Old Reilly was stumping along the line of his brigade and mumbling like
a man with a mouthful of grass. The fire from the enemy's position was
incredible in its swift fury, and Reilly's brigade was getting its
share of a very bad ordeal. The old man's face was of the colour of a
tomato, and in his rage he mouthed and sputtered strangely. As he
pranced along his thin line, scornfully erect, voices arose from the
grass beseeching him to take care of himself. At his heels scrambled a
bugler with pallid skin and clenched teeth, a chalky, trembling youth,
who kept his eye on old Reilly's back and followed it.
The old gentleman was quite mad. Apparently he thought the whole thing
a dreadful mess, but now that his brigade was irrevocably in it he was
full-tilting here and everywhere to establish some irreproachable,
immaculate kind of behaviour on the part of every man jack in his
brigade. The intentions of the three venerable Colonels were the same.
They stood behind their lines, quiet, stern, courteous old fellows,
admonishing their regiments to be very pretty in the face of such a
hail of magazine-rifle and machine-gun fire as has never in this world
been confronted save by beardless savages when the white man has found
occasion to take his burden to some new place.
And the regiments were pretty. The men lay on their little stomachs and
got peppered according to the law and said nothing, as the good blood
pumped out into the grass, and even if a solitary rookie tried to get a
decent reason to move to some haven of rational men, the cold voice of
an officer made him look criminal with a shame that was a credit to his
regimental education. Behind Reilly's command was a bullet-torn jungle
through which it could not move as a brigade; ahead of it were Spanish
trenches on hills. Reilly considered that he was in a fix no doubt, but
he said this only to himself. Suddenly he saw on the right a little
point of blue-shirted men already half-way up the hill. It was some
pathetic fragment of the Sixth United States Infantry. Chagrined,
shocked, horrified, Reilly bellowed to his bugler, and the
chalked-faced youth unlocked his teeth and sounded the charge by
rushes.
The men formed hastily and grimly, and rushed. Apparently there awaited
them only the fate of respectable soldiers. But they went because--of
the opinions of others, perhaps. They went because--no loud-mouthed lot
of jail-birds such as the Twenty-Seventh Infantry could do anything
that they could not do better. They went because Reilly ordered it.
They went because they went.
And yet not a man of them to this day has made a public speech
explaining precisely how he did the whole thing and detailing with what
initiative and ability he comprehended and defeated a situation which
he did not comprehend at all.
Reilly never saw the top of the hill. He was heroically striving to
keep up with his men when a bullet ripped quietly through his left
lung, and he fell back into the arms of the bugler, who received him as
he would have received a Christmas present. The three venerable
Colonels inherited the brigade in swift succession. The senior
commanded for about fifty seconds, at the end of which he was mortally
shot. Before they could get the news to the next in rank he, too, was
shot. The junior Colonel ultimately arrived with a lean and puffing
little brigade at the top of the hill. The men lay down and fired
volleys at whatever was practicable.
In and out of the ditch-like trenches lay the Spanish dead, lemon-faced
corpses dressed in shabby blue and white ticking. Some were huddled
down comfortably like sleeping children; one had died in the attitude
of a man flung back in a dentist's chair; one sat in the trench with
his chin sunk despondently to his breast; few preserved a record of the
agitation of battle. With the greater number it was as if death had
touched them so gently, so lightly, that they had not known of it.
Death had come to them rather in the form of an opiate than of a bloody
blow.
But the arrived men in the blue shirts had no thought of the sallow
corpses. They were eagerly exchanging a hail of shots with the Spanish
second line, whose ash-coloured entrenchments barred the way to a city
white amid trees. In the pauses the men talked.
"We done the best. Old E Company got there. Why, one time the hull of B
Company was _behind_ us."
"Jones, he was the first man up. I saw 'im."
"Which Jones?"
"Did you see ol' Two-bars runnin' like a land-crab? Made good time,
too. He hit only in the high places. He's all right."
"The Lootenant s all right, too. He was a good ten yards ahead of the
best of us. I hated him at the post, but for this here active service
there's none of 'em can touch him."
"This is mighty different from being at the post."
"Well, we done it, an' it wasn't b'cause _I_ thought it could be done.
When we started, I ses to m'self: 'Well, here goes a lot o' d----d
fools.'"
"'Tain't over yet."
"Oh, they'll never git us back from here. If they start to chase us
back from here we'll pile 'em up so high the last ones can't climb
over. We've come this far, an' we'll stay here. I ain't done pantin'."
"Anything is better than packin' through that jungle an' gettin'
blistered from front, rear, an' both flanks. I'd rather tackle another
hill than go trailin' in them woods, so thick you can't tell whether
you are one man or a division of cav'lry."
"Where's that young kitchen-soldier, Cadogan, or whatever his name is.
Ain't seen him to-day."
"Well, _I_ seen him. He was right in with it. He got shot, too, about
half up the hill, in the leg. I seen it. He's all right. Don't worry
about him. He's all right."
"I seen 'im, too. He done his stunt. As soon as I can git this piece of
barbed-wire entanglement out o' me throat I'll give 'm a cheer."
"He ain't shot at all b'cause there he stands, there. See 'im?"
Rearward, the grassy slope was populous with little groups of men
searching for the wounded. Reilly's brigade began to dig with its
bayonets and shovel with its meat-ration cans.