Chapter 1

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the

Online Distributed Proofreading Team

RED FLEECE

By Will Levington Comfort

Author of “Midstream,” “Down Among Men,” “Fate Knocks At the Door,”

“Routledge Rides Alone,” Etc., Etc.

1915

TO THE HOUR--WHEN TROOPS TURN HOME

CONTENTS

I. THE WOMAN AND THE EXILE

II. THE COURT OF EXECUTION

III. THE HOUSE OF AMPUTATIONS

IV. IN THE BOMB-PROOF PIT

V. THE SKYLIGHT PRISON

VI. THE FIELD OF HELMETS

VII. THE GREEN OF CEDARS

I

THE WOMAN AND THE EXILE

Peter Mowbray first saw her at the corner of Palace Square nearest

the river. He was not in the least the kind of young man who appraises

passing women, very far from a starer. At the instant their eyes met,

his thoughts had been occupied with work matters and the trickery of

events. In fact, there was so much to do that he resented the intrusion,

found himself hoping in the first flash that she would show some flaw to

break the attraction.

It may have been that her eyes were called to the passer-by just as his

had been, without warning or volition. In any event their eyes met full,

leisurely in that stirring silence before the consciousness of self,

time, place and convention rushes in. ... Though she seemed very poor,

there was something about her beyond reach in nobility. He was left with

the impression of the whitest skin, the blackest hair and the reddest

lips, but mainly of a gray-eyed girl--eyes that had become wider and

wider, and had filled with sudden amazement (doubtless at her own

answering look) before they turned away.

Desolation was abroad in Warsaw after this encounter. Mowbray thought

of New York with loneliness, the zest gone from all present activity.

Presently with curious grip his thoughts returned to a certain luncheon

in New York with a tired literary man who had talked about women with

the air of a connoisseur. The pith of the writer's observations was

restored to his mind in this form:

“If I were to marry again it would be to a Latin woman--French, Italian,

even Spanish--a close-to-nature woman born and bred in one of the

Mediterranean countries. Not a blue-blood, for that has to do with

decadence, but a woman of the people. They are passionate but pure, as

Poe would say. If they find a man of any value, he becomes their world.

They are strong natural mothers--mothering their children and their

husband, too,--and immune to common sicknesses. Given a little food,

they know enough to prepare it with art. If a man has a bit of a dream

left, such a woman will either make him forget it painlessly, or she

will make it come true.”

There was no apparent relation, and none that proved afterward. What he

had seen at the corner of Palace Square nearest the Vistula was not the

face of a Latin woman, nor was any looseness of common birth evident in

it. The key might have had to do with the little hat she wore, just a

hat for wearing on the head, a protection against sun and rain, and with

the austerely simple black dress; but these weathered exteriors again

were effective in contrast to the vivid freshness of her natural

coloring. As for what remained of the literary man's picture of the

ideal woman to marry, it was the last word of decadence--the eminent

selfishness of a man willing to accept the luxury of a woman who asks

little to be happy. ... The next day at the same time and place Mowbray

was there, and saw her coming from afar.

She seemed both afraid and angry, stopped abruptly and asked in Polish

what he wanted. He was startled. It was a hard moment. He explained with

difficulty that her language was as yet an inconvenient vehicle for him.

“You are not Russian?” she said in French.

He shook his head. She seemed to be relieved and he wondered why.

“What do you want?” she asked, though not quite with the original

asperity.

“It did not occur to me you would notice,” he said in the language she

had ventured. “I saw you yesterday. You made me think of New York. As

I was near to-day, I hoped to see you again---”

“You are American?” She spoke now in English, and with a still softer

intonation.

“Yes,--you speak English, too?”

“I like it. It is---” she checked herself and asked with just a shade of

coldness, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

It might be construed as a courtesy to a stranger from one who lived in

Warsaw. Peter liked it, a certain vista opening. However, there was no

answer within reach except the truth, and he plunged:

“I should like to know you better.”

The red lower lip disappeared beneath the other. Her gray eyes grew very

wide; something intrepid and exquisite in her manner as she searched

his face. Whatever she knew of the world, she dared still to trust her

intuition--this was something of the revelation he drew.

“Why?”

Many people were passing. He looked toward the quieter center of the

Square.

“Will you walk with me there?” he asked. “It is not easy to explain this

sort of thing---”

“No. I must go on. You may walk a little way.”

“You are very good.... You see, I cannot tell just _why_--as you

asked. If I knew you well, I could tell you. Yesterday I was quite

unromantic---”

She made it hard for him and did not let him see her smile. “You mean

you are romantic to-day?”

Peter laughed. “What a trap--and I was trying so hard to tell you.”

“You _were_ trying---”

“I don't need to tell you. All there is to say is that I want you to be

my friend.”

“I should have to think,” she answered.

“Of course. ... Do you pass here every day?”

“I should have to think,” she said.

It was the third day afterward that she passed again.

Chapter 2

The first time that Boylan of the _Rhodes News Agency_ of New York saw

Peter Mowbray was in the office of Lonegan of _The States_, Mowbray's

chief in Warsaw. Lonegan had known Peter in New York and had wanted him

for his second many months before the fact was brought about. This

was the Boylan of the Schmedding Polar Failure, of various wars and

expeditions, a huge spectacle of a man, an old-timer, and very fond of

Lonegan, though as representative of _Rhodes'_ he was structurally the

competitor of _The States_ in this territory.

“Young Mowbray may be all right,” Boylan observed, “but the curse of

the student is on him. I should say that he isn't gusty enough for hard

work--vest buttons too safe--”

“You can't measure health by the pound,” Lonegan observed, regarding the

other's bulk with one eye shut.

“I never heard of Mowbray spending much time in bed outside of the small

hours.”

“How old is he?”

“Twenty-six or seven.”

“I suppose he put on his gear all in a year or two?”

“There is that look about him, but he's safely over it. Some people

never stop, but I've had to look up at him from the same angle now and

then during the last five years.... It was just a little before that

he happened into--his route like mine--his cub-year in London, then

assistant in Antwerp, then in Dresden. He had Dresden alone for a year.

I've been angling for him some time----”

“Yes,” Boylan remarked, “you need the right kind of help to stand up

with _Rhodes_ from this end----”

“You do make it wildly exciting,” Lonegan answered gently. “We'll rock

Peter yet.”

This chat took place in June. Ten weeks afterward Boylan came in with

the big news, and found Lonegan bending over the following cablegram,

almost the last that came through in the private cipher of _The States:_

Get Mowbray post with Russians. We are mailing influential matters.

Warsaw key-desk for northern campaigns. We are to be congratulated on

having Lonegan there.

It was from the Old Man, who in certain cases ventured thus to be

expensively felicitous....

“I'm sorry, Lonegan,” Boylan said. “I thought you would be taking the

field---”

“No, the Old Man's got the right eye for these affairs. I'm a desk man.”

What Lonegan had swallowed to make his voice clear and steady, only he

knew, but his nerve was effective. “You've got to help me, Boylan,”

he said. “You know the military end. You've got to help me get him

attached. I know you'd do it for me, but I want you to do it for him--”

A grunt from the big man, who disappeared.

...Lonegan's lip curled. Again it was only Lonegan who knew why. He

read the cablegram carefully again, and felt his face as if speculating

whether he could wait until morning for a shave. There was routine

to do, and the developments of the day to file. Peter was on a mail

story.... It occurred to him presently that his second would be

interested in this eventuality from the Office. He called several places

by 'phone without locating the younger man.

“He's with the woman,” Lonegan concluded.

Peter had left her address somewhere, but it was not at hand; neither

was her house available to telephone. Lonegan took down the Warsaw

directory, and came finally to the street-number after this line:

“_Bertha Solwicz, sempstress_.”

Chapter 3

She, too, was almost a stranger in Warsaw, and lonely. Each had their

work, and many hours each day were required for it; still, after the

first fortnight, they managed to meet often. Peter's time was hers, for

he had the habit of leaving his feature-letter for the quiet hours of

the night.

“I hate the name of Solwicz,” she told him the first time he came to her

house, “especially from you. And you must call me _Berthe_, not Bertha.”

In spite of her obvious lack of means, she had a few friends of rare

quality, and yet he did not meet them. On her table that first day, he

picked up a little book of poems, the leader of which was entitled _We

Are Free_. Peter had read it a few weeks before and given it a quality

of appreciation that was seldom called in these days. Just now he noted

that the volume was affectionately inscribed to her from the author,

Moritz Abel. She spoke of him and of the group of young master workmen

to which he belonged. Then she read the poem, as they stood together. It

was a moment of honor to the poet. Peter had turned pale, and the little

room was hushed about them, as if Warsaw were suddenly stilled.

“You see what they are doing,” she said. “There is a new race of artists

in Russia. They have passed the emotions---”

“This poem was due in the world,” Peter said. “But it is still an age

ahead of the crowd.”

“That's what makes it so hard for them--for him. He does not like that.

He would like to talk to all men straight. Moritz Abel--the name will

not be forgotten. He is like the others of the new race. They are

terrible in their calm. They have passed the emotions. They are free.

Other artists in Europe or America repress the emotions. That is but the

beginning of the mastery. When they are as great as this group of young

men, they will show the spirit of the thing, not the emotion of it.

Emotions are red. This is pure white, don't you see?”

For three days Warsaw had been upheaved in excitement. On the afternoon

that the messenger from Lonegan brought the news of the cablegram,

Berthe and Peter were planning an excursion into the country for the

next day. She watched him closely as he read, and was sensitive enough

to realize the importance of the message, before he spoke.... He found

her gray eyes upon him. She chose her own way to break the tension:

“The country is heaven, no doubt about that. One must die to get there.

Also one must live just so. Even when I was little, something always

happened--just as we were planning to set out for the country.”

He showed her the message, but had hardly heard her words. His discovery

of this slender solitary red-lipped girl and what it meant, was rarely

clear at this moment. She had awakened him plane by plane, awakened his

passion and his mercy and his intuition.

“Tell me again what you said about the country. I was away for a

minute.”

“It is hard to think of a little excursion to the fields--with such a

holiday ahead, as you are called upon.”

“I wasn't thinking of that either, Berthe, but of you.”

“Of course, you will go?”

“Doubtless.”

“I was only talking foolishly, about our little excursion. One's own

wants are so pitifully unimportant now.”

“I had hardly expected personally to encounter a war,” he remarked and

added smilingly, “The fact is, I hadn't thought of meeting a woman like

you.”

“I don't believe you're as cold-blooded as you try to seem, Peter.”

“I have fought all my life to be cold-blooded.”

She never forgot that. “I wonder why men do it?”

“It's the cultivation, perhaps, of that which Americans love best of

all--”

“What?”

“Nerve.”

“We of Poland dare to be emotional,” she said.

“You are an older people. You know how.”

“One needs only to be one's self.”

Peter smiled. “Sometimes I dare actually to be honest with you. Even

Lonegan and I take no such liberties together.”

“It isn't a matter of courage,” she said. “You would dare anything. I

know your quiet, deadly kind of courage. That's the first thing I felt

about you.”

It was like Mowbray not to acknowledge that such a thing had been said.

“I came to you asleep. I wonder if I should always have remained

asleep?”

“Your words are pretty, Peter. It makes me sad that you are going away.”

“You remember that company of soldiers that passed us yesterday as we

walked? I had seen many such groups before--great shocky-haired fellows

who ate and drank disgustingly. But yesterday you made me see that their

blood is redder than the Little Father's--that empires ripen and go to

seed only on a grander scale than turnips.” Her eyes were gleaming.

“We who are so wise, who have mastered ourselves, should be very good to

the peasants--and not take what they have and kill them in wars.”

“Did I lead you to believe in any way that I felt myself mastered?” he

asked quickly.

She touched his arm. “I was talking of the Fatherland,” she answered.

He had met this intensity of hers before. Her scorn was neither hot

nor cold, but electric. So often when words failed her, Peter fancied

himself lost in some superb wilderness... Her own gray tone was in the

room to-day--her gray eyes and black hair that made the shadows seem

gray; her face that no night could hide from him. Sometimes his glance

was held to her lips--as one turns to the firelight. Passion there--or

was it the higher thing, _compassion?_ There was bend and give to the

black cloth she wore, as to the inflections of her voice. She could

forget herself. That was the first and the inexhaustible charm.

It is true that she was very poor. This room which had become his

sanctuary in Warsaw was in a humble house of a common quarter. She

laughed at this, and at her many hours of work each day, for which the

return was meager. There was the sweetest pathos to him in her little

purse, and her pride in these matters was a thing of royalty.

“My father earned the right to be poor,” she once said.

It seemed to him that her father was mentioned in the moments most

memorable... She was at the window now, her hand lifting the shade. The

light of the gray day shone through her fingers--a long, fragile hand

that trembled.

“Shall we walk somewhere, or must you go to your office, Peter?”

“I won't, just yet. Yes, let's go outside.”

They felt they must climb, a bit of suffocation in their hearts. Until

to-day there had been invariable stimulus for Mowbray in the age of all

things, even in the dusty, narrow, lower streets, but his smiling, easy

countenance was a lie that he disliked now. It pinched him cruelly to

leave her, and there was small amelioration in anything that the war

might bring. She would give him sympathy and zeal and honor for the work

and through all the lonely days, but what a lack would be of that swift

directness of purpose, the deeper seeing, the glad capacity for higher

heroism which he had found only in her presence. They crossed the

riverward corner of the Square, where they had met. He tried to tell her

how she had seemed that first day.

“I cannot understand,” she replied. “Especially that day when I first

saw you, I had nothing.”

Now they ascended the terraces that commanded the Vistula. The rocky

turf of the footpath, smoothed by the tread of forgotten generations

(but still whispering to her of those who had passed on); the crumbling

masonry of the retaining walls, gray with the pallor of the years; and

afar the curving, dust-swept farmlands, which had mothered a thousand

harvests, now moved with strange planting of peasant-soldiers.

Mobilization business everywhere, drilling of the half-equipped, a

singing excitement of parting, recruiting--no time for the actual

misery.

They stood in the very frown of the fortress at sunset. A column of raw

infantry came swinging out and started the descent. A moment afterward

the roar of a folk-song came up in a gust. It was as if the underworld

suddenly had been cratered.

“When they sing like that, and I think of what they shall soon be called

upon to do--I can hardly endure it!” she whispered.... They stood with

backs against the wall, as the tail of the column moved past. “Look at

that weary one--so spent and sick--yet trying to sing--”

They were in the silence again. Across the river, against the red

background, they watched another column of foot-soldiers moving like a

procession of ants erect; and beyond, on the dim plain, a field battery,

just replenished to war footing, was toiling with tired beasts and

untried pieces. Mowbray thought of the human meat being herded in

Austria for those great rakish guns, as the infantry below was being

trained for distant slaughter arenas.

“Do speak, Peter,” she whispered.

He turned to find her white face looking up to him and very close. They

were alone.

“You won't mind if I think about myself this once?” he asked.

“Please do.”

“I only want to say that, if you'll stay where you are, I'll come back

from this stuff--I was going to say, dead or alive.”

“Do you mean I am to stay in Warsaw?” she asked.

“No--not that exactly. I mean if you will stay where you are in regard

to me----”

Tears filled her eyes. He would have known it even if they had not shone

through the dusk, because his fingers felt the tremor in her arms. She

tried to speak, but finished, “How utterly silly words are!”

The face of young Mowbray was strange with emotion, pale but

brilliant-eyed, his long features bending to her. She was utter

receptivity. Neither knew until afterward how rare and perfect was this

moment.

“Anyway--we understand. We understand, Berthe.”

“...As for Berthe,” she said slowly, as they walked back, “her heart

will stay where you have put it, Peter. That's out of her power to

change. But the rest--I can't tell, yet----”

It was as if a finger had crossed Mowbray's face laterally under the

eyes and across his nostrils, leaving a gray welt.

“I know you belong to the moderns,” he said, after a moment. “We men

belong to the ancients. We want a woman to wait and weep while we go off

to the wars.”

“We understand,” she kept repeating.... “And now, before you go, come

home with me and let me make you a cup of tea--just a cup of tea--before

you go.”

He went with her, and, when his tea-cup was finished, he happened to

look into the bottom.

“What do you see?” she asked quickly, taking the cup.

“M-m-m,” said Mowbray.

Chapter 4

Peter and Lonegan were together at dinner three hours after the message

from _The States._

“It's a big chance, Mowbray. That's all I can say. I stay at the

wire--no heroics.”

“You ought to see it all from here.”

Lonegan smiled deprecatingly. “Boylan will help you get through. You

don't know him yet. Some time, perhaps, you will--two hundred and fifty

pounds of soul. He'll do all he can to get you the same chance he

has, because I asked him; and then he'll try to make _The States_ look

obsolete as a newspaper, wherein, of course, he'll fail. But he'll try.

If he takes to you, it won't make him try less, but he'd do your stuff

and his, if you fell sick. There isn't another Boylan--a great newspaper

man, too. _The States_ will watch closely, knowing that _Rhodes'_ will

get everything possible from Boylan's part of the front. The point

is--and I think he'll want it, too--you'd better work together on the

main line of stuff, as we do here. Your letters on the side should

be better than his, because you're a better writer. As for war stuff,

Boylan is the old master--Peking, Manchuria and the Balkans--that I

think of; also the Schmedding Polar Failure. That last _was_ war--a

spectacular expedition of the Germans--

“I might as well make this a lecture, now that I've started,” Lonegan

went on. “The war game isn't complex. All the bewildering technicalities

that bristle from a military officer's talk are just big-name stuff

designed to keep down the contempt of the crowd--the oldest professional

trick. Whenever the crowd gets to understand your terminology your game

is cooked. You know how it is in a drug-store, and you've seen the old

family doctor look wise....

“There's a lot of different explosives which they fire by mathematics,

and which you can learn in part from our homely encyclopedias, but the

main game will be fought out on the same principles that Attila fought

it and Genghis Khan--numbers, traps, unexpectedness, the same dull

old flanking activities, the raid of supplies and communications, the

bending back of wings, the crimp of a line by making a hole in one

part--and all that archaic rot. As I say, the game is extinct, so far

as our modern complicated intelligences go, and the men whose names

are biggest in the papers from now on are the same old beefy type

of rudiments whom a man wouldn't associate with in times of national

quiet.... I will end this by saying that the big story is the man--the

peasant, the trooper, the one blinded little dupe, who dies, or plunges,

or loses his legs in the name of the Fatherland--”

“I see that,” said Peter; “but what really is interesting to me is this

peasant's blindness and the monkey other men make of him--”

“I'm glad you spoke of that, for it is a thing to avoid. Interesting,

I grant, but not popular with our kind of press. We are not servants of

the minority or the elect. You'll find Boylan exploiting the army he's

with--just as another might have done under Napoleon. By the way, where

are you going to-night?”

“I'm going to sit at the feet of the most genial anarchist at large. His

name is Fallows, an American, who has been ten years in Russia among the

peasants.”

“Duke Fallows--I know of him. When did he come to town?”

“Two days ago.”

“Peter, how did you get next?” Lonegan looked a bit in awe at the other.

“I was asked to one of his private audiences last night.”

Peter knew that Lonegan had many things to ask by the quick tone in

which he spoke the first question.

“You know what Fallows will do to you?”

“Yes, if one lets go. He has learned how to use his power. He has

brought forth his young upon the bare rocks, as somebody said.”

“He'd turn an angel into an anarchist.”

“A man ought not to be afraid to listen if there's a chance for him to

be proved wrong--”

“Correct, absolutely. I am merely thinking about our job.”

“A man gets in the habit of thinking about his job--doesn't he?”

“Did he tell you about the plowman of Liaoyang?”

“No, but my companion did. Fallows must have seen that episode rather

clearly.”

“Let's not get off the job business, Peter. As I was saying, the truth

isn't popular--”

“That doesn't sound like Lonegan.”

“No, and I don't like the feel of saying it, but it's very much to the

point--”

“Possibly.”

“Mowbray, we are taking our bread, and its cake, too, from a paper that

expects us to exploit the orthodox heroics. The pity and atrocious sham

of it all has its side. But the fact still remains its side does not

furnish the stuff that American newspapers pay men and cable tolls to

furnish.”

“Won't you come to-night?” Peter asked laughing. “Perhaps we can both

reach the high point some day when we have earned the right to be poor.”

“That's a higher point than I dream of, Peter. I can't help but think

what a nest you've got into. Of course, I mean with Fallows and his

kind--”

“An eagle's nest.”

“But the eaglets are starving.”

“Heretofore the job has been served. Come along with me and meet Duke

Fallows again--”

“No. I must go back to the wire for the present. Boylan would be

shocked, too. By the way, I've got a bid in for you with General

Kohlvihr. Boylan is to help me put it through, of course. The more

decorated they are the more they fall for Boylan. There's a chance that

you'll start south with a column within two days. So you'd better get at

that encyclopedia stuff--”

“Yes, I'll attend to that.”

Peter left him smiling, and turned his steps across the Square, into a

narrow street of the poor quarter, and on toward a little room and a low

lamp, where a woman's hands sewed magically as she waited.

Chapter 5

Fallows met them in his small bleak room, turned the lamp low, and

opened the door of the diminutive wood-stove to let the firelight in the

room. The three sat around it.... Peter Mowbray felt strange and young

beside them. The woman seemed to belong to this world, and it was a

world at war with every existing power. All Peter's training resisted

stubbornly. Still, right or wrong, there was a nobility about their

stand. He did not need to be sure their vision was absolutely true, yet

the suspicion developed that they saw more clearly than he, and acted

more purely. Mowbray did not lack anything of valor, but he lacked the

fire somehow. He loved Berthe Solwicz, could have made every sacrifice

for her, but that was a concrete thing.

Fallow's bony knees were close to the fire. He seemed both light

and deep, often turning to Peter with secret intentness, and openly

regarding the young woman with amazement and delight. Nearing fifty,

Fallows was tall, thin and tanned. The deep lines of his face were

those which make a man look homely to himself, but often interesting

to others. His soft, low-collared shirt was somewhat of a spectacle in

consideration of the angular and weathered neck. No rest could exist in

the room that contained such loneliness as burned from his eyes. It was

said that he had been rich, though everything about him was poor now.

One would suspect the articles in his pockets to be meager and of poor

quality--the things you might find in a peasant's coat. That which he

called home was a peasant's house in the Bosk hills--the house of the

plowman of Liaoyang, whose children he fathered. Annually, however, he

went abroad, telling the story of the underdog, usually making the big

circuit from the East to the West, and stopping at a certain little

cabin within hearing distance of the whistles of Manhattan, where his

first disciple worked in solitude mainly, and against the stream. Just

now Fallows was planning a different winter's work.... They talked of

the first fighting.

“The startling thing to realize is that for the present we are allied

with England,” said Fallows. “I mean Russia. You see, I am Russian, now,

not the Russia of the Bear, but of the Man--”

Mowbray and the woman exchanged glances, each thinking of the tea-cup

in the afternoon.... The exile showed traces of his ten years' training

among simple men. Rhetoric and dithyramb were gone from his speech and

habit of mind. The whole study and vision of the man was to make his

words plain. Thus he said slowly:

“The peasants are children--children in mind and soul. We who have come

a little farther are responsible for them, as a father is responsible

for his children. So far we have wronged them, taught them to grasp

instead of to give, to look down instead of up. We have even stolen from

them the fruits of their looking down. The time is near at hand when

we shall have to pay for all this.... A true father would die for his

children. I know men who have done that, and there are men about us

here, even in Warsaw tonight, who are ready for that--”

Fallows' voice was tender. He watched the face of the woman as he spoke.

She was looking hard into the fire.

Fallows added: “There are fifty million men here in Russia--roughly

speaking. Very strong, very simple, possibly very brutal men, but brutal

as a fine dog is brutal, a simplicity about that. I do not idealize

them. I have lived among them. I know this: They might be led to

virtue, instead of to wickedness. My heart bleeds for them being led to

slaughter again. The hard thing is to make them see, but the reason for

that is simple, too. If they could see--they would not be children. They

must be led. Never in modern history have they been purely led. Words

cannot make them see; wars so far have not made them see. It may be that

the sufferings and heroisms of this war shall be great enough to make

them see....”

“What would you have the peasants see first?” Peter asked.

“Their real fathers--that men of wisdom and genius are the true fathers

of the Fatherland, not the groups of predatory men. True fathers would

die for their children. To me it has been blasphemy, when the nations of

the past have called themselves Fatherlands. I would have the peasants

fathered by men who realize that the peasants are the strength and salt

of the earth; men who realize that the plan of life is good--that the

plan of life is for concord and service each to the other--that the hate

of man for man is the deadly sin, the hell of the world--that the fields

and all the treasures of the mother earth are for those who serve and

aspire, and not for those who hold fast, look down and covet more.”

Mowbray was interested in the fact that Fallows had passed the stage

of eloquence and scorn and burning hatred against evil in persons and

institutions. There was no hue and cry about his convictions. He seemed

to live in continual amazement at the slowness with which the world

moves--the slowness to a man who is ahead and trying to pull his people

along. Moreover there was that final wisdom which Fallows revealed

from time to time--momentary loss of the conviction that he himself was

immortally right. Fallows saw, indeed, that a man may be atrociously out

of plumb, even to the point of becoming a private and public nuisance,

when allowed to feed too long alone on the strong diet of his own

convictions.... An hour sped by. Fallows replenished the fire and turned

to Berthe Solwicz.

“All evening you've had something in your mind to tell me and I've been

giving forth. You must forgive a man for so many words--when he has been

living with little children so long. What is it?”

“Just a reading of a tea-cup to-day--but everything you said has its

meaning concerned in it.”

“I'm almost as interested in tea-cups as in the stars,” said Fallows.

“You know a toy-bear, such as the Germans make?”

“Yes--”

“Well, it would have been like that--if one were thinking of toys.

We thought of the Russian Bear. It was perfect--in the bottom of the

cup--standing up, walking like a man--huge paunch, thick paws held out

pathetically, legs stretched out, just as he would be, rocking, you

know--”

Fallows bowed seriously. Mowbray turned his smile to the shadows.

“Near him,” Berthe added, “was a Russian soldier--perfect--fur cap,

high boots, tightly belted, very natty--more perfect than we see in the

streets, as if drawn from ideal. He was stabbing the bear with a long

pole, leisurely--”

“It was a rifle and bayonet,” said Peter. “We both saw it, but didn't

speak until now. He was churning the bayonet around in the great paunch

as if feeling for the vitals. The bear looked large and helpless.”

Fallows' bronzed head had sunk upon his chest. His eyes, red with

firelight, seemed lost to all expression. “I was thinking it would

happen in Germany first,” he said.

A moment afterward he added: “There's a time when a man wants to die for

what he believes, and another time when he's afraid he will die before

he gets a chance to make his life count.”

Again he paused, and then looked up to Mowbray. “It's a good omen.

That's the _real_ war.... And was it your cup?”

“Yes.”

“You say that you are going out for the Galician service?”

“Yes, possibly with Kohlvihr's column.”

“You will see much service,” said Fallows. “That used to be our

dream--to see service. It will be easier seen with the Russians. They

are not so modern in method as the French or Germans, or even the

Japanese. Of course, war is the same. The nation at the end will win

on the fields, not in the skies. The sky fulfillment is reserved for a

better utility than war. But war belongs under the sea.... You will not

be suppressed so rigidly with the Russians. You will see the side of

the war which will have the most bearing on the future. I do not believe

France and Germany are in the future as Russia is--”

“And England?” Peter asked quickly.

“The key to that is the wealth of the Indies--as of yore.”

“You mean if India remains loyal?”

“If India remains under the yoke.”

“But, if Britain should preserve her tenure in India with the Japanese

troops--” Peter suggested.

Fallows shuddered. “As yet I can see no philosophy under heaven to cover

that.”

“And you think Britain and Russia are enemies in spite of this

alliance?”

“Enemies, temperamental and structural--enemies, past and future.”

Peter recurred to this point: “You think that India would not remain

loyal if she had arms?”

“I was in a little village of the Punjab two years ago,” Fallows

replied, “and there was a lad of sixteen there, wonderful in promise--a

mind, a spirit. They could not raise in the village enough money to send

him across the seas steerage for his education. A single rifle costs

nearly three pounds. It is hard for us to realize how poor India is.”

Peter stood fast against this in his mind; his intellect would not

accept.... “Are you going to take the field again, Mr. Fallows?”

“Not in a newspaper way. I shall nurse wounded soldiers. At least they

have accepted me.... These are fearful and amazing days. We have all

been in a kind of long feeding dream, like the insects, accumulating

energy and terrible power for these days. Such death as we shall see!”

There was silence.

“I wonder how they are taking it in America?” Fallows mused.

“Doubtless as an opportunity for world-trade,” said Peter.

“Oh, I hope not!” the exile said passionately. “There must be another

America.”

Fallows placed his hands on Berthe's shoulders, looking down: “You make

me think of a young woman I once knew,” he said. “Not that you look like

her--but that you have the same zeal _for something_.... You are a very

true daughter of your father--”

“You knew him?” she said huskily.

“We all knew him--we who dare to think we look ahead. When he died, his

courage came to all of us. We were changed. If it had not been a pure

and durable thing--his courage would have died with him. It is wonderful

for me to be here with you. And this man loves you.”

It was not a question, just a fragmentary utterance of a fine moment.

Fallows said it as a man who has passed on, and yet loves to study the

lives and loves of younger men. Even to Mowbray the feeling came for an

instant that he was part of the solution to which they gave themselves.

“I have not told him of my father. He does not know my name,” Berthe

said. “But I am going to tell him--before he goes.”

“He is safe,” said Fallows. “I felt free with him--almost

immediately--and that picture in the tea-cup!... Peter Mowbray, Peter

Mowbray. It is a good name. And you are going out on the big story of

the war for _The States_. You will see great things--best of all with

the Russian columns. There will be an Austerlitz every day--a Liaoyang

every day. I was in Manchuria with a man who made that his battle.

I wonder if he will come out this time--to find how his dream of

brotherhood is faring? God, how he took to that dream! He will be a

Voice--”

They were standing. Fallows suddenly reached for his cap. “I'll go out

with you--just to get out. The room is too small for me to-night.”

Yet, when they reached the street, he left them abruptly, as if he had

already said too much.

“He seems to be burning up,” said Peter.

Berthe did not answer.

“He was like Zarathustra coming down from the mountain--so shockingly

full of power,” Peter added. “And yet he said so little of his own

part.”

“He couldn't, Peter. He's like you--when moments are biggest.... Oh,

Peter, where do you keep your passion?”

“You mean this great burning that Fallows knows?”

“Yes.”

“I haven't it. I haven't that passion. I think I am just a reporter.

But you have it.... My father loved his family. I think your father must

have loved the world--”

“But you love the world--”

“No, I love you.”

“Peter, Peter--come to-morrow! Don't come in with me to-night!”

Peter went to his rooms at once. He was struck hard, but merely showed

a bit weary. He found himself objecting to characteristics of Fallows'

mind, the same which he had admired and delighted in from Berthe. She

had always talked easily of death, and he had been without criticism;

now he disliked the casual mention of death in Fallows' talk.

Peter saw that he was sore, and hated himself for it. Fallows personally

was ready for death; therefore he had the right to counsel martyrdoms

for others if he wished. Death to Peter, however, was not strictly a

conversational subject. If a man were ready to die for another, it

was not good taste to say so. Still he forced himself to be just, by

thinking of Fallows' life.

Fallows somehow had turned a corner that he, Peter Mowbray, had not come

to so far. Self-hypnotized, or not, the exile had given up everything in

life to make the world better as he saw it. He had written and traveled

and talked and plotted, even vowed himself to poverty, all for the good

of the under-dog.

“It isn't fanaticism, when you come to look at it,” Peter mused. “He

sees it clearly, and makes one see it for the moment of listening. He

isn't afraid. He would die every day for it, if he could.... And I take

things as I find them, and grin. I wouldn't even have thought otherwise,

except for Berthe. I have a suspicion that I'm half-baked.”

Peter's mind was engaging itself thus feverishly, to avoid the main

issue that the woman had flung him from her, and run to cover, stuffing

her ears, so to speak, and asking him not to follow. He braced himself

now and faced it. “If it happened to another pair, I should say it was

the finish,” he thought. “I should say that no man and woman could pass

a rock like that.... I can't get to her point of view by thinking myself

there. I'm cold--that's the word. And she's superb. I'd rather be her

friend than lord of any other woman. That won't change. And she has

spoiled everything I thought I knew. Altogether--it's a game, bright

little story--and deep.”

Lonegan came in and flung himself down wearily.

“I've been busy. Boylan is leaving in thirty-six hours. You're going

with him?”

“I'm ready,” said Peter.

“Did you have a big time?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think of Fallows now?”

“I'm strong for him.”

“Peter--you look bushed.”

“It drains a man to spend an evening in that company. A fellow has to

have a heavy lid--not to waste fire.”

Lonegan was worried. “You don't mean to say you're getting fevers and

emotions.”

“I'm threatened.”

“Mowbray--you're lying. I don't believe you'd let anybody see your

fires--not even how well you bank 'em. It isn't in you.”

“I wish it were,” said Peter.

* * *

For a long time after Lonegan left he plunged into his work, but there

was no sleep for him afterward. He lay very still, breathing easily,

as the fag-end of the night crawled by. At dawn he arose, dressed

noiselessly, and went out into the city.

Chapter 7

It was too early to go to Berthe, yet his steps led him to the street of

her house, and he had not passed it a second time before she opened the

blinds above, and called to him. He looked at her sorrowfully, and she

met his eyes.

“Come in, Peter. I've been so sorry! If you can forgive me, we'll have

coffee together--”

He followed her upstairs. The premonition came that he was to take away

the image of Berthe Solwicz at its highest--inimitably enticing to his

heart, the girlish and utterly feminine spirit that had captivated the

man in his breast. She did not seem to know that she was like the woman

of the first meeting, but to him all her grace of that day had returned,

as if to complete the circle of the episode; and all that he had loved

since was added. The one thing in his life that he was proud of, was

that he had chosen this woman from the crowd.... They were in her room.

With both hands she held him in his coat, so that he could not remove

it, begging him to forget the last of last night before they could be at

rest.

“I don't know as I want to, Berthe,” he said. “It made me think. There

are two kinds of people in the world--the kind who give and the kind who

take. We represent each. I'm afraid the difference is intrinsic. There

would be no satisfaction in me trying to be some one else--even trying

to be like you. I am what I am--and must be that. But, Berthe, I can

hold the suspicion that I am your inferior, and be pleasant about it--”

“Peter, Peter--you don't understand. I don't love myself--nor my way

better. I am poor and tortured, carrying about a legacy, or a dream. I

need you. I can tell you now--I never needed you so much as last night

when I sent you away. I need your brain and balance--your big heart. It

was never so dear to me.”

This was too much for him. He sat down before her. All night he had been

trying to qualify for a lower place in her heart than his earlier dreams

had called for--any place rather than to be apart--for the stuff of

adoration was in Peter Mowbray. Half-sitting, half-kneeling, she took

her place on the rug before him.

“But first I must tell you the story. I could not tell you at once; and

since then we have managed so well. But you must know before you go. I

am not Polish, not even in name. My father's mother was a Russian woman,

but his father was an Irishman, and the name--my name--is Wyndham. My

father's given name was 'Metz'--”

Peter had caught it all before her last sentence. “Wyndham” had

been enough. He saw clearly the natural and excellent reason for the

tenderness of Duke Fallows toward the daughter of Metz Wyndham, and

recalled the tragic story of the power and fire of this prophet of the

people, who was executed by the Russian government in the midst of the

turmoil following Red Sunday--“Metz Wyndham, the notorious Red,” as he

was denoted in the subsidized press of Petersburg, though “Metz Wyndham,

the peasants' martyr,” was a whisper which seemed destined in the end to

silence all such uproar.

“You have heard of him? You knew his story?”

The upturned face shone with a different bloom for his eyes. “Yes,” he

answered.

“...I was away from Russia for years--in London and Paris,” she said

quickly. “But at last I felt I could not stay longer. I wanted to come

back here--where the struggle is so tense and constant. He worked much

here in Warsaw. All of his kind come some time to Warsaw. And so the

name _Solwicz_, which I hate; and so the fear when I found you watching

me in the street a second time, and my relief to learn that you were not

Russian-”

“Of course I understand,” said Peter. He put his hand upon her head. “I

was in awe of you before I knew,” he added, “and yet, I always saw that

in the most vital moments something of him would come out.... I keep

seeing you with him now--what a life for a young girl--what a builder,

those years, for a young girl--and how brave you are. Berthe, I have

it--you are spoiled for common people because you were brought up with

that kind of a man. How clearly I understand last night now!”

“There's another side to that,” she said huskily.

“Oh, I'm sorry--”

The most consummate plotting could not have endeared him to her as those

three words.

“Peter, you must see it--the other side. There was no rest with him. All

his brilliance, all his brilliant companions were one part, but there

was a steady pressure of tragedy about us--from outside. And there

was tragic pressure from him. He was subject to the most terrible

melancholia. He had enough vision to see the wrong everywhere. It was

not mania. There _is_ wrong everywhere, if one looks--in judges and

cities, in nations, wars, in the kind of amusements people plunge

into--wrong and coarseness and stupidity. He loved men but hated

institutions. Sometimes, he would see it all so clearly that the sense

of his own powerlessness would come. He would cry, 'One man can't do

anything. A man like me can't be heard--oh, I can't make myself heard!

It is as if I were shut in a tomb.' He would only have been happy

passing from one great crowd to another--harrowing, pleading,

electrifying men. He would rise--even alone with me--to the heights of

his power--and then fall into the valleys because no one could hear.

That was his cry, _'I can't make myself heard!_ Then often, when he was

waiting to speak, the power would come, and leave him drained when he

faced his people. He would tell me afterward, 'If I could only have

talked to them yesterday, or an hour before!'

“Then the doubt of self would come to him--the fear that he was wrong

or insane. 'Berthe, it can't be that the crowds are wrong; that I am

right--against all the crowds. It must be that I am insane.' He would

suffer like one damned from that. Worse than all was the fear of his

own Ego. He was more afraid of that than any other lion in the way. 'It

isn't the cause, it's me--that wants to be heard. It's the accursed me

that I am striving for--in agony to relieve. I merely use the Cause. All

the time it is myself that I wish to make heard.' That would make him

suicidal.

“I am only telling you these moods. He was a child, a playmate, the

loveliest companion a girl ever had--seeing the beauty and analogy in

all nature and outdoors--full of jest and delights. I just wanted to

show you the other side----”

It was all of breathless interest.

“There came a day,” she added, as Peter watched her raptly, “when he did

make himself heard, even as he dreamed....”

Peter thought of his reading the story--a boy at school, and was struck

with the memory of its appeal to him in the light of the present.

“...The sustaining of his friends was taken from us at the last. They

dared not come, of course. 'Berthe, little heart, it's all right,' he

would say. 'You will have to go on alone, but the way will be shown you.

You have the strength. You have been heaven and earth to me. I must go

and leave you, but that's only a temporary matter. It will be hard--but

it has been hard _with_ me.... This is all right. It's good for what

ails the world--but you are only a little girl! My God, I dare not think

of it....'

“I remember the dawn and the cold rain and the stone buildings--and

then to find the world's relation to his daughter. That had been spared

before. He kept it from me, and there was such a sustaining from his

friends and power. Those most concerned are slowest to learn exactly

what the world thinks of them.... It did not come until afterward, and

then it almost killed me. I was clinging to a sorrow almost sacred, and

I found that the world saw only the shame and madness of my plight.

I suddenly saw it in the eyes of the people--how they drew apart from

me.... He had only wanted to make them better. He said that all evil was

the result of men hating one another. He did not hate men, but predatory

institutions, false fatherlands, and all slave-drivers. They hanged him

for that hatred, but what was more shocking was to find that the people

whom he loved and served were horrified at his daughter....”

It did not detract from Peter's ardor that his intellect was away for an

instant in a rather skeptical study of Metz Wyndham's life. To Peter

had come glimpses of the magnificent selfishness of this prophet of the

people. Did all great men have such an ego? If their lives were

closely examined would they all reveal, in their intimate and familiar

relations, the most subtle and insidious forms of self-service? In fact,

was not the mighty _ego_ the source of their record-making in the world?

... Peter banished this rush of conjectures. Whatever the father, the

whole art of the life of Metz Wyndham's daughter was the loss of the

love of self.

“I feel before you,” he said, “as I once felt in the vineyards beneath

Vesuvius.”

She smiled at him. “There are several ways to take that.”

“Just one that I mean--and no explanation.”

“... Peter, our last day together--all shadowy background to be put

away--”

“And breakfast to occupy the immediate fore.”

He went out into the street to purchase certain essentials, found some

tall white flowers, and a copper vase to put them in. They were hungry,

after the long night, and their happiness was the exquisite moments

which they found between the darkenings. They would not permit the

parting altogether to pervade. Her face was lustrous white; her eyes

made him think of those gray days on the ocean, in which one can see

great distances. More of a girl than ever she seemed to him, with her

black hair combed loosely back and hanging in a pair of braids. The

flowers stood tall between them.

“War weather like this makes one grow quickly,” he said. “To think how

easy and content we thought ourselves--even three days ago. Now, I want

to say, 'Come, Berthe--come with me....' I want to take you to some

quiet place, back in the States, in the country by the water. Yes, north

country--by some lake that would be frozen when we got there. That's

where the silence is, that winter silence. A cabin, a roaring fire--you

and I together, alone. It seems you would be safe there, and I could

begin to be satisfied--“.

“Peter, Peter--don't make heavens to-day!”

“It's your particular heaven. No other would ever have made me think of

_winter_--of something austere and silent for you to ignite.”

“I wonder, shall it ever come to me--to have peace and abundance of

nature? I have always had the cities, and now it is more war again--the

opposite to nature--but I shall think every hour of that winter cabin.

That is my place,” she added. “Another would have made you think of the

South--or the seas. I shall think of your being there with me--every

day--no matter where I am---”

Her words had grown vague to his ears. Her lips were so red that for the

time he saw them only. He arose and went to her around the tall flowers.

“What did you say?” he asked, after a moment.

“I don't know--oh, yes--perhaps, if we are very good in this war, and

do all we can to make orderly our little circle of things in the great

chaos--perhaps we may earn that winter cabin and the fireplace and the

stillness. To plan our garden in the winter days---”

“I wish I hadn't spoken of it. It's almost unearthly far--in such a

time. But, Berthe, will you ever be satisfied with one who hasn't the

white fire of passion--as you have, in the cause of the peasants?”

“Oh, that's what I wanted to tell you. We are to be separated. We are

grown up--a man and a woman. We dare speak to each other. At least, I

dare.... Peter, I couldn't love you if you were all that--all that---”

She hesitated.

“All that you missed in me last night?” he suggested.

“Yes, but I didn't miss it exactly. I was excited and overwrought. You

are splendid with me. It is when others are near, that you are--cold and

unemotional. I know it's your training--that thing you Americans have

from the English. You are that way with men. You are not so with me.

But, if you were like Fallows, or like my father, I could not love you.

I would not dare---”

“Why?”

“First, I could not--and then I would not dare. First, that which we

are, we do not love. We love another kind--for completion----”

“Clearly said. That must be true,” he answered quickly. “And why would

you not dare?”

“Because we should have a little baby, and it would suffer so in coming

years. Peter, the poise and the balance--the very qualities I need in

you, and which I love, the little baby would require as his gift from

his father.”

II

THE COURT OF EXECUTION

Chapter 1

“Hai, you, Peter--wake up!”

It was Boylan's voice, seemingly afar off, but coming closer.

“Wake up.... I say, young man, what do you think of it by this time?”

Thus Peter was awakened the seventh morning out--and in a place he had

not observed the previous night. It was as good a place as usual, if not

better, except for the smell of fish that had gone before. Clearly it

had been a fish shop, business suspended some time. There were certain

scaly trays on the sloping showboards to the street; scales glistened

among the cobwebs of the low ceilings; also the floor was of turf, and

doubtless very full of phosphor, an excellent base for rose-culture.

The place dwindled and darkened to the rear, from which the head

and shoulders of Samarc presently emerged, and a moment later Little

Spenski, his companion, sat up and rubbed his eyes. These two,

invariably together, were men of a rapid-fire battery, to meet their

pieces lower in the fields, and attached for the present, as were Boylan

and Mowbray, to the staff of General Kohlvihr's command.

“Think of what?” Peter asked.

Boylan disdained answer. He was strapping a pigskin legging over a

bulging calf, always a severe strain. He looked up presently, reached

across and touched his forefinger to Peter's chin then to his own, which

bristled black and gray.

“Young man, you've got a secret,” he remarked darkly.

Peter smiled. He kept his razors in the same case as his tooth-brush,

and the case had not been mislaid so far. He could shave in the dark.

“You're either not of age, or your face is sterile,” said Boylan.

“The floor of this fish shop isn't,” said Peter.

“I've been with you the last forty-eight hours straight. No sign of life

in that time.”

“You went out looking for fresh meat at sundown. You were gone---”

“I was gone just five minutes, because the train wasn't up. You had tea

on when I came back.”

“There was a bit too much hot water.”

“Peter, that will do once more, but I've got a suspicion. No man living

can shave in the saddle--so you won't be able to spring that one.

Besides, you are willing to discuss the matter.”

“Did you ask what town this is?”

“No,” said Boylan; “I couldn't remember if they told me. New town every

night. The only thing to name a town is a battle. God, smell the wood

smoke--doesn't it make you keen?”

“For what?”

Boylan looked at him. “What are we out for?”

“Apparently the column is out for blood, but I thought you might mean

breakfast.”

“The column will get blood, right enough,” said Boylan, “whether it gets

breakfast or not. What's the news, I wonder?”

“I've forgotten my relation to news.... Where are you going?”

“To see if that beef-train is in. I suppose you'll have rigged up a

turkish bath and be in the cooling room by the time I get back.”

Peter fed the horses and had tea and black bread served for two, by

the time Boylan called from a distance: “Put on the griddle, Peter--a

regular steak.... I stopped in the farrier's on the way back and had it

anviled a bit. That's what kept me,” he added.

Peter tossed it in the pan. Their fire was in the turf at the door

of the fish shop. Boylan drew in close, having washed noisily, and

deposited the remaining provisions in the two saddle-bags. “We're fixed

for supper and breakfast,” he remarked, with a sigh.

“You said that the army that would win this war must win through famine.

The Russians had better begin--”

“I didn't say anything about Mr. B. B. Boylan--”

“Mr. Big Belt Boylan,” Peter muttered, twisting his face away from the

heat and sizzling smoke steam. The name held.

The huge Rhodes' man liked Peter more than the latter knew, and his

likings of this sort were deep and peculiar. Boylan was nearing fifty, a

man all in one piece--thick, ponderous, hard, scarred with _la viruela_,

a saber sweep, a green-blue arc in his throat where some dart or

arrow had torn its way in between vital columns. His head was bald and

wrinkled, but very large, his neck and jaw to match, his eyes a soft

blue that once had been his secret shame. Very often he had been called

into the public glare.

“I was so hungry once,” Boylan said, “that I've been a slave to the fear

of it ever since.” He referred to the Polar Failure. “Once in Farrel's

Island--we were four,” he added. “We drew lots to find out which one of

us we must eat. That _was_ a winter.... All you fellows may begin famine

as soon as you like. You'll come a long way before you arrive at the

personal familiarity of the subject earned by this same little fat

boy.... Turn it again, Peter.”

Samarc rushed past, speaking excitedly in French, and in the shadows

behind they saw the eyes of Spenski, sympathetic and wistful.

“What did he say, Peter?” Boylan asked quickly. “Samarc's French is like

my Russian.”

“He said his face had been fixed for tea--and toast with Spenski--until

we began to steam up the place. Now he's gone to the feed-wagons.”

“Why, bless the ruffian, there's enough here for four.”

“I told him that, but you know Samarc.”

Little Spenski's voice now drawled from behind.

“We're getting low, anyway. It was right for him to fill the bags this

morning, though very kind of you to offer--”

“I don't like that, Spenski,” said Boylan. “Bull cheek for four was my

order. Why, you fellows--”

Boylan was going to say how consistently generous with rations and

private provisions the two Warsaw men had been, but got tangled in

the language. Peter helped him. Boylan wouldn't have it otherwise, and

quartered the steak, serving Spenski and covering the fourth with a tin.

It was an excellent feast. For five days these two pair had cautiously,

timidly even, stood for each other in that reserved way that

much-weathered men integrate a memorable friendship.... Samarc returned.

They helped him cache his provisions and drew him into the quadrangle

around the fire. There was time for an extra pot of tea, and the dawn

rose superbly. That day in the column Spenski was called into the

personal escort of Kohlvihr, Boylan accompanying. Samarc and Peter rode

as usual with the forward infantry--just behind the van, headquarters

back a quarter of a mile.

“Tell me about Spenski,” Peter asked. “He's an interesting chap. I heard

him talking to you about the stars last evening, before supper, pointing

out Venus and Jupiter.”

“He'll grow on you,” said Samarc, their talk in French. “He did in my

case. We've been together six years in and out of the big instrument

shop in Warsaw--Bloom's. We make a camera, microscopes and even a

telescope now and then. I invented a rather profitable objective for the

Blooms, for which they gave me a position, and a small interest that has

kept me from wandering far from Warsaw. In the first days they told me

about Spenski--his remarkable workmanship--and pointed out the wiry,

red-headed little chap with the quick imperative smile you've seen. We

got on well together from the first. It has been no small thing for

me that he likes my ways. I got him in this service, by the way, and I

don't know whether I'm very proud of that. He's a lot more famous as a

workman now than six years ago.”

“What is his work?” Peter asked.

“A lens-maker. His art is one of the finest of the human eye--requires

genius to begin with. Spenski's craft on a glass in many cases doubles

the price of the instrument. No one knows better what kind of a workman

he is, nor can follow his particular finish with a keener or more

appreciative eye, than old Dr. Abbe himself. Spenski has letters from

that old master.

“He knows all sorts of out-of-the-way things--like the star stuff. He'll

name for you scores of the vague, indefinite ones, not to speak of the

larger magnitudes, which he can call by color at any hour of the night.

It was this passion of his for the stars which showed him his work as a

boy. That started him fabricating glasses to see them better. He has

a supreme eye for light, circles and foci, and a brain that just plays

with heavy mathematics--the most abstruse calculations. Yet, you see, he

carries it all with the ease of a boy. I think men who come with a task

to do are like that. It's part of them. They don't feel the weight of

what they know, because it's all through them--not localized. You might

be with Spenski an hour or a week and never know that he was more than

just a mechanic--if you were just a mechanic.”

“It's very interesting,” said Peter, as charmed with his companion as

with the man he talked about.

“A little while ago Spenski found his girl, and I would have

withdrawn--for that is the high test,” Samarc resumed. “But Spenski

managed to keep us both without strain.... And then the war came

along. A blight fell upon all workmanship in an hour. I had been on the

military side of things from a boy, a matter of training and heredity.

Of course, I would go. Spenski looked around the shop when I told him

this. It was stricken, the machinery cranking down, the faces of the

men white and troubled. 'I'll go, too,' said he.... I reminded him of

her.... 'She wouldn't be interested in a chap who remained at home,' he

said.... I told him of the big plants in Switzerland and America, where

he could be of great value, but he was not tempted. 'I want to go if

they'll take me in your battery,' was his last word on the matter.

“Of course I saw to that, but there's no work here, and there won't be,

that can bring out Spenski's real values. Think of using such a man

to feed the hopper of a rapid-fire piece.... But it's good to have him

along. Spenski's a hard habit to break.”

That night, when Boylan and Mowbray were together again, but a little

apart from the others, Big Belt said:

“Say, Peter, that little Spenski is a card. A good little chap, smart

and modest. I like him.”

“I found Samarc worth cultivating, too,” said Peter.

Chapter 2

Marching south along the Vistula with the old-fashioned army--no

airships, nothing that intensely puzzled Mowbray in this service--that

is, in the exteriors of it--nothing but earth poundage and earth power,

a game that had much to do with earth and not with heaven. Seven quiet

days of marching in splendid summer weather, the raw peasant soldiery

well fed and comfortable, becoming a unit, all outbreak of separate

consciousness anywhere more and more impossible, hardening to the

peculiar day's work. They were used to heavy work, but this was a

particular task that needed specific hardening of feet and lungs; also

the personal idea in each breast required numbing. The physical aim was

to make men light for heavy work; to give them a taste of the joy and

the true health of the field--before the entrainments, the haste and

the fighting; but the psychological purpose was to make each atom

forget itself, to weave it well into the fabric of the mass. Kohlvihr's

division had to be moved; very well, let the movement gather the values

of practice marching as well.

A raw division, with a scattering of Poles and Finns mixed with the

straight Slav peasantry and regarded by the Russian war office, as Peter

Mowbray understood at once, a ticklish proposition. The cement for

this new service was “green” as yet; it had to set, required frequent

wettings of fine humor and affiliation. The marvel to Mowbray was that

the thousands fell for it. They had practically all left something

that was life and death to them--land, labor, women, children. Each

had established the beginnings at least of a personal connection in

the world, and this relation had to be rubbed out. What had they been

promised to take its place? _Freedom_, doubtless. But intrinsically they

were free men.

Peter recalled what Fallows had said: that properly fathered this

peasantry might be led into a citizenship and virtue that would change

the world. Instead they were to be impregnated with every crime. With

such thoughts Peter felt the spirit of Berthe Wyndham awake in his mind.

Seven days and not a breath from the outer world. The correspondents

were allowed to move in and out of Kohlvihr's headquarters; and, though

they paid richly for everything, were treated well, and regarded as

guests by the staff officers. Peter had met Kohlvihr in Warsaw before

the thought of war--a good-tempered, if dull and bibulous old man, he

had seemed in the midst of semi-civilian routine; but a different party

here afield. Peter recalled the saying of old sailors that you never

know a skipper until you ship under him.

Moments of evening, in the sharp hazes of wood smoke, when the whole

army seemed nestling into itself, laughing, covering its nostalgia,

putting on its strength, Peter met in certain moments the advisability

of turning his back upon Boylan and Spenski and Samarc. The

extraordinary nature of Berthe Wyndham would flood home to him, as to

one to whom it belonged, very dear but very far.... He would smile when

he thought of _The States_ and the Old Man.... “He thinks I'm clutched

in the ripping drama and waiting for blood,” he muttered, “that I am

burning to stop the breath of the outer world with my story of gore and

conquest.... But I'm eating his bread. I won't betray. There must be a

wise way to feed the red melodramatic receptivity of the cities and at

the same time to tell the real story.”

He stood in the midst of square miles of men and military engines. On

every road other Russian forces moved southward and to the southeast.

The railroads groaned with troops, for the most part in a better state

of preparation than Kohlvihr's division. Rumors reached the staff, as

they neared the Galician border, that the Austrian fields below were

already bleeding; finally word came, as they turned eastward, that they

were to entrain at Fransic and make a junction with the main Russian

columns preparing to invade Galicia from the northeast.

On the night before they entered Fransic, Mowbray awoke, and saw a

figure sitting in the doorway of the little hut assigned them for

quarters. It was Spenski, his face upturned in the starlight. He sat so

still that Peter slipped out from the blankets (which covered Boylan as

well) and took his place beside the lens-maker. Spenski was facing

the east. The street of the little hill town lost itself in a sharp

declivity just ahead; the nearer huts were low. The whole east was naked

to the horizon and an indescribable glory of starlight.

“Aren't they amazing?” Spenski whispered. “It must be nearly morning,

for those are the winter stars. I think they must have wakened me up. Do

you know them?”

“Just the first magnitudes. They are more brilliant than I have ever

known.”

Orion and a great kite of suns stood out with new and flashing power.

“I never saw that huge _W_ before--” said Peter.

“You don't mean Cassiopeia? Her chair isn't there, but over to the

north--”

“No, no--_there_. Rigel, the upper right corner, down to the left, the

Dog-star; up to Betelguese, down to the left again to Procyon, and up to

the brightest of all--the stranger, not usually there--”

Spenski clutched him. “I was watching the bigger configuration, and

didn't notice. Your stranger is the planet Saturn in transit between

Taurus and Orion. Saturn completes the _W_, and the _W_ stands for--”

“War, possibly,” said Peter.

There was a growl just now from Boylan: “Come on back to bed, you

star-gazers.”

“Saturn is so far and moves so slowly,” the little man whispered, “that

the _W_ will not be deranged for many months.”

The hurry call for Kohlvihr came as expected in Fransic. The first

sections of the divisions were entrained the next day--an end to summer

road-work.... A day and night of intolerable slowness in a vile coach,

and on the following noon the troop-train was halted, while a string

of Red Cross cars drew up to a siding to give the soldiers the right of

way; a momentary halt--the line of passing windows filled with cheering,

weeping nurses.

Just one reposeful face--as both trains halted a second or two. It was

the face of one who seemed to understand the whole sorry story, already

to be contemplating the ruin ahead. Her hands were folded, the eyes

intent upon the distance rather than the immediate faces of men. Mowbray

could not articulate. Above all he wanted to meet her eyes, to put back

the light of the present in them, but it was neither sound nor gesture

that accomplished it; rather the storming intensity of anguish in his

mind. His train jerked, her eyes found him, her arms raised toward him,

lips parted. It became the one, above all, of the exquisite pictures in

his consciousness, and the reality passed so quickly--gone, and no word

between them.

Thus her colors came to him again--the mystic trinity of white and gray

and black--all he had since known and loved added to the mystery of

their first meeting. It was like an awakening to the rack of thirst

after one has dreamed of a spring of gurgling water--the swift passing

of that face of tender beauty and fortitude, that fair brow, gray eyes

and black hair....

Boylan was looking deeply into his face.

“Good God, man, you're a ghost. What is it, Peter?”

“It struck me queer to see a trainload of girls down here in the field,”

said Peter quite steadily.

“Well, if a trainload of strange women can do that to you--here's hoping

we never do Paris together.”

Little Spenski opposite had seen the outstretched hands, and Peter saw

that he had seen.

Chapter 3

And now a rainy field. Two days of cold wind and rain after the

cattle-cars; a different tone and temper from the men, coughing instead

of laughter at night-fall. Another nameless village--Galician, now, for

the border had been crossed, and the stillest night Peter Mowbray had

so far known among the troops. It was a listening army--the far distance

breathing just the murmur of cannonading.

He moved about within the cordon of head-quarter sentries, studying

the edges of the bivouac as the rain and the darkness fell. Kohlvihr's

division was but a tooth of the main army now; the whole region was

massed with Russians marching westward; but still the outfit from Warsaw

was enough, all that he could encompass of the mystery of numbers.

Others had met the enemy, but these were still virgin. They were

listening.

Their faces looked white in the thickening dark, noses pinched and the

rest _beard_.... Hair--it was like some rapidly ripening harvest in

the command, different each day, making the faces harder and harder to

memorize. Mowbray had been disgusted at first--faces like changelings,

atrocious like chickens. But the beards were taking form now--all

gradations of yellow and red and black--many of that gray-yellow which

loses itself in the middle distance and becomes a blur. How he hated

hair like that!

The next day dawned bright and cold. At ten Kohlvihr, in the midst of

the southern wing, brushed the tail of an Austrian force in its turning.

The engagement was sharp exhilaration to Peter; perhaps it was to

certain of the soldiers; yet it was the first. Its touch of blood

quivered through Kohlvihr's command not yet assimilated, stirred this

raw entity with deep inexplicable passion.

The correspondents were riding with the staff; the point of the van was

moving below in plain sight when its baptism fell. Kohlvihr licked his

white lips, the upper lip uncontrollable like a deprived drunkard's.

Below a skirmish was spreading out, the commands trumpeting back their

messages. Mowbray turned. A little battery of mountain guns was racing

forward through the infantry column, the drivers yelling for _gangway_.

It was like a small town's fire department in action. Now the infantry

poured down the rocky slopes that bordered the old iron road. Peter

turned quite around in the saddle. The murmur in the air was queer--like

something wrong below in a ship at sea. Kohlvihr's face interested him,

the skirmish lines and their reinforcements, the voice of Boylan (though

his faculties were too occupied to catch that rush of humorous comment

in English); the mountain guns interested him, and the sudden racket of

Russian riflery below.

Now one of the peasant soldiers was running up the slope from the van

toward the staff. He was bare-headed, shocky-haired and bearded, making

queer, high sounds like a squirrel as he ran--quite out of order

and amazed at himself. He would have been struck down by his nearest

neighbor ten days later, felled with the nearest officer's sword, but

there was funk and a bit of dismay in the heart of the raw division that

suffered the soldier to make his way to the staff.

Lifting his legs lumberingly, he held fast to his left wrist, where a

bullet had started the blood. He held the wound high, like a trophy,

the blood spurting, crying about it.... This was sudden discovery of

something the army had started out to find, but had forgotten in the

length of days. This was the red fleece--its drips of red were in each

raw soul now. A little way farther and the staff awoke. An officer

spoke. The peasant was caught and booted quiet. Kohlvihr licked his lips

to keep them still. He perceived that Mowbray's eyes had fastened upon

his mouth. The lips opened again. The order came forth for the soldier

to be flogged.... It was their particular friend, Dabnitz, a lieutenant

of the staff, who was given the execution of this order.

Chapter 4

The four were much together for a few days after that, Samarc and

Spenski not yet assigned to their battery. They learned each other in

those few days as men often fail to learn the hearts of their immediate

associates during years. There was fighting--scattered, open, surprising

often to one out of touch with the points and the scouting. Different

towns every day, and a continual giving of territory on the part of the

Austrians.

“This is not the main fighting at all,” said Boylan. “This is but the

edge of the game. It won't break into print. The big stuff is farther

on. These that we meet are the Austrian columns hurrying forward. This

territory is ours for the marching through. We'll catch it later--and

this will be forgotten.”

Samarc had known these towns that the Russian column was passing

through, yet he had to ask the names, because of the destruction.

The Austrians would always destroy in haste before leaving, and more

leisurely the Russians would destroy. It seemed to affect Samarc, as

some landmark reopened from its ruin for his eyes.

“It seems to say,” he told the lens-maker, “'I was this at one time, and

now I must go.'” Orders came for Samarc and Spenski, but they were not

to be remotely stationed, since their battery was assigned to Kohlvihr's

division--a different camp but the same field. Few words about the

separation, but each of the four understood.... Night and day, the dead

had been with them in the recent days--in such richness and variety

they could not escape, could not cover them, and something from the

dead entered their hearts. To Peter--so queerly were his thoughts

running--the memorable incident of their last night together had to do

with an ant colony.

Supper was over, and they had tossed on a decayed log to keep up the

fire. A nest of ants was presently driven forth by the heat from the

soft heart of the wood. They found themselves hemmed in flame and turned

back, as Peter thought, to seek the treacherous shelter of the nest

again. It was not so; they were wiser than that, and marched forth in

scores once more, each carrying an egg in its jaws. Spenski swung the

end of the log out to the grass for them to make good their retiring. It

was all very sane and admirable. Peter respected them....

The dead were with them. They had not learned to forget. Spenski would

whimper in his sleep. The days did not fill him, wearied his body but

other faculties and potencies were restless at night. This man who could

grind a lens so that a line from the center of the earth to the center

of the sun would pass through it without chromatic aberration, was more

shocked than the other three by the cursory killing of the days, his

imagination intoxicated and sleep perverted. His companion who imagined

himself of coarser and heavier texture often placed his hand upon the

dreaming one. Spenski would start, open his eyes and say, “Thanks,

Samarc.”

Continual rocking through the long days, and the rumbling of the earth

from the artillery forward. A mountain country of sharply cool nights,

of cool bright days--the scent of cedar and balsam, good water, steady

skirmishing--food just a bit scarce so that the peasants snapped and

bolted, showing sharp about the eyes. It was not hunger--just the lean

kind of fare. Peter often watched the halted columns at night as the

men sprang to the feeding. Supper fires burst forth at the drop of the

rifles. Not so raw now, the Warsaw contingent, a military eye would

remark--getting ripe, in fact.

A week afterward, Boylan reported at supper that they would be permitted

to ride with the battery on the following day. In the meantime they had

not seen nor heard of the other pair. Fighting and marching from dawn to

nightfall usually; human nature refused effort after that. They were so

near dead at night that they laughed about it, and felt their faces

in embarrassment, sharp-boned and unfamiliar as the faces of the dead.

Mowbray's was still clean shaven. Young Dabnitz, the exquisite of the

staff, and a rather brilliant young Russian, was the only other who had

kept his razors in order. Perhaps a woman ruled his heart, as Berthe

Wyndham ruled Mowbray's.

Big Belt had lost his last reservation about his companion. He gave

everything to Peter that he had given to Lonegan and something more--for

the field called a little more, and perhaps Peter called a little more.

The extent of Boylan's loyalty had nothing to do with words or matters

of conduct so far, but it was a huge affair, a suggestion of which came

to the younger man from time to time and humbled him.

Twice during the first fortnight, Boylan had asked if this were

positively his first venture into the field with troops. “The reason I

ask,” he explained later, “is that you appear to have been on the job

before.”

This would have been a matter interesting to the Old Man of _The

States_, according to Lonegan's story.

“I miss the little guy,” said Boylan, referring to Spenski. They were

anticipating the next day with the battery.

“I miss Samarc, too,” said Peter.

Romanceless, remorseless routine. The day that followed was their

hardest, for they were pressing the Austrians, taking their punishment

but inflicting punishment, as if called of God to extinguish a nation.

The face of the world seemed turned from them, in Peter's fancy. He

marveled at what seemed the swift disintegration of an ancient worldly

establishment like Austria--going down unsung. It was not like a country

losing its identity, though that had to do with the facts; but rather

like a shadow passing, to be followed, not by sunlight, but by another

shadow of different contour and texture.

“We put such store by names,” he muttered, as he watched the Austrian

infantry give way before them, “and yet, the world will get on with

other names just the same.”

...There had been no chance for talk. They had merely pressed the hands

of their friends, something darkly melancholy about Samarc, as if his

eyes were in deep shadow, and something luminous in the eyes that shone

from the haggard face of Little Spenski. They looked forward to the

night, as men famished and athirst in a pit listen to the toil of

rescuers. Almost the last thing that Peter remembered was that the moon

came up before the sun had set. The rapid-fire battery was at work on

a hot smoky hill, the shrapnel and larger pieces still higher, and the

great masses of infantry moving below among the wind-driven hazes of the

valley, their long necklaces, of white puffs, showing and vanishing.

Mowbray's ears were deadened to all sounds save from the immediate

machine-guns and the big hounds above; to his eyes the swaying strings

of infantry smoke-puffs in the valley were spectral and soundless.

The Russians had taken the little town of Judenbach in the early

afternoon, but the Austrians gave them a stand two miles beyond, finding

solid position in a range of craggy hills. The Russians had not cared to

leave them there over night, but the dislodgment proved difficult. The

unlimbering of the batteries toward the end of the day on the shoulders

of a thickly-wooded mass (from which Peter watched the infantry and

the moonrise in daylight), was the final effort of the day to drive the

enemy farther afield from Judenbach.

The two infantries were contending; gray Russian lines in the bottom

land and already advancing up the slopes. Day after day, smitten and

replenished--tillers of land becoming the dung of the land. Mowbray had

always pitied the infantry, and watched them now with unspeakable awe

and depression--moving up the slopes, lost in their white necklaces of

skirmish-fire, sprayed upon with steel vomit from the Austrian machines.

Samarc's battery was idle. It was often so, Boylan reported, when the

enemy's duplicate pieces were busy.

Now withering--those gray Russian lines. They diminished, gave way, a

thin ghostly pattern of the whole, falling back. An Austrian sortie of

yellow-brown men to finish the task.

“That's _our_ cue,” Big Belt whispered.

The officers were already finding the range and fall. Samarc's machine

was set, before his superior spoke. Peter saw what a week had done for

him. Samarc seemed old at the task, already to have grown old. Spenski

at the hopper--and the mutilating racket on. Between fire, Peter could

not hold in mind the inconceivable magnitude and velocity of these

sounds. His brain seemed to plow under, as it does the great events

of pain, the impress of hideous suffering which the proximity of the

machines caused. Yet at every firing the damnable things hurt him more.

Fast beyond count, as the threads break in a strip of canvas torn with

one movement--yet each crackling thread here meant projected steel.

They saw their work on the Austrian infantry lines. Yet always more

infantry would come forth, and in the silence following the machines,

the gray Russian lines stole forward again. Such was the slow battle

vibration.

A company of sappers was below, opening the wood of the slope, so that

the machine fire would not be impeded in case the Austrians drove back

the infantry beyond the hollows at the bottom of the valley. A hundred

yards down they were working like beavers among the trunks of cedar and

balsam, when a shrapnel broke among them. The Russian higher batteries

had been trying the same game among the Austrian emplacements, but could

not see results.

All battery men near the two Americans knew well that the Austrians

would note _that_ explosion of their shrapnel, and would relate the

range to the higher positions above. That one shot showed the Russian

artillerymen that their position was untenable. It was not that the

Austrians could see the damage they inflicted in one company of sappers,

but that the shattering blow in plain sight from their position would

show the exact means to displace the higher pieces that devastated their

infantry.

“We've got to get out of here,” Boylan whispered. Again as he spoke

the orders to retire came quietly as a bit of garrison gossip, and as

coldly. Horses came running down for the ammunition carts; every muscle

of man and beast had its work now.

In thirty or forty seconds Austrian shrapnel would land higher. Peter

was tallying off the seconds, wondering if they would get clear.... At

this moment he noted that the moon had come up and that the sun was

not yet sunk. The two on the eastern and western rims of the world were

almost of a size and color, very huge and alike, except that one dazzled

the eyes--the difference between incandescence and reflection. The whole

dome was lost in florid haze. He almost laughed at what followed in

his mind, so strange is the caravan of pictures that hurries through in

action. It was the beauty above and ghastly waste of the infantry that

brought back to his brain the reason and decency of the ants in the

burning log--their order in contrast to this chaos....

The Austrians were workmen. Their searching shrapnel had been quite

enough. Samarc's battery had begun to move, when they landed in the

heart of it. All was changed about, and new. The silence was like a deep

excavation, and the smell of fresh ground was in the air.

Peter did not see Boylan. He arose, half crawled up the torn ground to

the place where Spenski and Samarc had stood. They were some distance--a

saving distance for Mowbray--when he saw Samarc arise, his face sheeted

in red. Samarc was staring about for Spenski. Presently, Peter followed

the eyes of Samarc and saw the little man--half down, but looking up

toward his friend, the eyes wide open; also Spenski's mouth, and the

most extraordinary smile in the red beard.

Peter crawled a step nearer. There was no voice yet. He was tranced

before this meeting of the companions, each of whom saw none but the

other. Spenski had been partly kneeling, but as Samarc approached, his

head bowed slowly down, and the smile was gone.

“Come on--they'll do it again!”

Peter heard the words--but did not know who spoke them--possibly Boylan

from behind, possibly _he_ had said it. He had not seen Samarc's lips

move.

The voice was an offense in that silence.

Now Peter saw none but Spenski, until Samarc reached him, lifted,

called. Peter saw the body raised from the ground to Samarc's arms--saw

the little man's body open upon his friend like a melon that has rotted

underneath.

Chapter 5

All went black for Peter. The slope rose up and took him. For an

eternity afterward he felt someone tugging at him--hands of terrible

strength that would not let him die, would not let him sleep. After that

a familiar voice began calling at intervals.

“Hello,” said Peter at last. “What have I been doing?”

“Not anything that you've pulled before. Is this an old habit?”

“What?”

“Passing out unhurt--lying like a log for an hour or two?”

“No, it's a new one. Where are we?”

“Judenbach. It's past supper time--”

Peter sat up, wobbled. The terrible hands steadied him again. He knew

now what had lamed him.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“I was wondering what hit me?”

“Now, you're getting glib again,” said Boylan. Peter's reserve had

interposed. His absence had something to do with her, but he could not

remember. “Where is she?” had got away from him as he crossed the border

back into the racking physical domain. He didn't like that.

“Did I say anything?”

“Nothing that will be used against you,” Boylan observed. “As for what

hit you--that's the mystery. Not a scratch in sight.... I was behind.

You were standing still as a sentry after that shrapnel. Presently you

bowled over--”

“That shrapnel?”

“Yep--”

There was an instant of silence; the picture returned and wrung a groan

from Peter. All the energy of his life rebelled against _the fact_.

Boylan's hand tightened upon him. For the moment Mowbray was in a kind

of delirium.

“The moon had just come up,” he said, “like another sun. The real sun

was still in the sky from our hill.”

“I know. I was there. Cut it, Peter.”

“Where is Samarc?”

“In one of the hospital buildings, likely. I meant to find him as soon

as I could leave you--”

“I'll go with you.”

Big Belt fumbled in his saddled bags for a flask, brought it in one

hand, a cup of water in the other....

They were in the streets, very dark. Once they were caught in a swift

current of sheep driven in for the commissary. Judenbach sat on the

slope of a hill, a little city, its heart of stone, very ancient, its

“hoopskirts,” as Boylan said, made of woven-cane huts. Already the

stone buildings of the narrow main street were crowded with wounded.

The correspondents were not permitted far either way from headquarters.

Finally it was necessary to get Dabnitz of the staff to conduct them....

It had all been a jumble of ambulances at nightfall from the field, the

lieutenant said. Russian soldiers were not ticketed. Many faces on the

cots were bandaged beyond recognition. The three gave up at midnight,

Peter gaining strength rather than losing it in the later hours. Orders

were that the streets be emptied of all but sentries.

“No, nothing like that--” said Boylan, as Mowbray sank to the floor by

his blanket roll. “You haven't had supper--”

“Don't, Boylan.... I say, what do they do with the dead?”

Rain was pattering down; the smell of drugs reached them.

“It _does_ make a difference when you know one of them--doesn't it?....

God, man, we're cluttered with wounded. The dead are at peace--”

“I wonder what stars he's watching to-night?”

“Come, come. Peter--”

“I know.... I know, Boylan. Only it shows me something. He was a great

workman. There are things in the world that can't be done because he's

gone. There are others like him. He had a girl. He had a friend. He had

us--”

Boylan decided that talking was good. He listened and prepared soup.

“And to-morrow they're at it again,” said Peter.

“It won't look the same in the morning--”

Peter did not answer.

“Anyway, you didn't bring on the war, Peter--”

“It makes a man cold with that kind of cold a supper-fire don't help.”

“Peter, you've got me stopped with your moods--like a woman. Women were

always too profound for Mr. B. B. Boylan--”

“Sorry. You've been a prince. I'll do better now. I'll get out of it.

Little shock--that's all. I think it wasn't so much physical. Something

changed all around. I've been taking things as I found them so long.

That helps to bring on a war--”

Boylan glanced at him narrowly.

Peter laughed. “I'm all right. Head's working.”

Big Belt sighed. “I loved that little guy, too. God, I'd run east to

Asia and keep on running rather than meet his girl.”

Peter drank hot soup and slept. Next morning it was like a hard problem

that one has slept upon and awakened with the process and answer

straight-going. They had not searched ten minutes (calling “Samarc”

softly among the cots where the faces were bandaged) before a hand came

up to them. It was Peter who took it; and as their hands met, the whole

fabric of the man on the cot broke into trembling. They understood.

Samarc had been lying there rigid with his tragedy. Peter's touch had

been enough to break the dam of his misery.

“_I have ceased to kill,_” he said.

The head was twice as big with bandages; yet under that effigy, so

terrible was the intensity of the moment, Peter became conscious of ruin

there, also of a sudden icy cold in the morning air. Samarc's powerful

hand still clutched his. The voice that had emerged from under the

cloths was still in his ears. It had seemed to come as water from a

pipe--loosely, the faucet gone. The hand was unhurt.

“_...He came in the night. I did not speak--but my heart was fighting

against the guns. He was moving here and there. He turned to me, as if I

had suddenly cried out, 'What shall I do?'...'You can cease to kill,' he

said._”

Boylan was watching Peter. His face turned gray.

They received the intelligence of the words, as they came, although at

another time the mouthing would have been inarticulate as wind in one of

Judenbach's archaic street-lamps.

“I'll stay with him, Boylan,” said Peter, choosing the hardest thing,

but Big Belt would not leave, though the Russian columns were moving

in the street--off to renew the battle among the hills. The two sat by

until Samarc slept.

* * *

They were in the street again, moving close to the walls, for the

cavalry was crowding the narrow highway. They crossed finally to a

stone-paved area at the side of Judenbach's main building. Their feet

were upon the stone flags of this court, when Dabnitz suddenly hurried

forward, with a gesture for them to stand back.

“Just a moment, my friends,” he said. “A little formality, but very

necessary--”

Peter lifted his eyes, perceived three men standing bare-headed against

the wall of head-quarters, twenty paces away. One of them exclaimed, his

voice calm but penetrating:

“We are not spies. We do not care to turn our backs. We are not afraid

to die, for we have made our lives count--”

It was the voice of a public speaker; the voice of a man making good

many words.... Dabnitz stepped between Boylan and Mowbray, stretching

out his arms before them. It was all in an instant. They saw Dabnitz's

apologetic smile--and a Russian platoon at their right, rifles

raised--then the ragged volley.

Each of the three fell differently.

Chapter 6

Boylan and Peter sat together in the ante-room of headquarters. They did

not speak. Peter was getting down to the quick. He thought many things

which a man never tells another man, and seldom tells a woman; yet they

were matters of truth and reason, no sentiment about them. He recalled

many incidents of early years in which his mother had tried to teach

him sensitiveness and mercy. Until now her effort seemed to have been

wasted. It had been more simple and appealing to him to follow his

father's picture of manhood. Possibly his mother had wearied of pitting

her will against his. He had grown up under his father's control and

ideal. As it looked to him now, he had become all that was obvious and

average and easy; while his mother's passion had been for him to become

one of the singular and precious and elect.... He would never have seen

this so clearly had it not been for Berthe Wyndham. She had given him a

kind of new birth, taken up the work wherein his mother had failed....

Dabnitz came in. The young staff-officer was handsome, soldierly,

black-eyed. His manner was one of enfolding cheerfulness. He had

proved fair and kindly, temperate in his tastes and delicate in his

appreciations of humor and natural effects. He could express himself

fluently in Russian, German, English and French, but was a caste-man to

the core, a militarist and autocrat. As such he proved rather appalling

to Peter Mowbray on this day.

“Is General Kohlvihr out with the fronts?” Boylan asked.

“He's in the field, but not at the front. We got the point yesterday,

you see. I'd rather be in the van every day than left to these matters

of clean-up--”

Peter looked up at him. “Is there much of this to do?”

“I'm afraid so. They work among the hospitals. You don't catch many of

them in the ranks--”

“Perhaps they would rather tend the wounded than to make the wounds.”

Dabnitz smiled cheerfully. “They're afraid of their hides. When a man

does a lot of talking, he is generally shy on action--”

Peter saw the ease of the acceptance of this view on the part of the

others; saw how clearly it was the view of the military man.

“And yet it was a clean-cut death of that talker and his two companions

you just executed--”

“An exception now and then,” Dabnitz granted.

“How do you catch them?”

“We have a system at work for that purpose--everywhere, especially in

the hospitals. There isn't much temporizing when we get them.”

Peter Mowbray's skull prickled with heat and his face was cold with

sweat.

“What do they preach?” he managed to ask.

“Sometimes for men to rise and go home; sometimes for them to cease to

kill, and sometimes to shoot down the officers. It isn't all that a man

has to do now to lead his men forward,” Dabnitz observed. “He must do

that, of course, but all the danger isn't in front. It doesn't follow

that a man has turned his back upon the enemy nowadays--if he happens to

be found with a wound in the back.”

“Were these--these that you put out this morning--working in the

hospitals?”

“Yes.”

Peter turned away.

“In a good many cases we bring a man to his feet again from a bad

wound--to find him not a soldier but a damned anarchist.”

“It's expensive and cumbersome also to carry such a hospital system

afield,” Peter observed.

Dabnitz did not catch the irony. “Yes, it would be cheaper and simpler

to put a hard-hit soldier out of his misery--”

Boylan, watching Peter's face, suddenly arose, suggesting that they ride

out toward the fighting. ....When they were alone, he added:

“I know you don't want the front to-day, but it was very clear that I'd

better get you out of there....Peter, did you ever kill a man?”

“No.” The question did not seem wild to either of them--there by the

open court of Judenbach.

“I knew a man who did. I saw him getting whiter and whiter like your

face--and looking into his victim's eyes in that queer surprised way you

looked at Dabnitz. It wasn't in the field; in a city bar-room. I didn't

look for what happened--but I knew something was coming. The fool went

on talking, talking. The other watched him, and when all the blood was

burned out of him....Great God, here I am talking blood--”

“It's in the air,” said Peter. “It's hard to breathe!.... No, I won't

go down front to-day. I wish I could go back--back--oh, to the clean

Pole--no, to some little snowy woods in the States....Boylan, does it

suffocate you?”

“It's different from anything I knew,” said Boylan. “It's so damned

businesslike. Something's come over the world. War was more like a

picnic before. I never saw it like this. I believe we've gone crazy.”

They stood before the main building, just at the entrance of the stone

court--halted by the hideous outcry that reached them from another

building just a few doors below. It was as if a strong man were being

murdered by torture. The big cannons boomed up the narrow cobble-paved

road from the field. As far as they could see in either direction, the

street was crowded with soldiers, stepping aside for artillery going

south, and the stream of ambulances coming in from the front. Passing

them now from the street into the court was a cortege, little but

grim--a Cossack trooper leading two bare-headed men by a rope attached

to his saddle, a Cossack non-commissioned officer walking behind with

raised pistol. Both the prisoners were young, one a mere boy, yet he was

supporting the elder. Peter's eyes turned to the blank wall of the main

building where Dabnitz had been busy as they passed. To the right,

in the gloom from the walls, was a row of iron gratings, the windows

knocked out--darkness under the low stone lintels.

Peter had not noticed before this dim square, within the square. His

mind dwelt upon it now in the peculiar way of the faculties, when

thoughts are too swift and too terrible to bear....It was like something

he had seen before, the dark little square. Yes, it was like part of a

recess yard he had known in an old school-building years ago....

He couldn't keep off the reality long. In every direction the murderous

army--no song, no laugh, no human nature, no love, no work, but death.

He was imprisoned. And somewhere near or far in the midst of such

a chaos, was Berthe Wyndham. Could she live in this?.... Peter was

suicidal, very close to that, a new thing to him. Queerly he realized

that death would be easy for himself, simple, acceptable. For there was

no escape. They would not let him go. There was no place that one could

go out of the army. Not even the dead go back.... It would not be fair

to her. She might live, and call to him afterward. He did not think she

could live, but there was that chance. He thought of his mother--quite

as a little boy would, his lip quivering.... He started at the touch of

Boylan's hand.

“I'll tell you what we'll do,” Big Belt said. “We'll write, Peter. We'll

get out the machines to-day. We'll write a story--just as if we could

file it on a free cable. It will do us good. We'll tell the story--”

“We'd have to eat it....Boylan, if I should tell this story on paper,

the Russians would burn it and me and the house in which it was

written....No. I must work better than that. Come back. I want

Dabnitz--”

Boylan drew him face about.

“You're not going to--”

“No--no. I wasn't thinking of killing him. It wouldn't do any good.

One would have to kill all the officers and save enough energy for the

Little Father at the last. No, I want him to help me--”

They found him at headquarters.

“Lieutenant Dabnitz,” Peter said, his hand upon the Russian's shoulder,

speaking very quietly, “I feel like a fool doing nothing all day

long--and so much to do. I want you to take me over to that hospital

Samarc is in, and set me officially to work. Let me be orderly,

anything, to-day. I want to help, if you'll forgive me--”

“Gladly, Mr. Mowbray. I'm sure they'll be very glad. Of course, they are

always short-handed in the hospitals.”

“Thanks.”

Boylan's heart gave a thump at the new light in Mowbray's eyes.

“I'll go along, too,” he said. “I'm the daddy of them all, when it comes

to lifting.”

A ragged platoon volley crashed from the court as they entered the

street. Peter's steps quickened.

Chapter 7

Of course, they did not know it in _The States'_ office, neither the Old

Man nor his managing editor, but a way had been found to _rock_ Peter

Mowbray. Indeed he would have been rocked to pieces had he not found his

work that day in Judenbach. ....When no one was listening, he would talk

to the wounded. Peter discovered that there was a woman in him, as many

a field-man has discovered. In fact he came to believe that we are all

mixed men and women, and that it is the woman in us that suffers most.

He had a suspicion that there was a woman in Boylan, and had to smile

just there. He sank into the work, and saved himself. Samarc appeared to

be asleep.

He would have laughed to have heard his own talk afterward. A man does

not remember what he says to a loved horse, or to a dog that looks up in

passing. Innocent as that, Peter's sayings to the wounded and dying. Had

there been spies about, the American would have been counted eminently

safe. He had to talk; his heart was so full; it was part of the action

that saved him. All the time there was in the background of his mind a

steady amazement at himself--something of his, aloof, watchful, that was

not exactly ready to accede to all this change and emotion, and yet was

not strong enough to prevent.

Twice through the long forenoon he saw a little black-whiskered orderly,

eyes dark and wide and deep, his nose sensitive and finely shaped, his

shoulders unsoldierly. Once his cap fell as he went to lift a pan, and

Peter saw as noble a brow as ever dignified a man. He went to him and,

as he stood there, he found there was nothing to say.

“Who are you?” the other asked.

“That's what I was trying to think to ask you?” Peter said with a smile.

“I am Mowbray, an American correspondent--”

“Why are you here?” He pointed to the cots.

“I had to do something.”

“The misery called to you?”

“Perhaps. To be sure, I'd better say my own misery made me come.”

They talked in French.

“It is all the same. You are not a beast.”

“I'm not sure,” said Peter.

“That is good, too. I'm glad you have come. All morning I have watched

you....”

“You did not answer me. Who are you?”

“I am Moritz Abel.”

He held a wash basin in one hand, a bit of linen in the other--this

man who had done such a poem that the glory of the future flashed back

through it, to sustain and to be held by men. It was a queer moment.

Facing each other, Mowbray thought of Spenski--as if the little

lens-maker stood behind the narrow shoulders of the poet.... Was it only

the little red-headed body that they had killed? Would the immortal

come back with a new story of the stars? Thus Peter found himself

thinking of Spenski, with this lover of new Russia before him. And would

the destroyers slay this one too?... Now his humanity came back in a

cloud, and he shuddered at the thought of Russia murdering the man who

wrote _We Are Free_.... Perhaps it was the woman in him that made him

say:

“I hope _you_ live through the long night, Monsieur.”

Chapter 8

Moritz Abel stepped nearer. In the silence Peter grew embarrassed.

What he had said would sound without footing since the poet did not

understand the trend of his thoughts. He meant to, add what _the long

night_ signified, and wanted his saying really known for what it was--an

utterance of pure passion against the destruction of genius. The other

replied, making all explanation unnecessary:

“I knew you for one of us. It is the long night, but it is a great honor

for us to be here and at work.”

“Where are your companions?”

The Russian smiled. “They are all about through the dark of the long

night. We may only signal in passing. In fact, I must go now--”

The surgeon in charge had entered. Peter went to Samarc's cot, steeling

himself. “Samarc,” he whispered, without bending, “Samarc--”

The wounded man stirred a little, moaned, but did not answer.... In the

far corner Boylan was moving cots (occupants and all) closer together

for the admission of more. His sleeves were rolled. Near him a little

woman, whose waist was no larger than the white revelation of Boylan's

forearm, was directing the way, the giant of the Polar Failure

struggling to please. Something of ease and uplift had come to Peter

from this, and from the passing of Moritz Abel. Silently battling with

Dabnitz, with Kohlvihr, with king's desire and the animal of men, was

this service-thing greater than all, greater than death.... A soldier

called and he went toward the voice. Presently Peter was jockeying him

into good humor with low talk.

All day the battle tortured the southern distance--the cannonading

nearer, as the hours waned. The Austrians were holding their own or

better. It was the fiercest resistance which the Russian columns had as

yet encountered. All afternoon wounded were brought back. It became more

and more difficult to move among the cots in the building. So it was

with all Judenbach that was not in ruins. Twice through the afternoon

there were volleys in the court below; and when the two went forth for

food, they saw a soldier carrying baskets of dirt from the street, and

covering the stone flags close to the main building.... And from that

grim house a little down the street, came at intervals, shocking their

senses, the hideous outcry as of murder taking place.... Boylan went

down into the field an hour before sunset, Peter back to the hospital.

“I'll see what I can find,” Big Belt remarked. “You're right to go back,

Peter. As for me, I can stand it better outdoors.”

Crossing the street, it seemed to Peter that he had been in Judenbach

certain ages, a reckonable space of eternity--despite the lowering sun

which calmly informed him that at this time yesterday the Austrians had

found the range of Samarc's battery with a shrapnel or two. Many things

had come to him. He wished as never before for a free cable.... Boylan

came in at dark and drew him away from Samarc's cot.

“I'll be back to-night,” Peter promised.

“...There's been no break in the check to-day,” Big Belt reported.

“Kohlvihr's division, and the immediate forces surrounding, are part

of the great right wing, and this right is holding up the whole Russian

command. I heard Kohlvihr explaining to the Commander's aide that the

Austrians here had been reinforced; that they gave us Judenbach for

the taking yesterday, in order to fall back into the hills beyond. The

center and left, it appears, is clear, ready to fight on to Berlin or

Budapest, but the whole line is held up for this right wing. Kohlvihr

is desperate. There'll be a hard pull to get across the hills

to-morrow--all hands, Peter.”

“This may be our last night in Judenbach then?”

“If killing a division will start a hole across that range of hills,

it's our last night--”

“I'll sit it out with Samarc,” Peter said.

“Go to it, if you think best. You were a mighty sick woman this morning.

Something in yonder helped you. I'll see you through for another

treatment.”

“Boylan, don't you stay up. You've roughed it to-day and been afield.

Don't let me spoil your sleep--with a big day ahead. It wasn't lack of

sleep that got my nerve this morning--”

“Oh, I'll yap around till bedtime,” said the other. “What does Samarc

say?”

“Something has come over him. Some one came to him last night and seemed

to drive a nail right into his thinking--pinned him.”

“He's turned against the killing?”

“Yes. And he'll be restless to-night, sleeping so much to-day.... At

least, he made the appearance of sleeping. I think he was shocked to

hear his voice.... His eyes are right enough. But below--”

“What made you think he had the appearance of sleeping?”

“It just occurred to me. He didn't want to take all my time. I whispered

his name several times--no answer. Once when I was leaving, his hand

reached up and touched my coat.”

“Is he hurt badly?”

“Not a thing in the body. It's between his throat and his eyes.... You

know I saw him last night after the shrapnel as he lifted--it was just a

sheet of blood. Afterward it was covered in cloth. I don't think he knew

until this morning, when he started to talk.”

“He was all knit to the little man,” Boylan said. “As good a pair as I

ever met afield.... Oh, I say, eat something--”

Peter smiled at the big fellow and turned to his soup and black bread.

He didn't say what he thought, but it had to do with his own field

companion this time.

* * *

...Midnight. Boylan had gone back to quarters. Peter's ward was low-lit

and still. ...The wounded man's hands waved before his bandage, as if to

detract attention from the windy blur of his utterance. Samarc wanted to

die.

“You know it was because of me that he came--” he repeated.

“But you mustn't suffer for that. Really, Samarc, a man couldn't have

been a better friend than you. Spenski would tell you so if he could.

These are times for men to _live_. I wanted to kill myself this morning.

You know I was behind you on the hill, too. That, and the tragedy all

about, and then they were murdering spies and martyring real Fatherland

men out in the court--as if there wasn't enough death afield. It was too

much for me. Old Boylan helped me, but if I hadn't come in to work,

I'd have shot my head off. Here--men dying hard and easy; men and women

serving; so much to do,--I got better. Death isn't everything. I'm not

a genius or a dreamer, man. I'm so slow at dreaming and brotherhood and

all that, that a woman once ran from me. But I saw to-day that death

isn't all. I don't know what else there is, but this is a sort of long

night, this war. A few of us are awake. If we are put to sleep--that's

all right--I mean knocked out, you know. But so long as we are not,

we've got to watch and root for the dawn. God, man, there is much to do.

We've got to make our lives count--”

He was bending forward talking very low. He thought from the pressure of

Samarc's hands that he was gaining ground. It was queer and laughable to

himself--this line of talk that came to him. He knew so well the pangs

of that suicidal suffocation, that he could talk for the very life of

the other. He added:

“A little black-whispered man looked up from his soap and towels this

morning. His hat fell off, and I saw he had come a long ways. He looked

at me again, and I spoke to him. Samarc, it was another of these little

whirlwinds of human force--a master workman like the man you loved.

“It was Moritz Abel who wrote _We Are Free_....

“And there are others--like Spenski and Abel--some of them dead--some to

die to-morrow. Do you think the good God would let them die so easily if

it wasn't all right? But we mustn't die without making our lives count.”

Peter's eyes were covered by slender hands. It was like passing a garden

of mignonette in the night, that fleeting perfume of the hands.

“Oh, Peter, how sweet to see you and hear your voice!”

It seemed that he became molten in her presence. A heavenly _adagio_

after a prolonged movement of sin and shame and every dissonance. It

was as if she had come from a bath of peace to him; another inimitable

moment in the life of his romance. He turned to her, holding fast to the

hand that was stretched toward him. He cleared his voice.

“Excuse me, Samarc,” he said.

III

THE HOUSE OF AMPUTATIONS

Chapter 1

They looked long into each other's faces. “You were wonderful as you

spoke of your friend. Did you know that, Peter?”

He turned away deprecatingly.

“Forgive me. Of course you didn't know.”

“...And you meant to come all the time?” he asked at last.

“Yes.”

“I should have known it.... That day--that day across the siding--why,

Berthe, it was almost more than I could stand. I had just been thinking

of you.”

“We were like two spirits who hadn't earned the right to be together,”

she said.

“I'm afraid it's dangerous now,” he answered. “One mustn't have a whim,

other than to extinguish the enemy. The army is afraid of itself. All

day--”

Though he checked himself, she knew his thought.

“Yes, all day, they murdered white-browed men in the court below.”

“Berthe--”

“Yes.”

“I want you to guard your life--as if it were mine--just that.”

All surroundings were melting away from them. She had never seen him

like this.... Even Samarc could not hear their whispers.

“You came like an angel, Berthe,--all I ever want of an angel. I tell

you I am proud.”

“Of what, Peter?”

“That I had sense enough to go a second time to the Square at Warsaw.”

“I'm glad, too.... If we were only in the winter stillness--”

They were silent. Samarc's hand came up to Peter, and drew him close.

It was clear that he could not bear the woman to hear his struggle for

speech. “Tell her about Spenski,” came to Peter's ears in the lipless

mouthing.

Berthe saw that Peter was ghostly white, as he lifted his head. She

thought it had to do with what the wounded man said.

Peter began at random, gathering his thoughts on the wing. Nothing hurt

him in quite the same way as that suggested havoc under the bandage.

He steadied himself, and talked of the little lens-maker. Strength came

from the joy he was giving Samarc.... It seemed that they were quite

alone. He told of the night of stars, of the little man's superb

sensitiveness.... She bent to Samarc at last.

“You wanted him to tell me?”

He nodded. There was something intensely pathetic in it all. Her eyes

were full of light.

“The story thrills me,” she whispered. “Oh, this is very far from a

hopeless world. What I have seen to-day--even the fortitude of infamous

men--manhood, black and white--the war within the war. Don't you see,

all Russia is out here in the wilderness casting forth her demon? We

must not mind blood nor death--for the result means the life or death of

the world's soul!”

Once she would have seemed very far and remotely high to Peter

Mowbray.... They had drawn a little apart from the cot.

“What made you so white?” she asked.

“It's my weakness. We rode together for days and quartered together. He

was so clean-cut. It's the way his words come. And he seems so utterly

bereft without the little man.”

She pressed his hand in understanding.

“Berthe, do you sleep? Do you take food? Are you well? Are they good to

you? Can you live through?”

“Yes, and what of you?”

“All is quite well with me. I can endure anything with the hope of

taking you home afterward.”

“We must be ready to give up that, too. It is hard; it's our ordeal--but

if the end should appear, we must find strength to look it in the face.

These are the times for heroics. Every real emotion that I have ever

known is a lie--if those who love each other well enough to love the

world--do not pass on. Why, Peter, you said the same to him--speaking

of his friend and Moritz Abel, 'Do you think the good God would let such

men die so easily, if it weren't all right?'”

“Did I say that?”

She drew back her head, looking him through and through.

“Peter, it's the child in you that I love. You're so much a man, and

they all think of you as a man, man--all your training to be a man--and

yet it's the child that a woman's heart sees and wants to preserve for

her own.”

“Do you see much of Moritz Abel?” he asked.

“Yes.... It was he who found you for me.”

Peter was watching her red lips now. It was like that morning in her

room, the tall flowers between. He did not hear what she was saying. The

room was dim. Samarc's face was turned from them. One man in a near

cot flung his arms about his head wearily, but his eyes were toward the

wall.... He caught her in his arms and loved the beauty of earth in her

face.

“...Peter, we must forget ourselves!”

“I can't forget you. I want you as you are,” he repeated in tumult.

“I want you here in the world--as you are now! We'll stand for what we

can't help. There's no use fighting the end if it comes. The greatest

thing here to a man will be the greatest thing after he's dead--that's

clear enough. But I haven't had you here--only a few minutes. I want the

winter stillness _on earth_--in the woods--not in some paradise yet.”

“Hush--I want it too. Oh, you can never know how much!... I had better

go now--”

“Not until I know all about you. To-morrow is to be the big day of the

battle. All may be changed. If it's a Russian victory, this is our last

night in Judenbach--”

“You will go out to the fronts?”

“Yes, for a little, but I shall watch how the day fares, so I can hurry

back.”

“To-day--we were just a stone's throw apart. I was in that building down

the street--the amputation cases.”

“Not the house where those cries come from?”

“Yes, we work there. Moritz Abel, Fallows, Poltneck, the singer, and

others.... This morning I thought I could not bear to live. It was as

you told him--about yourself. You see we had no anesthesia, except for

cases of life or death--among the officers.”

“And you came to me from a day like that?” he asked unsteadily, his

passion blurred, even the beauty of it. The chance of her living had

suddenly darkened.

“It was like coming home,” she whispered. “...In Warsaw before your

day--sometimes crossing the Square in the darkness--I used to think what

it would mean to come to a house of happiness, after a long cruel day.

It seemed too far from me; sometimes even farther than now. When I came

in here to-night, and heard your voice--I knew what it would mean to

come home. We must not ask too much. Many have never known what has been

given to us--in these few minutes.”

“We must not ask too much,” he repeated.

She saw that he had a vivid picture of her day in that house of

amputations, that the picture had stunned him.

“But, Peter, I have seen such courage to-day. It was a revelation. All

that I had seen of isolated courage before in the world--all was there

to-day, and ten times more, there in the blood and torture. And

Poltneck sang to them--sang to the maimed and limbless--sang through the

probings--with the sound of the cannon in the distance and more wounded

coming in. He sang of home and Fatherland--even of the old Fatherland.

The many love the old still; it is only the few who love the dream of

the new.... We must not ask too much. The new spirit is being born into

the world. This war is greater than we dream of. In Warsaw I could see

only the evil, but here--under everything--is the humble and the heroic

in man. Hate and soldiery are just the surface. That which is beneath

will be above--”

She was far from him now; the white flame in her face. He saw that he

could only go on through the days and work and wait and trust in the

God he had told Samarc to trust in. How easily--without an impress of

memory, he had said that; and how heroic to accomplish--for mere man.

He did not answer--just looked at her. He saw her turn and smile. Moritz

Abel was standing there.

“I cannot tell you--what it meant to me to see you two standing so,”

he said. “And this place of quiet--you two and your paradise!... Let me

see, it occurred to me to suggest--”

He found himself reluctant to finish. He had spoken lightly as if to

propose that they would be more comfortable in another room--but his

thoughts concerned the volleys in the court. They knew it.

“The staff knows me rather well,” said Mowbray. “I was counting on that,

but one cannot be sure--”

“There has been no secret,” she said. “Will you come in the morning

before the columns go out?”

“Yes, it will be early.”

“I'll be watching. If not--he will be there to tell you why.”

Peter turned to the poet. “Watch over her--won't you?”

“You honor me, Mr. Mowbray. All that I can do--be very sure of.”

She went to Samarc's cot and took his hand. Peter saw her face

differently, as she leaned. It was one of the mysteries that her

tenderness was the face of one woman, her sorrow another.

“Good-by--good-night.”

.... A little later Peter found himself with Samarc's hand in his. He

had been sitting by the cot watching the war within the war, head bowed

on his free hand. It was a struggle of white and black--of knights and

kings, plumes and horses, white and black.... Now the wounded man seemed

sending messages through his hand. The lamps were low.

“It's been the day of days, Samarc,” Mowbray said. “You brought me

something that I needed very much. I wish I could do as much for you.

Let me know, won't you, if I can?... Yes, I'll be right here through the

night--”

He heard the tread of soldiers in the hollow-sounding court

below--clanking accouterments, heavy steps. There was a halt, a voice,

and a long moment before he breathed. It was just a change of sentries,

perhaps.

Chapter 2

Just a moment's talk in the street--twice interrupted by sentries, as

they moved the hundred yards from the courtyard of Judenbach to the

house of amputations.

“...He was trying to lift a man from the hopelessness of death when I

stepped up quietly behind,” Berthe was saying. “He was wonderful about

it, because he had felt the same hopelessness. I wish you could have

heard him.”

Moritz Abel said: “He is effective. He is intellect and heart--very

sound. His vision will come quickly. He does not wing--that is our

trouble. We are carried away. He is still within the comprehension of

the average man. We need him greatly. Also he needs us. What a man he

would be to steady us--to interpret for us. The new Fatherland must have

such men. It has been our destiny always to dream and to pass--another

generation to make our vision flesh--”

“You mean such men as Peter Mowbray would be direct interpreters?” she

asked.

“Exactly. We are poets and artists and singers. We are the fathers

of the new Fatherland in a sense, but we need among us lawgivers and

statesmen--men who love men straight and not through the arts--men who

have the same zeal for men that the arts give us when we are pure, but

who are conservers and constructors, men of great force and acumen and

kindness--”

“Oh, I know so well what you mean,” she whispered. “If you could only

have heard him with the bandaged man--_'I am not a genius or a dreamer,

man. I am so slow at dreaming and brotherhood, and all that, that a

woman once ran away from me. But I saw to-day that death isn't all.'”_

“Yes, that is it,” Moritz Abel said. “That is the quality. And many

times among those who do not make claim nor talk of brotherhood, the

reality is beaming from their daily service. Yes, that is it. I hope to

know him better after the long night.”

They had reached the place of blood and torture.

“And now you must rest a little,” he told her. “You know he asked me to

take care of you. I like him for that. A man would see a great deal in

that, for he honored me.”

“And me--” she whispered.

Chapter 3

It was not yet dawn. Peter heard the moaning of the men as they awoke

and turned in their bandages. Surgeon and assistants passed through;

two of the latter remained to start up the malingerers. Machine and

rapid-fire men especially were needed at the front, it was said. Four

thousand men had fallen in the past three days, and this was to be the

day of the most furious battle--Kohlvihr to drive a hole through the

hills, this day. An early incident revealed certain facts--personal--and

had a temporary numbing influence upon Mowbray. The day had risen and

Samarc awakened, when a strange orderly entered the ward, and came

leisurely to the cot where Peter sat:

“What have you here?”

“A shrapnel wound in the face.”

The orderly looked under the cot for the uniform, as if to determine

Samarc's place and rank.

“Where's the blouse?” he asked.

“It was covered with blood,” said Peter. “They took it away.”

“What branch of the service?”

Peter was not sure--infantry possibly. He didn't care for the stranger's

manner, nor to have this particular gunner of the rapid-fire pieces

hurried to the field unhealed. The orderly bent suddenly, whispering.

_“She told me to tell you that she wants to come, but that it isn't

safe--“_

...Moritz Abel looking for an interpreter would have been interested

now; also the Old Man of _The States_. The stranger had spoken

leisurely. Peter's temptation was conquered before he was half through.

“Are you sure you were to give me some message?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“But I wasn't expecting anyone.”

The other regarded him keenly. Peter was well trained for that. An

officer appeared in the doorway and beckoned the orderly.

“It must have been a mistake,” the latter muttered.

Peter was thinking fast. The fact remained that their meeting the night

before had been noted. He was leaving for the field shortly; the harm of

suspicion would fall upon her.

“I promised to call a moment this morning at the amputation house--but

no one was to come for me,” he added.

“I have made a mistake,” the orderly repeated.

“...I wonder if I have?” Peter thought.

Samarc's hand came up to him, and the pull that meant he wanted to

speak. Peter invariably paled before this ordeal. Not through words

but sounds were the meanings tortured out.... Samarc meant to take the

field. In the usual course there would be no coming back for him at

nightfall, because he had “ceased to kill--”

“But must your officers know?” Peter whispered.

...The officers would know if it were the same old crew, because they

knew Samarc's work. This was the substance of the answer.

“But why go?”

...They would take off the bandages to be sure that he required further

hospital care. He could not endure that. The bandages must never come

off.... He would rather be afield.

Peter saw the grim finality of it. Samarc wasn't changed. He meant to

end it. It was not only Spenski, but the havoc under the cloths....

A young assistant surgeon at a near cot was rather too hastily laying

bare the lint from a severe shoulder wound.

Exchange with Samarc had of course stopped. Peter, thinking deeply,

watched with but half attention until the assistant surgeon briskly

rebound the wound, and began tugging at the soldier to get on his feet.

The wounded one whimpered his weakness.

“Get up!”

The order was repeated. “Into your clothes, man. Scores are already in

the column with wounds worse than yours.”

The man groaned, stirred, but fell back. Peter had seen the wound--not

a desperate one, but enough to lay a man up for a fortnight at home,

and this could not have been more than three days old. There wasn't much

chance of malingering.

“Come, come!” the young officer urged angrily.

The soldier tried to raise himself, but did not make good work of it.

“I'll get you up, damn you--”

A quick scream from the man on the cot. Peter did not know what the

doctor did, but he smelled acid. All was cloudy before his eyes. He was

a bit surprised a second after to feel the Russian's neck in his two

hands:

“None but a beast would take from the stable a horse crippled like

that,” he was saying.

The assistant was but a boy. Peter caught this before lasting damage was

done. He left the place half crying, threatening to kill Mowbray later.

His superior appeared. Peter smiled at him. Samarc was up, drawing on

his clothes.

“A bit of bad judgment,” Peter said, not explaining whether it was his

or the young doctor's.

The surgeon did not ask, but turned to the great muffled face.

“This man was from one of the rapid-fire commands, I believe?”

Peter was prevented from further glibness by a decisive nod from Samarc.

“The Fatherland will need you to-day,” the surgeon said with a peculiar

significance.

To Peter's trained ear the sounds from Samarc were dangerously like,

“Fatherland-hell.”

“A shrapnel splinter struck him in the mouth,” he explained. “He says he

is ready to take the field.”

Samarc spoke again.

“His blouse is gone,” said Peter hastily. “I can manage for him.”

“Has he a fever?”

“I'm afraid so--a slight fever.”

The surgeon turned to the other cot. “Let this fellow sleep another

day,” he said.

The soldier lying there gave Peter a look almost uncanny in its

gratitude.

“Sit down, Samarc. I'll get you a blouse,” the latter said and left the

ward.

Chapter 4

Big Belt awoke early in his own quarters, and beat around under the

blankets for his friend. Peter was not there. Boylan remembered and sat

up. This was the day of the great battle, but there was to be

breakfast first. He recalled what was in the saddle-bags. This proved

unsatisfactory. Even that hinged on Peter, as every thought so far. ...

Boylan now reflected that he might have stayed longer in the ward last

night. There was just as much to hold him to the cot of Samarc as had

called Peter. Altogether, the day was not beginning in a way to suit.

He sat in the center of a tired tangle of woolen blankets and buckled on

his leggings. His face pricked his chest as he bent forward. There was

a stabbing run of ideas that had to do with marble baths, tepid plunges

and fragrant steam. This collection he made haste to banish with matters

of the day, and the absence of Peter,--but the pictures were various and

persistent--exceptionally enticing baths from all his history recurring.

He stretched out his gray woolen shirt and brushed it hard with handfuls

of dried grass; he washed uncomfortably. It was like an ablution before

one is undressed--that pervasive beard affair--and a general chill and

dampness about clothes and boots that had not yet worked warm. The day

was alternate gray and red. Noise gained in the street. Big Belt stepped

forth.

Just at this moment he saw Peter Mowbray disappear into that grim street

entrance from which the unspeakable human outcry had issued yesterday.

He followed, twisting into doorways to let provision wagons pass,

quickening his steps to cross between detachments of infantry. A certain

dead cavalry horse was powerful in the air. Boylan knew exactly where it

lay, for it had called attention these three days, an Austrian property,

saddle and all, a ghastly outpouring upon the turf.

Boylan found himself stepping forward with a gladness that was answered

with sharp objection by his own nature, and which he would not have let

Peter Mowbray know for all Judenbach. He was disgusted with the weakness

that made a man friend such a profound institution in his breast.

The hall-way was dark. Boylan heard low voices; something from them

prevailed to hush his entrance. In fact, at the turning he stood quite

still for possibly three seconds. Beyond in the shadows Peter stood with

a woman. Afterward Boylan recalled that there had been one poignant cry

of pain from above, as if born of the monotone of moaning in that house.

They did not see him.... A little man appeared from the shadows, joined

the two, and handed Peter a Russian blouse such as is worn by hospital

stewards of the service. Peter thanked him; the other departed; the

two were once more alone.... The huge scarred head of the old war-wolf

withdrew jerkily; with stealth, he stepped back into the street. He did

not stop until he reached his own quarters. There he found that he had

not folded his blankets. In the midst of this work his hands stopped....

He was as accustomed as any man can be to unremoved horse by this time.

It came steadily to his nostrils, mingled with the leathery smell of his

own field-outfit. Presently he looked at his watch, and snapped the

case shut with a crack. The strength of his fingers would have broken a

filbert.

“Some men can find 'em anywhere,” he muttered. “And such a one! She was

a flame.... As for Mr. B. B.--it's dead horse all his days.”

Chapter 5

Ashamed of himself, Big Belt waited to see if Peter would turn in to

their quarters, as he approached carrying the hospital steward's blouse

across his arm. Boylan would not call. It was like a woman's way--to

learn if a man had forgotten her; still he would not call....

Clean-shaven, very straight and full of life, Peter approached, smiling

at packers and soldiers, a smile for all the world. “Why not?” Boylan

thought. Peter did turn in, and came toward him, hand out.

“Tomato ketchup with duck's eggs. Draw up a chair,” said Boylan. He

appeared just now to see the steward's blouse.

“Samarc takes the field to-day. It's for him,” Peter explained.... “He's

going out to kill himself. Only one reservation--that he kill no one

else.”

Boylan seemed staring at Peter's knees.

“You're letting the ketchup burn,” Peter said mildly.

“I suppose that's what he really means to do,” Big Belt observed, after

a moment. “And what are we to do about it?”

“I thought I would stand by a little--not so as to be a nuisance, you

know--”

“Naturally not. Of course.”

They ate in silence--a thousand things to say.

“I won't be very far from the staff,” said Peter, hurrying back to the

hospital. “Poor old Samarc has two wounds, you know--”

* * *

It wasn't a day to explain things--not a day to talk. Men afield can

never tell what they are doing; some devilish irony is in the air. They

laugh; they listen; they hope--only a jest comes. The most thrilling and

stupendous situations bring forth but a curse or a roar. Human throats

are inarticulate, afield; the reality that voices heroic utterance and

makes it memorable is not at work in man-fabric; splendid faces and

brave actions--but the words are the revealers of emptiness. For the

animal is awake and upstanding; the spirit that quickens reality is

apart.

The battlefield opened to Mowbray's eyes that day with abnormal

clearness, as if he had brought rest and reflection to a problem that

long had harried him, He felt singularly light and full of ease--as one

does sometimes in the first hours of the day after a sleepless night.

The day was wild with west wind, a touch of south still clinging. The

east arrayed itself again and again in all the delicate blends of pink

and gray, watery yellow, rose, and azure; a different arrangement at

each glance, as if separate groups of maidens followed each around a

Roman bath.

Samarc was given a seat in an ammunition wagon, with orders to join his

battery. Peter found his horse, already saddled by Boylan, and overtook

the wagon train as it left the town. In a halt for the way to clear,

Kohlvihr and his staff passed, Dabnitz and Boylan riding together. The

General sat soft and lumpy in the saddle, his eyes small and feverish,

his face hotly red. The staff passed on, all except Boylan believing

that the correspondent had fallen in behind. Riding with the wagons,

Peter frequently turned to the terrifying bandage above the steward's

blouse. When the light was right, he caught a glint of the eyes beneath.

The way became steep for the wagons as they neared the emplacements.

Peter swung off and led his pony. Infantry was already engaged down in

the hollows; the reek of powder began to cut the air at intervals, but

the strong wind as often cleansed it away, and the scent of woods came

up startlingly, with the warmth of the sun upon the ground--the sweet

healing breath of drying cedar boughs.

He was sorry now he had roughed it with the young doctor; that sort of

thing was very far from him. He had no memory of another episode like

it. On occasion, dropping into the queerest abstractions, he fancied

_her_ near.... It had been like a soldier leaving his lady for the

battle--the precious few minutes less than an hour ago. She had promised

to be with him. There had been no talk nor thought of the terrifying

day she faced in the hospital; everything had to do with his taking the

field. She would follow him with her thoughts. Perhaps he would find his

soul out there, she suggested, as he had never found it before. Peter

wondered now just what she meant by that. It was not his way to fall

back upon any such abstraction.

He reflected how her presence always changed him, gave him strength of

a different sort, and directness of aim.... It was true that she seemed

near--on the other side from Samarc--a part of the mountain fragrance

that would not be overpowered in the gun-reek. He felt if he could turn

quickly enough he would catch the gleam of her colors. This was her

country. She was of the north and the cold lands; she belonged to the

purity of the cedars.

He played with the thought that she was near; and from the thought,

because it was good, a glimpse of the future came to him--the peace

to come, when men would dwell again with their loves, and the dream of

superb affiliation would come true. All this madness of men would pass,

as the rising powder-reek would pass from these Galician hills, and

leave them their silence and their natural fragrance.

The wagons had gone on. Samarc's battery might have been rubbed out for

all their ability to find it. All faces strange--gunners, range-finders,

and the cartridge hands. Peter felt a horror in his breast for the

immediate presence of the guns--as if he had reached the end of

toleration in the one day with them. Samarc felt this hate, too, his

ruling passion.... Any moment one of the rapid-firers might drum into

action. Their sense was one--that something would be uncoupled in their

minds. They turned, Peter laughing at his desire to run--as they found

another group of machines emplaced in a rocky shelter a little higher

than the spot where the shrapnel had struck three days before.

No one called to them as they turned back. A small belated wagon train

rumbled by, but no one hailed them from the seats. They were free,

alone. Peter inhaled the scent of the forest, sharp again from the acrid

taint of the cool, hazy air. He loved the sweet mountain wind as never

before--almost as if he were to leave it all. There was little need of

exchange of words. Each understood mainly the thoughts of the other. Big

guns thundered at each other from the remoter hills. Again they saw an

infantry movement start forth below--the endless strings of infantry

along the broad lower slopes. They stopped to watch them.

Creatures of the hollows, their business to rise and be swept

back--marching forth now--Kohlvihr's command. Peter's eyes filled and

his throat stopped at the spectacle of the gray lines. Surely something

was the matter with him, he thought. Was it pathological--loss of sleep,

or fatigue? Or was it something that Spenski and Abel, the field and

hospital; more than all was it something that Berthe Wyndham had given

him? In any event, it seemed as if those infantry lines marching out now

to the burning front were being torn from his own breast, every _moujik_

precious. He wanted to be with them, not with the heinous guns. He

wished he could spare them, stop the continual sacrifice. Miles of gray

lines moving out now. ...His companion's tugging hand.

It dawned upon Peter before many sounds that Samarc wanted to go alone.

He pointed the trail back around the hills toward Judenbach, where it

would meet the road Kohlvihr had taken, suggesting that Peter join the

staff. He, Samarc, would continue the search for his battery. As a rule

Mowbray was the last to continue in the presence of a man who wanted him

to go; and yet, he knew that Samarc hated the field pieces as much as

he, and that he did not mean to live through the day. He hesitated. The

final urging was pitiful--a sort of tumult from under the cloths.

“Nothing doing, Samarc,” he said suddenly. “You and I for it--at least

a while yet. I say--do the hard thing. The little man would have it so.

We'll go down closer to the infantry stuff and forget ourselves.”

...Yes, Samarc would do the hard thing. There was gratitude for which

Peter had no receptivity--gratitude for the friendship, the night's

watching. His hand was taken and carried to the other's breast, as only

a Russian could do--and down they went together.

The infantry was their magnet as they made the down grade--miles of gray

lines. The lower land was trampled and dusty; the breeze lost itself in

the hollows. Just as an orchardist, discovering a certain parasite on

his trees, thinks of a specific poison, so they knew that this great

“forward” of the Russian foot-soldiers would start the Austrian machine

and rapid-fire batteries.

They were moving now in front of a long line of new Russian works which

had appeared deserted. Boylan would have known better; Samarc should

have known. Peter had taken for granted that these had been emptied

by the huge advances already in movement. They were in the path of

Kohlvihr's reserves, it appeared, in the center of the line, when the

signal “forward” was sounded. The works suddenly blackened with men.

It was too much for the pony. Peter found a bridle with a broken throat

latch in his hand, as he watched the little beast tear down the front,

and heard the roar of laughter from the oncoming line.

The new front seemed endless in the rolling land. They were instantly

enveloped. Out of the throng appeared one face that Peter had bowed to

once or twice before--a captain, now working his way toward them. He

glanced at the civilian insignia on Peter's sleeve, and said, with a

smile:

“You've tricked us well this time, Mr. Mowbray. I hope you get back as

cheerfully. You'll have to go forward now--at least, until we stretch

out in skirmish. We're rather thick just here. Stay with my command--”

“We thought we were back of you,” Peter said. “I assure you I didn't

plan this, but it's very kind of you.”

The Captain glanced at Samarc and turned to the American as they urged

on.

“Hurt badly?”

“Just his face.”

“Stay by--some of the soldiers might be rough--”

They were carried forward in the resistless interference of great

numbers.

Chapter 6

Peter had pitied the infantry formerly from a hill, having stood with

a battery as it sprayed the Austrian lines. He had watched the Austrian

machines pouring steel upon the Russians also. There had been emotion;

he had felt the shame of it powerfully on this very morning; but now he

reflected, with a touch of levity, that his pity had not been adequate.

At the present juncture he belonged to the sacrifice. The process was

reversed; the globe of his experience shortly to be made complete. He

would have the effects of light and darkness from the vantage of the

preying and the preyed upon.

Peter had never been actually down among men before. He had watched men,

studied them sincerely, passed them in the street, reflected upon their

problems. At the same time, his personal impetus had always been away

from men, his a different purpose, a different aim. He was _one_ now,

one in the massed destiny of the command, one to obey. Only by falling

could he be free from this extraordinary authority of the army.

Moreover, he felt that the motive energizing this authority was not of

the human but of the tiger.

He might have thought of all this before, as he had thought of death

as one thing for the outsider and a different thing for the little

lens-maker he liked so well. But this was experience, not conjecture. He

was an atom of the charge. The army authority disrupted his moral sense.

It bound and gagged him. No imagination could have constricted his vital

and creative force as this adventure, in which he was caught up like a

chip and carried forward in a rush of animal power. Fear had no part

of his revulsion, but the break of his will. It was not like a man

drowning, in an insensible element; this that carried him _had_ a

consciousness and it was unclean.

He saw that the rankers leaned on each other; that there was not yet in

the peasant faces about him a single separate individual relation to the

impending peril. These men might have, seen others fall by the hundreds,

but their faith was in the command, their law its law. Peter saw that

they were in a sense like men parading through city streets, who endure

the eyes of the crowds because they are part of a line. It was the

eternal illusion of numbers again--the elbow brush, the heat, the

breath, the muttering of men--this atmosphere that the military machine

breathed. Standing alone, most of them would have fallen from fear.

He smelled the unwashed crowd. Under all the bronze that life in

the open had given the command was the lardy look of earth-born men,

close-to-the-ground men; these were the hordes that put on pounds and

size, the rudiment of a mind, the momentary ignition of soul perhaps

in moments such as now--and pass to the earth again. Yet the history of

Europe was to be written upon a surface like this; this, the soil of the

future. It was close to chaos, but as yet undefiled by man. This was the

newest product of earth, the new terrific fecundity of the North

that had alarmed lower Europe; these were the peasant millions as yet

unfathered, strong as yet only as bulls are strong, gregarians, almost

without memory; their terror, pain, passion, hope, genius not individual

yet, but in the solution of the crowds.

Peter Mowbray's shock was the loss of the sense of self; his battle

to retain this sense. He seemed to fuse in the heat, the vast solution

draining his vitality. He could have given himself to the white fire of

a group of men like Spenski, Abel, Fallows, Poltneck, perhaps--but to

give himself to this.... They were stretching out now as skirmishers,

the crush ended. Entire figures of men could be seen, instead of necks,

beards, and shoulders. Samarc gripped his arm, the other hand pointing

to a little red-haired boy who ran, crouched, sped on again, halted to

look, in the true squirrel fashion of advance, which is the approved

procedure of skirmishers. He talked to himself, appeared lost in

absorption, reminded one continually of Spenski when his face was

averted--and was just one of the miles of infantry.

Their faces looked cold now; a part of the gray tone so often observed.

The officers fought to stretch them out. Every line of fear that the

human mouth can express Peter saw. Now the drum of the Austrian pieces.

It was not as they had heard it in the heights, but like an encore at

first--as if some tremendous mass of men in a wooden gallery had started

a buffeting of feet. The valley muffled the volleys; the actual steel

was not heard until it neared like a rain torrent; indeed it found their

immediate lines before they heard the murderous cutting of the air. The

Austrian gunners were placed for enfilading, so that a fraction of point

gave them impaling force and a wide swath in the ranks.

Peter saw the little red head cocked forward as if to listen to the

nearing gusts of steel.

Now men were down and crying out. The fire was like that of a hostile

regiment concentrating its volley upon a little knot of soldiers--the

air was whipped, wild with throbbing missiles. Supernatural fear was

the answer from the very souls of men. Their prayer (in Mowbray's

conception) was not for life, but for cessation. Yet the machines held

them with infernal leisure as one holds the stream from a garden hose to

a spot of clay clinging to masonry.

In all postures the soldiers met the gale, with every answering sound.

Then falling, rising, crawling, the remnant went back. It was not pain

nor death nor wounds that mattered--but the hurtling concussions in the

air, the plague of steel....

It stopped. Peter lay exhausted an instant. He felt no hurt. He was down

because one could not stand in that sweep of projectiles. He recalled

that he had seen the red head fall a moment before, and turned like a

sick man, his eyes rolling, to learn if it were a dream or not. Yes,

Redhead had fallen. Samarc was crawling toward him on his knees. Peter

writhed forward, too, but disliking the movement lest it bring the

guns upon them again. He forgot that. Redhead was muttering about _the

storm_.

“Are you hard hit, boy?” Peter called.

There were others about--a whole line of fallen, but they saw just this

one--his cheek to the dirt, his mouth moving queerly. He was young like

the undersurgeon, seventeen or eighteen, and much bewildered, the gray,

clayey hue upon him, but not at all uncouth. Samarc felt his spine,

turned him. The wound was in his body. Just now Redhead saw the effigy

that was Samarc. He had been watching Peter before.

His mouth opened, eyes seemed to settle back into a red gleam of horror,

his face swung around into the dirt. Peter would have given his arm to

spare Samarc that. No sound from under the cloth--only a breath. Samarc

shouldered him, raised himself with the burden.

There are pressures of will. One turns on a certain force to meet an

obstacle, and it is exhausted. There are other sources of power, but

one brushes death to summon them. Far ahead they saw the remnant making

cover. Now Peter noted that there was human need at every step. They lay

in all positions, squirmed their faces up to him and implored. The few

were still; the many writhed. He looked for a small one. He had never

lifted a man and was surprised when one came up and rolled as if by

magic across his back. It was so easy that he wanted to take others.

“I will come back,” he called to the faces.

He meant to come back as he said it. He wanted to bring them all in.

He had no hate for the Austrian gunners, because he had seen Samarc and

Spenski at the same work, and he knew that the heart of man changes in

a day. He would have helped the little undersurgeon had he been there. A

_moujik_ arose from his knees in front of them, as they staggered on. He

was stunned, bewildered, blinded, but he could hear.

“Come on--we're going back,” Peter said.

The other held out his hand gropingly. Peter placed the flap of his coat

in it, and the moujik stumblingly followed.... Another soldier on his

knees barred the way.

“We're going back,” Peter said. “Come on. You can crawl--”

The soldier set out eagerly to obey, as if it had been a great boon to

follow with his own strength. It was the mightiest episode of the day to

Peter Mowbray. “My God, how they obey _men_!” he said, with awe. “They

_could_ be led right--peasants who obey like that!”

There was singing all about him--not of bullets, though this little

movement on the field drew a thin, uncertain long-range fire from some

intrenchment (apparently it was not enough to start a machine)--a low

singing as of wells of gladness reaching the surface. Peter was torn

with the agony of the field, yet thrilling with happiness--as if there

was liberation somewhere within. He turned to the crawling one who

inspired him:

“We're all hurt, but we're going back to bed. Come on--you're doing

famously--”

The back bobbed to greater effort. The blind one held him fast, and the

Redhead left his trail of blood and murmured about _the storm_.... It

was a long range for the rifles, and seemed as harmless as sandflies

after the horror of hornets they had known.... They were alone. They saw

the heaped rims of the Russian works ahead--five of them, alone, for,

queerly enough, they were as one.

And now from ahead, from the concealed Russian lines, arose a roar such

as Peter had never known. It struck him with a psychic force that filled

his eyes with tears, though he did not understand. He thought that the

end of the war must have come--so glad and so mighty was that shouting.

Now a fragment of the line ran forth to bring the little party in, not

minding Peter's gestures in the least; for he waved them back, lest they

start the machines again.... It appeared that his little group of maimed

and blind came home marching into the very hearts of the command--even

the Red one.... They had laid their burdens down; an incoherent Boylan

took Peter, leading the way back to the staff. Kohlvihr and Dabnitz

stood there, the old man repeating:

“Get the name of the hospital man.”

Dabnitz plucked the sleeve of Samarc's coat.

“Hospital steward,--I have that,” he said a second time, “but what's the

name and the division?”

“He can't speak,” said Peter. “I'll get his name later. He's been

wounded in the mouth.”

Curiously enough in this turmoil it appeared for the first time why

Samarc had been allowed a free field practically--why he had not been

impressed for service by one of the batteries. It was the steward's

blouse that Abel had given him.... Peter lost wonder at this. Things

were darkening about him. He smelled the cedars. Her colors seemed just

out of view.... She had been near.

“Peter--are you hit?” It was Boylan's voice.

“No, just bushed.”

Now he heard Kohlvihr say: “Anything for you we can, Mr. Mowbray. As a

civilian, you are of course exempt from specific honors, but as soon as

I learn your companion's name I shall suggest that he be honored by the

Little Father.”

“Why, you've put the whole line back into fighting trim!” Boylan

whispered.

Chapter 7

Something of the activity now apparent to the blurred faculties of

Mowbray, as he sat in the clammy embrace of nausea and struggling for

breath, appealed to him as structurally wrong; almost inconceivably

abominable, in fact. He had no interest in his so-called achievement,

regarded it with a laugh, repeated that it was pure accident; but

such as it was, he objected to it being used to put the line back into

“fighting trim.”

He was in the large sod-covered pit occupied by field headquarters. He

turned at the sound of breathing at his side. Samarc was sitting there.

Peter's hand went to his knee. Aides, messengers, and orderlies hastened

in and out. There were twenty men in the pit--Kohlvihr the center of

all. Big Belt was ministering--a flask, a momentary massage, a steady

run of comment, ruddy from the heart.... The activity came to him again.

Kohlvihr was actually planning another infantry advance.

Peter started to speak, but halted for further reflection, a bit

skeptical as to his own sanity. This was the third day of the battle;

this the day planned to drive a hole through the difficult Austrian

hills; the whole Russian army was dependent upon taking this Austrian

position; the weather was becoming colder, Berlin still afar off; the

Russian left and center pinned to the results of action here.

So far mental processes seemed adequate, but this changed in no way his

attitude toward the atrocious activity in the brain of Kohlvihr of the

bomb-proof pit.

Kohlvihr might sally forth for his wounded; hundreds were dying

out there in the windy hollow. He, Peter Mowbray, had seen their

faces--their bodies to the end of sight. But Kohlvihr had no thought

of that; rather to meet the range of death machines again with another

horde of his skirmishers--and again--and again, until the end of the

day--until enough passed through to gain the opposite slopes in fighting

force, or until the Austrian ammunition was exhausted....

And Kohlvihr had never been out there. His cave was well back in the

shelter of the works--sheltered from ahead and from the sky, with

Judenbach behind.... Old Doltmir, the second in command, was saying:

“It's a terrible price to pay, General--a terrible price. You will note

that they enfilade our lines as we reach the bottom land. You will

note that their machines cover the valley perfectly and that they are

practiced now--”

There was balm in that, but acid covered it an instant later from

Kohlvihr, who swallowed a drink and turned with a snarl.

“We have the price to pay--”

Peter was thinking now of the front line that had cheered his coming in;

the men so ready to forget themselves for a little spectacle, and the

thrill that had come to his own breast from their shouting. _He loved

them and knew why._ And those men, their lives and deaths--were in

the hands of this red-eyed human rat who fouled the air.... No, Peter

thought, it wasn't the brandy that smelled. It's Kohlvihr and the

brandy.

“Good God, Boylan,” he muttered in English, “can't you get him by the

throat?”

Boylan's eyes were wild. He laughed softly, however, saying in Russian:

“Very good, Peter--you'd joke at your death--”

And Big Belt's eyes roved to Dabnitz, who apparently had not heard

Peter's remark.

...And now the tugging from Samarc that meant words! It seemed as if a

ghastly stillness prepared for that final rumble; certainly stillness

followed it. All eyes turned, even Kohlvihr's, to the effigy. But Peter

alone understood.

“...Don't let them take off the bandages.”

Samarc left his seat in the dark corner and walked evenly toward the

center where Kohlvihr stood, his aides about him--poor old Doltmir

standing apart and distressed. The moment had come for the order to be

given. Kohlvihr turned to a dispatch rider at the door--a door made of

cedar trunks.

For the moment Peter was blocked between two desires, or paralyzed. The

huge face of Boylan close by mutely implored him to be silent.

“Samarc,” he called.

Samarc did not turn. Now Peter saw the red face of Kohlvihr in its gray

fringe suddenly lifted and enlarged. The effigy was close to it, but

not higher, and hands were tightening beneath it--Samarc's strong unhurt

hands. There had been one snarling scream. It was followed by a shot

from Dabnitz. The red face went down with the other to the clay floor.

Chapter 8

The roar of the battle followed as Peter staggered back alone to

Judenbach. He must have traversed a mile before there was a rational

activity of his faculties. The first mental picture was that of

the officers running along the works as the order for “advance as

skirmishers” was given. They were inspiring the men in the name of the

Little Father.

“If only they hadn't said that,” Peter muttered pathetically.

Then he recalled that Kohlvihr had been lifted practically unhurt from

the clay floor; that his order was carried out. The infantry had obeyed.

With all he knew, and all he had seen that day, the mystery of common

men deepened. Out of it all strangely stood forth in his mind now the

man who could not rise, but who crawled after him at a word....

These men obeyed--that was the whole story. If they were given true

fathers!... Why, that _was_ the answer!

Peter had come into this with all the fire of revelation. He had earned

it. Blood and courage, and the stress of death, had given it to him. Yet

it was worth it all. He would tell Berthe Wyndham....

He stopped short at the edge of the town. Never was there in his life

a moment of profounder humility. Berthe Wyndham had told him all this

before they left Warsaw--on the day that the message came from Lonegan.

All he had learned to-day through such rigor and jeopardy she had told

him; and she had understood it then with the same passion that he had it

now.

Peter had only listened that day; he had lived it to-day. His heart

suddenly flooded with warmth for Fallows. Fallows had been through all

this--all the burning and zealotry of it, and had come forth into

the coldness and austerity of service. It was very wonderful. Peter

Mowbray's eyes smarted. They, and the service, had certainly crumpled

the old fronts of calm and the sterile pools of intellect. He loved the

peasants now, _and he knew why_.... He saw what a stick he had been,

but this didn't trouble him greatly. The new seeing was enough; he was

changed. His emotions presently concerned the fresh realizations so

dearly bought--in the past three days... three days.

Not until now did he think of Samarc.... The reality had stood like a

black figure at the door of his brain throughout all the walk, but it

did not enter until now. No, Samarc would not come back to Judenbach. It

was finished as he had intended. He had ceased to kill. Even at the last

he had but used his hands, and in as righteous wrath as ever tortured

human fingers to terrible strength.... He, Mowbray, had not remained to

assure himself that the last command of his friend was obeyed. This

hurt him not a little.... He was in the main street... exertion, sorrow,

exaltation; now he was whipped again. He felt he had not done well at

the last. A teamster yelled to him to get out of the way. Peter stepped

back wearily to let a string of ambulances by.

Across was that grim door of the house of amputations. He was not quite

ready to enter. He would get himself in hand better. He had not been

gone long--it was only mid-forenoon. He would go to his quarters and

clean up a little--perhaps rest a moment. His thoughts turned often to

Samarc, always with a pang. He wished the Big Belt were here. This last

reminded him of his saddle bags--razors and all gone with the pony.

Boylan would have the laugh at him now.

He could not sit still in his quarters. Voices came to him from the

street, from the court--even from that grim place a little down the way.

He arose and went across to the familiar hospital ward.... Another was

in Samarc's place. A hand beckoned. It was from the cot of the soldier

for whom he had struggled with the young doctor. He went to it. There

was a message:

_“They were talking of you as an enemy--“_

That was all. Peter did not care for particulars. His volition was

quickened. He had been sadly in need of that. Now he went direct to

the hallway, where he had left her in the morning, and on upstairs. The

rooms were crowded with wounded and medical officers, but no familiar

face--neither Berthe Wyndham nor Moritz Abel.

Many eyes held him. He did not see the young doctor, but the surgeon who

had come to the other ward was there--that bland, quiet face, regarding

him curiously now. Peter asked nothing, and was free apparently to move

anywhere about the building. None of his own was there. His loneliness

was untellable. He could not have spoken to a stranger without a break

of tone....

He wished for Boylan again.

Peter was in the street, moved along the walls as one very tired. He was

searching, but the thoughts grew so terrible that he could not keep his

eyes to outer activity. His steps led him to the Court of Executions.

Standing by the street gate, he dreaded to enter. He would not tolerate

this, yet it was more than life or death. He had a mental picture of

finding her there, her body shrinking into one of the stone corners--as

a maimed bird that has fallen lies still under its wings.

His breath burst from him. He had been holding it as if under water. His

eyes traveled electrically now.

There were dead in the court, but she was not there, nor Abel nor

Fallows. He looked through the row of gratings and under the arches.

There was a low stone lintel with a dim deserted hall beyond....

Just now a step behind him, heavy boots ringing on the stone flags.

Peter turned. A Russian soldier halted, raised his rifle, commanded him

to advance.

Peter waved his hand in a gesture of obedience, but turned to glance in

the gloom under the lintel again. It was just _in the turning_ that

he had caught the gleam of her colors--not when he stared straight in.

Peter assured himself of this before giving himself up.

IV

IN THE BOMB-PROOF PIT

Chapter 1

The dead man in the hospital steward's coat had been carried forth from

the bomb-proof pit.

Big Belt perceived that the day was working out according to its evil

beginnings.... After coming in from the infantry hollows as one risen

from the dead (and transfigured in the garish light of field bravery)

Peter Mowbray had left him again, now in the possession of strange

devils.

Boylan was not ready to go back to Judenbach. It was almost noon. He was

watching the heart of the Russian invasion of Galicia, and from its

main lesion. This he knew quite as well as Dabnitz, or Doltmir, or the

half-insane Kohlvihr himself. The Austrians still held. Indeed, it was

not hard for them. The Russian west wing entire, and possibly part of

its center, would be called upon to flank this stoutly adhering force,

if Kohlvihr continued to fail. Such an action would greatly delay the

general forward movement of the Russian arms.

“You will be without a command, General,” Doltmir suggested, at the

end of the second infantry throwback, following that in which Peter had

participated. “We are not disturbing them greatly in our advances. We

are chiefly effective in destroying their ammunition--”

“Then we must continue that,” said Kohlvihr.

“But the troops will not continue to charge. Our reserves are in. The

fresher men see the fate of the former advances. The hollows are in

plain sight from the forward rifle pits.”

“The officers must drive them forward--”

“Most of the lesser commanders are lying in the valley. The troops are

killing them as well as the enemy--”

“Do you mean there is mutiny, sir?”

“Not of a reckonable type. These men work in the midst of action.

Moreover, our troops are hard pressed. Our division has borne the brunt

for three days in almost unparalleled action.”

“Would you advise me to leave them funking in the trenches?” Kohlvihr

demanded.

“General, I would advise a report to the Commander of our failure in

four advances--that we can not get sufficient men across the valley to

charge the Austrian positions. Meanwhile I would order the wounded to

be brought in. After that, I would suggest food for the men in the

trenches.”

“I do not care to report four failures without a fifth trial.”

Doltmir turned back.

Big Belt was thinking fast. In all his experience, he had never seen the

Inside stripped naked like this. Of course, he had observed the

strategy of small bodies of troops determined by a swift consultation of

officers; but this was an army in itself, or had been, and on the part

of Kohlvihr it was very clear that personal matters were powerfully to

the fore. Kohlvihr was enraged; Kohlvihr was ambitious. Big Belt was

aware that, given a free hand and a free cable, he could make Kohlvihr a

loathsome monster in the eyes of the world, this merely by a display of

the facts.

Boylan's view was cleared a little as he thought of such a narrative.

His sense of the reception of the story showed him the commanding nature

of it. The thing might be done later. Peter's trouble was that he could

not forget it for the present. Thoughts of work put a new energy into

Boylan's thinking. These things now passing in the bomb-proof pit formed

the climax of a narrative that had been running from the Warsaw office

to the present hour.... For a moment in the story's grasp, Boylan did

not hear the voice of the invaluable Dabnitz:

“...He is under suspicion, sir,” that young officer was saying to his

chief. “In fact, the whole hospital corps is rotten with revolutionists,

but the fact remains he can sing like an angel. I think if Poltneck were

brought here to the lines and made to sing the folk songs--”

“Get him,” said Kohlvihr. “Is he under arrest?”

“No; as yet merely under espionage. He was valuable in rather a unique

way in the hospitals yesterday.”

“Bring him at once.”

Kohlvihr sent an order for his troops to rest and have a bite in the

trenches.

The sorry Doltmir stepped forward again:

“Would it not be well to bring in our wounded from the field, sir?”

“We will _have_ the field presently,” said Kohlvihr. “The sun is not

hot. The lines already have seen too much of their blood.”

Big Belt remembered that. Moments were intense again when Poltneck was

brought in--a tall, angular, sandy-faced chap, with a wide mouth and

glistening teeth, a smile that quickened the pulse, somehow. Boylan

thought of the passions of women for such men. His shoulders were lean

and square. Yellow hair, long on top and cropped tight below the brim

of his hat, dropped a lock across his forehead, as he uncovered in the

bomb-proof pit. He had been shaven-recently. Boylan reflected that he

belonged to the hospital corps. There was a thrill about him not to be

missed.

“Poltneck--he calls himself,” Dabnitz whispered. “Poltneck perhaps, but

I've seen him with the Imperial orchestra or I'm losing memory. I didn't

have a good look at him before--”

Dabnitz was called by the General, who was seated with Doltmir over a

small collation with wine and bread. The lieutenant was requested to

arrange the inspiration for the men in the trenches.

Boylan noted how much taller the singer was than even the tall Russian

officer--as the two stood together.

“The men are very tired, Poltneck,” Dabnitz began. “Much has been

required of them, and much is still required. We want you to help us.”

“Yes?”

Poltneck had been looking about, interested as a kitten in a strange

house. He regarded Kohlvihr and the rest, the trace of a smile around

his mouth. The smile was still there as he turned quickly to Dabnitz

with the single questioning word, not contemptuous in itself, but Boylan

imagined it morally so. The voice furnished a second and very real

thrill.

“We thought you would sing for your fellow soldiers. You are from the

peasantry, I am told?”

“Yes, from the people.”

“We thought you would understand,” Dabnitz added. “There is an operatic

tenor in the command--one Chautonville. We might have sent for him, but

our thought was to reach the soldiers directly. It is a great honor.”

“Is it? How and where do you want me to sing?”

“An advance is to be ordered immediately. We will send an escort with

you along the trenches--just before the order is given. I heard you

singing yesterday. I am sure the men will answer with zeal.”

Poltneck seemed to wilt. Boylan was caught with the others thinking it

was the mention of the trenches that frightened this hospital soldier.

Yet the smile had not changed when Boylan's eye roved to that. It was

not more contemptuous, nor less; but something about it was unsteadying.

Dabnitz already had used many more words than he expected.

“I am not used to crowds,” Poltneck objected weakly. “I am just a simple

man. Already I am without voice. I beg of you to send for Chautonville

of the opera.”

Dabnitz was puzzled.

“That is out of the question. Chautonville is back in the city. Within

twenty minutes the order for advance will be given. Come, Poltneck; you

will do very well when you see your soldiers--”

Boylan reflected swiftly at this point that the smile might be neither

deep nor portentous--a single accomplishment, some stray refinement

perhaps that had leaked back somehow to the people.

“No, no. I am afraid. I belong back among the wounded. I am very good

there. This is not my place--”

“Will you require men to assist you to the trenches? Already I have

talked too long.”

“Yesterday I was an anesthetic,” Poltneck wailed. “To-day I am to be a

stimulant.”

Kohlvihr now came forward. “It is time,” he said.

“General,” said Dabnitz, “we have to deal with an unusual peasant, I am

afraid.”

“It would not do for me to encroach upon the work of professionals,” the

singer explained in dilemma.

“You see he is humorous,” Dabnitz observed.

“We sent for you to sing to the soldiers. Will you do that?” the General

asked, from puffing cheeks.

Poltneck looked down at him with sudden steadiness. “On the way home,”

he said.

“You refuse--then?”

“I would prefer that you wound them first.”

“At least, he has declared himself,” said Dabnitz.

Chapter 2

They did not murder him then and there. Boylan was glad of that. His

sack was already full of blood.... It was all too big. Something would

happen to spoil the telling. No man ever got out with such a story....

He was a little ashamed to find himself thinking of his newspaper story

so soon after the singer was led forth--the man who would sing for the

wounded, but who would not sing men to their death. Come to think--there

was a prostitution about it. Certainly Poltneck had a point of view. And

he was a hair-raiser of quality... everything about him.

Boylan thought of writing the Poltneck incident, and became hopeless

again. The Russians would be idiots to let him out alive. He did not

expect it. The only chance was that they couldn't see themselves.

Perhaps Kohlvihr thought he was a hero to-day. Doubtless he did.... One

thing was sure, he, Boylan, must sit tight with his enthusiasm for the

Russian force; must play it harder than ever--must play it for Peter

Mowbray, too.

“You fellows certainly have your troubles--front and back,” he said to

Dabnitz. “But I say, Lieutenant, you couldn't ask troops to go forward

better--you couldn't ask more of the Japanese in the business of

charges--”

“I wasn't out in that service,” Dabnitz observed.

“Grand little bunch of celibates afield, those Japanese--religious about

these matters of using up hostile ammunition. Fact is, I never saw

white troops go out to a finish four times in one day--as yours did

to-day--out over their own dead, too--”

He was becoming genial; his heart quaking for Peter, as he thought

suddenly of the words aimed at Kohlvihr's throat, and of Peter's

association at the last with the man in the steward's blouse. ...Dabnitz

was unvaryingly courteous.

The advance was on again. Boylan went forth to see the repulse. The

main lines on either side had loosened to fill the gaps of Kohlvihr's

division, the much-torn outfits braced by the fresher infantrymen. On

they went, a last time, over the strewn land.

Boylan saw it all again; heard the drum of the batteries when the troops

reached the hollow of the valley; saw them change like figures on a

blurred screen; perceived the antics and the general settling--and

turned away....

It was like the swoop of a carrion bird an instant afterward--and the

deafening strike. The Austrians had varied a little. A shrapnel

battery had been emplaced among the rapid-fire pieces during the recent

interval. A hundred yards down the works to the east landed the first

finger of a hand that groped for headquarters. Boylan watched for the

second shell--one eye, and as little besides as possible, above the

rim of the trench now deserted. It was the same tension and tallying of

seconds that Peter had known on the afternoon that the moon rose before

the setting sun. Big Belt ducked at the second scream. The explosion was

nearer and a little back. He returned to field headquarters just as a

third shrapnel shivered the land still nearer the bomb-proof pit.

Kohlvihr's face was gray as the fringe of his hair. He looked little and

aged.

“My compliments to the commander,” he was dictating, “...report that

after five advances we find enemy's front impregnable to infantry.

Headquarters now under shrapnel fire. We are forced to withdraw toward

Judenbach--”

The dispatch rider was standing by. The dirt sprinkled down on their

heads through the wooden buttresses as another shrapnel broke outside.

“But the wounded, General. The field is alive with wounded--” came from

Doltmir.

“I can't send troops out there again--” The voice was thick and hoarse

with repression. “We'll get them at nightfall.... Gentlemen, we may now

withdraw.”

Boylan was one of the last to leave. He saw the aged legs disappear up

the earth-rise as the rear door opened. The legs jerked and twitched

spasmodically, as if taking an invisible spanking.

Boylan was actually afraid of his thoughts, lest they be read in his

face--the shocking personal business on Kohlvihr's part. “A little

shrapnel or two sends him quaking home, and _they_ went out five times

for him into the very steam of hell.”

His brain kept repeating this in spite of him, so that he did not try to

overtake the staff.

And _they_--the poor last fragment of them--were piling back toward

Judenbach, leaving their wounded behind.

Chapter 3

Goylan was back in Judenbach. It was four in the afternoon. He had

searched everywhere for Peter Mowbray. The whole war zone was getting

blacker and blacker to his sight. He had even gone to the Grim House

to look for the white-fire creature who had taken his companion to her

breast, figuratively speaking; but neither she, nor the weak-shouldered

little chap who had brought the hospital steward's blouse, was there.

There remained Dabnitz, who more than any other was aware generally of

what passed. Big Belt returned to headquarters and waited. Darkness was

thickening before the Lieutenant came in.

“Where's Mowbray?”

Dabnitz came close and looked at the other sorrowfully.

“How long have you known Mr. Mowbray?”

Boylan tried to think. His faculties were at large. According to facts

he had known Peter (and not at all intimately) during a mere ten weeks

before the column left Warsaw. Facts, however, hadn't anything to do

with the reality. Peter Mowbray was his own property. He said as much,

his voice going back on him.

“Mr. Boylan, I have seldom been more hard hit. He was my friend, too. A

more charming and accomplished young American would be hard to find,

but we who are out for service, a life and death matter for our country,

must not let these things enter. Mr. Mowbray is affiliated in various

ways with our enemies--not the Austrians, but enemies more subtle and

insidious.”

“For God's sake--Dabnitz!”

“I thought it would hurt you.”

“You might just as well say it of me.”

“Not at all. Your record stands. It was well known to us when you were

accepted to accompany our column. You will recall that it was your

estimate of Mr. Mowbray's superior that decided us to accept the younger

man--”

“I have been with Mowbray night and day. He is a newspaper man, brain

and soul--one of the coolest and most effective I have ever met. He has

been for years in Paris and Berlin, before Warsaw.”

“I am sorry. You did not know that he caught a young surgeon by the

throat this morning, when the former was very properly stimulating a

malingerer?”

“I did not. But a personal matter ought not to weigh against a man's

life--”

“You did not know that he was seen in somewhat extended conversation

yesterday and last evening with one of the most dangerous of our recent

discoveries among the revolutionists?”

“I did not.”

“Or that a woman came to him last night, in the heart of the night--and

talked long--and was called for by the same revolutionist; that Mr.

Mowbray went to her a little after daybreak this morning--”

“Ah, Dabnitz--a little romance! All night he was serving in the

hospital. I went out to find him this morning, and saw him turn into

the amputation house. Following, I saw him standing there.... He had

probably never seen her until last night. You know how some young

fellows are. They--you turn around--and they are in an affair--”

“But the two were overheard to speak of days in Warsaw together. It is

not such a little affair.”

“I know nothing of it, but is such a thing fatal?”

“She is under arrest with the other revolutionist that I mentioned--a

case against her that is hardly breakable--”

Boylan sat down,

“Of course you are aware--of the remark he made this morning in the

field headquarters? I saw how gallantly you tried to cover it. It was

that remark, by the way, which nearly cost the life of our General. The

hospital steward, took up the action as you know--”

“Dabnitz, I was shocked as you. Peter was beside himself. He had come

in from the field--the actuality of it. He forgot where he was. The

unparalleled energy of the General to win the day, you know--and Peter

had just come in from the hollows where the men lay--”

“My dear Boylan, I'm sorry--”

For the first time, Big Belt felt the iron personality of the other.

There was something commercial in the manner of the last, a kind of

ushering out one who would not do. There are men who remain as aloof

as the peaks of Phyrges, though their words and intonations come down

running softly out of a smile. Boylan looked away, and then, with an

inner groan, turned back.

“I tell you it is a mistake. The boy is as sound as--”

He couldn't finish. There were exceptions to everything he thought of.

“I want to see him,” he added.

“I'll try to manage that for you, a little later.”

* * *

It was darkening. In the front room of the house, Kohlvihr sat bung-eyed

by a telegraph instrument. The further strategy from Judenbach was

still in the dark to Boylan. He wished the heavens would fall. As

never before, he had the sense that he had pinned his life and faith to

matters of no account; not that Peter Mowbray belonged to these matters,

but that he, too, was meshed in them.... A shot from somewhere below

in the town. Boylan shivered. There was shooting from time to time for

various butchering reasons, but this particular shot was all Big Belt

needed to finish the picture.

“Why, they'll shoot the lad,” he muttered.

The sentence remained in his brain in lit letters.

The States of America couldn't help him; even Mother Nature had turned

her face from this war.... “My dear Boylan, I'm sorry--” something

crippling in that.

Dabnitz returned, bringing a pair of saddle bags.

“They're Mr. Mowbray's,” he said. “His horse got loose and tangled

himself in a battery. One of the men brought in the bags.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant,” said Boylan.

Dabnitz started to the door when Boylan called, “Oh, I say, did you look

through 'em?”

The Russian smiled deprecatingly.

“Of course, I needn't have asked that, but I wanted you to. I'll gamble

you didn't find anything--”

“A little book of poems by a man we're familiar with. A woman's name

on the front page--a woman we're familiar with. Nothing startling, Mr.

Boylan.”

Dabnitz was gone, the bags lying on the floor. Big Belt opened the

nearest flap. On top was a case containing a tooth brush and a pair of

razors.

“Peter will want these,” he muttered.

V

THE SKYLIGHT PRISON

Chapter 1

Peter walked ahead unbound. He could not keep his mind on the journey

with the sentry. His thoughts winged from Lonegan at Warsaw, to _The

States'_ office and home, as if carrying the message of his own end....

Boylan might finally break out with the details.... The personal part

ended suddenly, like an essential formality, leaving him a sorrow for

Boylan and his mother especially. His full faculties now opened to

Berthe Wyndham.

He was ordered to turn twice to the left. They had left the little stone

court, entering the main street, and back again into the first side

street for a short distance to a narrow stairway, between low mercantile

houses now used for hospitals. Up the creaking way; the sentry within

answered the sentry without and opened the door. A long narrow room with

a single square of light from the roof, and Moritz Abel came forward.

“I'm sorry,” the poet said. “I had hoped--”

“Yes, we had hoped,” Peter replied with a smile.

Duke Fallows appeared from the shadows and hastily pressed his hand.

Abel had turned toward the square of light, as if there were still

another.

She came forward like a wraith--into the light--and still toward him,

her lips parted, her eyes intent upon him. The sentry who had brought

him turned, clattered down the stairs. The door was shut by the other

sentry. Her lips moved, but there was nothing that he heard. With one

hand still in his, she turned and led him back under the daylight to the

shadows.... He heard Moritz Abel's voice repeating that he had been a

poor protector. Fallows spoke....

There was much to it, hardly like a human episode--the silence so far as

words between them, the tragedy in each soul that the other must go; the

tearing readjustments to the end of all work in the world, and the swift

reversion of the mind to its innumerable broken ends of activity; and

above all, the deep joy of their being together in this last intense

weariness.... She wore her white veiled cap and apron; having followed

the summons from her work. There was a chair in the shadows, and she

pressed him down in her old way, and took her own place before him (as

in her own house) half-sitting, half-kneeling.

“Peter, I could not believe--until I touched you. I was praying just

here, that you would not come--”

“I am very grateful to be here,” he said.

“I was so lonely. I was afraid of death. Fallows talked to me and Moritz

Abel--but it did not do. I was thinking of you at the battle, as if you

were a thousand miles away--as if I were waiting, as a mother for you,

waiting for tidings with a babe in her arms--”

She paused and he said, “Tell me,” knowing that she must speak on.

“...It was just like that. I prayed that you would live--that you would

not be brought here--that the time would pass swiftly. We have been here

hours. They came for us soon after you went. We were all together in

that place--all at our work. They led us here through the streets. It

seemed very far. Something caught in the throat when the soldiers looked

at me. I know what my father felt when he kept saying, 'It's all right.

Yes, this is all right.' I know just how the surprise and the amazement

affected him from time to time, and made him say that.... Then we

were here. I wanted this darker chair. They came--I mean our good

friends--Fallows came and talked to me, and Moritz Abel, but it wasn't

what I seemed to need. Ah, Peter, I'm talking in circles--”

Something warned him that she was going to break, but he could not speak

quickly enough. The human frightened little girl that he had never seen

before in Berthe Wyndham, was so utterly revealing to his heart that

he was held in enchantment. She seemed so frail and tender, as she said

plaintively:

“We must be very dear to each other--”

There were tears in her eyes now, and her breast rose and fell with

emotion, as poignant to Mowbray as if it were his own.

“I did pray for them not to bring you here,” she added. “If I had not

left Warsaw, you would not be here now--”

“Listen--oh, Berthe, don't say that. Please, listen--”

The current was turned on in his brain, thoughts revolving faster and

faster:

“It would all have been a mere military movement if you had not come. I

would not have understood Spenski, nor the real Samarc, nor Kohlvihr as

he is, nor the charges of infantry. The coming of Moritz Abel, words I

have heard, the street, the singing, the field, the future--why, it's

all different because you came. I am not dismayed by this. I have had

a great life here. If this is our last day--the matter is lifted out of

our hands. And dear Berthe, what do you think it means to me--this last

hour together?”

“What does it mean, Peter?'

“I look into your face, and know that I've found something the world

tried to make me believe wasn't here. Everything I did as a boy and man

tried to show me that there isn't anything uncommon in a man finding a

woman. My mother knew differently, but every time she wanted to tell me

something happened. Another voice broke in, or perhaps she saw I wasn't

attentive or ready. But I know now--and it didn't come to me until here

in Judenbach--”

“She must have known,” Berthe whispered.

Fallows drew near. He seemed calm but very weary. “May I bring up my

chair for a little while?” he asked as an old nurse might.

“Please do,” they said.

“Thank you,” Fallows answered, and returned with his wooden chair. “If

you change the subject I shall have to go.”

“I was just saying that I had found something in the world that my

mother knew all the time,” Peter explained.

“Oh, I say, this is important. Moritz must come in,” Fallows told them.

They nodded laughingly.

“Moritz,” he called. “Here's a little boy and girl telling stories--very

important stories. You must hear.... We're all one, Peter Mowbray.”

They drew closer together. Berthe was watching Peter intensely, knowing

that it was his test, very far from his way. Then she remembered the

death-room, and that all things are changed by that. She sat very still,

trying to give him strength to go on. “I've always used my head,” he

said, “always explained why, and made diagrams. The one time I didn't

use my head--well, the best thing happened in my experience.”

Peter was in for it, and weathered gracefully.

“You'll forgive me,” he said, when they asked to know. “I was thinking

of meeting Berthe Wyndham. I saw her one day passing through the Square

in Warsaw near the river corner. Well, it all came about, because I went

there again the next day at the same time--”

He was a little breathless, but the glad and eager sincerity of his

listeners helped him, and he wanted more than all to lift Berthe if he

could.

“I could not help thinking of that when I recalled another little matter

yesterday--in Judenbach. Once when we were little, my brother Paul and

I quarreled. My mother and I were alone afterward. I told her of the

tragedy. Everything seemed lost since I had lost Paul. She said, 'Some

time you will find your real playmate, if you are good and search very

hard.' I suppose she has forgotten. I forgot for years. But it came

to me here.... You see I never suffered before, never was tested,

everything came smoothly, everything covered up--”

“You are good to let us listen,” Fallows said quietly. He was staring at

the ceiling.

“Here in Judenbach the relations of all other days began to match up.

It was as if the whole war was to show _me_, each department carried on

clearly. I didn't know a man could stand so much. Day before yesterday

morning, I wanted to quit. I had a kind of madness from it all--an ache

that wouldn't break or bleed, and was driving the life out of me. I

found the way out by going into the hospital. I had to forget myself or

go under.... When it seemed all over to-day, and the sentry was marching

me here (you see I had gone back to the house of amputations and

couldn't find any of you, and then to the Court of Execution, and you

were not there), it was all slipping away in a loneliness not to be

described, when I found you here--”

Fallows straightened his head and blinked.

“'It was all slipping away in a loneliness not to be described,'” he

repeated. “We know that. This is too fine.”

Peter laughed. He was thinking of what Lonegan had said on the night he

came back from Berthe's door, after she had asked him not to come

in.... “Peter, you're lying. I don't believe you'd let anybody see your

fires--not even how well you bank 'em.”

They seemed to require further talk from him. He did not want the two

men, sorry they had drawn up their chairs. His heart was very tender

to them--Fallows and Abel, and the woman who had changed him. They

were before him now as messengers from the benignant empire of the

future--strange strong souls gathered together now in waiting at the end

of a road.... He told them of the bomb-proof pit, the naked animalism of

Kohlvihr, the infantry advances and of Samarc. Presently his heart was

light again, the pent forces of expression springing gladly into use.

“...The laughable thing about it,” he finished, “--the thing that held

me speechless as Samarc left my side there in the dark corner of the

pit--was that just a few minutes before Kohlvihr had promised to see

that the Little Father decorated him. He had almost reached the General

when my throat worked, and I called, 'Samarc.' It was as if he didn't

hear me. Nothing would have stopped him. It was his idea, yet I think he

meant only to stop the order of another infantry advance. He had ceased

to kill, you know....”

Peter ended it hastily. They were all interested to know why Samarc was

to have been decorated. This opened the earlier part of the day, and his

strange wandering with Samarc among the hills--the magic of the hospital

steward's coat, the scent of the cedars, and Peter's persistent sense of

Berthe's nearness.

“Actually, I had to stop and think,” he explained. “Each time I

fell into an abstraction, it struck me that she was there. It seems

yesterday, too--”

“I was just here,” Berthe said. “It was soon after we came. We were all

quiet at first--in different corners--”

“Slipping away in that loneliness,” Fallows suggested.

“As for me,” said Moritz Abel, “I had to make peace with myself. We have

been very busy the last few days. I have discovered that I am a bit of a

coward at heart--and I missed having something to do--”

They smiled at him. “Perhaps I was out there,” Berthe said. “Perhaps I

was only sitting here--”

It was a queer matter that the three men, each of whom would have given

his life to save the woman's, to all appearances accepted the fact of

her as one of them in courage and control. It was Abel who mentioned

the singer, Poltneck, whom Peter had not met. He had been left in the

hospital when the others were taken; yet he had been one in all their

interests and the most reckless and outspoken of all in his hatred of

slaughter. They did not understand, but hoped he would be saved.

“He's a magician,” Abel said. “He sang to them yesterday--as they bore

the knife. He seemed to hold them in the everlasting arms. It was worth

living to witness that, but I'm afraid Poltneck will come to us. He's

got the fury. Hearing that we are gone, he will start something--if

only to join us. Then there will be no one to escape with the story. It

troubles me.... If Mr. Mowbray were only free. Doesn't it seem that our

brothers should hear the story?”

His voice broke a little. His brow was wet.

Fallows came back from the ceiling, and said:

“Moritz, my boy, all is well with us. That which is true is immortal.”