During the night a siege-gun had been brought up by hand, and now, from
its place where the road cut through the entrenchments, it opened with
the morning greeting of a hoarse bark, as the crew serving it began
feeling over the landscape for the field-piece which had boomed so
insistently last night.
Then, as the morning wore on, and orders to advance came, the slow
rifle-firing began again and increased in volume as the sun climbed.
The night-long rain of random lead had taken its toll in a few wounded,
though none had sustained mortal hurt. Two or three men from B Company
came back to the front from the improvised dressing-station at the rear,
wearing reddened bandages, which they displayed with the cocky pride of
medals, as they picked up their pieces and joined again in the game.
The masking woods told nothing of the trenches beyond except in the
swish of Mauser bullets, which shredded drooping palm fronds into
tatters. Newt Spooner was squatting on his haunches in the trench, with
a pipe between his teeth. Every now and then he came to his knees and
fired a shot. At his side knelt Jim Dodeman, who until he joined the
militia had never fared twenty miles from the cabin on Troublesome
where he had been born. Jimmy was bored with the ennui of shooting at a
screen of palm trees and crouching between times in a hot ditch. So, at
last, he rose for a fuller view and to stretch the cramp from his limbs.
He rose silently and as silently lay down again, but this time he lay
flat, and, when a pause in proceedings gave Newt leisure to relight his
pipe, he looked down to recognize in Jimmy's posture the dummy-like
quality of death. The little muddy spot under the soldier's temple was
fed by blood trickling from his brain.
First-Sergeant Peter Spooner had been going back and forth along the
company line, curbing the inclination of its restive integers to
over-spend cartridges in futile bickering. He stopped and turned the
prostrate figure face up, and for a moment looked into the dulled eyes.
"Dead," commented the sergeant briefly.
Newt nodded.
"Them damned Falkinses got him," he said over his shoulder. Then,
remembering that he had swapped enemies, he grinned, and corrected
himself: "I mean them other varmints."
At noon, a brigade staff-officer brought instructions. The whole line
was to be advanced five hundred yards to a new position where the woods
would no longer screen the enemy, and it was there to dig trenches along
a roadway, which paralleled the present front.
That news sent a drone of excited pleasure through the bluegrass
companies, and even into the phlegmatic stoicism of the Shirt-tail
battalion crept the suppressed expectation of the first charge. Major
Falkins went along the line for final instructions to company
commanders, and First Sergeant Spooner cast down his company front the
anxious glance of a stage-director who awaits the curtain call, on a
first night.
But the two platoons seemed steady enough as they rose from the trenches
in extended order, and waited for the word that should launch them
forward.
Then a bugle rang, and the entire two battalions started silently and
stolidly onward. In a few minutes the silence would be broken--from the
front. On to the screen of the woods they went at a rapid quickstep, and
through the foliage they broke into view, like circus riders through
paper hoops. As they emerged into the open rice-fields, and could see
the straw hats at the top of the trenches four hundred yards to the
north, the stillness was ripped in one wild roar of musketry, and their
terrific welcome had begun. Its echoes rolled away in waves of sound
that merged with fresh outburstings, and nearer at hand, in weird
shrieks, piercing the louder detonations, whimpered the lost-soul wail
of the Mauser bullets. As the straw hats bobbed hysterically up and
disappeared again, the men of the two battalions began stumbling and
lying grotesquely down in the rice-fields.
They reached the road, which the brigade order said was to be their
resting place. But neither brigade nor division orders can keep men
alive in a place where the physical topography forbids. The road ran at
the right and left in a sunken band between banks two or three feet
high, affording--to east and west--a natural protection; but for the
length of several furlongs it elected to rise and proceed in a level
flush with the rice-fields and gave to even the closest-lying and most
prostrate figures pitiless conspicuousness as targets. On each side, the
troops were at work, improving their cover, and for their work they had
partial security; but the Kentuckians were left mercilessly exposed.
They were firing desperately at the solid earth ahead and receiving in
response a death-hail which they could not for many minutes endure.
Sergeant Peter Spooner, running in a crouching attitude, dropping,
rising, his rifle barking, was doing all that mortal being could do to
make moles of his men and burrow them into the earth. The situation was
intolerable. The Shirt-tail battalion and the bluegrass battalion stood
in peril of decimation in their maiden engagement.
Newt Spooner lay stretched behind a mound of earth some seven inches
high. He lay spraddled and flattened like a large drab lizard, hugging
the earth with his feet stretched apart, and even his heels held tight
to the clay. At each report of his piece Private Spooner opened the
block and blew through the breech, as a trap-shooter blows the powder
out of a shot-gun. Private Spooner's face was sweating with exertion,
and the dust turned to mud as it gathered on his chin and jaws.
Behind similarly insufficient mounds, or no mounds at all, several
hundred other privates were similarly employed. At the front rose a
dense fog of fleecy white, for the volunteers had not yet been afforded
the luxury of smokeless powder. Ever and anon a man rose on one elbow
and strained his eyes in a vain effort to penetrate the pale smoke, and
as the hour-like minutes wore on, more and more of them rolled quietly
over and relinquished their rifles and stared up out of eyes which the
hot glare had ceased to trouble.
Orders are orders, and the line was commanded to remain here, but Major
Falkins knew that his section of it must move forward, or fall back and
leave the line broken. The colonel was at the regimental center where
the line lapped on the deeper banks. Falkins, with a scarlet thread down
his face where death had brushed him in passing, found the commanding
officer.
"I can't stay where I am," he shouted; "I must go forward."
"Go," acquiesced the "C. O." crisply. "And go like hell!"
At the returning major's elbow pressed the battalion's trumpeter, and,
at the signal of a nod, he set the bugle to his lips and blew, "Cease
firing!" It was the command for which he had been fretting. The brazen
message went only a little way along the noisy line, but it was relayed
by word of mouth; and, as the firing fell away, the second command
clamored upon the first. "Fix bayonets!"
Those notes were magic. They stood for the wild dash and close quarters
and hand-to-hand punishment. They promised vengeance for the men who had
fallen asleep. Down the front ran the ominous metallic click of engaging
hilt and muzzle, and, as the pall of smoke began to rise, the line came
shouting to its feet and set its eyes hungrily on the yellow stripe that
marked the top of the earth-works. They stood, a moment, exposed as the
command of "forward" flexed their taut nerves. There were three hundred
yards between them and their goal, and these three hundred were
annoyingly and maddeningly broken with fences and gullies, but now they
were free to fire at will, which meant as fast as they could load. Also,
as they advanced, they left behind their own blinding curtain of powder
fog. And these men from the hills, shooting now at a point-blank range
to which they were accustomed: a range at which every man was a
sharp-shooter, combed and harried the yellow earthen band ahead of them
with so galling and stinging and venomous a punishment that the straw
hats drew down like turtle heads into shells, and the Mauser bullets,
fired at random, went wilder and higher.
It was not easy work, though much easier than lying prone and being shot
to pieces. Even with random marksmanship and growing panic, the brown
men were still sheltered, and many shots went home. Newt, clambering
over a fence, saw at his shoulder a boy who used to sit at his side on
the split-log bench at school. He saw the boy loosen his hold on the
same fence and roll over and over in the rice-stubble, clawing at his
breast, while his lips snarled and swore.
Then, sixty yards from the yellow rim of the trenches, the bugle rang
out its most blood-quickening call, and, in answer, the line trembled
and leaped forward, and mountain reticence broke at last in one
prolonged mountain yell of fury and loosened passion.
And, as that barbaric howl of impending doom smote upon the ears of the
Filipinos in their ordered trenches, they read in it a cue for swift
exit, and their white-clad bodies began clambering out of the
rifle-pits, and their brown legs began twinkling through the rice-fields
behind.
The Kentuckians redoubled their pace. It was intolerable that the men
whom they had left strewn along the rice-paddies should go unavenged.
Yet, when they clambered across the trench fronts, it was to find them
empty, save for those who lay dead.
For a moment, the victors halted, winded and almost exhausted at the
trenches they had carried. Companies were as hopelessly jumbled and
mixed as a galley of type that a compositor has dropped downstairs.
Private Newt Spooner and perhaps enough men to make a half-platoon,
after a few moments of gasping and sweat-wiping, rose up and started on
in the trail of the fleeing insurgents.
"Hold on there!" bellowed Sergeant Peter Spooner, for once losing his
composure in a volley of profanity. "Where the hell do you think you're
goin' to?"
"We're goin' atter 'em!" shrieked back Private Newton Spooner. "Come on,
boys--we kin git 'em."
Major Falkins had seen the trouble and rushed up, his face steaming, but
triumphant.
"Get back, damn you!" he ordered. "Get back to those trenches." He had
neither time nor inclination to explain why pursuit was denied. Such
matters as preserving division alignment were of no interest to these
men.
For a moment, Newt Spooner hesitated, surveying his battalion commander
with an insolent contempt, then he turned to the other restive privates.
"Come on, boys!" he yelled. "Don't suffer them niggers ter git away."
The major and his sergeant acted promptly. With the flat of sword and
clubbed musket, they beat back the mutinous and excited men, and, after
one blood-mad moment, all except Newt turned readily enough with
shamefaced grins.
But, in the momentary flail-like wielding of his saber-blade, Henry
Falkins had struck Newton Spooner one light blow, and straightway the
boy forgot any war between the United States and Aguinaldo; and
remembered only the old war between himself and the man who had sent him
to prison. He slipped a cartridge into his breech and would have settled
the score at the moment.
But, in that same moment, Sergeant Peter Spooner caught his hand, and
whispered in his ear.
"Obey orders, damn you! This ain't your only chance. This ain't no
private quarrel."
No one else had seen that look, or in the larger excitement read its
significance, and, even while Sergeant Spooner held Private Spooner's
steaming wrist, and their faces bent close together, sweat-wet and
dirt-stained, a new roar awoke two hundred yards to their left, to seize
their attention. The windows and doors of the old Spanish church, that
stood with a crooked cross tottering over its stained stucco walls, was
belching fire upon them. There was no time to form company or platoon
now, or to sort men into their rightful commands. Major Falkins waved
his saber and led the way at a run toward the offending walls, and
Sergeant Spooner at his heels was herding the group forward at pell-mell
speed, their rifles blazing and barking as they went.
A few of them did not reach the place, but enough did, and, as they came
to the front, spreading and dividing to prevent possible escape from
other entrances, the doors opened, and the over-venturesome refugees
rushed out in a pelting tide of effort to fight their way to freedom by
a sortie. Then the wrath of the mountaineers was appeased, and those of
the enemy who did not remain for burial went back as prisoners.
As Henry Falkins hurried back to his command, Private Newt Spooner
followed close at his heels and this time his rifle swung at his side.
Its bayonet bore some stains which he wiped off as he walked. At the
trenches, the bugle was sounding assembly. Across the face of the
country, wisps and attenuated clouds of smoke were wreathing their way
up and melting in the blue. From the rice-paddies and dykes rose
wavering mists of heat.
The Kentucky hillsmen, now reformed into column, were going back to
their fellows. They alone had had the capping triumph of crossing the
earth-works and effecting the hand-to-hand dislodgment of the enemy. So
they went back with a jaunty tread, and they paused before starting
across that four hundred yards where they should be watched as returning
victors, to pull out their shirt-tails. Marching in that style, they
would not have to declare their identity.
To Henry Falkins they suggested, as the skirts of their flannel shirts
flapped around their legs like kilts, those far-off ancestors of the
Scotch highlands whose blood flowed unamalgamated in their veins.