These men in the dining-room were members of Fracasse's company of the
Grays whom Marta had seen from her window the night before rushing
across the road into the garden. It is time for their story--the story
of their attack on the redoubt. One of those who remained motionless on
the road was the doctor's son. If he had sprained his ankle at
manoeuvres, the whole company would have gossiped about the accident.
If he had died in the garrison hospital from pneumonia, the barracks
would have been blue for a week. If he had fallen in the charge across
the white posts, the day-laborer's son on his right and the judge's son
on his left would have felt a spasm of horror.
This is death, they would have thought; death that barely missed us;
death that lays a man in the full tide of youth, as we are, silent and
still forever.
Twelve hours after the war had begun, when the judge's son missed the
doctor's son from the ranks, he remarked:
"Then they must have got him!"
"Yes, I Saw him roll over on his side," said the laborer's son.
There was no further comment. The lottery had drawn the doctor's son
this time; it would get some one else with the next rush. Existence had
resolved itself into a hazard; all perspective was merged into a
brimstone-gray background. The men did not think of home and parents, as
they had on the previous night while they waited for the war to begin,
or of patriotism. Relatives were still dear and country was still dear,
but the threads of these affections were no longer taut. They hung
loose. Fatalism had taken the place of suspense. There is no occurrence
that frequency will not make familiar, and they were already familiar
with death.
A man might even get used to falling from a great height. At first, in
lightning rapidity of thought, all his life would pass in review before
him and all his hopes for the future would crowd thick. But what if he
were to go on descending for hours; yes, for days? Would not his
sensations finally wear themselves down to a raw, quivering brain and
the brain at length grow callous? Suppose, further, that a number of men
had been thrown over a precipice at the same time as he and that the
bottom of the abyss was the distance from star to star! Suppose that
they fell at the same rate of speed! The first to be dashed against a
shelf of rock would be a ghastly reminder to each man of his own
approaching end. But, proceeding on horror's journey, he would become
accustomed to such pictures. He would feel hunger and cold. Physical
discomfort would overwhelm mental agony. If a biscuit shot out from the
pocket of a corpse, wouldn't the living hand grab for it in brute
greediness?
The thinner the veneer of civilized habit, the more easily the animal,
always waiting and craving war, breaks through. And the animal was
strong in Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son. He had a bull's heart and
lacked the little tendrils of sensibility whose writhing would tire him.
Hugo Mallin had these tendrils by the thousand. He had so many that they
gave him a reserve physical endurance like a kind of intoxication. He
felt as if he had been drinking some noxious, foamy wine which made his
mind singularly keen to every impression. Therefore he and Pilzer alone
of Fracasse's company were not utterly fatigued.
The savagery of Pilzer's bitterness at seeing another get the bronze
cross before he received one turned not on little Peterkin, the valet's
son, but on Hugo. As he and Hugo moved, elbow to elbow, picking their
way forward from the knoll, he eased his mind with rough sarcasm at
Hugo's expense. He christened Hugo "White Liver." When Hugo stumbled
over a stone he whispered:
"White Liver, that comes from the shaking knees of a coward!"
Hugo did not answer, nor did he after they had crossed the road and were
under the cover of the fourth terrace wall, and Pilzer whispered:
"Still with us, little White Liver? Cowards are lucky. But your time
will come. You will die of fright."
They worked their way ahead in the darkness to the third terrace and
then to the second, without drawing fire. There they were told to unslip
their packs "and sleep--sleep!"
Fracasse passed the word, as if this were also an order which perforce
must be obeyed. They dropped down in a row, their heads against the cold
stone wall. So closely packed were their bodies that they could feel one
another's breaths and heart-beats. Where last night they had thought of
a multitude of things in vivid flashes, to-night nothing was vivid after
the last explosion in the town and there was an end of firing. Spaces of
consciousness and unconsciousness were woven together in a kind of
patchwork chaos of mind. For the raw brains were not yet quite
calloused; they quivered from the successive benumbing shocks of the
day.
Hugo would not even cheat himself by trying to close his eyes. He lay
quite still looking at the quietly twinkling, kindly stars. Unlike his
comrades, he had not to go to hell in order to know what hell was like.
He had foreseen the nature of war's reality, so it had not come as a
surprise. Sufficient universal projection of this kind of imagination
might afford sufficient martial excitement without war.
His mind was busy in the gestation of his impressions and observations
since he had crossed the frontier. Definitely he knew that he was not
afraid of bullets or shell fire, and in this fact he found no credit
whatever. The lion and the tiger and the little wild pigs of South
America who will charge a railroad train are brave. But it took some
courage to bear Pilzer's abuse in silence, he was thinking, while he was
conscious that out of all that he had seen and felt in the conflict of
multitudinous angles of view was coming something definite, which would
result in personal action, fearless of any consequences.
The thing that held him back from a declaration of self was the pale
faces around him; his comrades of the barracks and manoeuvres. He
loved them; he thought, student fashion, that he understood them. He
liked being their humorist; he liked to win their glances of affection.
The fortitude to endure their contempt, their enmity, their ostracism
would not save those dear to him in his distant provincial home from
humiliation and heart-break. There was the rub: his father and mother
and his sweetheart. He was an only son. His sweetheart was a goddess to
his eyes. What purpose is there in the rebellion of a grain of sand on
the seashore, in the insubordination of one of five million soldiers?
Hadn't Westerling answered all doubts with the aphorism, "It is a
mistake for a soldier to think too much"?
Thus pondering, in the company of the stars, Hugo, who had so many
thoughts of his own that he led a double life, awaited the dawn. When
the church spire became outlined in the rosy, breaking light of the
east, he thought how much it was like the church spire of his own town.
He saw that he was in what had been a beautiful, tenderly cared-for old
garden before soldiery had ruthlessly trampled its flowers.
Raising his head to a level with the terrace wall--the second terrace
was low--he could see the piles of sand-bags on the first terrace only
twenty feet away and an old house that belonged to the garden. The
location appealed to him as his glance swept over plain and mountains
glistening with dew. It must be glorious to come down from the veranda
at daybreak or day's end to look at the flowers at your feet and the
horizon in the distance.
"Could little White Liver sleep away from home and mamma? Did he long
for mamma to tuck him among the goose feathers, with a sweet biscuit in
his paddy?" inquired Pilzer awakening.
Hugo looked around at Pilzer in his quizzical fashion.
"Jake, you are unnecessarily uprooting an aster with the toe of your
boot," he said.
Pilzer had a torrent of abuse ready to his tongue's end when Fracasse
interrupted with a hoarse, whispered warning:
"Silence, Pilzer! You talk too much."
Now the irascible Pilzer had a further grudge against Hugo for having
made him the object of a reprimand.
"You!" he whispered, when the captain's back was turned, calling Hugo a
foul name.
This cut through even Hugo's philosophy and the blood went in a hot rush
to his cheeks; but he slipped on his pack, as the others were doing, and
readjusted his cartridge-box. Word was passed to make ready for another
rush, and soon the men knew that yesterday was not part of the hideous
nightmare which had kept their legs quivering mechanically, as in the
charge, while they slept, but that the nightmare was a continuing
reality and the peace of morning a dream.
Under cover of the rain of shell fire on Dellarme's position, already
described, they mounted the wall of the second terrace and ran to the
wall of the first terrace. They had expected to suffer terribly, but
passed safely underneath a sheet of bullets that caught other sections
of their regiment on the lower terraces. Over their heads were the
muzzles of the Browns' rifles, blazing toward the road, while in the
direction of the tower they saw the first charge of another regiment
melting like snow under sprays of flame. They could not fire at
Dellarme's men and Dellarme's men could not fire at them without leaning
over the parapet. They could not go ahead. There was no room to their
rear, for the reserves behind the third terrace had rushed up to the
second terrace; those behind the fourth to the third; and still others
across the road to the fourth, in successive waves.
With a welter of slaughter around them, Fracasse's men were in something
of the position that little Peterkin had enjoyed in the shell crater.
They ate a breakfast of biscuits, washed down by water from their
canteens. Trickles of sand from bullet holes sprinkled their shoulders
and they had enough resiliency of spirit to grin when a stream of sand
from a bag torn by a shell burst ran down the back of Pilzer's neck. It
was rather amusing to hear Jake growling as he twisted in his blouse.
Hugo caught the humor of it in another sense, for the same shell burst
threw a piece of brown sleeve matted in a piece of flesh among the
flowers. The next instant he saw a squad of Grays who sprang up to rush
toward the linden stumps go down under the hose stream from the
automatic with the precision of having been struck by an electric
current. Not occupied, as he had been yesterday, with the business of
keeping to his part as a physical cog in the machine, he was seeing war
as a spectator--as Marta saw it, as only a privileged few ever see it.
Society, he was thinking, took the trouble to bring boys through the
whooping-cough and measles, pay for clothing and doctors' bills, and,
while it complained about business losses and safe-guarded trees and
harvests and buildings, destroyed the most valuable product of all with
a spatter of bullets from a rapid-firer.
The position of him and his comrades struck him as tragically ludicrous.
Were they grown men? Had they reasoning minds? Were they of the great
races that had given the world steam-power, electric power, anæsthesia,
and antiseptics? Had they the religion of Christ? Had they an
inheritance of great ages of art, literature, music, and philosophy? Did
they guard the treasures of their libraries and galleries? Would they
shudder in indignation if some one sent a bullet through the Sistine
Madonna, or throw a bomb at the Venus de Milo, or struck a rare Chinese
porcelain into fragments with an axe?
Yes; oh, yes!
Here were beings created in the likeness of their Maker, whose criterion
of superiority over other animals was in these symbols and not in that
of tooth, claw, or talon, disembowelling their fellow creatures. Here
were beings huddled together like a lot of puppies or cubs on an island
in the midst of carnage which was not a visitation of the Almighty, but
of their own making. And suicide and homicide were against the law in
the lands of both the Browns and the Grays!
The whole business was monstrous, lunatic, inconceivable. Yet he himself
was one of the actors, without the character or the courage to break
free of the machine which was taking lives with the irresponsibility of
a baby hammering at the jewels of a watch. The fact that he knew better
made him far more culpable, he thought, than little Peterkin or any of
his comrades. Yes, he was despicable; he was a coward!
All were lulled into a sense of security except Captain Fracasse, who
had a set frown of apprehension which came of a professional knowledge
not theirs. Little Peterkin, warmed by the autumn sunlight, began to
believe in his star. If there were to be a special dispensation
providing shell craters and the reverse walls of redoubts for him, he
might retain his reputation for heroism.
The sand still working its way downward between Pilzer's bare skin and
his undershirt irritated him to unusual restlessness of ambition for
glory and bronze crosses. He was the strong man of his company, now
that Eugene Aronson was dead. He must prove his importance. An
inspiration made him leap to his feet. This brought his head within a
foot of the top of the parapet, with an enemy's rifle barrel in easy
reach. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he was the type who must precede
action with a boast; a bite with a growl. Let all see that he was about
to do a gallant, clever thing.
"Watch me snatch that rifle!" he announced.
"No, you don't! Get down!" snapped Fracasse. "We aren't inviting
hand-grenades. It's a wonder that we have escaped so far."
"Hand-grenades!" gasped Peterkin, going white.
But nobody observed his pallor. Every one else was gasping,
"Hand-grenades!" under his breath; or, if not, his thoughts were
shrieking, "Hand-grenades!" There was a restless movement, a wistful
look to the rear.
"Keep quiet!" whispered Fracasse. "Let us hope it isn't known that we're
here."
They became as still as men of stone.
"Well, if they are going to throw grenades then they will throw them!"
exclaimed Peterkin with the bravery of fear. He must do or say something
worthy of a hero, he thought, in order to prove that he was not as
scared as he knew he had looked and still felt.
"You have the right sort of _sang-froid_, Peter Kinderling!" whispered
Fracasse. "And you, Pilzer, showed a proper spirit, too, if wrongly
directed."
Under cover of this favor, Peterkin drew a little out of line, making a
great pretence of stretching his legs and yawning--yawning with a
sincerely dropped jaw and a quivering lip. He pressed his chin against
the ground and this stopped the quivering. Also, he was in a position to
watch the parapet closely and to make a quick spring.
Fatalism had become suspense--suspense without action to take their
minds off the prospect, the suspense of death lurking in a cloud which
might break in a lightning flash! They thought that they knew the full
gamut of horrors; but nothing that they had yet gone through was any
criterion for what they now had to endure. All understood the nature of
a hand-grenade, which bursts like a Nihilist's bomb. It was as easy,
they knew, to toss hand-grenades over the sand-bags into human flesh as
apples into a basket. They felt themselves bound and gagged, waiting for
an assassin to macerate them at his own sweet will.
The second hour was worse than the first, the third worse than the
second. In lulls they heard the voices of Dellarme and his men, which
seemed more ominous than the crash of rifles or the scream and crack of
shells. Finally there was a lull which they knew meant the supreme
attempt to storm the position from the town side. They heard the
commotion that followed Dellarme's death; the sharp, rallying commands
of Feller and Stransky; and then, as Peterkin saw a black object fly
free of a hand over the parapet he made a catlike spring, followed by
another and another, and plunged face downward at the angle where the
face of the redoubt bent toward the town.
He thought that he was dead, and found, as he had in the shell crater,
that he was not. After the two explosions he heard groans that chilled
his blood, and looked around to see living faces like chalk, with
glassy, beady, protruding eyes, and a dozen men killed and eviscerated
and mangled in bleeding confusion.
But Hugo and Pilzer and those of Peterkin's immediate group were alive.
They were in their places, while he was alone and out of his place. He
had bolted, while they held their ground; now he would be revealed in
his true light. The bronze cross would be lost before it was pinned to
his breast. From where he lay, however, he could see the other face of
the redoubt and a wedge of men about to mount the sand-bags. His next
act was born of the inspired cunning of his fear of being exposed,
which was almost as compelling as his fear of death. He waved his hand
excitedly to the others to come on.
"Charge! Charge! This is the way!" shrieked Peterkin.
His voice had the terror of a man floating toward a falls and calling
for a rope, but not so to Fracasse, to whom it was the voice of a great
chance. Why hadn't he thought of this before? Of course, he should move
around under cover of the reverse wall of the redoubt to join in the
attack on the weak point! The valet's son had shown him the way.
"Come, men, come! Follow me and Peterkin!" cried Fracasse.
Did they follow? Westerling or any expert in the psychology of war could
understand how ripe was their mood. "It is the wait under right
conditions that will make men fiends unleashed when the word to storm is
given," an older authority had written. Under sentence of death for six
hours, they welcomed any opportunity to get at grips with those who had
held death suspended over their heads.
You will use hand-grenades, will you? Snug behind sand-bags you will
tear the flesh of our comrades to pieces, will you? They saw red, the
red of raw fragments of flesh; the red of the gush from torn artery
walls--all except Hugo and Peterkin, who might well begin to believe
that there was a measure of art in heroism. Peterkin seemed to share
leadership at the captain's side, but he slipped and fell--he had weak
ankles, anyway--as Fracasse's men pressed the rear of the wedge forward
with the strength of mass, only to be borne back by men, riddled with
bullets, tumbling fairly into their faces.
As we have seen, there was no getting through a breach under the
concentrated blasts of a hundred rifles, and Pilzer, who, by using human
shoulders for steps, had reached the parapet, turned a back somersault
with out his rifle. However, he seized one from a dead man's hand
before the captain had noticed the loss. Some of the company joined in
the flight of the attackers from the town into the open, but Hugo and
Pilzer and their friends remained under cover of the wall. They still
saw red, the red of a darker anger--that of repulse.
When, finally, they burst into the redoubt after it was found that the
Browns had gone, all, even the judge's son, were the war demon's, own.
The veneer had been warped and twisted and burned off down to the raw
animal flesh. Their brains had the fever itch of callouses forming. Not
a sign of brown there in the yard; not a sign of any tribute after all
they had endured! They had not been able to lay hands on the murderous
throwers of hand-grenades. Far away now was the barrack-room geniality
of the forum around Hugo; in oblivion were the ethics of an inherited
civilization taught by mothers, teachers, and church.
But here was a house--a house of the Browns; a big, fine house! They
would see what they had won--this was the privilege of baffled victory.
What they had won was theirs! To the victor the spoils! Pell-mell they
crowded into the dining-room, Hugo with the rest, feeling himself a
straw on the crest of a wave, and Pilzer, most bitter, most ugly of all,
his short, strong teeth and gums showing and his liver patch red, lumpy,
and trembling. In crossing the threshold of privacy they committed the
act that leaves the deepest wound of war's inheritance, to go on from
generation to generation in the history of families.
"A swell dining-room! I like the chandeliers!" roared Pilzer.
With his bayonet he smashed the only globe left intact by the shell
fire. There was a laugh as a shower of glass fell on the floor. Even the
judge's son, the son of the tribune of law, joined in. Pilzer then
ripped up the leather seat of a chair. This introductory havoc whetted
his appetite for other worlds of conquest, as the self-chosen leader of
the increasing crowd that poured through the doorway.
"Maybe there's food!" he shouted. "Maybe there's wine!"
"Food and wine!"
"Yes, wine! We're thirsty!"
"And maybe women! I'd like to kiss a pretty maid servant!" Pilzer added,
starting toward the hall.
"Stop!" cried Hugo, forcing his way in front of Pilzer.
He was like no one of the Hugos of the many parts that his comrades had
seen him play. His blue eyes had become an inflexible gray. He was
standing half on tiptoe, his quivering muscles in tune with the
quivering pitch of his voice: a Hugo in anger! This was a tremendous
joke. He was about to regain his reputation as a humorist by a brilliant
display in keeping with the new order of their existence.
"We have no right in here! This is a private house!"
But the fever of their savagery--the infectious savagery of the
mob--wanted no humor of this kind.
"Out of the way, you white-livered little rat!" cried Pilzer, "or I'll
prick the tummy of mamma's darling!"
What happened then was so sudden and unexpected in Hugo that all were
vague about details. They saw him in a catapultic lunge, mesmeric in its
swiftness, and they saw Pilzer go down, his leg twisted under him and
his head banging the floor. Hugo stood, half ashamed, half frightened,
yet ready for another encounter.
Fracasse, entering at this moment, was too intent on his mission to
consider the rights of a personal difference between two of his company,
though he heard and noted Pilzer's growling complaint that he had been
struck an unfair blow.
"There's work to do! Out of here, quick! We are losing valuable time!"
he announced, rounding his men toward the door with commanding
gestures. "We are going in pursuit!"
Marta, who had observed the latter part of the scene from the shadows of
the hall, knew that she should never forget Hugo's face as he turned on
Pilzer, while his voice of protest struck a singing chord in her
jangling nerves. It was the voice of civilization, of one who could
think out of the orbit of a whirlpool of passionate barbarism. She could
see that he was about to spring and her prayer went with his leap. She
gloried in the impact that felled the great brute with the liver patch
on his cheek, which was like a birthmark of war.
After the men were gone she regretted that she had not gone to Hugo and
expressed her gratitude. She vaguely wondered if she should see him
again and hoped that she might. The two faces, Hugo's and Pilzer's, in
the instant of Hugo's protest and Pilzer's contempt, were as clear as in
life before her eyes.
Then a staff-officer appeared in the doorway. When he saw a woman enter
the room he frowned. He had ridden from the town, which was empty of
women, a fact that he regarded as a blessing. If she had been a maid
servant he would have kept on his cap. Seeing that she was not, he
removed it and found himself in want of words as their eyes met after
she had made a gesture to the broken glass on the floor and the
lacerated table top, which said too plainly:
"Do you admire your work?"
The fact that he was well groomed and freshly shaven did not in any wise
dissipate in her feminine mind his connection with this destruction. He
had never seen anything like the smile which went with the gesture. Her
eyes were two continuing and challenging flames. Her chin was held high
and steady, and the pallor of exhaustion, with the blackness of her
hair-and eyes, made her strangely commanding. He understood that she was
not waiting for him to speak, but to go.
"I did not know that there was a woman here!" he said.
"And I did not know that officers of the Grays were accustomed to enter
private houses without invitations!" she replied.
"This is a little different," he began.
She interrupted him.
"But the law of the Grays is that homes should be left undisturbed,
isn't it? At least, it is the law of civilization. I believe you
profess, too, to protect property, do you not?"
"Why, yes!" he agreed. He wished that he could get a little respite from
the steady fire of her eyes. It was embarrassing and as confusing as the
white light of an impracticable logic.
"In that case, please place a guard around our house lest some more of
your soldiers get out of control," she went on.
"I can do that, yes," he said. "But we are to make this a staff
headquarters and must start at once to put the house in readiness."
"General Westerling's headquarters?" she inquired.
He parried the question with a frown. Staff-officers never give
information. They receive information and transmit orders.
"I know General Westerling. You will tell him that my mother, Mrs.
Galland, and our maid and myself are very tired from the entertainment
he has given us, unasked, and we need sleep to-night. So you will leave
us until morning and that door, sir, is the one out into the grounds."
The staff-officer bowed and went out by that door, glad to get away from
Marta's eyes. His inspection of the premises with a view to plans for
staff accommodation could wait. Westerling would not be here for two
days at least.
"Whew! What energy she has!" he thought. "I never had anybody make me
feel so contemptibly unlike a gentleman in my life."
Yet Marta, returning to the hall, had to steady herself in a dizzy
moment against the wall. Complete reaction had come. She craved sleep as
if it were the one true, real thing in the world. She craved sleep for
the clarity of mind that comes with the morning light. In the haziness
of fleecy thought, as slumber drew its soft clouds around her, her last
conscious visions were the pleasant ones rising free of a background of
horror: of Feller's smile when he went back to his automatic for good;
of Dellarme's smile as he was dying; of Stransky's smile as Minna gave
him hope; and of Hugo's face as he uttered his flute-like cry of
protest. In her ears were the haunting calmness and contained force of
Lanstron's voice over the telephone. She was pleased to think that she
had not lost her temper in her talk with the staff-officer. No, she had
not flared once in indignation. It was as if she had absorbed some of
Lanny's own self-control. Lanny would approve of her in that scene with
an officer of the Grays. And she realized that a change had come over
her--a change inexplicable and telling--and she was tired--oh, so tired!
It had been exhausting work, indeed, for one woman, though she had been
around the world, making war on two armies.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, all too flushed with energy, the energy of movement, to think
of the feud between Hugo and Pilzer, Fracasse's men had sped along the
castle road. Little Peterkin easily kept pace. There was no danger in
pursuit. In him was the same zest of the chase which Animated his
comrades. They dropped down on a ledge without much regard to order.
Before them, at close range, was a company breaking out of close order
in a _sauve-qui-peut_ rout up a reverse slope. It was not Dellarme's
company, but some other that had mistaken its direction and retired too
late and by the wrong road.
You will throw hand-grenades, will you? thought Fracasse's men. You will
mangle our fellows when they Can't strike back, will you? Now you'll
pay! Now it is our turn! We have seen our blood flow and now yours will
flow!
The lust of the red slipped the cartridge clips into the magazines and
held a true aim in the mad delight of slaughter. No one minded, for no
one heard--not even little Peterkin--the scattering bullets in return.
They had reached the stage where the objective thought of revenge wholly
submerged the subjective thought of personal danger, which is the mood
of the hungry tiger in the hunt. They were the veritable finished
products of veteran experience in purpose and marksmanship. Hugo, too,
was firing, but far over the head of every target; firing like a man in
a trance who needs some deciding incident to bring him out of it into
the part he was to play.
Only occasional figures who had not escaped over the ridge were to be
seen. The fewer the targets the greater the concentration. A whole
company was firing on a dozen straggling figures. But one--that one in
the pasture--seemed to have a charmed life. The ground around him was
peppered with dust spots. He had only a few yards more to go to safety;
yes his head--the exasperation of him!--was in line with the crest
before he fell.
Where was there any more prey? With ferret quickness eyes swept the
range of vision. Out of an orchard into the stubble of a wheat-field
broke a panicky mass; a score or more of men who had lost their officer
and their heads presumably. They were the nail under the hammer, a brown
blot, a target.
"Ah!" a chorus of excited exclamations in greeting of the game flushed
from cover ran along the line. Just the way you got our fellows with the
hand-grenades, we will get you! This was the thought, this the prayer
which they saw being fulfilled by the glad medley of their fire when
Hugo Mallin sprang up and threw down his rifle as if it were something
whose touch had become venomous. He threw it down with features
transformed in the uplifting thought and the relief of a final
resolution taken.
"I am through!" he cried. "I will not murder my fellowman who has done
me no wrong! I cannot, I will not kill!"
Fracasse, who was near by, heard enough to understand the purport of the
declaration, and his recollection of Hugo's heresy and all the prejudice
that he had formed against Hugo and the abhorrence of Hugo's offence to
the strict militarist brought a rush of anger to his brain as he leaped
up and drawing his sword, struck at Hugo with the flat of it. He aimed
for Hugo's back, but a bullet had hit Hugo in the calf of his leg and,
his knees giving under him, he received the blow on the head and fell
unconscious.
When he came to it was with a twitch of pain in his ribs. He saw the
glowering faces of his comrades above him and realized that Pilzer had
given him a kick which expressed the general opinion.
"Once ought to be enough of that," said the doctor, who was bandaging
the leg, speaking to Pilzer.
Yet in the doctor's eyes Hugo saw no favor, only the humanity of his
occupation of mercy to criminal and king alike. But Hugo expected no
favor and he was glad of what he had done as he swooned again. When he
came to a second time, his head aching with throbs, it was with a sense
of falling. He found that he was on a litter that had just been set
down. Evidently this was by order of the colonel, who was standing over
Hugo in the company of some officers. All were regarding him as if he
were a species of reptile.
"World anarchist ideas, which is another word for treason or white
liver," observed the colonel. "To think that it happened in my regiment!
But I'll not try to cover it for the regiment's good name. He will get
the full measure of the law!"
"The placard is a good idea," suggested an officer.
"Yes, put on by one of his comrades!"
"The punishment of public opinion. It shows how sound the army is at
heart."
Hugo, lowering his glance, was able to see a sheet of note-paper pinned
to his blouse. It was lettered, but he could not make out the words.
Then he heard the approach of a galloping horse, whose hoofs seemed to
strike his head, and heard the horse stop and an orderly saying
something about Company I having got too far forward into a mess and the
need of litters.
"We can spare this one," said the colonel.
Hugo was rolled roughly onto the ground by the roadside and left alone.
He managed to raise himself on his elbow and saw that the lettering of
the placard was "Coward!" Officers and soldiers and hospital-corps men
called attention to it as they passed. The sun was very hot and he was
growing feverish. Painfully he dragged himself to the shelter of a tree,
and then, looking around, saw that he was near the big house of the
terraced garden.