An hour or so before the attack the telegraph instruments in the Galland house had become pregnantly silent. There were no more orders to give; no more reports to come from the troops in position until the assault was made. Officers of supply ceased to transmit routine matters over the wire, while they strained their eyes toward the range. Officers of the staff moved about restlessly, glancing at their watches and going to the windows frequently to see if the mist still held.
No one entered the library where Westerling was seated alone with nothing to do. His suspense was that of the mothers who longed for news of their sons at the front; his helplessness that of a man in a hospital lobby waiting on the result of an operation whose success or failure will save or wreck his career. The physical desire of movement, the conflict with something in his own mind, drove him out of doors.
"I want to blow my lungs in the fresh air! Call me if I am needed. I shall be in the garden," he told his aide; and he thought that his voice sounded calm and natural, as became Jove in a crisis that unnerved lesser men. "Though I fancy it is the other chief of staff who will have the work to do this evening, eh?" he added, forcing one of the smiles which had been the magnetic servant of his personal force in his rise to power.
"Yes, Your Excellency," said the aide.
Westerling was rather pleased with the fact that he could still smile; pleased with the loyalty of this young officer when, day by day, the rest of the staff had grown colder and more mechanical in the attitude that completed his isolation. Walking vigorously along the path toward the tower, the exercise of his muscles, the feel of the cool, moist air on his face, brought back some of the buoyancy of spirit that he craved. A woman's figure, with a cape thrown over the shoulders and the head bare, loomed out of the mist.
"I couldn't stay in—not to-night," Marta said, as Westerling drew near. "I had to see. It's only a quarter of an hour now, isn't it?"
"The Browns may sing 'God with us,' but He seems to have been with the Grays," Westerling answered. "Our whole movement was perfectly screened by the heavy weather."
"But they know—they know every detail that you have told me!" ran her mocking, scarifying thought. "And this will be the most terrible attack of all?" she asked faintly.
"Yes, such a concentration of men and guns as never were driven against any position—an irresistible force," he said. "Irresistible!" he repeated with a heavy emphasis.
"But if the Browns did know where you were going to attack?" she asked absently and still more faintly. "The sacrifice of lives then would be all the greater?"
"Yes, we should have to pay a higher price, but still we should be irresistible—irresistible!" he answered.
Ghastly faces were staring at her, their lips moving in death to excoriate her. It was not too late to tell him the truth; not too late to stop the attack. Her head had sunk; she trembled and swayed and a kind of moan escaped her. She seemed utterly frail and so distraught that Westerling, in an impulse of protection, laid his hands on her relaxed shoulders. She could feel the pressure of each finger growing firmer in its power, while a certain eloquence possessed him in defiance of his apprehensions.
"Our cause is at stake to-night," he declared, "yours and mine! We must win, you and I! It is our destiny!"
"You and I!" repeated Marta. "Why you and I?"
It seemed very strange to be thinking of any two persons when hundreds of thousands were awaiting the signal for the death prepared by him. He mistook the character of her thought in the obsession of his egoism.
"What do lives mean?" he cried with a sudden desperation, his grip of her shoulders tightening. "It is the law of nature for man to fight. Unless he fights he goes to seed. One trouble with our army is that it was soft from the want of war. It is the law of nature for the fittest to survive! Other sons will be born to take the place of those who die to-night. There will be all the more room for those who live. Victory will create new opportunities. What is a million out of the billions on the face of the earth? Those who lead alone count—those who dwell in the atmosphere of the peaks, as we do!" The pressure of his strong hands in the unconscious emphasis of his passion became painful; but she did not protest or try to draw away, thinking of his hold in no personal sense but as a part of his self-revelation. "All—all is at stake there!" he continued, staring toward the range. "It's the Rubicon! I have put my career on to-night's cast! Victory means that the world will be at our feet—honor, position, power greater than that of any other two human beings! Do you realize what that means—the honor and the power that will be ours? I shall have directed the greatest army the world has ever known to victory!"
"And defeat means—what does defeat mean?" she asked narrowly, calmly; and the pointed question released her shoulders from the vise.
What had been a shadow in his thoughts became a live monster, striking him with the force of a blow. He forgot Marta. Yes, what would defeat mean tohim? Sheer human nature broke through the bonds of mental discipline weakened by sleepless nights. Convulsively his head dropped as he covered his face.
"Defeat! Fail! That I should fail!" he moaned.
Then it was that she saw him in the reality of his littleness, which she had divined; this would-be conqueror. She saw him as his intimates often see the great man without his front of Jove. Don't we know that Napoleon had moments of privacy when he whined and threatened suicide? She wondered if Lanny, too, were like that—if it were not the nature of all conquerors who could not have their way. It seemed to her that Westerling was beneath the humblest private in his army—beneath even that fellow with the liver patch on his cheek who had broken the chandelier in the sport of brutal passion. All sense of her own part was submerged in the sight of a chief of staff exhibiting no more stoicism than a petulant, spoiled schoolboy.
While his head was still bent the artillery began its crashing thunders and the sky became light with flashes. His hands stretched out toward the range, clenched and pulsing with defiance and command.
"Go in! Go in, as I told you!" he cried. "Stay in, alive or dead! Stay till I tell you to come out! Stay! I can't do any more! You must do it now!"
"Then this may be truly the end," thought Marta, "if the assault fails."
And silently she prayed that it would fail; while the flashes lighted Westerling's set features, imploring success.
No commander was a more prodigal employer of spies than Napoleon. Did he or any other conqueror ever acknowledge a success due to the despised outcasts who brought him information? No. The brilliance of combinations, the stroke of genius of the swift march and the decisive blow in flank, the splendid charges—these always win in the historian's narrative and public imagination. Think of any place in the frieze of the statue of the great leader for that hypocrite, that poor devil in disguise, whose news made the victory possible!
"Good generalship is easy if you know what the enemy is going to do," Lanstron remarked to a member of the staff council who said something complimentary to him. Compliments from subordinates to superiors had not received Partow's favor and, therefore, not Lanstron's. Eccentric old Partow had once disparaged the Napoleonic idea as a fetich which had nothing to do with modern military efficiency, and he had added that if Napoleon were alive to-day nobody would be so prompt to see it as Napoleon himself. If he did not, and tried to incarnate the idea of the time by making himself the supreme genius of war, he would fail, because ability was too nearly universal and the age too big for another Colossus.
Through Marta's information every detail of Westerling's plan outlined itself to the trained minds of the Brown staff. Amazement at their dependence on an underground wire and a woman's word for shaping vast affairs was not reflected in any scepticism or hesitation as to the method of meeting the assault.
The fortifications that had sheltered the Brown infantry, including Stransky's men of the 53d, would be the object of the artillery fire which was to support the Gray charge. Well Lanstron knew that no fortifications could withstand the gusts of shells to be concentrated on such a small target. The defenders could not see to fire for the dust. Their rifles would be knocked out of their hands by the concussions. They must be crushed or imprisoned by the destruction of the very walls that had been their protection. So they were withdrawn to other redoubts in the rear, where a line of automatics placed under their rifles were in pointblank range of their old position which the Grays' shells would tear to pieces.
Back of them was a brown carpet of waiting soldiery of as close a pile as Westerling's carpet of gray. The rain-drenched Brown engineers dug as fast as the enemy's. Lanstron massed artillery against massed artillery. For every Gray gun he had more than one Brown gun. The Grays might excel by ratio of five to three in human avoirdupois, but a willing Brown government had been generous with funds. Money will buy guns and skill will man them. Battery back of battery in literal tiers, small calibres in front and heavy calibres in the rear, with ranges fixed to given points—more guns than ever fired on a single position before—were to pour their exploding projectiles not into redoubts but into the human wedge.
In the Browns' headquarters, as in the Grays', telegraph instruments were silent after the preparations were over. Here, also, officers walked about restlessly, glancing at their watches. They, too, were glad that the mist continued. It meant no wind. When the telegraph did speak it was with another message from some aerostatic officer, saying, "Still favorable," which was taken at once to Lanstron, who was with the staff chiefs around the big table. They nodded at the news and smiled to one another; and some who had been pacing sat down and others rose to begin pacing afresh.
"We could have emplaced two lines of automatics, one above the other!" exclaimed the chief of artillery.
"But that would have given too much of a climb for the infantry in going in—delayed the rush," said Lanstron.
"If they should stick—if we couldn't drive them back!" exclaimed the vice-chief of staff.
"I don't think they will!" said Lanstron.
To the others he seemed as cool as ever, even when his maimed hand was twitching in his pocket. But now, suddenly, his eyes starting as at a horror, he trembled passionately, his head dropping forward, as if he would collapse.
"Oh, the murder of it—the murder!" he breathed.
"But they brought it on! Not for theirs, but for ours!" said the vice-chief of staff, laying his hand on Lanstron's shoulder.
"And we sit here while they go in!" Lanstron added. "There's a kind of injustice about that which I can't get over. Not one of us here has been under fire!"
Even the minute of the attack they knew; and just before midnight they were standing at the window looking out into the night, while the vice-chief held his watch in hand. In the hush the faint sound of a dirigible's propeller high up in the heavens, muffled by the fog, was drowned by the Gray guns opening fire.
Before the mine exploded, by the light of the shell bursts breaking their vast prisms from central spheres of flame for miles, with the quick sequence of a moving-picture flicker, Fracasse's men could see one another's faces, spectral and stiff and pasty white, with teeth gleaming where jaws had dropped, some eyes half closed by the blinding flashes and some opened wide as if the lids were paralyzed. Faces and faces! A sea of faces stretching away down the slope—faces in a trance.
Up over the breastworks, over rocks and splintered timbers, Peterkin and the judge's son and their comrades clambered. When they moved they were as a myriad-legged creature, brain numbed, without any sensation except that of rapids going over a fall. Those in front could not falter, being pushed on by the pressure of those in the rear. For a few steps they were under no fire. The scream of their own shells breaking in infernal pandemonium in front seemed to be a power as irresistible as the rear of the wedge in driving them on.
Then sounds more hideous than the flight of projectiles broke about them with the abruptness of lightnings held in the hollow of the Almighty's hand and suddenly released. The Browns' guns had opened fire. Explosions were even swifter in sequence than the flashes that revealed the stark faces. Dust and stones and flying fragments of flesh filled the air. Men went down in positive paralysis of faculties by the terrific crashes. Sections of the ram were blown to pieces by the burst of a shrapnel shoulder high; other sections were lifted heavenward by a shell burst in the earth.
Peterkin fell with a piece of jagged steel embedded in his brain. He had gone from the quick to the dead so swiftly that he never knew that his charm had failed. The same explosion got Fracasse, sword in hand, and another buried him where he lay. The banker's son went a little farther; the barber's son still farther. Men who were alive hardly realized life, so mixed were life and death. Infernal imagination goes faint; its wildest similes grow feeble and banal before such a consummation of hell.
But the tide keeps on; the torn gaps of the ram are filled by the rushing legs from the rear. Officers urge and lead. Such are the orders; such is the duty prescribed; such is human bravery even in these days when life is sweeter to more men in the joys of mind and body than ever before. Precision, organization, solidarity in this charge such as the days of the "death-or-glory" boys never knew! Over the bodies of Peterkin and the barber's and the banker's sons, plunging through shell craters, stumbling, staggering, cut by swaths and torn by eddies of red destruction in their ranks, the tide proceeded, until its hosts were oftener treading on flesh than on soil. And all they knew was to keep on—keep on, bayonet in hand, till they reached the redoubt, and there they were to stay, alive or dead.
In that pulsating, fierce light, while the ground under their feet trembled with the concussions, Westerling's face was as clear to Marta as if he were staring in at a furnace door. The lines of breeding and of restrained authority which gave it distinction had faded. It had the eager ferocity of the hunt. His short, tense exclamations explained the stages of progress of the attack as revealed to his sight.
"It cannot fail! No! Impossible! Look at the speed of our gun-fire! But I judge that we have not been able to silence as many of their guns as we ought to—they're using shell into our close order. But all the guns in creation shall not stop us! I have men enough this time—enough, enough, enough! There! Our shorter-range guns have ceased firing! That shows we are in the redoubts. The longer-range guns continue. They are firing beyond the redoubt against any counter-attack, if the Browns try to recover what they have lost. But every minute brings another battalion into place. Engineers and guns will follow. The war is as good as won!"
He caught at Marta's hand, but she drew away; and her start of revulsion at his touch was almost coincident with a start on his part for another reason. A huge shadow shot at railway-train speed over their heads. Something very like fear flashed into his expression.
"One of our dirigibles!" he exclaimed. "I confess it came so near that it gave me a sort of shock, too."
"Only a shadow with no death in it," she said. "And there is death in every flash there on the range. General Westerling, have you ever been under fire?" she asked suddenly.
He had scarcely heard the question. He took a step forward, with head raised and shading his eyes.
"Not ours! One of theirs!" he exclaimed. "Theirs—and any number of theirs!"
Driving toward the volcano's centre were many Brown dirigibles, slowing down as they approached. Greater eruptions than any from shells rose from the earth as they passed.
"So that's what they've had their dirigibles in reserve for—for the last desperate defence!" he said. "The defence that can never win! Not their dirigibles—not any power known to man can stop my men. I have sent in so many that enough must survive. But where areourdirigibles? A few are up—why don't they close in? And our guns—why don't they fire at a target before their eyes as big as a house? There they go, and they got one!"—as a circle of flame brighter than the illumination of other explosions broke in the sky. "And one of ours is closing in! Look, both have blown up as they collided! That shows that two can play at the game! But what a swarm they have—more than we knew! Bouchard's intelligence at fault again! However, if they try to stop our fortifying the redoubt our guns will care for them. That clever trick of Lanstron's may have cost us a few extra casualties, but it will not change the result. It's time we had details over the wire," he concluded, turning back to the house rather precipitately. "Then there may be work for me."
"After hell, more hell, and then still more hell!" was the way that Stransky expressed his thought when the engineers had taken the place of the 53d of the Browns in the redoubt. They put their mines and connections deep enough not to be disturbed by shell fire. After the survivors in the van of the Grays' charge, spent of breath, reached their goal and threw themselves down, the earth under them, as the mine exploded, split and heaved heavenward. But those in the rear, slapped in the face by the concussion, kept on, driven by the pressure of the mass at their backs, and, in turn, plunged forward on their stomachs in the seams and furrows of the mine's havoc. The mass thickened as the flood of bodies and legs banked up, in keeping with Westerling's plan to have "enough to hold."
Now the automatics and the rifles from the redoubt to which the Browns had fallen back opened fire. So close together were these bullet-machines that the orbit of each one's swing made a spray of only a few yards' breadth over the old redoubt, where the Browns' gun-fire had not for a moment ceased its persistent shelling, with increasingly large and solid targets of flesh for their practice. The thing for these targets to do, they knew, was to intrench and begin to return the infantry and automatics' fire. Desperately, with the last effort of courage, they rose in the attempt—rose into playing hose streams of bullets whose close hiss was a steady undertone between shell bursts. In the garish, jumping light brave officers impulsively stood up to hearten their commands in their work, and dropped with half-uttered urgings, threats, and oaths on their lips.
The bullets from the automatics missing one mark were certain to find another, perhaps four or five in a row, such was their velocity and power of penetration. Where shells made gaps and tore holes in the human mass, the automatics cut with the regularity of the driven teeth of a comb. The men who escaped all the forms of slaughter and staggered on to the ruins of the redoubt, pressed their weight on top of those in the craters or hugged behind the pyramids of débris, and even made breastworks from the bodies of the dead. The more that banked up, the more fruitless the efforts of the officers to restore order in the frantic medley of shell screams and explosions at a time when a minute seemed an age.
Meanwhile, between them—this banked-up force at the charge's end—and the Brown redoubt with its automatics, the Gray gunners were making a zone of shell bursts in order to give the soldiers time to make their hold of the ground they had gained secure. Through this zone Stransky and his men were to lead the Browns in a counter-attack.
At the very height of the Gray charge, when all the reserves were in, dark objects fell out of the heavens, and where they dropped earth and flesh were mingled in the maceration. Like some giant reptile with its vertebræ breaking, gouged and torn and pinioned, the charge stopped, in writhing, throbbing confusion. Those on the outer circle of explosions were thrown against their fellows, who surged back in another direction from an explosion in the opposite quarter. From the rear the pressure weakened; the human hammer was no longer driving the ram. Blinded by the lightnings and dust, dizzy from concussions and noise, too blank of mind to be sane or insane, the atoms of the bulk of the charge in natural instinct turned from their goal and toward the place whence they had come, with death from all sides still buffeting them. Staggeringly, at first, they went, for want of initiative in their paralysis; then rapidly, as the law of self-preservation asserted itself in wild impulse.
As sheep driven over a precipice they had advanced; as men they fled. There was no longer any command, no longer any cohesion, except of legs struggling in and out over the uneven footing of dead and wounded, while they felt another pressure, that of the mass of the Browns in pursuit. Of all those of Fracasse's company whom we know, only the judge's son and Jacob Pilzer were alive. Stained with blood and dust, his teeth showing in a grimace of mocking hate of all humankind, Pilzer's savagery ran free of the restraint of discipline and civilized convention. Striking right and left, he forced his way out of the region of shell fire and still kept on. Clubbing his rifle, he struck down one officer who tried to detain him; but another officer, quicker than he, put a revolver bullet through his head.
Westerling, who had buried his face in his hands in Marta's presence at the thought of failure, must keep the pose of his position before the staff. With chin drawn in and shoulders squared in a sort of petrified military habit, he received the feverish news that grew worse with each brief bulletin. He, the chief of staff; he, Hedworth Westerling, the superman, must be a rock in the flood of alarm. When he heard that his human ram was in recoil he declared that the repulse had been exaggerated—repulses always were. With word that a heavy counter-attack was turning the retreat into an ungovernable rout, he broke into a storm. He was not beaten; he could not be beaten.
"Let our guns cut a few swaths in the mob!" he cried. "That will stop them from running and bring them back to a sense of duty to their country."
The irritating titter of the bell in the closet off the library only increased his defiance of facts beyond control. He went to the long distance with a reply to the premier's inquiry ready to his lips.
"We got into the enemy's works but had to fall back temporarily," he said.
"Temporarily! What do you mean?" demanded the premier.
"I mean that we have only begun to attack!" declared Westerling. He liked that sentence. It sounded like the shibboleth of a great leader in a crisis. "I shall assault again to-morrow night."
"Then your losses were not heavy?"
"No, not relatively. To-morrow night we press home the advantage we gained to-night."
"But you have been so confident each time. You still think that—"
"That I mean to win! There is no stopping half-way."
"Well, I'll still try to hold the situation here," replied the premier. "But keep me informed."
Drugged by his desperate stubbornness, Westerling was believing in his star again when he returned to the library. All the greater his success for being won against scepticism and fears! He summoned his chiefs of divisions, who came with the news that the Browns had taken the very redoubt from which the head of the Gray charge had started; but there they had stopped.
"Of course! Of course they stopped!" exclaimed Westerling. "They are not mad. A few are not going to throw themselves against superior numbers—our superior numbers beaten by our own panic! Lanstron is not a fool. You'll find the Browns back in their old position, working like beavers to make new defences in the morning. Meanwhile, we'll get that mob of ours into shape and find out what made them lose their nerve. To-morrow night we shall have as many more behind them. We are going to attack again!"
The staff exchanged glances of amazement, and Turcas, his dry voice crackling like parchment, exclaimed:
"Attack again? At the same point?"
"Yes—the one place to attack!" said Westerling. "The rest of our line has abundant reserves; a needless number for anything but the offensive. We'll leave enough to hold and draw off the rest to Engadir at once."
"But their dirigibles! A surprising number of them are over our lines," Bellini, the chief of intelligence, had the temerity to say.
"You will send our planes and dirigibles to bring down theirs!" Westerling commanded.
"I have—every last one; but they outnumber us!" persisted Bellini. "Even in retreat they can see. The air has cleared so that considerable bodies of troops in motion will be readily discernible from high altitudes. The reason for our failure last night was that they knew our plan of attack."
"They knew! They knew, after all our precautions! There is still a leak! You—"
Westerling raised his clenched hand threateningly at the chief of intelligence, his cheeks purple with rage, his eyes bloodshot. But Bellini, with his boyish, small face and round head set close to his shoulders, remained undisturbedly exact.
"Yes, there is a leak, and from the staff," he answered. "Until I have found it this army ought to suspend any aggressive—"
"I was not asking advice!" interrupted Westerling.
"But, I repeat, the leak is not necessary to disclose this new movement that you plan. Their air craft will disclose it," Bellini concluded. He had done his duty and had nothing more to say.
"Dirigibles do not win battles!" Westerling announced. "They are won by getting infantry in possession of positions and holding them. No matter if we don't surprise the enemy. Haven't the Browns held their line with inferior numbers? If they have, we can hold the rest of ours. That gives us overwhelming forces at Engadir."
"You take all responsibility?" asked Turcas.
"I do!" said Westerling firmly. "And we will waste no more time. The premier supports me. I have decided. We will set the troops in motion."
With fierce energy he set to work detaching units of artillery and infantry from every part of the line and starting them toward Engadir.
"This means an improvised organization; it breaks up the machine," said the tactical expert to Turcas when they were alone.
"Yes," replied Turcas. "He wanted no advice from us when he was taking counsel of desperation. If he succeeds, success will retrieve all the rest of his errors. We may have a stroke of luck in our favor."
In the headquarters of the Browns, junior officers and clerks reported the words of each bulletin with the relief of men who breathed freely again. The chiefs of divisions who were with Lanstron alternately sat down and paced the floor, their restlessness now that of a happiness too deeply thrilling to be expressed by hilarity. Each fresh detail only confirmed the completeness of the repulse as that memorable night in the affairs of the two nations slowly wore on. Shortly before three, when the firing had died down after the Brown pursuit had stopped, a wireless from a dirigible flying over the frontier came, telling of bodies of Gray troops and guns on the march. Soon planes and other dirigibles flying over other positions were sending in word of the same tenor. The chiefs drew around the table and looked into one another's eyes in the significance of a common thought.
"It cannot be a retreat!" said the vice-chief.
"Hardly. That is inconceivable of Westerling at this time," Lanstron replied. "The bull charges when wounded. It is clear that he means to make another attack. These troops on the march across country are isolated from any immediate service."
It was Lanstron's way to be suggestive; to let ideas develop in council and orders follow as out of council.
"The chance!" exclaimed some one.
"The chance!" others said in the same breath. "The God-given chance for a quick blow! The chance! We attack! We attack!"
It was the most natural conception to a military tactician, though any man who made it his own might have builded a reputation on it if he knew how to get the ear of the press. Their faces were close to Lanstron as they leaned toward him eagerly. He seemed not to see them but to be looking at Partow's chair. In imagination Partow was there in the life—Partow with the dome forehead, the pendulous cheeks, the shrewd, kindly eyes. A daring risk, this! What would Partow say? Lanstron always asked himself this in a crisis: What would Partow say?
"Well, my boy, why are you hesitating?" Partow demanded. "I don't know that I'd have taken my long holiday and left you in charge if I'd thought you'd be losing your nerve as you are this minute. Wasn't it part of my plan—my dream—that plan I gave you to read in the vaults, to strike if a chance, this very chance, were to come? Hurry up! Seconds count!"
"Yes, a chance to end the killing for good and all!" said Lanstron, coming abruptly out of his silence. "We'll take it and strike hard."
The staff bent over the map, Lanstron's finger flying from point to point, while ready expert answers to his questions were at his elbow and the wires sang out directions that made a drenched and shivering soldiery Who had been yielding and holding and never advancing grow warm with the thought of springing from the mire of trenches to charge the enemy. And one, Gustave Feller, in command of a brigade of field-guns—the mobile guns that could go forward rumbling to the horses' trot—saw his dearly beloved batteries swing into a road in the moonlight.
"La, la, la! The worm will turn!" he clucked. "It's a merry, gambling old world and I'm right fond of it—so full of the unexpected for the Grays! That lead horse is a little lame, but he'll last the night through. Lots of lame things will! Who knows? Maybe we'll be cleaning the mud off our boots on the white posts of the frontier to-morrow! A whole brigade mine! I live! You old brick, Lanny! This time we are going to spank the enemy on the part of his anatomy where spanks are conventionally given. La, la, la!"
If not his own pain, the moans, the gasps, the appeals for water, the convulsive shivers from cold, and the demoniacal giggles from a soldier gone insane in medley around him would have kept the judge's son awake. After he had fallen, struck by he knew not what, and consciousness had returned, came the surging charge of the Browns in the counter-attack, with throaty cries and threshing tread. He was able to turn over on his face and cover the back of his head with his hands, as a slight protection from steps that found footing on his body instead of on the earth. After that he had understood vaguely that a newcomer on the field of the fallen needed help with a first aid, and he had found his knife and slit a sleeve and applied a bandage to check the bleeding of an artery. Before dawn broke the sky was all alight again with a far-reaching gun-fire—that of the Brown advance—throwing the scene of slaughter into spectral relief, which became more real and terrible in the undramatic light of day.
Thick, ghastly thick, the dead and wounded; and the faces—faces half buried, faces black with congealed blood, faces staring straight up at the sky, faces with eyes popping where necks had been twisted! Near by was the distorted metal work of a dirigible, with the bodies of its crew burned beyond recognition, and farther away were other dirigible wrecks. A wounded Gray, who had not the strength to do it himself, begged some one to lift a corpse off his body. A Gray and a Brown were locked in a wrestling embrace in which a shrapnel burst had surprised them. Piles of dead and wounded had been scattered and torn by a shell which found only dead and wounded for destruction at the point of its explosion. The living were crawling out from under the shields they had made of corpses in shell craters, and searching for water in the canteens and biscuits in the haversacks of the dead. One Gray who was completely entombed except his head remarked that he was all right if some one would dig him out. At his side showed the legs of a man who had been buried face downward. Ribs of the wounded broken in; features of the dead mashed by the heels of the Brown countercharge! With every turn of his glance his surroundings grew more intimate in details of horror to the judge's son. On the earth, saturated with rivulets and little lakes of blood, gleamed the lead shrapnel bullets and the brighter, nickelled rifle-bullets and the barrels of rifles dropped from the hands of the fallen.
"I'd have bled to death if you hadn't put on that bandage. You saved my life!" whispered the man next to the judge's son, who was Tom Fragini.
"Did I? Did I?" exclaimed the judge's son. "Well, that's something."
"It certainly is to me," replied Tom, holding out his hand, and thus they shook hands, this Gray and this Brown. "Maybe some time, when the war's over, I can thank you in more than words."
"More than words! Perhaps you can do that now. You—you haven't a cigarette, old fellow?" asked the judge's son. "I haven't smoked for three days."
"Yes, only I roll mine," said Tom.
"So do I mine," said the judge's son.
"But with a game hand I—"
"Oh, I've the hands. It's my leg that's been mashed up," said the judge's son. "Labor and capital!" he added cheerily as he dropped the cosmopolitan tobacco on the cosmopolitan wafer of rice-paper.
They smoked and smiled at each other in the glow of that better passion when wounds have let out the poison of conflict, while the doctors and the hospital-corps men began their attention to the critical cases and on down the slopes the mills of war were grinding out more dead and wounded.
"At the hospital where I was interne before the war we were trying to save a crippled boy the use of his leg," remarked a reserve surgeon. "Half a dozen surgeons held consultations over that boy—yes, just for one leg. And now look at this!"
"I shall take a little nap. There will be plenty to do later," said Westerling, after the last telegram detaching the reserves for concentration had gone.
Yes, he would rest while the troops were in motion. The staff should see that he was still the same self-contained commander whose every faculty was the trained servant of his will. His efforts at sleep resulted in a numbing brain torture, which so desensitized it to outward impressions that his faithful personal aide entering the room at dawn had to touch him on the shoulder to arouse attention.
"There's nothing like being able to order yourself to sleep, whatever the crisis," he said. But suddenly he winced as if a blast of bullets had crashed through a window-pane and buried themselves in the wall beside his bed. "What is that?" he gasped "What?" With appalling distinctness he heard a cannonade that seemed as wide-spread as the horizon.
"I was to tell you that the enemy has been attacking along the whole front," the aide explained.
"Attacking! The Browns attacking!" Westerling exclaimed as he gathered his wits. "Well, so much the worse for them. I rather expected they would," he added.
Then through the door which the aide had left open the division chiefs, led by Turcas, filed in. To Westerling they seemed like a procession of ghosts. The features of one were the features of all, graven with the weariness of the machine's treadmill. Their harness held them up. A moving platform under their feet kept their legs moving. They grouped around the great man's desk silently, Turcas, his lips a half-opened seam, his voice that of crinkling parchment, acting as spokesman.
"The enemy seized his advantage," he said, "when he found that our reserves were on the march, out of touch with the wire to headquarters."
Westerling forced a smile which he wanted to be a knowing smile.
"Exactly! Of course their guns are making a lot of noise," he said. "It seems strange to you, no doubt, that they and not we should be attacking. Excellent! Let them have a turn at paying the costs of the offensive. Let them thrash their battalions to pieces. We want them exhausted when we go in to-night."
"However, we had not prepared our positions for the defensive," continued that very literal parchment voice. "They began an assault on our left flank first and we've just had word that they have turned it."
"Probably a false report. Probably they have taken an outpost. Order a counter-attack!" exclaimed Westerling.
"Nor is that the worst of it," said the vice-chief. "They are pressing at other well-chosen points. They threaten to pierce our centre."
"Our centre!" gibed Westerling. "You do need rest. Our centre, where we have the column of last night's attack still concentrated! If anything would convince me that I have to fight this war-alone—I—" Westerling choked in irritation.
"Yes. The ground is such that it is a tactically safe and advantageous move for Lanstron to make. He strikes at the vitals of our machine."
"But what about the remainder of the force that made the charge? What about all our guns concentrated in front of Engadir?"
"I was coming to that. The rout of the assaulting column was much worse than we had supposed. Those who are strong enough cannot be got to reform. Many were so exhausted that they dropped in their tracks. Our guns are at this moment in retreat—or being captured by the rush of the Browns' infantry. Your Excellency, the crisis is sudden, incredible."
"Our wire service has broken down. We cannot communicate with many of our division commanders," put in Bellini, the chief of intelligence.
"Yes, our organization, so dependent on communication, is in danger of disruption," concluded Turcas. "To avoid disorder, we think it best to retreat across the plain to our own range."
At the word "retreat" Westerling sprang to his feet, his cheeks purple, the veins of his neck and temples sculptured as he took a threatening step toward the group, which fell back before the physical rage of the man, all except the vice-chief, his mouth a thin, ashy line, who held his own.
"You cowards!" Westerling thundered. "Retreat when we have five millions to their three!"
"We have not that odds now," replied the parchment voice. "All their men are engaged. They have caught us at a disadvantage, unable to use our numbers except in detail in trying to hold on in face of—"
"I tell you we cannot retreat!" Westerling interrupted. "That is the end. I know what you do not know. I am in touch with the government. Yes, I know—"
This brought fresh alarm into faces which had become set in grim stoicism by many alarms. If the people were in ignorance of the losses and the army in ignorance of the nation's feeling, the officers of the staff were no less in ignorance of what passed over the long-distance wire between the chief of staff and the premier.
"I know what is best—I alone!" Westerling continued, driving home his point. "Tell our commanders to hold. Neither general nor man is to budge. They are to stick to the death. Any one who does not I shall hold up to public shame as a poltroon. Who knows but Lanstron's attack may be a council of desperation? The Browns may be worse off than we are. Hold, hold! If are are tired, they are tired. Frequently it takes only an ounce more of resolution to turn the tide of battle. Hold, hold! To-morrow will tell a different story! We are going to win yet! Yes, we are going to win!"
"It is for you to decide, Your Excellency," said Turcas, slowly and precisely. "You take the responsibility."
"I take the responsibility. I am in command!" replied Westerling in unflinching pose.
"Yes, Your Excellency."
And they filed out of the room, leaving him to his isolation.
A little later, when François came in unannounced, bringing coffee, he found his master with face buried in hands. Westerling was on the point of striking the valet in anger at the discovery, but instead attempted a yawn to deceive him.
"I fell asleep; there's so little to worry about, François," he explained.
"Yes, Your Excellency. There is no need of worrying as long as you are in command," said François; and Westerling gulped at the coffee and chewed at a piece of roll, which was so dry in his mouth and so hard to swallow that he gave up the attempt.
After Marta had learned, over the telephone, from Lanstron of the certain repulse of the Gray assault, fatigue—sheer physical fatigue such as made soldiers drop dead in slumber on the earth, their packs still on their backs—overcame her. Her work was done. The demands of nature overwhelmed her faculties. She slept with a nervous twitching of her muscles, a restless tossing of her lithe body, until hammers began beating on her temples, beating, beating with the sound of shell bursts, as if to warn her that punishment for her share in the killing was to be the eternal concussion of battle in her ears. At length she realized that the cannonading was real.
Hastening out-of-doors, as her glance swept toward the range she saw bursts of shrapnel smoke from the guns of the Browns nearer than since the fighting had begun on the main line, and these were directed at bodies of infantry that were in confused retreat down the slopes, while all traffic on the pass road was moving toward the rear. Impelled by a new apprehension she hurried to the tunnel. Lanstron answered her promptly in a voice that had a ring of relief and joy in place of the tension that had characterized it since the outbreak of the war.
"Thanks to you, Marta!" he cried. "Everything goes back to you—thanks to you came this chance to attack, and we are succeeding at every point! You are the general, you the maker of victories!"
"Yes, the general of still more killing!" she cried in indignation. "Why have you gone on with the slaughter? I did not help you for this. Why?"
No reply came. She poured out more questions, and still no reply. She pressed the button and tried again, but she might as well have been talking over a dead wire.
Though the morning was chill, Mrs. Galland, in a heavy coat, was seated outside the tower door, beatifically calm and smiling; for she would miss rejoicing over no detail of the spectacle. The battle's sounds were sweet music—symphony of retribution. Oh, if her husband and her father could only be with her to see the ancient enemy in flight! Her cheeks were rosy with the happy thrumming of her heart; a delirious beat was in her temples. She wanted to sing and cheer and give thanks to the Almighty. The advancing bursts of billowy shrapnel down the slopes were a heavenly nimbus to her eyes. She breathed a silent blessing on a man[oe]uvring Brown dirigible. They were coming! The soldiers of her people were coming to take back their own from the robber hosts and restore her hearth to her. Soon she would be seated on the veranda watching the folds of her flag floating over La Tir.
"Isn't it wonderful? Isn't it like some good story?" she said to Marta. "Yes, like a miracle—and there has been a Galland in every war of the Browns and you were in this!"
Having no son, she had given her daughter in sacrifice on the altar of her country's gods, who had answered with victory. Her old-fashioned patriotism, true to the "all-is-fair-in-war" precept, delighted in the hour of success in every trick of Marta's double-dealing, though in private life she could have been guilty of no deceit.
"Marta, Marta, I shall never tease you again about your advanced ideas or about journeying all the way around the world without a chaperon. Your father and my father would have approved!" She squeezed Marta's hands and pressed them to her cheek. Marta smiled absently.
"Yes, mother," she said, but in such a fashion that Mrs. Galland was reminded again that Marta had always been peculiar. Probably it was because she was peculiar that she had been able to outwit the head of an army.
"Oh, that mighty Westerling who was going to conquer the whole world! How does he feel now?" mused Mrs. Galland "Westerling and his boasted power of five against three!"
For the Grays were barbarians to her and the Browns a people of a superior civilization, a superior aristocracy, a superior professional and farming and laboring class. There was nothing about the Browns to Mrs. Galland that was not superior. War, that ancient popular test of superiority in art, civilization, morals, scholarship, the grace of woman and the manliness of man, had proved her point in the high court, permitting of no appeal.
One man alone against the tide—rather, the man who has seen a tide rise at his orders now finding all its sweep against him—Westerling, accustomed to have millions of men move at his command, found himself, one man out of the millions, still and helpless while they moved of their own impulses.
As news of positions lost came in, he could only grimly repeat, "Hold! Tell them to hold!" fruitlessly, like adjurations to the wind to cease blowing. The bell of the long distance kept ringing unheeded, until at last his aide came to say that the premier must speak either to him or to the vice-chief. Westerling staggered to his feet and with lurching steps went into the closet. There he sank down on the chair in a heap, staring at the telephone mouthpiece. Again the bell rang. Clenching his hands in a rocking effort, he was able to stiffen his spine once more as he took down the receiver. To admit defeat to the premier—no, he was not ready for that yet.
"The truth is out!" said the premier without any break in his voice and with the fatalism of one who never allows himself to blink a fact. "Telegraphers at the front who got out of touch with the staff were still in touch with the capital. Once the reports began to come, they poured in—decimation of the attacking column, panic and retreat in other portions of the line—chaos!"
"It's a lie!" Westerling declared vehemently.
"The news has reached the press," the premier proceeded. "Editions are already in the streets."
"What! Where is your censorship?" gasped Westerling.
"It is helpless, a straw protesting against a current," the premier replied. "A censorship goes back to physical force, as every law does in the end—to the police and the army; and all, these days, finally to public opinion. After weeks of secrecy, of reported successes, when nobody really knew what was happening, this sudden disillusioning announcement of the truth has sent the public mad."
"It is your business to control the public!" complained Westerling.
"With what, now? With a speech or a lullaby? As well could you stop the retreat with your naked hands. My business to control the public, yes, but not unless you win victories. I gave you the soldiers. We have nothing but police here, and I tell you that the public is in a mob rage—the whole public, bankers and business and professional men included. I have just ordered the stock exchange and all banks closed."
"There's a cure for mobs!" cried Westerling. "Let the police fire a few volleys and they'll behave."
"Would that stop the retreat of the army? We must sue for peace."
"Sue for peace! Sue for peace when we have five millions against their three!"
"It seems so, as the three millions are winning!" said the premier.
"Sue for peace because women go hysterical? Do you suppose that the Browns will listen now when they think they have the advantage? Leave peace to me! Give me forty-eight hours more! I have told our troops to hold and they will hold. I don't mistake cowardly telegraphers' rumors for facts—"
"Pardon me a moment," the premier interrupted. "I must answer a local call." So astute a man of affairs as he knew that Westerling's voice, storming, breaking, tightening with effort at control, confirmed all reports of disaster. "In fact, the crockery is broken—for you and for me!" said the premier when he spoke again. His life had been a gamble and the gamble had turned against him in playing for a great prize. There was an admirable stoicism in the way he announced the news he had received from the local call: "The chief of police calls me up to say that the uprising is too vast for him to hold. There isn't any mutiny, but his men simply have become a part of public opinion. A mob of women and children is starting for the palace to ask me what I have done with their husbands, brothers, sons, and fathers. They won't have to break in to find me. I'm very tired. I'm ready. I shall face them from the balcony. Yes, Westerling, you and I have achieved a place in history, and they're far more bitter toward you than me. However, you don't have to come back."
"No, I don't have to go back! No, I was not to go back if I failed!" said Westerling dizzily.
Again defiance rose strong as the one tangible thought, born of his ruling passion. It was inconceivable that so vast an ambition should fail. Failure! He defied it! He burst into the main staff room, where the tired officers regarded him with a glare, or momentary, weary wonder, and continued packing up their papers for departure. He went on into the telegraphers' room. Some of the operators were packing their instruments.
"The news? What is the news?" Westerling asked hoarsely.
An operator who was still at the key, without even half rising let alone saluting, glanced up from the cavernous sockets of eyes unawed by the chief of staff's presence.
"All that comes in is bad," he said. "Where we get none because the wires are down we know it's worse. We've been licked."
He went on sending a message, wholly oblivious of Westerling, who stumbled back into the staff room and paused inarticulate before Turcas.
"The army is going—resisting by units, but going. It has made its own orders!" Turcas said. The other division chiefs nodded in agreement. "Your Excellency, we are doing our best," added the vice-chief, holding the door for Westerling to return to his own office. "The nation is not beaten. Given breathing time for reorganization, the army will settle down to the defensive on our own range. There the enemy may try our costly tactics against the precision and power of modern arms, if they choose. No, the nation is not beaten."
The nation! Westerling was not thinking of the nation.
"You—" he began, looking around from face to face.
Not one showed any sign of softening or deference, and, his mind a blank, he withdrew, driven back to his isolation by an inflexible ostracism. The world had come to an end. Public opinion was master—master of his own staff. He sank down before his desk, staring, just staring; hearing the roar of battle which was drawing nearer; staring at the staff orderlies, who came in to take down the wall maps, and at his aide packing up the papers and leaving him in a room bare of all the appurtenances of his position, with little idea in his coma of despair of the hour or even that time was passing. Finally, some one touched him on the shoulder. He looked up to see his aide at his elbow saluting and François, his valet, standing by with an overcoat.
"We must go, Your Excellency," said the aide.
"Go?" asked Westerling dazedly.
"Yes, the staff has already gone to a new headquarters."
The announcement was the needle prick that once more aroused him to a sense of his situation. He rose and struck his fist on the desk in a pulsing outbreak of energy and stubbornness.
"But I stay! I stay!" he cried. "The enemy is not near. He can't be!"
"Very near, general. You can see for yourself, said the aide.
"I will!" Westerling replied. "I will see how the conspiracy of the staff has made ruin of my plans!"
Again something of his old manner returned; something of the stoic's fatalism flashed in his eye. He shook his head to François, refusing to slip his arms into the sleeves of the coat which François dropped on to his shoulders.
"Yes, I will see for myself!" he repeated, as he led the way out to the veranda. "I'll see what goblin scared my pusillanimous staff and robbed me of victory!"
Every cry of triumph in war is paid for by a cry of pain. On one side, anguish of heart; on the other, inexpressible ecstasy. The Gray staff were oblivious of fatigue in the glum, overpowering necessity of restoring the organization of the Gray army for a second stand. The Brown staff were oblivious of fatigue in the exhilaration of victory.
Had a picture of the sight which the judge's son had witnessed at dawn in the path of the attack and the counter-attack been thrown on the wall of the big lobby room of the Brown headquarters, there might have been less exultation on the part of the junior officers of the staff gathered there. They were not seeing or thinking of the dead. They were seeing only brown-headed pins pushing gray-headed pins out of the way on the map, as the symbol of an attack become a pursuit and of better than their dreams come true—the symbol of security for altar fires and race and nation. They were of the living, in the mightiest thrill that a soldier may know.
No doubt now! No more suspense! Labor and sacrifice rewarded! Fervent thanks to the Almighty were mingled with whistled snatches of wedding marches and popular songs. An aide taking a message to the wire preferred leaping over a chair to going around it. A subaltern and a colonel danced together. Victory, victory, victory out of the burr of automatics, the pounding of artillery, the popping roar of rifles! Victory out of the mire of trenches after brain-aching strain! Victory for you and for me and for sweethearts and wives and children! Aren't we all Browns, orderly and captain, boyish lieutenant and gray-haired general? A taciturn martinet of a major hugged a telegrapher to whom he had never spoken a single unofficial word. Hadn't the telegraphers, those silent men who were the tongue of the army, received the good news and passed it on? Some officers who could be spared from duty went to their quarters, where they dropped like falling logs on their beds. To them, after their spell of rejoicing, victory meant sleep for the first time in weeks without forked lightnings of apprehension stabbing their sub-consciousness.
Fellowship was in the victory, the fellowship which, developed under Partow, who believed that Napoleons and Colossi and gods in the car and all such gentlemen belonged to an archaic farce-comedy, had grown under Lanstron. "The staff reports," began the messages that awakened a world, retiring with the idea that the Browns were grimly holding the defensive, to the news that three millions had outgeneralled and defeated five.
In the inner room, whose opening door gave glimpses of Lanstron and the division chiefs, a magic of secret council which the juniors could not quite understand had wrought the wonder. Lanstron had not forgotten the dead. He could see them; he could see everything that happened. Had not Partow said to him: "Don't just read reports. Visualize men and events. Be the artillery, be the infantry, be the wounded—live and think in their places. In this way only can you really know your work!"
His elation when he saw his plans going right was that of the instrument of Partow's training and Marta's service. He pressed the hands of the men around him; his voice caught in his gratitude and his breaths were very short at times, like those of a spent, happy runner at the goal. Feeding on victory and growing greedy of more, his division chiefs were discussing how to press the war till the Grays sued for peace; and he was silent in the midst of their talk, which was interrupted by the ringing of the tunnel telephone. When he came out of his bedroom, Lanstron's distress was so evident that those who were seated arose and the others drew near in inquiry and sympathy. It seemed to them that the chief of staff, the head of the machine, who had left the room had returned an individual.
"The connection was broken while we were speaking!" he said blankly. "That means it must have been cut by the enemy—that the enemy knows of its existence!"
"Perhaps not. Perhaps an accident—a chance shot," said the vice-chief.
"No, I'm sure not," Lanstron replied. "I am sure that it was cut deliberately and not by her."
"The 53d Regiment is going forward in that direction—the same regiment that defended the house—and it can't go any faster than it is going," the vice-chief continued, rather incoherently. He and the others no less felt the news as a personal blow. Though absent in person, Marta had become in spirit an intimate of their hopes and councils.
"She is helpless—in their power!" Lanstron said. "There is no telling what they might do to her in the rage of their discovery. I must go to her! I am going to the front!"
The announcement started a storm of protest.
"But you are the chief of staff! You cannot leave the staff!"
"You've no right to expose yourself!"
"A chance shell or bullet—"
"You do not seem to realize what this victory means to you. You might be killed at the very moment of triumph."
"I haven't had any triumph. But if I had, could there be a better time?" Lanstron asked with a half-bantering smile.
"You couldn't reach there before the 53d Regiment anyway!" declared the vice-chief, having in mind the fact that the staff was fifteen miles to the rear, where it could be at the wire focus. "You will find the roads blocked with the advance. You'll have to ride, you can't go all the way in a car."
"Terrible hardship!" replied Lanstron. "Still, I'm going. Things are well in hand. I can keep in touch by the wire as I proceed. If I get out of touch then you," with a nod to the vice-chief, "know as well as I how to meet any sudden emergency. Yes, you all know how to act—we're so used to working together. The staff will follow as soon as the Galland house is taken. We shall make our headquarters there. I'm free now. I can be my own man for a little while—I can be human!"
A certain awe of him and of his position, born of the prestige of victory, hushed further protest. Who if not he had the right to go where he pleased in the Brown lines now? They noted the eagerness in his eyes, the eagerness of one off the leash, shot with a suspense which was not for the fate of the army, as he left headquarters.
A young officer of the Grays who was with a signal-corps section, trying to keep a brigade headquarters in touch with the staff during the retreat, two or three miles from the Galland house, had seen what looked like an insulated telephone wire at the bottom of a crater in the earth made by the explosion of a heavy shell. The instructions to all subordinates from the chief of intelligence to look for the source of the leak in information to the Browns made him quick to see a clew in anything unusual. He jumped down into the crater and not only found his pains rewarded, but that the wire was intact and ran underground in either direction. Who had laid it? Not the Grays. Why was it there? He called for one of his men to bring a buzzer, and it was the work of little more than a minute to cut the wire and make an attachment. Then he heard a woman's voice talking to "Lanny." Who was Lanny? He waited till he had heard enough to know that it was none other than Lanstron, the chief of staff of the Browns, and the woman must be a spy. An orderly despatched to the chief of intelligence with the news returned with the order:
"Drop everything and report to me in person at once."
"For this I have made my sacrifice!" Marta thought. "The killing goes on by Lanny's orders, not by Westerling's, this time."
Leaving her mother to enjoy the prospect, a slow-moving figure, trance-like, she went along the first terrace path to a point near the veranda where the whole sweep of landscape with its panorama of retreat magnetized her senses. Like the gray of lava, the Gray soldiery was erupting from the range; in columns, still under the control of officers, keeping to the defiles; in swarms and batches, under the control of nothing but their own emotions. Mostly they were hugging cover, from instinct if not from direction, but some relied on straight lines of flight and speed of foot for escape. Coursing aeroplanes were playing a new part. Their wireless was informing the Brown gunners where the masses were thickest. This way and that the Brown artillery fire drove retreating bodies, prodding them in the back with the fearful shepherdry of their shells. Officers' swords flashed in the faces of the bolters or in holding rear-guards to their work. Officers and orderlies were galloping hither and thither with messages, in want of wires. Commanders had been told to hold, but how and where to hold? They saw neighboring regiments and brigades going and they had to go. The machine, the complicated modern war machine, was broken; the machine, with its nerves of intelligence cut, became a thing of disconnected parts, each part working out its own salvation. Authority ceased to be that of the bureau and army lists. It was that of units racked by hardship, acting on the hour's demand.
Gorged was the pass road, overflowing with the struggling tumult of men and vehicles. Self-preservation breaking the bonds of discipline was in the ascendant, and it sought the highway, even as water keeps to the river bed. Like specks on the laboring tide was the white of bandages. An ambulance trying to cut out to one side was overturned. The frantic chauffeur and hospital-corps orderly were working to extricate the wounded from their painful position. A gun was overturned against the ambulance. A mêlée of horses and men was forming at the foot of the garden gate in front of the narrowing bounds of the road into the town, as a stream banks up before a jam of driftwood. The struggle for right of way became increasingly wild; the dam of men, horses, and wagons grew. A Brown dirigible was descending toward the great target; but on closer view its commander forbore, the humane impulse outweighing the desire for retribution for colleagues in camp and mess who had gone down in a holocaust in the aerial battles of the night.
Thus far the flight had seemed in the face of an unseen pursuer, like that of an army fleeing from some power visible to itself but not to Marta. Now she began to observe the flashes of rifles from the crests that the rear-guards of the Grays were deserting; then the rush of the Brown skirmish line to close quarters. Her glance pausing long on no detail, so active the landscape with its swarms and tumult, returned to the scene in front of the house. A Gray field-battery, cutting out to one side of the road, knocking over flimsier vehicles and wounded who got in the way, careening, its drivers cursing and officers shouting, galloped out in the open field and unlimbered to support a regiment of infantry that was hastily intrenching as a point to steady the retreating masses on its front and protect them in their flight when they had passed.
Marta saw how desperately the gunners worked; she could feel their fatigue. Nature had sunk in her heart a partisanship for the under dog. She who had stood for the three against five, now stood for the shaken, bewildered five in the cockpit under the fire of the three. Her sympathies went out to every beaten, weary Gray soldier. What was the difference between a Gray and a Brown? Weren't they both made of flesh and bone and blood and nerves?
Under the awful spell of the panorama, she did not see Westerling, who had stopped only a few feet distant with his aide and his valet, nor did he notice her as the tumult glazed his eyes. He was as an artist who looks on the ribbons of the canvas of his painting, or the sculptor on the fragments of his statue. Worse still, with no faith to give him fortitude except the materialistic, he saw the altar of his god of military efficiency in ruins. He who had not allowed the word retreat to enter his lexicon now saw a rout. He had laughed at reserve armies in last night's feverish defiance, at Turcas's advocacy of a slower and surer method of attack. In those hours of smiting at a wall with his fists and forehead, in denial of all the truth so clear to average military logic, if he had only given a few conventional directions all this disorder would have been avoided. His army could have fallen back in orderly fashion to their own range. The machine out of order, he had attempted no repair; he had allowed it to thrash itself to pieces.
The splinters of its débris—steel splinters—were lacerating his brain. He had a sense that madness was coming and some instinct of self-preservation made the whole scene grow misty, as he tried to resolve it out of existence in the desire for some one object which was not his guns and his men in demoralization. A bit of pink caught his eye—the pink of a dress, a little girl's dress, down there at the edge of the garden by the road, at the same moment that some guns of the Browns, in a new position, opened on an inviting target. Over her head was a crack and a blue tongue of smoke whipped out of nothing; while a shower of shrapnel bullets made spurts of dust around her. She started to run toward the terrace steps and another burst made her run in the opposite direction, while she looked about in a paralysis of fear and then threw herself on her face.
"My God! That little girl—there—there!" Westerling exclaimed distractedly.
"Clarissa! Clarissa!" cried Marta, seeing the child for the first time.
She started precipitately to the rescue, but a hand on her arm arrested her and she turned to see Hugo Mallin bound past her down the slope. Still remaining on the premises under guard while Westerling had neglected to dispose of the case, he had the run of the grounds that morning while the staff was feverishly preparing for departure.
Marta watched him leaping from terrace to terrace. Before he had reached Clarissa worse than shrapnel bursts happened. The spatter of the fragments and bullets falling on either side of the road whipped the edges of the struggling human jam inward. In the midst of this a percussion shell struck, bursting on contact with the road and spreading its own grist of death and the stones of the road in a fan-shaped, mowing swath. Legs and bodies were thrown out as if driven centrifugally by a powerful breath, with Hugo lost in the smoke and dust of the weaving mass. He came out of it bearing Clarissa in his arms, up the terrace steps. To Marta, this was an isolated deed of saving life, of mercy in the midst of merciless slaughter; a parallel to that of Stransky bringing in Grandfather Fragini pickaback.
"Big fireworks!" said Clarissa Eileen as Hugo set her down in front of Marta, whose heart was in her eyes speaking its gratitude.
The artillery's maceration of the human jam suddenly ceased; perhaps because the gunners had seen the Red Cross flag which a doctor had the presence of mind to wave. Westerling turned from a sight worse to him than the killing—that of the flowing retreat along the road pressing frantically over the dead and wounded in growing disorder for the cover of the town, and found himself face to face with the mask-like features of that malingerer who had told him on the veranda that the Grays could not win. Gall flooded his brain. In Hugo he recognized something kindred to the spirit that had set his army at flight, something tangible and personified; and through a mist of rage he saw Hugo smiling—smiling as he had at times at the veranda court—and saluting him as a superior officer.
"Now I am going to fight," said Hugo, "if they try to cross the white posts; to fight with all the skill and courage I can command. But not till then. They are still in their own country and we are not in ours. Then they, in the wrong, will attack and we, in the right, will defend—and, God with us, we shall win."
Thus a second time he had given to the prayer of Marta's children the life of action. She could imagine how steadfastly and exaltedly he would face the invader.
"Thank you, Miss Galland," he said. "And say good-by to your mother and Minna for me."
He was gone, without waiting for any reply, this stranger whom her part had not permitted to know well. A thousand words striving for utterance choked her as she watched him pass out of sight. Westerling was regarding her with a stare which fixed itself first on one thing and then on another in dull misery. Near by were Bellini, the chief of intelligence, and a subaltern who had arrived only a minute before. The subaltern was dust-covered. He seemed to have come in from a hard ride. Both were watching Marta, as if waiting for her to speak. She met Westerling's look steadily, her eyes dark and still and in his the reflection of the vague realization of more than he had guessed in her relations with Hugo.
"Well," she breathed to Westerling, "the war goes on!"
"That's it! That's the voice!" exclaimed the subaltern in an explosion of recognition.
A short, sharp laugh of irony broke from Bellini; the laugh of one whose suspicions are confirmed in the mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. Marta looked around at the interruption, alert, on guard.
"You seem amused," she remarked curiously.
"No, but you must have been," replied Bellini hoarsely. "Early this morning, not far from the castle, this young officer found in the crater made by a ten-inch shell a wire that ran in a conduit underground. The wire was intact. He tapped it. He heard a voice thanking some one for her part in the victory, and it seems that the woman's voice that answered is yours, Miss Galland. So, General Westerling, the leak in information was over this wire from our staff into the Browns' headquarters, as Bouchard believed and as I came to believe."
So long had Marta expected this moment of exposure that it brought no shock. Her spirit had undergone many subtle rehearsals for the occasion.
"Yes, that is true," she heard herself saying, a little distantly, but very quietly and naturally.
Westerling fell back as from a blow in the face. His breath came hard at first, like one being strangled. Then it sank deep in his chest and his eyes were bloodshot, as a bull's in his final effort against the matador. He raised a quivering, clenched fist and took a step nearer her.