We have heard nothing of Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son, and Peterkin,
the valet's son, and others of Fracasse's company of the 128th of the
Grays since Hugo Mallin threw down his rifle when they were firing on
scattered Brown soldiers in retreat.
It was in one of the minor actions of the step-by-step advance after the
taking of the Galland house that the judge's son received official
notice of a holiday in the form of a nickel pellet from the Browns which
made a clean, straight hole the size of a lead pencil through his flesh
and then went singing on its way without deflection, as if it liked to
give respites from travail to tired soldiers.
"Grazed the ribs--no arteries!" remarked the examining surgeon. "You'll
be well in a month."
"We'll hold the war for you!" called the banker's son cheerily after the
still figure on the stretcher.
"And you'll get gruel and custards, maybe," said the barber's son. "I
like custards."
Once the judge's son had thought that nothing could be so grand as to be
wounded fighting for one's country. He had in mind then, as the object
of his boyish admiration, a young officer returned from a little
campaign against the blacks in Africa, when, the casualties being few
and the scene distant and picturesque, all heroes with scars had an
aspect of romantic exclusiveness. But there was no more distinction now
in being wounded than in catching cold. Truly, colonial wars were the
only satisfactory kind.
The judge's son found himself one of many men on cots in long rows in
the former barracks of the Browns near La Tir. Daily bulletins told the
patients the names of the positions taken and daily they heard of fresh
batches of wounded arriving, which were not mentioned on the
bulletin-board.
"We continue to win," said the doctors and nurses invariably in answer
to all questions. "General Westerling announces that everything is going
as planned."
"You must know that speech well!" observed the judge's son to the nurse
of his section.
Her lips twitched in a kind of smile.
"Letter-perfect!" she replied "It's official."
In two weeks, so fast had the puncture from the aseptic little pellet of
civilized warfare healed under civilization's medical treatment, the
judge's son was up and about, though very weak. But the rules strictly
confined his promenades to the barracks yard. There might be news coming
down the traffic-gorged castle road out of the region where the guns
sounded that convalescents were not intended to hear. For news could
travel in other ways than by bulletin-boards; and the judge's son,
merely watching the faces of medical officers, guessed that it was
depressing. But after the first attack on Engadir their faces lighted.
The very thrill of victory seemed to be in the air.
"It's in the main line of defence!" called the doctor on his morning
rounds of the cots. "They've made Westerling a field-marshal. He's
outwitted the Browns! In a few days now we'll have the range!"
How staggering was the cost he was not to realize till later, when the
ambulance stewards kept repeating:
"More to come!"
A newcomer, who took the place of a man who had died on the cot next to
the judge's son, had been in the fight. He was still ether-sick and weak
from the amputation of his right arm, with a dazed, glassy, and far-away
look in his eyes, as if everything in the world was strange and
uncertain.
"The fearful flashes--the explosions--the gusts of steel in the air!"
he whispered.
The next night Westerling followed up his supposed advantage at Engadir
as he had planned, and there was no sleep for the thunders and the light
of the explosions through the barracks-room windows.
"I can see what is happening and feel--and feel!" said the man who had
been at Engadir.
In the morning the bulletin announced that more positions were taken,
with very heavy losses--to the enemy. But the news that travelled
unofficially from tongue to tongue down the castle road and spoke in the
faces of doctors and nurses said, "And to us!" plainly enough, even if
the judge's son had not heard a doctor remark:
"It's awful--inconceivable! Not a hospital tent in this division is
unoccupied. Most of the houses in town are full, and we're preparing for
another grand attack!"
Now for two days the guns kept up their roar.
"Making ready for the infantry to go in," ran the talk around the
barracks yard.
After the infantry had gone in and the result was known, the doctor on
his morning round said to the judge's son:
"You're pretty pale yet, but you'll do. We must make room for a big
crowd that is coming and the orders are to get every man who is in any
condition to fight to the front."
"And if I get another hole in me you'll patch me up again?"
"Get any number and we'll patch you up if they're in the right place,"
was the answer. "But be careful about that detail."
Soon the judge's son was with a score of convalescents who were marched
down to the town, where they formed in column with other detachments.
"Not with that cough!" exclaimed a doctor as they were about to start,
ordering a man out of line. "You'd never get to the front. You'd only
have to be brought back in an ambulance."
An enlightening march this for the judge's son from hospital to
trenches, moving with a tide of loaded commissariat wagons and empty
ambulances and passing a tide of loaded ambulances and empty
commissariat wagons. A like scene was on every road to the front; a like
scene on every vista of landscape along any part of the frontier. All
trees and bushes and walls and buildings that would give cover to the
enemy the Browns had razed. On every point of rising ground were the
trenches and redoubts that the Browns had yielded after their purpose of
making the Grays earn their way by trenches of their own had been
served. The fields were trampled by the feet of infantry, cut by gun
wheels, ploughed by shells, and sown with the conical nickel pellets
from rifles and the round lead bullets of shrapnel. An escarpment of
rock, where the road-bed was slashed into a hillside in a sharp turn,
struck by the concentrated fire of automatics, appeared to have been
beaten by thousands of sharp-headed hammers, leaving a pile of chips and
dust.
The traffic of the main roads spread into branch roads which ended in
the ganglia of supply depots, all kept in touch by the network of wires
focussing through different headquarters to Westerling. In this
conquered territory with its face of desolation there were no fighting
men except reserves or convalescents on their way to the front. All the
rest were wounded or dead or occupied in the routine of supply and
intelligence. The organization which had been drilled through two
generations of peace for this emergency exhibited the signs of pressure.
Eyes that met when commands were given and received were dull from want
of sleep or hectically bright as a hypochondriac's. Voices spoke in a
grim, tired monotone, broken by sudden flashes of irritation or
eruptions of anger. Features were drawn like those of rowers against a
tide. The very proportions of the ghastly harvest after the last, the
heaviest of all, of the attacks brought spasms of nausea to men already
hardened to blood and death. If the officers of the staffs in their
official conspiracy of silence would not talk, the privates and the
wounded would. The judge's son, observing, listening, thinking, was
gathering a story to tell his comrades of Company B of the 128th.
That night he and his comrade convalescents slept in the open. Their
bodies were huddled close together under their blankets for warmth,
while aching limbs twitched from the fatigue of the march. The morning
showed that others had coughs which should have kept them from the
front.
"Four or five cases of pneumonia due in that lot!" a doctor remarked to
a hospital-corps sergeant. "Put them in empties right away."
After this announcement other coughs developed. Amusing, these sudden,
purposeful efforts should one happen to think of them in that way. But
no one did.
"No you don't, you malingerers!" said the doctor sharply. "I've been at
this business long enough to know a real cough."
Now the judge's son and a dozen others were separated from the rest of
their companions and started over a hill. From the top they had a broad
view. Across a strip of valley lay the main rise to the heights of the
range. Along the summit nothing warlike was visible except the irregular
landscape against the horizon. There the enemy rested in his
fortifications. The slopes, as far as the judge's son could see on
either hand, were like the warrens of an overpopulated rabbit world in
hiding. Here was the army of the Grays in its redoubts and trenches A
thousand times as many men as were ever at work on the Panama Canal had
been digging their way forward--digging regardless of union hours;
digging to save their own lives and to take lives. And the nearer they
came to the top of the range the deeper they had to dig and the slower
their progress.
As the little group of convalescents descended into a valley a bursting
shell from the Browns scattered its fragments over the earth near by.
"They drop one occasionally, though they don't expect to get more than a
man or two by chance, which is hardly worth the cost of the charge,"
some one explained. "You see that they must know just what our positions
are from their understanding of our army's organization, and the purpose
is to bother us about bringing up supplies and reserves. Start a
commissariat train or a company in close order across, and--whew! The
air screams!"
Once on the other side of the valley, and the maze of zigzags and
parallels leading into the warrens was simplified by signs indicating
the location of regiments. At length the judge's son found himself in
the home cave of his own tribe. His comrades were resting at the
noon-hour, their backs against the wall of their shell-proof. In the
faint light their faces were as gray as the dust on the dirty uniforms
that hung on their gaunt bodies. Dust was caked in the seams around
their eyes; their cheeks were covered with dusty beards. Their greeting
of the returned absentee was that of men who had passed through a strain
that left existence untouched by the spring of average sensations.
"Did you get the custards?" asked the barber's son in a squeaky voice.
"No, but I got a jelly once--only once!"
"Snob!" said the barber's son.
"Jelly! I could eat a hogshead of jelly and still be empty! What I want
is fresh meat!" growled Pilzer, the butcher's son.
"A hogshead of jelly might be good to bathe in!" said the banker's son.
"I haven't had a bath for a month."
"I have. I turned my underclothes inside out!" said the barber's son. He
was aiming to take Hugo's place as humorist, in the confidence of one
sprung from a talkative family.
Scanning the faces, the judge's son found many new ones--those of the
older reservists--while many of the faces of barrack days were missing.
"Whom have we lost?" he asked.
The answer, given with dull matter-of-factness, revealed that, of the
group that had talked so light-heartedly of war six weeks before, only
little Peterkin, the valet's son, and Pilzer, the butcher's son, and the
barber's and the banker's sons survived. They were sitting in a row,
from the instinct that makes old associates keep together even though
they continually quarrel. The striking thing was that Peterkin looked
the most cheerful and well-kept of the four. As the proud possessor of a
pair of scissors, he had trimmed a surprisingly heavy beard Van Dyck
fashion, which emphasized his peaked features and a certain
consciousness of superiority; while the barber's son sported only a few
scraggly hairs. The scant, reddish product of Pilzer's cheeks, leaving
bare the liver patch, only accentuated its repulsiveness and a savagery
in his voice and look which was no longer latent under the conventional
discipline of every-day existence. The company had not been in the first
Engadir assault, but, being near the Engadir position, had suffered
heavily in support.
"You were in the big attack night before last?" asked the judge's son.
"We started in," said Peterkin, "but Captain Fracasse brought us back,"
he added in a way that implied that only orders had kept him from going
on.
Peterkin, the trembling little Peterkin of the baptismal charge across
the line of white posts, had been the first out of the redoubt on to the
glacis in that abortive effort, living up to the bronze cross on his
breast. He was one of the half dozen out of the score that had started
to return alive. The psychology of war had transformed his gallantry; it
had passed from simulation to reality, thanks to his established
conviction that he led a charmed life. Little Peterkin, always pale but
never getting paler, was ready to lead any forlorn hope. A superstitious
nature, which, at the outset of the war, had convinced him that he must
be killed in the first charge, now, as the result of his survival, gave
him all the faith of Eugene Aronson that the bullet would never be made
that could kill him.
"Was the attack general all along the front?" some one asked. "We
couldn't tell. All we knew was the hell around us."
"Yes," answered the judge's son.
"Did we accomplish anything?"
"A few minor positions, I believe."
"But we will win!" said Peterkin. "The colonel said so."
"And the news--what is the news?" demanded the barber's son. "You
needn't be afraid," he added. "The officers are on the other side of the
redoubt. They get sick of the sight of us and we of them and this is
their recess and ours from the eternal digging."
"Yes, the news from home!"
"Yes, from home! We don't even get letters any more. They've shut off
all the mails."
"I met a man from our town," said the judge's son. "He said that after
that story was published in the press about Hugo's damning patriotism
and hurrahing for the Browns--it was fearfully exaggerated--his old
father and mother shut themselves up in the house and would not show
their faces for shame. But his sweetheart, however much her parents
stormed, refused to renounce him. She held her head high and said that
the more they abused him the more she loved him, and she knew he could
do nothing wrong."
"Hugo was not a patriot. It takes red blood to make a patriot!" said
Peterkin. In the pride of heroism and prestige, he was becoming an
oracular enunciator of commonplaces from the lips of his superiors.
"The absence of any word from the front only increases the suspense of
the people. They do not know whether their sons and brothers and
husbands are living or dead," continued the judge's son.
"Up to a week ago they let us write," said Pilzer, "though they wouldn't
let us say anything except that we were well."
"That was because it might give information to the enemy," said
Peterkin.
"As if I didn't know that!" grumbled Pilzer. "The enemy seems to be
always ready for us, anyway," he added.
"The chief of staff stopped the letters because he said that mothers who
received none took it for granted that their sons were dead," explained
the judge's son. "Besides, he asserts that casualties are not heavy and
asks for patience in the name of patriotism."
"The--!" exclaimed Pilzer, referring to Westerling. He who had set out
to be an officers' favorite had become bitter against all officers, high
and low.
Peterkin was speechlessly aghast. The others said nothing. They were
used to Pilzer's oaths and obscenity, with a growing inclination to
profanity on their own part. Besides, they rather agreed with his view
of the chief of staff.
"Did you see many dead and wounded?" asked a very tired voice, that of
one of the older reservists who was emaciated, with a complexion like
blue mould.
"How can I tell you what I saw? Ought I to tell you?"
"When you've had to wipe a piece of brains out of your eye, as I
have--it was warm and jelly-like," said Pilzer, "you ain't as squeamish
as Hugo Mallin. I wonder they don't give him a bronze cross!"
"Bronze crosses are given for bravery in action," said Peterkin in his
new-fashioned parrot way since he had become great. "You should not do
anything to affect the spirit of corps."
"The boy wonder from the butler's pantry! Our dear, natty little
buttons! Bullets glide off him!" snarled Pilzer, who had set out to win
a bronze cross, only to see it won by a pygmy.
"Did you see many dead and wounded?" persisted the very tired voice of
the old reservist.
"Yes, yes--and every kind of destruction!" answered the judge's son.
"And--I kept thinking of Hugo Mallin."
"I'm glad they didn't shoot Hugo," said the very tired voice. "I'm sorry
for his old father and mother. I'm a father myself."
"I certainly had a good farewell kick at him!" declared Pilzer. "Lean on
yourself!" he added, giving a shove to the old reservist who was next
him.
"I saw men who had ceased to be human. That reminds me, Pilzer," the
judge's son went on, "I saw one wounded man, lying beside another, turn
and strike him, and he said: 'I had to hit somebody or something!' And I
heard a wounded man who was waiting in line before the surgeon's table
say: 'There's others hurt worse than me. I can wait.' I heard men
begging the doctors to put them out of their misery. I saw two dead men
with their hands clasped as they were when they died. Then there were
the men who went mad. One had to be held by force. He kept crying with
demoniacal laughs: 'I want to go back and kill--kill! Let's all kill,
kill, kill!' Another insisted on dancing, despite a bandaged leg. 'Look,
look at the little red spots!' he was saying. 'You must step on one
every time; if you don't, the automatic will get you!' Another declared
that he had been through hell and insisted that he would live forever
now. Another was an artist, a landscape-painter, who had lost his
eyesight. He was seeing beautiful landscapes, and the nurses had to
strap him to his cot to keep him from struggling to his feet and trying
to use an imaginary brush on imaginary canvases. He died seeing
beautiful landscapes.
"A pretty dreary sight, too, was the field of the dead, as I called it.
As the bodies were brought in they were laid in long rows, until there
was no more room without moving a supply depot. So there was nothing to
do but begin to pile them two deep. A service-corps man took off each
man's metal identification tag and tossed it into an ammunition box. One
box was already full and a second half full. Chink-chink-chink--tags of
the rich man's son and the poor man's son, the doctor of philosophy and
the illiterate; chink-chink-chink--a life each time. They'll take the
tags to the staff office and tired clerks will find the names that go
with the numbers."
"You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs," said Peterkin,
quoting high authority. "Some have to be killed."
"The last I heard from home my wife and one of the children were sick
and my employer had gone bankrupt," broke in the very tired voice rather
irrelevantly.
"Yes, my father's last letter was pretty blue about business," said the
banker's son. He was looking at his dirty hands. The odor of clothes
unlaundered for weeks, in which the men had slept, tortured his
sensitive nostrils. "A millionaire and filthy as swine in a sty!" he
exclaimed. "Digging like a navvy in order to get admission to the
abattoir!"
"Were there any reserves coming our way?" asked the barber's son.
"Yes, masses."
"Perhaps they will relieve us and we'll go into the reserves for a
while," suggested the very tired voice.
"No fear!" growled Pilzer.
"They have called out the old men, the fellows of forty-five to fifty,
who were supposed to be out of it for good," said the judge's son.
"Westerling says they are to guard prisoners and property when we cross
the range and start on the march to the Browns' capital. Then all the
other men can be on the firing-line and force the war to a mercifully
quick end with a minimum loss. I saw numbers of them just arriving at La
Tir, footsore and limping."
"I know. Mine's been indoor work, making paints," said the very tired
voice. "When you've had long hours in the shop and had to sit up late
with sick babies, you aren't fit for marching. And I think I've got
lead-poisoning."
"Whew!" The judge's son put his hand over his nose as a breeze sprang up
from the direction of the Brown lines.
"I thought we got them all," said the barber's son.
"Must have missed one that was buried by a shell and another shell must
have dug him up!" muttered Pilzer, glaring at the barber's son. "It's
not nice on people with ladylike nostrils. James, get the _eau de
cologne_ and draw his bath for our plutocrat!"
"You see, something had to be done about the dead between the redoubts,"
explained the barber's son, "though the officers on both sides were
against it."
"Naturally. It afforded opportunities for observation," put in Peterkin,
repeating the colonel's words.
"But finally it was agreed to let a dozen from either side go out
without arms," the barber's son concluded.
"I heard there was great complaint from the women," went on the judge's
son. "Women aren't like what they were in the last war. They want to
know what has become of their men-folk. They have been gathering in
crowds and making trouble for the police. One of the old reservists was
telling me of talk of an army of women marching to the front to learn
the truth of the situation."
"If you don't stop leaning on me I'll give you a punch you'll remember!"
exclaimed Pilzer as he rammed his elbow into the old reservist's ribs.
"I beg pardon! It was because I am tired and sort of blank-minded," the
old reservist explained.
"You brute!" snapped the banker's son to Pilzer.
"Mallin thrashed you once and I've done it once. On my word, I've a
mind to again!"
"No, you don't! No, you can't! And this time your boxing tricks will do
you no good. I'll finish you!"
The two had sprung to their feet with hectic energy: Pilzer's liver
patch a mottled purple in the midst of his curly red beard, his head
lowered in front of his short, thick neck as before a spring, and the
banker's son, lighter and quicker, awaiting the attack. Some of the
others half rose, while the rest looked on in curiosity mixed with
indifference.
"I'll call the captain!" piped Peterkin.
The judge's son stopped Peterkin and put a hand on either of the
adversaries' shoulders.
"Can't we get enough fighting from the Browns without fighting each
other?" he asked.
The banker's son and Pilzer dropped back in their places, in the
reaction of men who had spent their strength in defiance.
"The thick of it last night, I heard, was still at Engadir, where
Westerling is determined to break through," the judge's son proceeded.
"At one point they sent in a regiment with a regiment covering it from
the rear, and the fellows ahead were told that they wouldn't be allowed
to come back alive--just what occurred at Port Arthur, you know--so they
had better take the position."
"What happened?" asked the very tired voice.
"Those who reached the enemy's works alive were taken prisoner."
Further talk was interrupted by a volume of voices singing, which seemed
to issue from a cellar not far away. It had the swell of a hymn of
resolute purpose.
"The Browns' song--something new since you were with us," explained the
barber's son to the judge's son.
"Yes, their whole line sung it in the silence of dawn following last
night's repulse," said the banker's son. "Notice the hammer beat to it
and then the earth rumble, like pounding nails in a coffin box and
rattling the earth on top of the box after it is lowered."
"Yes, and I get the words," said the judge's son, who knew the language
of the Browns: "'God with us, not to take what is theirs, but to keep
what is ours! God with us!'"
"They say some private--Stransky, I believe his name is--composed the
words from a saying of Partow, their chief of staff, and it spread," put
in the very tired voice.
"As it would at a time of high pressure like this, when all humanity's
nerves form an electric circuit," said the judge's son. "'God with us!'
What a power they put into that!"
"But God is with us, not with them!" put in Peterkin earnestly. "Let's
have our song to answer them," he added, striking up the tune.
So they sung the song they had sung as they started off to the war--a
song about camping in the squares of the Browns' capital and dining in
the Browns' government palace; a hurrahing, marchy song, but without
exactly the snap in keeping with its character.
"The trouble is that they lie at the mouths of their burrows and get us
naked to their fire," said the banker's son. "We have to take their
positions--they don't try to take ours."
"But we must go on! We can't give up now!" said the barber's son.
"Yes, we must go on!" agreed some of the others stubbornly.
"Yes, yes," came faintly from the very tired voice.
"We shall win! The aggressive always wins!" declared Peterkin.
Then the redoubt shook with an explosion and their eyes were blinded
with dust.
"I thought it was about time!" said the barber's son.
"Yes, the--!" snarled Pilzer.
The shell had struck some distance away from where they sat, and as the
dust settled they heard the news of the result:
"One fellow had his arm broken and another had his head crushed."
"It'll keep us from working on the mine while we mend the breach," said
the barber's son.
While the judge's son was telling the news, the colonel of the 128th and
Captain Fracasse were eating their biscuits together and making
occasional remarks rather than holding a conversation.
"Well, Westerling is a field-marshal," said the colonel.
"Yes, he's got something out of it!"
"The men seem to be losing their spirit--there's no doubt of it!"
exclaimed the colonel, more aloud to himself than to Fracasse, after a
while.
"No wonder!" replied Fracasse. Martinet though he was, he spoke in
grumbling loyalty to his soldiers. "What kind of spirit is there in
doing the work of navvies? Spirit! No soldiers ever fought better--in
invasion, at least. Look at our losses! Spirit! Westerling drives us in.
He thinks we can climb Niagara Falls! He--"
"Stop! You're talking like an anarchist!" snapped the colonel. "How can
the men have spirit when you feel that way?"
"I shall continue to obey orders and do my duty, sir!" replied Fracasse.
"And they will, too, or I'll know the reason why."
There was a silence, but at length the colonel exploded:
"I suppose Westerling knows what he is doing!"
"Still, we must go on! We must win!"
"Yes, the offensive always wins in the end. We must go on!"
"And once we have the range--yes, once we've won one vital
position--the men will recover their enthusiasm and be crying: 'On to
the capital!'"
"Right! We were forgetting history. We were forgetting the volatility of
human nature."