When he returned he said he saw quite clearly how it was: the French had failed to advance their left flank--the despatches showed it--and there was the fatal error. The despatches also showed quite clearly that the French had no left flank to advance, nor right either, not to speak of any rear; but the general said he couldn't help that--they should have advanced their left flank: that was the only really soldier-like thing for them to do. When armies meet on the battle-field they should almost always (I think he said) advance their left flank. Again (to hasten to recent events), here were these puerile, unspeakable, unutterable heathens, the Turks. Vile as their moral status was, their military advantages were such that had they had among their pachas one man who possessed the slightest glimmering of a conception of the art of war they would not only have held Stamboul, but they would have advanced their left flank right into the heart of Russia and set the Crescent flag to flying from the tops of the palaces on the banks of the Neva. Naturally, knowing his bellicose proclivities, we were fully prepared to hear that the general's love-affair was intimately connected with the war-period; for Mrs. Marcellus herself proposed that the general should follow Mr. McLaughlin's example and relate, not his last love-affair necessarily, but his most romantic one. Everybody present respected the active, self-helpful wife of the postmaster too much to desire, even for a joke, that the fine sentiments which drew such a woman into marriage should be made the theme of a story told by a fireside for the beguilement of a winter's evening. So the general started by saying that prior to courting and wedding his dear wife he had been led into an affair of the heart: with a contrite spirit he confessed that that affair was one which might have had the most fatal consequences. Luckily, his eyes were opened in time. But had circumstances been otherwise, had the government at Washington known the brink on which he stood, he who was now honored by his country's confidence to the extent of the postmastership of the town of Hurville might instead be figuring in the reprobatory annals of the republic's history along with Benedict Arnold and Major André. The conviction instantly spread among the listeners that we were now to learn that the general himself on some important occasion had failed to advance his left flank: if so, we should have him on the hip in future--the left hip, of course. But the dreadful episode occurred, it seemed, not on the battle-field, but during the leisure hours when nothing was astir in camp. It was no question of infantry, cavalry or artillery, but the old, old story of a pair of brown eyes. "She" was a Southern girl; they met by chance; he ordered her to walk under the flag; she smiled at him as she did so; stolen interviews followed; she swore to renounce her allegiance to the "Lost Cause" and accompany him to the North. Deceived