The Conde concluded by conveying to de Quesnoy Don Alfonso's relief and happiness on learning that he was alive and well, with affectionate messages from Gulia, de Vendome, the Conde Ruiz, the Infanta Maria Alfonsine, and an expression of his own devoted friendship coupled with the hope that it would not be more than a year or two before they would all enjoy the happiness of having him among them again.
Meanwhile, through his acquaintances in the beautiful capital of Brazil, de Quesnoy had been exploring the possibilities of entering the Brazilian Army. As an ex-Chief Instructor of the French Military Academy of St. Cyr, with several years of distinguished active service in North Africa in addition, his qualifications could not be questioned, and after a few meetings with influential army officers the Minister for War offered him the post of Commandant at the Military College.
He would have preferred to command troops; but it appeared a good opening, so he accepted. Yet he had not long taken up the post before he regretted his decision. In those days, in Latin America, discipline among officers was still as nebulous as it had been in the European armies opposing Napoleon. Young sparks belonging to powerful families were accustomed to sleep out at nights and cut lectures and parades when they pleased but, all the same, they expected to receive the most sought-after appointments when the course was over. By cracking down on them de Quesnoy made himself intensely unpopular, and he soon learned that these wealthy idlers had complained to their influential fathers, with the result that an intrigue was developing to oust him from his job. Fighting he considered his business, but not fighting a haughty oligarchy for the right to force its decadent youth to toe the line and learn to become competent officers. In consequence, in the New Year of 1907 he had resigned and transferred to the army of one of the Central American Republics.
There he had been given the rank of Brigadier-General and sent to fight Indians. Although he found the troops allotted to him illiterate, ragged, and largely recruited from the gaols, and supplies reached him only in an inadequate trickle, he had soon become fascinated by jungle warfare. Not only was it utterly different from his campaigns against well-organized bodies of tribesmen, waged for oases in deserts and through the rocky gorges of the Atlas Mountains, it had a much closer resemblance to big game hunting, which had always been a passion with him. But in this case, instead of stalking dangerous animals for amusement, the object was to make waterways and jungle tracks safe for commerce from attack by murderous savages, and the risk entailed by the hunter was the much greater one of being pipped by a poison-tipped arrow, which could result in a death of excruciating agony.
After three months he had gone down with jungle fever and been invalided back to the capital. While he was convalescing a revolution had taken place and the new War Minister had decided that he would be of more value in helping to reorganize the army than returning to the jungle. By Central American standards the War Minister had been an honest man, and de Quesnoy had done his utmost to bring order out of chaos; but at every turn he had found his efforts baulked by the rivalries of unscrupulous Generals, graft, and every kind of political chicanery. By midsummer he had become so disgusted with the whole business that he had thrown in his hand and accepted an offer from a neighbouring State to become Inspector-General of its forces.
There he had fared little better, as its Government and the higher ranks of its rag, tag and bobtail army had proved equally riddled with corruption. But after a time he had managed to change his job for the command of an expedition to survey the upper reaches of an uncharted river and a great area of territory adjacent to it. That he had enjoyed, as it had meant his being his own master and again living dangerously, which was in his blood. It had entailed further encounters with hostile Indians, hunting an immense variety of big game, and the discovery of an ancient Maya city, ruined and half-submerged in giant creepers yet with many of its intricate carvings still undamaged. But, to his annoyance, the expedition was recalled long before it had completed its work owing to lack of funds to send up to it further essential supplies.
During the eighteen months that followed he had served with the rank of Major-General in the armies of three other Republics. In time he had come to accept the trickery, bribery and ignorance of military matters which was almost universal among his sallow-skinned, black-eyed colleagues, recognizing that their standards were as natural to them as a sense of integrity was to the majority of officers in the armies of the great European nations. Even when telling the most flagrant lies their manners were impeccable, they were most hospitable and intensely chivalrous towards women; so he came to regard them rather as selfish, wicked children than near criminals, and became good friends with a number of the more intelligent among them.
His dream of commanding a Cavalry Division remained as far away as ever since, except for a few squadrons of escort troops for Presidential processions, cavalry hardly existed, and he often thought with regret of the splendidly disciplined and equipped regiment of Spahis he had commanded in North Africa. But the half-Indian peons in the Central American armies were tough little men and earned his admiration.
For most of the time he lived in cities in which the privileged few enjoyed every luxury while the masses, mainly of mixed negroid and native Indian stock with only a rare dash of Spanish blood, plagued by disease, poverty and crushing taxation, barely managed to exist in the most appalling squalor. Yet each time resentment at such a state of things, or frustration at the intransigence and incompetence of his colleagues, had boiled up in him to a point at which he began to consider returning to Europe, he was either sent out to clear another jungle area of marauding Indians, or a revolution engineered by some magnate greedy for more wealth and power had to be crushed.
So for the past two and a half years he had at least lived a life that had not lacked for variety, and frequently provided him with situations in which he could indulge his favourite pastime of gambling his safety against his wits.
Now, as the Due de Richleau, he had to reorientate himself for his return to countries in which soldiers were not liable to be shot for minor acts of insubordination, where judges sent people to prison for offering them bribes instead of suggesting that the amount of the bribe should be doubled, where one did not have to take constant precautions against catching some terrible disease, or be liable to stumble in a street at night over the body of some poor wretch either struck down by one or knifed; and, in short, where a state of law and order was the rule rather than the exception.
Having crossed the Caribbean to New Orleans, as the nearest port from which he could be sure of making his voyage to Europe in a comfortable liner, he had had to wait there for one for eight days, and for a good part of that time he had amused himself by reading in the big City Library papers and periodicals which would bring him up-to-date with events in the Old World.
In England jovial King Edward VII still occupied the throne, with Asquith as his Prime Minister and a firebrand named Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Led by the latter the Radicals were carrying out a furious agitation to deprive the
House of Lords of its age-old right to veto measures passed by the Lower House. The Southern Irish meanwhile were carrying on an equally furious agitation to be given Home Rule. But the British people, as ever the pioneers in all forms of social welfare, had united in applauding a bill which a few months earlier had introduced Old Age Pensions for the needy.
In France Clemenceau was still Premier, but he was now having great trouble in holding together his coalition of Radicals and Socialists, and there were growing indications that the latter might split off and defeat him at the next election. The suppression of the Paris Commune, and all it stood for, in 1871 was now ancient history; but for a quarter of a century the memory of its threat to property, small as well as large, had made the majority of Frenchmen regard all workers' movements with the gravest suspicion. Since the 'nineties, however, they had gained ground by leaps and bounds. Recently the Marxists had fomented a great wave of
militant strikes which, by the sabotaging of plant, had cost the country a vast sum, and had been put down only by adopting emergency measures. The anarchists, too, continued to be equally active and, following an attempt to assassinate President Fallieres, were jeopardizing the effectiveness of the army by a great campaign encouraging desertion and denouncing military service.
In Germany Kaiser Wilhelm II continued to give his Chancellor, Prince von Biilow, sleepless nights wondering what new tactless and bellicose utterance he might learn in the morning that his Royal master had given out - generally to some foreign correspondent who had played upon his vanity during a private interview. There had been serious trouble in Germany's Polish provinces and also in Alsace-Lorraine, but a combination of efficient administration backed by the Prussian jack-boot had kept both minorities under control. Commercially, Germany was enjoying an era of great prosperity and there could be no doubt at all that the Kaiser's policies of Colonial expansion and building a High Seas Fleet that could challenge the British Navy had the full support of his people.
Italy was still labouring under a vast burden of debt and the backwardness and superstition of her agricultural population. In the south and m Sicily, the government, the priests and the Mafia competed to rob the peasantry of their last centissimi, and the appalling earthquake that had a few months earlier annihilated the great port of Messina had added greatly to the general distress.
From Vienna the aged Franz-Joseph still ruled his vast multiracial Empire. It was said that he worked stolidly for longer hours per day than the most conscientious of his civil servants, endeavouring to reconcile Hungarians with Czechs, Poles with Ruthenians, Austrians with Italians and Croats with Serbs; yet none of his subject races was content and, many people thought, they were waiting only for his death to proclaim their independence.
Portugal had for a long while been bankrupt, and in a final attempt to restore his country's finances King Carlos had allowed his Prime Minister to assume the powers of a dictator. This had led, fifteen months earlier, to an attack by a band of assassins on the Royal carriage. The King and Crown Prince had been shot dead; the Queen had miraculously escaped a hail of bullets and her younger son Manuel had been only slightly wounded. Now, aged nineteen, he wore the Crown, but was no more than a puppet in the hands of a coalition government which was desperately endeavouring to stave off revolution.
In Spain no event of outstanding importance had taken place, and since de Richleau was not going there he only glanced through the back numbers of such Spanish periodicals as were available. Whatever countries he might decide to visit later he was going first to Russia, to take up his inheritance; so it was to the state of things in Russia that he gave the lion's share of his interest.
Only a year before he had been shipped off to South America the Tsar had at last given way to popular pressure and consented to elections being held for the purpose of creating a National Assembly. This first Duma - as it was called - was convened only as a consultative body. But as soon as it assembled it became apparent that its members were not going to be content to act merely as advisers to the government. The two largest parties - the Liberal Democrats and the Socialists - had both demanded that the Duma should control the executive. The Tsar had refused to yield and dissolved his first 'parliament'.
Thereupon the leaders of the Opposition had crossed the frontier into Finland and issued a violent protest known as the 'Viborg Manifesto'. It called on the Russian people to refuse to pay taxes or supply recruits to the Army and Navy until the Duma was restored. The government had then counter-attacked by establishing special courts to punish terrorists and agitators. A great purge of Socialists had been carried out and thousands of people sent into exile.
Early in 1907, by which time things seemed to have quietened down, elections for a second Duma were held; but, in spite of the purge, a Liberal-Socialist majority was again returned. The Tsar's Minister, Count Stolypin, had accused the Socialist members of conspiracy and demanded their expulsion. A Committee had been appointed to examine the evidence, but the public outcry was so great that, without even waiting for the findings of the Committee, the Tsar had again dissolved the Duma.
There had followed a period of what almost amounted to civil war. On the one hand the Government used its Secret Police, and a vast spy system, with the utmost ruthlessness in an attempt to stamp out all opposition - even executing scores of people for political offences committed two or three years earlier - on the other a great part of the normally law-abiding masses now helped to finance, hide and abet the Nihilists, who succeeded in murdering scores of police and officials.
The Government won, at least to the extent that, when a third Duma was summoned in the autumn of 1907, Stolypin had at last secured the tame assembly he desired. This enabled him to introduce such reforms as he could persuade the Tsar to agree to, and to prepare the way for the measures on which his heart was set. These were designed to substitute private for communal ownership, so that the peasants might own the land on which they worked; for it was his very sensible belief that the possession of private property would prove the best bulwark against revolution.
But matters were not moving swiftly enough for the Socialists and Marxists. They continued their underground warfare with unabated vigour. Not a day passed but shots were fired or a bomb thrown at some relative of the Tsar, one of his Ministers, a General, a Police Chief, or some high official and innumerable police agents were knifed or slugged on the head. And it was in a bomb outrage that de Richleau's father had lost his life.
The old Duke had held no official position of any kind, and had never taken Russian nationality; so he was still technically a Frenchman. He had left his estate only to attend a centenary celebration in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, as the guest of the Governor, Count Boris Plackoff, a cousin of his dead wife. As so often happened, the bomb had been badly aimed. None of its splinters even grazed the Governor, but they killed or wounded a dozen soldiers and spectators standing a few yards away from him, the Duke among them.
That both de Quesnoy's wife and father should have met their deaths in the same way was not, in fact, a particularly strange coincidence. Anyone in the vicinity of royalty or a Governor making a public appearance at that time was liable to fall a victim to an assassin; so it was no more surprising than if two people, both of whom at times climbed mountains, should both die as a result of mountaineering accidents. Yet the murder of his father re-aroused in the new Duke all the emotions to which he had been subject two and a half years earlier.
The facts that he had never regarded his father with more than respectful affection, that he had seen very little of him during the past fifteen years, and that he had benefited through his death by coming into a considerable fortune, hardly entered his mind. They were submerged under the salient fact that his parent, while an innocent bystander, had been violently and painfully done to death by a small criminal minority which sought to impose its will by acts of terror upon a vast law-abiding majority.
The news of the assassination had brought back to him vivid memories of Angela, and the way in which their happiness had been terminated with such appalling suddenness. For some days, he was afflicted with periods of bitter brooding, as he thought of what his life might have been were she still alive, and what it had become owing to her death. He would have had a permanent home with the woman who had been his earliest and greatest love, a child now two years old to cherish, the enjoyment of a circle of friends with whom to pass their time in civilized surroundings. As it was, he had been forced to become a soldier of fortune, rootless, without family, and only circles of acquaintances which changed every month as he moved from one appointment to another, engaged in jungle warfare or countering the intrigues of unscrupulous Central American politicians.
Thinking back, it gave him some consolation to recall that, by undertaking his secret mission to Barcelona, he had succeeded in ensuring that Ferrer and his vile crew had been brought to book for the b
ackstage part they had played in Angela's murder, and had been put out of the way for good; but that did not alter the fact that the hydra-headed monster, militant anarchism, was still taking its toll almost daily of innocent victims, and that his father's life had been cut short by Russians of the poisonous Ferrer breed.
For a while he had contemplated offering to serve the Tsar in the same way as he had Don Alfonso, and under an alias seeking to penetrate the inner circles of the Russian Nihilists. But on consideration, he had recalled that the circumstances in Spain and Russia were very different. Don Alfonso had been anxious to employ him because the strongly Liberal element in his own police, especially in Catalonia, made them unreliable. To the Tsar's Secret Police, the Ocrana, that did not apply. Far too many of them had fallen victims to the bombs, pistols and knives of the Nihilists for them to have the least scruple about retaliating whenever the opportunity offered. They were already waging a relentless war against the terrorists, and had hundreds of spies constantly endeavouring to penetrate the cells of the assassins; so one more, and especially a man like himself who had not lived in Russia since his boyhood, could make no material difference.
By the time he reached New Orleans, he had decided that there was no place for him in the secret war that the Ocrana was waging; so his thoughts instinctively reverted to the type of war which was his own province, and the possibilities of future outbreaks of hostilities in various parts of the world. With that in mind, he looked through all the more serious English, French and German magazines, and read many articles in them to get an unbiased view of what diplomats termed The Concert of Europe'.
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