The Last Shot Part 42

"It seems to me that he is the biggest, most ridiculous man I ever saw!"

said Minna, as she watched him out of sight. "I'm tired, just tired to death, aren't you?" she added to Marta.

"Exactly!" agreed Marta. "I feel as if I had worked my way through h.e.l.l to heaven and heaven was the chance to sleep."

Within the kitchen Mrs. Galland was already slumbering soundly in her chair. Overhead Marta heard the exclamations of male voices and the tread of what was literally the heel of the conqueror--guests that had come without asking! Intruders that had entered without any process of law! Would they overrun the house, her mother's room, her own room?

Indignation brought fresh strength as she started up the stairs. The head of the flight gave on to a dark part of the hall. There she paused, held by the scene that a score or more of Gray soldiers, who had riotously crowded into the dining-room, were enacting.

XXIX

THROUGH THE VENEER

These men in the dining-room were members of Fraca.s.se's company of the Grays whom Marta had seen from her window the night before rus.h.i.+ng across the road into the garden. It is time for their story--the story of their attack on the redoubt. One of those who remained motionless on the road was the doctor's son. If he had sprained his ankle at manoeuvres, the whole company would have gossiped about the accident.

If he had died in the garrison hospital from pneumonia, the barracks would have been blue for a week. If he had fallen in the charge across the white posts, the day-laborer's son on his right and the judge's son on his left would have felt a spasm of horror.

This is death, they would have thought; death that barely missed us; death that lays a man in the full tide of youth, as we are, silent and still forever.

Twelve hours after the war had begun, when the judge's son missed the doctor's son from the ranks, he remarked:

"Then they must have got him!"

"Yes, I Saw him roll over on his side," said the laborer's son.

There was no further comment. The lottery had drawn the doctor's son this time; it would get some one else with the next rush. Existence had resolved itself into a hazard; all perspective was merged into a brimstone-gray background. The men did not think of home and parents, as they had on the previous night while they waited for the war to begin, or of patriotism. Relatives were still dear and country was still dear, but the threads of these affections were no longer taut. They hung loose. Fatalism had taken the place of suspense. There is no occurrence that frequency will not make familiar, and they were already familiar with death.

A man might even get used to falling from a great height. At first, in lightning rapidity of thought, all his life would pa.s.s in review before him and all his hopes for the future would crowd thick. But what if he were to go on descending for hours; yes, for days? Would not his sensations finally wear themselves down to a raw, quivering brain and the brain at length grow callous? Suppose, further, that a number of men had been thrown over a precipice at the same time as he and that the bottom of the abyss was the distance from star to star! Suppose that they fell at the same rate of speed! The first to be dashed against a shelf of rock would be a ghastly reminder to each man of his own approaching end. But, proceeding on horror's journey, he would become accustomed to such pictures. He would feel hunger and cold. Physical discomfort would overwhelm mental agony. If a biscuit shot out from the pocket of a corpse, wouldn't the living hand grab for it in brute greediness?

The thinner the veneer of civilized habit, the more easily the animal, always waiting and craving war, breaks through. And the animal was strong in Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son. He had a bull's heart and lacked the little tendrils of sensibility whose writhing would tire him.

Hugo Mallin had these tendrils by the thousand. He had so many that they gave him a reserve physical endurance like a kind of intoxication. He felt as if he had been drinking some noxious, foamy wine which made his mind singularly keen to every impression. Therefore he and Pilzer alone of Fraca.s.se's company were not utterly fatigued.

The savagery of Pilzer's bitterness at seeing another get the bronze cross before he received one turned not on little Peterkin, the valet's son, but on Hugo. As he and Hugo moved, elbow to elbow, picking their way forward from the knoll, he eased his mind with rough sarcasm at Hugo's expense. He christened Hugo "White Liver." When Hugo stumbled over a stone he whispered:

"White Liver, that comes from the shaking knees of a coward!"

Hugo did not answer, nor did he after they had crossed the road and were under the cover of the fourth terrace wall, and Pilzer whispered:

"Still with us, little White Liver? Cowards are lucky. But your time will come. You will die of fright."

They worked their way ahead in the darkness to the third terrace and then to the second, without drawing fire. There they were told to unslip their packs "and sleep--sleep!"

Fraca.s.se pa.s.sed the word, as if this were also an order which perforce must be obeyed. They dropped down in a row, their heads against the cold stone wall. So closely packed were their bodies that they could feel one another's breaths and heart-beats. Where last night they had thought of a mult.i.tude of things in vivid flashes, to-night nothing was vivid after the last explosion in the town and there was an end of firing. s.p.a.ces of consciousness and unconsciousness were woven together in a kind of patchwork chaos of mind. For the raw brains were not yet quite calloused; they quivered from the successive benumbing shocks of the day.

Hugo would not even cheat himself by trying to close his eyes. He lay quite still looking at the quietly twinkling, kindly stars. Unlike his comrades, he had not to go to h.e.l.l in order to know what h.e.l.l was like.

He had foreseen the nature of war's reality, so it had not come as a surprise. Sufficient universal projection of this kind of imagination might afford sufficient martial excitement without war.

His mind was busy in the gestation of his impressions and observations since he had crossed the frontier. Definitely he knew that he was not afraid of bullets or sh.e.l.l fire, and in this fact he found no credit whatever. The lion and the tiger and the little wild pigs of South America who will charge a railroad train are brave. But it took some courage to bear Pilzer's abuse in silence, he was thinking, while he was conscious that out of all that he had seen and felt in the conflict of mult.i.tudinous angles of view was coming something definite, which would result in personal action, fearless of any consequences.

The thing that held him back from a declaration of self was the pale faces around him; his comrades of the barracks and manoeuvres. He loved them; he thought, student fas.h.i.+on, that he understood them. He liked being their humorist; he liked to win their glances of affection.

The fort.i.tude to endure their contempt, their enmity, their ostracism would not save those dear to him in his distant provincial home from humiliation and heart-break. There was the rub: his father and mother and his sweetheart. He was an only son. His sweetheart was a G.o.ddess to his eyes. What purpose is there in the rebellion of a grain of sand on the seash.o.r.e, in the insubordination of one of five million soldiers?

Hadn't Westerling answered all doubts with the aphorism, "It is a mistake for a soldier to think too much"?

Thus pondering, in the company of the stars, Hugo, who had so many thoughts of his own that he led a double life, awaited the dawn. When the church spire became outlined in the rosy, breaking light of the east, he thought how much it was like the church spire of his own town.

He saw that he was in what had been a beautiful, tenderly cared-for old garden before soldiery had ruthlessly trampled its flowers.

Raising his head to a level with the terrace wall--the second terrace was low--he could see the piles of sand-bags on the first terrace only twenty feet away and an old house that belonged to the garden. The location appealed to him as his glance swept over plain and mountains glistening with dew. It must be glorious to come down from the veranda at daybreak or day's end to look at the flowers at your feet and the horizon in the distance.

"Could little White Liver sleep away from home and mamma? Did he long for mamma to tuck him among the goose feathers, with a sweet biscuit in his paddy?" inquired Pilzer awakening.

Hugo looked around at Pilzer in his quizzical fas.h.i.+on.

"Jake, you are unnecessarily uprooting an aster with the toe of your boot," he said.

Pilzer had a torrent of abuse ready to his tongue's end when Fraca.s.se interrupted with a hoa.r.s.e, whispered warning:

"Silence, Pilzer! You talk too much."

Now the irascible Pilzer had a further grudge against Hugo for having made him the object of a reprimand.

"You!" he whispered, when the captain's back was turned, calling Hugo a foul name.

This cut through even Hugo's philosophy and the blood went in a hot rush to his cheeks; but he slipped on his pack, as the others were doing, and readjusted his cartridge-box. Word was pa.s.sed to make ready for another rush, and soon the men knew that yesterday was not part of the hideous nightmare which had kept their legs quivering mechanically, as in the charge, while they slept, but that the nightmare was a continuing reality and the peace of morning a dream.

Under cover of the rain of sh.e.l.l fire on Dellarme's position, already described, they mounted the wall of the second terrace and ran to the wall of the first terrace. They had expected to suffer terribly, but pa.s.sed safely underneath a sheet of bullets that caught other sections of their regiment on the lower terraces. Over their heads were the muzzles of the Browns' rifles, blazing toward the road, while in the direction of the tower they saw the first charge of another regiment melting like snow under sprays of flame. They could not fire at Dellarme's men and Dellarme's men could not fire at them without leaning over the parapet. They could not go ahead. There was no room to their rear, for the reserves behind the third terrace had rushed up to the second terrace; those behind the fourth to the third; and still others across the road to the fourth, in successive waves.

With a welter of slaughter around them, Fraca.s.se's men were in something of the position that little Peterkin had enjoyed in the sh.e.l.l crater.

They ate a breakfast of biscuits, washed down by water from their canteens. Trickles of sand from bullet holes sprinkled their shoulders and they had enough resiliency of spirit to grin when a stream of sand from a bag torn by a sh.e.l.l burst ran down the back of Pilzer's neck. It was rather amusing to hear Jake growling as he twisted in his blouse.

Hugo caught the humor of it in another sense, for the same sh.e.l.l burst threw a piece of brown sleeve matted in a piece of flesh among the flowers. The next instant he saw a squad of Grays who sprang up to rush toward the linden stumps go down under the hose stream from the automatic with the precision of having been struck by an electric current. Not occupied, as he had been yesterday, with the business of keeping to his part as a physical cog in the machine, he was seeing war as a spectator--as Marta saw it, as only a privileged few ever see it.

Society, he was thinking, took the trouble to bring boys through the whooping-cough and measles, pay for clothing and doctors' bills, and, while it complained about business losses and safe-guarded trees and harvests and buildings, destroyed the most valuable product of all with a spatter of bullets from a rapid-firer.

The position of him and his comrades struck him as tragically ludicrous.

Were they grown men? Had they reasoning minds? Were they of the great races that had given the world steam-power, electric power, anaesthesia, and antiseptics? Had they the religion of Christ? Had they an inheritance of great ages of art, literature, music, and philosophy? Did they guard the treasures of their libraries and galleries? Would they shudder in indignation if some one sent a bullet through the Sistine Madonna, or throw a bomb at the Venus de Milo, or struck a rare Chinese porcelain into fragments with an axe?

Yes; oh, yes!

Here were beings created in the likeness of their Maker, whose criterion of superiority over other animals was in these symbols and not in that of tooth, claw, or talon, disembowelling their fellow creatures. Here were beings huddled together like a lot of puppies or cubs on an island in the midst of carnage which was not a visitation of the Almighty, but of their own making. And suicide and homicide were against the law in the lands of both the Browns and the Grays!

The whole business was monstrous, lunatic, inconceivable. Yet he himself was one of the actors, without the character or the courage to break free of the machine which was taking lives with the irresponsibility of a baby hammering at the jewels of a watch. The fact that he knew better made him far more culpable, he thought, than little Peterkin or any of his comrades. Yes, he was despicable; he was a coward!

All were lulled into a sense of security except Captain Fraca.s.se, who had a set frown of apprehension which came of a professional knowledge not theirs. Little Peterkin, warmed by the autumn sunlight, began to believe in his star. If there were to be a special dispensation providing sh.e.l.l craters and the reverse walls of redoubts for him, he might retain his reputation for heroism.

The sand still working its way downward between Pilzer's bare skin and his unders.h.i.+rt irritated him to unusual restlessness of ambition for glory and bronze crosses. He was the strong man of his company, now that Eugene Aronson was dead. He must prove his importance. An inspiration made him leap to his feet. This brought his head within a foot of the top of the parapet, with an enemy's rifle barrel in easy reach. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he was the type who must precede action with a boast; a bite with a growl. Let all see that he was about to do a gallant, clever thing.

"Watch me s.n.a.t.c.h that rifle!" he announced.