An hour or so before the attack the telegraph instruments in the Galland
house had become pregnantly silent. There were no more orders to give;
no more reports to come from the troops in position until the assault
was made. Officers of supply ceased to transmit routine matters over the
wire, while they strained their eyes toward the range. Officers of the
staff moved about restlessly, glancing at their watches and going to the
windows frequently to see if the mist still held.
No one entered the library where Westerling was seated alone with
nothing to do. His suspense was that of the mothers who longed for news
of their sons at the front; his helplessness that of a man in a hospital
lobby waiting on the result of an operation whose success or failure
will save or wreck his career. The physical desire of movement, the
conflict with something in his own mind, drove him out of doors.
"I want to blow my lungs in the fresh air! Call me if I am needed. I
shall be in the garden," he told his aide; and he thought that his voice
sounded calm and natural, as became Jove in a crisis that unnerved
lesser men. "Though I fancy it is the other chief of staff who will have
the work to do this evening, eh?" he added, forcing one of the smiles
which had been the magnetic servant of his personal force in his rise to
power.
"Yes, Your Excellency," said the aide.
Westerling was rather pleased with the fact that he could still smile;
pleased with the loyalty of this young officer when, day by day, the
rest of the staff had grown colder and more mechanical in the attitude
that completed his isolation. Walking vigorously along the path toward
the tower, the exercise of his muscles, the feel of the cool, moist air
on his face, brought back some of the buoyancy of spirit that he craved.
A woman's figure, with a cape thrown over the shoulders and the head
bare, loomed out of the mist.
"I couldn't stay in--not to-night," Marta said, as Westerling drew near.
"I had to see. It's only a quarter of an hour now, isn't it?"
"The Browns may sing 'God with us,' but He seems to have been with the
Grays," Westerling answered. "Our whole movement was perfectly screened
by the heavy weather."
"But they know--they know every detail that you have told me!" ran her
mocking, scarifying thought. "And this will be the most terrible attack
of all?" she asked faintly.
"Yes, such a concentration of men and guns as never were driven against
any position--an irresistible force," he said. "Irresistible!" he
repeated with a heavy emphasis.
"But if the Browns did know where you were going to attack?" she asked
absently and still more faintly. "The sacrifice of lives then would be
all the greater?"
"Yes, we should have to pay a higher price, but still we should be
irresistible--irresistible!" he answered.
Ghastly faces were staring at her, their lips moving in death to
excoriate her. It was not too late to tell him the truth; not too late
to stop the attack. Her head had sunk; she trembled and swayed and a
kind of moan escaped her. She seemed utterly frail and so distraught
that Westerling, in an impulse of protection, laid his hands on her
relaxed shoulders. She could feel the pressure of each finger growing
firmer in its power, while a certain eloquence possessed him in defiance
of his apprehensions.
"Our cause is at stake to-night," he declared, "yours and mine! We must
win, you and I! It is our destiny!"
"You and I!" repeated Marta. "Why you and I?"
It seemed very strange to be thinking of any two persons when hundreds
of thousands were awaiting the signal for the death prepared by him. He
mistook the character of her thought in the obsession of his egoism.
"What do lives mean?" he cried with a sudden desperation, his grip of
her shoulders tightening. "It is the law of nature for man to fight.
Unless he fights he goes to seed. One trouble with our army is that it
was soft from the want of war. It is the law of nature for the fittest
to survive! Other sons will be born to take the place of those who die
to-night. There will be all the more room for those who live. Victory
will create new opportunities. What is a million out of the billions on
the face of the earth? Those who lead alone count--those who dwell in
the atmosphere of the peaks, as we do!" The pressure of his strong hands
in the unconscious emphasis of his passion became painful; but she did
not protest or try to draw away, thinking of his hold in no personal
sense but as a part of his self-revelation. "All--all is at stake
there!" he continued, staring toward the range. "It's the Rubicon! I
have put my career on to-night's cast! Victory means that the world will
be at our feet--honor, position, power greater than that of any other
two human beings! Do you realize what that means--the honor and the
power that will be ours? I shall have directed the greatest army the
world has ever known to victory!"
"And defeat means--what does defeat mean?" she asked narrowly, calmly;
and the pointed question released her shoulders from the vise.
What had been a shadow in his thoughts became a live monster, striking
him with the force of a blow. He forgot Marta. Yes, what would defeat
mean to _him_? Sheer human nature broke through the bonds of mental
discipline weakened by sleepless nights. Convulsively his head dropped
as he covered his face.
"Defeat! Fail! That I should fail!" he moaned.
Then it was that she saw him in the reality of his littleness, which
she had divined; this would-be conqueror. She saw him as his intimates
often see the great man without his front of Jove. Don't we know that
Napoleon had moments of privacy when he whined and threatened suicide?
She wondered if Lanny, too, were like that--if it were not the nature of
all conquerors who could not have their way. It seemed to her that
Westerling was beneath the humblest private in his army--beneath even
that fellow with the liver patch on his cheek who had broken the
chandelier in the sport of brutal passion. All sense of her own part was
submerged in the sight of a chief of staff exhibiting no more stoicism
than a petulant, spoiled schoolboy.
While his head was still bent the artillery began its crashing thunders
and the sky became light with flashes. His hands stretched out toward
the range, clenched and pulsing with defiance and command.
"Go in! Go in, as I told you!" he cried. "Stay in, alive or dead! Stay
till I tell you to come out! Stay! I can't do any more! You must do it
now!"
"Then this may be truly the end," thought Marta, "if the assault fails."
And silently she prayed that it would fail; while the flashes lighted
Westerling's set features, imploring success.
No commander was a more prodigal employer of spies than Napoleon. Did he
or any other conqueror ever acknowledge a success due to the despised
outcasts who brought him information? No. The brilliance of
combinations, the stroke of genius of the swift march and the decisive
blow in flank, the splendid charges--these always win in the historian's
narrative and public imagination. Think of any place in the frieze of
the statue of the great leader for that hypocrite, that poor devil in
disguise, whose news made the victory possible!
"Good generalship is easy if you know what the enemy is going to do,"
Lanstron remarked to a member of the staff council who said something
complimentary to him. Compliments from subordinates to superiors had not
received Partow's favor and, therefore, not Lanstron's. Eccentric old
Partow had once disparaged the Napoleonic idea as a fetich which had
nothing to do with modern military efficiency, and he had added that if
Napoleon were alive to-day nobody would be so prompt to see it as
Napoleon himself. If he did not, and tried to incarnate the idea of the
time by making himself the supreme genius of war, he would fail, because
ability was too nearly universal and the age too big for another
Colossus.
Through Marta's information every detail of Westerling's plan outlined
itself to the trained minds of the Brown staff. Amazement at their
dependence on an underground wire and a woman's word for shaping vast
affairs was not reflected in any scepticism or hesitation as to the
method of meeting the assault.
The fortifications that had sheltered the Brown infantry, including
Stransky's men of the 53d, would be the object of the artillery fire
which was to support the Gray charge. Well Lanstron knew that no
fortifications could withstand the gusts of shells to be concentrated on
such a small target. The defenders could not see to fire for the dust.
Their rifles would be knocked out of their hands by the concussions.
They must be crushed or imprisoned by the destruction of the very walls
that had been their protection. So they were withdrawn to other redoubts
in the rear, where a line of automatics placed under their rifles were
in pointblank range of their old position which the Grays' shells would
tear to pieces.
Back of them was a brown carpet of waiting soldiery of as close a pile
as Westerling's carpet of gray. The rain-drenched Brown engineers dug as
fast as the enemy's. Lanstron massed artillery against massed
artillery. For every Gray gun he had more than one Brown gun. The Grays
might excel by ratio of five to three in human avoirdupois, but a
willing Brown government had been generous with funds. Money will buy
guns and skill will man them. Battery back of battery in literal tiers,
small calibres in front and heavy calibres in the rear, with ranges
fixed to given points--more guns than ever fired on a single position
before--were to pour their exploding projectiles not into redoubts but
into the human wedge.
In the Browns' headquarters, as in the Grays', telegraph instruments
were silent after the preparations were over. Here, also, officers
walked about restlessly, glancing at their watches. They, too, were glad
that the mist continued. It meant no wind. When the telegraph did speak
it was with another message from some aerostatic officer, saying, "Still
favorable," which was taken at once to Lanstron, who was with the staff
chiefs around the big table. They nodded at the news and smiled to one
another; and some who had been pacing sat down and others rose to begin
pacing afresh.
"We could have emplaced two lines of automatics, one above the other!"
exclaimed the chief of artillery.
"But that would have given too much of a climb for the infantry in going
in--delayed the rush," said Lanstron.
"If they should stick--if we couldn't drive them back!" exclaimed the
vice-chief of staff.
"I don't think they will!" said Lanstron.
To the others he seemed as cool as ever, even when his maimed hand was
twitching in his pocket. But now, suddenly, his eyes starting as at a
horror, he trembled passionately, his head dropping forward, as if he
would collapse.
"Oh, the murder of it--the murder!" he breathed.
"But they brought it on! Not for theirs, but for ours!" said the
vice-chief of staff, laying his hand on Lanstron's shoulder.
"And we sit here while they go in!" Lanstron added. "There's a kind of
injustice about that which I can't get over. Not one of us here has been
under fire!"
Even the minute of the attack they knew; and just before midnight they
were standing at the window looking out into the night, while the
vice-chief held his watch in hand. In the hush the faint sound of a
dirigible's propeller high up in the heavens, muffled by the fog, was
drowned by the Gray guns opening fire.
* * * * *
Before the mine exploded, by the light of the shell bursts breaking
their vast prisms from central spheres of flame for miles, with the
quick sequence of a moving-picture flicker, Fracasse's men could see one
another's faces, spectral and stiff and pasty white, with teeth gleaming
where jaws had dropped, some eyes half closed by the blinding flashes
and some opened wide as if the lids were paralyzed. Faces and faces! A
sea of faces stretching away down the slope--faces in a trance.
Up over the breastworks, over rocks and splintered timbers, Peterkin and
the judge's son and their comrades clambered. When they moved they were
as a myriad-legged creature, brain numbed, without any sensation except
that of rapids going over a fall. Those in front could not falter, being
pushed on by the pressure of those in the rear. For a few steps they
were under no fire. The scream of their own shells breaking in infernal
pandemonium in front seemed to be a power as irresistible as the rear of
the wedge in driving them on.
Then sounds more hideous than the flight of projectiles broke about them
with the abruptness of lightnings held in the hollow of the Almighty's
hand and suddenly released. The Browns' guns had opened fire. Explosions
were even swifter in sequence than the flashes that revealed the stark
faces. Dust and stones and flying fragments of flesh filled the air. Men
went down in positive paralysis of faculties by the terrific crashes.
Sections of the ram were blown to pieces by the burst of a shrapnel
shoulder high; other sections were lifted heavenward by a shell burst in
the earth.
Peterkin fell with a piece of jagged steel embedded in his brain. He had
gone from the quick to the dead so swiftly that he never knew that his
charm had failed. The same explosion got Fracasse, sword in hand, and
another buried him where he lay. The banker's son went a little farther;
the barber's son still farther. Men who were alive hardly realized life,
so mixed were life and death. Infernal imagination goes faint; its
wildest similes grow feeble and banal before such a consummation of
hell.
But the tide keeps on; the torn gaps of the ram are filled by the
rushing legs from the rear. Officers urge and lead. Such are the orders;
such is the duty prescribed; such is human bravery even in these days
when life is sweeter to more men in the joys of mind and body than ever
before. Precision, organization, solidarity in this charge such as the
days of the "death-or-glory" boys never knew! Over the bodies of
Peterkin and the barber's and the banker's sons, plunging through shell
craters, stumbling, staggering, cut by swaths and torn by eddies of red
destruction in their ranks, the tide proceeded, until its hosts were
oftener treading on flesh than on soil. And all they knew was to keep
on--keep on, bayonet in hand, till they reached the redoubt, and there
they were to stay, alive or dead.
In that pulsating, fierce light, while the ground under their feet
trembled with the concussions, Westerling's face was as clear to Marta
as if he were staring in at a furnace door. The lines of breeding and of
restrained authority which gave it distinction had faded. It had the
eager ferocity of the hunt. His short, tense exclamations explained the
stages of progress of the attack as revealed to his sight.
"It cannot fail! No! Impossible! Look at the speed of our gun-fire! But
I judge that we have not been able to silence as many of their guns as
we ought to--they're using shell into our close order. But all the guns
in creation shall not stop us! I have men enough this time--enough,
enough, enough! There! Our shorter-range guns have ceased firing! That
shows we are in the redoubts. The longer-range guns continue. They are
firing beyond the redoubt against any counter-attack, if the Browns try
to recover what they have lost. But every minute brings another
battalion into place. Engineers and guns will follow. The war is as good
as won!"
He caught at Marta's hand, but she drew away; and her start of revulsion
at his touch was almost coincident with a start on his part for another
reason. A huge shadow shot at railway-train speed over their heads.
Something very like fear flashed into his expression.
"One of our dirigibles!" he exclaimed. "I confess it came so near that
it gave me a sort of shock, too."
"Only a shadow with no death in it," she said. "And there is death in
every flash there on the range. General Westerling, have you ever been
under fire?" she asked suddenly.
He had scarcely heard the question. He took a step forward, with head
raised and shading his eyes.
"Not ours! One of theirs!" he exclaimed. "Theirs--and any number of
theirs!"
Driving toward the volcano's centre were many Brown dirigibles, slowing
down as they approached. Greater eruptions than any from shells rose
from the earth as they passed.
"So that's what they've had their dirigibles in reserve for--for the
last desperate defence!" he said. "The defence that can never win! Not
their dirigibles--not any power known to man can stop my men. I have
sent in so many that enough must survive. But where are _our_
dirigibles? A few are up--why don't they close in? And our guns--why
don't they fire at a target before their eyes as big as a house? There
they go, and they got one!"--as a circle of flame brighter than the
illumination of other explosions broke in the sky. "And one of ours is
closing in! Look, both have blown up as they collided! That shows that
two can play at the game! But what a swarm they have--more than we knew!
Bouchard's intelligence at fault again! However, if they try to stop our
fortifying the redoubt our guns will care for them. That clever trick of
Lanstron's may have cost us a few extra casualties, but it will not
change the result. It's time we had details over the wire," he
concluded, turning back to the house rather precipitately. "Then there
may be work for me."
* * * * *
"After hell, more hell, and then still more hell!" was the way that
Stransky expressed his thought when the engineers had taken the place of
the 53d of the Browns in the redoubt. They put their mines and
connections deep enough not to be disturbed by shell fire. After the
survivors in the van of the Grays' charge, spent of breath, reached
their goal and threw themselves down, the earth under them, as the mine
exploded, split and heaved heavenward. But those in the rear, slapped in
the face by the concussion, kept on, driven by the pressure of the mass
at their backs, and, in turn, plunged forward on their stomachs in the
seams and furrows of the mine's havoc. The mass thickened as the flood
of bodies and legs banked up, in keeping with Westerling's plan to have
"enough to hold."
Now the automatics and the rifles from the redoubt to which the Browns
had fallen back opened fire. So close together were these
bullet-machines that the orbit of each one's swing made a spray of only
a few yards' breadth over the old redoubt, where the Browns' gun-fire
had not for a moment ceased its persistent shelling, with increasingly
large and solid targets of flesh for their practice. The thing for these
targets to do, they knew, was to intrench and begin to return the
infantry and automatics' fire. Desperately, with the last effort of
courage, they rose in the attempt--rose into playing hose streams of
bullets whose close hiss was a steady undertone between shell bursts. In
the garish, jumping light brave officers impulsively stood up to hearten
their commands in their work, and dropped with half-uttered urgings,
threats, and oaths on their lips.
The bullets from the automatics missing one mark were certain to find
another, perhaps four or five in a row, such was their velocity and
power of penetration. Where shells made gaps and tore holes in the human
mass, the automatics cut with the regularity of the driven teeth of a
comb. The men who escaped all the forms of slaughter and staggered on to
the ruins of the redoubt, pressed their weight on top of those in the
craters or hugged behind the pyramids of débris, and even made
breastworks from the bodies of the dead. The more that banked up, the
more fruitless the efforts of the officers to restore order in the
frantic medley of shell screams and explosions at a time when a minute
seemed an age.
Meanwhile, between them--this banked-up force at the charge's end--and
the Brown redoubt with its automatics, the Gray gunners were making a
zone of shell bursts in order to give the soldiers time to make their
hold of the ground they had gained secure. Through this zone Stransky
and his men were to lead the Browns in a counter-attack.
At the very height of the Gray charge, when all the reserves were in,
dark objects fell out of the heavens, and where they dropped earth and
flesh were mingled in the maceration. Like some giant reptile with its
vertebræ breaking, gouged and torn and pinioned, the charge stopped, in
writhing, throbbing confusion. Those on the outer circle of explosions
were thrown against their fellows, who surged back in another direction
from an explosion in the opposite quarter. From the rear the pressure
weakened; the human hammer was no longer driving the ram. Blinded by the
lightnings and dust, dizzy from concussions and noise, too blank of
mind to be sane or insane, the atoms of the bulk of the charge in
natural instinct turned from their goal and toward the place whence they
had come, with death from all sides still buffeting them. Staggeringly,
at first, they went, for want of initiative in their paralysis; then
rapidly, as the law of self-preservation asserted itself in wild
impulse.
As sheep driven over a precipice they had advanced; as men they fled.
There was no longer any command, no longer any cohesion, except of legs
struggling in and out over the uneven footing of dead and wounded, while
they felt another pressure, that of the mass of the Browns in pursuit.
Of all those of Fracasse's company whom we know, only the judge's son
and Jacob Pilzer were alive. Stained with blood and dust, his teeth
showing in a grimace of mocking hate of all humankind, Pilzer's savagery
ran free of the restraint of discipline and civilized convention.
Striking right and left, he forced his way out of the region of shell
fire and still kept on. Clubbing his rifle, he struck down one officer
who tried to detain him; but another officer, quicker than he, put a
revolver bullet through his head.
* * * * *
Westerling, who had buried his face in his hands in Marta's presence at
the thought of failure, must keep the pose of his position before the
staff. With chin drawn in and shoulders squared in a sort of petrified
military habit, he received the feverish news that grew worse with each
brief bulletin. He, the chief of staff; he, Hedworth Westerling, the
superman, must be a rock in the flood of alarm. When he heard that his
human ram was in recoil he declared that the repulse had been
exaggerated--repulses always were. With word that a heavy counter-attack
was turning the retreat into an ungovernable rout, he broke into a
storm. He was not beaten; he could not be beaten.
"Let our guns cut a few swaths in the mob!" he cried. "That will stop
them from running and bring them back to a sense of duty to their
country."
The irritating titter of the bell in the closet off the library only
increased his defiance of facts beyond control. He went to the long
distance with a reply to the premier's inquiry ready to his lips.
"We got into the enemy's works but had to fall back temporarily," he
said.
"Temporarily! What do you mean?" demanded the premier.
"I mean that we have only begun to attack!" declared Westerling. He
liked that sentence. It sounded like the shibboleth of a great leader in
a crisis. "I shall assault again to-morrow night."
"Then your losses were not heavy?"
"No, not relatively. To-morrow night we press home the advantage we
gained to-night."
"But you have been so confident each time. You still think that--"
"That I mean to win! There is no stopping half-way."
"Well, I'll still try to hold the situation here," replied the premier.
"But keep me informed."
Drugged by his desperate stubbornness, Westerling was believing in his
star again when he returned to the library. All the greater his success
for being won against scepticism and fears! He summoned his chiefs of
divisions, who came with the news that the Browns had taken the very
redoubt from which the head of the Gray charge had started; but there
they had stopped.
"Of course! Of course they stopped!" exclaimed Westerling. "They are not
mad. A few are not going to throw themselves against superior
numbers--our superior numbers beaten by our own panic! Lanstron is not a
fool. You'll find the Browns back in their old position, working like
beavers to make new defences in the morning. Meanwhile, we'll get that
mob of ours into shape and find out what made them lose their nerve.
To-morrow night we shall have as many more behind them. We are going to
attack again!"
The staff exchanged glances of amazement, and Turcas, his dry voice
crackling like parchment, exclaimed:
"Attack again? At the same point?"
"Yes--the one place to attack!" said Westerling. "The rest of our line
has abundant reserves; a needless number for anything but the offensive.
We'll leave enough to hold and draw off the rest to Engadir at once."
"But their dirigibles! A surprising number of them are over our lines,"
Bellini, the chief of intelligence, had the temerity to say.
"You will send our planes and dirigibles to bring down theirs!"
Westerling commanded.
"I have--every last one; but they outnumber us!" persisted Bellini.
"Even in retreat they can see. The air has cleared so that considerable
bodies of troops in motion will be readily discernible from high
altitudes. The reason for our failure last night was that they knew our
plan of attack."
"They knew! They knew, after all our precautions! There is still a leak!
You--"
Westerling raised his clenched hand threateningly at the chief of
intelligence, his cheeks purple with rage, his eyes bloodshot. But
Bellini, with his boyish, small face and round head set close to his
shoulders, remained undisturbedly exact.
"Yes, there is a leak, and from the staff," he answered. "Until I have
found it this army ought to suspend any aggressive--"
"I was not asking advice!" interrupted Westerling.
"But, I repeat, the leak is not necessary to disclose this new movement
that you plan. Their air craft will disclose it," Bellini concluded. He
had done his duty and had nothing more to say.
"Dirigibles do not win battles!" Westerling announced. "They are won by
getting infantry in possession of positions and holding them. No matter
if we don't surprise the enemy. Haven't the Browns held their line with
inferior numbers? If they have, we can hold the rest of ours. That gives
us overwhelming forces at Engadir."
"You take all responsibility?" asked Turcas.
"I do!" said Westerling firmly. "And we will waste no more time. The
premier supports me. I have decided. We will set the troops in motion."
With fierce energy he set to work detaching units of artillery and
infantry from every part of the line and starting them toward Engadir.
"This means an improvised organization; it breaks up the machine," said
the tactical expert to Turcas when they were alone.
"Yes," replied Turcas. "He wanted no advice from us when he was taking
counsel of desperation. If he succeeds, success will retrieve all the
rest of his errors. We may have a stroke of luck in our favor."
* * * * *
In the headquarters of the Browns, junior officers and clerks reported
the words of each bulletin with the relief of men who breathed freely
again. The chiefs of divisions who were with Lanstron alternately sat
down and paced the floor, their restlessness now that of a happiness too
deeply thrilling to be expressed by hilarity. Each fresh detail only
confirmed the completeness of the repulse as that memorable night in the
affairs of the two nations slowly wore on. Shortly before three, when
the firing had died down after the Brown pursuit had stopped, a wireless
from a dirigible flying over the frontier came, telling of bodies of
Gray troops and guns on the march. Soon planes and other dirigibles
flying over other positions were sending in word of the same tenor. The
chiefs drew around the table and looked into one another's eyes in the
significance of a common thought.
"It cannot be a retreat!" said the vice-chief.
"Hardly. That is inconceivable of Westerling at this time," Lanstron
replied. "The bull charges when wounded. It is clear that he means to
make another attack. These troops on the march across country are
isolated from any immediate service."
It was Lanstron's way to be suggestive; to let ideas develop in council
and orders follow as out of council.
"The chance!" exclaimed some one.
"The chance!" others said in the same breath. "The God-given chance for
a quick blow! The chance! We attack! We attack!"
It was the most natural conception to a military tactician, though any
man who made it his own might have builded a reputation on it if he knew
how to get the ear of the press. Their faces were close to Lanstron as
they leaned toward him eagerly. He seemed not to see them but to be
looking at Partow's chair. In imagination Partow was there in the
life--Partow with the dome forehead, the pendulous cheeks, the shrewd,
kindly eyes. A daring risk, this! What would Partow say? Lanstron always
asked himself this in a crisis: What would Partow say?
"Well, my boy, why are you hesitating?" Partow demanded. "I don't know
that I'd have taken my long holiday and left you in charge if I'd
thought you'd be losing your nerve as you are this minute. Wasn't it
part of my plan--my dream--that plan I gave you to read in the vaults,
to strike if a chance, this very chance, were to come? Hurry up! Seconds
count!"
"Yes, a chance to end the killing for good and all!" said Lanstron,
coming abruptly out of his silence. "We'll take it and strike hard."
The staff bent over the map, Lanstron's finger flying from point to
point, while ready expert answers to his questions were at his elbow and
the wires sang out directions that made a drenched and shivering
soldiery Who had been yielding and holding and never advancing grow warm
with the thought of springing from the mire of trenches to charge the
enemy. And one, Gustave Feller, in command of a brigade of
field-guns--the mobile guns that could go forward rumbling to the
horses' trot--saw his dearly beloved batteries swing into a road in the
moonlight.
"La, la, la! The worm will turn!" he clucked. "It's a merry, gambling
old world and I'm right fond of it--so full of the unexpected for the
Grays! That lead horse is a little lame, but he'll last the night
through. Lots of lame things will! Who knows? Maybe we'll be cleaning
the mud off our boots on the white posts of the frontier to-morrow! A
whole brigade mine! I live! You old brick, Lanny! This time we are going
to spank the enemy on the part of his anatomy where spanks are
conventionally given. La, la, la!"
* * * * *
If not his own pain, the moans, the gasps, the appeals for water, the
convulsive shivers from cold, and the demoniacal giggles from a soldier
gone insane in medley around him would have kept the judge's son awake.
After he had fallen, struck by he knew not what, and consciousness had
returned, came the surging charge of the Browns in the counter-attack,
with throaty cries and threshing tread. He was able to turn over on his
face and cover the back of his head with his hands, as a slight
protection from steps that found footing on his body instead of on the
earth. After that he had understood vaguely that a newcomer on the field
of the fallen needed help with a first aid, and he had found his knife
and slit a sleeve and applied a bandage to check the bleeding of an
artery. Before dawn broke the sky was all alight again with a
far-reaching gun-fire--that of the Brown advance--throwing the scene of
slaughter into spectral relief, which became more real and terrible in
the undramatic light of day.
Thick, ghastly thick, the dead and wounded; and the faces--faces half
buried, faces black with congealed blood, faces staring straight up at
the sky, faces with eyes popping where necks had been twisted! Near by
was the distorted metal work of a dirigible, with the bodies of its
crew burned beyond recognition, and farther away were other dirigible
wrecks. A wounded Gray, who had not the strength to do it himself,
begged some one to lift a corpse off his body. A Gray and a Brown were
locked in a wrestling embrace in which a shrapnel burst had surprised
them. Piles of dead and wounded had been scattered and torn by a shell
which found only dead and wounded for destruction at the point of its
explosion. The living were crawling out from under the shields they had
made of corpses in shell craters, and searching for water in the
canteens and biscuits in the haversacks of the dead. One Gray who was
completely entombed except his head remarked that he was all right if
some one would dig him out. At his side showed the legs of a man who had
been buried face downward. Ribs of the wounded broken in; features of
the dead mashed by the heels of the Brown countercharge! With every turn
of his glance his surroundings grew more intimate in details of horror
to the judge's son. On the earth, saturated with rivulets and little
lakes of blood, gleamed the lead shrapnel bullets and the brighter,
nickelled rifle-bullets and the barrels of rifles dropped from the hands
of the fallen.
"I'd have bled to death if you hadn't put on that bandage. You saved my
life!" whispered the man next to the judge's son, who was Tom Fragini.
"Did I? Did I?" exclaimed the judge's son. "Well, that's something."
"It certainly is to me," replied Tom, holding out his hand, and thus
they shook hands, this Gray and this Brown. "Maybe some time, when the
war's over, I can thank you in more than words."
"More than words! Perhaps you can do that now. You--you haven't a
cigarette, old fellow?" asked the judge's son. "I haven't smoked for
three days."
"Yes, only I roll mine," said Tom.
"So do I mine," said the judge's son.
"But with a game hand I--"
"Oh, I've the hands. It's my leg that's been mashed up," said the
judge's son. "Labor and capital!" he added cheerily as he dropped the
cosmopolitan tobacco on the cosmopolitan wafer of rice-paper.
They smoked and smiled at each other in the glow of that better passion
when wounds have let out the poison of conflict, while the doctors and
the hospital-corps men began their attention to the critical cases and
on down the slopes the mills of war were grinding out more dead and
wounded.
"At the hospital where I was interne before the war we were trying to
save a crippled boy the use of his leg," remarked a reserve surgeon.
"Half a dozen surgeons held consultations over that boy--yes, just for
one leg. And now look at this!"