Every unit engrossed in his own work! Every man taught how a weak link
may break a chain and realizing himself as a link and only a link! The
captain of engineers forgot Marta's existence as an error of his
subordinates caught his eye, and he went to caution the axemen to cut
closer to the ground, as stumps gave cover for riflemen. For the time
being he had no more interest in the knoll than in the wreckage of
dirigibles which were down and out of the fight.
After all, the knoll was only a single point on the vast staff map--only
one of many points of a struggle whose progress was bulletined through
the siftings of regimental, brigade, division, and corps headquarters in
net results to the staff. Partow and Lanstron overlooked all. Their
knowledge made the vast map live under their eyes. But our concern is
with the story of two regiments, and particularly of two companies, and
that is story enough. If you would grasp the whole, multiply the
conflict on the knoll by ten thousand.
There had been the engrossment of transcendent emotion in repelling the
charge. What followed was like some grim and passionless trance with
triggers ticking off the slow-passing minutes. Dellarme aimed to keep
down the fusillade from Fracasse's trench and yet not to neglect the
fair targets of the reserves advancing by rushes to the support of the
128th. Reinforced, the gray streak at the bottom of the slope poured in
a heavier fire. Above the steady crackle of bullets sent and the whistle
of bullets received rose the cry of "Doctor! Doctor!" which meant each
time that another Brown rifle had been silenced. The litter bearers,
hard pressed to remove the wounded, left the dead. Already death was a
familiar sight--an article of exchange in which Dellarme's men dealt
freely. The man at Stransky's side had been killed outright. He lay face
down on his rifle stock. His cap had fallen off. Stransky put it back on
the man's head, and the example was followed in other cases. It was a
good idea to keep up a show of a full line of caps to the enemy.
Suddenly, as by command, the fire from the base of the knoll ceased
altogether. Dellarme understood at once what this meant--the next step
in the course of a systematic, irresistible approach by superior
numbers. It was to allow the ground scouts to advance. Individual gray
spots detaching themselves from the gray streak began to crawl upward in
search of dead spaces where the contour of the ground would furnish some
protection from the blaze of bullets from the crest.
"Over their heads! Don't try to hit them!" Dellarme passed the word.
"That's it! Spare one to get a dozen!" said Stransky, grinning in ready
comprehension. He seemed to be grinning every time that Dellarme looked
in that direction. He was plainly enjoying himself. His restless nature
had found sport to its taste.
The creeping scouts must have signalled back good news, for groups began
crawling slowly after them.
"Over their heads! Encourage them!" Dellarme commanded.
After they had advanced two or three hundred yards they stopped,
shoulders and hands exposed in silhouette, and began to work feverishly
with their spades.
"Now let them have it!"
"Oh, beautiful!" cried Stransky. "That baby captain of ours has some
brains, after all! We'll get them now and we'll get them when they run!"
But they did not run. Unfalteringly they took their punishment while
they turned over the protecting sod in the midst of their own dead and
wounded. In a few minutes they had dropped spades for rifles, and other
sections either crawled or ran forward precipitately and fell to the
task of joining the isolated beginnings into a single trench.
Again Dellarme looked toward regimental headquarters, his fixed, cheery
smile not wholly masking the appeal in his eyes. The Grays had only two
or three hundred yards to go when they should make their next charge in
order to reach the crest. But his men had fifteen hundred to go in the
valley before they were out of range. After their brave resistance
facing the enemy they would receive a hail of bullets in their backs.
This was the time to withdraw if there were to be assurance of a safe
retreat. But there was no signal. Until there was, he must remain.
The trench grew; the day wore on. Two rifles to one were now playing
against his devoted company, which had had neither food nor drink since
early morning. As he scanned his thinning line he saw a look of
bloodlessness and hopelessness gathering on the set faces of which he
had grown so fond during this ordeal. Some of the men were crouching too
much for effective aim.
"See that you fire low! Keep your heads up!" he called. "For your homes,
your country, and your God! Pass the word along!"
Parched throat after parched throat repeated the message hoarsely and
leaden shoulders raised a trifle and dust-matted eyelashes narrowed
sharply on the sights.
"For the man in us!" growled Stransky. "For the favor of nature at birth
that gave us the right to wear trousers instead of skirts! For the joy
of hell, give them hell!"
"For our homes! For the man in us!" they repeated, swallowing the words
as if they had the taste of a stimulant. But Dellarme knew that it
would not take much to precipitate a break. He himself felt that he had
been on that knoll half a lifetime. He looked at his watch and it was
five o'clock. For seven hours they had held on. The Grays' trench was
complete the breadth of the slope; more reserves were coming up. The
brigade commander of the Grays was going to make sure that the next
charge succeeded.
At last Dellarme's glance toward regimental headquarters showed the flag
that was the signal for withdrawal. Could he accomplish it? The first
lieutenant, with a shattered arm, had gone on a litter. The old sergeant
was dead, a victim of the colonial wars. Used to fighting savage
enemies, he had been too eager in exposing himself to a civilized foe.
He had been shot through the throat.
"Men of the first section," Dellarme called, "you will slip out of line
with the greatest care not to let the enemy know that you are going!"
"Going--going! Careful! Men of the first section going!" the parched
throats repeated in a thrilling whisper.
"Those who remain keep increasing their fire!" called Dellarme again.
"Cover the whole breadth of the trench!"
Every fourth man wormed himself backward on his stomach until he was
below the sky-line, when his stiffened limbs brought him to his feet and
he started on a dead run down into the valley and toward a cut behind
another knoll across the road from the Galland house.
"Tom Fragini, with your corporal dead I put you in charge of the first
section! What are you waiting for, Corporal Fragini?"
Tom was bending over Grandfather Fragini, who had been forgotten by
everybody in the ordeal. The old man was lying where he had fallen after
the first burst of shrapnel.
"Can't go! Got a game leg!" said grandfather, pointing to a swollen
ankle that had been bruised by a piece of shrapnel jacket that had lost
most of its velocity before striking him. "You do your duty and leave me
alone. I ain't a fighting man any more. I done my work when I steadied
you young fellows."
"Yes, go on, Fragini," said Dellarme. "Attend to your men. Everybody in
his place. We'll get the old man away on a litter."
"Yes, you go or you ain't any grandson of mine!" shouted the old man in
a high-pitched voice. "Just been promoted, too! You'll be up for
insubordination in a minute, you young whelp!"
Dellarme meant to look after grandfather, but his attention was
engrossed in seeing that his men withdrew cautiously, for every minute
that he was able to delay the enemy's charge was vital. He himself
picked up a rifle in order to increase the volume of fire when the third
section was starting. As the fourth and last section drew off he uttered
his first cry of triumph of the day as his final look revealed the Grays
still in place. But they would not wait long once all fire from the
knoll had ceased. Stransky, who was in the fourth section, remained to
give a parting shot.
"Good-by, d---- you!" he called to the Grays. "You'll hear more from me
later!"
Then Dellarme saw that grandfather had not yet been carried away and no
litters remained. What was to be done? Grandfather was prompt with his
own view.
"Just leave me behind. I've done my work, I tell you!" he declared.
"Can't lose you, grandpop!" said Stransky.
Quickly shifting his pack to the ground, he squatted with his back to
the old man.
"I ain't going to--and you're a traitor, anyway; that's what you are!"
"No back talk! No politics in this!" Stransky replied. "Get up! You
carry your skin and I'll carry your bones. Get up quick!"
With Dellarme's authoritative assistance grandfather mounted. Then
Dellarme put Stransky's pack on his own back.
"Let me carry your rifle, too," he said to Stransky as they started.
"Not much!" answered Stransky. "I was just married to that rifle this
morning. We're on our honeymoon trip and getting fairly well acquainted,
and expect shortly to settle down to a busy domestic life."
He set off at a lope and gained the rear of the section in his first
burst of speed. As the other men got their second wind, however,
Stransky began to puff and they soon drew away from him.
"Put me down! I ain't going to depend on any traitor that insulted the
flag!" protested grandfather.
"That's the way! Call out to me now and then so I'll know you're there,"
said Stransky. "You're so light I mightn't know it if you fell off."
Dellarme did not think it right to expose the last section by asking it
to delay. Shepherd of his flock and miser of his pieces of gold, now
that their work was done the one thing he wanted in the world was that
they should escape without further punishment. Already the van of the
first section was disappearing into the cut in safety. But the fourth
section, which had held to the last, had yet a thousand yards to go over
a path bare of cover except a single small bush. At any moment he
expected to hear a cheer from the knoll, and what would follow the cheer
he knew only too well. Yet he tarried with Stransky out of one man's
impulse not to desert another in danger. At the same time he was wroth
with the old man for having made such a nuisance of himself.
"What are you waiting for?" Stransky demanded of Dellarme.
"I like good company," answered Dellarme cheerfully.
"Compliment for you, grandfather!" said Stransky.
"Put me down!" screamed grandfather.
"Still there, eh? Thanks, grandpop!" said Stransky, turning on
Dellarme. "Can't you run any faster than that, captain? Your place is
with your men, sir. If you got wounded I'd have to carry you, too. Your
company's gaining on you every minute. Hurry up!"
From the peremptory way that he spoke, Dellarme might have been the
private and Stransky the officer.
"Right!" said Dellarme in face of such unanswerable military logic, and
broke into a run.
Stransky adapted himself to a pace which he thought he could maintain,
and plodded on, eyes on the bush as a half-way point. After a while he
heard a mighty hurrah, which was cut short abruptly; then spits of dust
about their feet hastened the steps of the last section, which was near
the cut. He saw men drop out of line to make a cradle of their arms for
comrades who had been hit; and these finally passed out of danger with
their burdens.
"No flock in sight! It's the turn of the individual birds!" thought
Stransky, and heard a familiar sound about his ears.
"Bullets!" exclaimed grandfather. "Don't whistle like they used to. They
kind of crack and sizzle now. Maybe if they hit me I'll stop 'em, and
that'll save you."
"That's so," replied Stransky glumly, realizing that he was running with
a human shield on his back. "But they'll go right through him he's so
thin," he thought in relief. The worst of it was that he had to receive
without sending, which made him boil with rage. He wished that the bush
had legs so it could run toward him; he half believed that it had and
was retreating. "They're shooting right at us, and that's in our favor.
It's hard to get the bull's-eye at that range," he assured grandfather.
Whish-whish-whish! Enough pellets were singing by to have torn away the
rim of the target, yet none got the centre before Stransky dropped
behind the bush. Blessed bush! Back of it was a bowlder. Thrice-blessed
bowlder! It protected grandfather as securely as the armor of a
battleship.
"We are having a noisy time," remarked Stransky as two or three of the
leaves fell. "Intelligent thieves! How did you guess we were here?" and
he put his big thumb to his big nose.
"But they didn't know about the bowlder!" said the old man with a senile
giggle. "Say, I didn't mean it when I called you a traitor--not after
the fight! I just said that to make you mad so you'd put me down and we
shouldn't lose a good fighting man trying to save an old bag of bones
like me. You ain't no traitor! You're a patriot!"
"More politics, when I'm simply full of cussedness!" grumbled Stransky.
"Not having any home, I'm fighting to save the other fellows' homes,
principally because I was married this morning by a shrapnel-shell to a
lady that understands me perfectly. Say, shall we give them a few?" he
asked with a squint down the bridge of his nose as he took up his rifle.
"Yes, give 'em a few!" grandfather urged when they ought to have
remained quiet, as the firing was dying down. It was not worth while to
shoot at a bush, and after all the torrent of lead that they had poured
into the bush the Grays had concluded that nothing behind it could
remain alive.
Stransky aimed at a head and shoulder on the sky-line, which he took for
those of an officer, and was accurate enough to make the head and
shoulders duck and to get a swarm of bullets in return.
"Children, why will you waste your country's ammunition?" said Stransky,
firing again.
"That's the way to talk!" said grandfather approvingly. "Nothing like a
little gayety and ginger in war."
Now a Brown battery whose fire could be spared from other work dropped a
few shells on the knoll and so occupied the attention of the 128th that
it had no time to attend to occasional bullets from snipers.
"Think we're no account! Shall we charge them now we've got the support
of the guns?" chuckled Stransky.
"You Hussar, you!" Grandfather gave Stransky a slap on the back. "With a
thousand like you we could charge me whole army, if the general would
let us!"
"But he wouldn't let us," replied Stransky. "I could even tell you why."
With the shadows gathering he slipped back to grandfather's side, and
after it was quite dark he said that it was time for the old Hussar to
mount his fiery steed. Grandfather's hands slipped from around
Stransky's neck at the first trial; with the next, Stransky took the
bony fingers in his grip and held them clasped on his chest with one
hand, proceeding as quietly as he could, for he had an idea that the
Grays were already moving down from the knoll under cover of night.
"Yes, sir, I'm glad I came!" said grandfather faintly and meanderingly.
"I wasn't sure about Tom--all this new-fangled education and these
uniforms without any color in 'em. But I saw him firing away steady as a
rock; yes, sir! I was in it, too, under fire! It made my heart
thump-thump like the old days. And we're going to hold 'em--we're going
to teach the land-sharks--I'm very happy--made my heart thump so--kind
of tired me--"
The old man's voice died away into silence. His knees weakened their
grip and his legs swung pendulum-like with Stransky's steps.
"What about me for a sleeping-car!" thought Stransky. "But he's
certainly harder to carry."
Yet it pleased Stransky not to waken his passenger until they reached
the station his ticket called for. Entering the cut, he was halted by
the challenging cry of "Who goes there?" in his own tongue.
"Stransky of the Reds!" he roared back. "Stransky, private of the
53d--Stransky and his bride and grandfather!"
"All right, Bert!" was the answer. "Hurrah for you! I'd know your old
bull voice out of a thousand."
Even this did not arouse grandfather. Stransky trudged on past the
sentry, across a road and up three series of steps of a garden terrace,
through a breach in a breastwork of sand-bags, and was again at
home--the only home he knew--among the comrades of his company. Most of
them had fallen asleep on the ground after finishing their rations, logs
of men in animal exhaustion. Some of those awake were too weary to give
more than a nod and smile and an exclamation of delight. They had
witnessed too much horror that day to be excited over a soldier with an
old man on his back. A few of the others, including Tom Fragini,
gathered around the pair.
"We've arrived, grandfather!" said Stransky, squatting. There was no
answer. "He certainly sleeps sound. I wonder if--."
"Yes," said Dellarme, who with Tom eased the fall of the limp body.
The thumping of an old man's heart with the youth of a Hussar had been
too much for it.
"He was game!" said Stransky. "There isn't much in this world except to
be game, I've concluded; and you can't be so old or so poor or so
big-nosed and wall-eyed that you can't be game."
Marta, coming out on the veranda, had not heard his remark, but she had
seen a leonine sort of private bearing an old man on his back and had
guessed that he had remained behind to save a life when every man in
uniform had been engaged in taking life.
"You are tired! You are hungry!" she said with urgent gentleness. "Come
in!"
He followed her into the house and dropped on a leather chair before a
shining table in a room panelled with oak, wondering at her and at
himself. No woman of Marta's world had ever spoken in that way to him.
But it was good to sit down. Then a maid with a sad, winsome face and
tender eyes brought him wine and bread and cold meat and jam. He gulped
down a glassful of the wine; he ate with great mouthfuls in the ravenous
call of healthy, exhausted tissues, while the maid stood by to cut more
bread.
"When it comes to eating after fighting--"
He looked up when the first pangs of hunger were assuaged. Enormous,
broad-shouldered, physical, his cheeks flushed with the wine, his eyes
opened wide and brilliant with the fire that was in his nature--eyes
that spoke the red business of anarchy and war.
"Say, but you're pretty!"
Springing up, he caught her hand and made to kiss her in the brashness
of impulse. Minna struck him a stinging blow in the face. He received it
as a mastiff would receive a bite from a pup, and she stood her ground,
her eyes challenging his fearlessly.
"So you are like that!" he said thoughtfully. "It was a good one, and
you meant it, too."
"Decidedly!" she answered. "There's more where that came from!"
"As I was telling the Grays this afternoon! Good for you!" He sat down
again composedly, while she glared at him. "I'm still hungry. I've had
wine enough; but would you cut me another slice of bread?"
She cut another slice and he covered it generously with jam. Then little
Clarissa Eileen entered and pressed against her mother's skirts,
subjecting Stransky to childhood's scrutiny. He waved a finger at her
and grinned and drew his eyes together in a squint at the bridge of his
nose, making a funny face that brought a laugh.
"Your child?" Stransky asked Minna.
"Yes."
"Where's her father? Away fighting?"
"I don't know where he is!"
"Oh!" he mused. "Was that blow for him at the same time as for me?" he
pursued thoughtfully.
"Yes, for all of your kind."
"M-m-m!" came from between his lips as he rose. "Would you mind holding
out your hand?" he asked with a gentleness singularly out of keeping
with his rough aspect.
"Why?" she demanded.
"I've never studied any books of etiquette of polite society, and I am a
poor sort at making speeches, anyhow. But I want to kiss a good woman's
hand by way of apology. I never kissed one in my life, but I'm getting a
lot of new experiences to-day. Will you?"
She held out her hand at arm's length and flushed slightly as he pressed
his lips to it.
"You certainly do cut thick slices of bread," he said, smiling. "And you
certainly are pretty," he added, passing out of the door as jauntily as
if he were ready for another fight and just in time to see the colonel
of the regiment come around the house. He stood at the salute, half
proudly, half defiantly, but in nowise humbly.
"Well, Major Dellarme!" was the colonel's greeting of the company
commander.
"Major?" exclaimed Dellarme.
"Yes. Partow has the power. Four of the aviators have iron crosses
already and promotion, too; and you are a major. Company G got into a
mess and the whole regiment would have been in one unless you held on.
So I let you stay. It all came out right, as Lanstron planned--right so
far. But your losses have been heavy and here you are in the thick of it
again. Your company may change places with Company E, which has had a
relatively easy time."
"No, sir; we would prefer to stay," Dellarme answered quietly.
"Good! Then you will take this battalion and I'll transfer Groller to
Alvery's Bad loss, Alvery--shrapnel. The artillery has been doing ugly
work, but that is all in favor of the defensive. If we can hold them on
this line till to-morrow noon, it's all we want for the present," he
concluded.
"We'll hold them! Don't worry!" put in Stransky.
If a private had spoken to a colonel in this fashion at drill, without
being spoken to, it would have been a glaring breach of military
etiquette. Now that they were at war it was different. Real comradeship
between officer and man begins with war.
"We shall, eh?" chuckled the colonel. "You look big enough to hold
anything, young man! Here! Isn't this the fellow that Lanstron got off?"
"Yes, sir," answered Dellarme.
"Well, was Lanstron right?"
"Yes, sir."
"Wonderful man, Lanstron!"
"He knows just' a little too much!" Stransky half growled.