The satire of war makes the valet's son a hero; the chance of war kills
the manufacturer's son and lets the day-laborer's son live; the sport of
war gives the latent forces of a Stransky full play; the mercy of war
grants Grandfather Fragini a happy death; the glory of war brings
Dellarme quick promotion; the glamour and the spectacular folly of war
turn the bolts of the lightnings which man has mastered against man.
Perhaps the savage who learned that he could start a flame by rubbing
two dry sticks together may have set fire to the virgin forest and wild
grass in order to destroy an enemy--and naturally with disastrous
results to himself if he mistook the direction of the wind.
Marta Galland's thoughts at dusk when she returned up the steps to the
house were much the same as Hugo Mallin's after Fracasse had taken the
knoll. While he had felt the hot whirlwind of war in his face, she had
witnessed the wreckage that it left. She also was seeing fathers staring
and mothers weeping. Her experience with the wounded drawing deep on the
wells of sympathy, heightened her loathing of war and of all who planned
and ordered it and led its legions. A Stransky righting would have been
repulsive to her, but a Stransky trying to save a life was noble.
Except for the few minutes when she had gone out on the veranda and had
seen Stransky bringing in the lifeless body of Grandfather Fragini, she
had been engaged since dark in completing the work of moving valuable
articles from the front to the rear rooms of the house, which had been
begun early in the day by Minna and the coachman.
Shortly after Stransky had finished his meal Minna came to say that
Major Dellarme wished to speak to Miss Galland. Dellarme a major! This
was his reward for his part in filling the ambulances with groans! In
the days when he was at the La Tir garrison he had been a frequent
caller. Now, in the perversity of her reasoning, out of the chaos of the
tangent odds of her impressions since she had gone to hold the session
of her school that morning, she thought of him as peculiarly one who
gave to the profession of arms the attraction that had made it the
vocation of the aristocrat. Waiting for her in the dismantled
dining-room, despite all that he had passed through, his greeting had
the diffident, boyish manner of her recollection; and despite a night on
the ground his brown uniform was without creases, giving him a
well-groomed, even debonair, appearance.
"I scarcely thought that we should ever meet under these conditions," he
said slightly constrained, a touch of color in his cheeks.
She had no excuse for her reply unless, in truth, she were in training
for the town scold. But he typified an idea. He gave to war the aspect
of refinement.
"If you did not expect it, why did you enter the army?" she asked.
He saw that she was not quite herself. The strain of the day had
unnerved her. Yet he answered her bootless question with simple
directness.
"I liked the idea of being a soldier. I was reared in the atmosphere of
the army, and I hoped that I might do my duty if war came."
Perhaps this was point one for him. Marta shrugged her shoulders.
"I might have guessed beforehand what you would say," she replied. "You
sent for me?"
"Hardly that, please. I asked if I might see you. The captain of
engineers tells me that you insist on staying and I came to beg you to
keep in the back of the house. You will be safe there. Any shell that
may enter will explode in the front rooms and the fragments will not go
through the second wall."
"Yes, we understand that. We have already removed our heirlooms," she
replied indifferently.
The fatalism of her attitude and his alarm lest she had gone a little
out of her head aroused all the innate horror of a man at the thought of
a woman under fire. He broke out desperately:
"Miss Galland, this is no place for you! You do not realize--"
He had made the same mistake as the captain of engineers--touched a spot
of irritation as raw as it had been in the morning.
"Why shouldn't I stay here? Why shouldn't every wife and mother be here
in the fire zone? You soldiers die--it is very easy to die--and leave us
to suffer. You destroy and leave us to build up. You go on a debauch of
killing and come home to the women to nurse you. Why make us suffer the
consequences without sharing the glory of the deed?"
Such reasoning was not in the province of his training. He feared that
she was about to become hysterical.
"Really, Miss Galland, I--women and children--I--" he was stammering.
"Better kill the children young than go to the expense of bringing them
up before they are killed!" she went on, not hysterically, unless frozen
intensity is hysteria. "Children clinging to your knees might stop you,
but I suppose you would have a police force to tear the children away
rather than miss the masculine privilege of murder."
"Miss Galland, you are overwrought. I--"
She interrupted him with half-breathed laughter.
"Don't I look it--hysterical?" she exclaimed. "How awkward for you if I
should fall on the floor and kick and scream!"
With a peculiar uplifting of the brows which spoke a brittle humor, she
looked at the floor as if selecting a place for the performance.
"That is not your way," he managed to say. He was quite adrift in
confusion at the recollection of quotations he had heard about woman's
subtleties and inconsistencies and her charm. Resorting to the last
weapon in his armory--which the captain of engineers had already
used--his attitude changed to a soldierly sternness. "Miss Galland, I
feel that it is my duty, as long as you are going to stay, to make sure
that--"
She killed the sentence on his lips with a gleam of mockery from her
eyes. He understood that she had again anticipated what he was going to
say.
"There are times when you must be firm with a woman, aren't there? And
the time has come for you to be firm!" The color in his cheeks deepened.
He knew what to do with his men on the knoll, but not what to do in the
present situation. "This is our home; our home is our country. Here we
remain; but, naturally, we don't propose to stick our heads out of the
windows in a shower of shrapnel bullets," she continued. "Even your
soldiers are not so zealous for death but they fight behind sand-bags.
They are not like Mohammedan fatalists who so love to die for their
illusions that they bare their breasts to bullets. We have already
arranged sleeping-quarters in the rear. Good night!"
She held out her hand with a smile of conventional pleasantry. Had it
not been for the sound of firing, which still continued, and for the
walls denuded of pictures, they might have been parting at the head of
the stairs at a house-party. She stopped half-way up in an impulse to
call back happily:
"You see, masculine firmness did calm feminine hysteria!"
"Oh, Miss Galland!" he exclaimed. "Miss Galland, you are beyond me!"
"What a pose! How foolish to break out in that way!" she thought
angrily, as she hastened up the rest of the flight and along the
corridor. "To him of all men! A pattern-plate of an officer, who never
has had anything but a military thought! But everything is pose!
Everything is abnormal! And sleep? Sleep is a pose, too. I feel as if my
eyes would remain open forever. Oh, I wish they would begin the fighting
and tear the house to pieces if they are going to! I wish--"
She was at the door of her mother's room, which was like an antique
shop. Old plates lay on top of old tables, with vases on the floor under
the tables. Surrounded by her treasures, Mrs. Galland awaited the
attack; not as a soldier awaits it, but as that venerable Roman senator
of the story faced the barbarous Gauls--neither disputing the power of
their spears nor yielding the self-respect of his own mind and soul. She
had lain down in her wrapper for the night, and the light from a single
candle--she still favored candles--revealed her features calm and
philosophical among the pillows. Yet the magic of war, reaching deep
into hidden emotions, had her also under its spell. Her voice was at
once more tender and vital.
"Marta, I see that you are all on wires!"
"Yes; jangling wires, every one, jangling every second out of tune,"
Marta acquiesced.
"Marta, my father"--her father had been a premier of the Browns--"always
said that you may enjoy the luxury of fussing over little things, for
they don't count much one way or another; but about big things you must
never fuss or you will not be worthy of big things. Marta, you cannot
stop a railroad train with your hands. This is not the first war on
earth and we are not the first women who ever thought that war was
wrong. Each of us has his work to do and you will have yours. It does no
good to tire yourself out and fly to pieces, even if you do know so much
and have been around the world."
She smiled as a woman of sixty, who has a secret heart-break that she
had never given her husband a son, may smile at a daughter who is both
son and daughter to her, and her plump hand, all curves like her plump
face and her plump body, spread open in appeal.
Marta, who, in the breeding of her generation, felt sentiment as more or
less of a lure from logic, dropped beside the bed in a sudden burst of
sentiment and gathered the plump hand in hers and kissed it.
"Mother, you are wonderful!" she said. "Mother, you are great!"
"Tush, Marta!" said Mrs, Galland. "You shouldn't say that. Your
grandfather was great--a very great man. He never quite got his deserts;
no good man does in politics."
"You are better than great," said Marta. "You soothe; you help; you
have--what shall I call it?--the wisdom of mothers! Minna has it, too."
She ran a tattoo of kisses along the velvety skin of Mrs. Galland's arm.
Mrs. Galland was blushing, and out of the depths of her eyes bubbled a
little fountain of stars.
"Marta, you have kissed me often before," she said, "but you have been a
little patronizing from your hilltop of youth and knowledge. Sometimes
you have looked to me lonely up there on your hilltop and I know that I
have been lonely sometimes in my valley of the years where knees are not
good at climbing hills."
"It was not my intention," Marta said rather miserably.
"No, it is a businesslike age," answered Mrs. Galland.
"I--you mean I was too detached? I was not human?"
"You are now. You make me very happy," her mother replied. "But you must
sleep," she insisted.
After a time, her ear becoming as accustomed to the firing as a city
dweller's to the distant roar of city traffic Mrs. Galland slept. But
Marta could not follow her advice. If, transiently at least, she had
found something of the peace of the confessional, the vigor of youth was
in her arteries; and youth cannot help remaining awake under some
conditions. She tiptoed across the hall into her own room and seated
herself by the window, which had often spread the broadening vista of
landscape with its lessening detail before her eyes.
On other nights she had looked out into opaqueness with the drum-beat of
rain on the roof; into the faint starlight when there was only the
vagueness of heights and levels; into the harvest moonlight with its
spectral unreality. Now the symbol of what the ear had heard the eye
saw: war, working in tones of the landscape by day with smokeless
powder; war, revealed by its tongues of flame at night. Ugly bursts of
fire from the higher hills spread to the heavens like an aurora borealis
and broke their messengers in sheets of flame over the lower hills--the
batteries of the Browns sprinkling death about the heads of the gunners
of the Grays emplacing their batteries. Staccato flashes from a single
point counted so many bullets from an automatic, which, directed by the
beams of the search-lights, found their targets in sections of advancing
infantry. Hill crests, set off with flashes running back and forth,
demarked infantry lines of the Browns assisting the automatics.
There were lulls between the crashes of the small arms and the heavy,
throaty speech of the guns; lulls that seemed to say that both sides had
paused for a breathing spell; lulls that allowed the battle in the
distance to be heard in its pervasive undertone. In one Of them, when
even the undertone had ceased for a few seconds, Marta caught faintly
the groans of a wounded man--one of the crew of a Gray dirigible burned
by an explosion and brought in his agony softly to earth by a billowing
piece of envelope which acted as a parachute.
Fighting proceeded in La Tir in stages of ferocity and blank silence.
The upper part of the town, which the Browns still held, was in
darkness; the lower part, where the Grays were, was illuminated.
"Another one of Lanny's plans!" thought Marta. "He would have them work
in the light, while we fire out of obscurity!"
Soon all the town was in darkness, for the Grays had cut the wire in the
main conduit shortly after she had heard the groans of the wounded man.
There the automatics broke out in a mad storm, voicing their feelings at
getting a company in close order in a street for the space of a minute,
before those who escaped could plaster themselves against doorways or
find cover in alleys. Then silence from the automatics and a cheer from
the Browns that rasped out its triumph like the rubbing together of
steel files.
From the line of defence, that included the first terrace of the Galland
grounds as the angle of a redoubt, not a shot, not a sound; silence on
the part of officers and men as profound as Mrs. Galland's slumber,
while one of the Browns' search-lights, like some great witch's
slow-turning eye in a narrow radius, covered the lower terraces and the
road.
Marta gave intermittent glances at the garden; the glances of a
guardian. She happened to be looking in that direction when figures
sprang across the road, crouching, running with the short, quick steps
of no body movement accompanying that of the legs. The search-light
caught them in merciless silhouette and the automatic and the rifles
from behind the sand-bags on the first terrace let go. Some of the
figures dropped and lay in the road and she knew that she had seen men
hit for the first time. Others, she thought, got safely to the cover of
the gutter on the garden side. Of those on the road, some were still and
some she saw were moving slowly back on their stomachs to safety. Now
the search-light laid its beam steadily on the road. Again silence. From
the upper terrace came a great voice, like that of the guns, from a
human throat:
"Why didn't we level those terraces? They'll creep up from one to the
other!" It was Stransky.
In answer was another voice--Dellarme's.
"Perhaps there wasn't time to do everything. And if this position is
taken before we are ready to go, it will not be from that side, but from
the side of the town."
"We're making them pay for seeing our garden, but, anyhow, we won't let
them pick any flowers," Stransky remarked pungently.
"If they get as far as the first terrace--well, in case of a crisis, we
have hand-grenades," Dellarme added in explanation. "But, God knows, I
hope we shall not have to use them."
After an interval, more figures made a rush across the road. They, too,
in Stransky's words, paid a price for seeing the garden. But the flashes
from the rifles and the automatic provided a target for a Gray battery.
The blue spark that flies from an overhead trolley or a third rail,
multiplied a hundredfold, broke in Marta's face. It was dazzling,
blinding as a bolt of lightning a few feet distant, with the thunder
crash at the same second, followed by the thrashing hum of bullets and
fragments against the side of the house.
"I knew that this must come!" something within her said. If she had not
been prepared for it by the events of the last twelve hours she would
have jumped to her feet with an exclamation of natural shock and horror.
As it was, she felt a convulsive, nervous thrill without rising from her
seat. A pause. The next shell burst in line with the first, out by the
linden-trees; a third above the veranda.
"We've got that range, all right!" thought the Gray battery commander,
who had judged the distance by the staff map. This was all he wanted to
know for the present. He would let loose at the proper time to support
the infantry attack, when there were enough driblets across the road to
make a charge. The driblets kept on coming, and, one by one, the number
of dead on the road was augmented.
Marta was diverted from this process of killing by piecemeal by a more
theatric spectacle. A brigade commander of the Grays had ticked an order
over the wires and it had gone from battery to battery. Not only many
field-guns, which are the terriers of the artillery, but some guns of
siege calibre, the mastiffs, in a sudden outburst started a havoc of
tumbling walls and cornices in the upper part of the town.
Then an explosion greater than any from the shells shot a hemisphere of
light heavenward, revealing a shadowy body flying overhead, and an
instant later the heavens were illuminated by a vast circle of flame as
the dirigible that had dropped the dynamite received its death-blow. But
already the Brown infantry was withdrawing from the town, destroying
buildings that would give cover for the attack in the morning as they
went. Two or three hours after midnight fell a silence which was to last
until dawn. The combatants rested on their arms, Browns saying to Grays,
"We shall be ready for the morrow!" and Grays replying: "So shall we!"
Marta, at her window, her eyes following the movements of the display,
now here, now there, found herself thinking of many things, as in the
intermissions between the acts of a drama. She wondered if the groaning,
wounded man were crying for water or if he were wishing that some one at
home were near him. She thought of her talk with Lanstron over the
telephone and how mad and feminine and feeble it must have sounded to a
mind working in the inexorable processes of the clash of millions of
men. She saw his left hand twitching in his pocket, his right hand
gripping it to hold it still, on that afternoon when, for the first
time, she had understood his injury in the aeroplane accident as the
talisman of his feelings--his controlled feelings! Always his controlled
feelings!
She saw Feller leaning against the moist wall of the dank tunnel,
suffering as it had never seemed to her that man could suffer, his agony
an irresistible plea. She saw Westerling, so conscious of his strength,
directing his chessmen in a death struggle against Partow. And he was
coming to this house as his headquarters when the final test of the
strength of the Titans was made.
She hoped that her mother was still sleeping; and she had seconds when
she was startled by her own calmness. Again, the faces of the children
in her school were as clear as in life. She breathed her gratitude that
the procession in which they moved to the rear was hours ago out of the
theatre of danger. In the simplicity of big things, her duty was to
teach them, a future generation, no less than Feller's duty was to the
pursuing shadow of his conscience. She should see war, alive, naked,
bloody, and she would tell her children what she had seen as a warning.
Silence, except an occasional rifle-shot--silence and the darkness
before dawn which would, she knew, concentrate the lightnings around the
house. She glanced into her mother's room and marvelled as at a miracle
to find her sleeping. Then she stole down-stairs and opened the outer
door of the dining-room. A step or two brought her to the edge of the
veranda. There she paused and leaned against one of the stone pillars.
Dellarme himself was in a half-reclining position, his back to a tree.
He seemed to be nodding. Except for a few on watch over the sand-bags,
his men were stretched on the earth, moving restlessly at intervals,
either in an effort to sleep or waking suddenly after a spell of
harassed unconsciousness.