We have heard nothing of Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son, and Peterkin, the valet's son, and others of Fracasse's company of the 128th of the Grays since Hugo Mallin threw down his rifle when they were firing on scattered Brown soldiers in retreat.
It was in one of the minor actions of the step-by-step advance after the taking of the Galland house that the judge's son received official notice of a holiday in the form of a nickel pellet from the Browns which made a clean, straight hole the size of a lead pencil through his flesh and then went singing on its way without deflection, as if it liked to give respites from travail to tired soldiers.
"Grazed the ribs—no arteries!" remarked the examining surgeon. "You'll be well in a month."
"We'll hold the war for you!" called the banker's son cheerily after the still figure on the stretcher.
"And you'll get gruel and custards, maybe," said the barber's son. "I like custards."
Once the judge's son had thought that nothing could be so grand as to be wounded fighting for one's country. He had in mind then, as the object of his boyish admiration, a young officer returned from a little campaign against the blacks in Africa, when, the casualties being few and the scene distant and picturesque, all heroes with scars had an aspect of romantic exclusiveness. But there was no more distinction now in being wounded than in catching cold. Truly, colonial wars were the only satisfactory kind.
The judge's son found himself one of many men on cots in long rows in the former barracks of the Browns near La Tir. Daily bulletins told the patients the names of the positions taken and daily they heard of fresh batches of wounded arriving, which were not mentioned on the bulletin-board.
"We continue to win," said the doctors and nurses invariably in answer to all questions. "General Westerling announces that everything is going as planned."
"You must know that speech well!" observed the judge's son to the nurse of his section.
Her lips twitched in a kind of smile.
"Letter-perfect!" she replied "It's official."
In two weeks, so fast had the puncture from the aseptic little pellet of civilized warfare healed under civilization's medical treatment, the judge's son was up and about, though very weak. But the rules strictly confined his promenades to the barracks yard. There might be news coming down the traffic-gorged castle road out of the region where the guns sounded that convalescents were not intended to hear. For news could travel in other ways than by bulletin-boards; and the judge's son, merely watching the faces of medical officers, guessed that it was depressing. But after the first attack on Engadir their faces lighted. The very thrill of victory seemed to be in the air.
"It's in the main line of defence!" called the doctor on his morning rounds of the cots. "They've made Westerling a field-marshal. He's outwitted the Browns! In a few days now we'll have the range!"
How staggering was the cost he was not to realize till later, when the ambulance stewards kept repeating:
"More to come!"
A newcomer, who took the place of a man who had died on the cot next to the judge's son, had been in the fight. He was still ether-sick and weak from the amputation of his right arm, with a dazed, glassy, and far-away look in his eyes, as if everything in the world was strange and uncertain.
"The fearful flashes—the explosions—the gusts of steel in the air!" he whispered.
The next night Westerling followed up his supposed advantage at Engadir as he had planned, and there was no sleep for the thunders and the light of the explosions through the barracks-room windows.
"I can see what is happening and feel—and feel!" said the man who had been at Engadir.
In the morning the bulletin announced that more positions were taken, with very heavy losses—to the enemy. But the news that travelled unofficially from tongue to tongue down the castle road and spoke in the faces of doctors and nurses said, "And to us!" plainly enough, even if the judge's son had not heard a doctor remark:
"It's awful—inconceivable! Not a hospital tent in this division is unoccupied. Most of the houses in town are full, and we're preparing for another grand attack!"
Now for two days the guns kept up their roar.
"Making ready for the infantry to go in," ran the talk around the barracks yard.
After the infantry had gone in and the result was known, the doctor on his morning round said to the judge's son:
"You're pretty pale yet, but you'll do. We must make room for a big crowd that is coming and the orders are to get every man who is in any condition to fight to the front."
"And if I get another hole in me you'll patch me up again?"
"Get any number and we'll patch you up if they're in the right place," was the answer. "But be careful about that detail."
Soon the judge's son was with a score of convalescents who were marched down to the town, where they formed in column with other detachments.
"Not with that cough!" exclaimed a doctor as they were about to start, ordering a man out of line. "You'd never get to the front. You'd only have to be brought back in an ambulance."
An enlightening march this for the judge's son from hospital to trenches, moving with a tide of loaded commissariat wagons and empty ambulances and passing a tide of loaded ambulances and empty commissariat wagons. A like scene was on every road to the front; a like scene on every vista of landscape along any part of the frontier. All trees and bushes and walls and buildings that would give cover to the enemy the Browns had razed. On every point of rising ground were the trenches and redoubts that the Browns had yielded after their purpose of making the Grays earn their way by trenches of their own had been served. The fields were trampled by the feet of infantry, cut by gun wheels, ploughed by shells, and sown with the conical nickel pellets from rifles and the round lead bullets of shrapnel. An escarpment of rock, where the road-bed was slashed into a hillside in a sharp turn, struck by the concentrated fire of automatics, appeared to have been beaten by thousands of sharp-headed hammers, leaving a pile of chips and dust.
The traffic of the main roads spread into branch roads which ended in the ganglia of supply depots, all kept in touch by the network of wires focussing through different headquarters to Westerling. In this conquered territory with its face of desolation there were no fighting men except reserves or convalescents on their way to the front. All the rest were wounded or dead or occupied in the routine of supply and intelligence. The organization which had been drilled through two generations of peace for this emergency exhibited the signs of pressure.
Eyes that met when commands were given and received were dull from want of sleep or hectically bright as a hypochondriac's. Voices spoke in a grim, tired monotone, broken by sudden flashes of irritation or eruptions of anger. Features were drawn like those of rowers against a tide. The very proportions of the ghastly harvest after the last, the heaviest of all, of the attacks brought spasms of nausea to men already hardened to blood and death. If the officers of the staffs in their official conspiracy of silence would not talk, the privates and the wounded would. The judge's son, observing, listening, thinking, was gathering a story to tell his comrades of Company B of the 128th.
That night he and his comrade convalescents slept in the open. Their bodies were huddled close together under their blankets for warmth, while aching limbs twitched from the fatigue of the march. The morning showed that others had coughs which should have kept them from the front.
"Four or five cases of pneumonia due in that lot!" a doctor remarked to a hospital-corps sergeant. "Put them in empties right away."
After this announcement other coughs developed. Amusing, these sudden, purposeful efforts should one happen to think of them in that way. But no one did.
"No you don't, you malingerers!" said the doctor sharply. "I've been at this business long enough to know a real cough."
Now the judge's son and a dozen others were separated from the rest of their companions and started over a hill. From the top they had a broad view. Across a strip of valley lay the main rise to the heights of the range. Along the summit nothing warlike was visible except the irregular landscape against the horizon. There the enemy rested in his fortifications. The slopes, as far as the judge's son could see on either hand, were like the warrens of an overpopulated rabbit world in hiding. Here was the army of the Grays in its redoubts and trenches A thousand times as many men as were ever at work on the Panama Canal had been digging their way forward—digging regardless of union hours; digging to save their own lives and to take lives. And the nearer they came to the top of the range the deeper they had to dig and the slower their progress.
As the little group of convalescents descended into a valley a bursting shell from the Browns scattered its fragments over the earth near by.
"They drop one occasionally, though they don't expect to get more than a man or two by chance, which is hardly worth the cost of the charge," some one explained. "You see that they must know just what our positions are from their understanding of our army's organization, and the purpose is to bother us about bringing up supplies and reserves. Start a commissariat train or a company in close order across, and—whew! The air screams!"
Once on the other side of the valley, and the maze of zigzags and parallels leading into the warrens was simplified by signs indicating the location of regiments. At length the judge's son found himself in the home cave of his own tribe. His comrades were resting at the noon-hour, their backs against the wall of their shell-proof. In the faint light their faces were as gray as the dust on the dirty uniforms that hung on their gaunt bodies. Dust was caked in the seams around their eyes; their cheeks were covered with dusty beards. Their greeting of the returned absentee was that of men who had passed through a strain that left existence untouched by the spring of average sensations.
"Did you get the custards?" asked the barber's son in a squeaky voice.
"No, but I got a jelly once—only once!"
"Snob!" said the barber's son.
"Jelly! I could eat a hogshead of jelly and still be empty! What I want is fresh meat!" growled Pilzer, the butcher's son.
"A hogshead of jelly might be good to bathe in!" said the banker's son. "I haven't had a bath for a month."
"I have. I turned my underclothes inside out!" said the barber's son. He was aiming to take Hugo's place as humorist, in the confidence of one sprung from a talkative family.
Scanning the faces, the judge's son found many new ones—those of the older reservists—while many of the faces of barrack days were missing.
"Whom have we lost?" he asked.
The answer, given with dull matter-of-factness, revealed that, of the group that had talked so light-heartedly of war six weeks before, only little Peterkin, the valet's son, and Pilzer, the butcher's son, and the barber's and the banker's sons survived. They were sitting in a row, from the instinct that makes old associates keep together even though they continually quarrel. The striking thing was that Peterkin looked the most cheerful and well-kept of the four. As the proud possessor of a pair of scissors, he had trimmed a surprisingly heavy beard Van Dyck fashion, which emphasized his peaked features and a certain consciousness of superiority; while the barber's son sported only a few scraggly hairs. The scant, reddish product of Pilzer's cheeks, leaving bare the liver patch, only accentuated its repulsiveness and a savagery in his voice and look which was no longer latent under the conventional discipline of every-day existence. The company had not been in the first Engadir assault, but, being near the Engadir position, had suffered heavily in support.
"You were in the big attack night before last?" asked the judge's son.
"We started in," said Peterkin, "but Captain Fracasse brought us back," he added in a way that implied that only orders had kept him from going on.
Peterkin, the trembling little Peterkin of the baptismal charge across the line of white posts, had been the first out of the redoubt on to the glacis in that abortive effort, living up to the bronze cross on his breast. He was one of the half dozen out of the score that had started to return alive. The psychology of war had transformed his gallantry; it had passed from simulation to reality, thanks to his established conviction that he led a charmed life. Little Peterkin, always pale but never getting paler, was ready to lead any forlorn hope. A superstitious nature, which, at the outset of the war, had convinced him that he must be killed in the first charge, now, as the result of his survival, gave him all the faith of Eugene Aronson that the bullet would never be made that could kill him.
"Was the attack general all along the front?" some one asked. "We couldn't tell. All we knew was the hell around us."
"Yes," answered the judge's son.
"Did we accomplish anything?"
"A few minor positions, I believe."
"But we will win!" said Peterkin. "The colonel said so."
"And the news—what is the news?" demanded the barber's son. "You needn't be afraid," he added. "The officers are on the other side of the redoubt. They get sick of the sight of us and we of them and this is their recess and ours from the eternal digging."
"Yes, the news from home!"
"Yes, from home! We don't even get letters any more. They've shut off all the mails."
"I met a man from our town," said the judge's son. "He said that after that story was published in the press about Hugo's damning patriotism and hurrahing for the Browns—it was fearfully exaggerated—his old father and mother shut themselves up in the house and would not show their faces for shame. But his sweetheart, however much her parents stormed, refused to renounce him. She held her head high and said that the more they abused him the more she loved him, and she knew he could do nothing wrong."
"Hugo was not a patriot. It takes red blood to make a patriot!" said Peterkin. In the pride of heroism and prestige, he was becoming an oracular enunciator of commonplaces from the lips of his superiors.
"The absence of any word from the front only increases the suspense of the people. They do not know whether their sons and brothers and husbands are living or dead," continued the judge's son.
"Up to a week ago they let us write," said Pilzer, "though they wouldn't let us say anything except that we were well."
"That was because it might give information to the enemy," said Peterkin.
"As if I didn't know that!" grumbled Pilzer. "The enemy seems to be always ready for us, anyway," he added.
"The chief of staff stopped the letters because he said that mothers who received none took it for granted that their sons were dead," explained the judge's son. "Besides, he asserts that casualties are not heavy and asks for patience in the name of patriotism."
"The—!" exclaimed Pilzer, referring to Westerling. He who had set out to be an officers' favorite had become bitter against all officers, high and low.
Peterkin was speechlessly aghast. The others said nothing. They were used to Pilzer's oaths and obscenity, with a growing inclination to profanity on their own part. Besides, they rather agreed with his view of the chief of staff.
"Did you see many dead and wounded?" asked a very tired voice, that of one of the older reservists who was emaciated, with a complexion like blue mould.
"How can I tell you what I saw? Ought I to tell you?"
"When you've had to wipe a piece of brains out of your eye, as I have—it was warm and jelly-like," said Pilzer, "you ain't as squeamish as Hugo Mallin. I wonder they don't give him a bronze cross!"
"Bronze crosses are given for bravery in action," said Peterkin in his new-fashioned parrot way since he had become great. "You should not do anything to affect the spirit of corps."
"The boy wonder from the butler's pantry! Our dear, natty little buttons! Bullets glide off him!" snarled Pilzer, who had set out to win a bronze cross, only to see it won by a pygmy.
"Did you see many dead and wounded?" persisted the very tired voice of the old reservist.
"Yes, yes—and every kind of destruction!" answered the judge's son. "And—I kept thinking of Hugo Mallin."
"I'm glad they didn't shoot Hugo," said the very tired voice. "I'm sorry for his old father and mother. I'm a father myself."
"I certainly had a good farewell kick at him!" declared Pilzer. "Lean on yourself!" he added, giving a shove to the old reservist who was next him.
"I saw men who had ceased to be human. That reminds me, Pilzer," the judge's son went on, "I saw one wounded man, lying beside another, turn and strike him, and he said: 'I had to hit somebody or something!' And I heard a wounded man who was waiting in line before the surgeon's table say: 'There's others hurt worse than me. I can wait.' I heard men begging the doctors to put them out of their misery. I saw two dead men with their hands clasped as they were when they died. Then there were the men who went mad. One had to be held by force. He kept crying with demoniacal laughs: 'I want to go back and kill—kill! Let's all kill, kill, kill!' Another insisted on dancing, despite a bandaged leg. 'Look, look at the little red spots!' he was saying. 'You must step on one every time; if you don't, the automatic will get you!' Another declared that he had been through hell and insisted that he would live forever now. Another was an artist, a landscape-painter, who had lost his eyesight. He was seeing beautiful landscapes, and the nurses had to strap him to his cot to keep him from struggling to his feet and trying to use an imaginary brush on imaginary canvases. He died seeing beautiful landscapes.
"A pretty dreary sight, too, was the field of the dead, as I called it. As the bodies were brought in they were laid in long rows, until there was no more room without moving a supply depot. So there was nothing to do but begin to pile them two deep. A service-corps man took off each man's metal identification tag and tossed it into an ammunition box. One box was already full and a second half full. Chink-chink-chink—tags of the rich man's son and the poor man's son, the doctor of philosophy and the illiterate; chink-chink-chink—a life each time. They'll take the tags to the staff office and tired clerks will find the names that go with the numbers."
"You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs," said Peterkin, quoting high authority. "Some have to be killed."
"The last I heard from home my wife and one of the children were sick and my employer had gone bankrupt," broke in the very tired voice rather irrelevantly.
"Yes, my father's last letter was pretty blue about business," said the banker's son. He was looking at his dirty hands. The odor of clothes unlaundered for weeks, in which the men had slept, tortured his sensitive nostrils. "A millionaire and filthy as swine in a sty!" he exclaimed. "Digging like a navvy in order to get admission to the abattoir!"
"Were there any reserves coming our way?" asked the barber's son.
"Yes, masses."
"Perhaps they will relieve us and we'll go into the reserves for a while," suggested the very tired voice.
"No fear!" growled Pilzer.
"They have called out the old men, the fellows of forty-five to fifty, who were supposed to be out of it for good," said the judge's son. "Westerling says they are to guard prisoners and property when we cross the range and start on the march to the Browns' capital. Then all the other men can be on the firing-line and force the war to a mercifully quick end with a minimum loss. I saw numbers of them just arriving at La Tir, footsore and limping."
"I know. Mine's been indoor work, making paints," said the very tired voice. "When you've had long hours in the shop and had to sit up late with sick babies, you aren't fit for marching. And I think I've got lead-poisoning."
"Whew!" The judge's son put his hand over his nose as a breeze sprang up from the direction of the Brown lines.
"I thought we got them all," said the barber's son.
"Must have missed one that was buried by a shell and another shell must have dug him up!" muttered Pilzer, glaring at the barber's son. "It's not nice on people with ladylike nostrils. James, get theeau de cologneand draw his bath for our plutocrat!"
"You see, something had to be done about the dead between the redoubts," explained the barber's son, "though the officers on both sides were against it."
"Naturally. It afforded opportunities for observation," put in Peterkin, repeating the colonel's words.
"But finally it was agreed to let a dozen from either side go out without arms," the barber's son concluded.
"I heard there was great complaint from the women," went on the judge's son. "Women aren't like what they were in the last war. They want to know what has become of their men-folk. They have been gathering in crowds and making trouble for the police. One of the old reservists was telling me of talk of an army of women marching to the front to learn the truth of the situation."
"If you don't stop leaning on me I'll give you a punch you'll remember!" exclaimed Pilzer as he rammed his elbow into the old reservist's ribs.
"I beg pardon! It was because I am tired and sort of blank-minded," the old reservist explained.
"You brute!" snapped the banker's son to Pilzer.
"Mallin thrashed you once and I've done it once. On my word, I've a mind to again!"
"No, you don't! No, you can't! And this time your boxing tricks will do you no good. I'll finish you!"
The two had sprung to their feet with hectic energy: Pilzer's liver patch a mottled purple in the midst of his curly red beard, his head lowered in front of his short, thick neck as before a spring, and the banker's son, lighter and quicker, awaiting the attack. Some of the others half rose, while the rest looked on in curiosity mixed with indifference.
"I'll call the captain!" piped Peterkin.
The judge's son stopped Peterkin and put a hand on either of the adversaries' shoulders.
"Can't we get enough fighting from the Browns without fighting each other?" he asked.
The banker's son and Pilzer dropped back in their places, in the reaction of men who had spent their strength in defiance.
"The thick of it last night, I heard, was still at Engadir, where Westerling is determined to break through," the judge's son proceeded. "At one point they sent in a regiment with a regiment covering it from the rear, and the fellows ahead were told that they wouldn't be allowed to come back alive—just what occurred at Port Arthur, you know—so they had better take the position."
"What happened?" asked the very tired voice.
"Those who reached the enemy's works alive were taken prisoner."
Further talk was interrupted by a volume of voices singing, which seemed to issue from a cellar not far away. It had the swell of a hymn of resolute purpose.
"The Browns' song—something new since you were with us," explained the barber's son to the judge's son.
"Yes, their whole line sung it in the silence of dawn following last night's repulse," said the banker's son. "Notice the hammer beat to it and then the earth rumble, like pounding nails in a coffin box and rattling the earth on top of the box after it is lowered."
"Yes, and I get the words," said the judge's son, who knew the language of the Browns: "'God with us, not to take what is theirs, but to keep what is ours! God with us!'"
"They say some private—Stransky, I believe his name is—composed the words from a saying of Partow, their chief of staff, and it spread," put in the very tired voice.
"As it would at a time of high pressure like this, when all humanity's nerves form an electric circuit," said the judge's son. "'God with us!' What a power they put into that!"
"But God is with us, not with them!" put in Peterkin earnestly. "Let's have our song to answer them," he added, striking up the tune.
So they sung the song they had sung as they started off to the war—a song about camping in the squares of the Browns' capital and dining in the Browns' government palace; a hurrahing, marchy song, but without exactly the snap in keeping with its character.
"The trouble is that they lie at the mouths of their burrows and get us naked to their fire," said the banker's son. "We have to take their positions—they don't try to take ours."
"But we must go on! We can't give up now!" said the barber's son.
"Yes, we must go on!" agreed some of the others stubbornly.
"Yes, yes," came faintly from the very tired voice.
"We shall win! The aggressive always wins!" declared Peterkin.
Then the redoubt shook with an explosion and their eyes were blinded with dust.
"I thought it was about time!" said the barber's son.
"Yes, the—!" snarled Pilzer.
The shell had struck some distance away from where they sat, and as the dust settled they heard the news of the result:
"One fellow had his arm broken and another had his head crushed."
"It'll keep us from working on the mine while we mend the breach," said the barber's son.
While the judge's son was telling the news, the colonel of the 128th and Captain Fracasse were eating their biscuits together and making occasional remarks rather than holding a conversation.
"Well, Westerling is a field-marshal," said the colonel.
"Yes, he's got something out of it!"
"The men seem to be losing their spirit—there's no doubt of it!" exclaimed the colonel, more aloud to himself than to Fracasse, after a while.
"No wonder!" replied Fracasse. Martinet though he was, he spoke in grumbling loyalty to his soldiers. "What kind of spirit is there in doing the work of navvies? Spirit! No soldiers ever fought better—in invasion, at least. Look at our losses! Spirit! Westerling drives us in. He thinks we can climb Niagara Falls! He—"
"Stop! You're talking like an anarchist!" snapped the colonel. "How can the men have spirit when you feel that way?"
"I shall continue to obey orders and do my duty, sir!" replied Fracasse. "And they will, too, or I'll know the reason why."
There was a silence, but at length the colonel exploded:
"I suppose Westerling knows what he is doing!"
"Still, we must go on! We must win!"
"Yes, the offensive always wins in the end. We must go on!"
"And once we have the range—yes, once we've won one vital position—the men will recover their enthusiasm and be crying: 'On to the capital!'"
"Right! We were forgetting history. We were forgetting the volatility of human nature."
Far up on a peak among the birds and aeroplanes, in a roofed, shell-proof chamber, with a telephone orderly at his side, a powerful pair of field-glasses and range-finders at his elbow, and a telescope before his eye, Gustave Feller, one-time gardener and now acting colonel of artillery, watched the burst of shells over the enemy's lines. While other men had grown lean on war, he had taken on enough flesh to fill out the wrinkles around eyes that shone with an artist's enjoyment of his work. Down under cover of the ridge were his guns, the keys of the instrument that he played by calls over the wire. Their barking was a symphony to his ears; errors of orchestration were errors in aim. He talked as he watched, his lively features reflective of his impressions.
"Oh, pretty! Right into their tummies! Right in the nose! La, la, la! But that's off—and so's that! Tell Battery C they're fifty yards over. Oh, beady-eyed gods and shiny little fishes—two smacks in the same spot! Humph! Tell Battery C that the trouble with that gun is worn rifling; that's why it's going short. Elevate it for another hundred yards—but it ought not to wear out so soon. I'd like to kick the maker or the inspector. The fellows in B 21 will accuse us of inattention. It's time to drop a shell on them to show we're perfectly impartial in our favors. La, la, la! Oh, what a pretty smack! Congratulations!"
B 21 was the position of Fracasse's company and the pretty smack the one that broke one man's arm and crushed another's head.
The "God with us!" song was singularly suited to the great, bull voice of its composer, born to the red and become Captain Stransky in the red business of war. It was he who led the thunder of its verses not far from where Peterkin led the song of the Grays.
"I certainly like that song," said Stransky. Well he might. It had made him famous throughout the nation. "There's Jehovah and brimstone in it. Now we'll have our own."
"Our own" was also of Stransky's composition and about Dellarme; for Stransky, child of the highways and byways, of dark, tragic alleys and sunny fields, had music in him, the music of the people. The skin on his high cheek-bones was drawn tighter than before, further exaggerating the size of his nose, and the deeper set of his eyes gave their cross a more marked character. He carried on the spirit of Dellarme in the company in his own fashion. The survivors among his men were as lean and dirty as Fracasse's, but, never having expected to reach the enemy's capital, war had brought few illusions. They had known sleepless vigils, but not much digging since they had fallen back on the main line into the fortifications which, with all resources at command, the engineers had built before the war. And the Browns still held the range! The principal fortifications of Engadir and every other vital point of the main line was theirs. All that the enemy had gained in his latest attack were a few minor positions.
"But we're always losing positions!" complained one of the men. "Little by little they are getting possession."
"They say the offensive always wins," said another.
"Five against three! They count on numbers," said Lieutenant Tom Fragini.
"There you go, Tom! Any other pessimists or anarchists want to be heard?" called out Stransky. "Just how long, at the present rate, will it take them to get the whole range? There's a limit to the number of even five millions."
"Yes, but if they ever break through in one place and get their guns up—"
"As you've said before, Tom!"
"As we want to keep saying—as we want to keep fighting our damnedest to make sure they won't," Tom explained.
"Yes, that's it!" declared a chorus.
"That's it, no matter what we pay!" declared Stransky. "We're not going back there except in hearses!" He swung his hand in a semicircle toward the distant hills, gold and purple in their dying foliage under the autumn sunlight.
Then the telephone in the redoubt brought some news. The staff begged to inform the army that the enemy's casualties in the last three days had been two hundred thousand! Immediately everybody was talking at once in Stransky's parliament, as he sometimes called that company of which he was, in the final analysis, unlimited monarch.
"How do they know?"
"Do you think it's fake?"
"That sums up to pretty near a million!"
"My God! Think of it—a million!"
"We're whittling them down!"
"It doesn't make any difference whether Partow or Lanstron is chief of staff!"
"They're paying!"
"Paying for our fellows that they've killed! Paying for being in the wrong!"
"Let's have the song again! Come on!"
"Yes, the song! The song!"
"No; hold on!" cried Tom. "Not because men are killed!"
"That's right, that's right!" said Stransky. "After all, they're our brothers." It was the first time since he had undergone the transformation which the war had wrought in him that he had mentioned any of his world-brotherhood ideas. "I still believe in that. We're fighting for that!" he concluded.
With the ready change of subject of soldiers who have been long in company, they were soon talking about other things—things that concerned the living.
"Say, wouldn't I like a real bath—an altogether!"
"And plenty of soap all over!"
"A welter of lather from head to foot and blowing bubbles from between my lips!"
"And to shave off this beard!"
"Think of the beards that are going when the war is over!"
"Not if you can't grow any more than John!"
"I'm not fighting out of ambush like you!" replied John. "I haven't got a place for the birds to nest!"
"I'm going to trim mine down gradually," said another; "first an imperial and mustache with mutton choppers; then mow my cheeks; then a great, sweeping mustache; then a dandy little mustache; then—"
"Mow is the word! Don't inflict a barber!"
"And, after the bath, clean underclothes, and, oh, me!—a home dinner!"
"Stop with your home dinners! That's barred. Army biscuits!"
"Yes, we all prefer army biscuits!"
"We wouldn't touch a home dinner!"
Stransky, his eyes drawing inward in their characteristic slant, was well pleased with his company, and the scattered exclamatory badinage kept on until it was interrupted by the arrival of the mail. Partow and Lanstron, understanding their machine as human in its elements, had chosen that the army should hear from home.
"How's this!" exclaimed one man, reading from a newspaper. "They're going to put up a statue of Partow in the capital! It's to show him as he died, dropped forward on the map, and in front of his desk a field of bayonets. On one face of the base will be his name. Two of the other faces will have 'God with us!' and 'Not for theirs, but for ours!' The legend on the fourth face the war is to decide."
"Victory! Victory!" cried those who had listened to the announcement.
"My mother says just what yours says, Tom. I needn't come home unless we win."
"The girl I'm going to marry said that, too!"
"If we go back with the Gray army at our heels we shall strike a worse fire than if we stick!"
Stransky was thinking that they had to do more than hold the Grays. Before he should see his girl they had to take back the lost territory. He carried two pictures of Minna in his mind: one when she had struck him in the face as he had tried to kiss her and the other as he said good-by at the kitchen door. There was not much encouragement in either.
"But when she gets better acquainted with me there's no telling!" he kept thinking. "I was fighting out of cussedness at first. Now I'm fighting for her and to keep what is ours!"
"I've learned that the greatest, most desperate attack of all is coming," Marta told Lanstron. "But I don't know at what point. I see Westerling only when he comes into the garden, and he does not come so frequently of late."
Very sweet and very harrowing to him was the intimacy of their conspiracy over that underground wire. With the prolongation of the strain, he feared for her. He understood how she suffered. Sometimes he felt that the Marta of their holiday comradeship was dead and it was the impersonal spirit of a great purpose that brought him information and inspiration. Her voice was taut, without inflection, as if in pain, occasionally breaking into a dry sob, only to become even more taut after a silence.
"I don't—I can't urge you to any further sacrifice," Lanstron replied. "You have endured enough."
"But it will help? It will be of vital service?"
"Yes, tremendously vital."
"I will try to learn more when I see him," she continued. "But it cannot be done by questioning. A single question might be fatal. The thing must come in a burst of confidence. That's the horrible part of it, the—" There was a dry sob over the wire as the voice broke and then went on steadily: "But I'm game! I'm game!"
In the closet off the Galland library, where the long-distance telephone was installed, Westerling was talking with the premier in the Gray capital.
"Your total casualties are eight hundred thousand! That is terrific, Westerling!" the premier was saying.
"Only two hundred thousand of those are dead!" replied Westerling. "Many with only slight wounds are already returning to the front. Terrific, do you say? Two hundred thousand in five millions is one man out of every twenty-five. That wouldn't have worried Frederick the Great or Napoleon much. Eight hundred thousand is one out of six. The trouble is that such vast armies have never been engaged before. You must consider the percentages, not the totals."
"Yet, eight hundred thousand! If the public knew!" exclaimed the premier.
"The public does not know!" said Westerling.
"They guess. They realize that we stopped the soldiers' letters because they told bad news. The situation is serious."
"Why not give the public something else to think about?" Westerling demanded.
"I've tried. It doesn't work. The murmurs increase. I repeat, my fears of a rising of the women are well grounded. There is mutiny in the air. I feel it through the columns of the press, though they are censored. I—"
"Then, soon I'll give the public something to think about, myself!" Westerling broke in. "The dead will be forgotten. The wounded will be proud of their wounds and their fathers and mothers triumphant when our army descends the other side of the range and starts on its march to the Browns' capital."
"But you have not yet taken a single fortress!" persisted the premier. "And the Browns report that they have lost only three hundred thousand men."
"Lanstron is lying!" retorted Westerling hotly. "But no matter. We have taken positions with every attack and kept crowding in closer. I ask nothing better than that the Browns remain on the defensive, leaving initiative to us. We have developed their weak points. The resolute offensive always wins. I know where I am going to attack; they do not. I shall not give them time to reinforce the defence at our chosen point. I have still plenty of live soldiers left. I shall go in with men enough this time to win and to hold."
"The army is yours, Westerling," concluded the premier. "I admire your stolidity of purpose. You have my confidence. I shall wait and hold the situation at home the best I can. We go into the hall of fame or into the gutter together, you and I!"
For a while after he had hung up the receiver Westerling's head drooped, his muscles relaxed, giving mind and body a release from tension. But his spine was as stiff as ever as he left the closet, and he was even smiling to give the impression that the news from the capital was favorable. When the telegraphers' jaws had dropped as the reports of casualties came in, when discouragement lengthened the faces around him and whispered in the very breezes from the fields of the dead, he had automatically maintained his confident mien. Any sign of weakening would be ruinous in its effect on his subordinates. The citadel of his egoism must remain unassailable. He must be the optimist, the front of Jove, for all.
When he called his chiefs of divisions it was hardly for a staff council. Stunned by the losses and repulses, loyally industrious, their opinions unasked, they listened to his whirlwind of orders without comment—all except Turcas.
"If they are apprised of our plan and are able to concentrate more artillery than our guns can silence, the losses will be demoralizing," he observed.
Westerling threw up his head, frowning down the objection.
"Suppose they amount to half the forces that we send in!" he exclaimed. "Isn't the position, which means the pass and the range, worth it?"
"Yes, if we both take and hold it; not if we fail," replied Turcas, quite unaffected by Westerling's manner.
"Failure is not in my lexicon!" Westerling shot back. "For great gains there must be great risks."
"We prepare for the movement, Your Excellency," answered Turcas.
It was a steel harness of his own will that Westerling wore, without admitting that it galled him, and he laid it off only in Marta's presence. With her, his growing sense of isolation had the relief of companionship. She became a kind of mirror of his egoism and ambitions. He liked to have her think of him as a great man unruffled among weaker men. In the quiet and seclusion of the garden, involuntarily as one who has no confidant speaks to himself, reserving fortitude for his part before the staff, while she, under the spell of her purpose, silently, with serene and wistfully listening eyes, played hers, he outlined how the final and telling blow was to be struck.
"We must and we shall win!" he kept repeating.
Through a rubber disk held to his ear in the closet of his bedroom a voice, tremulous with nervous fatigue, was giving Lanstron news that all his aircraft and cavalry and spies could not have gained; news worth more than a score of regiments; news fresh from the lips of the chief of staff of the enemy. The attack was to be made at the right of Engadir, its centre breaking from the redoubt manned by Fracasse's men.
"Marta, you genius!" Lanstron cried. "You are the real general! You—"
"Not that, please!" she broke in. "I'm as foul and depraved as a dealer in subtle poisons in the Middle Ages! Oh, the shame of it, while I look into his eyes and feign admiration, feign everything which will draw out his plans! I can never forget the sight of him as he told me how two or three or four hundred thousand men were to be crowded into a ram, as he called it—a ram of human flesh!—and guns enough in support, he said, to tear any redoubts to pieces; guns enough to make their shells as thick as the bullets from an automatic!"
"We'll meet ram with ram! We'll have some guns, too!" exclaimed Lanstron. "We'll send as heavy a shell fire at their infantry as they send into our redoubts."
"Yes; oh, yes!" she replied. "Westerling couldn't say it any better! What difference is there between you? Each at his desk is saying: 'This regiment will die here; that regiment will die there!' I bring you word of one human ram going to destruction in order that you may send another to destroy and be destroyed! And I'm worse than you. I am the go-between in the conspiracy of universal murder, sleeping in a good bed every night, in no danger—when I can sleep; but I can't. I go mad from thinking of my part, keying myself up deliriously to each fresh deceit!"
With every sentence her voice broke and it seemed that she would not be able to utter another. Yet she kept on in the alternation of taut, pitiful monotone and dry, coughing sobs.
"How have I ever been able to go as far as I have? How did I get through this last scene? When it seems as if I were about to collapse, something supports me. When the thing grows too horrible and I am about to cry out to Westerling that I am false, I hear his boast that he made the war as a last step in his ambition. And there is Dellarme's smile rising before me. He died so finely in defence of our garden! When my brain goes numb and I can't think what to say, can't act, Feller appears, prompting with ready word and facile change of expression, and I have my wits again. I go on! I go on!"
A racking sob, now, and silence; then, in the sudden effort of one who must change the subject to hold his sanity, she asked:
"How is Feller? Is he doing well?"
"Yes."
"At least I have brought him happiness. Sometimes I think that is about all the good I have accomplished—I, his successor in carrying out your plans! Oh, I'm burned out, Lanny! I'm ashes. It doesn't seem that I can ever be sane or clean and human again. In order to forget I should have to find a new life, like Feller. Each morning when I look in the mirror I expect to see my hair turned white, like his."
Lanstron felt her suffering as if it were his own. He had let his patriotic passion overwhelm every other consideration. He had allowed her to be a spy; he had sacrificed her sensibilities along with the battalions he had sent into battle. She was right: he was only the inhuman head of a machine. And she and Feller—they were human. Destiny playing in the crux of war's inconsistencies had formed a bond between them.
"But, go on, Lanny. Play your part as you see it—as Westerling sees his and Feller his and I mine," she said. "That is the only logic clear to me; only I can't play any more. I haven't the strength."
"Yes, I shall go on, Marta," he replied, "but you must not. Your work is over, and perhaps this last service may bring a quick end and save countless lives."
"Don't. It's too like Westerling! It has become too trite!" she protested. "The end! If I really were helping toward that and to save lives and our country to its people, what would my private feelings matter' My honor, my soul—what would anything matter? For that, any sacrifice. I'm only one human being—a weak, lunatic sort of one, just now!"
"Marta, don't suffer so! You are overwrought. You—"
"I can say all that for you, Lanny," she interrupted with the faintest laugh. "I've said it so many times to myself. Perhaps when I call you up again I shall not be so hysterical. Tell Feller how I have played his part, and, in the midst of all your responsibilities, remember to give him a chance."
Lanstron was not thinking of war or war's combination when he hung up the receiver.
"Yes, it is Gustave!" he thought. "I understand!" It was some moments before he returned to the staff room, and then he had mastered his emotion. He was the soldier again.
"They are clearing the wires for the chief of staff to speak to you, sir," announced the telephone aide in Feller's eyrie artillery lookout.
Feller received the word with his clucking "La, la, la!" and hummed a tune while the connection was being made. He had not spoken with Lanny since his own promotion to a colonelcy and Partow's death.
"My ear-drums split for joy at hearing your voice again!" Feller cried. "A regiment of guns for yours truly! You've made me the happiest man in the world. And haven't I smacked the Grays in the tummy, not to mention in the nose and on the shins! Well, I should say so! La, la, la!"
"You certainly have, you bully old boy!" said Lanstron. "Miss Galland sends her congratulations and regards."
"Eh, what? Her regards to me! The telephone still continues to work? Our own original trunk-tunnel private line? Eh? Tell me; tell me, quick!"
"Yes, she has performed the greatest service of the war—better than you could have done it, Gustave!"
"Whee-ee! Why not? Of course! I'm not surprised. She's the greatest woman in the world, I tell you, and I know! And she sends her regards to her old gardener? Think of that! If trouble never comes singly, why shouldn't joys come in a pour? Oh, it she could see me now, so cosey up here among the birds, chucking shells about as cheerily as if I were tossing roses to the ladies in a ballroom!"
"She wants you to have every chance," said Lanstron.
"She asks that for me!"
The peculiar intimate fervor of the exclamation sprang from a Feller in an officer's uniform who could now move in Marta's world. Lanstron hurried on to explain the nature of the next attack.
"If we repulse them we are going to throw in a ram of our own," he said. "We're going to take the aggressive for the moment. It is the only sure policy for successful defence."
"Right! Now you're talking. We learned that principle at school, didn't we?"
"And that means a bigger chance for you, Gustave. We are bringing up reserve artillery and making new dispositions. I am going to give you charge of the field-guns. But the chief of artillery will tell you about your work."
"This is heaven, Lanny! How am I ever going to—"
"There, no thanks, Gustave. You are the man. It is a time when only efficiency must be considered."
"Then I have made good! Then I've been worthy of my opportunity! I'd rather be a good gunner than a king. I'll eat this new work and smack my lips for more. Tell Miss Galland that every shell that hits the mark is a thought from the old gardener for her. Six weeks ago trimming rose-bushes and now—this is life! La, la, la! There's been romance and destiny in the whole business for us both, Lanny. And you—you are acting chief of staff! I forgot to congratulate you, Your Excellency. Your Excellency! Think of that! But it's no surprise to me. Didn't we go to school together? How could any one ever go to school with me and not be a great man? And I'm wearing a flower in my buttonhole! La, la, la!"
All that night and day before the night set for the attack, while the guns were being emplaced and the infantry formed in a gray carpet behind the slopes, a chill, misty rain fell, which the devout of the Grays might say proved that God was with them rather than with the Browns; for it screened their movements from the Brown lookouts. The judge's son and Peterkin and others of Fracasse's company had finished their mine; the fuses were laid. There was no dry place for a seat in their flooded redoubt and they had to stand, eating cold rations and shivering in their filthy, wet clothes. The whole army was drenched; the whole army shivered.
If only the air did not clear when darkness fell! The last thing the staff of the Grays wanted was to see a star in the sky. Had they believed in prayer they would have gone on their knees for a black fog, unaware that all that they would hide had been made known to the Browns through Marta almost from the hour that the preparations for the attack were begun.
With darkness, the rain ceased; but the mist remained a thick mantle over the landscape, impenetrable to the watchful search-lights of the Browns, which never stopped playing from sunset to dawn. The gray carpet of the reserves that were to form Westerling's ram moved over the slopes, dipping and rising with the convolutions of the earth, with no word spoken except the repeated whispered warnings of silence from the officers. Sweeping on up toward the redoubts, it found that parallels and trenches had been filled to give footing for the swifter impulse of the tide, once it was started for the heights.
A flash from Fracasse's pocket lamp showed faces pasty white and eyes of staring glassiness. Fracasse's face and the colonel's were also white—white with the rigidity of carved marble, carved with a set frown of determination. Fracasse was going in with his company and the colonel with his regiment. It was their duty. Both realized the nature of the risk; and, worse, each knew that the men realized it. In another age, when education was not so common and unthinking, unforeseeing passion could be aroused in ignorant minds, a stimulant on an empty stomach might have made them animals, oblivious to danger. They were about to offer their lives to pave the way for others to reach the works that none of them, probably, would ever reach. For the like of this, in gathering the enemy's spears to his breast, a saga had risen around one national hero. But Fracasse's veterans were only the shivering units of the millions; the part of the machine that happened to be the first to strike another machine in collision. Such was the end of all the training, the marching, the drilling in the gallant business of arms, with no more romance or glory than beeves going to the slaughter.
"You'll be the first out into the glacis, the first into the enemy's redoubt," said the colonel, forcing a tone of good, old-fashioned "up-guards-and-at-'em" vigor, as he touched the bronze cross on Peterkin's breast with his forefinger.
Little Peterkin, always pale but not so pale now as his comrades, flushed at the distinction.
"Yes, sir!" and he saluted.
In his eyes was the exaltation of his simple-minded faith. He did not think too much. What more could kings and conquerors ask than such a soldier as the valet's son, secure in the belief that his charmed life would bring him through the assault unharmed?
"My God! I can't!" exclaimed the banker's son. "I've suffered enough. There's life and wealth and all that it gives waiting for me at home! I'm young—I can't!"
There was a rustle of bodies in a restless movement of drawn breaths at common thought taking form, desperately fraught with alarm to Fracasse.
"You will!" Fracasse said, thrusting his revolver muzzle against the ribs of the banker's son. "If you don't, I'll shoot you dead, or you'll be trampled to death by the rush from the rear!"
The wedge point may not strike back at the hammer that drives it. Close packed behind Fracasse's company was a seemingly limitless mass of soldiery, palpitant with their short breaths, a steamy, sickening odor rising from their water-soaked clothes. Here were men so wet, so tired, so nerve-worn that they did not care when death came; men who wanted to curse and strike out against their fate; men who wanted to turn in flight, their natural impulse held down by the bonds of discipline and that pride of fellowship which is shamed to confess to a shiver along the spine. Some saw pictures of home, of sweethearts; some saw nothing. Some were in a coma of merciless suspense that grew more and more unendurable, until it seemed that anything to break it would be welcome.
Occasionally came a sob from a man gone hysterical under the strain, a moan of mental misery; and once a laugh, a strange, hiccoughy, delirious laugh, a strident attempt at the wit that keeps up courage; and from Pilzer, the butcher's son, a string of oaths mixed with brimstone and obscenity. After each outbreak an automatic, irritable whisper for silence came from an officer. Legs and arms, bodies and souls and brains in a nauseating press! Humanity reckoned by the pound, high-priced from breeding and rearing and training; yet very cheap.
Hearts thumped and watches ticked off the time, until suddenly the heavens were racked by the prologue of the guns. Child's play that baptism of shell fire in the first charge of the war beside later thunders; and these, in turn, mild beside this terrific outburst, with all the artillery concentrated to support the ram in a sudden blast. The passing projectiles formed the continuous scream and roar of some many-toned siren that penetrated the flesh as well as the ears with its sound. Orders could not have been heard if given. There was no need for orders. Fracasse, counting off the minutes between him and eternity on his watch face by his flash-light, saw that ten had passed. Then his finger that pressed a button, his brain that spoke to his hand, were those of an automaton acting by time release. He exploded the mine. This was the signal for the charge; for all the legs of the ram to move.