"You ought not to leave the house—not this morning," protested Mrs. Galland when Marta was putting on her hat to start for the regular Sunday service of her school.
"The children expect me," Marta explained.
"Hardly, hardly this morning. They will take it for granted that you will not come."
But Marta thrust her hatpin home decisively.
"Jacky Werther will certainly be there. Though he were the only one to come, I would not disappoint him!" she said. "Heaven knows, mother, if there were ever a time for teaching peace it is to-day! And I can't remain inactive. Just to sit still and wait in a time like this—that is too terrible!"
"As you will!" Mrs. Galland responded with gentle resignation.
Garden and veranda were as peaceful as on any other Sunday morning, but it was a different kind of peace—a peace mocked by sounds beyond its boundaries which were to her like the rattling of the steel scales of a demon licking its jaws with its red tongue in voracious anticipation of a gorge and stretching out great steel claws in readiness to sink them into the flesh of its victims when Partow and Westerling gave the word. As Lanstron had said, this demon would feed on every resource and energy of the nation. It had no voice and no thought except kill, kill, kill! And man called this demon patriotism and love of country. Those who risked death in the demon's honor got iron crosses and bronze crosses, but any one who dared to call it by its true name, if a man, received the decoration of the white feather; if a woman, was regarded as a sentimentalist and merely a woman, and told that she did not understand practical human nature.
Choosing to go to town by the castle road rather than down the terrace to the main pass road, Marta, as she emerged from the grounds, saw Feller, garden-shears in hand and in his workman's clothes instead of his Sunday black, a figure of stone watching the approach of some field-batteries. In the week of distracting and cumulative suspense that had elapsed since his secret had been revealed to her, their relations had continued as before. She studiously kept up the fiction of his deafness by writing her orders. The question of allowing him to undertake his part as a spy had drifted into the background of her mind under the distressing and ever-present pressure of the crisis. He was to remain until there was war, and thought about anything that implied that war was coming was the more hideous to her the nearer war approached.
"It will be averted! It cannot be!" she was thinking. Her glimpse of him had no more interest for her at this moment of preoccupation than any other familiar object of the landscape.
"The guns! The guns! How I love the guns!" he was thinking.
She was almost past him before he realized her presence, which he acknowledged by a startled movement and a step forward as he took off his hat. She paused. His eyes were glowing like coals under a blower as he looked at her and again at the batteries, seeming to include her with the guns in the spell of his fervid abstraction. He was unconscious that he had ever been anything but a soldier. His throat was athirst for words and his words craved a listening ear for all the pictures of the machinery of war in motion that crowded his imagination. To him the demon was a fair, beckoning god in cloth of gold—a god of hope and fortune.
"Frontier closed last night to prevent intelligence about our preparations leaking out—Lanny's plan all alive—the guns coming," he went on, his shoulders stiffening, his chin drawing in, his features resolute and beaming with the ardor of youth in action—"troops moving here and there to their places—engineers preparing the defences—automatics at critical points with the infantry—field-wires laid—field-telephones set up—the wireless spitting—the caissons full—planes and dirigibles ready—search-lights in position"
There the torrent of his broken sentences was checked A shadow passed in front of him. He came out of his trance of imageries of activities, so vividly clear to his military mind, to realize that Marta was abruptly leaving.
"Miss Galland!" he called urgently. "Firing may commence at any minute. You must not go into town!"
"But I must!" she declared, speaking over her shoulder while she paused. It was clear that no warning would prevail against her determined mood.
"Then I shall go with you!" he said, starting toward her with a light step, in keeping with the gallantry of a man even younger than his years. He spoke in a tone of protective masculine authority, as an officer might to a woman of whom he was fond when he saw her exposing herself to danger. He would escort her; he would see that no harm befell her. The impulse was spontaneous in an illusion free of the gardener's part. But he saw her lips tighten and a frown gather.
"It is not necessary, thank you!" she answered, more coldly than she had ever spoken to him. This had a magically quick effect on his attitude.
"I beg pardon! I forgot!" he explained in his old man's voice, his head sinking, his shoulders drooping in the humility of a servant who recognizes that he has been properly rebuked for presumption. "Not a gunner any more—I'm a spy!" he thought, as he shuffled off without looking toward the batteries again, though the music of wheels and hoofs was now close by. "I must turn my back on the guns, for they tempt me. And I must win her consent before I shall have even the dignity of a spy—and I will win it!" he added, brightening. "La, la, la! Trust me!"
Marta had a glimpse, as she turned away, of an appealingly pathetic figure bent as under a wound to his spirits, which gave her a sense of personal cruelty in the midst of a wave of pity and regret.
"He is what he is because of the army; a victim of a cult, a habit," she was thinking. "Had he been in any other calling his fine qualities might have been of service to the world and he would have been happy."
Then her sympathy was drawn to another object of war's injustice—a man approaching under the guard of two soldiers. Suddenly the man planted his feet and refused to budge.
"I tell you, it isn't fair!" he cried in rage and appeal. "I tell you, I was only visiting on this side and got caught! I'm a reservist of the first line. If I don't answer the call I'll be branded a shirker in my village, and I've got to live in that village all my life. You better kill me and have done with it!"
"Sorry," said one of the soldiers, "but you were caught trying to sneak. We're acting under orders. No use of balking."
"Who wouldn't sneak?" demanded the prisoner desperately. "Oh, say, be a little human! The worst of it is that I came over here to see my girl to say good-by to her. I'm going to marry her," he pleaded, "though my folks are against it because she's a Brown. It makes me so cheap—it—"
"We were told to take you to the general. He'll let you off if there isn't any war, and he may, anyway. But he sure won't if you resist arrest." The soldiers seized his arms firmly. "Come along!" they said, and he went. Any one must go when a steel claw of the demon enforces the order.
A company of infantry resting among their stacked rifles changed the color of the square in the distance from the gray of pavement to the brown of a mass of uniforms. In the middle of the main street a major of the brigade staff, with a number of junior officers and orderlies, was evidently waiting on some signal. Sentries were posted at regular intervals along the curb. The people in the houses and shops from time to time stopped packing up their effects long enough to go to the doors and look up and down apprehensively, asking bootless, nervous questions.
"Are they coming yet?"
"Do you think they will come?"
"Are you sure it's going to be war?"
"Will they shell the town?"
"There'll be time enough for you to get away!" shouted the major. "All we know is what is written in our instructions, and we shall act on them when the thing starts. Then we are in command. Meanwhile, get ready!"
A lieutenant of a detachment of engineers coming at the double from a cross street stopped to inquire:
"This way to the knitting mills?"
"Straight ahead! Can't go wrong!" the major answered.
"We are going to loophole their walls for the infantry," explained the lieutenant as he hurried on.
"Then they're going to fight in the town!"
"Blow our homes to pieces!"
"Destroy our property!"
After this fusillade from the people the major glared at the retreating back of the lieutenant as much as to say that some men would never learn to hold their tongues. Naturally, the duty of looking after refugees was not to his soldierly taste.
"We are doing it all for you, for the country," he explained. "We are going to make them pay for every foot they take—the invaders!"
"Yes, make them pay!" called a voice from the houses.
"Make them pay!" other voices joined in.
"It isn't the fellows just across the border that want to take our property," said an elderly man. "They're good friends enough. It's the Grays' politicians and the fire-eaters in the other provinces."
"The robbers!" piped a woman's high-pitched note. "I've got a son in the army, and if ever he leaves that mountain range and goes down the other side with the Grays chasing him, he'll get worse from me than the Grays could give him!"
"That's right! That's the way to talk!" came a chorus.
Then the major became aware of a young woman who was going in the wrong direction. Her cheeks were flushed from her rapid walk, her lips were parted, showing firm, white teeth, and her black eyes were regarding him in a blaze of satire or amusement; an emotion, whatever it was, that thoroughly centred his attention.
"Yes," she said, anger getting the better of her, "make them pay—and they make you pay—and you make them pay—and so on!"
The major smiled. It seemed the safe thing to do. He did not know but the young woman might charge.
"Mademoiselle, I am sorry, but unless you live in this direction," he said very politely, "you may not go any farther. Until we have other orders or they attack, every one is supposed to remain in his house or his place of business."
"This is my place of business!" Marta answered, for she was already opposite a small, disused chapel which was her schoolroom, where a half dozen of the faithful children were gathered around the masculine importance of Jacky Werther, one of the older boys.
"Then you are Miss Galland!" said the major, enlightened. His smile had an appreciation of the irony of her occupation at that moment. "Your children are very loyal. They would not tell me where they lived, so we had to let them stay there."
"Those who have homes," she said, identifying each one of the faithful with a glance, "have so many brothers and sisters that they will hardly be missed from the flock. Others have no homes—at least, not much of a one"—here her temper rose again—"taxes being so high in order that you may organize murder and the destruction of property."
"I—" gasped the major under the fire of those black eyes.
But their flashes suddenly splintered into less threatening lights as she realized the fatuity of this personal allusion.
"Oh, I'm not the town scold!" she explained with a nervous little laugh that helped her to recover poise.
With the black eyes in this mood, the major was conscious only of a desire to please which conflicted with duty.
"Now, really, Miss Galland," he began solicitously, "I have been assigned to move the civil population in case of attack. Your children ought—"
"After school! You have your duty this morning and I have mine!" Marta interrupted pleasantly, and turned toward the chapel.
"They are putting sharpshooters in the church tower to get the aeroplanes, and there are lots of the little guns that fire bullets so fast you can't count 'em—and little spring wagons with dynamite to blow things up—and—" Jacky Werther ran on in a series of vocal explosions as Marta opened the door to let the children go in.
"Yet you came!" said Marta with a hand caressingly on his shoulder.
"It looks pretty bad for peace, but we came," answered Jacky, round-eyed, in loyalty. "We'd come right through the bullets 'cause we said we would if we wasn't sick, and we wasn't sick."
"My seven disciples—seven!" exclaimed Marta as she counted them. "And you need not sit on the regular seats, but around me on the platform. It will be more intimate."
"That's grand!" came in chorus. They did not bother, about chairs, but seated themselves on the floor around Marta's skirts.
"My, Miss Galland, but your eyes are bright!"
"And your cheeks are all red!"
"With little spots in the centre!"
"You're very wonderful, Miss Galland!"
The church clock boomed out its deliberate strokes through ten, the hour set for the lesson, and all counted them—one—two—three. Marta was thinking what a dismal little effort theirs was, and yet she was very happy, tremblingly happy in her distraction and excitement, that they had not waited for her at the door of the chapel in vain.
She announced that there would be no talk this morning; they would only say their oath. Repeating in concert the pledge to the boys and girls of other lands, the childish voices peculiarly sweet and harmonious in contrast to the raucous and uneven sounds of foreboding from the street, they came in due course to the words of the concession that the oath made to militancy.
"If an enemy tries to take my land—"
"Children—I—" Marta interrupted with a sense of wonder and shock. They paused and looked at her questioningly. "I had almost forgotten that part!" she breathed confusedly.
"That's the part that makes all we're doing against the Grays right!" put in Jacky Werther promptly.
"As I wrote it for you! 'I shall appeal to his sense of justice and reason with him—'"
Jaws dropped and eyes bulged, for above the sounds of the street rose from the distance the unmistakable crackling of rifle-fire which, as they listened, spread and increased in volume.
"Go on—on to the end of the oath! It will take only a moment," said Marta resolutely. "It isn't much, but it's the best we can do!"
After the morning sun commenced to tickle the back of his neck, Eugene Aronson, the giant of the 128th of the Grays, stretched his limbs as healthily as a cub bear.
"No war yet!" he exclaimed, rubbing his eyes.
"Oh, we'd have called you if there were!" said the manufacturer's son, trying to make a joke, which was hard work with his clothes dew-soaked after a sleepless night in the open.
"Wouldn't want you to miss it after coming so far," added the laborer's son, aiming to show that he, too, was in a light-hearted mood.
"And how did you sleep?" asked Eugene, cheerily, of his neighbors.
"Fine!"
"First rate!"
"Like a stone!"
Every man was too intent in forcing his own spontaneity to notice that that of the others was also forced.
"Like a top!" chimed in pasty-faced Peterkin, the valet's son, to be in fashion.
"I didn't sleep much myself; in fact, not at all," said Hugo Mallin.
"Oh, ho!" groaned Pilzer, the butcher's son, with a broad grin that made a crease in the liver patch on his cheek.
"You see, it's a new experience for me," Hugo explained in a drawl, his face drawn as a mask. "I'm not so used to war as you other fellows are. I'm not so brave!"
There was a forced laugh because Hugo appeared droll, and when he appeared droll it was the proper thing to laugh. Besides, in the best humor there is a grain of truth, whether you see it or not. This time a number saw it quite clearly.
"I was thinking how ridiculous we all are," Hugo went on without change of tone or expression, "grovelling here on our stomachs and pretending that we slept when we didn't and that we want to be killed when we don't!"
"White feather again!" Pilzer exclaimed.
"Oh, shut up!" snapped the doctor's son irritably. "Let Hugo talk. He's only gassing. It's so monotonous lying here that any kind of nonsense is better than growling."
"Yes, yes!" the others agreed.
Hugo's outburst of the previous evening was forgotten. They welcomed anything that broke the suspense. Let the regimental wag make a little fun any way that he could. As the officers had withdrawn somewhat to the rear for breakfast, there was no constraint.
"I was thinking how I'd like to go out and shake hands with the Browns," said Hugo. "That's the way fencers and pugilists do before they set to. It seems polite and sportsmanlike, indicating that there's no prejudice."
There was a ripple of half-hearted merriment punctuated by exclamations.
"What a fool idea!"
"How do all your notions get into your head, Hugo?"
"Sometimes by squinting at the moonlight and counting odd numbers; sometimes by knowing that anything that's different is ridiculous; and sometimes by looking for tangent truths out of professorial ruts," Hugo observed with a sort of erudite discursiveness which was the rank dissimulation of a hypocrite to Pilzer and wholly confusing to Peterkin, not to say a draught on mental effort for many of the others. "For instance, I got a good one from two fellows of the Browns whom I met on the road the first day we arrived. They were reservists. We were soon talking together and so peaceably that I was sceptical if they were Browns at all. So I determined on a test. I told them I was from a distant province and hadn't travelled much and wouldn't they please take off their hats. They consented very good-naturedly."
"Oh, good old Hugo! He got one on the Browns!"
"I'd like to have been there to see it!"
"And when they took off their hats, what then?"
"Why, I said: 'This isn't convincing at all.'" Hugo's drawl paused for a second while interest developed. "'You haven't any horns! Haven't you any forked tails, either? Or are they curled up nicely inside your trousers' legs?'"
"Whew! But they must have felt cheap to have been got in that way!"
"And old Hugo looking so solemn!"
"Just like he does now!"
But the judge's son said under his breath, "Very pretty!" and the doctor's son, who was next him in the ranks, nodded understandingly.
"It seems they had checked their horns and tails at the frontier," Hugo continued, "and, as I had left mine hanging in the rifle racks at the barracks, we got on together like real human beings. I found they could speak my language better than my lesson-book try at theirs—yes, as well as I can speak it myself—and that made it all the easier. After a while I mentioned the war. They were very amiable and they didn't begin to call me a swill-eating land-shark or any other of the pretty names I've heard they are so fond of using. 'We want to keep what is ours,' they said. 'Your side will have to start the fight by crossing the line. We shall not!"'
"Because they know they'll be licked!" put in Pilzer hotly.
"No, we may beat them in fighting," agreed Hugo, "but these two fellows had me beaten on the argument!"
"They hauled down our flag! They insulted us in their despatches! They quibble! They're the perfidious Browns!" cried big Eugene Aronson, speaking the lesson taught him by the newspapers, which had it from the premier.
"There, he's got you again, Gene!"
"Yes, you funny old simpleton! You are almost too easy!"
There was something of the vivacity of the barrack-room banter in the exclamations at Eugene's expense. Yet they were not the same. The look on no man's face was the same. The humorist was silent.
"What next, Hugo?"
He half stared at them, and his mask was not solemn but tragic.
"I was thinking how men work their courage up, as if patriotism were a Moloch of which they were afraid," he said. "How in order to get killed we go out to kill others, when right is on their side! How you, Armand, or you, Eugene, might be dead before to-morrow! How—."
"The bullet is not made that will get me!" exclaimed Eugene, with a swelling breath from his bellows-like lungs.
"Take him home to mother!" groaned Pilzer.
"That will do for you, Hugo Mallin!" came another interruption, a sharp one from Captain Fracasse, who had returned unobserved from the rear in time to overhear Hugo's remarks. "And that's the way to talk, Aronson and Pilzer. As for you, Mallin, I've a mind to put you under arrest and send you back for a coward! A coward—do you hear?"
"Ah-h!" breathed Pilzer in a guttural of satisfaction.
Hugo crimsoned at first in confusion, then he looked frankly and unflinchingly at the captain.
"Very well, sir!" he said with a certain dignity which Fracasse, who was a good deal of a martinet, found very irritating.
"No, that would suit you too well!" Fracasse declared. "You shall stay! You shall do the duty for which your country trained you and take your share of the chances."
"Yes, sir!" answered Hugo. "But won't you," he asked persuasively and with the wondering inquiry of the suggestion that had sprung into his heretic brain, "won't you ask the men if there are not some here who really, in their hearts, the logic of their hearts—which is often better than brain logic—do not believe just as I do?"
"Have you gone insane? There are none!" In the impulse of anger that swept his cheeks with a red wave Fracasse half drew his sword as if he would strike Hugo. "And, Mallin, you are a marked man. I shall watch you! I'll have the lieutenants and sergeants watch you. At the first sign of flunking I'll make an example of you!"
"Yes, sir," answered Hugo, with the automatic deference of private to officer but with a reserved and studious inquiry that made the captain bite his lip.
"I'll have Aronson and Pilzer watch you, too!" Fracasse added.
"Yes, sir!" said Pilzer promptly.
Then, under the restraint of the captain's presence, there was a silence that endured. The men were left to the sole resource of their thoughts and observation of their surroundings. They were lying in a pasture facing the line of white posts whose tops ran in an even row over level ground. On the other side of the boundary was a wheat-field. Here a farmer had commenced his fall ploughing. His plough was in the furrow where he had left it when he unhitched his team for the day, before an orderly had come to tell him that he must move out of his house overnight. The wheat stubble swept on up to a knoll in the distance.
All the landscape in front of Fracasse's company seemed to have been deserted; no moving figures were anywhere in sight; no sign of the enemy's infantry. No trains came or went along the lines of steel into the mountain tunnel, which had been mined at a dozen points by the Browns. No vehicles and no foot-passengers dotted the highway into the town. Over the mountains and over the plain, planes and dirigibles moved in wide circles restively, watching for a signal as hawks watch for prey. Suspense this—suspense of such a swift vibration that it was like a taut G string of a violin under the bow!
Faintly the town clock was heard striking the hour. From eight to nine and nine to ten Fracasse's men waited; waited until the machine was ready and Westerling should throw in the clutch; waited until the troops were in place for the first move before he hurled his battalions forward. Every pawn of flesh facing the white posts had a thousand thoughts whirling in such a medley that he could be said to have no thought at all, only an impression juggled by destiny. No one would have confessed what he felt, while physical inactivity gave free rein to mental activity. That thing of a nation's nightmare; that thing for which generations had drilled without its materializing; that thing of speculation, of hazard, of horror; that thing of quick action and long-enduring consequences was coming.
They did not know how the captain at their back received his orders; they only heard the note of the whistle, with a command familiar to a trained instinct on the edge of anticipation. It released a spring in their nerve-centres. They responded as the wheels respond when the throttle is opened. Jumping to their feet they broke into a run, bodies bent, heads down, like the peppered silhouette that faced Westerling's desk. What they had done repeatedly in drills and man[oe]uvres they were now doing in war, mechanically as marionettes.
"Come on! The bullet is not made that can get me! Come on!" cried the giant Eugene Aronson.
He leaped over a white post and then over the plough, which was also in his path. Little Peterkin felt his legs trembling. They seemed to be detached from his will, and the company's and the captain's will, and churning in pantomime or not moving at all. If Hugo Mallin had been called a coward, what of himself? What of the stupid of the company, who would never learn even the manual of arms correctly, as the drill-sergeant often said? A new fear made him glance around. He would not have been surprised to find that he was already in the rear. But instead he found that he was keeping up, which was all that was necessary, as more than one other man assured his legs. After thirty or forty yards most of the legs, if not Peterkin's, had worked out their shiver and nearly all felt the exhilaration of movement in company. Then came the sound that generations had drilled for without hearing; the sound that summons the imagination of man in the thought of how he will feel and act when he hears it; the sound that is everywhere like the song snatches of bees driven whizzing through the air.
"That's it! We're under fire! We're under fire!" flashed as crooked lightning recognition of the sound through every brain.
There was no sign of any enemy; no telling where the bullets came from.
"Such a lot of them, one must surely get me!" Peterkin thought.
Whish-whish! Th-ipp-whing! The refrain gripped his imagination with an unseen hand. He seemed to be suffocating. He wanted to throw himself down and hold his hands in front of his head. While Pilzer and Aronson were not thinking, only running, Peterkin was thinking with the rapidity of a man falling from a high building. Worse! He did not know how far he had to go. He was certain only that he was bound to strike ground.
"An inch is as good as a mile!" He recollected the captain's teaching. "Only one of a thousand bullets fired in war ever kills a man"—but he was certain that he had heard a million already. Then one passed very close, its swift breath brushing his cheek with a whistle like a s-s-st through the teeth. He dodged so hard that he might have dislocated his neck; he gasped and half stumbled, but realized that he had not been hit. And he must keep right on going, driven by one fear against another, in face of those ghastly whispers which the others, for the most part, in the excitement of a charge, had ceased to hear.
Again he would be sure that his legs, which he was urging so frantically to their duty, were not playing pantomime. He looked around to find that he was still keeping up with Eugene and felt the thrill of the bravery of fellowship at sight of the giant's flushed, confident face revelling in the spirit of a charge. And then, just then, Eugene convulsively threw up his arms, dropped his rifle, and whirled on his heel. As he went down his hand clutched at his left breast and came away red and dripping. After one wild, backward glance, Peterkin plunged ahead.
"Eugene!" Hugo Mallin had stopped and bent over Eugene in the supreme instinct of that terrible second, supporting his comrade's head.
"The bullet is not—made—." Eugene whispered, the ruling passion strong to the last. A flicker of the eyelids, a gurgle in the throat, and he was dead.
Fracasse had been right behind them. The sight of a man falling was something for which he was prepared; something inevitably a part of the game. A man down was a man out of the fight, service finished. A man up with a rifle in his hand was a man who ought to be in action.
"Here, you are not going to get out this way!" he said in the irritation of haste, slapping Hugo with his sword. "Go on! That's hospital-corps work."
Hugo had a glimpse of the captain's rigid features and a last one of Eugene's, white and still and yet as if he were about to speak his favorite boast; then he hurried on, his side glance showing other prostrate forms. One form a few yards away half rose to call "Hospital!" and fell back, struck mortally by a second bullet.
"That's what you get if you forget instructions," said Fracasse with no sense of brutality, only professional exasperation, "Keep down, you wounded men!" he shouted at the top of his voice.
The colonel of the 128th had not looked for immediate resistance. He had told Fracasse's men to occupy the knoll expeditiously. But by the common impulse of military training, no less than in answer to the whistle's call, in face of the withering fire they dropped to earth at the base of the knoll, where Hugo threw himself down at full length in his place in line next to Peterkin.
"Fire pointblank at the crest in front of you! I saw a couple of men standing up there!" called Fracasse. "Fire fast! That's the way to keep down their fire—pointblank, I tell you! You're firing into the sky! I want to see more dust kicked up. Fire fast! We'll have them out of there soon! They're only an outpost."
Hugo was firing vaguely, like a man in a dream, and thinking that maybe up there on the knoll were the two Browns he had met on the road and perhaps their comrades were as fond of them as he was of Eugene. It is a mistake for a soldier to think much, as Westerling had repeatedly said.
Pilzer was shooting to kill. His eye had the steely gleam of his rifle sight and the liver patch on his cheek was a deeper hue as he sought to avenge Eugene's death. Drowned by the racket of their own fire, not even Peterkin was hearing the whish-whish of the bullets from Dellarme's company now. He did not know that the blacksmith's son, who was the fourth man from him, lay with his chin on his rifle stock and a tiny trickle of blood from a hole in his forehead running down the bridge of his nose.
Fracasse, glancing along from rifle to rifle, as a weaver watches the threads of a machine loom, saw that Hugo was firing at too high an angle.
"Mallin!" he called. Hugo did not hear because of the noise, and Fracasse had to creep nearer, which was anything but cooling to his temper. "You fool! You are shooting fifty feet above the top of the knoll! Look along your sight!" he yelled.
Fracasse observed, with some surprise, that Hugo's hand was steady as he carefully drew a bead. Hugo saw a spurt of dust at the point slightly below the crest where he aimed; for he was the best shot in the company at target practice.
"I'm not killing anybody!" he thought happily.
What about Stransky of the Reds, who would not fight to please the ruling classes? What about Grandfather Fragini, who would fight on principle whenever a Gray was in sight? Now we leave the story of Fracasse's men at the foot of the knoll for that of the Browns on the crest.
Young Dellarme, new to his captain's rank, with lips pressed tightly together, his delicately moulded, boyish features reflecting the confidence which it was his duty to inspire in his company, watching the plain through his glasses, saw the movement of mounted officers to the rear of the 128th as a reason for summoning his men.
"Creep up! Don't show yourselves! Creep up—carefully—carefully!" he kept repeating as they crawled forward on their stomachs. "And no one is to fire until the command comes."
Hugging the cover of the ridge of fresh earth which they had thrown up the previous night, they watched the white posts. Stransky, who had been ruminatively silent all the morning, was in his place, but he was not looking at the enemy. Cautiously, to avoid a reprimand, he raised his head to enable him to glance along the line. All the faces seemed drawn and clayish.
"They don't want to fight! They're just here because they're ordered here and haven't the character to defy authority," he thought. "The leaven is working! My time is coming!"
But Grandfather Fragini's cheeks had a hectic flush; his heart was beating with the exhilaration of an old war-horse. Looking over Tom's shoulder, he squinted into the distance, his underlip quivering against his toothless gums.
"My eyesight's kind of uncertain," he said. "Can you see 'em?"
"There by the white posts—those lying figures!" said Tom. "They're almost the color of the stubble."
"So I do, the land-sharks! Down on their bellies, too! No flag, either! But that ain't no reason why we shouldn't have a flag. It ought to be waving at 'em in defiance right over our heads!"
"Flags draw fire. They let the enemy know where you are,' Tom explained.
"The Hussars didn't bother about that. We let out a yell and went after 'em!" growled grandfather. "Appears to me the fighting these days is grovelling in the dirt and taking care nobody don't get hurt!"
"Oh, there'll be enough hurt—don't you worry about that!" said a voice from the line.
"Good thing an old fellow who's been under fire is along to stiffen you rookies!" replied grandfather tartly. "You'll be all right once you get going. You'll settle down to be real soldiers yet. And I'd like to hear a little more cussing. How the Hussars used to cuss! Too much reading and writing nowadays. It makes men too ladylike."
By this time he had once more attracted the captain's attention.
"Grandfather Fragini, you must drop back—you must! If you don't, I'll have you carried back!" called Dellarme, sparing the old man only a glance from his concentrated observation on the front.
When he looked again at the enemy any thought of carrying out his threat vanished, for the minute had come when all his training was to be put to a test. The figures on the other side of the white posts were rising. He was to prove by the way he directed a company of infantry in action whether or not he was worthy of his captain's rank. He breathed one of those unspoken prayers that are made to the god of one's own efficient, conscientious responsibility to duty. The words of it were: "May I keep my head as if I were at drill!" Then he smiled cheerily. In order that he might watch how each man used his rifle, he drew back of the line, his slim body erect as he rested on one knee, his head level with the other heads while he fingered his whistle. His lieutenants followed his example even to the detail of his cheery smile. There was a slight stirring of heads and arms as eyes drew beads on human targets. The instant that Eugene Aronson sprang over the white post a blast from Dellarme's whistle began the war.
It was a signal, too, for Stransky to play the part he had planned; to make the speech of his life. His six feet of stature shot to its feet with a Jack-in-the-box abruptness, under the impulse of a mighty and reckless passion.
"Men, stop firing!" he cried thunderously. "Stop firing on your brothers! Like you, they are only the pawns of the ruling class, who keep us all pawns in order that they may have champagne and caviare. Comrades, I'll lead you! Comrades, we'll take a white flag and go down to meet our comrades and we'll find that they think as we do! I'll lead you!"
Grandfather Fragini, impelled by the hysterical call of the Hussar spirit, also sprang up, waving his hat and trembling and swaying with the emotion that racked his old body.
"Give it to 'em! Aim low! Give it to 'em—give it to 'em, horns and hoofs, sabre and carbine!" he shouted in a high, jumpy voice. "Give it to 'em! Make 'em weep! Make 'em whine! Make 'em bellow!"
Both appeals were drowned in the cracking of the rifles working as regularly as punching-machines in a factory. Every soldier was seeing only his sight and the running figures under it. Mechanically and automatically, training had been projected into action, anticipation into realization. A spectator might as well have called to a man in a hundred-yard dash to stop running, to an oarsman in a race to jump out of his shell.
So centred was Dellarme in watching his men and the effect of their fire that he did not notice the two silhouettes on the sky-line, making ridicule of all his care about keeping his company under cover, until the doctor, who alone had nothing to do as yet, touched him on the arm. At the moment he looked around, and before he could speak a command, a hospital-corps man who was near Grandfather Fragini threw himself in a low tackle and brought the old man to earth, while the company sergeant sprang for Stransky with an oath. But Stransky was in no mood to submit. He felled the sergeant with a blow and, recklessly defiant, stared at Dellarme, while the men, steadily firing, were still oblivious of the scene. The sergeant, stunned, rose to his knees and reached for his revolver. Dellarme, bent over to keep his head below the crest, had already drawn his as he hastened toward them.
"Stransky," said Dellarme, "you have struck an officer under fire! You have refused to fight! Within the law I am warranted in shooting you dead!"
"Well!" answered Stransky, throwing back his head, his face seeming all big, bony nose and heavy jaw and burning eyes.
"Will you get down? Will you take your place with your rifle?" demanded Dellarme.
Stransky laughed thunderously in scorn. He was handsome, titanic, and barbaric, with his huge shoulders stretching his blouse, which fell loosely around his narrow hips, while the fist that had felled the sergeant was still clenched.
"No!" said Stransky. "You won't kill much if you kill me and you'd kill less if you shot yourself! God Almighty! Do you think I'm afraid? Me—afraid?"
His eyes in a bloodshot glare, as uncompromising as those of a bull in an arena watching the next move of the red cape of the matador, regarded Dellarme, who hesitated in the revulsion of the horror of killing and in admiration of the picture of human force before him. But the old sergeant, smarting under the insult of the blow, his sandstone features mottled with red patches, had no compunctions of this order. He was ready to act as executioner.
"If you don't want to shoot, I can! An example—the law! There's no other way of dealing with him! Give the word!" he said to Dellarme.
Stransky laughed, now in strident cynicism. It was the laugh of the red, of bastardy, of blanketless nights in the hedgerows, and boot soles worn through to the macadam, with the dust of speeding automobiles blown in the gaunt face of hunger. Dellarme still hesitated, recollecting Lanstron's remark. He pictured Stransky in a last stand in a redoubt, and every soldier was as precious to him as a piece of gold to a miser.
"One ought to be enough to kill me if you're going to do it to slow music," said Stransky. "You might as well kill me as the poor fools that your poor fools are trying to—"
Another breath finished the speech; a breath released from a ball that seemed to have come straight from hell. The fire-control officer of a regiment of Gray artillery on the plain, scanning the landscape for the origin of the rifle-fire which was leaving many fallen in the wake of the charge of the Gray infantry, had seen two figures on the knoll. "How kind! Thank you!" his thought spoke faster than words. No need of range-finding! The range to every possible battery or infantry position around La Tir was already marked on his map. He passed the word to his guns.
The burst of their first shrapnel-shell blinded all three actors in the scene on the crest of the knoll with its ear-splitting crack and the force of its concussion threw Stransky down beside the sergeant. Dellarme, as his vision cleared, had just time to see Stransky jerk his hand up to his temple, where there was a red spot, before another shell burst, a little to the rear. This was harmless, as a shrapnel's shower of fragments and bullets carry forward from the point of explosion. But the next burst in front of the line. The doctor's period of idleness was over. One man's rifle shot up as his spine was broken by a jagged piece of shrapnel jacket. Now there were too many shells to watch them individually.
"It's all right—all right, men!" Dellarme called again, assuming his cheery smile. "It takes a lot of shrapnel to kill anybody. Our batteries will soon answer!"
His voice was unheard, yet its spirit was felt. The men knew through their training that there was no use of dodging and that their best protection was an accurate fire of their own.
"Shelling us, the ———- ———!" gasped Grandfather Fragini, who had experience, if he were weak in reading and writing. "All noise and smoke!"—as it was to a larger degree in his day.
Stransky had half risen, a new kind of savagery dawning on his features as he regained his wits. With inverted eyes he regarded the red ends of his fingers, held in line with the bridge of his nose. He felt of the wound again, now that he was less dizzy. It was only a scratch and he had been knocked down like a beef in an abattoir by an unseen enemy, on whom he could not lay hands! He glared around as if in search of the hidden antagonist. The sergeant had crept forward to be a steadying influence to the men in their first trial, if need be, and the doctor and a hospital-corps man were dragging a wounded man out of fine without exposing their own shoulders above the crest. Stransky rolled his eyes in and out; the tendons of his neck swelled; his jaw worked as if crunching pebbles. Deafeningly, the shrapnel jackets continued to crack with "ukung-s-sh—ukung-s-sh" as the swift breath of the shrapnel missiles spread.
"Give it to 'em! Give it to 'em!" Grandfather Fragini cried, his old voice a quavering bird note in the pandemonium. "My, but they do come fast!" he gasped.
Yes, a trifle faster than in your day, grandfather, when a gun of the horse-artillery had to be relaid after the recoil, which is now taken up by an oil chamber, while the gunner on his seat behind the breech keeps the sight steady on the target. The guns of one battery of that Gray regiment of artillery, each firing six fourteen-pound shells a minute methodically, every shell loaded with nearly two hundred projectiles, were giving their undivided attention to the knoll.
How long could his company endure this? Dellarme might well ask. He knew that he would not be expected to withdraw yet. With a sense of relief he saw Fracasse's men drop for cover at the base of the knoll and then, expectation fulfilled, he realized that rifle-fire now reinforced the enemy's shell fire. His duty was to remain while he could hold his men, and a feeling toward them such as he had never felt before, which was love, sprang full-fledged into his heart as he saw how steadily they kept up their fusillade.
The sergeant, who now had time to think of Stransky, was seized with a spasm of retributive rage. He drew his revolver determinedly.
"You brought this on! I'll do for you!" he cried, turning toward the spot where he had left Stransky, only to lower his revolver in amazement as he saw Stransky, eager in response to a new passion, spring forward into place and pick up his rifle.
"If you will not have it my way, take it yours!" said the best shot in the company, as he began firing with resolute coolness.
"They have a lot of men down," said Dellarme, his glasses showing the many prostrate figures on the wheat stubble. "Steady! steady! We have plenty of batteries back in the hills. One will be in action soon."
But would one? He understood that with their smokeless powder the Gray guns could be located only by their flashes, which would not be visible unless the refraction of light were favorable. Then "thur-eesh—thur-eesh" above every other sound in a long wail! No man ever forgets the first crack of a shrapnel at close quarters, the first bullet breath on his cheek, or the first supporting shell from his side in flight that passes above him.
"That is ours!" called Dellarme.
"Ours!" shouted the sergeant.
"Ours!" sang the thought of every one of the men.
Over the Gray batteries on the plain an explosive ball of smoke hung in the still air; then another beside it.
"Thur-eesh—thur-eesh—thur-eesh," the screaming overhead became a gale that built a cloud of blue smoke over the offending Gray batteries—beautiful, soft blue smoke from which a spray of steel descended. There was no spotting the flashes of the Browns' guns in order to reply to them, for they were under the cover of a hill, using indirect aim as nicely and accurately as In firing pointblank. The gunners of the Gray batteries could not go on with their work under such a hail-storm, they were checkmated. They stopped firing and began moving to a new position, where their commander hoped to remain undiscovered long enough to support the 128th by loosing his lightnings against the defenders at the critical moment of the next charge, which would be made as soon as Fracasse's men had been reinforced.
There was an end to the concussions and the thrashing of the air around Dellarme's men, and they had the relief of a breaking abscess in the ear. But they became more conscious of the spits of dust in front of their faces and the passing whistles of bullets. In return, they made the sections of Gray infantry in reserve rushing across the levels, leave many gray lumps behind. But Fracasse's men at the foot of the slope poured in a heavier and still heavier fire.
"Down there's where we need the shells now!" spoke the thought of Dellarme's men, which he had anticipated by a word to the signal corporal, who waved his flag one—two—three—four—five times. Come on, now, with more of your special brand of death, fire-control officer! Your own head is above the sky-line, though your guns are hidden. Five hundred yards beyond the knoll is the range! Come on!
He came with a burst of screams so low in flight that they seemed to brush the back of the men's necks with a hair broom at the rate of a thousand feet a second. Having watched the result, Dellarme turned with a confirmatory gesture, which the corporal translated into the wigwag of "Correct!" The shrapnel smoke hanging over Fracasse's men appeared a heavenly blue to Dellarme's men.
"They are going to start for us soon! Oh, but we'll get a lot of them!" whispered Stransky gleefully to his rifle.
Dellarme glanced again toward the colonel's station. No sign of the retiring flag. He was glad of that. He did not want to fall back in face of a charge; to have his men silhouetted in the valley as they retreated. And the Grays would not endure this shower-bath long without going one way or the other. He gave the order to fix bayonets, and hardly was it obeyed when he saw flashes of steel through the shrapnel smoke as the Grays fixed theirs. The Grays had five hundred yards to go; the Browns had the time that it takes running men to cover the distance in which to stop the Grays.
"We'll spear any of them who has the luck to get this far!" whispered Stransky to his rifle. The sentence was spoken in the midst of a salvo of shrapnel cracks, which he did not hear. He heard nothing, thought nothing, except to kill.
The Gray batteries on the plain, having taken up a new position and being reinforced, played on the crest at top speed instantly the Gray line rose and started up the slope at the run. With the purpose of confusing no less than killing, they used percussion, which burst on striking the ground, as well as shrapnel, which burst by a time-fuse in the air. Fountains of sod and dirt shot upward to meet descending sprays of bullets. The concussions of the earth shook the aim of Dellarme's men, blinded by smoke and dust, as they fired through a fog at bent figures whose legs were pumping fast in dim pantomime.
But the guns of the Browns, also, have word that the charge has begun. The signal corporal is waiting for the gesture from Dellarme agreed upon as an announcement. The Brown artillery commander cuts his fuses two hundred and fifty yards shorter. He, too, uses percussion for moral effect.
Half of the distance from the foot to the crest of the knoll Fracasse's men have gone in face of the hot, sizzling tornado of bullets, when there is a blast of explosions in their faces with all the chaotic and irresistible force of a volcanic eruption. Not only are they in the midst of the first lot of the Browns' shells at the shorter range, but one Gray battery has either made a mistake in cutting its fuses or struck a streak of powder below standard, and its shells burst among those whom it is aiming to assist.
The ground seems rising under the feet of Fracasse's company; the air is split and racked and wrenched and torn with hideous screams of invisible demons. The men stop; they act on the uncontrollable instinct of self-preservation against an overwhelming force of nature. A few without the power of locomotion drop, faces pressed to the ground. The rest flee toward a shoulder of the slope through the instinct that leads a hunted man in a street into an alley. In a confusion of arms and legs, pressing one on the other, no longer soldiers, only a mob, they throw themselves behind the first protection that offers itself. Fracasse also runs. He runs from the flame of a furnace door suddenly thrown open.
The Gray batteries have ceased firing; certain gunners' ears burn under the words of inquiry as to the cause of the mistake from an artillery commander. Dellarme's men are hugging the earth too close to cheer. A desire to spring up and yell may be in their hearts, but they know the danger of showing a single unnecessary inch of their craniums above the sky-line. The sounds that escape their throats are those of a winning team at a tug of war as diaphragms relax.
With the smoke clearing, they see twenty or thirty Grays plastered on the slope at the point where the charge was checked. Every one of those prostrate forms is within fatal range. Not one moves a finger; even the living are feigning death in the hope of surviving. Among them is little Peterkin, so faithful in forcing his refractory legs to keep pace with his comrades. If he is always up with them they will never know what is in his heart and call him a coward. As he has been knocked unconscious, he has not been in the pell-mell retreat.
His first stabbing thought on coming to was that he must be dead; but, no; he was opening his eyes sticky with dust. At least, he must be wounded! He had not power yet to move his hands in order to feel where, and when they grew alive enough to move, what he saw in front of him held them frigidly still. His nerves went searching from his head to his feet and—miracle of Heaven!—found no point of pain or spot soppy with blood. If he were really hit there was bound to be one or the other, he knew from reading.
Between him and the faces of the Browns—yes, the actual, living, terrible Browns—above the glint of their rifle barrels, was no obstacle that could stop a bullet, though not more than three feet away was a crater made by a shell burst. The black circle of every muzzle on the crest seemed to be pointing at him. When were they going to shoot? When was he to be executed? Would he be shot in many places and die thus? Or would the very first bullet go through his head? Why didn't they fire? What were they waiting for? The suspense was unbearable. The desperation of overwhelming fear driving him in irresponsible impulse, he doubled up his legs and with a cat's leap sprang for the crater.
A blood-curdling burst of whistles passed over his head as a dozen rifles cracked. This time he was surely killed! He was in some other world! Which was it, the good or the bad? The good, for he had a glimpse of blue sky. No, that could not be, for he had been alive when he leaped for the crater, and there he was pressed against the soft earth of its bottom. He burrowed deeper blissfully. He was the nearest to the enemy of any man of the 128th, and he certainly had passed through a gamut of emotions in the half-hour since Eugene Aronson had leaped over a white post.
"Confound it! If we'd kept on we'd have got them! Now we have to do it all over again!" growled Fracasse distractedly as he looked around at the faces hugging the cover of the shoulder—faces asking, What next? each in its own way; faces blank and white; faces with lips working and eyes blinking; faces with the blood rushing back to cheeks in baffled anger. One, however, was half smiling—Hugo Mallin's.
"You did your share of the running, I'll warrant, Mallin!" said Fracasse excitedly, venting his disgust on a particular object.
"Yes, sir," answered Hugo. "It was very hard to maintain a semblance of dignity. Yes, sir, I kept near you all the time so you could watch me. Wasn't that what you wanted me to do, sir?"
"Good old Hugo! The same old Hugo!" breathed the spirit of the company. Three or four men burst into a hysterical laugh as if something had broken in their throats. Everybody felt better for this touch of drollery except the captain. Yet, possibly, it may have helped him in recovering his poise. Sometimes even a pin-prick will have this effect.
"Silence!" he said in his old manner. "I will give you something to joke about other than a little setback like this! Get up there with your rifles!"
He formed the nucleus of a firing-line under cover of the shoulder, and then set the remainder of his company to work with their spades making a trench. The second battalion of the 128th, which faced the knoll, was also digging at the base of the slope, and another regiment in reserve was deploying on the plain. After the failure to rush the knoll the Gray commander had settled down to the business of a systematic approach.
And what of those of Fracasse's men who had not run but had dropped in their tracks when the charge halted? They were between two lines of fire. There was no escape. Some of the wounded had a mercifully quick end, others suffered the consciousness of being hit again and again; the dead were bored through with bullet holes. In torture, the survivors prayed for death; for all had to die except Peterkin, the pasty-faced little valet's son.
Peterkin was quite safe, hugging the bottom of the shell crater under a swarm of hornets. In a surprisingly short time he became accustomed to the situation and found himself ravenously hungry, for the strain of the last twelve hours had burned up tissue. He took a biscuit out of his knapsack and began nibbling it, as became a true rodent.