XXXVII

He would breathe for possibly an hour longer, but practically the man

was dead. Still listening for the faint, intermittent heart-beats, a

splash of gravel stung P. C. Breagh smartly in the neck and cheek,

and the dull thunder of horse-hoofs came unpleasantly close and

stopped. He lifted his ear from the rattling chest, and looked up

into the face of an infantry officer, who was reining up his beast

and bending from the saddle as he looked at the casualty on the

ground. The officer asked in staccato sentences:

"It is a case of heat-stroke? You are a doctor?"

P. C. Breagh answered shortly:

"Enough of one to know that there is no hope."

The horse, a fine, spirited animal, hoofed the ground impatiently.

The captain said, patting the glossy, sweating neck:

"Very good. Will you kindly show me his name-tag?"

P. C. Breagh found the zinc label, bearing the moribund Hessian's

name, regimental, battalion and company-number, and turned it

face-upward on the discolored breast. The captain, leaning from the

saddle, read, and mentally registered. His keen eyes, hedged with

dusty fair lashes, narrowed against the blinding white sunshine and,

somewhat bloodshot with heat and fatigue, had something like a smile

in them; and for some reason, to the dusty young man who squatted on

the ground by the dying, the smile was an offense. He scowled, and

the officer, noting this, asked curiously:

"Were you acquainted with that one, then?"

He indicated the body by an overhand thumb-gesture. Resenting the

gesture for the same inexplicable reason, P. C. Breagh responded with

a head-shake. The captain pursued, pulling the damp and blackened

reins between his gloved fingers, stained with his own sweat and the

horse's within the palms....

"I asked, because you seemed--how shall one put it?--sorry for him,

you know!"

The dust-smeared, freckled face turned on the interlocutor angrily.

The smouldering fire in the eyes leaped into sudden flame:

"I am, damned sorry for him! To come by his end like this--without

firing a single shot!"

There was something unusual about this little dialogue, carried on

between the smart mounted officer and the footsore, untidy

pedestrian, over the body stretched out by the roadside. As the

broad stream of marching men flowed by, curious eyes rolled their

way, the whites showing startlingly in their owners' sunburned faces.

Men wondered what he had died of, and what they were discussing

there. And P. C. Breagh went on, his mouth pulled awry with wrathful

bitterness:

"He was as good a patriot, I'd bet my hat!--as any fellow in his

battalion. He set as much store as others by King and Fatherland! I

daresay he dreamed of getting the Distinguished Service medal for

some tremendous act of gallantry, and astonishing his wife--he wears

a wedding ring, so I suppose he had one!--with it when he got home.

And now it's all over. It makes me feel sick. All over, and nothing

to show for it!"

The blank, rolled-up eyes, staring unwinkingly in the face of the

coppery, westering sun, and the discolored face, with the look of

agonized surprise now fixed upon it, seemed to echo dumbly: "Nothing

but this!" The officer returned:

"So! but there will be a war-pension for the widow, as he died upon

Active Service, and that will not be so bad, after all. And

presently the _Feld-lazarett_ will come up and put him in a wagon.

He will be buried at sundown, when we halt.... They will give him a

firing party and a bugler--everything will be done decently. After a

battle there is not always--you understand?..."

He shrugged, and the Danish and Austrian war-medals on his dark blue

tunic glinted, in witness of his ripe knowledge and experience.

Hating him still more vigorously, P. C. Breagh ended his sentence:

"Not always time to stow away lost pawns!"

"'Pawns!' My worthy sir, _our_ pawns are battalions!" The captain

laughed, showing even, but tobacco-stained teeth under his thick

brown mustache. "This was--a unit among myriads of myriads.... You

will find plenty of work waiting for you among his comrades, if, as I

guess, you are a graduate in surgery out for practice.... Let me

advise you to join a Red Cross ambulance--the arm-badge is a

protection--of a definite kind."

He saluted, gave rein, and the tired, yet impatient horse snorted

relief, and cantered on with him, sending another shower of

dust-grains and gravel-grit over the extinct "unit among myriads of

myriads" and the unkempt Samaritan hunkering by its side.

A scalding wave of bitterness and resentment had swept over him a

moment previously. Behind and through the officer's brown-eyed,

good-looking face he had seen the fierce, challenging blue stare and

great domed skull and bulldog jaw of the great Minister who made wars

at will. And the limp, dead body of the "unit among myriads of

myriads," lying by the beaten track where twenty thousand men thus

clad and armed had passed already, had awakened in him a rage of pity

and a fury of disgust.

This War that had seemed such a huge and splendid world-event,

shaking sovereigns upon their thrones and stirring nations to wildest

enthusiasm, meant catastrophes innumerable as minute; infinitesimal

tragedies never to be heard of, related or known,--involving the

humbler and the weaker among the people of both sides.

Meanwhile--here was a letter, pinned inside the dead man's shirt, an

ill-spelt, loving scrawl, containing a wilted sprig of some kind of

garden-herb, smelling evilly.

"Glory is glory," said the poor soul who wrote, "but so thou bring

thyself safe back to me and the Kinder, that will be enough."

Meanwhile, entreating her lambkin to remember that "old man" kept off

the fleas, she enclosed "a bit picked from the clump in the garden

border by the old red gooseberry bush," and with a tender inquiry

after his poor corns, and a row of blotty kisses, signed herself his

faithful wife Lottchen. One could only be sorry for poor Lottchen

and note down her address, together with her deceased lambkin's name

and regiment, and send her presently a line from a stranger who had

been near him when he died.

For the unit among myriads of myriads, nothing could be done beyond

pulling his yet pliant limbs into decent straightness and folding the

already stiffening hands upon the unheaving breast. Then P. C.

Breagh covered his face with the red handkerchief, and--a tin

crucifix being suspended from the neck by a leather bootlace--touched

the violet-mottled lips with it, and whispered a prayer for the

departed soul, before, resuming possession of his discarded jacket

and shouldering his knapsack, he trudged upon his way.

"Our Moltke" was testing his material at the outset, by heavy

marching. Since breakfast-time there had been no halt; the columns

of human flesh and horsemeat had pegged along, tirelessly as though

the sinews that bore them had been forged of elastic steel.

The blazing sun set in a great whirlpool of molten rubies and gold

beyond the Birkenfeld, while the sky to the north and east was green,

with a vivid, springlike hue. The clear, thin dusk of August fell,

yet the tireless columns marched on--and in company of other, even

queerer wayfarers, the dusty young man with the knapsack doggedly

continued to trudge beside them. When at length the halt was

sounded, he staggered through a hedge-gap into a field of flax, and

threw himself heavily face downward amid the yellowing stems that had

long ago flowered, and seeded, and ripened for pulling.

Stupid with weariness, he might have lain there ten minutes, when a

bugle shrilled close by, and the brown, hairy heads and forelegs of

the leaders of a team of gun-horses crashed through the hedgerow, the

scarlet face, open shouting mouth, and uplifted whip-arm of the

forerider showing above. As luck would have it, orders had been

given that a half-battery of mounted artillery should bivouac in this

flax-field. And death under the iron-shod hoofs of the horses, and

the iron-shod wheels that followed them, shaved very close to P. C.

Breagh.

Yet he was not grateful as he picked himself out of the hollow into

which his frog-like, instinctive leap for life had landed him. The

heavy riding-whip of the forerider had cut him bitterly across the

loins while yet in mid-air. Adding insult to injury, the

artilleryman had cursed his victim for getting in the way of the

battery, and the other riders and the gunners on the limber were

grinning from ear to ear. Smarting, P. C. Breagh cursed back, in a

cautious but vigorous whisper, as he hobbled back to the road....

Upon the farther side two half-battalions of infantry, divided by a

little bushy knoll, were already encamped upon a strip of gorsey

grass. The thing had been done as if by magic, the officers grouped

in the foreground round their little camp tables were drinking Rhine

wine and beer as peacefully as though they had not stirred for hours.

Behind them the battalion-color and the halberd of the drum-major had

been planted upright in the center of an orderly array of drums and

band-instruments, the straight rows of knapsacks within rolled

greatcoats, stretching away in the rear, were divided by the

customary ten-pace interval, and the mathematically balanced stacks

of needle-guns.

Fires of brush and dry cones from the pine-groves fringing the road

crackled in the small oblong trenches dug by the fatigue-men.

Squad-cooks were cutting up pea-sausages, raw potatoes, and onions

into camp-kettles of water, destined to simmer, slung on sticks

reaching from bank to bank. And the regimental butchers had already

slaughtered a couple of young bullocks, whose skins lay smoking by

the chopping-block. Presently, when the officers' mess-cooks had

chosen such joints as seemed good to them, the rest of the meat would

go to enrich the stew of the rank-and-file. Meanwhile the men,

scattered to the utmost limits of the cordon of sentries, blunted the

edge of hunger with black bread and the flinty brown biscuit, crowded

thirstily round the beer and wine-carts, squatted in groups playing

cards, chatting, or singing part-songs; wrestled and ran races, or

dozed lying face downward on the sunburnt grass, their foreheads

resting on their folded arms.

A charming scene, now that the all-pervading dust had begun to

settle--the bivouac roofed in by the clear green twilight, through

which diamond star-points began to thrust. If only one had been less

sharp-set, and the proprietors of the wine and beer-carts had had

bread and sausage to sell as well as warm, flat beer and

musty-smelling vintage, the beauty would have appealed to one a good

deal more.

Squatted by a lichened boulder in a clump of sun-scorched bracken, P.

C. Breagh searched his pockets, and then the recesses of his

knapsack, for something to eat. An ancient crust of black bread

rewarded his investigations, just as the savory-smelling camp-kettles

were taken off the fires.

He fell to work upon his crust as the stew was apportioned, and the

big cans of beer distributed to each mess; and as he gnawed dog-like

at the stone-hard lump of baked rye-dough, he caught the eye of one

of the Barmecides, a merry-faced, red-haired young private, who was

evidently the jester of his squad.

"Our soup smells good, what? Well, the smell may be had for nothing.

He may fill his belly with as much of that as he can!"

A roar of laughter greeted the sally of the humorist. To whom P. C.

Breagh nodded assent, and, gravely extending his diminished crust in

the quarter from whence the whiff of oniony pea-soup came most

powerfully, fell to with apparently renewed appetite, provoking the

approving comment:

"He can take a joke! Well, then, let him take this! and this!

Catch it, _junge_!"

A lump of very fresh beef, boiled in the oniony pea-soup, was dumped

into a bit of newspaper, screwed up, and pitched across to the

supperless. P. C. Breagh gratefully caught the oleaginous parcel and

the two hard Army biscuits that came after, and, pulling out some

small change, signified his desire to pitch back the coins in return.

But a big hand waved them vigorously away, with the gruff

exclamation: "_Der Teufel!_ let him keep his pfennigs. One gives a

share of one's supper--one doesn't sell!"

And so genuine was the one that, despite the smarting weal that had

been the gift of another less kindly, P. C. Breagh's faith in

humanity lifted up its head.

He disposed of the grub, and drank some hill-water tinctured with

Kinahan, a permissible indulgence in view of his fatigue, and stuffed

the well-used briar-root with bird's eye, and, propping his back

comfortably against the boulder, kindled the pipe of peace. By

nature clubbable, and athirst for news, he would have liked to mingle

with the replete, unbuttoned soldiers, who, supper over, gathered

round the fires to smoke and chat and sing. But the snub dealt by

Valverden had not left off smarting; the fear of incurring another

rebuff, even from a social inferior, kept him aloof and solitary. He

realized with dismay that his stock of self-confidence was beginning

to run low.

"I'd a lot of faith in myself when I accepted that commission from

Knewbit," he ruminated, chewing hard on the stem of the venerable

briar-root. "More than half his money's spent--what did I want with

that revolver?--and I haven't written him a line. Instead, I've

swotted up a thundering long descriptive article, telling people all

about what they know already--and sent it to that shaved sea-elephant

in a Gladstone collar, who told me I might forward letters from the

seat of hostilities if ever I got there!"

He frowned, mentally reviewing the points of the first-born launched

upon the tide of speculation. However ancient its matter might be,

the vigor and mastery of that descriptive article--completed in the

train between Bingen and Mayence, and dropped with paternal

solicitude into the sack of a corporal of the Field Post--would

surely--could not fail to--insure its appearance in print.

Why did a horrible conviction of its utter stodginess come home to

him at this eleventh hour? Its labored periods revolted, its stately

mawkishness sickened his memory. He knocked out the pipe-bowl

against the boulder and got out his note-book and began to jot down a

letter to Mr. Knewbit by the light of the now risen moon, who, with

Venus blazing emerald at her opulent side, hung high in the

south-east, looking down upon forest and field, mountain, valley and

river, and the armed men and beasts, guns and wagon-trains, strung

out over leagues of distance, calmly as befitting an aged Queen

familiar with the portents of War.

She stared down so haughtily at the travel-soiled and dusty scallawag

lying upon the fringe of the bivouac among the remnants of a meal

cadged from a soldier's camp-kettle, that he caught her eye and broke

his pencil-lead. No! he couldn't write, even well enough to "please

plain, homely people." ... Why, hang it all!--Old Knewbit must have

known from the beginning, to do that was the highest and most

difficult art of all. Men came into the world equipped, as had come

Shakespeare, and Scott, and Dickens, each with a single feather, such

as might belong to the wing of a Phcenix or an Archangel, sprouting

from his own flesh. Urged by the inborn crave to set down Life, each

had plucked forth his birth-gift with a pang of unutterable anguish,

and there, at the quill-end, hung a single drop of red, red blood.

And that drop tinctured every page they penned, and thus what they

wrote lived. To be a distinguished War Correspondent one had to be

born with the magic pen-feather. The Doctor had it. That was why

his written sentences dug home to the quick. Without it, Success

would never come to one, no matter how hard one tried for it. One

would be nothing better all one's life than a plodding paragraphist.

Pity an unlucky youth, fagged, footsore, and smarting, not only from

disillusion and chagrin, but from the very recent application of an

Artillery horsewhip. In addition, the infantry band had now begun to

play with soul-melting sweetness. First "The Lorelei," and then "Red

Dawn That Lights Me to My Early Grave," and then the song of Siebel

from "Faust"--with all its yearning passion and tender anguish. And

possibly other eyes were wet besides P. C. Breagh's, who fairly put

down his head and sobbed, under cover of the twilight and the

protecting boulder, as he had not done since his knickerbocker

days.... Not now from a vague, wistful aching for the voice and the

touch of the young, unknown, long-dead mother. Pain and longing were

there, but of how different a kind....

The reign of Brünhilde-Britomart-Isolde was over. That night saw the

smallest and slenderest of heroines established on the vacant throne

of the Ideal.

He who wept was not the type of a young girl's hero, choking and

gulping, and burrowing his hot, wet face into the dry, rustling fern.

But he suffered as only youth can suffer, the pangs were very real

that wrung from him such stifled cries as these:

"Oh, God! I love her--Juliette de Bayard! ... I have loved her since

the moment our eyes met. My infernal ingratitude that she forgave

like an angel!--the brutal things I thought and said of her--were

because I could not forgive myself for loving her so. My discontent,

my restlessness, my ambition to do something and be somebody--weren't

they prompted by the longing to cut a figure in her eyes! ... Lovely

eyes;--and at this minute her husband may be kissing them!--'the

noble gentleman, brave as a lion,' who fought like the deuce and all!

Stop, though! If he's an Army man, he has had to leave her. Could I

have borne to do that if I had had the luck to be in his shoes? Yet

how she would despise a lover who hesitated between her and his duty!

Even if '_her heart-strings about his heels were tied_,' as the

Suabian ballad says, '_she would bid him march to war!_' For a girl

like that could love, mind you! like Juliet and Desdemona and Viola

rolled into one, and yet never be blinded by love into forgetfulness

of God, or honor, or loyalty. It is written in her face. Are these

things first with me? I'm afraid not!... I think not!... I know

they're not!... And yet I dare to love her--to whom they mean

everything!"

His conscience stung and smarted like the weal from the Artillery

whip-lash. And the dread of Death and the Hereafter wakened in him,

shuddering and quaking in the creeping dusk.

Now he comprehended his own insignificance and weakness and

loneliness.... He had seen a man die that day, suddenly, without

time for preparation, as thousands of others would die before the

ending of this war. What if to-morrow at the hottest hour the

trenchant blade of the sun should bite through P. C. Breagh's

brain-pan? He heard the other self within him saying "Suppose...?"

And he asked himself, with a cold sweat breaking out upon his flesh,

and a curious stirring among the roots of his hair, what would have

happened only an hour or two back, if the flying squirrel-leap that

had made the white teeth flash against the brown faces of the gunners

on the limber, had failed to land the dusty scallawag who had been

sleeping in the flax-field beyond reach of the pounding of the hoofs

of the battery-team! ...

"_Father, I cry to Thee!_"

The soldiers were singing the Battle Prayer of Körner, the lusty

Teutonic basses and baritones and tenors mingling in melodious unison

with the night-breeze that had risen with the moon.

Previously P. C. Breagh might have smiled at the simultaneous

production of hymn-books, the rising at the word of command to

sing--the short, business-like prayer recited by an officer, that was

followed by a crashing Amen.

Now, it seemed to him, there was something wholesome and good in the

military regulation that united men of every Christian creed and

denomination, with those who habitually omitted religion from the

daily routine, in the brief act of worship described.... Recalled by

it to the teachings of the Mother Church, he made the sacred sign

upon brow and breast, and whispered his nightly prayers. The name of

Juliette mingled in the entreaty that Our Lord and His Mother would

bless and guard those dear to the petitioner from danger and harm.

"And not let me come to grief for _her_ sake--of course I mean

Monica's! For she never would have loved me even if there hadn't

been another man. But O! take care of her, and shield her from evil,

sickness, grief, and danger. And let me see her again one day!"

He grew drowsy, lying against the yet sun-warm boulder, listening to

the distant cry of the mousing owl, and the long rattling _chur'r'r!_

of the nightjar, mingled with the occasional snorting of the tethered

horses, the measured tramp of the sentries,--the small explosions

made by pine-cones thrown upon the blazing guard-fires, and the other

sounds of the bivouac.