These men in the dining-room were members of Fracasse's company of the Grays whom Marta had seen from her window the night before rushing across the road into the garden. It is time for their story—the story of their attack on the redoubt. One of those who remained motionless on the road was the doctor's son. If he had sprained his ankle at man[oe]uvres, the whole company would have gossiped about the accident. If he had died in the garrison hospital from pneumonia, the barracks would have been blue for a week. If he had fallen in the charge across the white posts, the day-laborer's son on his right and the judge's son on his left would have felt a spasm of horror.
This is death, they would have thought; death that barely missed us; death that lays a man in the full tide of youth, as we are, silent and still forever.
Twelve hours after the war had begun, when the judge's son missed the doctor's son from the ranks, he remarked:
"Then they must have got him!"
"Yes, I Saw him roll over on his side," said the laborer's son.
There was no further comment. The lottery had drawn the doctor's son this time; it would get some one else with the next rush. Existence had resolved itself into a hazard; all perspective was merged into a brimstone-gray background. The men did not think of home and parents, as they had on the previous night while they waited for the war to begin, or of patriotism. Relatives were still dear and country was still dear, but the threads of these affections were no longer taut. They hung loose. Fatalism had taken the place of suspense. There is no occurrence that frequency will not make familiar, and they were already familiar with death.
A man might even get used to falling from a great height. At first, in lightning rapidity of thought, all his life would pass in review before him and all his hopes for the future would crowd thick. But what if he were to go on descending for hours; yes, for days? Would not his sensations finally wear themselves down to a raw, quivering brain and the brain at length grow callous? Suppose, further, that a number of men had been thrown over a precipice at the same time as he and that the bottom of the abyss was the distance from star to star! Suppose that they fell at the same rate of speed! The first to be dashed against a shelf of rock would be a ghastly reminder to each man of his own approaching end. But, proceeding on horror's journey, he would become accustomed to such pictures. He would feel hunger and cold. Physical discomfort would overwhelm mental agony. If a biscuit shot out from the pocket of a corpse, wouldn't the living hand grab for it in brute greediness?
The thinner the veneer of civilized habit, the more easily the animal, always waiting and craving war, breaks through. And the animal was strong in Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son. He had a bull's heart and lacked the little tendrils of sensibility whose writhing would tire him. Hugo Mallin had these tendrils by the thousand. He had so many that they gave him a reserve physical endurance like a kind of intoxication. He felt as if he had been drinking some noxious, foamy wine which made his mind singularly keen to every impression. Therefore he and Pilzer alone of Fracasse's company were not utterly fatigued.
The savagery of Pilzer's bitterness at seeing another get the bronze cross before he received one turned not on little Peterkin, the valet's son, but on Hugo. As he and Hugo moved, elbow to elbow, picking their way forward from the knoll, he eased his mind with rough sarcasm at Hugo's expense. He christened Hugo "White Liver." When Hugo stumbled over a stone he whispered:
"White Liver, that comes from the shaking knees of a coward!"
Hugo did not answer, nor did he after they had crossed the road and were under the cover of the fourth terrace wall, and Pilzer whispered:
"Still with us, little White Liver? Cowards are lucky. But your time will come. You will die of fright."
They worked their way ahead in the darkness to the third terrace and then to the second, without drawing fire. There they were told to unslip their packs "and sleep—sleep!"
Fracasse passed the word, as if this were also an order which perforce must be obeyed. They dropped down in a row, their heads against the cold stone wall. So closely packed were their bodies that they could feel one another's breaths and heart-beats. Where last night they had thought of a multitude of things in vivid flashes, to-night nothing was vivid after the last explosion in the town and there was an end of firing. Spaces of consciousness and unconsciousness were woven together in a kind of patchwork chaos of mind. For the raw brains were not yet quite calloused; they quivered from the successive benumbing shocks of the day.
Hugo would not even cheat himself by trying to close his eyes. He lay quite still looking at the quietly twinkling, kindly stars. Unlike his comrades, he had not to go to hell in order to know what hell was like. He had foreseen the nature of war's reality, so it had not come as a surprise. Sufficient universal projection of this kind of imagination might afford sufficient martial excitement without war.
His mind was busy in the gestation of his impressions and observations since he had crossed the frontier. Definitely he knew that he was not afraid of bullets or shell fire, and in this fact he found no credit whatever. The lion and the tiger and the little wild pigs of South America who will charge a railroad train are brave. But it took some courage to bear Pilzer's abuse in silence, he was thinking, while he was conscious that out of all that he had seen and felt in the conflict of multitudinous angles of view was coming something definite, which would result in personal action, fearless of any consequences.
The thing that held him back from a declaration of self was the pale faces around him; his comrades of the barracks and man[oe]uvres. He loved them; he thought, student fashion, that he understood them. He liked being their humorist; he liked to win their glances of affection. The fortitude to endure their contempt, their enmity, their ostracism would not save those dear to him in his distant provincial home from humiliation and heart-break. There was the rub: his father and mother and his sweetheart. He was an only son. His sweetheart was a goddess to his eyes. What purpose is there in the rebellion of a grain of sand on the seashore, in the insubordination of one of five million soldiers? Hadn't Westerling answered all doubts with the aphorism, "It is a mistake for a soldier to think too much"?
Thus pondering, in the company of the stars, Hugo, who had so many thoughts of his own that he led a double life, awaited the dawn. When the church spire became outlined in the rosy, breaking light of the east, he thought how much it was like the church spire of his own town. He saw that he was in what had been a beautiful, tenderly cared-for old garden before soldiery had ruthlessly trampled its flowers.
Raising his head to a level with the terrace wall—the second terrace was low—he could see the piles of sand-bags on the first terrace only twenty feet away and an old house that belonged to the garden. The location appealed to him as his glance swept over plain and mountains glistening with dew. It must be glorious to come down from the veranda at daybreak or day's end to look at the flowers at your feet and the horizon in the distance.
"Could little White Liver sleep away from home and mamma? Did he long for mamma to tuck him among the goose feathers, with a sweet biscuit in his paddy?" inquired Pilzer awakening.
Hugo looked around at Pilzer in his quizzical fashion.
"Jake, you are unnecessarily uprooting an aster with the toe of your boot," he said.
Pilzer had a torrent of abuse ready to his tongue's end when Fracasse interrupted with a hoarse, whispered warning:
"Silence, Pilzer! You talk too much."
Now the irascible Pilzer had a further grudge against Hugo for having made him the object of a reprimand.
"You!" he whispered, when the captain's back was turned, calling Hugo a foul name.
This cut through even Hugo's philosophy and the blood went in a hot rush to his cheeks; but he slipped on his pack, as the others were doing, and readjusted his cartridge-box. Word was passed to make ready for another rush, and soon the men knew that yesterday was not part of the hideous nightmare which had kept their legs quivering mechanically, as in the charge, while they slept, but that the nightmare was a continuing reality and the peace of morning a dream.
Under cover of the rain of shell fire on Dellarme's position, already described, they mounted the wall of the second terrace and ran to the wall of the first terrace. They had expected to suffer terribly, but passed safely underneath a sheet of bullets that caught other sections of their regiment on the lower terraces. Over their heads were the muzzles of the Browns' rifles, blazing toward the road, while in the direction of the tower they saw the first charge of another regiment melting like snow under sprays of flame. They could not fire at Dellarme's men and Dellarme's men could not fire at them without leaning over the parapet. They could not go ahead. There was no room to their rear, for the reserves behind the third terrace had rushed up to the second terrace; those behind the fourth to the third; and still others across the road to the fourth, in successive waves.
With a welter of slaughter around them, Fracasse's men were in something of the position that little Peterkin had enjoyed in the shell crater. They ate a breakfast of biscuits, washed down by water from their canteens. Trickles of sand from bullet holes sprinkled their shoulders and they had enough resiliency of spirit to grin when a stream of sand from a bag torn by a shell burst ran down the back of Pilzer's neck. It was rather amusing to hear Jake growling as he twisted in his blouse.
Hugo caught the humor of it in another sense, for the same shell burst threw a piece of brown sleeve matted in a piece of flesh among the flowers. The next instant he saw a squad of Grays who sprang up to rush toward the linden stumps go down under the hose stream from the automatic with the precision of having been struck by an electric current. Not occupied, as he had been yesterday, with the business of keeping to his part as a physical cog in the machine, he was seeing war as a spectator—as Marta saw it, as only a privileged few ever see it. Society, he was thinking, took the trouble to bring boys through the whooping-cough and measles, pay for clothing and doctors' bills, and, while it complained about business losses and safe-guarded trees and harvests and buildings, destroyed the most valuable product of all with a spatter of bullets from a rapid-firer.
The position of him and his comrades struck him as tragically ludicrous. Were they grown men? Had they reasoning minds? Were they of the great races that had given the world steam-power, electric power, anæsthesia, and antiseptics? Had they the religion of Christ? Had they an inheritance of great ages of art, literature, music, and philosophy? Did they guard the treasures of their libraries and galleries? Would they shudder in indignation if some one sent a bullet through the Sistine Madonna, or throw a bomb at the Venus de Milo, or struck a rare Chinese porcelain into fragments with an axe?
Yes; oh, yes!
Here were beings created in the likeness of their Maker, whose criterion of superiority over other animals was in these symbols and not in that of tooth, claw, or talon, disembowelling their fellow creatures. Here were beings huddled together like a lot of puppies or cubs on an island in the midst of carnage which was not a visitation of the Almighty, but of their own making. And suicide and homicide were against the law in the lands of both the Browns and the Grays!
The whole business was monstrous, lunatic, inconceivable. Yet he himself was one of the actors, without the character or the courage to break free of the machine which was taking lives with the irresponsibility of a baby hammering at the jewels of a watch. The fact that he knew better made him far more culpable, he thought, than little Peterkin or any of his comrades. Yes, he was despicable; he was a coward!
All were lulled into a sense of security except Captain Fracasse, who had a set frown of apprehension which came of a professional knowledge not theirs. Little Peterkin, warmed by the autumn sunlight, began to believe in his star. If there were to be a special dispensation providing shell craters and the reverse walls of redoubts for him, he might retain his reputation for heroism.
The sand still working its way downward between Pilzer's bare skin and his undershirt irritated him to unusual restlessness of ambition for glory and bronze crosses. He was the strong man of his company, now that Eugene Aronson was dead. He must prove his importance. An inspiration made him leap to his feet. This brought his head within a foot of the top of the parapet, with an enemy's rifle barrel in easy reach. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he was the type who must precede action with a boast; a bite with a growl. Let all see that he was about to do a gallant, clever thing.
"Watch me snatch that rifle!" he announced.
"No, you don't! Get down!" snapped Fracasse. "We aren't inviting hand-grenades. It's a wonder that we have escaped so far."
"Hand-grenades!" gasped Peterkin, going white.
But nobody observed his pallor. Every one else was gasping, "Hand-grenades!" under his breath; or, if not, his thoughts were shrieking, "Hand-grenades!" There was a restless movement, a wistful look to the rear.
"Keep quiet!" whispered Fracasse. "Let us hope it isn't known that we're here."
They became as still as men of stone.
"Well, if they are going to throw grenades then they will throw them!" exclaimed Peterkin with the bravery of fear. He must do or say something worthy of a hero, he thought, in order to prove that he was not as scared as he knew he had looked and still felt.
"You have the right sort ofsang-froid, Peter Kinderling!" whispered Fracasse. "And you, Pilzer, showed a proper spirit, too, if wrongly directed."
Under cover of this favor, Peterkin drew a little out of line, making a great pretence of stretching his legs and yawning—yawning with a sincerely dropped jaw and a quivering lip. He pressed his chin against the ground and this stopped the quivering. Also, he was in a position to watch the parapet closely and to make a quick spring.
Fatalism had become suspense—suspense without action to take their minds off the prospect, the suspense of death lurking in a cloud which might break in a lightning flash! They thought that they knew the full gamut of horrors; but nothing that they had yet gone through was any criterion for what they now had to endure. All understood the nature of a hand-grenade, which bursts like a Nihilist's bomb. It was as easy, they knew, to toss hand-grenades over the sand-bags into human flesh as apples into a basket. They felt themselves bound and gagged, waiting for an assassin to macerate them at his own sweet will.
The second hour was worse than the first, the third worse than the second. In lulls they heard the voices of Dellarme and his men, which seemed more ominous than the crash of rifles or the scream and crack of shells. Finally there was a lull which they knew meant the supreme attempt to storm the position from the town side. They heard the commotion that followed Dellarme's death; the sharp, rallying commands of Feller and Stransky; and then, as Peterkin saw a black object fly free of a hand over the parapet he made a catlike spring, followed by another and another, and plunged face downward at the angle where the face of the redoubt bent toward the town.
He thought that he was dead, and found, as he had in the shell crater, that he was not. After the two explosions he heard groans that chilled his blood, and looked around to see living faces like chalk, with glassy, beady, protruding eyes, and a dozen men killed and eviscerated and mangled in bleeding confusion.
But Hugo and Pilzer and those of Peterkin's immediate group were alive. They were in their places, while he was alone and out of his place. He had bolted, while they held their ground; now he would be revealed in his true light. The bronze cross would be lost before it was pinned to his breast. From where he lay, however, he could see the other face of the redoubt and a wedge of men about to mount the sand-bags. His next act was born of the inspired cunning of his fear of being exposed, which was almost as compelling as his fear of death. He waved his hand excitedly to the others to come on.
"Charge! Charge! This is the way!" shrieked Peterkin.
His voice had the terror of a man floating toward a falls and calling for a rope, but not so to Fracasse, to whom it was the voice of a great chance. Why hadn't he thought of this before? Of course, he should move around under cover of the reverse wall of the redoubt to join in the attack on the weak point! The valet's son had shown him the way.
"Come, men, come! Follow me and Peterkin!" cried Fracasse.
Did they follow? Westerling or any expert in the psychology of war could understand how ripe was their mood. "It is the wait under right conditions that will make men fiends unleashed when the word to storm is given," an older authority had written. Under sentence of death for six hours, they welcomed any opportunity to get at grips with those who had held death suspended over their heads.
You will use hand-grenades, will you? Snug behind sand-bags you will tear the flesh of our comrades to pieces, will you? They saw red, the red of raw fragments of flesh; the red of the gush from torn artery walls—all except Hugo and Peterkin, who might well begin to believe that there was a measure of art in heroism. Peterkin seemed to share leadership at the captain's side, but he slipped and fell—he had weak ankles, anyway—as Fracasse's men pressed the rear of the wedge forward with the strength of mass, only to be borne back by men, riddled with bullets, tumbling fairly into their faces.
As we have seen, there was no getting through a breach under the concentrated blasts of a hundred rifles, and Pilzer, who, by using human shoulders for steps, had reached the parapet, turned a back somersault with out his rifle. However, he seized one from a dead man's hand before the captain had noticed the loss. Some of the company joined in the flight of the attackers from the town into the open, but Hugo and Pilzer and their friends remained under cover of the wall. They still saw red, the red of a darker anger—that of repulse.
When, finally, they burst into the redoubt after it was found that the Browns had gone, all, even the judge's son, were the war demon's, own. The veneer had been warped and twisted and burned off down to the raw animal flesh. Their brains had the fever itch of callouses forming. Not a sign of brown there in the yard; not a sign of any tribute after all they had endured! They had not been able to lay hands on the murderous throwers of hand-grenades. Far away now was the barrack-room geniality of the forum around Hugo; in oblivion were the ethics of an inherited civilization taught by mothers, teachers, and church.
But here was a house—a house of the Browns; a big, fine house! They would see what they had won—this was the privilege of baffled victory. What they had won was theirs! To the victor the spoils! Pell-mell they crowded into the dining-room, Hugo with the rest, feeling himself a straw on the crest of a wave, and Pilzer, most bitter, most ugly of all, his short, strong teeth and gums showing and his liver patch red, lumpy, and trembling. In crossing the threshold of privacy they committed the act that leaves the deepest wound of war's inheritance, to go on from generation to generation in the history of families.
"A swell dining-room! I like the chandeliers!" roared Pilzer.
With his bayonet he smashed the only globe left intact by the shell fire. There was a laugh as a shower of glass fell on the floor. Even the judge's son, the son of the tribune of law, joined in. Pilzer then ripped up the leather seat of a chair. This introductory havoc whetted his appetite for other worlds of conquest, as the self-chosen leader of the increasing crowd that poured through the doorway.
"Maybe there's food!" he shouted. "Maybe there's wine!"
"Food and wine!"
"Yes, wine! We're thirsty!"
"And maybe women! I'd like to kiss a pretty maid servant!" Pilzer added, starting toward the hall.
"Stop!" cried Hugo, forcing his way in front of Pilzer.
He was like no one of the Hugos of the many parts that his comrades had seen him play. His blue eyes had become an inflexible gray. He was standing half on tiptoe, his quivering muscles in tune with the quivering pitch of his voice: a Hugo in anger! This was a tremendous joke. He was about to regain his reputation as a humorist by a brilliant display in keeping with the new order of their existence.
"We have no right in here! This is a private house!"
But the fever of their savagery—the infectious savagery of the mob—wanted no humor of this kind.
"Out of the way, you white-livered little rat!" cried Pilzer, "or I'll prick the tummy of mamma's darling!"
What happened then was so sudden and unexpected in Hugo that all were vague about details. They saw him in a catapultic lunge, mesmeric in its swiftness, and they saw Pilzer go down, his leg twisted under him and his head banging the floor. Hugo stood, half ashamed, half frightened, yet ready for another encounter.
Fracasse, entering at this moment, was too intent on his mission to consider the rights of a personal difference between two of his company, though he heard and noted Pilzer's growling complaint that he had been struck an unfair blow.
"There's work to do! Out of here, quick! We are losing valuable time!" he announced, rounding his men toward the door with commanding gestures. "We are going in pursuit!"
Marta, who had observed the latter part of the scene from the shadows of the hall, knew that she should never forget Hugo's face as he turned on Pilzer, while his voice of protest struck a singing chord in her jangling nerves. It was the voice of civilization, of one who could think out of the orbit of a whirlpool of passionate barbarism. She could see that he was about to spring and her prayer went with his leap. She gloried in the impact that felled the great brute with the liver patch on his cheek, which was like a birthmark of war.
After the men were gone she regretted that she had not gone to Hugo and expressed her gratitude. She vaguely wondered if she should see him again and hoped that she might. The two faces, Hugo's and Pilzer's, in the instant of Hugo's protest and Pilzer's contempt, were as clear as in life before her eyes.
Then a staff-officer appeared in the doorway. When he saw a woman enter the room he frowned. He had ridden from the town, which was empty of women, a fact that he regarded as a blessing. If she had been a maid servant he would have kept on his cap. Seeing that she was not, he removed it and found himself in want of words as their eyes met after she had made a gesture to the broken glass on the floor and the lacerated table top, which said too plainly:
"Do you admire your work?"
The fact that he was well groomed and freshly shaven did not in any wise dissipate in her feminine mind his connection with this destruction. He had never seen anything like the smile which went with the gesture. Her eyes were two continuing and challenging flames. Her chin was held high and steady, and the pallor of exhaustion, with the blackness of her hair-and eyes, made her strangely commanding. He understood that she was not waiting for him to speak, but to go.
"I did not know that there was a woman here!" he said.
"And I did not know that officers of the Grays were accustomed to enter private houses without invitations!" she replied.
"This is a little different," he began.
She interrupted him.
"But the law of the Grays is that homes should be left undisturbed, isn't it? At least, it is the law of civilization. I believe you profess, too, to protect property, do you not?"
"Why, yes!" he agreed. He wished that he could get a little respite from the steady fire of her eyes. It was embarrassing and as confusing as the white light of an impracticable logic.
"In that case, please place a guard around our house lest some more of your soldiers get out of control," she went on.
"I can do that, yes," he said. "But we are to make this a staff headquarters and must start at once to put the house in readiness."
"General Westerling's headquarters?" she inquired.
He parried the question with a frown. Staff-officers never give information. They receive information and transmit orders.
"I know General Westerling. You will tell him that my mother, Mrs. Galland, and our maid and myself are very tired from the entertainment he has given us, unasked, and we need sleep to-night. So you will leave us until morning and that door, sir, is the one out into the grounds."
The staff-officer bowed and went out by that door, glad to get away from Marta's eyes. His inspection of the premises with a view to plans for staff accommodation could wait. Westerling would not be here for two days at least.
"Whew! What energy she has!" he thought. "I never had anybody make me feel so contemptibly unlike a gentleman in my life."
Yet Marta, returning to the hall, had to steady herself in a dizzy moment against the wall. Complete reaction had come. She craved sleep as if it were the one true, real thing in the world. She craved sleep for the clarity of mind that comes with the morning light. In the haziness of fleecy thought, as slumber drew its soft clouds around her, her last conscious visions were the pleasant ones rising free of a background of horror: of Feller's smile when he went back to his automatic for good; of Dellarme's smile as he was dying; of Stransky's smile as Minna gave him hope; and of Hugo's face as he uttered his flute-like cry of protest. In her ears were the haunting calmness and contained force of Lanstron's voice over the telephone. She was pleased to think that she had not lost her temper in her talk with the staff-officer. No, she had not flared once in indignation. It was as if she had absorbed some of Lanny's own self-control. Lanny would approve of her in that scene with an officer of the Grays. And she realized that a change had come over her—a change inexplicable and telling—and she was tired—oh, so tired! It had been exhausting work, indeed, for one woman, though she had been around the world, making war on two armies.
Meanwhile, all too flushed with energy, the energy of movement, to think of the feud between Hugo and Pilzer, Fracasse's men had sped along the castle road. Little Peterkin easily kept pace. There was no danger in pursuit. In him was the same zest of the chase which Animated his comrades. They dropped down on a ledge without much regard to order. Before them, at close range, was a company breaking out of close order in asauve-qui-peutrout up a reverse slope. It was not Dellarme's company, but some other that had mistaken its direction and retired too late and by the wrong road.
You will throw hand-grenades, will you? thought Fracasse's men. You will mangle our fellows when they Can't strike back, will you? Now you'll pay! Now it is our turn! We have seen our blood flow and now yours will flow!
The lust of the red slipped the cartridge clips into the magazines and held a true aim in the mad delight of slaughter. No one minded, for no one heard—not even little Peterkin—the scattering bullets in return. They had reached the stage where the objective thought of revenge wholly submerged the subjective thought of personal danger, which is the mood of the hungry tiger in the hunt. They were the veritable finished products of veteran experience in purpose and marksmanship. Hugo, too, was firing, but far over the head of every target; firing like a man in a trance who needs some deciding incident to bring him out of it into the part he was to play.
Only occasional figures who had not escaped over the ridge were to be seen. The fewer the targets the greater the concentration. A whole company was firing on a dozen straggling figures. But one—that one in the pasture—seemed to have a charmed life. The ground around him was peppered with dust spots. He had only a few yards more to go to safety; yes his head—the exasperation of him!—was in line with the crest before he fell.
Where was there any more prey? With ferret quickness eyes swept the range of vision. Out of an orchard into the stubble of a wheat-field broke a panicky mass; a score or more of men who had lost their officer and their heads presumably. They were the nail under the hammer, a brown blot, a target.
"Ah!" a chorus of excited exclamations in greeting of the game flushed from cover ran along the line. Just the way you got our fellows with the hand-grenades, we will get you! This was the thought, this the prayer which they saw being fulfilled by the glad medley of their fire when Hugo Mallin sprang up and threw down his rifle as if it were something whose touch had become venomous. He threw it down with features transformed in the uplifting thought and the relief of a final resolution taken.
"I am through!" he cried. "I will not murder my fellowman who has done me no wrong! I cannot, I will not kill!"
Fracasse, who was near by, heard enough to understand the purport of the declaration, and his recollection of Hugo's heresy and all the prejudice that he had formed against Hugo and the abhorrence of Hugo's offence to the strict militarist brought a rush of anger to his brain as he leaped up and drawing his sword, struck at Hugo with the flat of it. He aimed for Hugo's back, but a bullet had hit Hugo in the calf of his leg and, his knees giving under him, he received the blow on the head and fell unconscious.
When he came to it was with a twitch of pain in his ribs. He saw the glowering faces of his comrades above him and realized that Pilzer had given him a kick which expressed the general opinion.
"Once ought to be enough of that," said the doctor, who was bandaging the leg, speaking to Pilzer.
Yet in the doctor's eyes Hugo saw no favor, only the humanity of his occupation of mercy to criminal and king alike. But Hugo expected no favor and he was glad of what he had done as he swooned again. When he came to a second time, his head aching with throbs, it was with a sense of falling. He found that he was on a litter that had just been set down. Evidently this was by order of the colonel, who was standing over Hugo in the company of some officers. All were regarding him as if he were a species of reptile.
"World anarchist ideas, which is another word for treason or white liver," observed the colonel. "To think that it happened in my regiment! But I'll not try to cover it for the regiment's good name. He will get the full measure of the law!"
"The placard is a good idea," suggested an officer.
"Yes, put on by one of his comrades!"
"The punishment of public opinion. It shows how sound the army is at heart."
Hugo, lowering his glance, was able to see a sheet of note-paper pinned to his blouse. It was lettered, but he could not make out the words. Then he heard the approach of a galloping horse, whose hoofs seemed to strike his head, and heard the horse stop and an orderly saying something about Company I having got too far forward into a mess and the need of litters.
"We can spare this one," said the colonel.
Hugo was rolled roughly onto the ground by the roadside and left alone. He managed to raise himself on his elbow and saw that the lettering of the placard was "Coward!" Officers and soldiers and hospital-corps men called attention to it as they passed. The sun was very hot and he was growing feverish. Painfully he dragged himself to the shelter of a tree, and then, looking around, saw that he was near the big house of the terraced garden.
The general staff-officer of the Grays, who had tasted Marta's temper on his first call, when he returned the next morning did not enter unannounced. He rang the door-bell.
"I have a message for you from General Westerling," he said to her. "The general expresses his deep regret at the unavoidable damage to your house and grounds and has directed that everything possible be done immediately in the way of repairs."
In proof of this the officer called attention to a group of service-corps men who were removing the sand-bags from the first terrace. Others were at work in the garden setting uprooted plants back into the earth.
"His Excellency says," continued the officer, "that, although the house is so admirably suited for staff purposes, we will find another if you desire."
He was too polite and too considerate in his attitude for Marta not to meet him in the same spirit.
"That is what we should naturally prefer," and Marta bowed her head in indecision.
"We should have to begin installing the telegraph and telephone service on the lower floor at once," he remarked. "In fact, all arrangements must be made before the general's arrival."
"He has been a guest here before," she said reminiscently and detachedly.
Her head dropped lower, in apparent disregard of his presence, as she took counsel with herself. She was perfectly still, without even the movement of an eyelash. Other considerations than any he might suggest, he subtly understood, held her attention. They were the criterion by which she would at length assent or dissent, and nothing could hurry the Marta of to-day, who yesterday had been a creature of feverish impulse.
It seemed a long time that he was watching that wonderful profile under the very black hair, soft with the softness of flesh, yet firmly carved. She lifted her head gradually, her eyes sweeping past the spot where Dellarme had lain dying, where Feller had manned the automatic, where Stransky had thrown Pilzer over the parapet. He saw the glance arrested and focussed on the flag of the Grays, which was floating from a staff on the outskirts of the town, and slowly, glowingly, the light rippling on its folds was reflected in her face.
"She is for us! She is a Gray!" he thought triumphantly. The woman and the flag! The matter-of-fact staff-officer felt the thrill of sentiment.
"I think we can arrange it," Marta announced with a rare smile of assent.
"Then I'll go back to town and set the signal-corps men to work," he said.
"And when you come you will find the house at your disposal," she assured him.
Except that he was raising his cap instead of saluting, he was conscious of withdrawing with the deference due to a superior.
In place of the smile, after he had gone, came a frown and a look in her eyes as if at something revolting; then the smile returned, to be succeeded by the frown, which was followed by an indeterminate shaking of the head.
The roar of battle kept up its steady refrain in the direction of the range. Marta had heard it when she fell asleep and heard it when she awakened. A battery of heavy guns of the Grays broke their flashes from a knoll this side of the one where Dellarme's men had made their first stand. At the foot of the garden, where yesterday she had distributed flowers to the wounded Browns, a regiment of Gray infantry was marching past a train of siege-guns. All the figures moving on the landscape, which yesterday had been brown, had changed to gray. The Grays were masters of the town and all the neighborhood.
Marta stepped down from the veranda in response to the call of the open air to physical vigor renewed after sweet sleep. Rather than return directly to the kitchen, where breakfast was waiting, she would go around the house. She stopped before a Japanese maple which had been split by a shell striking in a crotch. Was there any hope of saving it? No. She turned white about the lips, with red spots on her cheeks, and at length nodded her head as if in answer to some inward question.
Over the sward, cut by shell fragments, lay torn limbs and bits of bark, and in the shade of a tree near the road she had a glimpse of the shoulder of the gray uniform of a prostrate man. The rest of him was hidden by the low-hanging branches of one of the Norway spruces which bordered the estate at this point. Another step and she saw a circular red spot on a white leg bandage; another, and a white square of paper pinned to a blouse; another, and she identified the wounded man as her hero of the scene in the dining-room.
Hugo's eyes were closed, his breaths slow, in restless sleep. His face, flushed with fever, was winningly boyish and frank. He who had had the courage to speak alone against the opinion of his fellows, to voice a belief that made every sympathetic chord in her own mind sing with praise and understanding, the courage to say that invasion was wrong even when made by his own people, had been labelled coward and left to die!
The exaltation of his features when he had been the champion of her beliefs and her impulse against the barbarism of his comrades and the charm of their resignation now, the pitifulness of his condition—all had an appeal as she bent over him that called for an expression having the touch of the sublimely feminine. She took his hand in hers and pressed it gently. He awoke and brought himself jerkily to a sitting posture. The effort made a crash in his head that sent his senses swimming. She thought that he was going to swoon and slipped her arm behind him in support and, the Marta of impulse, pressed her lips to his brow. After the first racking throb of his temples he was able to steady himself, and as she drew away she saw his blue eyes starting in wonder at her act.
"I—I had to do it to thank you for what you did in the dining-room!" she stammered.
"Oh! Oh! It was very beautiful of you, but I couldn't help being surprised, for it was rather unusual—from a stranger." He smiled, and Hugo had a gift in smiles, as we know: smiles for laughter, smiles for reassurance, and smiles to cure embarrassment. "It was almost as refreshing as a drink of water," he concluded impersonally.
"You are thirsty?"
"This—this is morning, isn't it?" Hugo went on quizzically.
"Yes, yes!"
"Then it must be the next day," he pursued, still quizzically. "You see, I said I would not kill any more—and I will not—and I was shot and got tagged without even being shipped as freight. I was thirsty last night, very thirsty, and some one—I think it was Jake Pilzer—some one said to go to the fountain of hell for a drink, but I—I don't think that a very good place to get a drink, do you?"
Weak and faint as he was, he put a touch of drollery into the question which made her laugh, her eyes sparkling through a moist haze.
"You're real, aren't you?" he inquired in sudden perplexity. "I'm not dreaming?"
"As real as the water I shall bring you."
Soon Marta was back, holding a glass to his lips.
"There's no doubt about it; you are real!" said Hugo.
"I feel as if the chimney were still hot but that you had drenched the fire in the grate."
"Who put this on you?" she asked as she unpinned the placard.
"I've a vague idea, from a vague overhearing of the colonel's remarks, that it is public opinion," he replied, and seeing, that she was about to tear it up, he arrested her action. "No, I think I'd like to save it as a souvenir—the odds are so greatly against me—as a sort of souvenir to keep up my courage."
His tone, the way he drew the muscles of his face, ironed out her frown of disgust at public opinion with a smile. For he made his kind of courage no less light-hearted and free of pose than Dellarme had made his.
Directly the coachman, whom Marta had summoned when she went for the water, appeared with an improvised litter, and the two bore in at the kitchen door a guest for breakfast whose arrival gave Mrs. Galland a distinctly visible surprise. His uniform was gray, and in her heart of hearts she hated gray as the symbol of an enemy whom her husband had fought. But when Marta told the story of the part he had played in defence of the chandelier, personal partisanship abetted the motherly impulse that was already breaking down prejudice. She was busy with a dozen suggestions for his comfort, quite taking matters out of Marta's hands.
"I know more about the care of the sick than you do!" she insisted. "One lump or two in your coffee, sir? There, there, you had better let me hold the cup for you. You are sure you can sit up? Then we must have a pillow."
"I'll fetch one from the other room," put in Minna.
"Two will be better!" Marta called after her.
"It is delightful to have breakfast in your kitchen, madame," said Hugo to Mrs. Galland in a way that ought to have justified her in thinking herself the most charming and useful person in the world.
It was more irritating than ever for Mrs. Galland to keep pace with her daughter's inconsistencies. There was a Marta listening in partisan sympathy to Hugo's story of why he had refused to fight and telling the story of her school in return. There was a Marta seizing Hugo's hand in a quick, impulsive grasp as she exclaimed: "Your act personified what I taught my children!" There was a Marta planning how he should be secreted in the coachman's quarters over the stable, where he would be reasonably free from discovery until his strength was regained. Then here was another Marta, after Hugo had been carried away on the litter, saying coolly to her mother:
"'Unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's!' We have our property, our home to protect. Perhaps the Grays have come to stay for good, so graciousness is our only weapon. We cannot fight a whole army single-handed."
"You have found that out, Marta?" said Mrs. Galland.
"We have four rooms in the baron's tower and a kitchen stove," Marta proceeded. "With Minna we can make ourselves very comfortable and leave the house to the staff."
"The Gallands in their gardener's quarters! The staff of the Grays in ours! Your father will turn in his grave!" Mrs. Galland exclaimed.
"But, mother, it is not quite agreeable to think of three women living in the same house with a score of strange men!" Marta persisted.
"I had not thought of that, Marta. Of course, it would be abominable!" agreed Mrs. Galland, promptly capitulating where a point of propriety was involved.
When Marta informed the officer—the same one who had rung the door-bell on his second visit—of the family's decision he appeared shocked at the idea of eviction that was implied. But, secretly pleased at the turn of events, he hastened to apologize for war's brutal necessities, and Marta's complaisance led him to consider himself something of a diplomatist. Yes, more than ever he was convinced of the wisdom of an invader ringing door-bells.
Meanwhile, the service-corps men had continued their work until now there was no vestige of war in the grounds that labor could obliterate; and masons had come to repair the walls of the house itself and plasterers to renew the broken ceilings.
All this Marta regarded in a kind of charmed wonder that an invader could be so considerate. Her manner with the officers in charge of preparations had the simplicity and ease which a woman of twenty-seven, who is not old-maidish because she is not afraid of a single future, may employ as a serene hostess. She frequently asked if there were good news.
"Yes," was the uniform reply. An unexpected setback here or resistance there, but progress, nevertheless. But she learned, too, that the first two days' fighting along the frontier had cost the Grays fifty thousand casualties.
"In order to make an omelet you must break eggs!" she remarked.
"Spoken like a true soldier—like a member of the staff!" was the reply.
In her constraint and detachment they realized her conscious appreciation of the fact that in earlier times her people had been for the Browns; but in her flashes of interest in the progress of the war, flashes from a woman's unmilitary mind, they judged that her heart was with the Grays. And why not? Was it not natural that a woman with more than her share of intellectual perception should be on the right side? From her associations it was not to be expected that she would make an outright declaration of apostasy. This would destroy the value and the attractiveness of her conversion Reverence for the past, for a father who had fought for the Browns, against her own convictions, made her attitude appear singularly and delicately correct.
Though everything was ready for them, the staff delayed coming owing to the stubbornness of some heavy guns of the Browns, which, while they had directed no shells against the house, had shown that they had the range by unexpectedly playing havoc with infantry in close order on the pass road at the foot of the garden and with transportation on the castle road. But at last the battery was silenced and the mind of the army might establish itself in its offices on the ground floor and its quarters on the second floor without being in danger.
The war was a week old—a week which had developed other tangents and traps than La Tir—on the morning that the first instalment of junior officers came to occupy the tables and desks. Where the family portraits had hung in the dining-room were now big maps dotted with brown and gray flags. Portable field cabinets with sectional maps on a large scale were arranged around the walls of the drawing-room. In what had been the lounging room of the old days of Galland prosperity, the refrain of half a dozen telegraph instruments made medley with the clicking of typewriters. Cooks and helpers were busy in the kitchen; for the staff were to live like gentlemen; they were to have their morning baths, their comfortable beds, and regular meals. No twinge of indigestion or of rheumatism from exposure was to interfere with the working of their precious intellectual processes. No detail of assistance would be lacking to save any bureaucratic head time and labor The bedrooms were apportioned according to rank—that of the master awaited the master; the best servant's bedroom awaited François, his valet.
When Bouchard, the chief of intelligence, who fought the battle of wits and spies against Lanstron, came, two hours before Westerling was due, the last of the staff except Westerling and his personal aide had arrived Bouchard, with his iron-gray hair, bushy eyebrows, strong, aquiline nose, and hawk-like eyes, his mouth hidden by a bristly mustache, was lean and saturnine, and he was loyal. No jealous thought entered his mind at having to serve a man younger than himself. He did not serve a personality; he served a chief of staff and a profession. The score of words which escaped him as he looked over the arrangements were all of directing criticism and bitten off sharply, as if he regretted that he had to waste breath in communicating even a thought.
"I tell nothing, but you tell me everything!" said Bouchard's hawk eyes. He was old-fashioned; he looked his part, which was one of the many points of difference between him and Lanstron as a chief of intelligence.
After he had gone through the house he went for a flyspecking tour of the grounds, where he came upon a private of the Grays on crutches. With rest and good food the tiny hole in Hugo's leg from the merciful small-calibre bullet had healed rapidly. Confinement was irksome on a sunny day. He had grown strong enough in spirit to face his fate, whatever it might be, and in the absence of the watchful coachman he had risked the delight of a convalescent's adventure in the open, clad in his uniform, the only clothes he had. Bouchard saw instantly that this private did not wear the insignia of staff service.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"Getting well of a wound," answered Hugo, looking frankly into the hawk eyes.
"Evidently!" said Bouchard, who was always irritated when told what he could see for himself. "Why aren't you at a hospital?"
"I was not wanted there!" said Hugo.
"What! what!" But Bouchard had wasted two words. "Your name and regiment?" he asked.
"Hugo Mallin, of the 128th," replied Hugo.
"Uh-h!" Bouchard's pigeonhole memory had retained the name. "Charge—mutiny under fire; anarchism!" he went on, chopping out the words as if they were chips from a piece of granite. "Well, you have not escaped trial by hiding."
"I did not flatter myself that with one leg against a whole army I had much chance, sir!" Hugo replied respectfully.
"Uh-h!" The hawk eyes flashed their disapproval of such controversial freedom of language from a private. Had he had his way he would have hanged Hugo to the nearest tree; for Bouchard had truly a mediæval soul.
But Hugo's case was so extraordinary that it had reached Westerling's ears, and Bouchard knew that Westerling wished to see Hugo when he was apprehended. It was not for Bouchard to consider this desire of a chief of staff to deal with the case of a private in person as singular. No request of the chief of staff was singular to him. It became a matter of natural law. He called to one of the staff guards who was pacing back and forth near by.
"Take this man in charge and watch him sharply until General Westerling sends for him!"
"And you will get justice from General Westerling!" It was Marta's voice. In approaching she had unavoidably overheard part of the conversation. "Justice is his first characteristic!" she added as the hawk eyes turned their scrutiny into hers, which were calm and smiling.
Hugo had not seen Marta since he had been carried to the coachman's quarters. Minna had visited him frequently, bearing inquiries from her mistress as well as custards. He had looked forward to a talk with Marta as a kindred spirit, yet it was difficult for him to reconcile the woman speaking now with the woman who had kissed him on the forehead. But he said nothing as he was marched away.
"Miss Galland!" exclaimed Bouchard in a way that said he knew her story. "Yes, that little monkey can depend on more justice than he deserves. The unanswerable evidence is on the chief of staff's desk awaiting his arrival."
Bouchard's hawk eyes probed hers for an instant longer and seemed to find nothing to call further curiosity; then he lifted his cap and proceeded with his tour of inspection.
Marta smiled thoughtfully as she watched his receding figure, while her eyelashes narrowed and she inclined her head with a nod before she moved away in the direction of the tower. There was almost complete silence along the front. Since yesterday's action, which had checked the guns commanding the range of the house, there had been little firing. She guessed that the lull was only a recess of preparation for the grand attack on the first line of permanent defence, and that probably this would follow Westerling's arrival. He was due at four o'clock and he would be characteristically prompt to the minute.
"It must not be! Hugo Mallin is too fine a spirit to be sacrificed. I'll go on my knees, if need be, to Westerling," Marta was thinking as she paced back and forth in her room. On her knees to him! She stopped short, struck in revolt with a memory of the way he had looked at her once as she sat across the tea-table from him in the hotel reception-room. "No, I could not endure that except as a last resort. If ever there were a time to use all my wits it is now—to save Hugo Mallin, the one soldier who acted out the principles which I taught my children!"