MAROONED
"Will they do anything for us?" repeated Carfax.
The staff officer thought it very doubtful. He stood in the snow switching
his wet puttees and looking out across a world of tumbled mountains. Over
on his right lay Germany; on his left, France; Switzerland towered in ice
behind him against an arctic blue sky.
It grew warm on the Falcon Peak, almost hot in the sun. Snow was melting
on black heaps of rocks; a black salamander, swollen, horrible, stirred
from its stiff lethargy and crawled away blindly across the snow.
"Our case is this," continued Carfax; "somebody’s made a mistake. We’ve
been forgotten. And if they don’t relieve us rather soon some of us will
go off our bally nuts. Do you get me, Major?"
"I beg your pardon----"
"Do you understand what I’ve been saying?"
"Oh, yes; quite so."
"Then ask yourself, Major, how long can four men stand it, cooped up here
on this peak? A month, two months, three, five? But it’s going on ten
months--ten months of solitude--silence--not a sound, except when the
snowslides go bellowing off into Alsace down there below our feet." His
bronzed lip quivered. "I’ll get aboard one if this keeps on."
He kicked a lump of ice off into space; the staff officer glanced at him
and looked away hurriedly.
"Listen," said Carfax with an effort; "we’re not regulars--not like the
others. The Canadian division is different. Its discipline is
different--in spite of Salisbury Plain and K. of K. In my regiment there
are half-breeds, pelt-hunters, Nome miners, Yankees of all degrees,
British, Canadians, gentlemen adventurers from Cosmopolis. They’re good
soldiers, but do you think they’d stay here? It is so in the Athabasca
Battalion; it is the same in every battalion. They wouldn’t stay here ten
months. They couldn’t. We are free people; we can’t stand indefinite
caging; we’ve got to have walking room once every few months."
The staff officer murmured something.
"I know; but good God, man! Four of us have been on this peak for nearly
ten months. We’ve never seen a Boche, never heard a shot. Seasons come and
go, rain falls, snow falls, the winds blow from the Alps, but nothing else
comes to us except a half-frozen bird or two."
The staff officer looked about him with an involuntary shiver. There was
nothing to see except the sun on the wet, black rocks and the whitewashed
observation station of solid stone from which wires sagged into the valley
on the French side.
"Well--good luck," he said hastily, looking as embarrassed as he felt.
"I’ll be toddling along."
"Will you say a word to the General, like a good chap? Tell him how it is
with us--four of us all alone up here since the beginning. There’s Gary,
Captain in the Athabasca Battalion, a Yankee if the truth were known;
there’s Flint, a cockney lieutenant in a Calgary battery; there’s young
Gray, a lieutenant and a Prince Edward Islander; and here’s me, a major in
the Yukon Battalion--four of us on the top of a cursed French
mountain--ten months of each other, of solitude, silence--and the whole
world rocking with battles--and not a sound up here--not a whisper! I tell
you we’re four sick men! We’ve got a grip on ourselves yet, but it’s
slipping. We’re still fairly civil to each other, but the strain is
killing. Sullen silences smother irritability, but--" he added in a
peculiarly pleasant voice, "I expect we are likely to start killing each
other if somebody doesn’t get us out of here very damn quick."
The staff captain’s lips formed the words, "Awfully sorry! Good luck!" but
his articulation was indistinct, and he went off hurriedly, still
murmuring.
Carfax stood in the snow, watching him clamber down among the rocks, where
an alpinist orderly joined them.
Gary presently appeared at the door of the observation station. "Has he
gone?" he inquired, without interest.
"Yes," said Carfax.
"Is he going to do anything for us?"
"I don’t know.... _No!_"
Gary lingered, kicked at a salamander, then turned and went indoors.
Carfax sat down on a rock and sucked at his empty pipe.
Later the three officers in the observation station came out to the door
again and looked at him, but turned back into the doorway without saying
anything. And after a while Carfax, feeling slightly feverish, went
indoors, too.
In the square, whitewashed room Gray and Flint were playing cut-throat
poker; Gary was at the telephone, but the messages received or transmitted
appeared to be of no importance. There had never been any message of
importance from the Falcon Peak or to it. There was likely to be none.
Ennui, inertia, dry rot--and four men, sometimes silently, sometimes
violently cursing their isolation, but always cursing it--afraid in their
souls lest they fall to cursing one another aloud as they had begun to
curse in their hearts.
Months ago rain had fallen; now snow fell, and vast winds roared around
them from the Alps. But nothing else ever came to the Falcon Peak, except
a fierce, red-eyed _Lämmergeyer_ sheering above the peak on enormous
pinions, or a few little migrating birds fluttering down, half frozen,
from the high air lanes. Now and then, also, came to them a staff officer
from below, British sometimes, sometimes French, who lingered no longer
than necessary and then went back again, down into friendly deeps where
were trees and fields and familiar things and human companionship, leaving
them to their hell of silence, of solitude, and of each other.
The tide of war had never washed the base of their granite cliffs; the
highest battle wave had thundered against the Vosges beyond earshot; not
even a deadened echo of war penetrated those silent heights; not a Taube
floated in the zenith.
In the squatty, whitewashed ruin which once had been the eyrie of some
petty predatory despot, and which now served as an observatory for two
idle divisions below in the valley, stood three telescopes. Otherwise the
furniture consisted of valises, trunks, a table and chairs, a few books,
several newspapers, and some tennis balls lying on the floor.
Carfax seated himself at one of the telescopes, not looking through it,
his heavy eyes partly closed, his burnt-out pipe between his teeth.
Gary rose from the telephone and joined the card players. They shuffled
and dealt listlessly, seldom speaking save in monosyllables.
After a while Carfax went over to the card table and the young lieutenant
cashed in and took his place at the telescope.
Below in the Alsatian valley spring had already started the fruit buds,
and a delicate green edged the lower snow line.
The lieutenant spoke of it wistfully; nobody paid any attention; he rose
presently and went outdoors to the edge of the precipice--not too near,
for fear he might be tempted to jump out through the sunshine, down into
that inviting world of promise below.
Far underneath him--very far down in the valley--a cuckoo called. Out of
the depths floated the elfin halloo, the gaily malicious challenge of
spring herself, shouted up melodiously from the plains of
Alsace--_Cuckoo!_ _Cuckoo!_ _Cuckoo!_--You poor, sullen, frozen foreigner
up there on the snowy rocks!--_Cuckoo!_ _Cuckoo!_ _Cuckoo!_
The lieutenant of Yukon infantry, whose name was Gray, came back into the
room.
"There’s a bird of sorts yelling like hell below," he said to the card
players.
Carfax ran over his cards, rejected three, and nodded. "Well, let him
yell," he said.
"What is it, a Boche dicky-bird insulting you?" asked Gary, in his Yankee
drawl.
Flint, declining to draw cards, got up and went out into the sunshine.
When he returned to the table, he said: "It’s a cuckoo.... I wish to God I
were out of this," he added.
They continued to play for a while without apparent interest. Each man had
won his comrades’ money too many times to care when Carfax added up debit
and credit and wrote down each man’s score. In nine months, alternately
beggaring one another, they had now, it appeared, broken about even.
Gary, an American in British uniform, twitched a newspaper toward himself,
slouched in his chair, and continued to read for a while. The paper was
French and two weeks old; he jerked it about irritably.
Gray, resting his elbows on his knees, sat gazing vacantly out of the
narrow window. For a smart officer he had grown slovenly.
"If there was any trout fishing to be had," he began; but Flint laughed
scornfully.
"What are you laughing at? There must be trout in the valley down there
where that bird is," insisted Gray, reddening.
"Yes, and there are cows and chickens and houses and women. What of it?"
Gary, in his faded service uniform of a captain, scowled over his
newspaper. "It’s bad enough to be here," he said heavily; "so don’t let’s
talk about it. Quit disputing."
Flint ignored the order.
"If there was anything sportin’ to do----"
"Oh, shut up," muttered Carfax. "Do you expect sport on a hog-back?"
Gray picked up a tennis ball and began to play it against the whitewashed
stone wall, using the palm of his hand. Flint joined him presently; Gary
went over to the telephone, set the receiver to his ear and spoke to some
officer in the distant valley on the French side, continuing a spiritless
conversation while watching the handball play. After a while he rose,
shambled out and down among the rocks to the spring where snow lay,
trodden and filthy, and the big, black salamanders crawled half stupefied
in the sun. All his loathing and fear of them kindled again as it always
did at sight of them. "Dirty beasts," he muttered, stumping and stumbling
among the stunted fir trees; "some day they’ll bite some of these damn
fools who say they can’t bite. And that’ll end ’em."
Flint and Gray continued to play handball in a perfunctory way while
Carfax looked on from the telephone without interest. Gary came back, his
shoes and puttees all over wet snow.
"Unless," he said in a monotonous voice, "something happens within the
next few days I’ll begin to feel queer in my head; and if I feel it coming
on, I’ll blow my bally nut off. Or somebody’s." And he touched his service
automatic in its holster and yawned.
After a dead silence:
"Buck up," remarked Carfax; "think how our men must feel in Belfort, never
letting off their guns. Ross rifles, too--not a shot at a Boche since the
damn war began!"
"God!" said Flint, smiting the ball with the palm of his hand, "to think
of those Ross rifles rusting down there and to think of the pink-skinned
pigs they could paunch so cleanly. Did you ever paunch a deer? What a mess
of intestines all over the shop!"
Gary, still standing, began to kick the snow from his shoes. Gray said to
him: "For a dollar of your Yankee money I’d give you a shot at me with
your automatic--you’re that slack at practice."
"If it goes on much longer like this I’ll not have to pay for a shot at
anybody," returned Gary, with a short laugh.
Gray laughed too, disagreeably, stretching his facial muscles, but no
sound issued.
"We’re all going crazy together up here; that’s my idea," he said. "I
don’t know which I can stand most comfortably, your voices or your
silence. Both make me sick."
"Some day a salamander will nip you; then you’ll go loco," observed Gary,
balancing another tennis ball in his right hand. "Give me a shot at you?"
he added. "I feel as though I could throw it clean through you. You look
soft as a pudding to me."
Far, clear, from infinite depths, the elf-like hail of the cuckoo came
floating up to the window.
To Flint, English born, the call meant more than it did to Canadian or
Yankee.
"In Devon," he said in an altered voice, "they’ll be calling just now.
There’s a world of primroses in Devon.... And the thorn is as white as the
damned snow is up here."
Gary growled his impatience and his profile of a Greek fighter showed in
clean silhouette against the window.
"Aw, hell," he said, "did I come out here for this?--nine months of it?"
He hurled the tennis ball at the wall. "Can the home talk, if you don’t
mind."
The cuckoo was still calling.
"Did you ever play cuckoo," asked Carfax, "at ten shillings a throw? It’s
not a bad game--if you’re put to it for amusement."
Nobody replied; Gray’s sunken, boyish face betrayed no interest; he
continued to toss a tennis ball against the wall and catch it on the
rebound.
Toward sundown the usual Alpine chill set in; a mist hung over the
snow-edged cliffs; the rocks breathed steam under a foggy and battered
moon.