Every unit engrossed in his own work! Every man taught how a weak link may break a chain and realizing himself as a link and only a link! The captain of engineers forgot Marta's existence as an error of his subordinates caught his eye, and he went to caution the axemen to cut closer to the ground, as stumps gave cover for riflemen. For the time being he had no more interest in the knoll than in the wreckage of dirigibles which were down and out of the fight.
After all, the knoll was only a single point on the vast staff map—only one of many points of a struggle whose progress was bulletined through the siftings of regimental, brigade, division, and corps headquarters in net results to the staff. Partow and Lanstron overlooked all. Their knowledge made the vast map live under their eyes. But our concern is with the story of two regiments, and particularly of two companies, and that is story enough. If you would grasp the whole, multiply the conflict on the knoll by ten thousand.
There had been the engrossment of transcendent emotion in repelling the charge. What followed was like some grim and passionless trance with triggers ticking off the slow-passing minutes. Dellarme aimed to keep down the fusillade from Fracasse's trench and yet not to neglect the fair targets of the reserves advancing by rushes to the support of the 128th. Reinforced, the gray streak at the bottom of the slope poured in a heavier fire. Above the steady crackle of bullets sent and the whistle of bullets received rose the cry of "Doctor! Doctor!" which meant each time that another Brown rifle had been silenced. The litter bearers, hard pressed to remove the wounded, left the dead. Already death was a familiar sight—an article of exchange in which Dellarme's men dealt freely. The man at Stransky's side had been killed outright. He lay face down on his rifle stock. His cap had fallen off. Stransky put it back on the man's head, and the example was followed in other cases. It was a good idea to keep up a show of a full line of caps to the enemy.
Suddenly, as by command, the fire from the base of the knoll ceased altogether. Dellarme understood at once what this meant—the next step in the course of a systematic, irresistible approach by superior numbers. It was to allow the ground scouts to advance. Individual gray spots detaching themselves from the gray streak began to crawl upward in search of dead spaces where the contour of the ground would furnish some protection from the blaze of bullets from the crest.
"Over their heads! Don't try to hit them!" Dellarme passed the word.
"That's it! Spare one to get a dozen!" said Stransky, grinning in ready comprehension. He seemed to be grinning every time that Dellarme looked in that direction. He was plainly enjoying himself. His restless nature had found sport to its taste.
The creeping scouts must have signalled back good news, for groups began crawling slowly after them.
"Over their heads! Encourage them!" Dellarme commanded.
After they had advanced two or three hundred yards they stopped, shoulders and hands exposed in silhouette, and began to work feverishly with their spades.
"Now let them have it!"
"Oh, beautiful!" cried Stransky. "That baby captain of ours has some brains, after all! We'll get them now and we'll get them when they run!"
But they did not run. Unfalteringly they took their punishment while they turned over the protecting sod in the midst of their own dead and wounded. In a few minutes they had dropped spades for rifles, and other sections either crawled or ran forward precipitately and fell to the task of joining the isolated beginnings into a single trench.
Again Dellarme looked toward regimental headquarters, his fixed, cheery smile not wholly masking the appeal in his eyes. The Grays had only two or three hundred yards to go when they should make their next charge in order to reach the crest. But his men had fifteen hundred to go in the valley before they were out of range. After their brave resistance facing the enemy they would receive a hail of bullets in their backs. This was the time to withdraw if there were to be assurance of a safe retreat. But there was no signal. Until there was, he must remain.
The trench grew; the day wore on. Two rifles to one were now playing against his devoted company, which had had neither food nor drink since early morning. As he scanned his thinning line he saw a look of bloodlessness and hopelessness gathering on the set faces of which he had grown so fond during this ordeal. Some of the men were crouching too much for effective aim.
"See that you fire low! Keep your heads up!" he called. "For your homes, your country, and your God! Pass the word along!"
Parched throat after parched throat repeated the message hoarsely and leaden shoulders raised a trifle and dust-matted eyelashes narrowed sharply on the sights.
"For the man in us!" growled Stransky. "For the favor of nature at birth that gave us the right to wear trousers instead of skirts! For the joy of hell, give them hell!"
"For our homes! For the man in us!" they repeated, swallowing the words as if they had the taste of a stimulant. But Dellarme knew that it would not take much to precipitate a break. He himself felt that he had been on that knoll half a lifetime. He looked at his watch and it was five o'clock. For seven hours they had held on. The Grays' trench was complete the breadth of the slope; more reserves were coming up. The brigade commander of the Grays was going to make sure that the next charge succeeded.
At last Dellarme's glance toward regimental headquarters showed the flag that was the signal for withdrawal. Could he accomplish it? The first lieutenant, with a shattered arm, had gone on a litter. The old sergeant was dead, a victim of the colonial wars. Used to fighting savage enemies, he had been too eager in exposing himself to a civilized foe. He had been shot through the throat.
"Men of the first section," Dellarme called, "you will slip out of line with the greatest care not to let the enemy know that you are going!"
"Going—going! Careful! Men of the first section going!" the parched throats repeated in a thrilling whisper.
"Those who remain keep increasing their fire!" called Dellarme again. "Cover the whole breadth of the trench!"
Every fourth man wormed himself backward on his stomach until he was below the sky-line, when his stiffened limbs brought him to his feet and he started on a dead run down into the valley and toward a cut behind another knoll across the road from the Galland house.
"Tom Fragini, with your corporal dead I put you in charge of the first section! What are you waiting for, Corporal Fragini?"
Tom was bending over Grandfather Fragini, who had been forgotten by everybody in the ordeal. The old man was lying where he had fallen after the first burst of shrapnel.
"Can't go! Got a game leg!" said grandfather, pointing to a swollen ankle that had been bruised by a piece of shrapnel jacket that had lost most of its velocity before striking him. "You do your duty and leave me alone. I ain't a fighting man any more. I done my work when I steadied you young fellows."
"Yes, go on, Fragini," said Dellarme. "Attend to your men. Everybody in his place. We'll get the old man away on a litter."
"Yes, you go or you ain't any grandson of mine!" shouted the old man in a high-pitched voice. "Just been promoted, too! You'll be up for insubordination in a minute, you young whelp!"
Dellarme meant to look after grandfather, but his attention was engrossed in seeing that his men withdrew cautiously, for every minute that he was able to delay the enemy's charge was vital. He himself picked up a rifle in order to increase the volume of fire when the third section was starting. As the fourth and last section drew off he uttered his first cry of triumph of the day as his final look revealed the Grays still in place. But they would not wait long once all fire from the knoll had ceased. Stransky, who was in the fourth section, remained to give a parting shot.
"Good-by, d—— you!" he called to the Grays. "You'll hear more from me later!"
Then Dellarme saw that grandfather had not yet been carried away and no litters remained. What was to be done? Grandfather was prompt with his own view.
"Just leave me behind. I've done my work, I tell you!" he declared.
"Can't lose you, grandpop!" said Stransky.
Quickly shifting his pack to the ground, he squatted with his back to the old man.
"I ain't going to—and you're a traitor, anyway; that's what you are!"
"No back talk! No politics in this!" Stransky replied. "Get up! You carry your skin and I'll carry your bones. Get up quick!"
With Dellarme's authoritative assistance grandfather mounted. Then Dellarme put Stransky's pack on his own back.
"Let me carry your rifle, too," he said to Stransky as they started.
"Not much!" answered Stransky. "I was just married to that rifle this morning. We're on our honeymoon trip and getting fairly well acquainted, and expect shortly to settle down to a busy domestic life."
He set off at a lope and gained the rear of the section in his first burst of speed. As the other men got their second wind, however, Stransky began to puff and they soon drew away from him.
"Put me down! I ain't going to depend on any traitor that insulted the flag!" protested grandfather.
"That's the way! Call out to me now and then so I'll know you're there," said Stransky. "You're so light I mightn't know it if you fell off."
Dellarme did not think it right to expose the last section by asking it to delay. Shepherd of his flock and miser of his pieces of gold, now that their work was done the one thing he wanted in the world was that they should escape without further punishment. Already the van of the first section was disappearing into the cut in safety. But the fourth section, which had held to the last, had yet a thousand yards to go over a path bare of cover except a single small bush. At any moment he expected to hear a cheer from the knoll, and what would follow the cheer he knew only too well. Yet he tarried with Stransky out of one man's impulse not to desert another in danger. At the same time he was wroth with the old man for having made such a nuisance of himself.
"What are you waiting for?" Stransky demanded of Dellarme.
"I like good company," answered Dellarme cheerfully.
"Compliment for you, grandfather!" said Stransky.
"Put me down!" screamed grandfather.
"Still there, eh? Thanks, grandpop!" said Stransky, turning on Dellarme. "Can't you run any faster than that, captain? Your place is with your men, sir. If you got wounded I'd have to carry you, too. Your company's gaining on you every minute. Hurry up!"
From the peremptory way that he spoke, Dellarme might have been the private and Stransky the officer.
"Right!" said Dellarme in face of such unanswerable military logic, and broke into a run.
Stransky adapted himself to a pace which he thought he could maintain, and plodded on, eyes on the bush as a half-way point. After a while he heard a mighty hurrah, which was cut short abruptly; then spits of dust about their feet hastened the steps of the last section, which was near the cut. He saw men drop out of line to make a cradle of their arms for comrades who had been hit; and these finally passed out of danger with their burdens.
"No flock in sight! It's the turn of the individual birds!" thought Stransky, and heard a familiar sound about his ears.
"Bullets!" exclaimed grandfather. "Don't whistle like they used to. They kind of crack and sizzle now. Maybe if they hit me I'll stop 'em, and that'll save you."
"That's so," replied Stransky glumly, realizing that he was running with a human shield on his back. "But they'll go right through him he's so thin," he thought in relief. The worst of it was that he had to receive without sending, which made him boil with rage. He wished that the bush had legs so it could run toward him; he half believed that it had and was retreating. "They're shooting right at us, and that's in our favor. It's hard to get the bull's-eye at that range," he assured grandfather.
Whish-whish-whish! Enough pellets were singing by to have torn away the rim of the target, yet none got the centre before Stransky dropped behind the bush. Blessed bush! Back of it was a bowlder. Thrice-blessed bowlder! It protected grandfather as securely as the armor of a battleship.
"We are having a noisy time," remarked Stransky as two or three of the leaves fell. "Intelligent thieves! How did you guess we were here?" and he put his big thumb to his big nose.
"But they didn't know about the bowlder!" said the old man with a senile giggle. "Say, I didn't mean it when I called you a traitor—not after the fight! I just said that to make you mad so you'd put me down and we shouldn't lose a good fighting man trying to save an old bag of bones like me. You ain't no traitor! You're a patriot!"
"More politics, when I'm simply full of cussedness!" grumbled Stransky. "Not having any home, I'm fighting to save the other fellows' homes, principally because I was married this morning by a shrapnel-shell to a lady that understands me perfectly. Say, shall we give them a few?" he asked with a squint down the bridge of his nose as he took up his rifle.
"Yes, give 'em a few!" grandfather urged when they ought to have remained quiet, as the firing was dying down. It was not worth while to shoot at a bush, and after all the torrent of lead that they had poured into the bush the Grays had concluded that nothing behind it could remain alive.
Stransky aimed at a head and shoulder on the sky-line, which he took for those of an officer, and was accurate enough to make the head and shoulders duck and to get a swarm of bullets in return.
"Children, why will you waste your country's ammunition?" said Stransky, firing again.
"That's the way to talk!" said grandfather approvingly. "Nothing like a little gayety and ginger in war."
Now a Brown battery whose fire could be spared from other work dropped a few shells on the knoll and so occupied the attention of the 128th that it had no time to attend to occasional bullets from snipers.
"Think we're no account! Shall we charge them now we've got the support of the guns?" chuckled Stransky.
"You Hussar, you!" Grandfather gave Stransky a slap on the back. "With a thousand like you we could charge me whole army, if the general would let us!"
"But he wouldn't let us," replied Stransky. "I could even tell you why."
With the shadows gathering he slipped back to grandfather's side, and after it was quite dark he said that it was time for the old Hussar to mount his fiery steed. Grandfather's hands slipped from around Stransky's neck at the first trial; with the next, Stransky took the bony fingers in his grip and held them clasped on his chest with one hand, proceeding as quietly as he could, for he had an idea that the Grays were already moving down from the knoll under cover of night.
"Yes, sir, I'm glad I came!" said grandfather faintly and meanderingly. "I wasn't sure about Tom—all this new-fangled education and these uniforms without any color in 'em. But I saw him firing away steady as a rock; yes, sir! I was in it, too, under fire! It made my heart thump-thump like the old days. And we're going to hold 'em—we're going to teach the land-sharks—I'm very happy—made my heart thump so—kind of tired me—"
The old man's voice died away into silence. His knees weakened their grip and his legs swung pendulum-like with Stransky's steps.
"What about me for a sleeping-car!" thought Stransky. "But he's certainly harder to carry."
Yet it pleased Stransky not to waken his passenger until they reached the station his ticket called for. Entering the cut, he was halted by the challenging cry of "Who goes there?" in his own tongue.
"Stransky of the Reds!" he roared back. "Stransky, private of the 53d—Stransky and his bride and grandfather!"
"All right, Bert!" was the answer. "Hurrah for you! I'd know your old bull voice out of a thousand."
Even this did not arouse grandfather. Stransky trudged on past the sentry, across a road and up three series of steps of a garden terrace, through a breach in a breastwork of sand-bags, and was again at home—the only home he knew—among the comrades of his company. Most of them had fallen asleep on the ground after finishing their rations, logs of men in animal exhaustion. Some of those awake were too weary to give more than a nod and smile and an exclamation of delight. They had witnessed too much horror that day to be excited over a soldier with an old man on his back. A few of the others, including Tom Fragini, gathered around the pair.
"We've arrived, grandfather!" said Stransky, squatting. There was no answer. "He certainly sleeps sound. I wonder if—."
"Yes," said Dellarme, who with Tom eased the fall of the limp body.
The thumping of an old man's heart with the youth of a Hussar had been too much for it.
"He was game!" said Stransky. "There isn't much in this world except to be game, I've concluded; and you can't be so old or so poor or so big-nosed and wall-eyed that you can't be game."
Marta, coming out on the veranda, had not heard his remark, but she had seen a leonine sort of private bearing an old man on his back and had guessed that he had remained behind to save a life when every man in uniform had been engaged in taking life.
"You are tired! You are hungry!" she said with urgent gentleness. "Come in!"
He followed her into the house and dropped on a leather chair before a shining table in a room panelled with oak, wondering at her and at himself. No woman of Marta's world had ever spoken in that way to him. But it was good to sit down. Then a maid with a sad, winsome face and tender eyes brought him wine and bread and cold meat and jam. He gulped down a glassful of the wine; he ate with great mouthfuls in the ravenous call of healthy, exhausted tissues, while the maid stood by to cut more bread.
"When it comes to eating after fighting—"
He looked up when the first pangs of hunger were assuaged. Enormous, broad-shouldered, physical, his cheeks flushed with the wine, his eyes opened wide and brilliant with the fire that was in his nature—eyes that spoke the red business of anarchy and war.
"Say, but you're pretty!"
Springing up, he caught her hand and made to kiss her in the brashness of impulse. Minna struck him a stinging blow in the face. He received it as a mastiff would receive a bite from a pup, and she stood her ground, her eyes challenging his fearlessly.
"So you are like that!" he said thoughtfully. "It was a good one, and you meant it, too."
"Decidedly!" she answered. "There's more where that came from!"
"As I was telling the Grays this afternoon! Good for you!" He sat down again composedly, while she glared at him. "I'm still hungry. I've had wine enough; but would you cut me another slice of bread?"
She cut another slice and he covered it generously with jam. Then little Clarissa Eileen entered and pressed against her mother's skirts, subjecting Stransky to childhood's scrutiny. He waved a finger at her and grinned and drew his eyes together in a squint at the bridge of his nose, making a funny face that brought a laugh.
"Your child?" Stransky asked Minna.
"Yes."
"Where's her father? Away fighting?"
"I don't know where he is!"
"Oh!" he mused. "Was that blow for him at the same time as for me?" he pursued thoughtfully.
"Yes, for all of your kind."
"M-m-m!" came from between his lips as he rose. "Would you mind holding out your hand?" he asked with a gentleness singularly out of keeping with his rough aspect.
"Why?" she demanded.
"I've never studied any books of etiquette of polite society, and I am a poor sort at making speeches, anyhow. But I want to kiss a good woman's hand by way of apology. I never kissed one in my life, but I'm getting a lot of new experiences to-day. Will you?"
She held out her hand at arm's length and flushed slightly as he pressed his lips to it.
"You certainly do cut thick slices of bread," he said, smiling. "And you certainly are pretty," he added, passing out of the door as jauntily as if he were ready for another fight and just in time to see the colonel of the regiment come around the house. He stood at the salute, half proudly, half defiantly, but in nowise humbly.
"Well, Major Dellarme!" was the colonel's greeting of the company commander.
"Major?" exclaimed Dellarme.
"Yes. Partow has the power. Four of the aviators have iron crosses already and promotion, too; and you are a major. Company G got into a mess and the whole regiment would have been in one unless you held on. So I let you stay. It all came out right, as Lanstron planned—right so far. But your losses have been heavy and here you are in the thick of it again. Your company may change places with Company E, which has had a relatively easy time."
"No, sir; we would prefer to stay," Dellarme answered quietly.
"Good! Then you will take this battalion and I'll transfer Groller to Alvery's Bad loss, Alvery—shrapnel. The artillery has been doing ugly work, but that is all in favor of the defensive. If we can hold them on this line till to-morrow noon, it's all we want for the present," he concluded.
"We'll hold them! Don't worry!" put in Stransky.
If a private had spoken to a colonel in this fashion at drill, without being spoken to, it would have been a glaring breach of military etiquette. Now that they were at war it was different. Real comradeship between officer and man begins with war.
"We shall, eh?" chuckled the colonel. "You look big enough to hold anything, young man! Here! Isn't this the fellow that Lanstron got off?"
"Yes, sir," answered Dellarme.
"Well, was Lanstron right?"
"Yes, sir."
"Wonderful man, Lanstron!"
"He knows just' a little too much!" Stransky half growled.
A digression, this, about pale, little Peterkin, the valet's son, whom we left nibbling a biscuit in perfect security after his leap in mortal terror. When Fracasse's men rose from their trench for the final charge and found that the enemy had gone, Peterkin, hearing their cheer and the thunderous tread of their feet, dared to look above the edge of the shell crater. Here was his company coming and he not in the ranks where he belonged. Of course he ought to have gone back with them when they went; whatever they did he ought to do. This was the only safe way for one of his incurable stupidity, as the drill sergeant had told him repeatedly.
He recognized the stocky butcher's son and other familiar figures among his comrades. Their legs, unlike his, had not been paralyzed with fright; they had been able to run. He was in an absolute minority of one, which he knew, from the experience of his twenty years of life and his inheritance as a valet's son, meant that he was utterly in the wrong. In a minute they would be sweeping down on him. They would be jeering him and calling him a rabbit or something worse for hiding in the ground.
Fright prompted him to a fresh impulse. Picking up his rifle, which he had not touched since his leap, he faced toward the now unoccupied crest of the knoll and commenced firing. Meanwhile, Fracasse's men had reached the point where their first charge had broken, marked by a line of bodies, including that of the manufacturer's son, who had thought that war would be beneficial as a deterrent to strikes and an impetus to industry, lying with his head on his arm, his neck twisted, and the whites of his eyes idled skyward. In a spasm of sickening realization of how impossible it was for those who had not run back to survive between two lines of fire, they heard a shot from the ground at their feet and beheld the runt of the company in the act of making war single-handed. It was a miracle! It was like the dead coming to life!
"Peterkin?"
"Yes, Peterkin!"
"With a whole skin!"
Probably it was a great mistake for him to have a whole skin, thought Peterkin. He scrambled to his feet and kept pace with the others, hoping that he would be overlooked in the ranks.
"I'm so glad! Dear little Peterkin!" said Hugo Mallin, who was at Peterkin's side.
His knowledge of Hugo's gentle nature convinced Peterkin that Hugo was trying to soften the forthcoming reprimand.
When their feet at last actually stood on the knoll which had dealt death to their ranks and they saw the brown figures of the enemy that had driven them back in full flight, the men of the 128th felt the thrill of triumph won in the face of bullets. This is a thrill by itself, primitive and masculine, that calls the imagination of men to war for war's sake. Pilzer, the butcher's son, wanted to kill for the sheer joy and revenge of killing. He rejoiced in the dead and the blood spots that, as clearly as the trench itself, marked the line that Dellarme's men had occupied along the crest of the knoll. It pleased him to use one of the bodies as a rest for his rifle, while he laid his sight in ecstasy on the large target of two men of the last section who were bringing off one of the wounded, and he swore when they got away.
"But there's another out there all alone!" he cried. "Better say your prayers, for I'm going to get you," he whispered; though, as we know, Stransky was not hit.
Peterkin had been doing his best to make amends for past errors by present enthusiasm of application. He fired no less earnestly than the butcher's son. Now that Eugene Aronson was dead, Pilzer had become Peterkin's chief patron and guide. He would be doing right if he did what that brave Pilzer did, he was thinking, while he was conscious of Fracasse's eyes boring into his back. With the others, but no more expeditiously, however frightened, he fell back to cover from the burst of shell fire; and then, with the word to break ranks, he found himself the centre of a group including not only his captain but the colonel of the regiment. He could not quite make out the expressions on their faces, but he surmised that they were wondering how any man born under the flag of the Grays could be such a coward as he was. Probably he would be shot at sunrise.
"How did it happen?" Fracasse asked.
His tone was very pleasant, but Peterkin felt that this was only the calmness of a judge hearing the evidence of a culprit. Punishment would be, accordingly, the more drastic. He was too scared to tell the truth. He spoke softly, with the mealy tongue of a valet father who never explained why the wine was low in the decanter by any reference to a weakness of his own palate.
"I didn't hear the whistle to fall back," he said, "so I stayed."
"Didn't hear the whistle!" exclaimed the captain. He looked at the colonel and the colonel looked at him. The colonel stroked his mustache as if it were a nice mustache. "There wasn't any whistle," said Fracasse with a wry grin.
"Yes, my boy; and then?" asked the colonel, who had never before called any private in his regiment "my boy."
A bright light broke on Peterkin. Inherited instinct did not permit him to show much emotion on his face, and he had, too, an inherited gift of invention. He rubbed his rifle stock with his palm and bowed much in the fashion of the parent washing his hands in gratitude for a compliment.
"And I didn't want to run," he continued. "I wanted to take that hill. That was what we were told to do, wasn't it, sir?"
"Yes, yes!" said the colonel. "Go on!"
The light grew brighter, showing Peterkin's imagination the way to higher flights.
"I jumped quick into the crater, knowing that if I jumped quick I would not be hit," he proceeded, his thin voice accentuating his deferential modesty. "My! but the bullets were thick, going both ways! But I remembered the lectures to recruits said that it took a thousand to kill a man. I found that I had cover from the bullets from our side and some cover from their side. I could not lie there doing nothing, I decided, after I had munched biscuits for a while—"
"Coolly munching biscuits!" exclaimed the colonel.
"Yes, sir; so I began firing every time I had a chance and I picked off a number, I think, sir."
"My boy," said the colonel, putting his hand on Peterkin's shoulder, "I am going to recommend you for the bronze cross."
The bronze cross—desired of generals and privates—for Peterkin, when Pilzer had been so confident that he should win the first that came to the 128th now that Eugene Aronson was dead!
"I—I—" stammered Peterkin.
"And so modest about it!" added the colonel. "Remembered the lectures to recruits and acted on them faithfully!"
The old spirit of the nation was not dead. Here it was reappearing in a valet's son, as it was bound to reappear in all classes! Yes, Peterkin had supplied the one shining incident of the costly day to the colonel, who found himself without his headquarters for the night at the Galland house as planned, waiting for orders on this confounded little knoll. He was wondering if his regiment would be out in reserve and given a rest on the morrow, when an officer of the brigade staff brought instructions:
"The batteries are going to emplace here for your support in the morning. You will move as soon as your men have eaten and occupy positions B-31 to B-35. That gives you a narrow front for one battalion, with two battalions in reserve to drive home your attack. The chief of staff himself desires that we take the Galland house before noon. The enemy must not have the encouragement of any successes."
"So easy for Westerling to say," thought the colonel; while aloud he acknowledged the message with proper spirit.
Before the order to move was given the news of it passed from lip to lip among the men in tired whispers. Since dawn they had lived through the impressions of a whole war, and they had won. With victory they had not thought of the future, only of their hunger. After the nightmare of the charge, after hearing death whispering for hours intimately in their ears, they were too weary and too far thrown out of the adjustments of any natural habits of thought and feeling to realize the horror of eating their dinners in the company of the dead. Now they were to go through another hell, but many of them in their exhaustion were chiefly concerned as to whether or not they should get any sleep that night.
Peterkin could hear his heart thumping and feel chills running down his spine. How should he ever live up to a bronze cross—the precious cross given for valor alone, which marked him as heroic for life—when all he wanted to do was to crawl away to some quiet, safe place and munch more biscuits? He had once been a buttons who looked down on scullery boys, but how gladly would he be a scullery boy forever if he could escape to the rear where he would hear no more bullets!
His conscience smote him; he wanted a confessor. He had an impulse to tell the whole truth to Hugo Mallin, for Hugo was the one man in the company who would sympathetically understand the situation. Yet he did not find the words, because he was rather pleased with the réclame of being a hero, which was an entirely new experience in a family that had been for generations in service.
Hugo Mallin had fired when the others fired; advanced when the others advanced. He had done his mechanical part in a way that had not excited Fracasse's further acute displeasure, and he had no sense of physical fatigue, only of mental depression, of the elemental things that he had seen and felt this day in a whirling pressure on his brain.
It seemed to him that all his comrades had changed. They could never be the same as before they had set out to kill another lot of men on the crest of the knoll. He could not keep a comparison out of mind: One of the dead Browns, lying in almost the same position, looked enough like the manufacturer's son to be his brother. He pictured Eugene Aronson's parents receiving the news of his death—the mother weeping, the father staring stonily. And he saw many mothers weeping and many fathers staring stonily.
The satire of war makes the valet's son a hero; the chance of war kills the manufacturer's son and lets the day-laborer's son live; the sport of war gives the latent forces of a Stransky full play; the mercy of war grants Grandfather Fragini a happy death; the glory of war brings Dellarme quick promotion; the glamour and the spectacular folly of war turn the bolts of the lightnings which man has mastered against man. Perhaps the savage who learned that he could start a flame by rubbing two dry sticks together may have set fire to the virgin forest and wild grass in order to destroy an enemy—and naturally with disastrous results to himself if he mistook the direction of the wind.
Marta Galland's thoughts at dusk when she returned up the steps to the house were much the same as Hugo Mallin's after Fracasse had taken the knoll. While he had felt the hot whirlwind of war in his face, she had witnessed the wreckage that it left. She also was seeing fathers staring and mothers weeping. Her experience with the wounded drawing deep on the wells of sympathy, heightened her loathing of war and of all who planned and ordered it and led its legions. A Stransky righting would have been repulsive to her, but a Stransky trying to save a life was noble.
Except for the few minutes when she had gone out on the veranda and had seen Stransky bringing in the lifeless body of Grandfather Fragini, she had been engaged since dark in completing the work of moving valuable articles from the front to the rear rooms of the house, which had been begun early in the day by Minna and the coachman.
Shortly after Stransky had finished his meal Minna came to say that Major Dellarme wished to speak to Miss Galland. Dellarme a major! This was his reward for his part in filling the ambulances with groans! In the days when he was at the La Tir garrison he had been a frequent caller. Now, in the perversity of her reasoning, out of the chaos of the tangent odds of her impressions since she had gone to hold the session of her school that morning, she thought of him as peculiarly one who gave to the profession of arms the attraction that had made it the vocation of the aristocrat. Waiting for her in the dismantled dining-room, despite all that he had passed through, his greeting had the diffident, boyish manner of her recollection; and despite a night on the ground his brown uniform was without creases, giving him a well-groomed, even debonair, appearance.
"I scarcely thought that we should ever meet under these conditions," he said slightly constrained, a touch of color in his cheeks.
She had no excuse for her reply unless, in truth, she were in training for the town scold. But he typified an idea. He gave to war the aspect of refinement.
"If you did not expect it, why did you enter the army?" she asked.
He saw that she was not quite herself. The strain of the day had unnerved her. Yet he answered her bootless question with simple directness.
"I liked the idea of being a soldier. I was reared in the atmosphere of the army, and I hoped that I might do my duty if war came."
Perhaps this was point one for him. Marta shrugged her shoulders.
"I might have guessed beforehand what you would say," she replied. "You sent for me?"
"Hardly that, please. I asked if I might see you. The captain of engineers tells me that you insist on staying and I came to beg you to keep in the back of the house. You will be safe there. Any shell that may enter will explode in the front rooms and the fragments will not go through the second wall."
"Yes, we understand that. We have already removed our heirlooms," she replied indifferently.
The fatalism of her attitude and his alarm lest she had gone a little out of her head aroused all the innate horror of a man at the thought of a woman under fire. He broke out desperately:
"Miss Galland, this is no place for you! You do not realize—"
He had made the same mistake as the captain of engineers—touched a spot of irritation as raw as it had been in the morning.
"Why shouldn't I stay here? Why shouldn't every wife and mother be here in the fire zone? You soldiers die—it is very easy to die—and leave us to suffer. You destroy and leave us to build up. You go on a debauch of killing and come home to the women to nurse you. Why make us suffer the consequences without sharing the glory of the deed?"
Such reasoning was not in the province of his training. He feared that she was about to become hysterical.
"Really, Miss Galland, I—women and children—I—" he was stammering.
"Better kill the children young than go to the expense of bringing them up before they are killed!" she went on, not hysterically, unless frozen intensity is hysteria. "Children clinging to your knees might stop you, but I suppose you would have a police force to tear the children away rather than miss the masculine privilege of murder."
"Miss Galland, you are overwrought. I—"
She interrupted him with half-breathed laughter.
"Don't I look it—hysterical?" she exclaimed. "How awkward for you if I should fall on the floor and kick and scream!"
With a peculiar uplifting of the brows which spoke a brittle humor, she looked at the floor as if selecting a place for the performance.
"That is not your way," he managed to say. He was quite adrift in confusion at the recollection of quotations he had heard about woman's subtleties and inconsistencies and her charm. Resorting to the last weapon in his armory—which the captain of engineers had already used—his attitude changed to a soldierly sternness. "Miss Galland, I feel that it is my duty, as long as you are going to stay, to make sure that—"
She killed the sentence on his lips with a gleam of mockery from her eyes. He understood that she had again anticipated what he was going to say.
"There are times when you must be firm with a woman, aren't there? And the time has come for you to be firm!" The color in his cheeks deepened. He knew what to do with his men on the knoll, but not what to do in the present situation. "This is our home; our home is our country. Here we remain; but, naturally, we don't propose to stick our heads out of the windows in a shower of shrapnel bullets," she continued. "Even your soldiers are not so zealous for death but they fight behind sand-bags. They are not like Mohammedan fatalists who so love to die for their illusions that they bare their breasts to bullets. We have already arranged sleeping-quarters in the rear. Good night!"
She held out her hand with a smile of conventional pleasantry. Had it not been for the sound of firing, which still continued, and for the walls denuded of pictures, they might have been parting at the head of the stairs at a house-party. She stopped half-way up in an impulse to call back happily:
"You see, masculine firmness did calm feminine hysteria!"
"Oh, Miss Galland!" he exclaimed. "Miss Galland, you are beyond me!"
"What a pose! How foolish to break out in that way!" she thought angrily, as she hastened up the rest of the flight and along the corridor. "To him of all men! A pattern-plate of an officer, who never has had anything but a military thought! But everything is pose! Everything is abnormal! And sleep? Sleep is a pose, too. I feel as if my eyes would remain open forever. Oh, I wish they would begin the fighting and tear the house to pieces if they are going to! I wish—"
She was at the door of her mother's room, which was like an antique shop. Old plates lay on top of old tables, with vases on the floor under the tables. Surrounded by her treasures, Mrs. Galland awaited the attack; not as a soldier awaits it, but as that venerable Roman senator of the story faced the barbarous Gauls—neither disputing the power of their spears nor yielding the self-respect of his own mind and soul. She had lain down in her wrapper for the night, and the light from a single candle—she still favored candles—revealed her features calm and philosophical among the pillows. Yet the magic of war, reaching deep into hidden emotions, had her also under its spell. Her voice was at once more tender and vital.
"Marta, I see that you are all on wires!"
"Yes; jangling wires, every one, jangling every second out of tune," Marta acquiesced.
"Marta, my father"—her father had been a premier of the Browns—"always said that you may enjoy the luxury of fussing over little things, for they don't count much one way or another; but about big things you must never fuss or you will not be worthy of big things. Marta, you cannot stop a railroad train with your hands. This is not the first war on earth and we are not the first women who ever thought that war was wrong. Each of us has his work to do and you will have yours. It does no good to tire yourself out and fly to pieces, even if you do know so much and have been around the world."
She smiled as a woman of sixty, who has a secret heart-break that she had never given her husband a son, may smile at a daughter who is both son and daughter to her, and her plump hand, all curves like her plump face and her plump body, spread open in appeal.
Marta, who, in the breeding of her generation, felt sentiment as more or less of a lure from logic, dropped beside the bed in a sudden burst of sentiment and gathered the plump hand in hers and kissed it.
"Mother, you are wonderful!" she said. "Mother, you are great!"
"Tush, Marta!" said Mrs, Galland. "You shouldn't say that. Your grandfather was great—a very great man. He never quite got his deserts; no good man does in politics."
"You are better than great," said Marta. "You soothe; you help; you have—what shall I call it?—the wisdom of mothers! Minna has it, too." She ran a tattoo of kisses along the velvety skin of Mrs. Galland's arm.
Mrs. Galland was blushing, and out of the depths of her eyes bubbled a little fountain of stars.
"Marta, you have kissed me often before," she said, "but you have been a little patronizing from your hilltop of youth and knowledge. Sometimes you have looked to me lonely up there on your hilltop and I know that I have been lonely sometimes in my valley of the years where knees are not good at climbing hills."
"It was not my intention," Marta said rather miserably.
"No, it is a businesslike age," answered Mrs. Galland.
"I—you mean I was too detached? I was not human?"
"You are now. You make me very happy," her mother replied. "But you must sleep," she insisted.
After a time, her ear becoming as accustomed to the firing as a city dweller's to the distant roar of city traffic Mrs. Galland slept. But Marta could not follow her advice. If, transiently at least, she had found something of the peace of the confessional, the vigor of youth was in her arteries; and youth cannot help remaining awake under some conditions. She tiptoed across the hall into her own room and seated herself by the window, which had often spread the broadening vista of landscape with its lessening detail before her eyes.
On other nights she had looked out into opaqueness with the drum-beat of rain on the roof; into the faint starlight when there was only the vagueness of heights and levels; into the harvest moonlight with its spectral unreality. Now the symbol of what the ear had heard the eye saw: war, working in tones of the landscape by day with smokeless powder; war, revealed by its tongues of flame at night. Ugly bursts of fire from the higher hills spread to the heavens like an aurora borealis and broke their messengers in sheets of flame over the lower hills—the batteries of the Browns sprinkling death about the heads of the gunners of the Grays emplacing their batteries. Staccato flashes from a single point counted so many bullets from an automatic, which, directed by the beams of the search-lights, found their targets in sections of advancing infantry. Hill crests, set off with flashes running back and forth, demarked infantry lines of the Browns assisting the automatics.
There were lulls between the crashes of the small arms and the heavy, throaty speech of the guns; lulls that seemed to say that both sides had paused for a breathing spell; lulls that allowed the battle in the distance to be heard in its pervasive undertone. In one Of them, when even the undertone had ceased for a few seconds, Marta caught faintly the groans of a wounded man—one of the crew of a Gray dirigible burned by an explosion and brought in his agony softly to earth by a billowing piece of envelope which acted as a parachute.
Fighting proceeded in La Tir in stages of ferocity and blank silence. The upper part of the town, which the Browns still held, was in darkness; the lower part, where the Grays were, was illuminated.
"Another one of Lanny's plans!" thought Marta. "He would have them work in the light, while we fire out of obscurity!"
Soon all the town was in darkness, for the Grays had cut the wire in the main conduit shortly after she had heard the groans of the wounded man. There the automatics broke out in a mad storm, voicing their feelings at getting a company in close order in a street for the space of a minute, before those who escaped could plaster themselves against doorways or find cover in alleys. Then silence from the automatics and a cheer from the Browns that rasped out its triumph like the rubbing together of steel files.
From the line of defence, that included the first terrace of the Galland grounds as the angle of a redoubt, not a shot, not a sound; silence on the part of officers and men as profound as Mrs. Galland's slumber, while one of the Browns' search-lights, like some great witch's slow-turning eye in a narrow radius, covered the lower terraces and the road.
Marta gave intermittent glances at the garden; the glances of a guardian. She happened to be looking in that direction when figures sprang across the road, crouching, running with the short, quick steps of no body movement accompanying that of the legs. The search-light caught them in merciless silhouette and the automatic and the rifles from behind the sand-bags on the first terrace let go. Some of the figures dropped and lay in the road and she knew that she had seen men hit for the first time. Others, she thought, got safely to the cover of the gutter on the garden side. Of those on the road, some were still and some she saw were moving slowly back on their stomachs to safety. Now the search-light laid its beam steadily on the road. Again silence. From the upper terrace came a great voice, like that of the guns, from a human throat:
"Why didn't we level those terraces? They'll creep up from one to the other!" It was Stransky.
In answer was another voice—Dellarme's.
"Perhaps there wasn't time to do everything. And if this position is taken before we are ready to go, it will not be from that side, but from the side of the town."
"We're making them pay for seeing our garden, but, anyhow, we won't let them pick any flowers," Stransky remarked pungently.
"If they get as far as the first terrace—well, in case of a crisis, we have hand-grenades," Dellarme added in explanation. "But, God knows, I hope we shall not have to use them."
After an interval, more figures made a rush across the road. They, too, in Stransky's words, paid a price for seeing the garden. But the flashes from the rifles and the automatic provided a target for a Gray battery. The blue spark that flies from an overhead trolley or a third rail, multiplied a hundredfold, broke in Marta's face. It was dazzling, blinding as a bolt of lightning a few feet distant, with the thunder crash at the same second, followed by the thrashing hum of bullets and fragments against the side of the house.
"I knew that this must come!" something within her said. If she had not been prepared for it by the events of the last twelve hours she would have jumped to her feet with an exclamation of natural shock and horror. As it was, she felt a convulsive, nervous thrill without rising from her seat. A pause. The next shell burst in line with the first, out by the linden-trees; a third above the veranda.
"We've got that range, all right!" thought the Gray battery commander, who had judged the distance by the staff map. This was all he wanted to know for the present. He would let loose at the proper time to support the infantry attack, when there were enough driblets across the road to make a charge. The driblets kept on coming, and, one by one, the number of dead on the road was augmented.
Marta was diverted from this process of killing by piecemeal by a more theatric spectacle. A brigade commander of the Grays had ticked an order over the wires and it had gone from battery to battery. Not only many field-guns, which are the terriers of the artillery, but some guns of siege calibre, the mastiffs, in a sudden outburst started a havoc of tumbling walls and cornices in the upper part of the town.
Then an explosion greater than any from the shells shot a hemisphere of light heavenward, revealing a shadowy body flying overhead, and an instant later the heavens were illuminated by a vast circle of flame as the dirigible that had dropped the dynamite received its death-blow. But already the Brown infantry was withdrawing from the town, destroying buildings that would give cover for the attack in the morning as they went. Two or three hours after midnight fell a silence which was to last until dawn. The combatants rested on their arms, Browns saying to Grays, "We shall be ready for the morrow!" and Grays replying: "So shall we!"
Marta, at her window, her eyes following the movements of the display, now here, now there, found herself thinking of many things, as in the intermissions between the acts of a drama. She wondered if the groaning, wounded man were crying for water or if he were wishing that some one at home were near him. She thought of her talk with Lanstron over the telephone and how mad and feminine and feeble it must have sounded to a mind working in the inexorable processes of the clash of millions of men. She saw his left hand twitching in his pocket, his right hand gripping it to hold it still, on that afternoon when, for the first time, she had understood his injury in the aeroplane accident as the talisman of his feelings—his controlled feelings! Always his controlled feelings!
She saw Feller leaning against the moist wall of the dank tunnel, suffering as it had never seemed to her that man could suffer, his agony an irresistible plea. She saw Westerling, so conscious of his strength, directing his chessmen in a death struggle against Partow. And he was coming to this house as his headquarters when the final test of the strength of the Titans was made.
She hoped that her mother was still sleeping; and she had seconds when she was startled by her own calmness. Again, the faces of the children in her school were as clear as in life. She breathed her gratitude that the procession in which they moved to the rear was hours ago out of the theatre of danger. In the simplicity of big things, her duty was to teach them, a future generation, no less than Feller's duty was to the pursuing shadow of his conscience. She should see war, alive, naked, bloody, and she would tell her children what she had seen as a warning.
Silence, except an occasional rifle-shot—silence and the darkness before dawn which would, she knew, concentrate the lightnings around the house. She glanced into her mother's room and marvelled as at a miracle to find her sleeping. Then she stole down-stairs and opened the outer door of the dining-room. A step or two brought her to the edge of the veranda. There she paused and leaned against one of the stone pillars. Dellarme himself was in a half-reclining position, his back to a tree. He seemed to be nodding. Except for a few on watch over the sand-bags, his men were stretched on the earth, moving restlessly at intervals, either in an effort to sleep or waking suddenly after a spell of harassed unconsciousness.