The Red Cross Barge

The Herr Doktor moved away his chair from the large round table across half of which, amid the remains of a delicious dessert a large-scale map of the surrounding Frenchcountryside had been spread out. On the other half of the table had been pushed a confusion of delicate white-and-goldcoffee-cups and almost empty liqueur-bottles-signs of the pleasant ending to the bestdinner the five young Uhlan officers who were now gathered together in this French innparlour had eaten since 'The Day.'Although the setting sun still threw a warm, lambent light on the high chestnut trees in thepaved courtyard outside, the low-walled room was already beginning to be filled with thepale golden shadows of an August night. A few moments ago the Herr Commandant hadloudly called for a lamp, and Madame Blanc, owner of the Tournebride, had herself broughtit in. Placed in the centre of the table the lamp illumined the flushed, merry young facesnow bent over the large coloured map. Alone the Herr Doktor sat apart from the bright circle of light, and, although he was himselfsmoking a pipe, the fumes of the other men's strong cigars seemed to stifle him. Of only medium height, with the thoughtful, serious face which marks the thinker andworker; clad, too, in the plain, practical 'feld-grau' uniform of a German Red Cross surgeon, he was quite unlike his temporary comrades. And there was a further reason for thisunlikeness. The Herr Doktor, Max Keller by name, was from Weimar; the young officersnow round him were Prussians of the Junker class. They were quite civil to the HerrDoktor-in fact they were too civil-and their high spirits, their constant, exultant boastsof all they meant to do in Paris-in Paris where they expected to be within a week, for itwas now August 27, 1914-jarred on his tired, sensitive brain. Behind his large tortoise-shell spectacles the Herr Doktor's eyes ached and smarted. Hebelonged to the generation which had been, even as children, put into spectacles. Hispresent companions, more fortunate than he, had been born into the 'nature-eye' cycle ofGerman oculistic research. Not one of them wore spectacles, and their exemption was oneof the many reasons why he, though only thirty-four years of age, felt so much older, and soapart from them in every wa