There was no clattering in of couriers, no hurried dispatching of orders this way and that.

Only, just before we finished with the meal, he got up and walked away a few paces, and there two of his aides joined him and the three of them confabbed together earnestly for a couple of minutes or so.

While so engaged they had the air about them of surgeons preparing to undertake an operation and first consulting over the preliminary details.

Or perhaps it would be truer to say they looked like civil engineers discussing the working-out of an undertaking regarding which there was interest but no uneasiness.

Assuredly they behaved not in the least as a general and aides would behave in a story book or on the stage, and when they were through they came back for their coffee and their cigars to the table where the rest of us sat.
"We are going now to a battery of the twenty-one-centimeter guns and from there to the ten-centimeters," called out Lieutenant Geibel as we climbed aboard our cars; "and when we pass that first group of houses yonder we shall be under fire.