officer," he had said grimly, and they went
away quite contentedly on their mission. Lieutenant D'Hubert had no
difficulty in finding two friends equally discreet and devoted to their
principal. "There's a sort of crazy fellow to whom I must give another
lesson," he had curtly declared, and they asked for no better reasons.
On these grounds an encounter with duelling swords was arranged one
early morning in a convenient field. At the third set-to, Lieutenant
D'Hubert found himself lying on his back on the dewy grass, with a hole
in his side. A serene sun, rising over a German landscape of meadows
and wooded hills, hung on his left. A surgeon--not the flute-player but
another--was bending over him, feeling around the wound.
"Narrow squeak. But it will be nothing," he pronounced.
Lieutenant D'Hubert heard these words with pleasure. One of his
seconds--the one who, sitting on the wet grass, was sustaining his head
on his lap-said:
"The fortune of war, _mon pauvre vieux_. What will you have? You had
better make it up, like two good fellows.
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