Said the sutler-woman, whose coarse black hair was powdered white as
any lady's of the early eighteenth century, smearing the dust from
the peonies of her cheeks with a brawny arm that was dusty as any
miller's:
"Young man, if thou stick to thy word, and take good care of the
jackass, remembering the sharp nail-spike in the end of the whip-butt
if he tries to kick or bite--I'll creep in under the tilt and take a
forty-winks. Lord be thanked! my legs are sound, but they ache a
bit!"
The jackass, who boasted the not inglorious name of "Rumschottel,"
laid back his ears viciously at his mistress's reference to the
persuasive spike in the whip-butt, and the young man addressed by his
temporary employer nodded in assent without opening his lips. For
the dust in which the little tilt-cart moved was almost solid, being
kicked up by the Seventh Corps of the Second Army of Germany, in line
of march through the Haardt Wald by Kaiserslautern.
The sutler-woman's young man had marched with the Fifth Corps from
Mayence by Oppenheim and Alzey, and had picked up an American tourist
who knew of a short cut to Kaiserslautern, and had mislaid the Army
Corps in trying to find it. Staffs, squadrons, batteries,
battalions, transport and baggage had vanished like smoke among these
vineyard-and-forest-clad hills, these pine-jacketed gorges, these
roads that ran between natural ramparts of granite, or passed through
quaint villages tucked under hillsides crimson and gold with laden
appletrees, and dominated by ancient castles perched on towering
platforms of rock.
Scenery palls when the thigh-bones seem wearing through their
sockets; when the stomach complains for very emptiness, and there are
bloody blisters inside the ragged socks. The American who had been
so cocksure about the road to Kaiserslautern was lying up under a
peasant's penthouse-thatch, at a twenty-mile distant village,
drinking Kirsch, nursing his own skinless heels, and reading up
"Murray." His late companion had refused to give in, and
perseverance had won its reward. Sixty miles or so above Kreuznach,
where the main road forks right and left, climbing the shoulders of
the Nahe Valley, he had met the Ninth Corps of the Second Army
marching up from Bingen, and hobbled at the heels of one of the dusty
battalions until he could hobble no more.
The sutler-woman had come upon him sitting pumped-out by the wayside,
had sold him bread, coffee and sausage, doctored his blisters,
supplied him with tallowed strips of linen to replace his wornout
socks, earned his gratitude, and displayed no reluctance to profit by
her philanthropy, when he had volunteered to help lead the jackass as
far as Kaiserslautern. True, he spoke a most vile jargon, but you
cannot have everything. And the weather was so beautifully dusty,
thought the sutler-woman, that an assistant would certainly be of
use. Without the dust that clogs the human throat, the trade in
liquid lubricants would be less roaring. And the tilt-cart
contained, beside other marching-requisites, a twenty-gallon barrel
of rather luke-warm beer.
The young man nodded again as the cart-shafts tilted in the
hame-straps, and a command to throw his weight on the front-board was
issued from behind. There was a good deal of creaking as he obeyed.
A heavy weight suddenly added to the jackass's load made Rumschottel
look malevolently round his near-side blinker, and display an upper
row of long orange-colored teeth in testimony of his desire to bite.
Then his driver slid off the board, took the rope reins, and
continued to trudge beside him, keeping well to the low hedgerow so
as to leave a clear space between the sutler's cart and the seemingly
endless column of dusty infantrymen, striding steadily forward
through a blazing August noon.
Ahead, where black-and-white and white-and-black lance-pennons
flickered at the turn of the road below a steep hill-shoulder covered
with bronzing vineyards heavy with purpling grapes, the light-blue of
a Prussian Dragoon regiment and the facings of a squadron of Red
Uhlans showed through the thick coating of dust that clung to horse
and man. But the dark uniforms of a succeeding battery of Horse
Artillery and the indigo or rifle-green of the battalions that
marched with the needle-gun, had long ago given place to a pervasive
whitey-brown.
Schmidt, Klaus, and Klein were pressing on in spite of dust and an
eighty-five-in-the-shade thermometer, you must understand, so as not
to get left out of the fighting that must be going on ahead. For the
First and Second Corps of the Second Army, with the Headquarters
Staff, were known to have reached Homburg, and on the previous night
the Army of the Crown Prince had bivouacked behind the Klingbach,
south of Landau.... Five or six in the morning, supposing him to
have marched at dawn, would see him well across the frontier. And
scouts on the hills had heliographed and flag-signaled the arrival of
Imperial battalions and artillery at Wissembourg, and blue Baden
Dragoons reported a cavalry camp at Selz. For all they knew, "Unser
Fritz" and the Napoleon were even then at grips.
So they marched--as they had marched since they detrained at Bingen,
swinging starkly on under the weight of the knapsack, eighty rounds
of ammunition, rolled great-coat, camp-kettle, sword, spade,
water-bottle, haversack and bread-roll, or half-a-dozen flint-hard
brown biscuits threaded together on a bit of string.
Men sweated and blistered under the relentless sun, but not many fell
out, and there were very few severe cases of sunstroke, these for the
most part falling to the lot of Reservists. And in the hottest part
of the day a plump of thunder broke among the hills eastward, and a
deluge that followed turned the dust on them to paste. Then the sun
came out again and baked the paste hard; and the sutler-woman stuck
her head out between the front flaps of the cart-tilt, and told her
young man to pull up for a bit of a rest and a snack.
So P. C. Breagh unharnessed Rumschottel, and the jackass rolled in a
sandy hollow in asinine fashion, and rose up braying and refreshed.
Then, quite mildly submitting to be hobbled by his mistress, he
fell-to upon a patch of thistles that the battery-wheels had spared.
And the sutler-woman, who answered to the name of Krumpf, produced
black bread and cheese, with peppery sausage of Brunswick, and a
mighty tin bottle of cold milk-coffee, from the depths of her
vehicle, and liberally dispensed of these refreshments to her
servitor. She partook of them herself, largely, lacing her own mug
of coffee out of a private bottle of _schnaps_.
"_Herr Je!_" she grumbled presently, "what is he gaping at?" For her
young man had finished eating, and was absorbed in watching marching
legs.... She added, snorting scornfully: "We might sit here and
sleep for three hours, and they would still be going by when we woke
up.... Horses' legs and men's legs, just as though they had got
clockwork inside them.... It was so in Schleswig-Holstein, and it
will be so in France. And what the Danes got the French will get,
and that will be a thumping!" She nodded directly afterward and
dozed heavily, leaning her broad back against the wheel of her cart.
Perhaps she slept a quarter-of-an-hour while the dusty men marched
by, four abreast, without slackening pace or changing step. They had
hard-featured, serious, intelligent faces for the most part, thought
P. C. Breagh, though here and there was a visage that bore the stamp
of vice upon it, or was pimply with drink, or brutal, or merely sly.
They had ceased to sing, though their bivouac of the night before had
been patriotically vocal; the dusty instruments of the bandsmen came
less frequently out of their dustier bags. They marched for the most
part in silence, though the trampling of their feet made the solid
ground reverberate.
Sometimes a battalion would quit the road, and hedges would go down
before it as by magic; and through the middle of a field of browning
corn or whitening barley a broad white highway would be beaten hard
as any threshing-floor, bare of anything save the most insignificant
tokens of their passage, such as a covey of late-hatched partridge
chicks trampled into rags, a broken strap, a fragment of biscuit, a
scattering of potato-peels, an empty match-box, the paper that had
held an ounce of tobacco, and many empty bottles that had held beer.
Rarely, a great scurry in the dust where some obstreperous charger
had reared and fallen with his rider, the extent of whose injuries
might be guessed by a clotted puddle of drying blood and a broken
stirrup-iron. Thus, under the rhythmical tread of the dusty boots,
as under the iron-shod wheels and iron-shod hoofs that had preceded
and would follow them--green things were beaten from the face of
earth, and fur and feather fled, as they were flying before the Third
Army, marching toward Wissembourg; as they were flying before
Steinmetz, bringing the First Army from the North.
Where they halted they left their taint by the scorched hedgerows,
and the black circles of their great fires remained to tell of them,
like the soil-pits that scarred the fields where they had bivouacked.
Last night, by some delusion of the wearied senses of sight and
hearing, they had seemed to the boy who had slept on the outskirts of
their camp to be marching even as they slept. The lusty snoring of
the countless swathes of sleepers between the long, orderly rows of
stacked needle-guns topped with gilt-spiked helmets, suggested the
rushing of a host in onward motion. When the boy who had lain
through the night under the sutler-woman's cart to guard it from
light-fingered marauders had fallen into a troubled slumber, his
blistered feet had carried him on in dreams behind them still. Then
in the blue dusk before dawn cavalry trumpets far ahead and shrill
bugles near at hand had shrilled reveillé--and when the tremendous
war-machine rushed on again once more, the dusty boy had been caught
up once more by the wind of its going, and drawn along with it, as a
chip is whirled in the under-draught of a rushing express-train, or a
wisp of hay is caught up by a traveling tornado, and borne upon its
dreadful way.
He grinned now, reminiscent of the Doctor's analogy, as a
blunt-nosed, shaggy dog of no distinguishable breed trotted past,
sneezing, between the files at the rear of a half-company-column.
"Whose is the beast?" he heard a soldier ask his neighbor on the
right-hand, and: "Nobody's--joined the battalion at Bingen!" was the
reply. Upon which the inquirer tossed the canine waif a scrap of
biscuit, with "Here, Bang!" and Bang, thus adopted and christened,
neatly caught the morsel, bolted it, and trotted on,--no more an
ownerless mongrel, but a regimental dog.
Now the sutler-woman was waking, rubbing the sleep out of a pair of
eyes which were less bright than they had been before their owner
became addicted to the use of beer with _schnaps_ as a lacing. She
had an incipient beard, and the voice of a heavy dragoon, yet there
was a tinge of womanly coquetry in her way of straightening her big,
battered bonnet, and adjusting the checked blue-and-yellow shawl tied
crosswise over her voluminous bust. She yawned, struggled to the
perpendicular position, with some difficulty, owing to her
corpulence; and cried, pointing a stout red finger at her henchman,
yet squatting in the shade of a clump of dusty whins:
"Lord! if he isn't mooning still, with his chin on his two fists!
Such a _gimpel_ I never yet did see! But they say all the _Englisch_
are mad, their climate makes them so. Otherwise would they not live
in their country?--but no! they can't. _Hier_! Catch Rumschottel,
and let's be moving!"
P. C. Breagh obliged, undisturbed by the appellation of idiot, or the
contumely heaped on the United Kingdom. It was better to be on the
black books of the sutler-woman than distinguished by her
too-favorable regard.
For though the stout proprietress of the tilt-cart had undoubtedly
played the part of a Samaritaness toward the wandering Englander, she
was, it had to be owned, more charitable than chaste; trading not
only in beer, bread, sausages, matches, cheap packs of cards,
dominoes, pipe-tobacco, sweets and pickled cucumbers, but following,
between marches, the oldest profession in the world.
Being invited on the previous evening to convey a verbal billet of
the amorous kind to a young Pioneer of Würtemberg Artillery, P. C.
Breagh had flatly declined. Conceiving the refusal to be prompted by
jealousy, Frau or Fraulein Krumpf had not taken it in ill part.
Until, being undeceived upon this point, she uncorked the vials of
her anger and exerted a gift for vituperation justly celebrated among
her clients of the rank and file.
"You threadling, you whipper-snapper! You pickled herring in a
jacket and breeches! There is a man buried in the Domkirche at
Mainz, where I belong, that has been dead over a hundred years, and
has more of good red life in him to-day than thou! '_Frauenlob_,'
they called him, because he couldn't live without women, and women!
and when he died, eight of the town-girls carried him on his bier.
And they poured wine over his grave so that you stepped up to your
knees in it--all because he had liked the women as a tom-cat likes
cream!"
The first spate of her resentment over, she had accepted the
situation. But the wound remained; and as the better-half of
Potiphar may have railed at her husband's young Hebrew steward, the
sutler-woman nagged at the young man who limped beside her jackass,
through the deep welcome shade of ancient oak-forests or over long
blistering stretches of naked mountain roads, as those tireless,
dusty men marched by.
There was no keeping up with them; they passed, and others swarmed
after them. Batteries succeeded battalions, ammunition and baggage,
ambulance and commissariat-trains were followed by yet other
battalions, while the sweat dripped into the eyes of P. C. Breagh and
the skin wore off his heels.
At midday, when his chest hurt with the very act of breathing and his
straining muscles seemed about to crack, a man died.
He was an infantryman of Hessians, and it happened quite suddenly.
P. C. Breagh, who had long ago abandoned all unnecessary integuments,
marching without coat, vest, collar, or braces, had noticed him a
moment previously swinging along with unbuttoned uniform--it was
marvelous how small a minority of the soldiers had sought this method
of relief.... His open shirt showed the lighter skin of his bare
chest, his _pickelhaube_ was perched upon the cooking-pan crowning
his knapsack-top, and he had draped a wetted red handkerchief over
his steaming head.
Save that his face was purple with congested blood, so that his pale,
staring eyes seemed colorless by comparison, and he walked with open
mouth, the Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking as he gulped down
the hot air, he conveyed no dire impression of breakdown. But
suddenly he stumbled and spun round, as if seized by sudden
giddiness, clutching at his shirt-breast, dropping his gun. Men were
thrown out of step as he fell, with an absurd clatter of metal and
tin-ware. Yet they marched on without a pause.
Others came, stepping over the fallen figure lying huddled in the
way. Its fingers moved, paddling in the dust; and P. C. Breagh,
yielding to a sudden impulse, dropped the bridle of the jackass, ran
in, grabbed hold and hauled the heavy body out of the way.
"What are you doing, born stupid that you are?" the sutler-woman
cried viciously, for Rumschottel had swerved aside to the hedge and
was ravenously devouring weeds. She added, becoming aware of the
prone infantryman, who was lying on his back staring at the sun
unwinkingly: "It it all up with that one, his eyes are turning white
already. Such as he have never six pfennigs to pay for other folks'
time and trouble. Better leave him for the _Feld-lazarett_ to pick
up."
But P. C. Breagh only grunted dourly, hunkering by the prostrate
Hessian, and with a parting sarcasm the proprietress of Rumschottel
seized her beast's head and trudged on. If she had looked back, she
would have seen good Irish whisky wasted. For despite the shade of
the tree under which he was hauled, the rolled-up coat thrust under
his head and the laving of his face and breast with spirit, it was
all up with the man, as she had prophesied.
He grabbled with his sunburnt fingers in the dust a little, and tried
to lift a hand to his perspiring chest. By the tin crucifix
dependent from a leather bootlace round his neck, you could tell that
he tried to make the sacred Sign. Then his eyes rolled up, and an
expression of great surprise overspread his discolored countenance.
His knees jerked and a sound like a rotten stick of wood, breaking,
came from his open mouth.
"_A-a-ach!_"