Marta remained where Westerling had left her, rooted to the ground by
the monstrous spell of the developing panorama of seemingly limitless
movement. With each passing minute there must be a hundred acts of
heroism which, if isolated in the glare of a day's news, would make the
public thrill. At the outset of the war she had seen the Browns, as part
of a preconceived plan, in cohesive rear-guard resistance, with every
detail of personal bravery a utilized factor of organized purpose. Now
she saw defence, inchoate and fragmentary, each part acting for itself,
all deeds of personal bravery lost in a swirl of disorganization. That
was the pity of it, the helplessness of engineers and of levers when the
machine was broken; the warning of it to those who undertake war
lightly.
The Browns' rifle flashes kept on steadily weaving their way down the
slopes, their reserves pressing close on the heels of the skirmishers in
greedy swarms. A heavy column of Brown infantry was swinging in toward
the myriad-legged, writhing gray caterpillar on the pass road and many
field-batteries were trotting along a parallel road. Their plan
developed suddenly when a swath of gun-fire was laid across the pass
road at the mouth of the defile, as much as to say: "Here we make a gate
of death!" At the same time the head of the Brown infantry column
flashed its bayonets over the crest of a hill toward the point where the
shells were bursting. These men minded not the desperate, scattered
rifle-fire into their ranks. Before their eyes was the prize of a panic
that grew with their approach. Kinks were out of legs stiffened by long
watches. The hot breath of pursuit was in their nostrils, the fever of
victory in their blood.
In the defile, the impulse of one Gray straggler, who shook a
handkerchief aloft in fatalistic submission to the inevitable, became
the impulse of all. Soon a thousand white signals of surrender were
blossoming. As the firing abruptly ceased, Marta heard the faint roar of
the mighty huzzas of the hunters over the size of their bag.
In the area visible to Marta was the strife of forces larger than the
largest that Napoleon ever led in battle; as large as fought the
decisive battle in the last war of the Grays. But here was only a
section of the raging whole from frontier end to frontier end. The
immensity of it! All the young manhood of a nation employed! Marta
ceased to see any particular incident of the scene. All was confused in
a red mist--red as blood. She, the one being in that landscape who was a
detached observer, felt herself condemned to watch the war go on
forever.
An edge of the curtain of mist lifted. Sight and mind and soul
concentrated on the nearest horror. She saw the whirlpool at the foot of
the garden, horses and men in a straggle among dead and wounded, which
had grown fiercer now that the portion of the retreat that had not been
cut off in the defile pressed forward the more madly. She had thought of
herself as ashes; as an immovable creature of flayed nerves, incapable
of raising her hand to change the march of events. But the misery that
she saw intimately, almost within stone's throw of her door, broke the
spell with its appeal. The hectic energy of battle speeded her steps in
the blessed oblivion of action.
Some doctors of different regiments thrown together in the havoc of
remnants of many organizations, with the help of hospital-corps men,
were trying to extricate the wounded from among the dead. They heard a
woman's voice and saw a woman's face. They did not wonder at her
presence, for there was nothing left in the world for them to wonder at.
Had an imp from hell or an angel from heaven appeared, or a shower of
diamonds fallen from the sky, they would not have been surprised. Their
duty was clear; there was work of their kind to do, endless work. Units
of the broken machine, in the instinct of their calling they struggled
with the duty nearest at hand.
"What do you need? What can I do?" Marta asked.
"Rest, shelter, safety for these poor fellows," answered one of the
doctors.
"There is the house--our house!" said Marta.
"My God! Aren't you men?" bellowed an officer. "Get away from the road!
Come out here! Form line! You--you; I mean you!"
"You who can walk--you who aren't hurt, you cowards, give us a hand with
the wounded!" shouted another doctor.
The soldiers were deaf to commands, but they heard a feminine voice
above the oaths and groans and heavy breathing and rustle of pressing
bodies and thrusting arms; a feminine voice, clear and steadying in that
orgy of male ferocity. It was like a chemical precipitate clearing muddy
water. Their wild glances saw a woman's features in exaltation and in
her eyes something as definite as the fire of command. She was shaming
them for their unmanliness; shaming their panic--the foolish panic at a
theatre exit--and giving orders as if that were her part and theirs was
to obey; a woman to soldiers, the weak sex to the strong. They did obey,
under the spell of the amazing fact of her presence, in the relief of
having some simple human purpose to cling to.
After the work was begun they needed no urging to carry the wounded up
the terrace steps; and men who had knocked down and trampled on the
wounded were gentle with them now, under the guidance of better
impulses. How could they falter directed by a woman unmindful of
occasional shells and bullet whistles? They begged her to go back to
the house; this was no place for her.
But Marta did not want safety. Danger was sweet; it was expiation. She
was helping, actually helping; that was enough. She envied the peaceful
dead--they had no nightmares--as she aided the doctors in separating the
bodies that were still breathing from those that were not; and she
steeled herself against every ghastly sight save one, that of a man
lying with his legs pinned under a wagon body. His jaw had been shot
away. Slowly he was bleeding to death, but he did not realize it. He
realized nothing in his delirium except the nature of his wound. He was
dipping his finger in the cavity and, dab by dab, writing "Kill me!" on
the wagon body. It sent reeling waves of red before her eyes. Then a
shell burst near her and a doctor cried out:
"She's hit!"
But Marta did not hear him. She heard only the dreadful crack of the
splitting shrapnel jacket. She had a sense of falling, and that was all.
The next that she knew she was in a long chair on the veranda and the
vague shadows bending over her gradually identified themselves as her
mother and Minna.
"I remember when you were telling of the last war that you didn't swoon
at the sight of the wounded, mother," Marta whispered.
"But I was not wounded," replied Mrs Galland.
Marta ceased to be only a consciousness swimming in a haze. With the
return of her faculties, she noticed that both her mother and Minna were
looking significantly at her forearm; so she looked at it, too. It was
bandaged.
"A cut from a shrapnel fragment," said a doctor. "Not deep," he added.
"Do I get an iron cross?" she asked, smiling faintly. It was rather
pleasant to be alive.
"All the crosses--iron and bronze and silver and gold!" he replied.
"You forgot platinum," she said almost playfully, as she found nerves,
muscles, and bones intact after that drop over a precipice into a black
chasm. It was like the Marta of the days before she had undertaken to
reform all creation, her mother was thinking. "Did I help any?" she
asked seriously.
"Well, I should say so!" declared the doctor. "I should say so!" he
repeated. "You did the whole business down there by the gate."
"Yes, the whole business! I brought it all on--all! I--" She flung a
wild gesture at the landscape and then buried her face in her hands.
"Yes, I did the whole business I--I played, smiled, lied! That awful
sight--and he might not have been writing 'kill me' if I--"
The doctor grasped her shoulders to keep her from rising. He spoke the
first soothing words that came to mind. There was another shudder, an
effort at control, and her hands dropped and she was looking up with a
dull steadiness.
"I'm not going mad!" she exclaimed. "What happened to--to that man who
was pleading for death? Did any one who had been engaged in killing men
who wanted to live kill the one who wanted to die?"
"The shell burst that wounded you finished him," said the doctor.
"Which, of course, was quite according to the tenets of civilization,
which wouldn't have allowed it to be done as an open act of mercy!" said
Marta. "But that is only satire. It is of no service," she added, rising
to a sitting posture to look around.
The struggle by the gate was over. All the uninjured had made good their
escape. A Red Cross flag floated above the wounded and the débris of
overturned wagons. Brown skirmishers were descending the near-by slopes
and crossing the path of the cavalry charge. Signal-corps men were
spinning out their wires. A regiment of guns were being emplaced behind
a foot-hill. A returning Brown dirigible swept over the town. All
firing except occasional scattered shots had ceased in the immediate
vicinity, though in the distance could be heard the snarl of the firmer
resistance that the Grays were making at some other point. The Galland
house, for the time being, was isolated--in possession of neither side.
"Isn't there something else I can do to help with the wounded?" Marta
asked. She longed for action in order to escape her thoughts.
"You've had a terrible shock--when you are stronger," said the doctor.
"When you have had something to eat and drink," observed the practical
Minna authoritatively.
Marta would not have the food brought to her. She insisted that she was
strong enough to accompany Minna to the tower. While Minna urged
mouthfuls down Marta's dry throat as she sat outside the door of the
sitting-room with her mother a number of weary, dust-streaked faces,
with feverish energy in their eyes, peered over the hedge that bounded
the garden on the side toward the pass. These scout skirmishers of
Stransky's men of the 53d Regiment of the Browns made beckoning gestures
as to a crowd, before they sprang over the hedge and ran swiftly,
watchfully, toward the linden stumps, closely followed by their
comrades. Soon the whole garden was overrun by the lean, businesslike
fellows, their glances all ferret-like to the front.
"Look, Minna!" exclaimed Marta. "The giant who carried the old man in
pickaback the first night of the war!"
"Yes, the bold impudence of him!" said Minna. "As if there was nothing
that could stand in his way and what he wanted he would have!"
But Minna was flushing as she spoke. The flush dissipated and she drew
up her chin when Stransky, looking around, recognized her with a merry,
confident wave of his hand.
"See, he's a captain and he wears an iron cross!" said Marta as
Stransky hastened toward them.
"He acts like it!" assented Minna grudgingly.
Eager, leviathan, his cap doffed with a sweeping gesture as he made a
low bow, Stransky was the very spirit of retributive victory returning
to claim the ground that he had lost.
"Well, this is like getting home again!" he cried.
"So I see!" said Minna equivocally.
Stransky drew his eyes together, sighting them on the bridge of his nose
thoughtfully at this dubious reception.
"I came back for the chance to kiss a good woman's hand," he observed
with a profound awkwardness and looking at Minna's hand. "Your hand!" he
added, the cast in his eyes straightening as he looked directly at her
appealingly.
She extended her finger-tips and he pressed his lips to them. Then she
drew back a step, a trifle pale, her eyes sad and questioning, more than
ever Madonna-like, and curled her arm around little Clarissa Eileen, who
had stolen to her mother's side.
"What is that?" asked Clarissa Eileen, pointing to the cross on
Stransky's breast.
"That," observed Stransky deliberately, "is a little piece of metal that
I got for an inspiration of manhood. It doesn't cost the price of a
day's rations, but it's one of the things which money can't buy--not
yet--in this commercial age. One of those institutions of barbarism that
we anarchists call government gave it to me, and I'll never part with
it!"
"Because he was a brave soldier, Clarissa," explained Marta in simpler
terms. "Because he was ready to die for his country."
"And for your mother!" put in Stransky, seizing Clarissa in his great
hands and lifting her lightly to the level of his face. "Oh, I've got
stories," he said to her, "a soldier-man's stories, to tell you, young
lady, one of these days--and such stories!"
He crossed his eyes over his big nose in a fashion that made Clarissa
clap her hands and burst into a peal of laughter.
"You're an awfully funny man!" she declared as Stransky set her down.
"So your mother thinks," said Stransky, blinking at Minna, who had
indulged in a smile which his remark promptly ironed out.
This irrepressible soldier, given so much as an inch, would be demanding
a province. But erasing a smile is not destroying the fact of it.
Stransky took heart for the charge on seeing a breach in the enemy's
lines.
"Yes, I was fighting for you!" he burst out to Minna. "When the other
fellows were reading letters from their sweethearts I was imagining
letters from you. I even wrote out some and posted them from one pocket
to another, in place of the regular mails."
"What did you say in those letters?" asked Marta.
"Why, you're big and awkward and cross-eyed, Stransky, but you've a way
with you, and maybe--"
"Humph!" sniffed Minna.
"I kept seeing the way you looked when you belted me one in the face,"
he went on unabashed to Minna, "and knocked any anarchism out of me that
was left after the shell burst. I kept seeing your face in my last
glimpse when the Grays made me run for it from your kitchen door before
I had half a chance for the oration crying for voice. You were in my
dreams! You were in battle with me!"
"This sounds like a disordered mind," observed Minna. "I've heard men
talk that way before."
"Oh, I have talked that way to other women myself!" said Stransky.
"Yes," said Minna bitterly. His candor was rather unexpected.
"I have talked to others in passing on the high road," he continued.
"But never after a woman had struck me in the face. That blow sank
deep--deep--deep as what Lanstron said when I revolted on the march. I
say it to you with this"--he touched the cross--"on my breast. And I'm
not going to give you up. It's a big world. There's room in it for a
place for you after the war is over and I'm going to make the place.
Yes, I've found myself. I've found how to lead men. My home isn't to be
in the hedgerows any more. It's to be where you are. You and I, whom
society gave a kick, will make society give us a place!" He was eloquent
in his strength; eloquent in the fire of resolution blazing from his
eyes. "And I'll be back again," he concluded. "You can't shake me. I'll
camp on your door-step. But now I've got to look after my company.
Good-by till I'm back--back to stay! Good-by, little daughter!" he added
with a wave of his hand to Clarissa as he turned to go. "Maybe we shall
have our own automobile some day. It's no stranger than what's been
happening to me since the war began."
"If you don't marry him, Minna, I'll--I'll--" Mrs. Galland could not
find words for the fearful thing that she would do.
"Marry him! I have only met him three times for about three minutes each
time!" protested Minna. She was as rosy as a girl and in her confusion
she busied herself retying the ribbon on Clarissa Eileen's hair. "He
called you little daughter!" she said softly to the child as she
withdrew into the tower.
"I am glad we didn't send Minna away when misfortune befell her," said
Mrs. Galland. "You were right about that, Marta, with your new ideas.
What a treasure she has been!"
Marta was scarcely hearing her mother; certainly not finding any credit
for herself in the remark. She was thinking what a simple, what a
glorious thing was a love such as Stransky's and Minna's: the mating of
a man and a woman whose brains were not oversensitized by too
complicated mentality; of a man and a woman direct and sincere,
primarily and clearly a man and a woman. Such happiness could never be
for her now; for her who had let a man make love to her for his own
undoing.
The skirmishers having halted beyond the linden stumps, the reserves
were stacking their rifles and dropping to rest in the garden. The sight
of the uniforms of the deliverers, of her own people, stirred Mrs.
Galland to unwonted activity. She moved here and there among them with
smiles of mothering pride. She told them how brave they were; how her
husband had been a colonel of Hussars in the last war. They must be
tired and hungry. She hurried in to Minna, and together they emptied the
larder of everything, even to the lumps of sugar, which were impartially
bestowed.
But Marta remained in the chair by the doorway of the tower, weak and
listless. She was weary of the sight of uniforms and bayonets. In the
dreary opaqueness of her mind flickered one tiny, bright light as
through a blanket; that she herself had been in danger. She had been
under fire. She had not merely sent men to death; she had been in
death's company.
Now her lashes were closed; again they opened slightly as her gaze roved
the semicircle of the horizon. A mounted officer and his orderly
galloping across the fields to the pass road caught her desultory
attention and held it, for they formed the most impetuous object on the
landscape. When the officer alighted at the foot of the garden and
tossed his reins to the orderly, she detected something familiar about
him. He leaped the garden wall at a bound and, half running, came toward
the tower. Not until he lifted his cap and waved it did she associate
this lithe, dapper artillerist with a stooped old gardener in blue
blouse and torn straw hat who had once shuffled among the flowers at her
service.
"Hello! Hello!" he shouted in clarion greeting at sight of her. "Hello,
my successor!"
Only in the whiteness of his hair was he like the old Feller. His tone,
the boyish sparkle of his black eyes, those full, expressive lips
playing over the brilliant teeth, his easy grace, his quick and telling
gestures--they were of the Feller of cadet days. Something in his look
as he stopped in front of her startled Marta. Suddenly he bent over and
drew down his face, with dropping underlip.
"I'm deaf--stone deaf, if you please!" he wheezed in senile fashion.
She had to laugh and he laughed, too, with the ringing tone of youth
that made him seem younger than his years.
"Not a gardener--a colonel of artillery, in the uniform, under the flag
again, thanks to you!" he cried. "An officer once more!"
"I'm glad!" she exclaimed. Here was one thing more to the credit of war.
"Thanks to you, instead of being shot as a spy--thanks to you!" More
than the emotion of the brimming gratitude of his heart shone through
his mobile features.
"It was your choice; you improved it. You fulfilled a faith that I had
in you," she said.
"Faith in me! That is the finest tribute of all--better than this,
better than this!" He touched the iron cross on his coat as Stransky had
to Minna.
"And I took your place," said Marta with a dull, slow emphasis.
Yes, he did owe much to her, she was thinking. In his place she had
lied; his part she had played in shame and no future act, she felt,
could ever expiate it. The teacher of peace, she had become the partisan
of war in wicked cunning.
He guessed nothing of what lay behind her words. He had forgotten her
children's school.
"And did my work better than I could! You are wonderful, wonderful!" He
was aglow with admiration, with awe, with adoration.
She smiled faintly, bitterly, while he burst into a flood of talk.
"I was back with the guns you had given me when I heard that you were
taking my place. Then I thought, can I be worthy of this--of what you
have done for me, giving me back my own world, your world? I vowed I
would be worthy--worthy of you. Heavens! How I made the guns
play--bang-bang-bang!" He cupped his bands over his eyes as an imaginary
range-finder, sweeping the field. "Oh, they are beautiful guns, these
new models! With a battalion I won a regiment. I asked Lanny to tell
you; did he?"
"Yes, and also of the iron cross."
"A fine bit of metal, the cross, and they have not been giving them too
promiscuously, either," said Feller. "But they're not gun-metal! That is
the real metal. It was my guns that closed the gate to the pass," he
went on, swept by the flood of enthusiasm. "I didn't open fire till I
could concentrate so as to make a solidly locked gate. I tell you, the
guns are the thing! You ought to have seen that retreat curl up on
itself. And where the shells struck on the hard road--phew! They lifted
the Grays upward to meet shrapnel pounding them from the sky! We could
have torn the whole Column to pieces if they hadn't surrendered. What a
bag of rifles and guns and stores is going to our capital! Oh, our
friends the Grays were a little too fast! They didn't know what the guns
meant in defence. The guns--they are back to their old place of glory!
They rule!"
"Was it your guns that fired into the mêlée there by the gate?" Marta
asked.
"Yes. I saw that soft target early. They put up a Red Cross flag at
first, but I soon realized that it wasn't any dressing station; only
stragglers; only the kind that run away without orders. So I let them
have it, for that's the law of war, and the way they would give it to us
and did, more than once. But I took care that no shots were fired at the
house, though if it had not been your house I'd have sent a shell or two
on the chance that some of the Gray staff might still be there. Then,
after the surrender, I kept spanking that lot with intermittent shells
till I was sure the Red Cross flag was justified."
"The fire was very accurate, as I happen to know, for it wounded me,"
said Marta.
So intent had he been in talking to his audience, to her eyes, that now
for the first time he noticed the bandage on her forearm. His
impressionable features were as struck with alarm and horror at sight of
the tiny red spot as if she had been in danger of immediate death.
"You--you were down by the road?" he gasped. "My guns were firing at
you? Why--how?"
"Helping with the wounded."
"The Gray wounded?"
"Yes."
"Of course, you would--with any wounded!" he cried. "Splendid! Like you!
It is not bad? It does not pain you?"
He bent over the red spot, his lips very near it and twitching, all his
volatile force melting into solicitude and his voice taut, as if he
himself were suffering the anguish of a dozen wounds.
"Only a scratch. Don't worry about it!" she assured him soothingly, with
a peculiar smile.
Now he made a gesture of amazement, catching at another thought that
darted as a shooting star across his mind.
"Wonderful--wounded! Wonderful! Was there ever such a woman?" he cried.
"No, I knew from the first there never was. The minute the way was clear
and I could be spared from my guns I came to you--to you! This time I
come not as a deaf, cringing, watery-eyed old gardener"--for an instant
he was the gardener--"but as one of your world, to which I was bred,"
and his shoulders, rising, filled out his uniform in the grace of the
commander of men in action. "Destiny has played with us. It sent a spy
to your garden. It put you in my place. A strange service, ours--yes,
destiny is in it!"
"Yes," she breathed painfully, his suggestion striking deep.
She was staring at the ground, her face very still. Yes, it was he who
had started the train of circumstances that had left her with a memory
more tragic than the one that had whitened his hair. His memory was
already erased. What could ever erase hers? He had begun anew. How could
she ever begin anew? The fact of this man talking of everything as
destiny--of the slaughter, the misery, as destiny--was the worst mockery
of all. Yet he was true to himself. His enjoyed facility of fervid
expression, his boyishness, his gift of making the lived moment the
greatest of his life, was the very gift she had craved to make her
forget her yesterdays. Only faintly did she hear his next outburst,
until he came to the end.
"I come with the question which I had sealed in my lonely heart," he was
saying, "while I lived a lie and trimmed rose-bushes and hung on your
words. You saved me. I fought for you. You were in my eyes, in my
angers, in my brain as I directed the fire of my guns. 'She will be
pleased to hear that I am a colonel!' I kept thinking. I love you! I
love you!"
Marta started up from her chair, her eyes moist and open wide, amazed,
but growing kind and troubled. Had she been guilty of giving him hope?
Was there something in her that had led him on, a shame that came
natural to her since she had let Westerling proceed with his love? Her
guilt in Feller's case was worse than in Westerling's. A thousand
Westerlings were not worth one Feller. And he had been near her, near as
a comrade, in imagination, with his ready suggestions of how to play her
part in its most exacting moments! While he stood, the picture of the
eager, impatient lover trembling for an answer that seemed to mean
heaven or perdition for him, the kindness that went with the trouble in
her eyes warmed to fondness, as she laid her fingers on his shoulder.
"You would want me to love you, wouldn't you?" she asked gently. "And if
I cannot? Yes, if I can neither act nor play at love, so real must love
be to me?"
He turned miserable, with eyes seeming to sink into his head, and body
to wilt in the dejection of that pitiful, hopeless attitude when his
secret had been discovered in the tower sitting-room.
"Act! Act!" he murmured.
"Yes." Her fingers exercised the faintest pressure on his shoulder.
"Your true love, your one enduring love, is the guns. All other loves
come and go. To-morrow, if not, next day, in this big, throbbing world,
with your future assured, as you lived other great moments you would
look back on this moment as another part that you had acted--and so
beautifully acted."
"Act! Act!" he repeated, like one who is coming to grip with facts.
For a period he stared at the ground before he reached for the hand on
his shoulder, which he pressed in both of his, looking soberly into her
eyes. He smiled; smiled apparently at a memory, let her hand drop, and
raised his own hands, palms out, in a gesture of good-humored
comprehension.
"You know me!" he exclaimed. "But I did it well, didn't I?" he asked,
after a pause.
"Beautifully. I repeat, it was convincingly real," she replied, laughing
in relief.
"If I hadn't, it would have been most disappointing after all my
rehearsals," he went on. "Yes, you know me! Why, I might have been
wanting to break the engagement in a week because I was beginning other
rehearsals!" He laughed, too, as if relishing the prospect. "Yes, I
act--act always, except with the guns. They alone are real!" he burst
out in joyous fury. "We are going on, I and my guns, on to the best
yet--on in the pursuit! Nothing can stop us! We shall hit the Grays so
fast and hard that they can never get their machine in order again. God
bless you! Everything that is fine in me will always think finely of
you! You and Lanny--two fixed stars for me!"
"Truly!" She was radiant. "Truly?" she asked wistfully.
"Yes, yes--a yes as real as the guns!"
"Then it helps! Oh, how it helps!" she murmured almost inaudibly.
"Good-by! God bless you!" he cried as he started to go, adding over his
shoulder merrily: "I'll send you a picture post-card from the Grays'
capital of my guns parked in the palace square."
She watched him leap the garden wall as lightly as he had come and
gallop away, an impersonation of the gay, adventurous spirit of war,
counting death and wounds and hardship as the delights of the gamble.
Yes, he would follow the Grays, throwing shells in the irresponsible joy
of tossing confetti in a carnival. Pursuit! Was Feller's the sentiment
of the army? Were the Browns not to stop at the frontier? Were they to
change their song to, "Now we have ours we shall take some of theirs"?
The thought was fresh fuel to the live coals that still remained under
the ashes.
A brigade commander and some of his staff-officers near by formed a
group with faces intent around an operator who was attaching his
instrument to a field-wire that had just been reeled over the hedge.
Marta moved toward them, but paused on hearing an outburst of jubilant
exclamations:
"A hundred thousand prisoners!"
"And five hundred guns!"
"We're closing in on their frontier all along the line!"
"It's incredible!"
"But the word is official--it's right!"
From mouth to mouth--a hundred thousand prisoners, five hundred
guns--the news was passed in the garden. Eyes dull with fatigue began
flashing as the soldiers broke into a cheer that was not led, a cheer
unlike any Marta had heard before. It had the high notes of men who were
weary, of a terrible exultation, of spirit stronger than tired legs and
as yet unsatisfied. Other exclamations from both officers and men
expressed a hunger whetted by the taste of one day's victory.
"We'll go on!"
"We'll make peace in their capital!"
"And with an indemnity that will stagger the world!"
"Nothing is impossible with Lanstron. How he has worked it out--baited
them to their own destruction!"
"A frontier of our own choosing!"
"On the next range. We will keep all that stretch of plain there!"
"And the river, too!"
"They shall pay--pay for attacking us!"
Pay, pay for the drudgery, the sleepless nights, the dead and the
wounded--for our dead and wounded! No matter about theirs! The officers
were too intent in their elation to observe a young woman, standing
quite still, her lips a thin line and a deep blaze in her eyes as she
looked this way and that at the field of faces, seeking some
dissentient, some partisan of the right. She was seeing the truth now;
the cold truth, the old truth to which she had been untrue when she took
Feller's place. There could be no choice of sides in war unless you
believed in war. One who fought for peace must take up arms against all
armies. Her part as a spy appeared to her clad in a new kind of shame:
the desertion of her principles.
Nor did the officers observe a man of thirty-five, wearing the cords of
the staff and a general's stars, coming around the corner of the house.
Marta's feverish, roving glance had noted him directly he was in sight.
His face seemed to be in keeping with the other faces, in the ardor of a
hunt unfinished; hand in blouse pocket, his bearing a little too easy to
be conventionally military--the same Lanny.
She was dimly conscious of surprise not to find him changed, perhaps
because he was unaccompanied by a retinue or any other symbol of his
power. He might have been coming to call on a Sunday afternoon. In that
first glimpse it was difficult to think of him as the commander of an
army. But that he was, she must not forget. She was shaken and
trembling; and a mist rose before her, so that she did not see him
clearly when, with a gesture of relief, he saw her.
"Lanstron!" exclaimed an officer in the first explosive breath of
amazement on recognizing him; then added: "His Excellency, the chief of
staff!"
But the one word, Lanstron, had been enough to thrill all the officers
into silence and ramrod salutes. Marta noted the deference of their
glances as they covertly looked him over. On what meat had our Cæsar fed
that he had grown so great? This was the man who had pleaded with her to
allow a spy in her garden; for whom she herself had turned spy.
To-morrow his name would be in the head-lines of every newspaper in the
world. His portrait would become as familiar to the eyes of the world as
that of the best-advertised of kings. He was the conqueror whose
commonplace sayings would be the sparks of genius because the gamble of
war had gone his way. He had grown so great by sending shells into the
stricken eddy at the foot of the garden and driving punishing columns
against the retreating masses in the defile. The god in the car and of
the machine, with his quiet manner, his intellectual features; this
one-time friend, more subtle in pursuit of the same ambitions than the
blind egoism of Westerling! These officers and men and all officers and
men and herself were pawns of his plans and his will. Yes, even herself.
Had he stopped with the repulse of the enemy? No. Would he stop now? No.
Her disillusion was complete. She knew the truth; she felt it as steel
stiffening against him and against every softer impulse of her own.
"I wanted a glimpse of the front as well as the rear," Lanstron
remarked in explanation of his presence to the general of brigade as he
passed on toward Marta, who was thinking that she, at least, was not in
awe of him; she, at least, saw clearly and truly his part.
"Marta! Marta!"
Lanstron's voice was tremulous, as if he were in awe of her, while he
drank in the fact that she was there before him at arms' length, safe,
alive. She did not offer her hand in greeting. She was incapable of any
movement, such was her emotion; and he, too, was held in a spell, as the
reality of her, after all that had passed, filled his eyes. He waited
for her to speak, but she was silent.
"Marta--that bandage! You have been hurt?" he exclaimed.
Unlike Feller, he had not been so obsessed with a purpose as to be blind
to externals. Her hostile mood was quick to recall that no smallest
detail of anything under his sight ever escaped him. This was his kind
of strength--the strength that had wrecked Westerling as a fine,
intellectual process. He could act, too. In the tone of the question,
"You've been hurt?" without tragic emphasis, was a twitching, throbbing
undercurrent of horror, which set the hand hidden in the pocket of his
blouse quivering. Why care if she were hurt? Why not think about the
hundreds of thousands of others who were wounded. Why not care for that
poor fellow whose ghastly wound kept staring at her as he wrote "Kill
me!" on the wagon body?
"It's the fashion to be wounded," she said, eyebrows lifted and lashes
lowered, with a nervous smile. "I played Florence Nightingale, the
natural woman's part, I believe. We should never protest; only nurse the
victims of war. After helping to send men to death I went under fire
myself, and--and that helped."
She could be kind to Feller but not to Lanstron. He was not a child. He
was Lanny, who, as she thought of him now, did nothing except by
calculation.
"Yes, that would help," he agreed, wincing as from a knife thrust.
Her old taunt: sending men to death and taking no risk himself! She saw
that he winced; she realized that she had stayed words that were about
to come in a flood. Then she seemed to see him through new lenses. He
appeared drawn and pale and old, as if he, too, had become ashes;
anything but the conqueror. Her feelings grew contradictory. Why all
this fencing? How weak, how silly! She had much to say to him--a last
appeal to make. Her throat held a dry lump. She was marshalling her
thoughts to begin when the brittle silence was broken by a rumbling of
voices, a stirring of feet, and a cheer.
"Lanstron! Lanstron! Hurrah for Lanstron!"
The soldiers in the garden did not bother with any "Your Excellency, the
chief of staff" formula when word had been passed of his presence. Marta
looked around to see their tempestuous enthusiasm as they tossed their
caps in the air and sent up their spontaneous tribute from the depths of
their lungs. Conqueror and hero to the living, but the dead could not
speak, whispered some fiend in her heart.
Lanstron uncovered to the demonstration impulsively, when the
conventional military acknowledgment would have been a salute. He always
looked more like the real Lanny to her with his forehead bare. It
completed the ensemble of his sensitive features. She saw that he was
blinking almost boyishly at the compliment and noted the little
deprecatory shake of his head, as much as to say that they were making a
mistake.
"Thank you!" he called, and the cheeriness of his voice, she thought,
expressed his real self; the delight of victory and the glowing
anticipation of further victories.
"Thank _you_!" called a private with a big voice.
"Yes, thank _you_!" repeated some of the officers in quick appreciation
of a compliment as real as human courage.
"We're going to put your headquarters in the Grays' capital!" cried the
soldier with the big voice.
Another cheer rose at the suggestion.
"You will follow the staff?" Lanstron called in sudden intensity.
"Yes, yes, yes!" they shouted. "Yes, yes; follow you!"
"You think our staff led you wisely?" he continued distinctly, slowly,
and very soberly. "You think we can continue to do so? You trust us? You
trust our judgment?"
"Yes, yes, yes!"
"Thank you!" he said with a long-drawn, happy breath.
"Thank _you_!" they shouted.
He stood smiling for a moment in reply to their smiles; then, still
smiling, but in a different way, he said to Marta:
"As you say, that helps!" with a nod toward the bandage on her forearm
and hurriedly turned away.
She saw him involuntarily clutch the wrist above the pocket of his
blouse to still the twitching; but beyond that there was no further sign
of emotion as he went to the telephone. She had been about to cry out
her protest against the continuance of the war in the name of humanity,
of justice, of every bit of regard he had ever had for her. When he was
through talking she should go to him in appeal--yes, on her knees, if
need be, before all the officers and soldiers--to stop the killing; but
instantly he was through he started toward the pass road, not by the
path to the steps, but by leaping from terrace to terrace and waving his
hand gayly to the soldiers as he went. The officers stared at the sight
of a chief of staff breaking away from his communications in this
unceremonious fashion. They saw him secure a horse from a group of
cavalry officers on the road and gallop away.
Marta having been the object of Lanstron's attention now became the
object of theirs. It was good to see a woman, a woman of the Browns,
after their period of separation from feminine society. She found
herself holding an impromptu reception. She heard some other self
answering their polite questions; while a fear, a new kind of fear, was
taking hold of her real self; a fear inexplicable, insidiously growing.
Lanstron was still in the officers' minds after his strange appearance
and stranger departure. They began to talk of him, and Marta listened.
"He said something about being a free man now!"
"Yes, he looked as eager as a terrier after rats."
"He knows what he is doing. He sees so far ahead of what we are thinking
that it's useless to guess his object. We'll understand when it's done."
"How little side he has! So perfectly simple. He hardly seems to realize
the immensity of his success. In fact, none of us realizes it; it's too
enormous, overwhelming, sudden!"
"And no nerves!"
"No nerves, did you say? There you are wrong. Did you see that hand
twitching in his pocket? Of course, you've heard about the hand? Why,
he's a bundle of nerve-wires held in control; a man of the age; master
of his own machine, therefore, able to master the machine of an army."
Of course, they guessed nothing of Marta's part in his success. The very
things they were saying about him built up a figure of the type whose
character she had keenly resented a few minutes before.
"But, Miss Galland, you seem to know him far better than we. This is not
news to you," remarked the brigade commander.
"Yes, I saw the accident of his first flight when his hand was injured,"
she said, and winced with horror. Never had the picture of him as he
rose from the wreck appeared so distinct. She could see every detail of
his looks; feel his twinges of pain while he smiled. Was the revelation
the more vivid because it had not once occurred to her since the war
began? It shut out the presence of the officers; she no longer heard
what they were saying. Black fear was enveloping her. Vaguely she
understood that they were looking away at something. She heard the roar
of artillery not far distant and followed their gaze toward the knoll
where Dellarme's men had received their baptism of fire, now under a
canopy of shrapnel smoke.
"That's about their last stand in the tangent, their last snarl on our
soil," remarked the brigade commander.
"And we're raining shells on it!" said his aide. "With our glasses we'll
be able to watch the infantry go in."
"Yes, very well."
"We're all used to how it feels, now we'll see how it looks at a
distance," piped one of the soldiers.
Not until he had shouted to them did they notice a division
staff-officer who had come up from the road. He had a piece of
astounding news to impart before he mentioned official business.
"What do you think of this?" he cried. "Nothing could stop him!
Lanstron--yes, Lanstron has gone into that charge with the African
Braves!"
In these days, when units of a vast army in the same uniform, drilled in
the same way, had become interchangeable parts of a machine, the African
Braves still kept regimental fame. They had guarded the stretches of hot
sand in one of the desert African colonies of the Browns; and they had
served in the jungle in the region of Bodlapoo, which, by the way, was
nominally the cause of the war. They had fought Mohammedan fanatics and
black savages. It did not matter much to them when they died; now as
well as ever. If they had mothers or sisters they were the secrets of
each man's heart. The scapegrace youth, the stranded man of thirty who
would forget his past, the born adventurer, the renegade come a
cropper, the gentleman who had gambled, the remittance man whose
remittance had stopped, the peasant's son who had run away from home,
criminals and dreamers, some minor poets, some fairly good actors,
scholarly fellows who chanted the "Odyssey," and both oath-ripping and
taciturn, quiet-mannered fellows who could neither read nor write found
a home in the African Braves' muster-roll. Their spirit of corps had a
dervish fatalism. They had begged to have a share in the war and Partow
had consented. In the night after their long journey, while Westerling's
ram was getting its death-blow, they had detrained and started for the
front. But the Grays were going as fast as the Braves, and they had been
unable to get into action.
"Wait for us! We want to be in it!" cried their impatience. "We'll show
you how they fight in Africa! Way for us!"
"Give them a chance!" said Lanstron.
This order a general of corps repeated to a general of division, who
repeated it to a general of brigade.
"Give them a chance! Give them a chance!"
Reserves along the route of their advance knew them at a glance by their
uniform, their Indian tan, and their jaunty swagger and gave a cheer as
they passed. They touched the chord of romance in the hearts of
officers, who regarded them as an archaic survival which sentiment
permitted in an isolated instance in Africa, where it excellently
served. And officers looked at one another and shook their heads
knowingly, out of the drear, hard experience in spade approaches, when
they thought of that brilliant uniform as a target and of frontier
tactics against massed infantry and gun-fire.
"Once will be enough," said the cynical. "There won't be many left to
tell the tale!"
And the African Braves knew how the army felt. They had a reputation out
of Africa to sustain, this band of exotics among the millions of
home-trained comrades. They didn't quite believe in all this machine
business. Down the slopes with their veteran stride, loose-limbed and
rhythmic, they went, past the line of the Galland house, with no
fighting in sight. What if they had to return to Africa without firing a
shot? The lugubrious prospect saddened them. They felt that a battle
should be ordered on their account.
"You will take that regiment's place and it will fall back for support,
while you storm the knoll beyond!" said the brigade commander, a twinkle
in his eye.
"Is it much of a job, do you think?" asked the colonel of the Braves.
He had two fingers' length of service colors on his blouse. Lean he was
and bony-jawed, with deep-set eyes. He loved every mother's son of the
Braves, from illiterate to the chanter of the "Odyssey"; from peasant's
son to penniless nobleman, and thought any one of his privates rather
superior to a home brigade commander.
"A pretty good deal. I think the Grays'll make a snappy resistance,"
said the brigade commander honestly. "The way we feel them out, they're
getting back their wind, and for the first time we'll be fighting them
up-hill. Yes, there's a sting in a retreating army's tail when it gets
over its demoralization."
"Good!" observed the colonel as if he had a sweet taste in his mouth.
"And if you find it too stiff," the brigade commander went on, "why,
I've seasoned veterans back of you who will press in to your support."
"Veterans, you say, and seasoned? I have some of my own, too! Thank you!
Thank you most kindly!" said the colonel, saluting stiffly, with a twist
to the corner of his mouth. "When we need their help it will be to bury
our dead," he added. "Can we do it alone? Will we?"
He passed these inquiries along the line, which rose to the suggestion
with different kinds of oaths and jests and grins and grim whistles. The
scholar suddenly transferred his affections from the Greeks' phalanx to
the Roman legions and began with the first verse of Virgil's "Æneid." He
always made the change when action was near. "The Greeks for poetry and
the Romans for war!" he declared, and could argue his company to sleep
if anybody disputed him.
"I want to be in one fight. I haven't been under fire in the whole war,"
Lanstron explained to the colonel, who understood precisely the feeling.
"Lanstron is with us! The chief of staff is watching us!" ran the
whisper from flank to flank of the Braves. It was not wonderful to them
that he should be there. This complicated business of running a war over
a telephone was not in the ken of their calculations. The colonel was
with them, so all the generals ought to be. "We'll show Lanstron!"
determined the Braves. "We'll show him how we fight in Africa!"
"With the first rush you go to the bottom of the valley; with the
second, take the knoll!" Such were the colonel's simple tactics. "But
stop on the top of the knoll. Though we'd like to take the capital this
afternoon, it's against orders."
Lanstron, dropping into place in the line, felt as if he were about to
renew his youth. He had the elation of his early aeroplane flights, when
he was likely to be hung on a church steeple. Now he was not sending men
to death; he was having his personal fling. It was all very simple
beside sitting at a desk with battle raging in the distance. He dodged
at the first bullet that whistled near his head and looked rather
sheepishly at the man next him, who was grinning.
"Lots of fellows do that with the first one, no matter how many times
they've been under fire," said the comrade. "But if they do it with the
second one--" He dropped the corners of his mouth with a significance
that required no further comment to express his views on that kind of a
soldier.
"I shan't!" said Lanstron; and he kept his word.
"I knew by the cut of your jib you wouldn't!" observed the Brave,
speaking not to the chief of staff but to the man. What were chiefs of
staff to him? Everybody on the firing-line was simply another Brave.
Lanstron liked the compliment. It pleased him better than those endowing
him with military genius. It was free of rank and etiquette and
selfishness.
Of such stuff were the Braves as Cæsar's veterans who walloped the
Belgæ, the adventurous ruffians of Cortez, the swashbucklers who fought
in Flanders, the followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the regulars of
the American Indian campaigns. When they rose to the charge with a yell,
in a wave of scarlet and blue, flashing with brass buttons, their silken
flag rippling in the front rank, they made a picture to please the
romantic taste. Here on the brown background of the commonplace three
millions of moderns was a patch of the color and glamour that
story-tellers, poets, artists, and moving-picture men would choose as
the theme of real military glory.
Intoxication of all the senses, of muscles and nerves, with the
mesmerism of movement and burning desire which calls the imagination of
youth to arms! The supreme moment of fury and splendid rush, which
becomes the recollection to the survivor to be told from the knee to
future generations in a way to make small boys love to play with
soldiers! These men knew nothing except that they had legs and that
ahead was a goal. Oaths and laughter were mingled in their souls; the
energy of a delirium sped their steps. They were so many human missiles
fired by an impulse, with too much initial velocity to stop at the
bottom of the valley as the colonel had directed. Lord, no! Let's have
the thing over with, bit in teeth! The common instinct of the living,
who neither saw nor thought of those who fell, swept them up the slope.
Every man who survived was the whole regiment in himself; its pride, its
gallantry, its inheritance in his keeping.
"Fiends of hell and angels of heaven! We're here and we did it alone!"
gasped the winded, ragged line that reached the crest.
"I thought they would!" said the brigade commander, who had watched the
charge through his glasses from an eminence. "But at what a cost! It was
lucky for them that it was only a rear-guard resistance. However, it
certainly thrills the imagination and it will be a good thing for Brown
prestige in Africa."
"Why?" Marta heard the officers around her asking after their
exclamations of amazement at the news that Lanstron was going in the
charge. "Why should the chief of staff risk his life in this fashion?"
Marta knew. All her taunts about sending others to death from his office
chair, uttered as the fugitive sarcasm of a mood, recurred in the
merciless hammer-beat of recollection. For a moment she was aghast,
speechless. Then the officers, occupied with the startling news, heard a
voice, wrenched from a dry throat in anguish, saying:
"The telephone! Try to reach him! Tell him he must not!"
"We can hardly say 'must not' to a chief of staff," said the general
automatically.
"Tell him I ask him not to! Try to reach him--try--you can try!"
"Yes, yes! Certainly!" exclaimed the general, turning to the telephone
operator.
He had seen now what the younger men had seen at a glance. They were
recalling Lanstron's relief at seeing her; how he had passed them by to
speak to her; the intensity of the two in their almost wordless meeting.
Her bloodless lips, the imploring passion in her eyes, her quivering
impatience told the rest.
"Division headquarters!" called the operator. "They're getting brigade
headquarters," he added while he waited in silence. "Brigade
headquarters says the Braves have no wire. It's too late. The charge is
starting."
"So it is!" cried one of the subalterns. "Look! Look!"
Marta looked toward the rising ground this side of the knoll in time to
see bayonets flash in the waning afternoon sunlight and disappear as
they descended the slope.
"There! They're up on the other slope without stopping!" exclaimed the
general. "Quick! Don't you want to see?" He offered his glasses to
Marta.
"No, I can see well enough," she murmured, though the landscape was
moving before her eyes in giddy waves.
"The madness of it! The whole slope is peppered with the fallen!"
"What a cost! Magnificent, but not war. Carrying their flag in the good
old way, right at the front!"
"Heavens! I hope they do it!"
"The flag's down!"
"Another man has it--it's up!"
"Now--now--splendid! They're in!"
"So they are! And the flag, too!"
"Yes, what's left are in!"
"And Lanstron was there--in that!"
"What if--"
"Yes, the chief of staff, the head of the army, in an affair like that!"
"The mind of the army--the mind that was to direct our advance!"
"When all the honors of the world are his!"
Their words were acid-tipped needles knitting back and forth through
Marta's brain. Was Lanny one of those black specks that peppered the
slope? Was he? Was he?
"Telephone and--and see if Lanny is--is killed!" she begged.
She knew not how she uttered that monstrous word killed. But utter it
she did in its naked terror. Now she knew a simpler feeling than that of
the grand sympathy of the dreamer with the horrors of war as a whole.
She knew the dumb, helpless suspense of the womenfolk remaining at home
watching for the casualty lists that Westerling had suppressed. What
mattered policies of statesmen and generals, propagandas and tactics, to
them? The concern of each wife or sweetheart was with one--one of the
millions who was greater to the wife or the sweetheart than all the
millions. Marta was not thinking of sending thousands to death. Had she
sent _him_ to death? The agony of waiting, waiting there among these
strangers, waiting for that little instrument at the end of a wire to
say whether or not he were alive, became insupportable.
"I'll go--I'll go out there where he is!" she said incoherently, still
looking toward the knoll with glazed eyes. She thought she was walking
fast as she started for the garden gate, but really she was going
slowly, stumblingly.
"I think you had better stop her if you can," said the general to his
aide.
The aide overtook her at the gate.
"We shall know about His Excellency before you can find out for
yourself," he said; and, young himself, he could put the sympathy of
youth with romance into his tone. "You might miss the road, even miss
him, when he was without a scratch, and be for hours in ignorance," he
explained. "In a few minutes we ought to have word."
Marta sank down weakly on the tongue of a wagon, overturned against the
garden wall in the mêlée of the retreat, and leaned her shoulder on the
wheel for support.
"If the women of the Grays waited four weeks," she said with an effort
at stoicism, "then I ought to be able to wait a few minutes."
"Depend on me. I'll bring news as soon as there is any," the aide
concluded, and, seeing that she wished to be alone, he left her.
For the first time she had real oblivion from the memory of her deceit
of Westerling, the oblivion of drear, heart-pulling suspense. All the
good times, the sweetly companionable times, she and Lanny had had
together; all his flashes of courtship, his outburst in their last
interview in the arbor, when she had told him that if she found that she
wanted to come to him she would come in a flame, passed in review under
the hard light of her petty ironies and sarcasms, which had the false
ring of coquetry to her now, genuine as they had been at the time.
Through her varying moods she had really loved him, and the thing that
had slumbered in her became the drier fuel for the flame--perhaps too
late.
Her thought, her feeling was as if he were not chief of staff, but a
private soldier, and she were not a woman who had girdled the world and
puckered her brow over the solution of problems, but a provincial girl
who had never been outside her village--his sweetheart. All questions of
the army following up its victory, of his responsibilities and her fears
that he would go on with conquest, faded into the fact of life--his
life, as the most precious thing in the world to her. For him, yes, for
him she had played the spy, as that village girl would for her lover,
thinking of warm embraces; for him she had kept steady under the strain.
Without him--what then? It seemed that the fatality that had let him
escape miraculously from the aeroplane accident, made him chief of
staff, and brought him victory, might well choose to ring down the
curtain of destiny for him in the charge that drove the last foot of the
invader off the soil of the Browns.... A voice was calling.... She heard
it hazily, with a sudden access of giddy fear, before it became a
cheerful, clarion cry that seemed to be repeating a message that had
already been spoken without her understanding it.
"He's safe, safe, safe, Miss Galland! He was not hit! He is on his way
back and ought to be here very soon!"
She heard herself saying "Thank you!" But that was not for some time.
The aide was already gone. He had had his thanks in the effect of the
news, which made him think that a chief of staff should not receive
congratulations for victory alone.
Lanny would return through the garden. She remained leaning against the
wagon body, still faint from happiness, waiting for him. She was drawing
deeper and longer breaths that were velvety with the glow of sunshine. A
flame, the flame that Lanny had desired, of many gentle yet passionate
tongues, leaping hither and thither in glad freedom, was in possession
of her being. When his figure appeared out of the darkness the flame
swept her to her feet and toward him. Though he might reject her he
should know that she loved him; this glad thing, after all the shame she
had endured, she could confess triumphantly.
But she stopped short under the whip of conscience. Where was her
courage? Where her sense of duty? What right had she, who had played
such a horrible part, to think of self? There were other sweethearts
with lovers alive who might be dead on the morrow if war continued. The
flame sank to a live coal in her secret heart. Another passion possessed
her as she seized Lanstron's hand in both her own.
"Lanny, listen! Not the sound of a shot--for the first time since the
war began! Oh, the blessed silence! It's peace, peace--isn't it to be
peace?" As they ascended the steps she was pouring out a flood of
broken, feverish sentences which permitted of no interruption. "You kept
on fighting to-day, but you won't to-morrow, will you? It isn't I who
plead--it's the women, more women than there are men in the army, who
want you to stop now! Can't you hear them? Can't you see them?"
In the fervor of appeal, before she realized his purpose, they were on
the veranda and at the door of the dining-room, where the Brown staff
was gathered around the table.
"I still rely on you to help me, Marta!" he whispered as he stood to one
side for her to enter.