A digression, this, about pale, little Peterkin, the valet's son, whom
we left nibbling a biscuit in perfect security after his leap in mortal
terror. When Fracasse's men rose from their trench for the final charge
and found that the enemy had gone, Peterkin, hearing their cheer and the
thunderous tread of their feet, dared to look above the edge of the
shell crater. Here was his company coming and he not in the ranks where
he belonged. Of course he ought to have gone back with them when they
went; whatever they did he ought to do. This was the only safe way for
one of his incurable stupidity, as the drill sergeant had told him
repeatedly.
He recognized the stocky butcher's son and other familiar figures among
his comrades. Their legs, unlike his, had not been paralyzed with
fright; they had been able to run. He was in an absolute minority of
one, which he knew, from the experience of his twenty years of life and
his inheritance as a valet's son, meant that he was utterly in the
wrong. In a minute they would be sweeping down on him. They would be
jeering him and calling him a rabbit or something worse for hiding in
the ground.
Fright prompted him to a fresh impulse. Picking up his rifle, which he
had not touched since his leap, he faced toward the now unoccupied crest
of the knoll and commenced firing. Meanwhile, Fracasse's men had reached
the point where their first charge had broken, marked by a line of
bodies, including that of the manufacturer's son, who had thought that
war would be beneficial as a deterrent to strikes and an impetus to
industry, lying with his head on his arm, his neck twisted, and the
whites of his eyes idled skyward. In a spasm of sickening realization of
how impossible it was for those who had not run back to survive between
two lines of fire, they heard a shot from the ground at their feet and
beheld the runt of the company in the act of making war single-handed.
It was a miracle! It was like the dead coming to life!
"Peterkin?"
"Yes, Peterkin!"
"With a whole skin!"
Probably it was a great mistake for him to have a whole skin, thought
Peterkin. He scrambled to his feet and kept pace with the others, hoping
that he would be overlooked in the ranks.
"I'm so glad! Dear little Peterkin!" said Hugo Mallin, who was at
Peterkin's side.
His knowledge of Hugo's gentle nature convinced Peterkin that Hugo was
trying to soften the forthcoming reprimand.
When their feet at last actually stood on the knoll which had dealt
death to their ranks and they saw the brown figures of the enemy that
had driven them back in full flight, the men of the 128th felt the
thrill of triumph won in the face of bullets. This is a thrill by
itself, primitive and masculine, that calls the imagination of men to
war for war's sake. Pilzer, the butcher's son, wanted to kill for the
sheer joy and revenge of killing. He rejoiced in the dead and the blood
spots that, as clearly as the trench itself, marked the line that
Dellarme's men had occupied along the crest of the knoll. It pleased him
to use one of the bodies as a rest for his rifle, while he laid his
sight in ecstasy on the large target of two men of the last section who
were bringing off one of the wounded, and he swore when they got away.
"But there's another out there all alone!" he cried. "Better say your
prayers, for I'm going to get you," he whispered; though, as we know,
Stransky was not hit.
Peterkin had been doing his best to make amends for past errors by
present enthusiasm of application. He fired no less earnestly than the
butcher's son. Now that Eugene Aronson was dead, Pilzer had become
Peterkin's chief patron and guide. He would be doing right if he did
what that brave Pilzer did, he was thinking, while he was conscious of
Fracasse's eyes boring into his back. With the others, but no more
expeditiously, however frightened, he fell back to cover from the burst
of shell fire; and then, with the word to break ranks, he found himself
the centre of a group including not only his captain but the colonel of
the regiment. He could not quite make out the expressions on their
faces, but he surmised that they were wondering how any man born under
the flag of the Grays could be such a coward as he was. Probably he
would be shot at sunrise.
"How did it happen?" Fracasse asked.
His tone was very pleasant, but Peterkin felt that this was only the
calmness of a judge hearing the evidence of a culprit. Punishment would
be, accordingly, the more drastic. He was too scared to tell the truth.
He spoke softly, with the mealy tongue of a valet father who never
explained why the wine was low in the decanter by any reference to a
weakness of his own palate.
"I didn't hear the whistle to fall back," he said, "so I stayed."
"Didn't hear the whistle!" exclaimed the captain. He looked at the
colonel and the colonel looked at him. The colonel stroked his mustache
as if it were a nice mustache. "There wasn't any whistle," said Fracasse
with a wry grin.
"Yes, my boy; and then?" asked the colonel, who had never before called
any private in his regiment "my boy."
A bright light broke on Peterkin. Inherited instinct did not permit him
to show much emotion on his face, and he had, too, an inherited gift of
invention. He rubbed his rifle stock with his palm and bowed much in
the fashion of the parent washing his hands in gratitude for a
compliment.
"And I didn't want to run," he continued. "I wanted to take that hill.
That was what we were told to do, wasn't it, sir?"
"Yes, yes!" said the colonel. "Go on!"
The light grew brighter, showing Peterkin's imagination the way to
higher flights.
"I jumped quick into the crater, knowing that if I jumped quick I would
not be hit," he proceeded, his thin voice accentuating his deferential
modesty. "My! but the bullets were thick, going both ways! But I
remembered the lectures to recruits said that it took a thousand to kill
a man. I found that I had cover from the bullets from our side and some
cover from their side. I could not lie there doing nothing, I decided,
after I had munched biscuits for a while--"
"Coolly munching biscuits!" exclaimed the colonel.
"Yes, sir; so I began firing every time I had a chance and I picked off
a number, I think, sir."
"My boy," said the colonel, putting his hand on Peterkin's shoulder, "I
am going to recommend you for the bronze cross."
The bronze cross--desired of generals and privates--for Peterkin, when
Pilzer had been so confident that he should win the first that came to
the 128th now that Eugene Aronson was dead!
"I--I--" stammered Peterkin.
"And so modest about it!" added the colonel. "Remembered the lectures to
recruits and acted on them faithfully!"
The old spirit of the nation was not dead. Here it was reappearing in a
valet's son, as it was bound to reappear in all classes! Yes, Peterkin
had supplied the one shining incident of the costly day to the colonel,
who found himself without his headquarters for the night at the Galland
house as planned, waiting for orders on this confounded little knoll. He
was wondering if his regiment would be out in reserve and given a rest
on the morrow, when an officer of the brigade staff brought
instructions:
"The batteries are going to emplace here for your support in the
morning. You will move as soon as your men have eaten and occupy
positions B-31 to B-35. That gives you a narrow front for one battalion,
with two battalions in reserve to drive home your attack. The chief of
staff himself desires that we take the Galland house before noon. The
enemy must not have the encouragement of any successes."
"So easy for Westerling to say," thought the colonel; while aloud he
acknowledged the message with proper spirit.
Before the order to move was given the news of it passed from lip to lip
among the men in tired whispers. Since dawn they had lived through the
impressions of a whole war, and they had won. With victory they had not
thought of the future, only of their hunger. After the nightmare of the
charge, after hearing death whispering for hours intimately in their
ears, they were too weary and too far thrown out of the adjustments of
any natural habits of thought and feeling to realize the horror of
eating their dinners in the company of the dead. Now they were to go
through another hell, but many of them in their exhaustion were chiefly
concerned as to whether or not they should get any sleep that night.
Peterkin could hear his heart thumping and feel chills running down his
spine. How should he ever live up to a bronze cross--the precious cross
given for valor alone, which marked him as heroic for life--when all he
wanted to do was to crawl away to some quiet, safe place and munch more
biscuits? He had once been a buttons who looked down on scullery boys,
but how gladly would he be a scullery boy forever if he could escape to
the rear where he would hear no more bullets!
His conscience smote him; he wanted a confessor. He had an impulse to
tell the whole truth to Hugo Mallin, for Hugo was the one man in the
company who would sympathetically understand the situation. Yet he did
not find the words, because he was rather pleased with the réclame of
being a hero, which was an entirely new experience in a family that had
been for generations in service.
Hugo Mallin had fired when the others fired; advanced when the others
advanced. He had done his mechanical part in a way that had not excited
Fracasse's further acute displeasure, and he had no sense of physical
fatigue, only of mental depression, of the elemental things that he had
seen and felt this day in a whirling pressure on his brain.
It seemed to him that all his comrades had changed. They could never be
the same as before they had set out to kill another lot of men on the
crest of the knoll. He could not keep a comparison out of mind: One of
the dead Browns, lying in almost the same position, looked enough like
the manufacturer's son to be his brother. He pictured Eugene Aronson's
parents receiving the news of his death--the mother weeping, the father
staring stonily. And he saw many mothers weeping and many fathers
staring stonily.