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Title: The Last Shot

Author: Frederick Palmer

Release Date: October 13, 2004  [eBook #13738]

Language: English

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THE LAST SHOT

by

FREDERICK PALMER

Author of _Over the Pass_, etc.

1914







TO THE READER

This story of war grew out of my experience in many wars. I have been
under fire without fighting; known the comradeship of arms without
bearing arms, and the hardships and the humors of the march with only an
observer's incentive. A singular career, begun by chance, was pursued to
the ends of the earth in the study of the greatest drama which the earth
stages. Whether watching a small force of white regulars disciplining a
primitive people, or the complex tactics of huge army against huge army;
whether watching war in the large or in the small, I have found the same
basic human qualities in the white heat of conflict working out the same
illusions, heroisms, tragedies, and comedies.

The fellowship of campaigning made the cause of the force that I
accompanied mine for the time being. Thus, one who settles in the town
of A absorbs its local feeling of rivalry against the town of B in
athletic games or character of citizenship. To A, B is never quite
sportsmanlike; B is provincial and bigoted and generally inferior. But
settle in B and your prejudices reverse their favor from A to B.

Yet in the midst of battle, with the detachment of a non-combatant
marvelling at the irony of two lines of men engaged in an effort at
mutual extermination, I have caught myself thinking with the other side.
I knew why my side was busy at killing. Why was the other? For the same
reasons as ours.

I was seeing humanity against humanity. A man killed was a man killed,
courage was courage, sacrifice was sacrifice, romance was romance, a
heart-broken mother was a heart-broken mother, a village burned was a
village burned, regardless of race or nation. Every war became a story
in a certain set form: the rise of the war passion; the conflict;
victory and defeat; and then peace, in joyous relief, which the nations
enjoyed before they took the trouble to fight for it.

But such thoughts have been a familiar theme to the poet, the novelist,
the dramatist, the satirist, the dreamer, and the peace propagandist,
while the world goes on arming. In want of their talent, I offer
experience of the monstrous object of their gibes and imagination. To
me, the old war novels have the atmosphere of smoke powder and
antiquated tactics which still survived when I went on my first campaign
sixteen years ago. These classic masterpieces endure through their
genius; the excuse of any plodder who chooses their theme to-day is that
he deals with the material of to-day.

Methods of light and of motive power have not changed more rapidly in
the forty-odd years since the last great European war than the soldier's
weapons and his work. With all the symbols of economic improvement the
public is familiar, while usually it thinks of war in the old symbols
for want of familiarity with the new. My aim is to express not only war
as fought to-day, soldiers of to-day under the fire of arms of to-day,
but also the effects of war in the _n_th degree of modern organization
and methods on a group of men and women, free in its realism from the
wild improbabilities of some latter-day novelists who have given us
wars in the air or regaled us with the decimation of armies by
explosives dropped from dirigibles or their asphyxiation by noxious
gases compounded by the hero of the tale.

The Russo-Japanese and the Balkan campaigns, particular in their nature,
gave me useful impressions, but not the scene for my purpose. The world
must think of those wars comparatively as second-rate and only partially
illustrative, when its fearful curiosity and more fearful apprehension
centre on the possibility of the clash of arms between the enormous
forces of two first-class European land-powers, with their supreme
training and precision in arms. What would such a war mean in reality to
the soldiers engaged? What the play of human elements? What form the new
symbols? Therefore have I laid my scene in a small section of a European
frontier, and the time the present.

Identify your combatants, some friends insist. Make the Italians fight
the Austrians or the French fight the Germans. As a spectator of wars,
under the spell of the growing cosmopolitanism that makes mankind more
and more akin, I could not see it in that way and be true to my
experience. My soldiers exist for my purpose only as human beings. Race
prejudices they have. Race prejudice is one of the factors of war. But
make the prejudice English, Italian, German, Russian, or French and
there is the temptation for reader and author to forget the story of men
as men and war as war. Even as in the long campaign in Manchuria I would
see a battle simply as an argument to the death between little fellows
in short khaki blouses and big fellows in long gray coats, so I see the
Browns and the Grays in "The Last Shot" take the field.

But, though the scene is imaginary, the characters are from life. Their
actions and their sayings are those of men whom I have studied under the
stress of danger and sudden emergency. The delightful, boyish confidence
of Eugene Aronson has been at my elbow in a charge; Feller I knew in the
tropics as an outcast who shared my rations; Dellarme's last words I
heard from a dying captain; the philosophy of Hugo Mallin is no less
familiar than the bragging of Pilzer or the transformation of Stransky,
who whistled a wedding-march as he pumped bullets at the enemy. In
Lanstron we have a type of the modern officer; in the elder Fragini a
type of the soldier of another day. Each marches in his place and plays
his part in the sort of spectacle that I have often watched. If there be
no particular hero, then I can only say, in confidence behind the
scenes, that I have found no one man, however heroic in the martial
imagination of his country, to be a particular hero in fact. Take, for
example, our trembling little Peterkin, who won the bronze cross for
courage.

As for Marta and Minna, they speak for another element--for a good half
of the world's population that does not bear arms. In a siege once I had
glimpses of women under fire and I learned that bravery is not an
exclusively masculine trait. The game of solitaire? Well, it occurred in
a house in the midst of bursting shells. But the part that Marta plays?
Is it extravaganza? Not in war. The author sees it as something very
real.

FREDERICK PALMER.




CONTENTS

        I.  A SPECK IN THE SKY
       II.  TEN YEARS LATER
      III.  OURS AND THEIRS
       IV.  THE DIVIDENDS OF POWER
        V.  OFF TO THE FRONTIER
       VI.  THE SECOND PROPHECY
      VII.  TIMES HAVE CHANGED
     VIII.  THANKS TO A BUMBLEBEE
       IX.  A SUNDAY MORNING CALL
        X.  A LUNCHEON AT THE GALLANDS'
       XI.  MARTA HEARS FELLER'S STORY
      XII.  A CRISIS WITHIN A CRISIS
     XIII.  BREAKING A PAPER-KNIFE
      XIV.  IN PARTOW'S OFFICE
       XV.  CLOSE TO THE WHITE POSTS
      XVI.  DELLARME'S MEN GET A MASCOT
     XVII.  A SUNDAY MORNING IN TOWN
    XVIII.  THE BAPTISM OF FIRE
      XIX.  RECEIVING THE CHARGE
       XX.  MARTA'S FIRST GLIMPSE OF WAR
      XXI.  SHE CHANGES HER MIND
     XXII.  FLOWERS FOR THE WOUNDED
     XIII.  STRANSKY FIGHTS ALONE
     XXIV.  THE MAKING OF A HERO
      XXV.  THE TERRIBLE NIGHT
     XXVI.  FELLER IS TEMPTED
    XXVII.  HAND TO HAND
   XXVIII.  AN APPEAL TO PARTOW
     XXIX.  THROUGH THE VENEER
      XXX.  MARTA MEETS HUGO
     XXXI.  UNTO CÆSAR
    XXXII.  TEA ON THE VERANDA AGAIN
   XXXIII.  IN FELLER'S PLACE
    XXXIV.  THREE VOICES
     XXXV.  MRS. GALLAND INSISTS
    XXXVI.  MARKING TIME
   XXXVII.  THUMBS DOWN FOR BOUCHARD
  XXXVIII.  HUNTING GHOSTS
    XXXIX.  A CHANGE OF PLAN
       XL.  WITH FRACASSE'S MEN
      XLI.  WITH FELLER AND STRANSKY
     XLII.  THE RAM
    XLIII.  JOVE'S ISOLATION
     XLIV.  TURNING THE TABLES
      XLV.  THE RETREAT
     XLVI.  THE LAST SHOT
    XLVII.  THE PEACE OF WISDOM






THE LAST SHOT




I

A SPECK IN THE SKY


It was Marta who first saw the speck in the sky. Her outcry and her
bound from her seat at the tea-table brought her mother and Colonel
Westerling after her onto the lawn, where they became motionless
figures, screening their eyes with their hands. The newest and most
wonderful thing in the world at the time was this speck appearing above
the irregular horizon of the Brown range, in view of a landscape that
centuries of civilization had fertilized and cultivated and formed.

At the base of the range ran a line of white stone posts, placed by
international commissions of surveyors to the nicety of an inch's
variation. In the very direction of the speck's flight a spur of
foot-hills extended into the plain that stretched away to the Gray
range, distinct at the distance of thirty miles in the bright afternoon
light. Faithful to their part in refusing to climb, the white posts
circled around the spur, hugging the levels.

In the lap of the spur was La Tir, the old town, and on the other side
of the boundary lay South La Tir, the new town. Through both ran the
dusty ribbon of a road, drawn straight across the plain and over the
glistening thread of a river. On its way to the pass of the Brown range
it skirted the garden of the Gallands, which rose in terraces to a
seventeenth-century house overlooking the old town from its outskirts.
They were such a town, such a road, such a landscape as you may see on
many European frontiers. The Christian people who lived in the region
were like the Christian people you know if you look for the realities of
human nature under the surface differences of language and habits.

Beyond the house rose the ruins of a castle, its tower still intact.
Marta always referred to the castle as the baron; for in her girlhood
she had a way of personifying all inanimate things. If the castle walls
were covered with hoar frost, she said that the baron was shivering; if
the wind tore around the tower, she said that the baron was groaning
over the democratic tendencies of the time. On such a summer afternoon
as this, the baron was growing old gracefully, at peace with his
enemies.

Centuries older than the speck in the sky was the baron; but the pass
road was many more, countless more, centuries older than he. It had been
a trail for tribes long before Roman legions won a victory in the pass,
which was acclaimed an imperial triumph. To hold the pass was to hold
the range. All the blood shed there would make a red river, inundating
the plain. Marta, a maker of pictures, saw how the legions, brown,
sinewy, lean aliens, looked in their close ranks. They were no less real
to her imagination than the infantry of the last war thirty years ago,
or the Crusaders who came that way, or the baron in person and his
shaggy-bearded, uncouth, ignorant ruffians who were their own moral law,
leaving their stronghold to plunder the people of the fertile plain of
the fruits of their toil.

Stone axe, spear and bow, javelin and broadsword, blunderbuss and
creaking cannon--all the weapons of all stages in the art of war--had
gone trooping past. Now had come the speck in the sky, straight on, like
some projectile born of the ether.

"Beside the old baron, we are parvenus," Marta would say. "And what a
parvenu the baron would have been to the Roman aristocrat!"

"Our family is old enough--none older in the province!" Mrs. Galland
would reply. "Marta, how your mind does wander! I'd get a headache just
contemplating the things you are able to think of in five minutes."

The first Galland had built a house on the land that his king had given
him for one of the most brilliant feats of arms in the history of the
pass. He had the advantage of the baron in that he could read and write,
though with difficulty. Marta had an idea that he was not presentable at
a tea-table; however, he must have been more so than the baron, who, she
guessed, would have grabbed all the cakes on the plate as a sheer matter
of habit in taking what he wanted unless a stronger than he interfered.

Even the tower, raised to the glory of an older family whose
descendants, if any survived, were unaware of their lineage, had become
known as the Galland tower. The Gallands were rooted in the soil of the
frontier; they were used to having war's hot breath blow past their
door; they were at home in the language and customs of two peoples;
theirs was a peculiar tradition, which Marta had absorbed with her first
breath. Every detail of her circumscribed existence reminded her that
she was a Galland.

Town and plain and range were the first vista of landscape that she had
seen; doubtless they would be the last. Meanwhile, there was the
horizon. She was particularly fond of looking at it. If you are
seventeen, with a fanciful mind, you can find much information not in
histories or encyclopædias or the curricula of schools in the horizon.

There she had learned that the Roman aristocrat had turned his thumb
down to a lot of barbarian captives because he had a fit of indigestion,
and the next day, when his digestion was better, he had scattered coins
among barbarian children; that Napoleon, who had also gone over the pass
road, was a pompous, fat little man, who did not always wipe his upper
lip clean of snuff when he was on a campaign; that the baron's youngest
daughter had lost her eyesight from a bodkin thrust for telling her
sister, who had her father's temper, that she was developing a double
chin.

For the people of Maria's visions were humanly real to her, and as such
she liked and understood them. If the first Galland were half a robber,
to disguise the fact because he was her ancestor was not playing fair.
It made him only a lay figure of romance.

One or two afternoons a week Colonel Hedworth Westerling, commander of
the regimental post of the Grays on the other side of the white posts,
stretched his privilege of crossing the frontier and appeared for tea at
the Gallands'. It meant a pleasant half-hour breaking a long walk, a
relief from garrison surroundings. Favored in mind and person, favored
in high places, he had become a colonel at thirty-two. People with fixed
ideas as to the appearance of a soldier said that he looked every inch
the commander. He was tall, strong-built, his deep, broad chest
suggesting powerful energy. Conscious of his abilities, it was not
without reason that he thought well of himself, in view of the order,
received that morning, which was to make this a farewell call.

He had found Mrs. Galland an agreeable reflection of an aristocratic
past. The daughter had what he defined vaguely as girlish piquancy. He
found it amusing to try to answer her unusual questions; he liked the
variety of her inventive mind, with its flashes of downright
matter-of-factness.

Ascending the steps with his firm, regular tread, he suggested poise and
confidence and, perhaps, vanity also in his fastidious dress. As Marta's
slight, immature figure came to the edge of the veranda, he wondered
what she would be like five years later, when she would be twenty-two
and a woman. It was unlikely that he would ever know, or that in a month
he would care to know. He would pass on; his rank would keep him from
returning to South La Tir, which was a colonel's billet except in time
of war.

Not until tea was served did he mention his new assignment; he was
going to the general staff at the capital. Mrs. Galland murmured her
congratulations in conventional fashion.

"Into the very holy of holies of the great war machine, isn't it?" Marta
asked.

"Yes--yes, exactly!" he replied.

Her chair was drawn back from the table. She leaned forward in a
favorite position of hers when she was intensely interested, with hands
clasped over her knee, which her mother always found aggravatingly
tomboyish. She had a mass of lustrous black hair and a mouth rather
large in repose, but capable of changing curves of emotion. Her large,
dark eyes, luminously deep under long lashes, if not the rest of her
face, had beauty. Her head was bent, the lashes forming a line with her
brow now, and her eyes had the still flame of wonder that they had when
she was looking all around a thing and through it to find what it meant.
Westerling knew by the signs that she was going to break out with one of
her visions, rather than one of her whimsical ideas. She was seeing the
Roman general, the baron, the first Galland, and the fat, pompous little
man, no less in the life than Hedworth Westerling. She had fused them
into one.

"Some day you will be chief of staff, the head of the Gray army!" she
suddenly exclaimed.

Westerling started as if he had been surprised in a secret. Then he
flushed slightly.

"Why?" he asked with forced carelessness. "Your reasons? They're more
interesting than your prophecy."

"Because you have the will to be," she said without emphasis, in the
impersonal revelations of thought. "You want power. You have ambition."

He looked the picture of it, with his square jaw, his well-moulded head
set close to the shoulders on a sturdy neck, his even teeth showing as
his lips parted in an unconscious smile.

"Marta, Marta! She is--is so explosive," Mrs. Galland remarked
apologetically to the colonel.

"I asked for her reasons. I brought it on myself--and it is not a bad
compliment," he replied. Indeed, he had never received one so thrilling.

His smile, a smile well pleased with itself, remained as Mrs. Galland
began to talk of other things, and its lingering satisfaction
disappeared only with Marta's cry at sight of the speck in the sky over
the Brown range. She was out on the lawn before the others had risen
from their seats.

"An aeroplane! Hurry!" she called.

This was a summons that aroused even Mrs. Galland's serenity to haste.
For the first time they were seeing the new wonder in all the
fascination of novelty to us moderns, who soon make our new wonders
commonplace and clamor impatiently for others.

"He flies! A man flies!" Marta exclaimed. "Look at that--coming straight
for your tower, baron! You'd better pull up the drawbridge and go on
your knees in the chapel, for devils are abroad!"

How fast the speck grew! How it spread to the entranced vision! It
became a thing of still, soaring wings with a human atom in its centre,
Captain Arthur Lanstron, already called a fool for his rashness by a
group of Brown officers on the aviation grounds beyond the Brown range.

Naturally, the business of war, watching for every invention that might
serve its ends, was the first patron of flight. Lanstron, pupil of a
pioneer aviator, had been warned by him and by the chief of staff of the
Browns, who was looking on, to keep in a circle close to the ground. But
he was doing so well that he thought he would try rising a little
higher. When the levers responded with the ease of a bird's wings,
temptation became inspiration and inspiration urged on temptation. He
had gone mad with the ecstasy of his sensation, there between heaven and
earth. Five seconds of this was worth five thousand years of any other
form of life.

The summits of the range shot under him, unfolding a variegated rug of
landscape. He dipped the planes slightly, intending to follow the
range's descent and again they answered to his desire. He saw himself
the eyes of an army, the scout of the empyrean. If a body of troops were
to march along the pass road they would be as visible as a cloud in the
sky. Yes, here was revolution in detecting the enemy's plans! He had
become momentarily unconscious of the swiftness of his progress, thanks
to its hypnotic facility. He was in the danger which too active a brain
may bring to a critical and delicate mechanical task. The tower loomed
before him as suddenly as if it had been shot up out of the earth. He
must turn, and quickly, to avoid disaster; he must turn, or he would be
across the white posts in the enemy's country.

"Oh, glorious magic!" cried Marta.

"A dozen good shots could readily bring it down," remarked Westerling
critically. "It makes a steady target at that angle of approach. He's
going to turn--but take care, there!"

"Oh!" groaned Marta and Mrs. Galland together.

In an agony of suspense they saw the fragile creation of cloth and
bamboo and metal, which had seemed as secure as an albatross riding on
the lap of a steady wind, dip far over, careen back in the other
direction, and then the whirring noise that had grown with its flight
ceased. It was no longer a thing of winged life, defying the law of
gravity, but a thing dead, falling under the burden of a living weight.

"The engine has stopped!" exclaimed Westerling, any trace of emotion in
his observant imperturbability that of satisfaction that the machine was
the enemy's. He was thinking of the exhibition, not of the man in the
machine.

Marta was thinking of the man who was about to die, a silhouette against
the soft blue holding its own balance resolutely in the face of peril.
She could not watch any longer; she could not wait on the catastrophe.
She was living the part of the aviator more vividly than he, with his
hand and mind occupied. She rushed down the terrace steps wildly, as if
her going and her agonized prayer could avert the inevitable. The plane,
descending, skimmed the garden wall and passed out of sight. She heard a
thud, a crackling of braces, a ripping of cloth, but no cry.

Westerling had started after her, exclaiming, "This is a case for first
aid!" while Mrs. Galland, taking the steps as fast as she could, brought
up the rear. Through the gateway in the garden wall could be seen the
shoulders of a young officer, a streak of red coursing down his cheek,
rising from the wreck. An inarticulate sob of relief broke from Marta's
throat, followed by quick gasps of breath. Captain Arthur Lanstron was
looking into the startled eyes of a young girl that seemed to reflect
his own emotions of the moment after having shared those he had in the
air.

"I flew! I flew clear over the range, at any rate!" he said. "And I'm
alive. I managed to hold her so she missed the wall and made an easy
bump."

Marta smiled in the reaction from terror at his idea of an easy bump,
while he was examining the damage to his person. He got one foot free of
the wreck and that leg was all right. She shared his elation. Then he
found that the other was uninjured, just as she cried in distress:

"But your hand--oh, your hand!"

His left hand hung limp from the wrist, cut, mashed, and bleeding. Its
nerves numbed, he had not as yet felt any pain from the injury. Now he
regarded it in a kind of awakening stare of realization of a deformity
to come.

"Wool-gathering again!" he muttered to himself crossly.

Then, seeing that she had turned white, he thrust the disgusting thing
behind his back and twinged with the movement. The pain was arriving.

"It must be bandaged! I have a handkerchief!" she begged. "I'm not
going to faint or anything like that!"

"Only bruised--and it's the left. I am glad it was not the right," he
replied. Westerling arrived and joined Marta in offers of assistance
just as they heard the prolonged honk of an automobile demanding the
right of way at top speed in the direction of the pass.

"Thank you, but they're coming for me," said Lanstron to Westerling as
he glanced up the road.

Westerling was looking at the wreck. Lanstron, who recognized him as an
officer, though in mufti, kicked a bit of the torn cloth over some
apparatus to hide it. At this Westerling smiled faintly. Then Lanstron
saluted as officer to officer might salute across the white posts,
giving his name and receiving in return Westeling's.

They made a contrast, these two men, the colonel of the Grays, swart and
sturdy, his physical vitality so evident, and the captain of the Browns,
some seven or eight years the junior, bareheaded, in dishevelled fatigue
uniform, his lips twitching, his slender body quivering with the pain
that he could not control, while his rather bold forehead and delicate,
sensitive features suggested a man of nerve and nerves who might have
left experiments in a laboratory for an adventure in the air. There was
a kind of challenge in their glances; the challenge of an ancient feud
of their peoples; of the professional rivalry of polite duellists.
Lanstron's slight figure seemed to express the weaker number of the
three million soldiers of the Browns; Westerling's bulkier one, the four
million five hundred thousand of the Grays.

"You had a narrow squeak and you made a very snappy recovery at the last
second," said Westerling, passing a compliment across the white posts.
Marta could literally see a white post there between the two.

"That's in the line of duty for you and me, isn't it?" Lanstron
replied, his voice thick with pain as he forced a smile.

There was no pose in his fortitude. He was evidently disgusted with
himself over the whole business, and he turned to the group of three
officers and a civilian who alighted from a big Brown army automobile as
if he were prepared to have them say their worst. They seemed between
the impulse of reprimanding and embracing him.

"I hope that you are not surprised at the result," said the oldest of
the officers, a man of late middle age, rather affectionately and
teasingly. He wore a single order on his breast, a plain iron cross, and
the insignia of his rank was that of a field-marshal.

"Not now. I should be again, sir," said Lanstron, looking full at the
field-marshal in the appeal of one asking for another chance. "I was
wool-gathering. My mind was off duty for a second and I got a lesson in
self-control at the expense of the machine. I treated it worse than it
deserved, and it treated me better than I deserved. But I shall not
wool-gather next time. I've got a reminder more urgent than a string
tied around my finger."

"Yes, that hand needs immediate attention," said the doctor. He and
another officer began helping Lanstron into the automobile.

"The first flight ever made over a range--even a low one! Thirty miles
straightaway!" remarked the civilian, making a cursory examination of
the wreck of the machine which was a pattern known by his name.

"Very educational for our young man," said the field-marshal, and at
sight of Mrs. Galland paused while they exchanged the greetings of old
friends.

"Your Excellency, may we send back for you, sir?" called the doctor. He
was not one to let rank awe him when duty pressed. "This hand ought to
be at the hospital at once."

"I'm coming along. I've a train to catch," replied His Excellency,
springing into the car. "No more wool-gathering, eh?" he said, giving
Lanstron a pat on the shoulder. To Lanstron this pat meant another
chance.

"Good-by!" he called to the young girl, who was still watching him with
big, sympathetic eyes. "I am coming back soon and land in the field,
there, and when I do. I'll claim a bunch of flowers."

"Do! What fun!" she cried, as the car started.

"The field-marshal was Partow, their chief of staff?" Westerling asked.

"Yes," said Mrs. Galland. "I remember when he was a young infantry
officer before the last war, before he had won the iron cross and become
so great. He was not of an army family--a doctor's son, but very clever
and skilful."

"Getting a little old for his work!" remarked Westerling. "But
apparently he is keen enough to take a personal interest in anything
new."

"Wasn't it thrilling and--and terrible!" Marta exclaimed.

"Yes, like war at our own door again," replied Mrs. Galland, who knew
war. She had seen war raging on the pass road. "Lanstron, the young man
said his name was," she resumed after a pause. "No doubt the Lanstrons
of Thorbourg. An old family and many of them in the army."

"The way he refused to give in--that was fine!" said Marta.

Westerling, who had been engrossed in his own thoughts, looked up.

"Courage is the cheapest thing an army has! You can get hundreds of
young officers who are glad to take a risk of that kind. The thing is,"
and his fingers pressed in on the palm of his hand in a pounding gesture
of the forearm, "to direct and command--head work--organization!"

"If war should come again--" Marta began. Mrs. Galland nudged her. A
Brown never mentioned war to an officer of the Grays; it was not at all
in the accepted proprieties. But Marta rushed on: "So many would be
engaged that it would be more horrible than ever."

"You cannot make omelets without breaking eggs," Westerling answered
with suave finality.

"I wonder if the baron ever said that!" Marta recollected that it was a
favorite expression of the fat, pompous little man. "It sounds like the
baron, at all events."

Westerling did not mind being likened to the baron. It was a
corroboration of her prophecy. The baron must have been a great leader
of men in his time.

"The aeroplane will take its place as an auxiliary," he went on, his
mind still running on the theme of her prophecy, which the meeting with
Lanstron had quickened. "But war will, as ever, be won by the bayonet
that takes and holds a position. We shall have no miracle victories,
no--"

There he broke off. He did not accompany Mrs. Galland and Marta back to
the house, but made his adieus at the garden-gate.

"I'm sure that I shall never marry a soldier!" Marta burst out as she
and her mother were ascending the steps.

"No?" exclaimed Mrs. Galland with the rising inflection of a placid
scepticism that would not be drawn into an argument. Another of Marta's
explosions! It was not yet time to think of marriage for her. If it had
been Mrs. Galland would not have been so hospitable to Colonel
Westerling. She would hardly have been, even if the colonel had been
younger, say, of Captain Lanstron's age. Though an officer was an
officer, whether of the Browns or the Grays, and, perforce, a gentleman
to be received with the politeness of a common caste, every beat of her
heart was loyal to her race. Her daughter's hand was not for any Gray.
Young Lanstron certainly must be of the Thorbourg Lanstrons, she mused.
A most excellent family! Of course, Marta would marry an officer. It
was the natural destiny of a Galland woman. Yet she was sometimes
worried about Marta's whimsies. She, too, could wonder what Marta would
be like in five years.




II

TEN YEARS LATER


Does any man of power know whither the tendencies of his time are
leading him, or the people whom he leads whither they are being led? Had
any one of these four heroes of the Grays in their heavy gilt frames
divined what kind of a to-morrow his day was preparing? All knew the
pass of La Tir well, and if all had not won decisive battles they would
have been hung in the outer office or even in the corridors, where a
line of half-forgotten or forgotten generals crooked down the stairways
into the oblivion of the basement. That unfortunate one whom the first
Galland had driven through the pass was quite obscured in darkness. He
would soon be crowded out to an antique shop for sale as an example of
the portrait art of his period.

The privileged quartet on that Valhalla of victories, the walls of the
chief of staff's room, personified the military inheritance of a great
nation; their names shone in luminous letters out of the thickening
shadows of the past, where those of lesser men grew dimmer as their
generations receded into history. He in the steel corselet, with high
cheek-bones, ferret, cold eyes, and high, thin nose, its nostrils drawn
back in an aristocratic sniff--camps were evil-smelling in those
days--his casquette resting on his arm, was the progenitor of him with
the Louis XIV. curls; he of the early nineteenth century, with a face
like Marshal Ney's, was the progenitor of him with the mustache and
imperial of the sixties.

It was whispered that the aristocratic sniff had taken to fierce,
no-quarter campaigns in the bitterness of a broken heart. Did the
Grays, then, really owe two of their fairest provinces to the lady who
had jilted him? Had they to thank the clever wife of him of the Louis
XIV. curls, whose intrigues won for her husband command of the army, for
another province? It was whispered, too, that the military glory of him
of the Marshal Ney physiognomy was due to the good fortune of a senile
field-marshal for an opponent. But no matter. These gentlemen had seen
the enemy fly. They had won. Therefore, they were the supermen of sagas
who incarnate a people's valor.

The Browns gratified their own sense of superiority, in turn, by
admiration of the supermen who had vanquished the Gray generals
consigned to the oblivion of the basement. In their staff building, the
first Galland occupied a prominent position in the main hall; while in
the days of Marta's old baron heroes did not have their portraits
painted for want of painters, and the present nations had consisted only
of warring baronies and principalities.

They must have been rather lonely, these immortals in the Gray Valhalla,
as His Excellency the chief of staff was seldom in his office. His
Excellency had years, rank, prestige. The breast of his uniform sagged
with the weight of his decorations. He appeared for the army at great
functions, his picture was in the shop-windows. Hedworth Westerling, the
new vice-chief of staff, was content with this arrangement. His years
would not permit him the supreme honor. This was for a figurehead, while
he had the power.

His appointment to the staff ten years ago had given him the fields he
wanted, the capital itself, for the play of his abilities. His vital
energy, his impressive personality, his gift for courting the influences
that counted, whether man's or woman's, his astute readiness in stooping
to some measures that were in keeping with the times but not with army
precedent, had won for him the goal of his ambition. He had passed over
the heads of older men, whom many thought his betters, rather
ruthlessly. Those who would serve loyally he drew around him; those who
were bitter he crowded out of his way.

The immortals would have been still more lonely, or at least confused,
in the adjoining room occupied by Westerling. There the walls were hung
with the silhouettes of infantrymen, such as you see at manoeuvres, in
different positions of firing, crouching in shallow trenches, standing
in deep trenches, or lying flat on the stomach on level earth. Another
silhouette, that of an infantryman running, was peppered with white
points in arms and legs and parts of the body that were not vital, to
show in how many places a man may be hit with a small-calibre bullet and
still survive.

The immortals had small armies. Even the mustache and imperial had only
three hundred thousand in the great battle of the last war. In this day
of universal European conscription, if Westerling were to win it would
be with five millions--five hundred thousand more than when he faced a
young Brown officer over the wreck of an aeroplane--including the
reserves; each man running, firing, crouching, as was the figure on the
wall, and trying to give more of the white points that peppered the
silhouette than he received.

Now Turcas, the assistant vice-chief of staff, and Bouchard, chief of
the division of intelligence, standing on either side of Westerling's
desk, awaited his decisions on certain matters which they had brought to
his attention. Both were older than Westerling, Turcas by ten and
Bouchard by fifteen years.

Turcas had been strongly urged in inner army circles for the place that
Westerling had won, but his manner and his inability to court influence
were against him A lath of a man and stiff as a lath, pale, with thin,
tightly-drawn lips, quiet, steel-gray eyes, a tracery of blue veins
showing on his full temples, he suggested the ascetic no less than the
soldier, while his incisive brevity of speech, flavored now and then
with pungent humor, without any inflection in his dry voice, was in
keeping with his appearance. He arrived with the clerks in the morning
and frequently remained after they were gone. His life was an affair of
calculated units of time; his habits of diet and exercise all regulated
for the end of service. His subordinates, whose respect he held by the
power of his intellect, said that his brain never tired and he had not
enough body to tire. He was one of the wheels of the great army machine
and loved the work for its own sake too well to be embittered at being
overshadowed by a younger man. As a master of detail Westerling regarded
him as an invaluable assistant, with certain limitations, which were
those of the pigeonhole and the treadmill.

As for Bouchard, nature had meant him to be a wheel-horse. He had never
had any hope of being chief of staff. Hawk-eyed, with a great beak nose
and iron-gray hair, intensely and solemnly serious, lacking a sense of
humor, he would have looked at home with his big, bony hands gripping a
broadsword hilt and his lank body clothed in chain armor. He had a
mastiff's devotion to its master for his chief.

"Since Lanstron became chief of intelligence of the Browns information
seems to have stopped," said Westerling, but not complainingly. He
appreciated Bouchard's loyalty.

"Yes, they say he even burns his laundry bills, he is so careful,"
Bouchard replied.

"But that we ought to know," Westerling proceeded, referring very
insistently to a secret of the Browns which had baffled Bouchard. "Try a
woman," he went on with that terse, hard directness which reflected one
of his sides. "There is nobody like a woman for that sort of thing.
Spend enough to get the right woman."

Turcas and Bouchard exchanged a glance, which rose suggestively from the
top of the head of the seated vice-chief of staff. Turcas smiled
slightly, while Bouchard was graven as usual.

"You could hardly reach Lanstron though you spent a queen's ransom,"
said Bouchard in his literal fashion.

"I should say not!" Westerling exclaimed. "No doubt about Lanstron's
being all there! I saw him ten years ago after his first aeroplane
flight under conditions that proved it. However, he must have
susceptible subordinates."

"We'll set all the machinery we have to work to find one, sir," Bouchard
replied.

"Another thing, we may dismiss any idea that they are concealing either
artillery or dirigibles or planes that we do not know of," continued
Westerling. "That is a figment of our apprehensions. The fact that we
find no truth in the rumors proves that there is none. Such things are
too important to be concealed by one army from another."

"Lanstron certainly cannot carry them in his pockets," remarked Turcas.
"Still, we must be sure," he added thoughtfully, more to himself than to
Westerling, who had already turned his attention to a document which
Turcas had laid on the desk.

"A recommendation by the surgeon-in-chief," said Turcas, "for a new
method of prompt segregation of ghastly cases among the wounded. I have
put it in the form of an order. If reserves coming into action see men
badly lacerated by shell fire it is bound to make them self-conscious
and affect morale."

"Yes," Westerling agreed. "If moving pictures of the horrors of Port
Arthur were to be shown in our barracks before a war, it would hardly
encourage martial enthusiasm. I shall look this over and then have it
issued. It will not be necessary to wait on action of the staff in
council."

Turcas and Bouchard exchanged another glance. They had fresh evidence of
Westerling's tendency to concentrate authority in himself.

"The 128th Regiment has been ordered to South La Tir, but no order yet
given for the 132d, whose place it takes," Turcas went on.

"Let it remain for the present!" Westerling replied.

After they had withdrawn, the look that passed between Turcas and
Bouchard was a pointed question. The 132d to remain at South La Tir! Was
there something more than "newspaper talk" in this latest diplomatic
crisis between the Grays and the Browns? Westerling alone was in the
confidence of the premier of late. Any exchange of ideas between the two
subordinates would be fruitless surmise and against the very instinct of
staff secrecy, where every man knew only his work and asked about no one
else's.

Westerling ran through the papers that Turcas had prepared for him. If
Turcas had written the order for the wounded, Westerling knew that it
was properly done. Having cleared his desk into the hands of his
executive clerk, he looked at the clock. It had barely turned four. He
picked up the final staff report of observations on the late Balkan
campaign, just printed in book form, glanced at it and laid it aside.
Already he knew the few lessons afforded by this war "done on the
cheap," with limited equipment and over bad roads. No dirigibles had
been used and few planes. It was no criterion, except in the effect of
the fire of the new pattern guns, for the conflict of vast masses of
highly trained men against vast masses of highly trained men, with rapid
transportation over good roads, complete equipment, thorough
organization, backed by generous resources, in the cataclysm of two
great European powers.

Rather idly, now, he drew a pad toward him and, taking up a pencil, made
the figures seventeen and twenty-seven. Then he made the figures
thirty-two and forty-two. He blackened them with repeated tracings as he
mused. This done, he put seventeen under twenty-seven and thirty-two
under forty-two. He made the subtraction and studied the two tens.

A swing door opened softly and his executive clerk reappeared with a
soft tread, unheard by Westerling engaged in mechanically blackening the
tens. The clerk, pausing as he waited for a signal of recognition,
observed the process wonderingly. To be absently making figures on a pad
was not characteristic of the vice-chief of staff. When he was absorbed
his habit was to tap the desk edge with the blunt end of his pencil.

"Some papers for your signature, sir," said the clerk as he slipped them
on the blotter in front of Westerling. "And the 132d--no order about
that, sir?" he asked.

"None. It remains!" Westerling replied.

The clerk went out impressed. His chief taking to sums of subtraction
and totally preoccupied! The 132d to remain! He, too, had a
question-mark in his secret mind.

Westerling proceeded with his mathematics. Having heavily shaded the
tens, he essayed a sum in division. He found that ten went into seventy
just seven times.

"One-seventh the allotted span of life!" he mused. "Take off fifteen
years for youth and fifteen after fifty-five--nobody counts after that,
though I mean to--and you have ten into forty, which is one fourth. That
is a good deal. But it's more to a woman than to a man--yes, a lot more
to a woman than to a man!"

The clerk was right in thinking Westerling preoccupied; but it was not
with the international crisis. He had dismissed that for the present
from his thoughts by sending the 128th Regiment to South La Tir. He
might move some other regiments in the morning if advices from the
premier warranted. At all events, the army was ready, always ready for
any emergency. He was used to international crises. Probably a dozen had
occurred in the ten years since he had spoken his adieu to a young girl
at a garden-gate. Over his coffee the name of Miss Marta Galland, in a
list of arrivals at a hotel, had caught his eye in the morning paper. A
note to her had brought an answer, saying that her time was limited,
but she would be glad to have him call at five that afternoon.

Rather impatiently he watched the slow minute-hand on the clock. He had
risen from his desk at four-thirty, when his personal aide, a handsome,
boyish, rosy-cheeked young officer, who seemed to be moulded into his
uniform, appeared.

"Your car is waiting, sir," he said. His military correctness could not
hide the admiration and devotion in his eyes. He thought himself the
most fortunate lieutenant in the army. To him Westerling was, indeed,
great. Westerling realized this.

"This is a personal call," Westerling explained; "so you are at liberty
to make one yourself, if you like," he added, with that magnetic smile
of a genial power which he used to draw men to him and hold them.




III

OURS AND THEIRS


On the second terrace, Feller, the Gallands' gardener, a patch of blue
blouse and a patch of broad-brimmed straw hat over a fringe of white
hair, was planting bulbs. Mrs. Galland came down the path from the
veranda loiteringly, pausing to look at the flowers and again at the
sweep of hills and plain. The air was singularly still, so still that
she heard the cries of the children at play in the yards of the
factory-workers' houses which had been steadily creeping up the hill
from the town. She breathed in the peace and beauty of the surroundings
with that deliberate appreciation of age which holds to the happiness in
hand. To-morrow it might rain; to-day it is pleasant. She was getting
old. Serenely she made the most of to-day.

The gardener did not look up when she reached his side. She watched his
fingers firmly pressing the moist earth around the bulbs that he had
sunk in their new beds. There were only three more to set out, and her
inclination, in keeping with her leisureliness, was to wait on the
completion of his task before speaking. Again she let her glance wander
away to the distances. It was arrested and held this time by two groups
of far-away points in the sky along the frontier, in the same bright
light of that other afternoon when Captain Arthur Lanstron had made his
first night over the range.

"Look!" she cried. "Look, look!" she repeated, a girlish excitement
rippling her placidity.

Aeroplanes and dirigibles had become a familiar sight. They were always
going and coming and manoeuvring, the Browns over their territory and
the Grays over theirs. But here was something new: two squadrons of
dirigibles and planes in company, one on either side of the white posts.
For the fraction of a second the dirigibles seemed prisms and the planes
still-winged dragon-flies hung on a blue wall. With the next fraction
the prisms were seen to be growing and the stretch of the plane wings
broadening.

"They are racing--ours against theirs!" exclaimed Mrs. Galland. "Look,
look!"

Still the gardener bent to his work, unconcerned.

"I forgot! I always forget that you are deaf!" she murmured.

She touched his shoulder. The effect was magical on the stoop-shouldered
figure, which rose with the spring of muscles that are elastic and
joints that are limber. His hat was removed with prompt and rather
graceful deference, revealing eyebrows that were still dark in contrast
to the white hair. For only an instant did he remain erect, but long
enough to suggest how supple and well-formed he must have been in youth.
Then he made a grimace and dropped his hand demonstratively over his
knee.

"Pardon, Mrs. Galland, I have old bones. They always remind me if I try
to play any youthful tricks on them. Pardon! I did not see that you were
here. I," he said, in the monotonous voice of the deaf, which, however,
had a certain attractive wistfulness--"I--" and from the same throat as
he saw the object of her gaze came a vibration of passionate interest.
"Yes, neck and neck! Coming right for the baron's tower, neck and neck!"
he cried, in the zest of a contest understood and enjoyed.

His hand rose in a vigorous, pulsating gesture; his eyes were snapping;
his lips parted in an ecstasy that made him seem twenty years younger;
his shoulders broadened and his chest expanded with the indrawing of a
deep breath. This let go, the stoop returned in a sudden reaction, the
briefly kindled flame died out of his eyes, his lips took on the droop
of age, and he thrust his hat back on his head, pulling the brim low
over his brow.

"Wonderful, but terrible--terrible!" said Mrs. Galland. "Another horror
is added to war, as if there were not already enough. Oh, I know what
war is! I've seen this garden all spattered with blood and dead bodies
in a row here at our feet, and heard the groans and the cheers--the
groans of the wounded here in the garden and the cheers of the men who
had taken the castle hill!"

Feller, with the lids of shaded eyes half closed, watched the oncoming
squadrons in a staring mesmerism. His only movement was a tattoo of the
fingers on his trousers' legs.

"War!" he exclaimed with motionless lips. "War!" he repeated softly,
coaxingly. One would easily have mistaken the thought of war as
something delightful to him if he had not appeared so gentle and
detached. It seemed doubtful if he realized what he was saying or even
that he was speaking aloud.

As the Gray squadron started to turn in order to keep on their side of
the white posts which circled around the spur of La Tir, one of the
dirigibles failed to respond to its rudder and lost speed; that in the
rear, responding too readily, had its leader on the thwart. An
aeroplane, sheering too abruptly to make room, tipped at a dangerous
angle and a tragedy seemed due within another wink of the eye.

"Huh-huh-huh!" came from Feller in quick breaths, like the panting of a
dog on a hot day.

"Oh!" gasped Mrs. Galland in one long breath of suspense.

The envelope of the second dirigible grazed the envelope of its leader;
the groggy plane righted itself and volplaned underneath a dirigible;
and, though scattered, the Gray squadron drew away safely from the
Brown, which, slowing down, came on as straight as an arrow in
unchanged formation in a line over the castle tower. From the forward
Brown aeroplane, as its shadow shot over the garden, pursued by the
great, oblong shadows of the dirigibles, a white ball was dropped. It
made a plummet streak until about fifty feet above the earth, when it
exploded into a fine shower of powder, leaving intact a pirouetting bit
of white.

"I think that was Colonel Lanstron leading when he ought to leave such
work to his assistants," said Mrs. Galland. "You remember him--why, it
was the colonel who recommended you! There, now, I've forgotten again
that you are deaf!"

The slip of paper glided back and forth on slight currents of air and
finally fell among the rose-bushes a few yards from where the two were
standing. Feller brought it to Mrs. Galland.

"Yes, it was Colonel Lanstron," she said, after reading the message.
"The message says: 'Hello, Marta!' Any other officer would have said:
'How do you do, Miss Galland!' He could not have known that she was
away. I've just had a telegram from her that she will be home in the
morning, and that takes me back to my idea that I came to speak about to
you," she babbled on, while Feller regarded her with a gentle,
uncomprehending smile. "You know how she likes chrysanthemums and they
are in full bloom. We'll cut them and fill all the vases in the
living-room and her room and--oh, how I do forget! You're not hearing a
word!" she exclaimed as she noted the helpless eagerness of his eyes.

"It is a great nuisance, deafness in a gardener. But I love my work. I
try to do it well," he said in his monotone.

"You do wonderfully, wonderfully!" she assented; "and you deserve great
credit. Many deaf people are irritable--and you are so cheerful!"

He smiled as pleasantly as if he had heard the compliment and passed her
a small pad from his blouse pocket. With the pencil attached to it by a
string she wrote her instructions slowly, in an old-fashioned hand,
dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's.

"Pardon me, madam, but Miss Galland"--he paused, dwelling with a slight
inflection on his mention of the daughter as the talisman that warranted
his presuming to disagree with the mother--"Miss Galland, when she took
her last look around before going, said: 'Please don't cut any yet. I
want to see them all abloom in their beds first.'"

"She has taken such an interest in them, and my idea was to please her.
Of course, leave them," said Mrs. Galland. She made repeated vigorous
nods of assent to save herself the trouble of writing. Starting back up
the steps, she murmured: "I suppose cut flowers are out of fashion--I
know I am--and deaf gardeners are in." She sighed. "And you are
twenty-seven, Marta, twenty-seven!" She drew another, a very long sigh,
and then her serenity returned.

"Ours did not pass theirs," observed the gardener, with a musing smile
when he was alone; "but theirs nearly had a jolly spill there at the
turn!"

As he bent once more to his work a bumblebee approached on its glad,
piratical errand from flower to flower in the rapt stillness, and Feller
looked around with a slight courtesy of his hat brim.

"You and your fussily thunderous wings!" he said, half aloud. "I wonder
if you think you're an aeroplane. Surely, they'd never train you to
evolute in squadrons. You are an anarchist, you are, and an epicurean
into the bargain!"

He went with his barrow for more bulbs. Meanwhile, the sun sank behind
the range. The plain lay bathed in soft, golden light; the ravines were
tongues of black shadow. As the evening gun boomed out from a fortress
on the Brown side of the frontier, Feller glanced around to see if any
one were watching. Assured that he was alone, he removed his hat, and,
though he wiped the brim and wiped his brow, in his attitude was the
suggestion of the military stance of attention at colors. A minute
later, when the evening gun of the Grays across the white posts
reverberated over the plain, he jammed his hat back on his head rather
abruptly and started to the tool house with his barrow.

"War! war!" he repeated softly. "Yes, war!" he added in eager desire.




IV

THE DIVIDENDS OF POWER


Westerling realized that the question of marriage as a social
requirement might arise when he should become officially chief of staff
with the retirement of His Excellency the field-marshal. For the present
he enjoyed his position as a bachelor who was the most favored man in
the army too much to think of marriage. This did not imply an absence of
fondness for women; rather the contrary. He liked sitting next to a
beautiful neck and shoulders and having a pair of feminine eyes sparkle
into his at dinner; though, with rare exceptions, not the same neck and
shoulders on succeeding nights. His natural sense of organization
divided women into two classes: those of family and wealth, whom he met
at great houses, and those purring kittens who live in small flats. Both
afforded him diversion. A woman had been the most telling influence in
making him vice-chief of staff; an affair to which gossip gave the
breath of scandal had been an argument against him.

It was a little surprising that the bell that the girl of seventeen had
rung in his secret mind when he was on one of the first rounds of the
ladder, now lost in the mists of a lower stratum of existence, should
ever tinkle again.... Yet he had heard its note in the tone of her
prophecy with each step in his promotion; and while the other people
whom he had known at La Tir were the vaguest shadows of personalities,
her picture was as definite in detail as when she said: "You have the
will! You have the ambition!" She had recognized in him the power that
he felt; foreseen his ascent to the very apex of the pyramid. She was
still unmarried, which was strange; for she had not been bad-looking and
she was of a fine old family. What was she like now? Commonplace and
provincial, most likely. Many of the people he had known in his early
days appeared so when he met them again. But, at the worst, he looked
for an interesting half-hour.

The throbbing activity of the streets of the capital, as his car
proceeded on the way to her hotel, formed an energetic accompaniment to
his gratifying backward survey of how all his plans had worked out from
the very day of the prophecy. Had he heard the remark of a great
manufacturer to the banker at his side in a passing limousine, "There
goes the greatest captain of industry of us all!" Westerling would only
have thought: "Certainly. I am chief of staff. I am at the head of all
your workmen at one time or another!" Had he heard the banker's answer,
"But pretty poor pay, pretty small dividends!" he would have thought:
"Splendid dividends--the dividends of power!"

He had a caste contempt for the men of commerce, with their mercenary
talk about credit and market prices; and also for the scientists,
doctors, engineers, and men of other professions, who spoke of things in
books which he did not understand. Reading books was one of the faults
of Turcas, his assistant. No bookish soldier, he knew, had ever been a
great general. He resented the growing power of these leaders of the
civil world, taking distinction away from the military, even when, as a
man of parts, he had to court their influence. His was the profession
that was and ever should be the elect. A penniless subaltern was a
gentleman, while he could never think of a man hi business as one.

All the faces in the street belonged to a strange, busy world outside
his interest and thoughts. They formed what was known as the public,
often making a clatter About things which they did not understand, when
they Should obey the orders of their superiors. Of late, their clatter
had been about the extra taxes for the recent increase of the standing
forces by another corps. The public was bovine with a parrot's head. Yet
it did not admire the toiling ox, but the eagle and the lion.

As his car came to the park his eyes lighted at sight of one of the
dividends--one feature of urban life that ever gave him a thrill. A
battalion of the 128th, which he had ordered that afternoon to the very
garrison at South La Tir that he had once commanded, was marching
through the main avenue. Youths all, of twenty-one or two, they were in
a muddy-grayish uniform which was the color of the plain as seen from
the veranda of the Galland house.

Around them, in a mighty, pervasive monotone, was the roar of city
traffic, broken by the nearer sounds of the cries of children playing in
the sand piles, the bark of motor horns, the screech of small boys'
velocipedes on the paths of the park; while they themselves were silent,
except for the rhythmic tramp of the military shoes of identical
pattern, as was every article of their clothing and equipment from head
to foot, whose character had been the subject of the weightiest
deliberation of the staff.

How much can a soldier carry and how best carry it easily? What shoes
are the most serviceable for marching and yet cheap? Nothing was so
precise in all their surroundings, nothing seemed so resolutely
dependable as this column of soldiers. They were the last word in
filling human tissue into a mould for a set task. Where these came from
were other boys growing up to take their places. The mothers of the
nation were doing their duty. All the land was a breeding-ground for the
dividends of Hedworth Westerling.

At the far side of the park he saw another kind of dividend--another
group of marching men. These were not in uniform. They were the
unemployed. Many were middle-aged, with worn, tired faces. Beside the
flag of the country at the head of the procession was that of universal
radicalism. And his car had to stop to let them pass. For an instant the
indignation of military autocracy rose strong within him at sight of the
national colors in such company. But he noted how naturally the men kept
step; the solidarity of their movement. The stamp of their army service
in youth could not be easily removed. He realized the advantage of
heading an army in which defence was not dependent on a mixture of
regulars and volunteers, but on universal conscription that brought
every able-bodied man under discipline.

These reservists, in the event of war, would hear the call of race and
they would fight for the one flag that then had any significance. Yes,
the old human impulses would predominate and the only enemy would be on
the other side of the frontier. They would be pawns of his will--the
will that Marta Galland had said would make him chief of staff.

Wasn't war the real cure for the general unrest? Wasn't the nation
growing stale from the long peace? He was ready for war now that he had
become vice-chief, when the retirement of His Excellency, unable to bear
the weight of his years and decorations in the field, would make him the
supreme commander. One ambition gained, he heard the appeal of another:
to live to see the guns and rifles that had fired only blank cartridges
in practice pouring out shells and bullets, and all the battalions that
had played at sham war in manoeuvres engaged in real war, under his
direction. He saw his columns sweeping up the slopes of the Brown range.
Victory was certain. He would be the first to lead a great modern army
against a great modern army; his place as the master of modern tactics
secure in the minds of all the soldiers of the world. The public would
forget its unrest in the thrill of battles won and provinces conquered,
and its clatter would be that of acclaim for a new idol of its old
faith.




V

OFF TO THE FRONTIER


Ranks broken in the barracks yard, backs free of packs, shoulders free
of rifles, the men of the first battalion of the 28th, which Westerling
had seen marching through the park, had no thought except the prospect
of the joyous lassitude of resting muscles and of loosening tongues that
had been silent on the march. They were simply tired human beings in the
democracy of a common life and service.

The 128th had been recruited from a province in the high country distant
from the capital. In the days of Maria's old baron, a baron of the same
type had plundered their ancestors, and in the days of the first Galland
they formed a principality frequently at war with their neighbors of the
same blood and language. At length they had united with their neighbors
who had in turn united with other neighbors, forming the present nation
of the Grays, which vented its fighting spirit against other nations.
Each generation must send forth its valorous and adventurous youth to
the proof of its manhood in battle, while those who survived wounds and
disease became the heroes of their reminiscences, inciting the younger
generation to emulation. With each step in the evolution learning had
spread and civilization developed.

Since the last war universal conscription had gone hand in hand with
popular education and the telegraphic click of the news of the world to
all breakfast tables and cheap travel and better living. Every private
of the five millions was a scholar compared to the old baron; he had a
broader horizon than the first Galland. In the name of defence, to hold
their borders secure, the great powers were straining their resources to
strengthen the forces that kept an armed peace. Evolution never ceases.
What next?

In a group of the members of Company B, who dropped on a bench in the
barrack room, were the sons of a farmer, a barber, a butcher, an army
officer, a day-laborer, a judge, a blacksmith, a rich man's valet, a
banker, a doctor, a manufacturer, and a small shopkeeper.

"Six months more and my tour is up!" cried the judge's son.

"Six months more for me!"

"Now you're counting!"

"And for me--one, two, three, four, five, six!"

"Oh, don't rub it in," the manufacturer's son shouted above the chorus,
"you old fellows! I've a year and six months more."

"Here, too!" chimed in the banker's son. "A year and six months more of
iron spoons and tin cups and army shoes and army fare and early rising.
Hep-hep-hep, drill-drill-drill, and drudgery!"

"Oh, I don't know!" said the day-laborer's son. "I don't have to get up
any earlier than I do at home, and I don't have to work as hard as I'll
have to when I leave."

"Nor I!" agreed the blacksmith's son. "It's a kind of holiday for me."

"Holiday!" the banker's son gasped. "That's so," he added thoughtfully,
and smiled gratefully over a fate that had been indulgent to him in a
matter of fathers and limousines.

"Look at the newspapers! Maybe we shall be going to war," said the
manufacturer's son.

"Stuff! Nonsense!" said the judge's son. "We are always having scares.
They sell papers and give the fellows at the Foreign Office a chance to
look unconcerned. But let's have the opinion of an international expert,
of the great and only philosopher, guide, companion, and friend. What
do you think of the crisis, eh, Hugo? Soberly, now. The fate of nations
may hang on your words. If not, at least the price of a ginger soda!"

It was around Hugo Mallin that the group had formed. Groups were always
forming around Hugo. He could spring the unexpected and incongruous and
make people laugh. Slight but wiry of physique, he had light hair, a
freckled and rather nondescript nose, large brown eyes, and a broad,
sensitive mouth. Nature had not attempted any regularity of features in
his case. She had been content with making each one a mobile servant of
his mind. In repose his face was homely, and it was a mask.

"Come on, Hugo! Out with it!"

Hugo's brow contracted; the lines of the mask were drawn in deliberate
seriousness.

"I never hear war mentioned that I don't have a shiver right down my
spine, as I did when I was a little boy and went into the cellar without
a light," he replied.

"Fear?" exclaimed Eugene Aronson, the farmer's son, whose big, plain
face expressed dumb incomprehension. He alone was standing. Being the
giant and the athlete of the company, the march had not tired him.

"Fear?" some of the others repeated. The sentiment was astounding, and
Hugo was as manifestly in earnest as if he were a minister addressing a
parliamentary chamber.

"Yes, don't you?" asked Hugo, in bland surprise.

"I should say not!" declared Eugene.

"Do you want to be killed?" asked Hugo, with profound interest.

"The bullet isn't made that will get me!" answered Eugene, throwing back
his broad shoulders.

"I don't know," mused Hugo, eying the giant up and down. "You're pretty
big, Gene, and a bullet that only nicked one of us in the bark might get
you in the wood. However, if you are sure that you are in no danger,
why, you don't count. But let's take a census while we are about it and
see who wants to be killed. First, you, Armand; do you?" he asked the
doctor's son, Armand Daution.

Armand grinned. The others grinned, not at him, but at the quizzical
solemnity of Hugo's manner.

"If so, state whether you prefer bullets or shrapnel, early in the
campaign or late, à la carte or table d'hôte, morning or--" Hugo went
on.

But laughter drowned the sentence, though Hugo's face was without a
smile.

"You ought to go on the stage!" some one exclaimed.

"If it were as easy to amuse a pay audience as you fellows, I might,"
Hugo replied. "But I've another question," he pursued. "Do you think
that the fellows on the other side of the frontier want to be killed?"

"No danger! They'll give in. They always do," said Eugene.

"I confess that it hardly seems reasonable to make war over the Bodlapoo
affair!" This from the judge's son.

"Over some hot weather, some swamp, and some black policemen in Africa,"
said Hugo.

"But they hauled down our flag!" exclaimed the army officer's son.

"On their territory, they say. We were the aggressors," Hugo interposed.

"It was _our_ flag!" said Eugene.

"But we wouldn't want them to put up their flag on our territory, would
we?" Hugo asked.

"Let them try it!" thundered Eugene, with a full breath from the big
bellows in his broad chest. "Hugo, I don't like to hear you talk that
way," he added, shaking his head sadly. Such views from a friend really
hurt him; indeed, he was almost lugubrious. This brought another laugh.

"Don't you see he's getting you, Gene?"

"He's acting!"

"He always gets you, you old simpleton!" The judge's son gave Eugene an
affectionate dig in the ribs.

Eugene was well liked and in the way that a big Saint Bernard dog is
liked. At the latest manoeuvres, on the night that their division had
made a rapid flank movement, without any apparent sense that his own
load was the heavier for it, he had carried the rifle and pack of Peter
Kinderling, a valet's pasty-faced little son "Peterkin," as he was
called, was the stupid of Company B. Being generally inoffensive, the
butt of the drill sergeant, who thought that he would never learn even
the manual of arms, and rounding out the variety of characters which
makes for fellowship, he was regarded with a sympathetic kindliness by
his comrades.

"But I don't think you ought to joke about the flag That's sacred!"
declared Eugene.

"Now you're talking!" said Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son, who sat on
the other side of the bench from Eugene. He was heavily built, with an
undershot jaw and a patch of liverish birthmark on his cheek.

"Yes," piped Peterkin, who had an opinion when the two strong men of the
company agreed on any subject. But he spoke tentatively, nevertheless.
He was taking no risks.

"Oh, if we went to war the Bodlapoo affair would be only an excuse,"
said the manufacturer's son. "We shall go to war as a matter of broad
national policy."

"Right you are!" agreed the banker's son. "No emotion about it. Emotion
as an international quantity is dead. Everything is business now in this
business age."

"Killing people as a broad international policy!" mused Hugo _sotto
voce_, as if this were a matter of his own thoughts.

The others scarcely heard him as the manufacturer's son struck his fist
in the palm of his hand resoundingly to demand attention.

"We need room in which to expand. We have eighty million people to
their fifty, while our territory is only a little larger than theirs.
Our population grows; the Browns' does not!" he announced.

"But there is a remedy for that," Hugo interjected loftly, so softly
that everybody looked at him. "Why, all the conscripts of the army for
two years could take a vow not to marry," he said. "We could reduce the
output, as your father's factory does when the market is dull. We should
not have so many babies. This would be cheaper than rearing them to be
slaughtered in their young manhood."

"Hear ye! Hear ye!" shouted the doctor's son, in the midst of the
hilarity that ensued. "Hugo Mallin solves the whole problem of eugenics
by destroying the field for eugenics!"

"The levity of a lot of mere unthinking privates who mistake themselves
for sociological experts shall not deter me from finishing my speech,"
pursued the manufacturer's son.

"Speak on!"

"Listen to the fount of wisdom play!"

"A beer if you produce an idea!"

"War must come some day. It must come if for no other reason than to
stop the strikes, arouse patriotism, and give an impetus to industry. An
army of five millions on our side against the Browns' three millions! Of
course, they won't start it! We shall have to take the aggressive;
naturally, they'll not."

"And they'll run, they'll run, just as they always have" Eugene cried
enthusiastically.

"You bet they will, or they'll be mush for our bayonets!" said Pilzer,
the butcher's son.

"Will they? Do you really think they will?" asked Hugo, drawing down the
corners of his mouth in profound contemplation that was actually
mournful. "I wonder, now, I wonder if they can run any faster than I
can?"

Everybody was laughing except him. If he had laughed too, he would not
have been funny. His faint, look of surprise over their outburst only
served to prolong it.

"Hugo, you're immense!"

"You're a scream!"

"But I am considering," Hugo resumed, when there was silence. "If both
sides ran as fast as they could when the war began, it would be
interesting to see which army reached home first. Some of us might get
out of breath, but nobody would be killed." He had to wait on another
laugh before he could continue. It takes little to amuse men in garrison
if one knows how. "I don't want to be killed, and why should I want to
kill strangers on the other side of the frontier?" He paused on the
rising inflection of his question, a calm, earnest challenge in his
eyes. "I don't know them. I haven't the slightest grudge against them."

No grudge against the Browns--against the ancient enemy! The faces
around were frowning, as if in doubt how to take him.

"What did you come into the army for, then?" called Pilzer, the
butcher's son. "You didn't have to, being an only son. Talk that stuff
to your officers! They will let you out. They don't want any cowards
like you!"

"Cowards! Hold on, there!" said Eugene, who was very fond of Hugo. He
spoke in the even voice of his vast good nature, but he looked meaningly
at the butcher's son.

"Coward? Is that the word, Jake?" Hugo inquired amiably. "Now, maybe I
am. I don't know. But it wouldn't prove that I wasn't if I fought you
any more than if I fought the strangers on the other side of the
frontier."

"Well, if you don't want to fight, what are you in the army for? That's
a fair question, isn't it?" growled Pilzer, in an appeal to public
opinion.

"Yes, you can carry a joke too far," said the army officer's son. "Yes,
why?"

The others nodded. An atmosphere of hostility was gathering around Hugo.
In face of it a smile began playing about the corners of his lips. The
smile spread. For the first time he was laughing, while all the others
were serious. Suddenly he threw his arms around the necks of the men
next to him.

"Why, to be with all you good fellows, of course!" he said, "and to
complete my education. If I hadn't taken my period in the army, you
might have shaved me, Eduardo; you might have fixed a horseshoe for me,
Henry; you might have sold me turnips, Eugene, but I shouldn't have
known you. Now we all know one another by eating the same food, wearing
the same clothes, marching side by side, and submitting to another kind
of discipline than that of our officers--the discipline of close
association in a community of service. There's hope for humanity in
that--for humanity trying to free itself of its fetters. We have mixed
with the people of the capital. They have found us and we have found
them to be of the same human family."

"That's so! This business of moving regiments about from one garrison to
another is a good cure for provincialism," said the doctor's son.

"Judge's son or banker's son or blacksmith's son, whenever we meet in
after-life there will be a thought of fellowship exchanged in our
glances," Hugo continued. "Haven't we got something that we couldn't get
otherwise? Doesn't it thrill you now when we're all tired from the march
except leviathan Gene--thrill you with a warm glow from the flow of
good, rich, healthy red blood?"

"Yes, yes, yes!"

There was a chorus of assent. Banker's son clapped valet's son on the
shoulder; laborer's son and doctor's son locked arms and teetered on the
edge of the cot together.

"And I've another idea," proceeded Hugo very seriously as the vows of
eternal friendship subsided. "It is one to spread education and the
spirit of comradeship still further. Instead of two sets of autumn
manoeuvres, one on either side of the frontier, I'd have our army and
the Browns hold a manoeuvre together--this year on their side and next
year on ours."

The biggest roar yet rose from throats that had been venting a tender
tone. Only the slow Eugene Aronson was blank and puzzled. But directly
he, too, broke into laughter, louder and more prolonged than the others.

"You can be so solemn that it takes a minute to see your joke," he said.

"And humorous when we expect him to be solemn--and, presto, there he
goes!" added the judge's son.

Hugo's lips were twitching peculiarly.

"Look at him!" exclaimed the manufacturer's son. "Oh, you've had us all
going this afternoon, you old farceur, you, Hugo!"

In the silence that waited on another extravagance from the entertainer
the sergeant entered the room.

"We shall entrain to-morrow morning!" he announced. "We are going to
South La Tir on the frontier."

Oh, joy! Oh, lucky 128th! It was to see still more of the world! The
sergeant stood by listening to the uproar and cautioning the men not to
overturn the tables and benches. Even the banker's and the
manufacturer's sons, who had toured the country from frontier to
frontier in paternal automobiles, were as happy as the laborer's son.

"What fun it would be if we could visit back and forth with the fellows
on the other side of the frontier!" said Hugo.

"What the--eh!" exclaimed the sergeant. "Will you never stop your
joking, you, Hugo Mallin?"

"Never, sir," replied Hugo dryly. "It comes natural to me!"




VI

THE SECOND PROPHECY


In the reception-room, where he awaited the despatch of his card,
Hedworth Westerling caught a glimpse of his person in a panel glass so
convenient as to suggest that an adroit hotel manager might have placed
it there for the delectation of well-preserved men of forty-two. He saw
a face of health that was little lined; brown hair that did not reveal
its sprinkle of gray at that distance; shoulders, bearing the gracefully
draped gold cords of the staff, squarely set on a rigid spine in his
natural attitude. Yes, he had taken good care of himself, enjoying his
pleasures with discreet, epicurean relish as he would this meeting with
a woman whom he had not seen for ten years.

On her part, Marta, when she had received the note, had been in doubt as
to her answer. Her curiosity to see him again was not of itself
compelling. The actual making of the prophecy was rather dim to her mind
until he recalled it. She had heard of his rise and she had heard, too,
things about him which a girl of twenty-seven can better understand than
a girl of seventeen. His reason for wanting to see her he had said was
to "renew an old acquaintance." He could have little interest in her,
and her interest in him was that he was head of the Gray army. His work
had intimate relation to that which the Marta of twenty-seven, a Marta
with a mission, had set for herself.

A page came to tell Westerling that Miss Galland should be down
directly. But before she came a waiter entered with a tea-tray.

"By the lady's direction, sir," he explained as he set the tray on a
table opposite Westerling.

Across a tea-table the prophecy had been made and across a tea-table
they had held most of their talks. Having a picture in memory for
comparison, he was seeing the doorway as the frame for a second picture.
When she appeared the picture seemed the same as of old. There was an
undeniable delight in this first impression of externals. There had been
no promise that she would be beautiful, and she was not. There had been
promise of distinction, and she seemed to have fulfilled it. For a
second she paused on the threshold rather diffidently. Then she smiled
as she had when she greeted him from the veranda as he came up the
terrace steps. She crossed the room with a flowing, spontaneous vitality
that appealed to him as something familiar.

"Ten years, isn't it?" she exclaimed, putting a genuine quality of
personal interest into the words as she gave his hand a quick, firm
shake. Then, with the informality of old acquaintances who had parted
only yesterday, she indicated a place on the sofa for him, while she
seated herself on the other side of the tea-table. "The terrace there in
the foreground," she said with conforming gestures of location, "the
church steeple over the town, the upward sweep of the mountains, and
there the plain melting into the horizon. And, let me see, you took two
lumps, if I remember?"

He would have known the hand that poised over the sugar bowl though he
had not seen the face; a brownish hand, not long-fingered, not narrow
for its length--a compact, deft, firm little hand.

"None now," he said.

"Do you find it fattening?" she asked.

He recognized the mischievous sparkle of the eyes, the quizzical turn of
the lips, which was her asset in keeping any question from being
personal. Nevertheless, he flushed slightly.

"A change of taste," he averred.

"Since you've become such a great man?" she hazarded. "Is that too
strong?" This referred to the tea.

"No, just right!" he nodded.

He was studying her with the polite, veiled scrutiny of a man of the
world. A materialist, he would look a woman over as he would a soldier
when he had been a major-general making an inspection. She was slim,
supple; he liked slim, supple women. Her eyes, though none the less
luminous, and her lips, though none the less flexible, did not seem
quite as out of proportion with the rest of her face as formerly, now
that it had taken on the contour of maturity, which was noticeable also
in the lines of her figure. Yes, she was twenty-seven, with the vivacity
of seventeen retained, though she were on the edge of being an old maid
according to the conventional notions. Necks and shoulders that happened
to be at his side at dinner, he had found, when they were really
beautiful, were not averse to his glance of appreciative and
discriminating admiration of physical charm. But he saw her shrug
slightly and caught a spark from her eyes that made him vaguely
conscious of an offence to her sensibilities, and he was wholly
conscious that the suggestion, bringing his faculties up sharply, had
the pleasure of a novel sensation.

"How fast you have gone ahead!" she said. "That little prophecy of mine
did come true. You are chief of Staff!"

After a smile of satisfaction he corrected her.

"Not quite; vice-chief--the right-hand man of His Excellency. I am a
buffer between him and the heads of divisions. This has led to the
erroneous assumption which I cannot too forcibly deny--"

He was proceeding with the phraseology habitual whenever men or women,
to flatter him, had intimated that they realized that he was the actual
head of the army. His Excellency, with the prestige of a career, must be
kept soporifically enjoying the forms of authority. To arouse his
jealousy might curtail Westerling's actual power.

"Yes, yes!" breathed Marta softly, arching her eyebrows a trifle as she
would when looking all around and through a thing or when she found any
one beating about the bush. The little frown disappeared and she smiled
understandingly. "You know I'm not a perfect goose!" she added. "Had you
been made chief of staff in name, too, all the old generals would have
been in the sulks and the young generals jealous," she continued. "The
one way that you might have the power to exercise was by proxy."

This downright frankness was another reflection of the old days before
he was at the apex of the pyramid. Now it was so unusual in his
experience as to be almost a shock. On the point of arguing, he caught a
mischievous, delightful "Isn't that so?" in her eyes, and replied:

"Yes, I shouldn't wonder if it were!"

Why shouldn't he admit the truth to the one who had rung the bell of his
secret ambition long ago by recognizing in him the ability to reach his
goal? He marvelled at her grasp of the situation.

"It wasn't so very hard to say, was it?" she asked happily, in response
to his smile. Then, her gift of putting herself in another's place,
while she strove to look at things with his purpose and vision, in full
play, she went on in a different tone, as much to herself as to him:
"You have labored to make yourself master of a mighty organization. You
did not care for the non-essentials. You wanted the reality of shaping
results."

"Yes, the results, the power!" he exclaimed.

"Fifteen hundred regiments!" she continued thoughtfully, looking at a
given point rather than at him. "Every regiment a blade which you would
bring to an even sharpness! Every regiment a unit of a harmonious whole,
knowing how to screen itself from fire and give fire as long as bidden,
in answer to your will if war comes! That is what you live and plan for,
isn't it?"

"Yes, exactly! Yes, you have it!" he said. His shoulders stiffened as he
thrilled at seeing a picture of himself, as he wanted to see himself,
done in bold strokes. It assured him that not only had his own mind
grown beyond what were to him the narrow associations of his old La Tir
days, but that hers had grown, too. "And you--what have you been doing
all these years?" he asked.

"Living the life of a woman on a country estate," she replied. "Since
you made a rule that no Gray officers Should cross the frontier we have
been a little lonelier, having only the Brown officers to tea. Did you
really find it so bad for discipline in your own case?" she concluded
with playful solemnity.

"One cannot consider individual cases in a general order," he explained.
"And, remember, the Browns made the ruling first. You see, every year
means a tightening--yes, a tightening, as arms and armies grow more
complicated and the maintaining of staff secrets more important. And you
have been all the time at La Tir, truly?" he asked, changing the
subject. He was convinced that she had acquired something that could not
be gained on the outskirts of a provincial town.

"No. I have travelled. I have been quite around the world."

"You have!" This explained much. "How I envy you! That is a privilege I
shall not know until I am superannuated." While he should remain chief
of staff he must be literally a prisoner in his own country.

"Yes, I should say it was splendid! Splendid--yes, indeed!" Snappy
little nods of the head being unequal to expressing the joy of the
memories that her exclamation evoked, she clasped her hands over her
knees and swung back and forth in the ecstasy of seventeen.

"Splendid! I should say so!" She nestled the curling tip of her tongue
against her teeth, as if the recollection must also be tasted.
"Splendid, enchanting, enlightening, stupendous, and wickedly expensive!
Another girl and I did it all on our own."

"O-oh!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, oh, oh!" she repeated after him. "Oh, what, please?"

"Oh, nothing!" he said. It was quite comprehensible to him how well
equipped she was to take care of herself on such an adventure.

"Precisely, when you come to think it over!" she concluded.

"What interested you most? What was the big lesson of all your
journeying?" he asked, ready to play the listener.

"Being born and bred on a frontier, of an ancestry that was born and
bred on a frontier, why, frontiers interested me most," she said. "I
collected impressions of frontiers as some people collect pictures. I
found them all alike--stupid, just stupid! Oh, so stupid!" Her frown
grew with the repetition of the word; her fingers closed in on her palm
in vexation. He recollected that he had seen her like this two or three
times at La Tir, when he had found the outbursts most entertaining. He
imagined that the small fist pressed against the table edge could
deliver a stinging blow. "As stupid as it is for neighbors to quarrel!
It put me at war with all frontiers."

"Apparently," he said.

She withdrew her fist from the table, dropped the opened hand over the
other on her knee, her body relaxing, her wrath passing into a kind of
shamefacedness and then into a soft, prolonged laugh.

"I laugh at myself, at my own inconsistency," she said. "I was warlike
against war. At all events, if there is anything to make a teacher of
peace lose her temper it is the folly of frontiers."

"Yes?" he exclaimed. "Yes? Go on!" And he thought: "I'm really having a
very good time."

"You see, I came home from my tour with an idea--an idea for a life
occupation just as engrossing as yours," she went on, "and opposed to
yours. I saw there was no use of working with the grown-up folks. They
must be left to The Hague conferences and the peace societies. But
children are quite alike the world over. You can plant thoughts in the
young that will take root and grow as they grow."

"Patriotism, for instance," he observed narrowly.

"No, the follies of martial patriotism! The wickedness of war, which is
the product of martial patriotism!"

The follies of patriotism! This was the red flag of anarchy to him. He
started to speak, flushing angrily, but held his tongue and only emitted
a "whew!" in good-humored wonder.

"I see you are not very frightened by my opposition," she rejoined in a
flash of amusement not wholly untempered by exasperation.

"We got the appropriation for an additional army corps this year," he
explained contentedly, his repose completely regained.

"Thus increasing the odds against us. But perhaps not; for we are
dealing with the children not with recruits, as I said. We call
ourselves the teachers of peace. I organized the first class in La Tir.
I have the children come together every Sunday morning and I tell them
about the children that live in other countries. I tell them that a
child a thousand miles away is just as much a neighbor as the one across
the street. At first I feared that they would find it uninteresting. But
if you know how to talk to them they don't."

"Naturally they don't, when you talk to them," he interrupted.

She was so intent that she passed over the compliment with a gesture
like that of brushing away a cobweb. Her eyes were like deep, clear
wells of faith and repose.

"I try to make the children of other countries so interesting that our
children will like them too well ever to want to kill them when they
grow up. We have a little peace prayer--they have even come to like to
recite it--a prayer and an oath. But I'll not bother you with it. Other
women have taken up the idea. I have found a girl who is going to start
a class on your side in South La Tir, and I came here to meet some women
who want to inaugurate the movement in your capital."

"I'll have to see about that!" he rejoined, half-banteringly,
half-threateningly.

"There is something else to come, even more irritating," she said, less
intently and smiling. "So please be prepared to hold your temper."

"I shall not beat my fist on the table defending war as you did
defending peace!" he retaliated with significant enjoyment.

But she used his retort for an opening.

"Oh, I'd rather you would do that than jest! It's human. It's going to
war because one is angry. You would go to war as a matter of cold
reason."

"If otherwise, I should lose," he replied.

"Exactly. You make it easy for me to approach my point. I want to
prevent you from losing!" she announced cheerfully yet very seriously.

"Yes? Proceed. I brace myself against an explosion of indignation!"

"It is the duty of a teacher of peace to use all her influence with the
people she knows," she went on. "So I am going to ask you not to let
your country ever go to war against mine while you are chief of staff."

"Mine against yours?" he equivocated. "Why, you live almost within
gunshot of the line! Your people have as much Gray as Brown blood in
their veins, _Your_ country! _My_ country! Isn't that patriotism?"

"Patriotism, but not martial patriotism," she corrected him. "My thought
is to stop war for both countries as war, regardless of sides. Promise
me that you will not permit it!"

"I not permit it!" He smiled with the kindly patronage of a great man
who sees a charming woman floundering in an attempt at logic. "It is for
the premier to say. I merely make the machine ready. The government says
the word that makes it move. I able to stop war! Come, come!"

"But you can--yes, you can with a word!" she declared positively.

"How?" he asked, amazed. "How?" he repeated blandly.

Was she teasing him? he wondered. What new resources of confusion had
ten years and a tour around the world developed in her? Was it possible
that the Whole idea of the teachers of peace was an invention to make
conversation at his expense? If so, she carried it off with a sincerity
that suggested other depths yet unsounded.

"Very easily," she answered. "You can tell the premier that you cannot
win. Tell him that you will break your army to pieces against the
Browns' fortifications!"

He gasped. Then an inner voice prompted him that the cue was comedy.

"Excellent fooling--excellent!" he said with a laugh. "Tell the premier
that I should lose when I have five million men to their three million!
What a harlequin chief of staff I should be! Excellent fooling! You
almost had me!"

Again he laughed, though in the fashion of one who had hardly unbent his
spine, while he was wishing for the old days when he might take tea with
her one or two afternoons a week. It would be a fine tonic after his
isolation at the apex of the pyramid surveying the deference of the
lower levels. Then he saw that her eyes, shimmering with wonder, grew
dull and her lips parted in a rigid, pale line as if she were hurt.

"You think I am joking?" she asked.

"Why, yes!"

"But I am not! No, no, not about such a ghastly subject as a war
to-day!" She was leaning toward him, hands on knee and eyes burning like
coals without a spark. "I"--she paused as she had before she broke out
with the first prophecy--"I will quote part of our children's oath: 'I
will not be a coward. It is a coward who strikes first. A brave man even
after he receives a blow tries to reason with his assailant, and does
not strike back until he receives a second blow. I shall not let a
burglar drive me from my house. If an enemy tries to take my land I
shall appeal to his sense of justice and reason with him, but if he then
persists I shall fight for my home. If I am victorious I shall not try
to take his land but to make the most of my own. I shall never cross a
frontier to kill my fellowmen.'"

Very impressive she made the oath. Her deliberate recital of it had the
quality which justifies every word with an urgent faith.

"You see, with that teaching there can be no war," she proceeded, "and
those who strike will be weak; those who defend will be strong."

"Perhaps," he said.

"You would not like to see thousands, hundreds of thousands, of men
killed and maimed, would you?" she demanded, and her eyes held the
horror of the sight in reality. "You can prevent it--you _can_!" Her
heart was in the appeal.

"The old argument! No, I should not like to see that," he replied. "I
only do my duty as a soldier to my country."

"The old answer! The more reason why you should tell the premier you
can't! But there is still another reason for telling him," she urged
gently.

Now he saw her not at twenty-seven but at seventeen, girlish, the
subject of no processes of reason but in the spell of an intuition, and
he knew that something out of the blue in a flash was coming.

"For you will not win!" she declared.

This struck fire. Square jaw and sturdy body, in masculine energy,
resolute and trained, were set indomitably against feminine vitality.

"Yes, we shall win! We shall win!" he said without even the physical
demonstration of a gesture and in a hard, even voice which was like that
of the machinery of modern war itself, a voice which the aristocratic
sniff, the Louis XVI. curls, or any of the old gallery-display heroes
would have thought utterly lacking in histrionics suitable to the
occasion. He remained rigid after he had spoken, handsome,
self-possessed.

There was no use of beating feminine fists against such a stone wall.
The force of the male was supreme. She smiled with a strange, quivering
loosening of the lips. She spread out her hands with fingers apart, as
if to let something run free from them into the air, and the flame of
appeal that had been in her eyes broke into many lights that seemed to
scatter into space, yet ready to return at her command. She glanced at
the clock and rose, almost abruptly.

"I was very strenuous riding my hobby against yours, wasn't I?" she
exclaimed in a flutter of distraction that made it easy for him to
descend from his own steed. "I stated a feeling. I made a guess, a
threat about your winning--and all in the air. That's a woman's
privilege; one men grant, isn't it?"

"We enjoy doing so," he replied, all urbanity.

"Thank you!" she said simply. "I must be at home in time for the
children's lesson on Sunday. My sleeper is engaged, and if I am not to
miss the train I must go immediately."

With an undeniable shock of regret he realized that the interview was
over. Really, he had had a very good time; not only that, but--.

"Will it be ten years before we meet again?" he asked.

"Perhaps, unless you change the rules about officers dossing the
frontier to take tea," she replied.

"Even if I did, the vice-chief of staff might hardly go."

"Then perhaps you must wait," she warned him, "until the teachers of
peace have done away with all frontiers."

"Or, if there were war, I should come!" he answered in kind. He half
wished that this might start another argument and she would miss her
train. But she made no reply. "And you may come to the Gray capital
again. You are not through travelling!" he added.

This aroused her afresh; the flame was back in her eyes.

"Yes. I have all the memories of my journeys to enjoy, all their lessons
to study," she said. "There is the big world, and you want to have had
the breath of all its climates in your lungs, the visions of all its
peoples yours. Then the other thing is three acres and a cow. If you
could only have the solidarity of the Japanese, their public spirit,
with the old Chinese love of family and peace, and a cathedral near-by
on a hill! Patriotism? Why, it is in the soil of your three acres. I
love to feel the warm, rich earth of our own garden in my hands!
Hereafter I shall be a stay-at-home; and if my children win," she held
out her hand in parting with the same frank, earnest grip of her
greeting, "why, you will find that tea is, as usual, at four-thirty."

He had found the women of his high official world--a narrower world than
he realized--much alike. Striking certain keys, certain chords
responded. He could probe the depths of their minds, he thought, in a
single evening. Then he passed on, unless it was in the interest of
pleasure or of his career to linger. This meeting had left his curiosity
baffled. He understood how Marta's vitality demanded action, which
exerted itself in a feminine way for a feminine cause. The cure for such
a fad was most clear to his masculine-perception. What if all the power
she had shown in her appeal for peace could be made to serve another
ambition? He knew that he was a great man. More than once he had
wondered what would happen if he were to meet a great woman. And he
should not see Marta Galland again unless war came.




VII

TIMES HAVE CHANGED


A prodigious brown worm, its body turning and rising and falling with
the grade and throbbing with the march of its centipede feet, wound its
way along a rising mountain road. In the strong, youthful figures set in
the universal type of military mould it might have been a regiment of
any one of many nations' but the tint of its uniform was the brown of
the nine hundred regiments that prepared for war against the gray of the
fifteen hundred under Hedworth Westerling.

The 53d of the Browns had started for La Tir on the same day that the
128th of the Grays had started for South La Tir. While the 128th was
going to new scenes, the 53d was returning to familiar ground. It had
detrained in the capital of the province from which its ranks had been
recruited. After a steep incline, there was a welcome bugle note and
with shouts of delight the centipede's legs broke apart! Bankers',
laborers', doctors', valets', butchers', manufacturers', and judges'
sons threw themselves down on the greensward of the embankment to rest.
With their talk of home, of relatives whom they had met at the station,
and of the changes in the town was mingled talk of the crisis.

Meanwhile, an aged man was approaching. At times he would break into a
kind of trot that ended, after a few steps, in shortness of breath. He
was quite withered, his bright eyes twinkling out of an area of moth
patches, and he wore a frayed uniform coat with a medal on the breast.

"Is this the 53d?" he quavered to the nearest soldier

"It certainly is!" some one answered. "Come and join us, veteran!"

"Is Tom--Tom Fragini here?"

The answer came from a big soldier, who sprang to his feet and leaped
toward the old man.

"It's grandfather, as I live!" he called out, kissing the veteran on
both cheeks. "I saw sister in town, and she said you'd be at the gate as
we marched by."

"Didn't wait at no gate! Marched right up to you!" said grandfather.
"Marched up with my uniform and medal on! Stand off there, Tom, so I can
see you. My word! You're bigger'n your father, but not bigger'n I was!
No, sir, not bigger'n I was in my day before that wound sort o' bent me
over. They say it's the lead in the blood. I've still got the bullet!"

The old man's trousers were threadbare but well darned, and the holes in
the uppers of his shoes were carefully patched. He had a merry air of
optimism, which his grandson had inherited.

"Well, Tom, how much longer you got to serve?" asked grandfather.

"Six months," answered Tom.

"One, two, three, four--" grandfather counted the numbers off on his
fingers. "That's good. You'll be in time for the spring ploughing. My,
how you have filled out! But, somehow, I can't get used to this kind of
uniform. Why, I don't see how a girl'd be attracted to you fellows, at
all!"

"They have to, for we're the only kind of soldiers there are nowadays.
Not as gay as in your day, that's sure, when you were in the Hussars,
eh?"

"Yes, I was in the Hussars--in the Hussars! I tell you, with our sabres
a-gleaming, our horses' bits a-jingling, our pennons a-flying, and all
the color of our uniform--I tell you, the girls used to open their eyes
at us. And we went into the charge like that--yes, sir, just that gay
and grand, Colonel Galland leading!"

Military history said that it had been a rather foolish charge, a fine
example of the vainglory of unreasoning bravery that accomplishes
nothing, but no one would suggest such scepticism of an immortal event
in popular imagination in hearing of the old man as he lived over that
intoxicated rush of horses and men into a battery of the Grays.

"Well, didn't you find what I said was true about the lowlanders?" asked
grandfather after he had finished the charge, referring to the people of
the southern frontier of the Browns, where the 53d had just been
garrisoned.

"No, I kind of liked them. I made a lot of friends," admitted Tom.
"They're very progressive."

"Eh? eh? You're joking!" To like the people of the southern frontier was
only less conceivable than liking the people of the Grays. "That's
because you didn't see deep under them. They're all on the outside--a
flighty lot! Why, if they'd done their part in that last war we'd have
licked the Grays until they cried for mercy! If their army corps had
stood its ground at Volmer--"

"So you've always said," interrupted Tom.

"And the way they cook tripe! I couldn't stomach it, could you? And if
there's anything I am partial to it's a good dish of tripe! And their
light beer--like drinking froth! And their bread--why, it ain't bread!
It's chips! 'Taint fit for civilized folks!"

"But I sort of got used to their ways," said Tom.

"Eh? eh?" Grandfather looked at grandson quizzically, seeking the cause
of such heterodoxy in a northern man. "Say, you ain't been falling in
love?" he hazarded. "You--you ain't going to bring one of them southern
girls home?"

"No!" said Tom laughing.

"Well, I'm glad you ain't, for they're naturally light-minded. I
remember 'em well." He wandered on with his questions and comments. "Is
it a fact, Tom, or was you just joking when you wrote home that the
soldiers took so many baths?"

"Yes, they do."

"Well, that beats me! It's a wonder you didn't all die of pneumonia!" He
paused to absorb the phenomenon. Then his half-childish mind, prompted
by a random recollection, flitted to another subject which set him to
giggling. "And the little crawlers--did they bother you much, the little
crawlers?"

"The little crawlers?" repeated Tom, mystified.

"Yes. Everybody used to get 'em just from living close together. Had to
comb 'em out and pick 'em out of your clothes. The chase we used to call
it."

"No, grandfather, crawlers have gone out of fashion. And no more
epidemics of typhoid and dysentery either," said Tom.

"Times have certainly changed!" grumbled Grandfather Fragini.

Interested in their own reunion, they had paid no attention to a group
of Tom's comrades near-by, sprawled around a newspaper containing the
latest despatches from both capitals. It was a group as typical as that
of the Grays around Hugo Mallin's cot; only the common voice was that of
defence.

"Five million soldiers to our three million!"

"Eighty million people to our fifty million!"

"Because of the odds, they think we are bound to yield, no matter if we
are in the right!"

"Let them come!" said the butcher's son. "If we have to go, it will be
on a wave of blood."

"And they will come some time," said the judge's son. "They want our
land."

"We gain nothing if we beat them back. War will be the ruin of
business,"-said the banker's son.

"Yes, we are prosperous now. Let well enough alone!" said the
manufacturer's son.

"Some say it makes wages higher," said the laborer's son, "but I am
thinking it's a poor way of raising your pay."

"There won't be any war," said the banker's son "There can't be without
credit. The banking interests will lot permit it."

"There can always be war," said the judge's son, "always when one people
determines to strike at another people--even if it brings bankruptcy."

"It would be a war that would make all others in history a mere exchange
of skirmishes. Every able-bodied man in line--automatics a hundred shots
a minute--guns a dozen shots a minute--and aeroplanes and dirigibles!"
said the manufacturer's son.

"To the death, too!"

"And not for glory! We of the 53d who live on the frontier will be
fighting for our homes."

"If we lose them we'll never get them back. Better die than be beaten!"

There was no humorist Hugo Mallin in this group; no nimble fancy to send
heresy skating over thin ice; but there was Herbert Stransky, with
deep-set eyes, slightly squinting inward, and a heavy jaw, an enormous
man who was the best shot in the company when he cared to be. He had
listened in silence to the others, his rather thick but expressive lips
curving with cynicism. His only speech all the morning had been in the
midst of the reception in the public square of the town when he said:

"This home-coming doesn't mean much to me. Home? Hell! The hedgerows of
the world are my home!"

He appeared older than his years, and hard and bitter, except when his
eyes would light with a feverish sort of fire which shone now as he
broke into a lull in the talk.

"Comrades," he began.

"Let us hear from the socialist!" a Tory exclaimed.

"No, the anarchist!" shouted a socialist.

"There won't be any war!" said Stransky, his voice gradually rising to
the pitch of an agitator relishing the sensation of his own words.
"Patriotism is the played-out trick of the ruling classes to keep down
the proletariat. There won't be any war! Why? Because there are too
many enlightened men on both sides who do the world's work. We of the
53d are a provincial lot, but throughout our army there are thousands
upon thousands like me. They march, they drill, but when battle comes
they will refuse to fight--my comrades in heart, to whom the flag of
this country means no more than that of any other country!"

"Hold on! The flag is sacred!" cried the banker's son.

"Yes, that will do!"

"Shut up!"

Other voices formed a chorus of angry protest.

"I knew you thought it; now I've caught you!" This from the sergeant,
who had seen hard fighting against a savage foe in Africa and therefore
was particularly bitter about the Bodlapoo affair. The welt of a scar on
his gaunt, fever-yellowed cheek turned a deeper red as he seized
Stransky by the collar of the blouse.

Stransky raised his free hand as if to strike, but paused as he faced
the company's boyish captain, slender of figure, aristocratic of
feature. His indignation was as evident as the sergeant's, but he was
biting his lips to keep it under control.

"You heard what he said, sir?"

"The latter part--enough!"

"It's incitation to mutiny! An example!"

"Yes, put him under arrest."

The sergeant still held fast to the collar of Stransky's blouse.
Stransky could have shaken himself free, as a mastiff frees himself from
a puppy, but this was resistance to arrest and he had not yet made up
his mind to go that far. His muscles were weaving under the sergeant's
grip, his eyes glowing as with volcanic fire waiting on the madness of
impulse for eruption.

"I wonder if it is really worth while to put him under arrest?" said
some one at the edge of the group in amiable inquiry.

The voice came from an officer of about thirty-five, who apparently had
strolled over from a near-by aeroplane station to look at the regiment.
From his shoulder hung the gold cords of the staff. His left hand thrust
in the pocket of his blouse heightened the ease of his carriage, which
was free of conventional military stiffness, while his eyes had the
peculiar eagerness of a man who seems to find everything that comes
under his observation interesting and significant.

It was Colonel Arthur Lanstron, whose plane had skimmed the Gallands'
garden wall for the "easy bump" ten years ago. There was something
more than mere titular respect in the way the young captain
saluted---admiration and the diffident, boyish glance of recognition
which does not presume to take the lead in recalling a slight
acquaintance with a man of distinction.

"Dellarme! It's all of two years since we met at Miss Galland's, isn't
it?" Lanstron said, shaking hands with the captain.

"Yes, just before we were ordered south," said Dellarme, obviously
pleased to be remembered.

"I overheard your speech," Lanstron continued, nodding toward Stransky.
"It was very informing."

A crowd of soldiers was now pressing around Stransky, and in the front
rank was Grandfather Fragini.

"Said our flag was no better'n any other flag, did he?" piped the old
man. "Beat him to a pulp! That's what the Hussars would have done."

"If you don't mind telling it in public, Stransky, I should like to know
your origin," said Lanstron, prepared to be as considerate of an
anarchist's private feelings as of anybody's.

Stransky squinted his eyes down the bony bridge of his nose and grinned
sardonically.

"That won't take long," he answered. "My father, so far as I could
identify him, died in jail and my mother of drink."

"That was hardly to the purple!" observed Lanstron thoughtfully.

"No, to the red!" answered Stransky savagely.

"I mean that it was hardly inclined to make you take ft roseate view of
life as a beautiful thing in a well-ordered world where favors of
fortune are evenly distributed," continued Lanstron.

"Rather to make me rejoice in the hope of a new order of things--the
re-creation of society!" Stransky uttered the sentiment with the
triumphant pride of a pupil who knows his text-book thoroughly.

By this time the colonel commanding the regiment, who had noticed the
excitement from a distance, appeared, forcing a gap for his passage
through the crowd with sharp words. He, too, recognized Lanstron. After
they had shaken hands, the colonel scowled as he heard the situation
explained, with the old sergeant, still holding fast to Stransky's
collar, a capable and insistent witness for the prosecution; while
Stransky, the fire in his eyes dying to coals, stared straight ahead.

"It is only a suggestion, of course," said Lanstron, speaking quite as a
spectator to avoid the least indication of interference with the
colonel's authority, "but it seems possible that Stransky has clothed
his wrongs in a garb that could never set well on his nature if he tried
to wear it in practice. He is really an individualist. Enraged, he would
fight well. I should like nothing better than a force of Stranskys if I
had to defend a redoubt in a last stand."

"Yes, he might fight." The colonel looked hard at Stransky's rigid
profile, with its tight lips and chin as firm as if cut out of stone.
"You never know who will fight in the pinch, they say. But that's
speculation. It's the example that I have to deal with."

"He is not of the insidious, plotting type. He spoke his mind openly,"
suggested Lanstron. "If you give him the limit of the law, why, he
becomes a martyr to persecution. I should say that his remarks might
pass for barrack-room gassing."

"Very well," said the colonel, taking the shortest way out of the
difficulty. "We will excuse the first offence."

"Yes, sir!" said the sergeant mechanically as he released his grip of
the offender. "We had two anarchists in my company in Africa," he
observed in loyal agreement with orders. "They fought like devils. The
only trouble was to keep them from shooting innocent natives for sport."

Stransky's collar was still crumpled on the nape of his neck. He
remained stock-still, staring down the bridge of his nose. For a full
minute he did not vouchsafe so much as a glance upward over the change
in his fortunes. Then he looked around at Lanstron gloweringly.

"I know who you are!" he said. "You were born to the purple. You have
had education, opportunity, position--everything that you and your kind
want to keep for your kind. You are smarter than the others. You would
hang a man with spider-webs instead of hemp. But I won't fight for you!
No, I won't!"

He threw back his head with a determination in his defiance so intense
that it had a certain kind of dignity that freed it of theatrical
affectation.

"Yes, I was fortunate; but perhaps nature was not altogether unkind to
you," said Lanstron. "In Napoleonic times, Stransky, I think you might
even have carried a marshal's baton in your knapsack."

"You--what rot!" A sort of triumph played around Stransky's full lips
and his jaw shot out challengingly. "No, never against my comrades on
the other side of the border!" he concluded, his dogged stare returning.

Now the colonel gave the order to fall in; the bugle sounded and the
centipede's legs began to assemble on the road. But Stransky remained a
statue, his rifle untouched on the sward. He seemed of a mind to let the
regiment go on without him.

"Stransky, fall in!" called the sergeant.

Still Stransky did not move. A comrade picked up the rifle and fairly
thrust it into his hands.

"Come on, Bert, and knead dough with the rest of us!" he whispered.
"Come on! Cheer up!" Evidently his comrades liked Stransky.

"No!" roared Stransky, bringing the rifle down on the ground with a
heavy blow.

Then impulse broke through the restraint that seemed to characterize the
Lanstron of thirty-five. The Lanstron of twenty-five, who had met
catastrophe because he was "wool-gathering," asserted himself. He put
his hand on Stransky's shoulder. It was a strong though slim hand that
looked as if it had been trained to do the work of two hands in the
process of its owner's own transformation. Thus the old sergeant had
seen a general remonstrate with a brave veteran who had been guilty of
bad conduct in Africa. The old colonel gasped at such a subversion of
the dignity of rank. He saw the army going to the devil. But young
Dellarme, watching with eager curiosity, was sensible of no familiarity
in the act. It all depended on how such a thing was done, he was
thinking.

"We all have minutes when we are more or less anarchists," said Lanstron
in the human appeal of one man to another. "But we don't want to be
judged by one of those minutes. I got a hand mashed up for a mistake
that took only a second. Think this over to-night before you act. Then,
if you are of the same opinion, go to the colonel and tell him so. Come,
why not?"

"All right, sir, you're so decent about it!" grumbled Stransky, taking
his place in the ranks.

Hep-hep-hep! the regiment started on its way, with Grandfather Fragini
keeping at his grandson's side.

"Makes me feel young again, but it's darned solemn beside the Hussars,
with their horses' bits a-jingling. Times have certainly
changed--officers' hands in their pockets, saying 'if you don't mind' to
a man that's insulted the flag! Kicking ain't good enough for that
traitor! Ought to hang him--yes, sir, hang and draw him!"

Lanstron watched the marching column for a time.

"Hep-hep-hep! It's the brown of the infantry that counts in the end," he
mused. "I liked that wall-eyed giant. He's all man!"

Then his livening glance swept the heavens inquiringly. A speck in the
blue, far away in the realms of atmospheric infinity, kept growing in
size until it took the form of the wings with which man flies. The plane
volplaned down with steady swiftness, till its racing shadow lay large
over the landscape for a few seconds before it rose again with beautiful
ease and precision.

"Bully for you, Etzel!" Lanstron thought, as he started back to the
aeroplane station. "You belong in the corps. We shall not let you return
to your regiment for a while. You've a cool head and you'd charge a
church tower if that were the orders."




VIII

THANKS TO A BUMBLEBEE


"Has he changed much?" Mrs. Galland asked, when she learned that Marta
had seen Westerling.

"Jove has reached his own--the very top of Olympus, and he likes the
prospect," Marta replied.

The only home news of importance that her mother had to impart related
to a tiny strip of paper with the greeting, "Hello, Marta!" that had
been dropped from the pilot aeroplane as the Brown aerial squadron flew
over the garden after its race with the Gray. She noted Marta's
customary quickening interest at mention of Lanstron's name. It had
become the talisman of a hope whose fulfilment was always being
deferred.

"How different Lanny and Westerling are!" Marta exclaimed, the picture
of the two men rising before her vision. "Lanny trying so hard under the
pressure of his responsibility not to be human and unable to forget
himself, and Westerling trying, really trying, to be human at times, but
unable to forget that he is Jove! Did you wave your acknowledgments to
Lanny,'?"

"Why, no! How could I?" asked Mrs. Galland. "He went over so fast I
didn't know it was he--a little figure so far overhead."

"It's odd, but I think I'd know Lanny a mile away by a sort of
instinct," said Marta. "You know I'd like a gun that would fire a bomb
and drop a message of 'Hello, yourself!' right on his knee. Wouldn't
that give him a surprise?"

"You and he are so full of nonsense that you--" But Mrs. Galland
desisted. What was the use?

Sometimes she wished that Colonel Lanstron would stay away altogether
and leave a free field for a newcomer. Yet if two or three weeks passed
without a call from him she was apprehensive. Besides being one of the
Thorbourg Lanstrons, he was a most charming, capable man, who had risen
very rapidly in his profession. It had been only six months after he had
bolted up from the wreck of his plane by way of self-introduction to
Marta before he alighted in the field across the road from the garden to
report a promise kept.

Once she knew that he was a Lanstron of Thorbourg, a fact of hardly
passing interest to Marta, Mrs. Galland made him intimately welcome. By
the time he had paid his third call he was Lanny to Marta and she was
Marta to him, quite as if they had known each other from childhood. She
had a gift for unaffected comradeship. He was the kind of man with whom
she could be a comrade. There was always something to say the moment
they met and they were never through talking when he had to go. They
disagreed so often that Mrs. Galland thought they made a business of it.
She wondered how real friendship could exist between two such
controversialists. They could be seriously disputatious to the point of
quarrelling; they could be light-heartedly disputatious to the bantering
point, where either was uncertain which side of the argument he had
originally espoused.

"The gardener did not cut the chrysanthemums," Mrs. Galland said. "That
is why we had asters in the bowl at luncheon. His deafness is really a
cross, I never realized before what a companion one naturally makes of a
gardener."

"No, there's no purpose in having a deaf gardener," said Marta. "Nature
distributes her defects unintelligently. Now, if we had dumb demagogues,
deaf gossips, and steel that when it was being formed into a sword-blade
or a gun would turn to putty, we should be much better off. But we
couldn't let Feller go, could we? He's already made himself a fixture.
So few people would put up with his deafness! He's so desirous of
pleasing and he loves flowers."

"And Colonel Lanstron recommended him. Except for his deafness he is a
perfect gardener. Of course he had to have some drawback, for complete
perfection is impossible," Mrs. Galland agreed.

The old straw hat that shaded the fringe of white hair had been hovering
within easy approaching distance of the chrysanthemum bed ever since the
whistle of the train that brought Marta home had been heard from the
station. Feller was watching Marta when she paused for a moment on the
second terrace steps, enjoying the sweep of landscape anew with the
freshness of a first glimpse and the intimacy of every familiar detail
cut in the memory. It was her landscape, famed in history, where history
might yet be made.

His greeting was picturesque and effective. With white head bared, he
looked up from the chrysanthemums to her and back at them and up at her
again, with a sort of covert comradeship in his eyes which were young,
very young for such white hair, and held out his little pad and pencil.
She smiled approval and slowly worked out a "perfect" in the
deaf-and-dumb alphabet before she took the proffered pencil and wrote:

"I practised the deaf-and-dumb alphabet on the train. I'm learning fast.
We've never had such chrysanthemums before. Next year we shall have some
irises--just a few--as fine as they have in Japan. How's your
rheumatism?"

He had replaced the broad-brimmed hat over his brow and his lips were
visible in a lingering smile as he read the message.

"Thank you, Miss Galland," he said in his even monotone. "You are very
kind and I am very fortunate to find a place like this. I already knew
something about irises and I've been reading up on the subject. We'll
try to hold our own with those little Japanese. As for the rheumatism,
since you are good enough to inquire, Miss Galland, it's about the same.
My legs are getting old. There are bound to be some kinks in them."

"You select those to cut--a great armful!" she slowly spelled out on her
fingers, clapping her hands with a triumphant cry of "How's that?" at
the finish.

"Your time has come! To the sacrifice!" he exclaimed to the flowers.

Very tenderly, as if he were an executioner considerate of the victims
of an inexorable law, he was snipping the stems, his head bent close to
the blooms, when a bumblebee appeared among the salvias a few feet away.
Perhaps army staffs who neglect no detail have made a mistake in
overlooking the whirring of bumblebees' wings in affecting the fate of
nations. These plunderers are not dangerous from their size, but they
have not yet been organized to the hep-hep-hep of partisanship. They
would as soon live in a Gray as a Brown garden, as soon probe for an
atom of honey on one side of the white posts as the other. This one as
it drew nearer was well to one side over Feller's shoulders. With eyes
and mind intent on his work, Feller turned his head absently, as one
will at an interruption.

"There you are again, my dear!" he said. "You must think you're a
battery of automatics."

He went on cutting chrysanthemums, apparently unconscious that he had
spoken.

"Bring them up on the veranda, please," Marta wrote on the pad, her
fingers moving with unusual nervous rapidity, the only sign of her
inward excitement.

Coming to the head of the steps of the terrace above, she looked back.
Feller's face was quite hidden under his hat and suddenly she seemed to
stub her toe and fall, while she uttered a low cry of pain. The hat rose
like a jack-in-the-box with the cover released. Feller bounded toward
her, taking two of steps at a time. She scrambled to her feet hastily,
laughed, and gestured to show that she was not hurt. He drew his
shoulders together and bent over spasmodically, gripping his knee.

"I can run off if something starts me just as spry as if I were twenty,"
he said. "But after I've done it and the kinks come, I realize I've got
old legs."

"Now I know he's not deaf!" Marta murmured, as he returned to his work.
She frowned. She was angry. "Lanny, you have something to explain," she
thought.

But when Feller brought his armful of chrysanthemums to her on the
veranda, there was no trace in her expression of the discovery she had
made, and she wrote a direction on his pad in the usual fashion.




IX

A SUNDAY MORNING CALL


As a boy, Arthur Lanstron had persisted in being an exception to the
influences of both heredity and environment. Though his father and both
grandfathers were officers who believed theirs to be the true
gentleman's profession, he had preferred any kind of mechanical toy to
arranging the most gayly painted tin soldiers in formation on the
nursery floor; and he would rather read about the wonders of natural
history and electricity than the campaigns of Napoleon and Frederick the
Great and my lord Nelson. Left to his own choice, he would miss the
parade of the garrison for inspection by an excellency in order to ask
questions of a man wiping the oil off his hands with cotton-waste, who
was far more entertaining to him than the most spick-and-span ramrod of
a sergeant.

The first time he saw a dynamo in motion he was spellbound. This was
even more fascinating than the drill that the family dentist worked with
his foot. His tutor found him inclined to estimate a Cæsar,
self-characterized in his commentaries, as less humanly appealing than
his first love, the engine-driver, with whom he kept up a correspondence
after his father had been transferred to another post. He was given to
magic lanterns, private telegraph and telephone lines, trying to walk a
tight rope, and parachute acts and experiments in chemistry. When the
family were not worried lest he should break his neck or blow his head
off investigating, they were irritated by a certain plebeian strain in
him which kept all kinds of company. His mother disapproved of his
picking an acquaintance with a group of acrobats in order to improve his
skill on the trapeze. His excuse for his supple friends was that they
were all "experts" in something, just as his tutor was in Greek verbs.

Very light-hearted he was, busy, vital, reckless, with an earnest smile
that could win the post telegrapher to teach him the code alphabet or
persuade his father not to destroy his laboratory after he had singed
off his eyebrows. This may explain why he had to cram hard in the dead
languages at times, with a towel tied around his head. He complained
that they were out of date; and he wanted to hear the Gauls' story, too,
before he fully made up his mind about Cæsar. But for the living
languages he had a natural gift which his father's service abroad as
military attaché for a while enabled him to cultivate.

Upon being told one day that he was to go to the military school the
following autumn, he broke out in open rebellion. He had just decided,
after having passed through the stages of engine-driver, telegraph
operator, railroad-signal watchman, automobile manufacturer, and
superintendent of the city's waterworks, to build bridges over tropical
torrents that always rose in floods to try all his skill in saving his
construction work.

"I don't want to go into the army!" he said.

"Why?" asked his father, thinking that when the boy had to give his
reasons he would soon be argued out of the heresy.

"It's drilling a few hours a day, then nothing to do," Arthur replied.
"All your work waits on war and you don't know that there will ever be
any war. It waits on something nobody wants to happen. Now, if you
manufacture something, why, you see wool come out cloth, steel come out
an automobile. If you build a bridge you see it rising little by little.
You're getting your results every day; you see your mistakes and your
successes. You're making something, creating something; there's
something going on all the while that isn't guesswork. I think that's
what I want to say. You won't order me to be a soldier will you?"

The father, loath to do this, called in the assistance of an able
pleader then, Eugene Partow, lately become chief of staff of the Browns,
who was an old friend of the Lanstron family. It was not in Partow's
mind to lose such a recruit in a time when the heads of the army were
trying, in answer to the demands of a new age, to counteract the old
idea that made an officer's the conventional avocation of a gentleman of
leisurely habits.

"No army that ever worked as hard in peace as the average manufacturer
or bridge-builder was ever beaten in battle if it fought anything like
equal numbers," he said. "The officer who works hard in the army
deserves more credit than he would in any other profession because the
incentive for results seems remote. But what a terrible test of results
may be made in a single hour's action. There is nothing you have learned
or ever will learn that may not be of service to you. There is no
invention, no form of industrial organization that must not be included
in the greatest organization of all, whose plant and methods must be up
to date in every particular. To be backward in a single particular may
mean disaster--may mean that the loss of thousands of lives is due to
you. You must have self-control, courage, dash, judgment If you have not
kept up, if you are not equal to the test, your inefficiency will mean
your shame and your country's suffering; while efficiency means a clear
conscience and your country's security."

Thus Partow turned the balance on the side of filial affection. He kept
watch of the boy, but without favoring him with influence. Young
Lanstron, who wanted to see results, had to earn them. He realized in
practice the truth of Partow's saying that there was nothing he had ever
learned but what could be of service to him as an officer. What the
acrobats had taught him probably saved his life on the occasion of his
first flight across the range. The friendships with all sorts of people
in his youth were the forerunner of his sympathy with the giant,
wall-eyed Stransky who had mutinied on the march.

"Finding enough work to do?" Par tow would ask with a chuckle when they
met in these days, for he had made Lanstron both chief of intelligence
and chief aerostatic officer. Young Colonel Lanstron's was the duty of
gaining the secrets of the Gray staff and keeping those of the Brown and
organizing up-to-the-moment efficiency in the new forces of the air.

He had remarked truly enough that the injury to his left hand served as
a better reminder against the folly of wool-gathering than a string,
even a large red string, tied around his finger. Thanks to skilful
surgery working ingeniously with splintered bone and pulpy flesh, there
was nothing unpleasant to the eye in a stiffened wrist and scarred
knuckles slightly misshapen. The fingers, incapable of spreading much,
were yet serviceable and had a firm grip of the wheel as he rose from
the aeroplane station on the Sunday morning after Marta's return home
for a flight to La Tir.

He knew the pattern weaving under his feet as one knows that of his own
garden from an overlooking window. Every detail of the staff map,
ravines, roads, buildings, battery positions, was stitched together in
the flowing reality of actual vision. No white posts were necessary to
tell him where the boundary between the two nations lay. The line was
drawn in his brain.

Nature was in a gracious humor, the very tree tops motionless. The rich
landscape in Sunday quiet appealed to his affections. He loved his
country and he loved Marta. It had been on such a day as this when there
would be no danger, that he had taken her for her first flight. The
glimpses, as they flew, of her profile, so alive and tense, were fresh
to his eye. How serious she had been! How vivid her impressions! How
tempestuous her ideas! He recalled their talk upon their return; all his
questions and her answers.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Sublime and ridiculous!" she had begun in a summing up. "It is like
seeing the life of a family through a glass roof--the big, universal
family! Valleys seemed no larger than sauce-dishes on a table."

"What was the sublime thing?"

"Man's toil! The cumulative result of it, on every hand, in the common
aim for food, comfort, happiness, and progress! Little details of
difference disappeared. Towns, villages, houses were simply towns,
villages, houses of any country."

"And the supremely ridiculous thing?"

"A regiment of cavalry of the Grays and one of the Browns on the same
road! They appeared so self-important, as if the sky would fall or the
earth heave up to meet the sky if they got out of formation. I imagined
each man a metal figure that fitted astride a metal horse of the kind
that comes to children at Christmas time. They might better be engaged
in brass-ring-snatching contests at the merry-go-rounds of public fairs.
I wanted to brush them all over with a wave of the hand as you might the
battalions of the nursery floor. Just drilling and drilling in order to
slash at one another some day. Flight! flight! It makes one's mind as
big and broad as the world. Oh, what a wonderful talk I'll have for my
kids next Sunday!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Now that Lanstron was the organizer of the aviation corps his own
flights were rare. Mostly they were made to La Tir. His visits to Marta
were his holidays? All the time that she was absent on her journey
around the world they had corresponded. Her letters, so revealing of
herself and her peculiar angles of observation, formed a bundle sacredly
preserved. Her mother's joking reference about her girlish resolution
not to marry a soldier often recurred to him. There, he sometimes
thought, was the real obstacle to his great desire.

He wished, this morning, that he were not Colonel Lanstron, but the
bridge-builder returning from his triumph after he had at last spanned
the chasm and controlled the floods. Ah, there was something like
romance and real accomplishment in that! What an easy time a
bridge-builder had, comparatively, too! What an easy master capital must
be compared to Eugene Partow! But no! If Marta loved it would not matter
whether he were bridge builder or army builder. Yes, she was like that.
And what right had he to think of marriage? He could not have any home.
He was now in the capital; again, along the frontier--a vagabond of duty
and Partow's orders.

       *       *       *       *       *

When he alighted from the plane he thrust his left hand into his blouse
pocket. He always carried it there, as if it were literally sewn in
place. In moments of emotion the scarred nerves would twitch as the
telltale of his sensitiveness; and this was something he would conceal
from others no matter how conscious he was of it himself. He found the
Galland veranda deserted. In response to his ring a maid came to the
open door. Her face was sad, with a beauty that had prematurely faded.
But it lighted pleasurably in recognition. Her hair was thick and tawny,
lying low over the brow; her eyes were a softly luminous brown and her
full lips sensitive and yielding. Lanstron, an intimate of the Galland
household, knew her story well and the part that Marta had played in it.

Some four years previously, when a baby was in prospect for Minna, who
wore no wedding-ring, Mrs. Galland had been inclined to send the maid to
an institution, "where they will take good care of her, my dear. That's
what such institutions are for. It is quite scandalous for her and for
us--never happened in our family before!"

Marta arched her eyebrows.

"We don't know!" she exclaimed softly.

"How can you think such a thing, let alone saying it--you, a Galland!"
her mother gasped in indignation.

"That is, if we go far back," said Marta. "At all events, we have no
precedent, so let's establish one by keeping her."

"But for her own sake! She will have to live with her shame!" Mrs.
Galland objected. "Let her begin afresh in the city. We shall give her a
good recommendation, for she is really an excellent servant. Yes, she
will readily find a place among strangers."

"Still, she doesn't want to go, and it would be cruel to send her away."

"Cruel! Why, Marta, do you think I would be cruel? Oh, very well, then
we will let her stay!"

       *       *       *       *       *

"Both are away at church. Mrs. Galland ought to be here any minute, but
Miss Galland will be later because of her children's class," said Minna.
"Will you wait on the veranda?"

He was saying that he would stroll in the garden when childish footsteps
were heard in the hall, and after a curly head had nestled against the
mother's skirts its owner, reminded of the importance of manners in the
world where the stork had left her, made a curtsey. Lanstron shook a
small hand which must have lately been on intimate terms with sugar or
jam.

"How do you do, flying soldier man?" chirruped Clarissa Eileen. It was
evident that she held Lanstron in high favor.

"Let me hear you say your name," said Lanstron.

Clarissa Eileen was triumphant. She had been waiting for days with the
revelation when he should make that old request. Now she enunciated it
with every vowel and consonant correctly and primly uttered; indeed, she
repeated it four or five times in proof of complete mastery.

"A pretty name. I've often wondered how you came to give it to her,"
said Lanstron to Minna.

"You do like it!" exclaimed Minna with girlish eagerness. "I gave her
the most beautiful name I could think of because"--she laid her hand
caressingly on the child's head and a madonna-like radiance stole into
her face--"because she might at least have a beautiful name when"--the
dull blaze of a recollection now burning in her eyes--"when there wasn't
much prospect of many beautiful things coming into her life; though I
know, of course, that the world thinks she ought to be called Maggie."

       *       *       *       *      *

Proceeding leisurely along the main path of the first terrace, Lanstron
followed it past the rear of the house to the old tower. Long ago the
moat that surrounded the castle had been filled in. The green of rows of
grape-vines lay against the background of a mat of ivy on the ancient
stone walls, which had been cut away from the loopholes set with
window-glass. The door was open, showing a room that had been closed in
by a ceiling of boards from the walls to the circular stairway that ran
aloft from the dungeons. On the floor of flags were cheap rugs. A number
of seed and nursery catalogues were piled on a round table covered with
a brown cloth.

"Hello!" Lanstron called softly. "Hello!" he called louder and yet
louder.

Receiving no answer, he retraced his steps and seated himself on the
second terrace in a secluded spot in the shadow of the first terrace
wall, where he could see any one coming up the main flight of steps from
the road. When Marta walked she usually came from town by that way. At
length the sound of a slow step from another direction broke on his car.
Some one was approaching along the path that ran at his feet. Around the
corner of the wall, in his workman's Sunday clothes of black, but still
wearing his old straw hat, appeared Feller, the gardener. He paused to
examine a rose-bush and Lanstron regarded him thoughtfully and sadly:
his white hair, his stoop, his graceful hands, their narrow finger-tips
turning over the leaves.

As he turned away he looked up, and a glance of definite and unfaltering
recognition was exchanged between the two men. Feller's hat was promptly
lowered enough to form a barrier between their eyes. His face was
singularly expressionless. It seemed withered, clayish, like the walls
of a furnace in which the fire has died out. After a few steps he paused
before another rose-bush. Meanwhile, both had swept the surroundings in
a sharp, covert survey. They had the garden to themselves.

"Gustave!" Lanstron exclaimed under his breath.

"Lanny!" exclaimed the gardener, turning over a branch of the rose-bush.
He seemed unwilling to risk talking openly with Lanstron.

"You look the good workman in his Sunday best to a T!" said Lanstron.

"Being stone-deaf," returned Feller, with a trace of drollery in his
voice, "I hear very well--at times. Tell me"--his whisper was quivering
with eagerness--"shall we fight? Shall we fight?"

"We are nearer to it than we have ever been in our time," Lanstron
replied.

The hat still shaded Feller's face, his stoop was unchanged, but the
branch in his hand shook.

"Honest?" he exclaimed. "Oh, the chance of it! the chance of it!"

"Gustave!" Lanstron's voice, still low, came in a gust of sympathy, and
the pocket which concealed his hand gave a nervous twitch as if it held
something alive and distinct from his own being. "The trial wears on
you! You feel you must break out?"

"No, I'm game--game, I tell you!" Still Feller spoke to the branch,
which was steady now in a firm hand. "No, I don't grow weary of the
garden and the isolation as long as there is hope. But being deaf,
always deaf, and yet hearing everything! Always stooped, even when the
bugles are sounding to the artillery garrison--that is somewhat
tiresome!"

"The idea of being deaf was yours, you know, Gustave," said Lanstron.

"Yes, and the right plan. It was fun at first going through the streets
and hearing people say, 'He's deaf as a stone!' and having everybody
work their lips at me while I pretended to study them in a dumb effort
to understand. Actors have two hours of it an evening, and an occasional
change of parts, but I act one part all the time. I get as taciturn as a
clam. If war doesn't come pretty soon I shall be ready for a monastery
of perpetual silence."

"Confound it, Gustave!" exclaimed Lanstron. "It's inhuman, old boy! You
shan't stay another day!" Discretion to the winds, he sprang to his
feet.

An impulse of the same sort overwhelmed Feller. His hand let go of the
branch. The brim of the hat shot up, revealing a face that was not old,
but in mercurial quickness of expressive, uncontrollable emotion was
young, handsomely and attractively young in its frame of prematurely
white hair. The stoop was wholly gone. He was tall now, his eyes
sparkling with wild, happy lights and the soles of the heavy workman's
shoes unconsciously drawn together in a military stance. Lanstron's
twitching hand flew from his pocket and with the other found Feller's
hand in a strong, warm, double grip. For a second's silence they
remained thus. Feller was the first to recover himself and utter a
warning.

"Miss Galland--Minna--some one might be looking."

He drew away abruptly, his face becoming suddenly old, his stoop
returning, and began to study the branch as before. Lanstron dropped
back to his seat and gazed at the brown roofs of the town. Thus they
might continue their conversation as guest and gardener.

"I didn't think you'd stick it out, but you wanted to try--you chose,"
said Lanstron. "Come--this afternoon--now!"

"This is best for me--this to the end of the chapter!" Feller replied
doggedly. "Because you say you didn't think I'd stick it out--ah, how
well you know me. Lanny!--is the one reason that I should."

"True!" Lanstron agreed. "A victory over yourself!"

"How often I have heard in imagination the outbreak of rifle-fire down
there by the white posts! How often I have longed for that day--for war!
I live for war!"

"It may never come," Lanstron said in frank protest. "And, for God's
sake, don't pray for it in that way!"

"Then I shall be patient--patient under all irritations. The worst is,"
and Feller raised his head heavily, in a way that seemed to emphasize
both his stoop and his age, "the worst is Miss Galland."

"Miss Galland! How?"

"She is learning the deaf-and-dumb alphabet in order the better to
communicate with me. She likes to talk of the flowers--gardening is a
passion with her, too--and all the while, in face of the honesty of
those big eyes of hers and of her gentle old mother's confidence, I am
living a lie! Oh, the satire of it! And I have not been used to lying.
That is my only virtue; at any rate, I was never a liar!"

"Then, why stay, Gustave? I will find something else for you."

"No!" Feller shot back irritably. "No!" he repeated resolutely. "I don't
want to go! I mean to be game--I--" He shifted his gaze dismally from
the bush which he still pretended to examine and suddenly broke off
with: "Miss Galland is coming!"

He started to move away with a gardener's shuffling steps, looking from
right to left for weeds. Then pausing, he glanced back, his face in
another transformation--that of a comedian.

"La, la, la!" he clucked, tossing his head gayly. "Depend on me, Lanny!
They'll never know I'm not deaf. I get my blue fits only on Sundays! And
deafness has its compensations. Think if I had to listen to all the
stories of my table companion, Peter, the coachman! La, la, la!" he
clucked again, before disappearing around a bend in the path. "La, la,
la! I'm the man for this part!"

Lanstron started toward the steps that Marta was ascending. She moved
leisurely, yet with a certain springy energy that suggested that she
might have come on the run without being out of breath or seeming to
have made an effort. Without seeing him, she paused before one of the
urns of hydrangeas in full bloom that flanked the third terrace wall,
and, as if she would encompass and plunge her spirit into their abundant
beauty, she spread out her arms and drew the blossoms together in a mass
in which she half buried her face. The act was delightful in its grace
and spontaneity. It was like having a page out of her secret self. It
brought the glow of his great desire into Lanstron's eyes.

"Hello, stranger!" she called as she saw him, and quickened her pace.

"Hello, pedagogue!" he responded.

As they shook hands they swung their arms back and forth like a pair of
romping children for a moment.

"We had a grand session of the school this morning, the largest class
ever!" she said. "And the points we scored off you soldiers! You'll find
disarmament already in progress when you return to headquarters. We're
irresistible, or at least," she added, with a flash of intensity, "we're
going to be some day."

"So you put on your war-paint!"

"It must be the pollen from the hydrangeas!" She flicked her
handkerchief from her belt and passed it to him. "Show that you know how
to be useful!"

He performed the task with deliberate care.

"Heavens! You even have some on your ear and some on your hair; but
I'll leave it on your hair; it's rather becoming. There you are!" he
concluded.

"Off my hair, too!"

"Very well. I always obey orders."

"I oughtn't to have asked you to do it at all!" she exclaimed with a
sudden change of manner as they started up to the house. "But a habit of
friendship, a habit of liking to believe in one's friends, was
uppermost. I forgot. I oughtn't even to have shaken hands with you!"

"Marta! What now, Marta?" he asked.

He had known her in reproach, in anger, in laughing mockery, in militant
seriousness, but never before like this. The pain and indignation in her
eyes came not from the sheer hurt of a wound but from the hurt of its
source. It was as if he had learned by the signal of its loss that he
had a deeper hold on her than he had realized.

"Yes, I have a bone to pick with you," she said, recovering a grim sort
of fellowship. "A big bone! If you're half a friend you'll give me the
very marrow of it."

"I am ready!" he answered more pathetically than philosophically.

"There's not time now; after luncheon, when mother is taking her nap,"
she concluded as they came to the last step and saw Mrs. Galland on the
veranda.




X

A LUNCHEON AT THE GALLANDS'


Seated at the head of the table at luncheon, Mrs. Galland, with her
round cheeks, her rather becoming double chin, and her nicely dressed
hair, almost snow-white now, suggested a girlhood in the Bulwer Lytton
and Octave Feuillet age, when darkened rooms were favored for the
complexion and it was the fashion for gentlewomen to faint on occasion.
She lived in the past; the present interested her only when it aroused
some memory. To-day all her memories were of the war of forty years ago.

"I remember how Mrs. Karly collapsed when they brought word of the death
of her son, and never recovered her mind. And I remember Eunice Steiner
when they brought Charles home looking so white--and it was the very day
set for their wedding! And I remember all the wounded gathered at the
foot of the terrace and being carried in here, while the guns were
roaring out on the plain--and now it's all coming again!"

"Why, mother, you're very blue to-day!" said Marta.

"We have had these crises before. We--" Lanstron began, rallying her.

"Oh, yes, you have reason and argument," she parried gently. "I have
only my feelings. But it's in the air--yes, war is in the air, as it was
that other time. And I remember that young private, only a boy, who lay
crumpled up on the steps where he fell. I bandaged him myself and helped
to make his position easier. Yes, I almost lifted him in my arms" She
was looking at the flowers on the table but not seeing them. She was
seeing the face of the young private forty years ago.

"He asked me to bring him a rose. He said the smell of roses was so
sweet and he felt so faint. I brought him the rose--and he was dead!"

"Yes, yes!" Marta breathed. She, too, in her quick imagination, was
seeing the young private and spatters of blood on the terrace. Lanstron
feasted his eyes on her face, which mirrored her emotion.

"Oh, the groans of the dying in the night and the cheering when the news
of victory came in!" Mrs. Galland continued. "I could not cheer. But
that was, long, long ago--long ago, and yet only yesterday! And now we
are to have it all over again. The young men must have their turn. They
will not be satisfied by the experience of their fathers. Yes, all over
again; still more horrible--and it was horrible enough then! I used to
get giddy easily. I do yet. But I didn't faint--no, not once through the
days of nursing, the weeks of suspense. I wondered afterward how I could
have endured so much."

"Are we of the septicized-serum age equal to it?" Marta exclaimed.

"Yes, we of the matter-of-fact, automatic gun-recoil age!" put in
Lanstron.

"Oh, mother," Marta went on, "I wish you would go with me to the class
some morning, you who have seen and felt war, and tell it all as you saw
it to the children!"

"But," remonstrated Mrs. Galland, "I'm an old-fashioned woman; and,
Marta, your father was an officer, as your grandfather was, too. I am
sure he would not approve of your school, and I could do nothing against
his wishes."

She looked up with moistening eyes to a portrait on the opposite wall
over the seat which her husband had occupied at table. Lanstron saw
there a florid, jaunty gentleman in riding-habit, gloves on knee, crop
in hand. The spirit of the first Galland or of the stern grandfather on
the side wall--with Blücher tufts in front of his ears sturdy defiance
of that parvenu Bonaparte and of his own younger brother who had fallen
fighting for Bonaparte--would have frowned on the descendant who had
filled the house with many guests and paid the bills with mortgages in
the ebbing tide of the family fortunes. But Mrs. Galland saw only a
hero. She shared his prejudices against the manufacturers of the town;
she saw the sale of land to be cut up into dwelling sites, which had
saved the Gallands from bankruptcy, as the working of the adverse fate
of modern tendencies. Even as she had left all details of business to
her husband, so she had of late left them to Marta's managing.

"Edward and I were just engaged before the outbreak of the war," she
proceeded. "How handsome he was in his Hussars' uniform! How frightened
I was and hew proud of his fine bravado when I heard him and a number of
fellow officers drinking here in this room to quick death and speedy
promotion! Do they still have that toast, Colonel?"

"Yes, in some regiments," Lanstron answered. He would not say that what
was good form in the days of the _beau sabreur_ was considered a little
theatrical in the days of the automatic gun-recoil.

"And when he came--oh, when you came home," breathed Mrs. Galland to the
portrait, "with the scar on your cheek, how tanned and strong your hands
were and how white mine as you held them so fast! And then"--she smiled
in peaceful content--"then I did faint. I am not ashamed of it--I did!"

"Without any danger of falling far!" said Lanstron happily.

"Or with much of a jar!" added Marta.

"You prattling children!" gasped Mrs. Galland, her cheeks flushing. "Do
you think that I fainted purposely? I would have been ashamed to my
dying day if I had feigned it!"

"And you did not faint in the presence of the dead and dying!" said
Marta thoughtfully, wonderingly, leaning nearer to her mother, her eyes
athirst and drinking.

"But I believe it is only a wispy-waspy sort of girl that faints at all
these days. They're all so businesslike," said Mrs. Galland--"so
businesslike that they are ceasing to marry."

How many girls she had known to wait a little too long! If anything
could awaken Marta to action it ought to be war, which was a great
match-maker forty years ago. The thought of a lover in danger had
precipitated wavering hearts into engagements. Marta's mood was such
that she received the hint openly and playfully to-day.

"Oh, I don't despair!" she exclaimed, straightening her shoulders and
drawing in her chin with a mock display of bravery. "I believe it was in
an English novel that I read that any woman without a hump can get any
man she sets out for. It is a matter of determination and concentration
and a wise choice of vulnerable objects."

"Marta, Marta!" gasped Mrs. Galland. In her tone was a volume of
lamentation.

"Now that I'm twenty-seven mother is ready to take any risk on my
behalf, if it is masculine. By the time I'm thirty she will be ready to
give me to a peddler with a harelip!" she said mischievously.

"A peddler with a harelip! Marta, will you never be serious?"

"Some day, mother," Marta went on, "when we find the right man, you hold
him while I propose, and together we'll surely--"

Mrs. Galland could not resist laughing, which was one way to stop
further absurdities--absurdities concealing a nervous strain they
happened to be this time--while Colonel Lanstron was a little flushed
and ill at ease. She had a truly silvery laugh--the kind no longer in
fashion among the gentry since golden laughs came in,--that went well
with the dimples dipping into her pink cheeks.

Contrary to custom, she did not excuse herself immediately after
luncheon for her afternoon nap, but kept battling with her nods until
nature was victorious and the fell fast asleep. Marta, grown restless
with impatience, suggested to Lanstron that they stroll in the garden,
and they took the path past the house toward the castle tower, stopping
in an arbor with high hedges on either side around a statue of Mercury.

"Now!" exclaimed Marta narrowly. "It was you, Lanny, who recommended
Feller to us as a gardener, competent though deaf!" With literal brevity
she told how she had proved him to be a man of most sensitive hearing.
"I didn't let him know that he was discovered. I felt too much pity for
him to do that. You brought him here--you, Lanny, you are the one to
explain."

"True, he is not deaf!" Lanstron replied.

"You knew he was not deaf, while we wrote our messages to him and I have
been learning the deaf-and-dumb alphabet! It was pretty fun, wasn't it?"

"Not fun--no, Marta!" he parried.

"He is a spy?" she asked.

"Yes, a spy. You can put things in a bright light, Marta!" He found
words coming with difficulty in face of the pain and disillusion of her
set look.

"Using some broken man as a pawn; setting him as a spy in the garden
where you have been the welcome friend!" she exclaimed. "A spy on
what--on my mother, on Minna, on me, on the flowers, as a part of this
monstrous game of trickery and lies that you are playing?"

There was no trace of anger in her tone. It was that of one mortally
hurt. Anger would have been easier to bear than the measuring,
penetrating wonder that found him guilty of such a horrible part. Those
eyes would have confused Partow himself with the steady, welling
intensity of their gaze. She did not see how his left hand was twitching
and how he stilled its movement by pressing it against the bench.

"You will take Feller with you when you go!" she said, rising.

Lanstron dropped his head in a kind of shaking throb of his whole body
and raised a face white with appeal.

"Marta!" He was speaking to a profile, very sensitive and yet like
ivory. "I've no excuse for such an abuse of hospitality except the
obesssion of a loathsome work that some man must do and I was set to do.
My God, Marta! I cease to be natural and human. I am a machine. I keep
thinking, what if war comes and some error of mine let the enemy know
where to strike the blow of victory; or if there were information I
might have gained and failed to gain that would have given us the
victory--if, because I had not done my part, thousands of lives of our
soldiers were sacrificed needlessly!"

At that she turned on him quickly, her face softening.

"You do think of that--the lives?"

"Yes, why shouldn't I?"

"Of those on your side!" she exclaimed, turning away.

"Yes, of those first," he replied. "And, Marta, I did not tell you why
Feller was here because he did not want me to, and I was curious to see
if he had sustained power enough to keep you from discovering his
simulation. I did not think he would remain. I thought that in a week he
would tire of the part. But now you must have the whole story. You will
listen?"

"I should not be fair if I did not, should I?" she replied, with a weary
shadow of a smile.




XI

MARTA HEARS FELLER'S STORY


To tell the story as Lanstron told it is to have it from the partisan
lips of a man speaking for a man out of the depths of a friendship grown
into the fibre of youth. It is better written by the detached narrator.

Gustave Feller's father had died when Gustave was twelve and his mother
found it easy to spoil an only son who was handsome and popular. He
suffered the misfortune of a mental brilliancy that learns too readily
and of a personal charm that wins its way too easily. He danced well; he
was facile at the piano; and he had so pronounced a gift as an amateur
actor that a celebrated professional had advised him to go on the stage.

The two entering the cadet officers' school at the same time, chance
made them roommates and choice soon made them chums. They had in common
cleverness and the abundant energy that must continually express itself
in action, and a mutual attraction in the very complexity of dissimilar
traits that wove well in companionship.

While they were together Lanstron was a brake on his friend's impulses
of frivolity which carried him to extremes; but they separated after
receiving their commissions, Feller being assigned to the
horse-artillery and Lanstron to the infantry and later to the staff. In
charge of a field-battery at manoeuvres Feller was at his best. But in
the comparative idleness of his profession he had much spare time for
amusement, which led to gambling. Soon many debts hung over his head,
awaiting liquidation at high rates of interest when he should come into
the family property.

To the last his mother, having ever in mind a picture of him as a fine
figure riding at the head of his guns, was kept in ignorance of this
side of his life. With her death, when he had just turned thirty, a
fortune was at his disposal. He made an oath of his resolution to pay
his debts, marry and settle down and maintain his inheritance
unimpaired. This endured for a year before it began to waver; and the
wavering was soon followed by headlong obsession which fed on itself. As
his passion for gambling grew it seemed to consume the better elements
of his nature. Lanstron reasoned with him, then implored, then stormed;
and Feller, regularly promising to reform, regularly fell each time into
greater excesses. Twice Lanstron saved him from court-martial, but the
third time no intercession or influence would induce his superiors to
overlook the offence. Feller was permitted to resign to avoid a scandal,
and at thirty-three, penniless, disgraced, he faced the world and sought
the new land which has been the refuge for numbers of his kind. Only one
friend bade him farewell as he boarded a steamer for New York, and this
was Lanstron.

"Keep away from cities! Seek the open country! And write me,
Gustave--don't fail!" said Lanstron.

Letters full of hope came from a Wyoming ranch; letters that told how
Feller had learned to rope a steer and had won favor with his fellows
and the ranch boss; of a one-time gourmet's healthy appetite for the
fare of the chuck wagon. Lanstron, reading more between the lines than
in them, understood that as muscles hardened with the new life the old
passion was dying and in its place was coming something equally
dangerous as a possible force in driving his ardent nature to some
excess for the sake of oblivion. Finally, Feller broke out with the
truth.

"My hair is white now, Lanny," he wrote. "I have aged ten years in these
two. With every month of this new life the horror of my career has
become clear to me. I lie awake thinking of it. I feel unworthy to
associate with my simple, outspoken, free-riding companions. Remorse is
literally burning up my brain. It is better to have my mind diseased, my
moral faculties blurred, my body unsound; for to be normal, healthy,
industrious is to remember the whole ghastly business of my dishonor.

"'Pay back! Pay back in some way!' a voice keeps saying. 'Pay back! Have
an object in mind. Get to work on something that will help you to pay
back or you will soon take a plunge to lower depths than you have yet
sounded.'

"It is not the gambling, not the drinking--no! The thing that I cannot
forget, that grows more horrible the more keenly awake clean living
makes me to the past, is that I am inwardly foul--as foul as a priest
who has broken his vows. I have disgraced the uniform--my country's
uniform. I may never wear that uniform again; never look the meanest
private in a battery in the face without feeling my cheeks hot with
shame. While I cannot right myself before the service, I should like to
do something to right myself with my conscience. I should like to see a
battery march past and look at the flag and into the faces of the
soldiers of my country feeling that I had atoned--feeling so for my own
peace of mind--atoned by some real deed of service.

"I have been reading how Japanese volunteers made a bridge of their
bodies for their comrades into a Russian trench, and when everybody else
felt a horrible, uncanny admiration for such madness I have envied them
the glorious exhilaration of the moment before the charge. That was a
sufficient reward in life for death. So I come again to you for help.
Now that you are chief of intelligence you must have many secret agents
within the inner circle of the army's activities. In the midst of peace
and the commonplaces of drill and manoeuvres there must be dangerous
and trying work where the only distinction is service for the cause--our
cause of three million against five. Find a task for me, no matter how
mean, thankless, or dangerous, Lanny. The more exacting it is the more
welcome, for the better will be my chance to get right with myself."

"Come!" was Lanstron's cable in answer.

At the time he had not chosen any employment for Feller. He was thinking
only that something must be found. When he heard of the death of the
Gallands' gardener he recollected that before the passion for gambling
overtook Feller he had still another passion besides his guns. The
garden of the Feller estate had been famous in its neighborhood. Young
Lanstron had not been more fond of the society of an engine-driver than
young Feller of a gardener's. On a holiday in the capital with his
fellow cadets he would separate from them to spend hours in the
botanical gardens. Once, after his downfall began, at a riotous dinner
party he had broken into a temper with a man who had torn a rose to
pieces in order to toss the petals over the table.

"Flowers have souls!" he had cried in one of his tumultuous, abandoned
reversions to his better self which his companions found eccentric and
diverting. "That rose is the only thing in the room that is not foul
--and I am the foulest of all!"

The next minute, perhaps after another glass of champagne, he would be
winning a burst of laughter by his mimicry of a gouty old colonel
reprimanding him for his erring career.

Naturally, in the instinct of friendship, Lanstron's own account left
out the unpleasant and dwelt on the pleasant facts of Feller's career.

"His colonel did not understand him," he said. "But I knew the depths of
his fine spirit and generous heart. I knew his talent. I knew that he
was a victim of unsympathetic surroundings, of wealth, of love of
excitement, and his own talent. Where he was, something must happen. He
bubbled with energy. The routine of drill, the same old chaff of the
mess, the garrison gossip, the long hours of idleness while the busy
world throbs outside, which form a privileged life to most officers,
were stifling to him. 'Let's set things going!' he would say in the old
days, and we'd set them. Most of our demerits were for some kind of
deviltry. And how he loved the guns! I can see the sparkle of his men's
eyes at sight of him. Nobody could get out of them what he could. If he
had not been put in the army as a matter of family custom, if he had
been an actor, or if he and I had gone to build bridges, then he might
have a line of capital letters and periods after his name, and he would
not be a spy or I an employer of spies, doing the work of a detective
agency in an officer's uniform because nobody but an officer may do it."

At first Marta listened rigidly, but as the narrative proceeded her
interest grew. When Lanstron quoted Feller's appeal for any task,
however mean and thankless, she nodded sympathetically and
understandingly; when he related the incident of the rose, its appeal
was irresistible. She gave a start of delight and broke silence.

"Yes. I recall just how he looked as he stood on the porch, his head
bent, his shoulders stooped, twirling his hat in his hands, while mother
and I examined him as to his qualifications," she said. "I remember his
words. He said that he knew flowers and that, like him, flowers could
not hear; but perhaps he would be all the better gardener because he
could not hear. He was so ingratiating; yet his deafness seemed such a
drawback that I hesitated."

Following the path to the tower leisurely, they had reached the tower.
Feller's door was open. Marta looked into the room, finding in the neat
arrangement of its furniture a new significance. He was absent, for it
was the dinner hour.

"And on my recommendation you took him," Lanstron continued.

"Yes, on yours, Lanny, on a friend's! You"--she put a cold emphasis on
the word--"you wanted him here for your plans! And why? You haven't
answered that yet. What purpose of the war game does he serve in our
garden?"

His look pleaded for patience, while he tried to smile, which was rather
difficult in face of her attitude.

"Not altogether in the garden; partly in the tower," he replied. "You
are to be in the whole secret and in such a way as to make my temptation
clear, I hope. First, I think you ought to see the setting. Let us go
in"

Impelled by the fascination of Feller's romantic story and by a
curiosity that Lanstron's manner accentuated, she entered the room.
Apparently Lanstron was familiar with the premises. Passing through the
sitting-room into the room adjoining, where Feller stored his tools, he
opened a door that gave onto the circular stone steps leading down into
the dungeon tunnel.

"I think we had better have a light," he said, and when he had fetched
one from the bedchamber he descended the steps, asking her to follow.

They were in a passage six feet in height and about three feet broad,
which seemed to lead on indefinitely into clammy darkness. The dewy
stone walls sparkled in fantastic and ghostly iridescence under the rays
from the lantern. The dank air lay moist against their faces.

"It's a long time since I've been here," said Marta, glad to break the
uncanny sound of their footsteps in the weird silence with her voice.
"Not since I was a youngster. Then I came on a dare to see if there were
goblins. There weren't any; at least, none that cared to manifest
himself to me."

"We have a goblin here now that we are nursing for the Grays--an
up-to-date one that is quite visible," said Lanstron. "This is far
enough." He paused and raised the lantern. With its light full in her
face, she blinked. "There, at the height of your chin!"

She noted a metal button painted gray, set at the side of one of the
stones of the wall, which looked unreal. She struck the stone with her
knuckles and it gave out the sound of hollow wood, which was followed,
as an echo, by a little laugh from Lanstron. Pressing the button, a
panel door flew open, revealing a telephone mouthpiece and receiver set
in the recess. Without giving him time to refuse permission, her thought
all submissive to the prompting spirit of adventure, she took down the
receiver and called: "Hello!"

"The wire isn't connected," explained Lanstron.

Marta hung up the receiver and closed the door abruptly in a spasm of
reaction.

"Like a detective play!" were the first words that sprang to her lips.
"Well?" As she faced around her eyes glittered in the lantern's rays.
"Well, have you any other little tricks to show me? Are you a
sleight-of-hand artist, too, Lanny? Are you going to take a machine gun
out of your hat?"

"That is the whole bag," he answered. "I thought you'd rather see it
than have it described to you."

"Having seen it, let us go!" she said, in a manner that implied further
reckoning to come.

"If out of a thousand possible sources one source succeeds, then the
cost and pains of the other nine hundred and ninety-nine are more than
repaid," he was saying urgently, the soldier uppermost in him. "Some of
the best service we have had has been absurd in its simplicity and its
audacity. In time of war more than one battle has been decided by a
thing that was a trifle in itself. No matter what your preparation, you
can never remove the element of chance. An hour gained in information
about your enemy's plans may turn the tide in your favor. A Chinese
peasant spy, because he happened to be intoxicated, was able to give the
Japanese warning in time for Kuroki to make full dispositions for
receiving the Russian attack in force at the Sha-ho. There are many
other incidents of like nature in history. So it is my duty to neglect
no possible method, however absurd."

By this time he was at the head of the steps. Standing to one side, he
offered his hand to assist Marta. But she seemed not to see it. Her
aspect was that of downright antagonism.

"However absurd! yes, it is absurd to think that you can make me a party
to any of your plans, for--" She broke off abruptly with starting eyes,
as if she had seen an apparition.

Lanstron turned and through the door of the tool-room saw Feller
entering the sitting-room. He was not the bent, deferential old
gardener, nor was he the Feller changed to youth as he thought of
himself at the head of a battery. His features were hard-set, a fighting
rage burning in his eyes, his sinews taut as if about to spring upon an
adversary. When he recognized the intruders he turned limp, his head
dropped, hiding his face with his hat brim, and he steadied himself by
resting a hand on the table edge.

"Oh, it's you, Lanny--Colonel Lanstron!" he exclaimed thickly. "I saw
that some one had come in here and naturally I was alarmed, as nobody
but myself ever enters. And Miss Galland!" He removed his hat
deferentially and bowed; his stoop returned and the lines of his face
drooped. "I was so stupid; it did not occur to me that you might be
showing the tower to Colonel Lanstron."

"We are sorry to have given you a fright!" said Marta very gently.

"Eh? eh?" queried Feller, again deaf. "Fright? Oh, no, no fright. It
might have been some boys from the town marauding."

He was about to withdraw, in keeping with his circumspect adherence to
his part, which he played with a sincerity that half-convinced even
himself at times that he was really deaf, when the fire flickered back
suddenly to his eyes and he glanced from Lanstron to the stairway in
desperate inquiry.

"Wait, Feller! Three of us share the secret now. These are Miss
Galland's premises. I thought best that she should know everything,"
said Lanstron.

"Everything!" exclaimed Feller. "Everything--" the word caught in his
throat. "You mean my story, too?" He was neither young nor old now. He
seemed nondescript and miserable. "She knows who I am?" he asked.

"Yes!" Lanstron answered.

"Lanny!" This almost reproachfully, as if the ethics of friendship had
been abused.

"Yes. I'm sorry, Gustave. I--" Lanstron began miserably.

"But why not?" said Feller, with a wan attempt at a smile. "You see--I
mean--it does not matter!" he concluded in a hopeless effort at
philosophy.

"My thoughtlessness, my callousness, my obsession with my work! I should
not have told your story," said Lanstron.

"His story!" exclaimed Marta, with a puzzled look to Lanstron before she
turned to Feller with a look of warm sympathy. "Why, there is no story!
You came with excellent recommendations. You are our very efficient
gardener. That is all we need to know. Isn't that the way you wish it,
Mr. Feller?"

"Yes, just that!" he said softly, raising his eyes to her in gratitude.
"Thank you, Miss Galland!"

He was going after another "Thank you!" and a bow; going with the slow
step and stoop of his part, when Lanstron, with a masculine roughness of
impulse which may be a sublime gentleness, swung him around and seized
his hands in a firm caress.

"Forgive me, Gustave!" he begged. "Forgive the most brutal of all
injuries--that which wounds a friend's sensibilities."

"Why, there is nothing I could ever have to forgive you, Lanny," he
said, returning Lanstron's pressure while for an instant his quickening
muscles gave him a soldierly erectness. Then his attitude changed to one
of doubt and inquiry. "And you found out that I was not deaf when you
had that fall on the terrace?" he asked, turning to Marta. "That is how
you happened to get the whole story? Tell me, honestly!"

"Yes"

"Had you suspected me before that?"

"Yes, if you must know. I observed you speak to a bumblebee you could
not see," she said frankly, though she knew that her answer hurt him.
There was no parleying with the insistence of his pale, drawn face and
his fingers playing in nervous tension on the table edge. Suddenly he
smiled as he had at the bumblebee.

"There you are again, confound you!" he exclaimed, shaking his finger at
the imaginary intruder on the silence of the garden. "Did anyone else
suspect?" he asked in fierce intensity.

"No, I don't think so."

He drew back with a long breath of relief, while his fingers now beat a
merry tattoo.

"You saw so much more of me than the others, Miss Galland," he said with
a charming bow, "and you are so quick to observe that you are hardly a
fair test. That little thunderer will not get me again. I'll fool the
ones I want to fool. And I'm learning, Lanny, learning all the
time--getting a little deafer all the time. Miss Galland," he added,
struck in visible contrition by a new thought, "I am sorry"--he paused
with head down for an instant--"very sorry to have deceived you."

"But you are still a deaf gardener to me," said Marta, finding
consolation in pleasing him.

"Eh? eh?" He put his hand to his ear as he resumed his stoop. "Yes,
yes," he added, as a deaf man will when understanding of a remark which
he failed at first to catch comes to him in an echo. "Yes, the gardener
has no past," he declared in the gentle old gardener's voice, "when all
the flowers die every year and he thinks only of next year's
blossoms--of the future!"

Now the air of the room seemed to be stifling him, that of the roofless
world of the garden calling him. His face spoke pitifully a desire for
escape as he withdrew. The bent figure disappeared around a turn in the
path and they listened without moving until the sound of his slow,
dragging footfalls had died away.

"When he is serving those of his own social station I can see how it
would be easier for him not to have me know," said Marta. "Sensitive,
proud, and intense--" and a look of horror appeared in her eyes. "As he
came across the room his face was transformed. I imagine it was like
that of a man giving no quarter in a bayonet charge!"

"His secret was at stake!" Lanstron said in ready championship.

She put up her hand as if to shut out a picture.

"Don't let us think of it!" she exclaimed with a shudder. "He did not
know what he was doing. His is one of the natures that have moments when
an impulse throws them off their balance and ruins the work of years.
No, we must think only of his sacrifice, his enforced humiliation, in
order to try to make amends for the past according to his light. No one
could refuse him sympathy and respect."

Feller had won the day for himself where a friend's pleas might have
failed. This was as it should be, Lanstron thought; and he smiled
happily over the rare thing in Marta that felt the appeal which Feller
had for him.

"The right view--the view that you were bound to take!" he said.

"And yet, I don't know your plans for him, Lanny. Pity is one thing;
there is another thing to consider," she replied, with an abrupt change
of tone. "But first let us leave Feller's quarters. We are intruders
here."




XII

A CRISIS WITHIN A CRISIS


"A broken-hearted man playing deaf; a secret telephone installed on our
premises without our consent--this is all I know so far," said Marta,
who was opposite Lanstron at one end of the circular seat in the arbor
of Mercury, leaning back, with her weight partly resting on her hand
spread out on the edge of the bench, head down, lashes lowered so that
they formed a curtain for her glance. "I listen!" she added.

"Of course, with our three millions against their five, the Grays will
take the offensive," he said. "For us, the defensive. La Tir is in an
angle. It does not belong in the permanent tactical line of our
defences. Nevertheless, there will be hard fighting here. The Browns
will fall back step by step, and we mean, with relatively small cost to
ourselves, to make the Grays pay a heavy price for each step--just as
heavy as we can!"

They had often argued before with all the weapons known to controversy;
but now the realization that his soldierly precision was bringing the
forces of war into their personal relations struck her cold, with a
logic as cold as his own seemed to her.

"You need not use euphonious terms," she said without lifting her lashes
or any movement except a quick, nervous gesture of her free hand that
fell back into place on her lap. "What you mean is that you will kill as
many as possible of the Grays, isn't it? And if you could kill five for
every man you lost, that would be splendid, wouldn't it?"

"I don't think of it as splendid. There is nothing splendid about war,"
he objected; "not to me, Marta."

"Still you would like to kill five to one, even ten to one, wouldn't
you?" she persisted.

"Marta, you are merciless!"

"So is war. It should be treated mercilessly."

"Yes, twenty to one if they try to take our land!" he declared. "If we
could keep up that ratio the war would not last more than a week. It
would mean a great saving of lives in the end. We should win."

"Exactly. Thank you. Westerling could not have said it better as a
reason for another army-corps. For the love of humanity--the humanity of
our side--please give us more weapons for murder! And after you have
made them pay five to one or ten to one in human lives for the tangent,
what then? Go on! I want to look at war face to face, free of the
will-o'-the-wisp glamour that draws on soldiers!"

"We fall back to our first line of defence, fighting all the time. The
Grays occupy La Tir, which will be out of the reach of our guns. Your
house will no longer be in danger, and we happen to know that Westerling
means to make it his headquarters."

"Our house Westerling's headquarters!" she repeated. With a start that
brought her up erect, alert, challenging, her lashes flickering, she
recalled that Westerling had said at parting that he should see her if
war came. This corroborated Lanstron's information. One side wanted a
spy in the garden; the other a general in the house. Was she expected to
make a choice? He had ceased to be Lanny. He personified war. Westerling
personified war. "I suppose you have spies under his very nose--in his
very staff offices?" she asked.

"And probably he has in ours," said Lanstron, "though we do our best to
prevent it."

"What a pretty example of trust among civilized nations!" she exclaimed.
"And you say that Westerling, who commands the killing on his side, will
be in no danger?"

"Naturally not. As you know, a chief of staff must be at the wire head
where all information centres, free of interruption or confusion or any
possibility of broken lines of communication with his corps and
divisions."

"Then Partow will not be in any danger?"

"For the same reasons, no."

"How comfortable! In perfect safety themselves, they will order other
men to death!"

"Marta, you are unjust!" exclaimed Lanstron, for he revered Partow as
disciple reveres master. "Partow has the iron cross!"--the prized iron
cross given to both officers and men of the Browns for exceptional
courage in action and for that alone. "He won it leading a second charge
with a bullet in his arm, after he had lost thirty per cent, of his
regiment. The second charge succeeded."

"Yes, I understand," she went on a little wildly. "And perhaps the
colonel on the other side, who fought just as bravely and had even
heavier losses, did not get the bronze cross of the Grays because he
failed. Yes, I understand that bravery is a requisite of the military
cult. You must take some risk or you will not cause enough slaughter to
win either iron or bronze crosses. And, Lanny, are you a person of such
distinction in the business of killing that you also will be out of
danger?"

She had forgotten about the telephone; she had forgotten the picture of
dare-devil nerve he made when he rose from the wreck of his plane. If
his work were to make war, her work was against war--the mission of her
life as she saw it in the intense, passionate moments when some new
absurdity of its processes appeared to her. She was ready to seize any
argument his talk offered to combat the things for which he stood. She
did not see, as her eyes poured her hot indignation into his, that his
maimed hand was twitching or how he bit his lips and flushed before he
replied:

"Each one goes where he is sent, link by link, down from the chief of
staff. Only in this way can you have that solidarity, that harmonious
efficiency which means victory."

"An autocracy, a tyranny over the lives of all the adult males in
countries that boast of the ballot and self-governing institutions!" she
put in.

"But I hope," he went on, with the quickening pulse and eager smile that
used to greet a call from Feller to "set things going" in their cadet
days, "that I may take out a squadron of dirigibles. After all this spy
business, that would be to my taste."

"And if you caught a regiment in close formation with a shower of bombs,
that would be positively heavenly, wouldn't it?" She bent nearer to him,
her eyes flaming demand and satire.

"No! War--necessary, horrible, hellish!" he replied. Something in her
seemed to draw out the brutal truth she had asked for in place of
euphonious terms.

"You apparently know where your profession ought to feel perfectly at
home--but what is the use? What?" She put her hands over her face and
shuddered. "I grow savage; but it is because I have known you so well
and because everything you say brings up its answer irresistibly to my
mind. I keep thinking of what mother said at luncheon--of her certainty
that war is coming. I see the garden spattered with blood, the wounded
and the dying--an eddy in the conflict! And I am in a controversial eddy
whirling round and round away from the main current of what you were to
tell me." She let her hands drop, but her eyes still held their lights
of hostility. "Go on. I listen!"

"When I became chief of intelligence I found that an underground wire
had been laid to the castle from the Eighth Division headquarters, which
will be our general staff headquarters in time of war," he said. "The
purpose was the same as now, but abandoned as chimerical. All that was
necessary was to install the instrument, which Feller did. I, too, saw
the plan as chimerical, yet it was a chance--the one out of a thousand.
If it should happen to succeed we should play with our cards concealed
and theirs on the table."

"The noble art of war, so sportsmanlike!" she exclaimed. "So like the
rules and ideals of the Olympic games! But the games will not serve to
keep nations virile. They must shed blood!"

"Sportsmanlike? Not in the least!" he said. "The sport and glamour of
war are past. The army becomes a business, a trade that ought to be
uniformed in blue jumpers rather than gold lace. We are in an era of
enormous forces, untried tactics, and rapidly changing conditions. This
is why the big nations hesitate to make war; why they prepare well; why
the stake is so great that the smallest detail must not be overlooked."

She could not hold back her arguments, reason was so unquestionably on
her side.

"Yes, the cunning of the fox, the brutality of Cain, using modern
science and invention! Feint and draw your enemy into a cul-de-sac;
screen your flank attacks; mask your batteries and hold their fire till
the infantry charge is ripe for decimation! Oh, I have been brought up
among soldiers! I know!"

"The rest of Feller's part you have guessed already," he concluded. "You
can see how a deaf, inoffensive old gardener would hardly seem to know a
Gray soldier from a Brown; how it might no more occur to Westerling to
send him away than the family dog or cat; how he might retain his
quarters in the tower; how he could judge the atmosphere of the staff,
whether elated or depressed, pick up scraps of conversation, and, as a
trained officer, know the value of what he heard and report it over the
'phone to Partow's headquarters."

"But what about the aeroplanes?" she asked. "I thought you were to
depend on them for scouting."

"We shall use them, but they are the least tried of all the new
resources," he said. "A Gray aeroplane may cut a Brown aeroplane down
before it returns with the news we want. At most, when the aviator may
descend low enough for accurate observation he can see only what is
actually being done. Feller would know Westerling's plans before they
were even in the first steps of execution. This"--playing the thought
happily--"this would be the ideal arrangement, while our planes and
dirigibles were kept over our lines to strike down theirs. And, Marta,
that is all," he concluded. "I've tried to make everything clear."

"You have, quite!" Marta replied decisively. "Now it is my turn to
talk."

"You have been talking a little already!" he intimated good-naturedly.

"Only interruptions. That's not really talking," she answered, and broke
into a sharp little laugh. A laugh was helpful to both after such a taut
colloquy, but it seemed only to renew her energies for conflict. "If
there is war, the moment that Feller's ruse is discovered he will be
shot as a spy?" she asked.

"I warned him of that," said Lanstron. "I made the situation plain. He
refused the assignments I first suggested to him. He objected that they
did not offer any real expiation; they were not difficult or hazardous
enough. I saw that I could not trick his conscience--what a conscience
old Gustave has!--by any nominal task. When I mentioned this one he was
instantly keen. The deafness was his idea of a ruse for his purpose. He
wanted his secret kept. Thinking that his weakness for change would not
let him bear the monotony of a gardener's life as he saw himself bearing
it in imagination, I recommended him to you. And there was the
chance--the thousandth chance, Marta! He is a soldier, with a soldier's
fatalism. He sees no more danger in this than in commanding a battery in
a crisis."

"Naturally, as he is all impulse and fire. But you are the tempered
steel of self-control. You should save him from his impulses, not make
use of them."

"You put it bluntly, Marta. You--"

"My turn to talk!" she reminded him. "Did you of all her views of
Feller from his entrance to his quarters till he had gone. Her lips,
which had kept so firm in argument, were parted and trembling in
sympathy.

"I can see how he would take it!" she exclaimed. "I see his white hair,
his eyes, his fingers trembling on the edge of the table, his utter
dejection--and then impulse, headlong, irresponsible, craving the
devil's company!"

"Yes, nothing could hold him," Lanstron agreed. "What makes it worse is
that with regular living, the pleasure of the garden, and a settled
purpose I have noticed his improvement already!"

"There is something so fine about him, something that deserves to win
out against his weaknesses," she said reflectively.

"If there is no war, I hope--after a year or so, I hope and believe that
I may have him rewarded in some way that would make him feel that he had
atoned."

"And we have been talking as if war were due to-morrow!" she exclaimed.
The breaking light of a discovery, followed by a wave of happy relief,
swept over her responsive features, from relaxing brows to chin, which
gave a toss on its own account. "Why, of course, Lanny! Till war does
come he is only a gardener with an illusion that is giving mental
strength. Why didn't you put it that way before?" she asked in surprise
at so easy a solution having escaped them. "Let him stay, at least until
war comes."

"And then?"

"Lanny, you yourself, with all your information, you don't think--"

"No; though we are nearer it than ever before, it seems to me," he said,
choosing his words carefully. "But it is likely that diplomacy will find
its way out of this crisis as it has out of many others."

"Then we'll leave that question till the evil day," she replied. "We
have had a terrific argument, Lanny, haven't we? And you have won!"

Her fingers flew out to his arm and rested lightly there after an
instant's firm pressure, as was her wont after an argument and they
sheathed their blades. Their comradeship seemed to be restored in all
its old glory of freedom from petty restraint. He was sure of one thing:
that she would let her fingers remain on no other man's sleeve in this
fashion; and he hoped that she would let them remain there a long time.
Very foolish he was about her, very foolish for a piece of human
machinery driven by the dynamo of a human will.

"I have an impression that your goodness of heart has won," he suggested
gently.

"Or rather let us say that Feller has won."

"Better still, yes, Feller has won!" he agreed. "Oh, it is good, good,
good to be here with you, Marta, away from the grind for a little
while," he was saying, in the fulness of his anticipation of the hours
they should have together before he had to go, when they heard the sound
of steps. He looked around to see an orderly from the nearest military
wireless station.

"I was told it was urgent, sir," said the orderly, in excuse for his
intrusion, as he passed a telegram to Lanstron.

Immediately Lanstron felt the touch of the paper his features seemed to
take on a mask that concealed his thought as he read:

"Take night express. Come direct from station to me. Partow."

This meant that he would be expected at Partow's office at eight the
next morning. He wrote his answer; the orderly saluted and departed at a
rapid pace; and then, as a matter of habit of the same kind that makes
some men wipe their pens when laying them down, he struck a match and
set fire to one corner of the paper, which burned to his fingers' ends
before he tossed the charred remains away. Marta imagined what he would
be like with the havoc of war raging around him--all self-possession and
mastery; but actually he was trying to reassure himself that he ought
not to feel petulant over a holiday cut short.

"I shall have to go at once," he said. "Marta, if there were to be war
very soon--within a week or two weeks--what would be your attitude about
Feller's remaining?"

"To carry out his plan, you mean?"

"Yes."

There was a perceptible pause on her part.

"Let him stay," she answered. "I shall have time to decide even after
war begins."

"But instantly war begins you must go!" he declared urgently.

"You forget a precedent," she reminded him. "The Galland women have
never deserted the Galland house!"

"I know the precedent. But this time the house will be in the thick of
the fighting."

"It has been in the thick of the fighting before," she said, with a
gesture of impatience.

"Not this kind of fighting, Marta," he proceeded very soberly. "Other
wars are no criterion for this. I know about the defences of the tangent
because I helped to plan them. In order to keep the enemy in ignorance
we have made no permanent fortifications. But the engineers and the
material will be ready, instantly the frontier is closed to
intelligence, to construct defences suited to a delaying and punishing
action. Every human being will be subject to martial law; every resource
at military command. Every hill, house, ditch, and tree will be used as
cover or protection and will be subject to attack."

Not argument this, but the marshalling of facts of the kind in which he
dealt as unanswerable evidence, while she listened with a still face and
dilating eyes that did not look at him until he had finished. Then a
smile came, a faint, drawn smile of irony, and her eyes staring into his
were chilling and greenish-black in their anger.

"And the house of a friend meant nothing! It was only fuel for the hell
you devise!" she said, making each word count like shot singing over
glare ice.

"It is only fair to myself to say that when I laid the sheets of my map
before Partow I had excluded your house and grounds," he pleaded in
defence. "His thumb pounced on that telltale blank space. 'A key-point!
So this is your tendon of Achilles, eh?' he said in his blunt fashion."

"The blunt fashion is admired by soldiers," she replied without
softening. "Yes, he could play chess with heaps of bodies! He is worse
than Westerling!"

"No, he would use his own premises, his brother's, his father's if it
would help. Well, then he took a pen and filled in the blank space with
the detail which is to make your house and garden the centre of an
inferno."

"How Christian!" breathed Marta. "I suppose he loves his grandchildren
and that they are taught the Lord's prayer!"

"I believe his only pastime is playing with them," admitted Lanstron,
stumbling on, trying to be loyal to Partow, to duty, to country, no
longer calm or dispassionate, but demoralized under the lash. "He tells
them that when they are grown he hopes there will be an end of war."

"Worse yet--a hypocrite!"

"But, Marta, I never knew a man more sincere. He is working to the same
end as you--peace. If the Grays would play with fire he would give them
such a burning that they will never try again. He would make war too
horrible for practice; fix the frontier forever where by, right it
belongs; make conquest by one civilized nation of another impossible
hereafter. Yes, when it is stalemate, when it is proved that the science
of modern defence has made the weak so strong that superior numbers
cannot play the bully, then shall we have peace in practice!"

"My children's prayer and Partow in the same gallery!" she laughed
stonily. "The peace of armament, not of man's superiority to the tiger
and the tarantula! And you say it all so calmly. You picture the hell of
your manufacture as coolly as if it were some fairies' dance!"

"Should I be enthusiastic? Should I view the prospect with an
old-fashioned Hussar's hurrah?" he asked. "The right way is without
illusions. Let us lose our heads, cry out for glory--and then chaos!"

"The heedless barbarism of ignorance intoxicated with primitive passion
versus calculating, refined, intellectual, comprehending barbarism! I
see no choice," she concluded, rising slowly in the utter weariness of
spirit that calls for the end of an interview.

"Marta, you will promise not to remain at the house?" he urged.

"Isn't that my affair?" she asked. "Aren't you willing to leave even
that to me after all you have been telling how you are to make a redoubt
of our lawn, inviting the shells of the enemy into our drawing-room?"

What could he say in face of a hostility so resolute and armed with the
conviction of its logic? Only call up from the depths the two passions
of his life in an outburst, with all the force of his nature in play.

"I love this soil, my country's soil, ours by right---and I love you! I
would be true to both!"

"Love! What mockery to mention that now!" she cried chokingly. "It's
monstrous!"

"I--I--" He was making an effort to keep his nerves under control.

This time the stiffening elbow failed. With a lurching abruptness he
swung his right hand around and seized the wrist of that trembling,
injured hand that would not be still. She could not fail to notice the
movement, and the sight was a magic that struck anger out of her.

"Lanny, I am hurting you!" she cried miserably.

"A little," he said, will finally dominant over its servant, and he was
smiling as when, half stunned and in agony--and ashamed of the fact--he
had risen from the débris of cloth and twisted braces. "It's all
right," he concluded.

She threw back her arms, her head raised, with a certain abandon as if
she would bare her heart.

"Lanny, there have been moments when I would have liked to fly to your
arms. There have been moments when I have had the call that comes to
every woman in answer to a desire. Yet I was not ready. When I really go
it must be in a flame, in answer to your flame!"

"You mean--I--."

But if the flame were about to burst forth she smothered it in the
spark.

"And all this has upset me," she went on incoherently. "We've both been
cruel without meaning to be, and we're in the shadow of a nightmare; and
next time you come perhaps all the war talk will be over and--oh, this
is enough for to-day!"

She turned quickly in veritable flight and hurried toward the house. At
the bend of the path she wheeled and stood facing him, a hand tossed up
and opening and closing as if she had caught a shaft of sunshine and let
it go again. Thus she would wave to him from the veranda as he came up
the terrace steps. Indelible to him this picture, radiant of a
versatile, impressionable vitality, of capacities yet unsounded, of a
downright sincerity of impulses, faiths, and ideals which might buffet
her this way and that over a strange course. A woman unafraid of
destiny; a woman too objective yet to know herself!

"If it ever comes," she called, "I'll let you know! I'll fly to you in a
chariot of fire bearing my flame--I am that bold, that brazen, that
reckless! For I am not an old maid yet. They've moved the age limit up
to thirty. But you can't drill love into me as you drill discipline into
armies--no, no more than I can argue peace into armies!"

For a while, motionless, Lanstron watched the point where she had
disappeared.

"If I had only been a bridge-builder or an engine-driver," he thought;
"anything except this beastly--"

But he was wool-gathering again. He pulled himself together and started
at a rapid pace for the tower, where he found Feller sitting by the
table, one leg over the other easily, engaged in the prosaic business of
sewing a button on his blouse. Lanstron rapped; no answer. He beat a
tattoo on the casing; no answer.

"Gustave!" he called; no answer.

Now he entered and touched Feller's shoulder.

"Hello, Lanny!" exclaimed Feller, rising and setting a chair and
breaking into a stream of talk. "That's the way they all have to do when
they want to attract my attention. I heard your voice and Miss
Galland's--having an argument in the garden, I should say. Then I heard
your step. Since I became deaf my sense of hearing has really grown
keener, just as the blind develop a keener sense of feeling. Eh? eh?" He
cupped his hand over his ear in the unctuous enjoyment of his gift of
acting. "Yes, Colonel Lanstron, would you like to know what a perfect
triumph we're going to pull off in irises next season--but, Lanny, you
seem in a hurry!"

"Gustave, I am ordered to headquarters by the night express and I came
to tell you that I think it means war."

"War! war!" Feller shouted. "Ye gods and little fishes!" In riotous glee
he seized a chair and flung it across the room. "Ye salty, whiskery gods
and ye shiny-eyed little fishes! War, do you hear that, you plebeian
trousers of the deaf gardener? War!" Flinging the trousers after the
chair, he executed a few steps. When he had thus tempered his elation,
he grasped Lanstron's arm and, looking into his eyes with feverish
resolution and hope, said: "Oh, don't fear! I'll pull it off. And then I
shall have paid back--yes, paid back! I shall be a man who can look men
in the face again. I need not slink to the other side of the street when
I see an old friend coming for fear that he will recognize me. Yes, I
could even dare to love a woman of my own world! And--and perhaps the
uniform and the guns once more!"

"You may be sure of that. Partow cannot refuse," said Lanstron, deeply
affected. After a pause he added: "But I must tell you, Gustave, that
Miss Galland, though she is willing that you remain as a gardener, has
not yet consented to our plan. She will make no decision until war
comes. Perhaps she will refuse. It is only fair that you should know
this."

For an instant Feller was downcast; then confidence returned at high
pitch.

"Trust me!" he said. "I shall persuade her!"

"I hope you can. It is a chance that might turn the scales of victory--a
chance that hangs in my mind stubbornly, as if there were some fate in
it. Luck, old boy!"

"Luck to you, Lanny! Luck and promotion!"

They threw their arms about each other in a vigorous embrace.

"And you will keep watch that Mrs. Galland and Marta are in no danger?"

"Trust me for that, too!"

"Then, good-by till I hear from you over the 'phone or I return to see
you after the crisis is over!" concluded Lanstron as he hurried away.




XIII

BREAKING A PAPER-KNIFE


Hedworth Westerling would have said twenty to one if he had been asked
the odds against war when he was parting from Marta Galland in the hotel
reception-room. Before he reached home he would have changed them to ten
to one. A scare bulletin about the Bodlapoo affair compelling attention
as his car halted to let the traffic of a cross street pass, he bought a
newspaper thrust in at the car window that contained the answer of the
government of the Browns to a despatch of the Grays about the dispute
that had arisen in the distant African jungle. This he had already read
two days previously, by courtesy of the premier. It was moderate in
tone, as became a power that had three million soldiers against its
opponent's five; nevertheless, it firmly pointed out that the territory
of the Browns had been overtly invaded, on the pretext of securing a
deserter who had escaped across the line, by Gray colonial troops who
had raised the Gray flag in place of the Brown flag and remained
defiantly in occupation of the outpost they had taken.

As yet, the Browns had not attempted to repel the aggressor by arms for
fear of complications, but were relying on the Gray government to order
a withdrawal of the Gray force and the repudiation of a commander who
had been guilty of so grave an international affront. The surprising and
illuminating thing to Westerling was the inspired statement to the press
from the Gray Foreign Office, adroitly appealing to Gray chauvinism and
justifying the "intrepidity" of the Gray commander in response to
so-called "pin-pricking" exasperations.

At the door of his apartment, François, his valet and factotum, gave
Westerling a letter.

"Important, sir," said François.

Westerling knew by a glance that it was, for it was addressed and marked
"Personal" in the premier's own handwriting. A conference for ten that
evening was requested in a manner that left no doubt of its urgency.

"Let me see, do I dine at the Countess Zalinski's to-night?" asked
Westerling. Both François and his personal aide kept a list of his
appointments.

"Not to-night, sir. To-night you--" said François.

"Good!" thought Westerling. "No excuses will be necessary to Marie in
order to be at the premier's by ten."

Curiosity made him a little ahead of time, but he found the premier
awaiting him in his study, free from interruption or eavesdropping.

In the shadow of the table lamp the old premier looked his years. His
definite features were easy material for the caricaturist, who does not
deal in halftones. A near view of them was not attractive. They had the
largeness which impresses the gallery from the floor of a parliamentary
chamber, where delicate lines of sensibility and character lack the
quality which the actor supplies with his make-up. As is often the case
with elderly statesmen, his face seemed like that of the crowd done
boldly as a single face, while his shrewd eyes in a bed of crow's-feet,
when they lighted to their purpose in confidence, expressed his
understanding of the crowd and its thoughts and how it may be led.

From youth he had been in politics, ever a bold figure and a daring
player, but now beginning to feel the pressure of younger men's elbows.
Fonder even of power, which had become a habit, than in his twenties, he
saw it slipping from his grasp at an age when the 'downfall of his
government meant that he should never hold the reins again. He had been
called an ambitious demagogue and a makeshift opportunist by his
enemies, but the crowd liked him for his ready strategy, his genius for
appealing phrases, and for the gambler's virtue which hitherto had made
him a good loser.

"You saw our _communiqué_ to-night that went with the publication of the
Browns' despatch?" he remarked.

"Yes, and I was glad that I had been careful to send a spirited
commander to that region," Westerling replied.

"So you guess my intention, I see." The premier smiled. He picked up a
long, thin ivory paper-knife and softly patted the palm of his hand with
it. "We have had many discussions, you and I, Westerling," he said. "But
to-night I'm going to ask categorical questions. They may take us over
old ground, but they are the questions of the nation to the army."

"Certainly!" Westerling replied in his ready, confident manner.

"We hear a great deal about the precision and power of modern arms as
favoring the defensive," said the premier. "I have read somewhere that
it will enable the Browns to hold us back, despite our advantage of
numbers. Also, that they can completely man every part of their frontier
and that their ability to move their reserves rapidly, thanks to modern
facilities, makes a powerful flanking attack in surprise out of the
question."

"Some half-truths in that," answered Westerling. "One axiom, that must
hold good through all time, is that the aggressive which keeps at it
always wins. We take the aggressive. In the space where Napoleon
deployed a division, we deploy a battalion to-day. The precision and
power of modern arms require this. With such immense forces and
present-day tactics, the line of battle will practically cover the
length of the frontier. Along their range the Browns have a series of
fortresses commanding natural openings for our attack. These are almost
impregnable. But there are pregnable points between them. Here, our
method will be the same that the Japanese followed and that they learned
from European armies. We shall concentrate in masses and throw in wave
after wave of attack until we have gained the positions we desire. Once
we have a tenable foothold on the crest of the range the Brown army must
fall back and the rest will be a matter of skilful pursuit."

The premier, as he listened, rolled the paper-knife over and over,
regarding its polished sides, which were like Westerling's manner of
facile statement of a programme certain of fulfilment.

"We can win, then? We can go to their capital, or far enough to force a
great indemnity, the annexation of one of their provinces, perhaps, and
the taking over of their African colonies, which we can develop so much
better than they?"

Westerling took care to show none of the eagerness which had set his
pulses humming.

"To their capital!" he declared decisively. "Nothing less. For that I
have planned."

"And the cost in lives?"

"Five or six hundred thousand casualties, which means about a hundred
thousand killed."

"Ghastly! The population of a good-sized city!" exclaimed the premier.

"A small percentage out of five million soldiers; a smaller out of
eighty million population," Westerling returned.

"And how long do you think the war would last? How long the strain on
our finances, the suspense to the markets?"

"About a month. We shall go swiftly. The completeness of modern
preparation must make a war of to-day brief between two great powers. We
must win with a rush, giving the defenders no breathing spell, pouring
masses after masses upon the critical positions."

"How long will it take to mobilize?"

"Less than a week after the railroads are put entirely at our service,
with three preceding days of scattered movements," answered Westerling.
"Deliberate mobilizations are all right for a diplomatic threat that
creates a furore in the newspapers and a depression in the stock-market,
but which is not to be carried out. When you mean war, all speed and the
war fever at white heat."

"Therefore, there would be little time for the public to hoard money or
to provoke a panic. The government, knowing precisely what was before
it, could take severe preventive measures."

"But I may say that we should strike before mobilization is complete. A
day will be required to take the La Tir tangent and other outlying
positions. The 128th and other regiments who will do this work are
already at the front. They were chosen because they came from distant
provinces and we can count on their patriotic fervor for brilliant and
speedy action, with resulting general enthusiasm for the whole army,
which will be up in time for the assault on the Browns' permanent
defences."

"You would have made a good politician, Westerling," the premier
remarked, with a twitching uplift of the brows and a knowing gleam in
his shrewd old eyes.

"Thank you," replied Westerling, appearing flattered, though secretly
annoyed that any one should think that a chief of staff could care to
change places with any man in the world. Governments might come and go,
but the army was the rock in the midst of the play of minor forces, the
ultimate head of order and power. "A man who is able to lead in anything
must be something of a politician," he said suavely.

"Very true, indeed. Perhaps I had that partly in mind in making you
vice-chief of staff," responded the premier enjoyably. "You spoke of the
war fever at white heat," he went on, returning to his muttons, "and of
the army's enthusiasm for its work. There we come to the kernel in the
nut, eh?" he asked, as he prodded the paper-knife into the palm of his
hand.

"Drill, organization, discipline, and centralized authority and a
high-spirited aristocracy of officers are most important," said
Westerling. "But after that come morale and the psychology of the
soldier." There he shrugged slightly, in indication of a resentment at
the handicap of human nature in his work. "The business of a soldier is
to risk death in the way he is told. The keener he is for his cause the
better. An ideal soldier is he who does not think for himself, but
observes every detail of training and will not stop until halted by
orders or a bullet. Therefore we want the army hot with desire. The
officers of a company cannot force their men forward. Without
insubordination or mutiny the men may stop from lack of interest after
only a very small percentage of loss."

"Lack of interest!" mused the premier. But Westerling, preoccupied with
the literal exposition of his subject, did not catch the flash of
passing satire before the premier, his features growing hard and
challenging, spoke in another strain: "Then it all goes back to the
public--to that enormous body of humanity out there!" He swung the
paper-knife around with outstretched arm toward the walls of the room.
"To public opinion--as does everything else in this age--to the people!
I have seen them pressing close, about to remove me from power, and I
have started a diversion which made them forget the object of their
displeasure. I have thought them won one day, and the next I realized
that they were going against me. Thank Heaven for the brevity of their
memory, or we leaders would be hung high by our own inconsistencies! He
who leads sees which way they will go, rushes to the head of the
procession, discovers them to themselves and turns a corner and they
follow, thinking that they are going straight to the point. But always
they are there, never older, never younger, never tiring--there, smiling
or scowling or forgetting all about you, only to have a sudden fierce
reminder overnight to surprise you--and our masters, yours and mine! For
no man can stand against them when they say no or yes."

"You know the keys to play on, though," remarked Westerling with a
complimentary smile. "No one knows quite so well."

"I ought to," replied the premier. "That was the purpose of the
semi-official _communiqué_ about Bodlapoo, which, of course, we can
repudiate later, if need be. I saw that the brilliant forced march of
our commander had excited popular enthusiasm. It does not matter if he
were in the wrong. Will race feeling rise to the pitch of war from this
touchstone with the proper urging? Of course, the impulse must come from
the people themselves. We must seem to resist it, the better to arouse
it." He bent the paper-knife into a bow with fingers that were rigid.
"Times are hard, factions are bitter, our cabinet is in danger, with
economic and political chaos from overpopulation in sight," he
continued. "We hunger for land, for fresh opportunities for development.
An outburst of patriotism, concentrating every thought of the nation on
war!--is that the way out?"

Westerling had only answered questions so far. Here was his cue for
argument.

"We were never so ready," he said. "War must come some time. We should
choose the moment, not leave it to chance. The nation needs war as a
stimulant, as a corrective, as a physician. We grow stale; we think of
our domestic troubles. The old racial passions are weakening and with
them our virility. Victory will make room for millions in the place of
the thousands who fall. The indemnity will bring prosperity. Because we
have had no war, because the long peace has been abnormal, is the reason
you have all this agitation and all these strikes. They will be at an
end. Those who are fit to rule will be in power."

"And you are sure--sure we can win?" the premier asked with a long,
tense look at Westerling, who was steady under the scrutiny.

"Absolutely!" he answered. "Five millions against three! It's
mathematics, or our courage and skill are not equal to theirs
Absolutely! We have the power, why not use it? We do not live in a dream
age!"

The premier sank deeper in his chair. He was silent, thinking. He who
had carried off so many great coups with rare ease was on the threshold
of one that made them all seem petty. He had heard random talk that some
of the officers of the staff considered Westerling to be lath painted to
look like steel. There was a reported remark by Turcas, his assistant,
implying that the ability to achieve a position did not mean the ability
to fill it. Jealousy, no doubt; the jealousy of rivals! The premier
himself was used to having members of his own cabinet ever on the watch
for the vulnerable spot in his back, which he had never allowed them to
find. Yet, there was the case of Louis Napoleon. He had the ability to
achieve a position; he had been the lath painted to look like steel. He
had all the externals which the layman associates with victory until he
went to the supreme test, which ripped him into slivers of rotten wood.
The little Napoleon had been one of the premier's favorite bugaboo
examples of stage realism tried out in real life. But it was ridiculous
to compare him with the stalwart figure sitting across the table, who
had spoken the language of materialism without illusion.

Westerling's ambition on edge communicated itself to the premier, whose
soft hands, long since divorced from any labor except official
hand-shaking and the exercise of authority, were bending the paper-knife
with unconscious vigor.

"All the achievements of power form only a dull background for victory
in war to a people's imagination!" he exclaimed. "Your name and mine to
symbolize an age! What power for us! What power for the nation!"

From a sudden, unwitting exertion of his strength the knife which had
been the recipient of his emotions snapped in two. Rather carefully he
laid the pieces on the table before he rose and turned to Westerling,
his decision made.

"If the people respond with the war fever, then it is war!" he said. "I
take you at your word that you will win!"

Westerling's chair creaked with the tense drawing of his muscles in the
impulse of delight. He had gained the great purpose; but there was
another and vital one on his programme.

"A condition!" he announced. "From the moment war begins the army is
master of all intelligence, all communication, all resources. Everything
we require goes into the crucible!"

"And the press--the mischievous, greedy, but very useful press?" asked
the premier.

"It also shall serve; also obey. No lists of killed and wounded shall be
given out until I am ready. The public must know nothing except what I
choose to tell. I act for the people and the nation."

"That is agreed," said the premier. "For these terrible weeks every
nerve and muscle of the nation is at your service to win for the nation.
In three or four days I shall know if the public rises to the call. If
not--" He shook his head.

"While all the information given out is provocative to our people, you
will declare your hope that war may be averted," Westerling continued.
"This will screen our purpose. Finally, on top of public enthusiasm will
come the word that the Browns have fired the first shot--as they must
when we cross the frontier--that they have been killing our soldiers.
This will make the racial spirit of every man respond. Having decided
for war, every plan is worthy that helps to victory."

"It seems fiendish!" exclaimed the premier in answer to a thought
eddying in the powerful current of his brain. "Fiendish with
calculation, but merciful, as you say."

"A fast, terrific campaign! A ready machine taking the road!"
Westerling declared. "Less suffering than if we went to war carelessly
for a long campaign--than if we allowed sentiment to interfere with
intellect."

"I like your energy, your will!" said the premier admiringly. "And about
the declaration of war? We shall time that to your purpose."

"Declarations of war before striking, by nations taking the aggressive,
are a disadvantage," Westerling explained. "They are going out of
practice. Witness the examples of Japan against Russia and the Balkan
allies against Turkey. In these days declarations are not necessary as a
warning of what is going to happen. They belong to the etiquette of
fencers."

"Yes, exactly. The declaration of war and the ambassador's passports
will be prepared and the wire that fighting has begun will release
them," agreed the premier. "Another thing," he added, "there is the
question of the opinion of the world as represented by The Hague and the
peace societies. This government has always expressed sympathy with
their ideas."

"Naturally," Westerling put in. "We shall use hand-grenades, explosives
from dirigibles, every known power of destruction. So will the Browns,
you may be sure. In such a cataclysm we shall have no time for niceties.
The peace societies will have hardly formulated their protests to The
Hague before the war is over. Our answer will be our victory--the power
that goes with the prestige of unconquerable force. Victory, nothing but
victory counts!"

Westerling was speaking by the book, expressing the ideas that he had
again and again rehearsed as a part of the preparation, the eternal
preparation for the sudden emergency of war, which is the duty of the
staff. So letter-perfect was he in his lines that a layman might have
scouted his realization of the enormousness of his responsibility.

"Yet if we did lose! If when I had given you all you ask your plans
went wrong! If our army were broken to pieces on the frontier and then
the nation, kept in ignorance of events, learned the truth"--the premier
enunciated slowly and pointedly while he locked glances with
Westerling--"that is the end for us both. You would hardly want to
return to the capital to face public wrath!"

"We must win though we lose a million men!" he answered. "I stake my
life!" he cried hoarsely, striking his fist on the table.

"You stake your life!" repeated the premier with slow emphasis.

"Bravado hardly becomes a chief of staff. His place is not under fire,"
Westerling explained. "However, I mean to make my headquarters at La
Tir, immediately we have taken it, for the effect of having the leader
of the army promptly established on conquered territory."

"I understand that," replied the premier. "But still you stake your
life? That is the greatest thing a man has to stake. You stake your life
on victory?" he demanded fiercely.

"I do!" said Westerling. "Yes, my life. We cannot fail!"

"Then it will be war, if the people want it!" said the premier. "I shall
not resist their desire!" he added in his official manner, at peace with
his conscience.




XIV

IN PARTOW'S OFFICE


Partow was a great brain set on an enormous body. Partow's eyes had the
fire of youth at sixty-five, but the pendulous flesh of his cheeks was
pasty. Partow was picturesque; he was a personality with a dome forehead
sweeping back nobly to scattered and contentious, short gray hairs.
Jealousy and faction had endeavored for years to remove him from his
position at the head of the army on account of age. New governments
decided as they came in that he must go, and they went out with him
still in the saddle. He worked fourteen hours a day, took no holidays
and little exercise, violated the rules of health, and never appeared at
gold-braid functions. The business of official display, as he said
pungently, he delegated to that specialist, his handsome vice-chief of
staff.

He had set up no silhouette of a charging soldier peppered with bullet
marks on the wall of his office, for this was a picture that he carried
in his mind. Pertinent to his own taste, under the glance of the
portraits of the old heroes, was a little statuette of a harvester
called Toil on his desk.

"That's the fellow we're defending," he would say, becoming almost
rhapsodical. "I like to think back to him. He's the infantry before you
put him in uniform."

Let officers apply themselves with conspicuous energy and they heard
from a genial Partow; let officers only keep step and free of courts
martial, and they heard from a merciless taskmaster. Resign, please, if
you like a leisurely life, he told the idlers; and he had a way of
making them so uncomfortable that they would take the advice. Among the
sons of rest who had retired to mourn over the world going to the devil
he was referred to as not being a gentleman, which amused him; some said
that he was crazy, which amused him even more.

Peculiarly human, peculiarly dictatorial, dynamic, and inscrutable was
Partow, who never asked any one under him to work harder than himself.

Lanstron appeared in the presence of Jove shortly after eight o'clock
the next morning after he left La Tir. Jove rolled his big head on his
short neck in a nod and said:

"Late!"

"The train was late, sir!"

"And you have disobeyed orders!" grumbled Partow.

"Disobeyed orders? How, sir?"

"And you look me in the eye as you always do! You think that excuses
you, perhaps?"

"No, sir. But I am bound to ask what orders?"

"Well, not orders, but my instructions; at least, my desire. Flying
yourself--directing a manoeuvre--racing the Grays!"

"You heard about it?"

"I hear about everything! I have told you not to risk your life. Lives
are assets of various kinds in an army. It is my business to determine
the relative value of those of my subordinates. You are not to sacrifice
yours."

"I haven't yet, sir. I have it with me this morning," Lanstron replied,
"and I have some news about our thousandth chance."

"Hm-m! What is it?" asked Partow. When Lanstron had told the story,
Partow worked his lips in a way he had if he were struck by a passing
reflection which might or might not have a connection with the subject
in hand. "Strange about her when you consider who her parents were!" he
said. "But you never know. His son," nodding to Toil, "might be a great
painter or a snob. Miss Galland has an idea--that's something--and
character and a brain making arrows so fast that she shoots them into
the blue just for mental relief. She's quite a woman. If I were thirty,
and single, I believe I'd fall in love with her. But don't you dare tell
Mrs. Partow. I want the fun of telling her myself. Hm-m! Why don't you
sit down, young man?"

Partow turned his thick, white palm toward a chair, and his smile, now
clearly showing that he was not deeply offended with Lanstron's
insubordination, had a singular charm. The smile vanished as Lanstron
seated himself and in its place came such a look as friend Toil had seen
on very rare occasions.

"The way that the Grays gave out our despatch convinces me of their
intentions," Partow said. "Their people are rising to it and ours are
rising in answer. The Grays have been transferring regiments from
distant provinces to their frontier because they will fight better in an
invasion. We are transferring home regiments to our frontier because
they will fight for their own property. By Thursday you will find that
open mobilization on both sides has begun."

"My department is ready," said Lanstron, "all except your decision about
press censorship."

"A troublesome point," responded Partow. "I have procrastinated because
two definite plans were fully worked out. It is a matter of choice
between them: either publicity or complete secrecy. You know I am no
believer in riding two horses at once. My mind is about made up; but let
me hear your side again. Sometimes I get conviction by probing another
mans."

Lanstron was at his best, for his own conviction was intense.

"Of course they will go in for secrecy; but our case is different," he
began.

Partow settled himself to listen with the gift of the organizer who
draws from his informant the brevity of essentials.

"I should take the people into our confidence," Lanstron proceeded. "I
should make them feel that we were one family fighting for all we hold
dear against the invader. If our losses are heavy, if we have a setback,
then the inspiration of the heroism of those who have fallen and the
danger of their own homes feeling the foot of the invader next will
impel the living to greater sacrifices. For the Grays are in the wrong.
The moral and the legal right is with us."

"And the duty of men like you and me, chosen for the purpose," said
Partow, "is worthily to direct the courage that goes with moral right.
The overt act of war must come from them by violating our frontier, not
in the African jungle but here. Even when the burglar fingers the
window-sash we shall not fire--no, not until he enters our house. When
he does, you would have a message go out to our people that will set
them quivering with indignation?"

"Yes, and I would let the names of our soldiers who fall first be known
and how they fell, their backs to their frontier homes and their faces
to the foe."

"Our very liberality in giving news will help us to cover the military
secrets which we desire to preserve," Partow said, with slow emphasis.
"We shall hold back what we please, confident of the people's trust.
Good policy that, yes! But enough! Your orders are ready, in detail, I
believe. You have nothing to add?"

"No, sir, nothing; at least, not until war begins."

"Very well. We shall have the orders issued at the proper moment,"
concluded Partow. "And Westerling is going to find," he proceeded after
a thoughtful pause, "that a man is readier to die fighting to hold his
own threshold than fighting to take another man's. War is not yet solely
an affair of machinery and numbers. The human element is still
uppermost. I know something, perhaps, that Westerling does not know. I
have had an experience that he has not had and that few active officers
of either army have had--I have been under fire."

His eyes flashed with the memory of his charge, and visions of the day
when Grandfather Fragini was a _beau sabreur_ and Marta Galland's father
toasted quick death and speedy promotion seemed to cluster around him.

"Experience plus an old man's honest effort for a mind open to all
suggestion and improvements!" he exclaimed. "An open mind that let you
have your way in equipping more dirigibles and planes than Westerling
guesses we have, eh? And, perhaps, a few more guns! And you, too, have
been under fire," he added. "Give me your hand--no, not that one, not
the one you shake hands with--the one wounded in action!"

Partow enclosed the stiffened fingers in his own with something of the
caress which an old bear that is in very good humor might give to a
promising cub.

"I have planned, planned, planned for this time," he said. "I have
played politics with statesmen to hold my place in the belief that I was
the man for the work which I have done. The world shall soon know, as
the elements of it go into the crucible test, whether it is well done or
not. I want to live to see the day when the last charge made against our
trenches is beaten back. Then they may throw this old body onto the
rubbish heap as soon as they please--it is a fat, unwieldy behemoth of
an old body!"

"No, no, it isn't!" Lanstron objected hotly. He was seeing only what
most people saw after talking with Partow for a few minutes, his fine,
intelligent eyes and beautiful forehead.

"All that I wanted of the body was to feed my brain," Partow continued,
heedless of the interruption. "I have watched my mind as a navigator
watches a barometer. I have been ready at the first sign that it was
losing its grip to give up. Yet I have felt that my body would go on
feeding my brain and that to the last moment of consciousness, when
suddenly the body collapses, I should have self-possession and energy of
mind. Under the coming strain the shock may come, as a cord snaps. At
that instant my successor will take up my work where I leave it off."

"Goerwitz, you mean." Lanstron referred in unmistakable apprehension to
the vice-chief of staff, whom all the army knew had no real ability or
decision underneath his pleasing, confident exterior.

"No, not Goerwitz," said Partow, with a shrug. "Some one who will go on
with the weaving, not by knotting threads but with the same threads in a
smooth fabric." Lanstron felt an increased pressure of the hand, a
communicated tingling to his nerves. "I have chosen him. The old fogy
who has aimed to join experience to youth chooses youth. You took your
medicine without grumbling in the disagreeable but vitally important
position of chief of intelligence. Now you--there, don't tremble with
stage fright!" For Lanstron's hand was quivering in Partow's grasp,
while his face was that of a man stunned.

"But Goerwitz--what will he say?" he gasped.

"Goerwitz goes to a division in reserve."

"And the army! The government! What will they say at such--such a jump
for a colonel?"

"The government leaves all to me from the day war begins. I shall
transfer others than Goerwitz--others who have had influence with the
premier which it was not wise to deny in time of peace."

"Very well, sir," answered Lanstron, with a subordinate's automatic
consent to a superior's orders. His words sounded ridiculous in view of
his feelings, yet they were more expressive than any florid speech.

"You are to be at the right hand of this old body," continued Partow.
"You are to go with me to the front; to sleep in the room next to mine;
to be always at my side, and, finally, you are to promise that if ever
the old body fails in its duty to the mind, if ever you see that I am
not standing up to the strain, you are to say so to me and I give you my
word that I shall let you take charge."

Lanstron was too stunned to speak for a moment. The arrangement seemed a
hideous joke: a refinement of cruelty inconceivable. It was expecting
him to tell Atlas that he was old and to take the weight of the world
off the giant's shoulders.

"Have you lost your patriotism?" demanded Partow. "Are you afraid?
Afraid to tell me the truth? Afraid of duty? Afraid in your youth of the
burden that I bear in age?"

His fingers closed in on Lanstron's with such force that the grip was
painful.

"Promise!" he commanded.

"I promise!" Lanstron said with a throb.

"That's it' That's the way! That's the kind of soldier I like," Partow
declared with change of tone, and he rose from his chair with a spring
that was a delight to Lanstron in its proof of the physical vigor so
stoutly denied. "We have a lot to say to each other to-day," he added;
"but first I am going to show you the whole bag of tricks."

His arm crooked in Lanstron's, they went along the main corridor of the
staff office hung with portraits of generals who had beaten or held
their own with the Grays. Passing through a door for which Partow held
the key, they were in a dim, narrow passage with bare walls, lighted by
two small gas flames. At the end was another, a heavy steel door, of the
sort associated with the protection of bonds and securities, but in this
case for the security of a nation's defence. Partow turned the knob of
the combination back and forth and with the smooth swing of a great
weight on noiseless hinges the door opened and they entered a vault
having a single chair and a small table in the centre and lined by
sections of numbered pigeonholes, each with a combination lock At the
base of one section was a small safe. It was not the first time that
Lanstron had been in this vault. He had the combination of two of the
sections of pigeonholes, aerostatics and intelligence. The rest belonged
to other divisions.

"The safe is my own, as you know. No one opens it; no one knows what is
in it but me," said Partow, taking from it an envelope and a manuscript,
which he laid on the table. "There you have all that, is in my
brain--the whole plan. The envelope contains the combinations of all the
pigeonholes, if you wish to look up any details."

"Thank you!" Lanstron half whispered. It was all he could think of to
say.

"And you will find that there is more than you thought, perhaps: the
reason why I have fought hard to remain chief of staff; why--" Partow
continued in a voice that had the sepulchral uncanniness of a threat
long nursed now breaking free of the bondage of years within the
sound-proof walls. "But--" he broke off suddenly as if he distrusted
even the security of the vault. "Yes, it is all there--my life's work,
my dream, my ambition, my plan!"

Lanstron heard the lock slide in the door as Partow went out and he was
alone with the army's secrets. As he read Partow's firm handwriting,
many parts fell together, many moves on a chess-board grew clear. His
breath came faster, he bent closer over the table, he turned back pages
to go over them again. Every sentence dropped home in his mind like a
bolt in a socket.

When he had finished the manuscript the trance of his thoughts held him
in the same attitude. "Five millions to our three!" a voice kept
repeating to him. "In face of that this dream!" another voice was
saying. Had it been right to intrust such responsibility to one man of
Partow's age and right to transfer that responsibility to himself in an
emergency? Yet how clear the plan in the confidence of its wisdom!
Unconscious of the passage of time, he did not hear the door open or
realize Partow's presence until he felt Partow's hand on his shoulder.

"I see that you didn't look into any of the pigeonholes," the chief of
staff observed.

Lanstron pressed his finger-tips on the manuscript significantly.

"No. It is all there!"

"The thing being to carry it out!" said Partow. "God with us!" he added
devoutly.




XV

CLOSE TO THE WHITE POSTS


Have you forgotten Hugo Mallin, humorist of Company B of the 128th
Regiment of the Grays, whom we left in their barracks under orders for
South La Tir on the afternoon that Westerling called on Marta Galland?
Have you forgotten Eugene Aronson, the farmer's son, and Jacob Pilzer,
the butcher's son, and pasty-faced little Peterkin, the valet's son, and
the judge's son, and the other privates of the group that surrounded
Hugo Mallin as he aired heresies that set them laughing?

Through the press, an unconscious instrument of his purpose, the astute
premier has inoculated them with the virus of militant patriotism. Day
by day the crisis has become more acute; day by day the war fever has
risen in their veins. Big Eugene Aronson believes everything he reads;
his country can do no wrong. Jacob Pilzer is most bellicose; he chafes
at inaction, while they all suffer the discomforts of an empty factory
building in the rear of South La Tir which has become a temporary
barracks.

On Tuesday they hear of crowds around the Foreign Office demanding war,
on Wednesday of panics on the stock exchanges, on Thursday of
mobilization actually begun and a rigid press censorship established,
and on Friday other regiments and guns and horses are detraining and
departing right and left. Hurrying officers know nothing except what
they have been told to do.

"When do we start? What are we waiting for?" demanded Pilzer. "I want to
be in the thick of the fighting and not trailing along with the
reserves!" If any one in the 128th wins the bronze cross he means that
it shall be he and not Eugene Aronson.

"Never mind, you'll have a chance. There'll be war enough to go around,
I am sure!" said Hugo Mallin.

"More than you'll want!" Pilzer shot back, thrusting out his jaw.

"I'm sure of that!" answered Hugo, the mask of his face drawn in
quizzical solemnity. "I don't want any at all."

This brought a tremendous laugh. All the laughs had been tremendous
since mobilization had begun in earnest, and the atmosphere was like the
suspense before a thunder-storm breaks.

On Saturday evening the 128th was mustered in field accoutrements and a
full supply of cartridges. In the darkness the first battalion marched
out at right angles to the main road that ran through La Tir and South
La Tir. At length Company B, deployed in line of skirmishers, lay down
to sleep on its arms.

"We wait here for the word," Fracasse, the captain, whispered to his
senior lieutenant. "If it comes, our objective is the house and the old
castle on the hill above the town."

The tower of the church showed dimly when a pale moon broke through a
cloud. By its light Hugo saw on his right Eugene's big features and
massive shoulders and on his left the pinched and characterless features
of Peterkin. A few yards ahead was a white stone post.

"That's their side over there!" whispered the banker's son, who was next
to Peterkin.

"When we cross war begins," said the manufacturer's son.

"I wonder if they are expecting us!" said the judge's son a trifle
huskily, in an attempt at humor, though he was not given to humor.

"Just waiting to throw bouquets!" whispered the laborer's son. He, too,
was not given to humor and he, too, spoke a trifle huskily.

"And we'll fix bayonets when we start and they will run at the sight of
our steel!" said Eugene Aronson. He and Hugo alone, not excepting
Pilzer, the butcher's son, spoke in their natural voices. The others
were trying to make their voices sound natural, while Pilzer's voice had
developed a certain ferocity, and the liver patch on his cheek twitched
more frequently. "Why, Company B is in front! We have the post of honor,
and maybe our company will win the most glory of any in the regiment!"
Eugene added. "Oh, we'll beat them! The bullet is not made that will get
me!"

"Your service will be over in time for you to help with the spring
planting, Eugene," whispered Hugo, who was apparently preoccupied with
many detached thoughts.

"And you to be at home sucking lollipops!" Pilzer growled to Hugo.

"That would be better than murdering my fellowman to get his property,"
Hugo answered, so soberly that it did not seem to his comrades that he
was joking this time. Pilzer's snarling exclamation of "White feather!"
came in the midst of a chorus of indignation.

Captain Fracasse, who had heard only the disturbance without knowing the
cause, interfered in a low, sharp tone:

"Silence! As I have told you before, silence! We don't want them to know
that we are here. Go to sleep! You may get no rest to-morrow night!"

But little Peterkin, the question in his mind breaking free of his lips,
unwittingly asked:

"Shall--shall we fight in the morning?"

"I don't know. Nobody knows!" answered Fracasse. "We wait on orders,
ready to do our duty. There may be no war. Don't let me hear another
peep from you!"

Now all closed their eyes. In front of them was vast silence which
seemed to stretch from end to end of the frontier, while to the rear was
the rumble of switching railway trains and the rumble of provision
trains and artillery on the roads, and in the distance on the plain the
headlight of a locomotive cut a swath in the black night. But the
breathing of most of the men was not that of slumber, though Eugene and
Pilzer slept soundly. Hours passed. Occasional restless movements told
of efforts to force sleep by changing position.

"It's the waiting that's sickening!" exploded the manufacturer's son
under his breath, desperately.

"So I say. I'd like to be at it and done with the suspense!" said the
doctor's son.

"They say if you are shot through the head you don't know what killed
you, it's so quick. Think of that!" exclaimed Peterkin, huddling closer
to Hugo and shivering.

"Yes, very merciful," Hugo whispered, patting Peterkin's arm.

"Sh-h-h! Silence, I tell you!" commanded Fracasse crossly. He was
falling into a half doze at last.




XVI

DELLARME'S MEN GET A MASCOT


And have you forgotten gigantic Private Stransky, born to the red, with
the hedgerows of the world his home? Have you forgotten Tom Fragini and
the sergeant and the others of Captain Dellarme's men of the 53d of the
Browns, whom we left marching along the road to La Tir, with old
Grandfather Fragini, veteran of the Hussars, in his faded uniform coat
with his medal on his breast, keeping step, hep-hep-hep?

Grandfather Fragini has attached himself to the regiment while it rests
in barracks a few hours' march from the frontier. He is accepted as the
mascot of the company in which both his grandson and Stransky are
serving. But he never speaks to Stransky and refers to him in the third
person as "that traitor," which makes Stransky grin sardonically. Each
day's developments bring more color to his cheeks; his rheumatic old
legs are limbering with the elixir of rising patriotism, though Tom and
his comrades are singularly without enthusiasm, according to
grandfather's idea. They lead the newspapers gluttonously and they
welcome each item that promises a peaceful solution of the crisis.

Inwardly, Grandfather Fragini is worried about the state of the army. Is
his race becoming decadent? Or, as he puts it, are the younger
generation without sand in their craws? When he came into the barracks
yard swinging his cap aloft and shouting the news that mobilization had
begun there was not even a cheer.

"I suppose it means war," said Tom Fragini with a soberness that was in
keeping with the grave faces of his fellows. Stransky sitting at one
side by himself smiled.

"Well, you'd think it was a funeral!" grandfather exclaimed in disgust.

"There will be lots of funerals!" said Tom.

"I s'pose there will be; but if you get that in your mind how can you
fight?" grandfather demanded. "Why, if any Hussar had spoken of funerals
we'd called him white-livered, that's what we would! We cheered till we
was hoarse; we danced and hugged one another; we rattled our sabres in
our scabbards; we sang rip-roaring death-or-glory songs. When you're
going to war you want to sing and shout. That's the way to keep your
spirits up."

"Let's sing 'Ring-around-the-rosy' to please the old gentleman. Come
on!" suggested Stransky.

"I don't see that we are after either death or glory," said Tom. "We are
going to do our duty."

The impulse of enthusiasm seemed equally lacking in the others. Stransky
grinned and his deep-set eyes turned inward with a squint of knowing
satisfaction at the bony bridge of his nose.

"I'm not wanting any traitor to start any songs for me!" declared
grandfather.

"Never mind. The fellows on the other side aren't any more enthusiastic
than we are, grandfather," Stransky said soothingly, in his mocking way.
"The fact is, we don't want to kill our brothers across the frontier and
they don't want to kill us or be killed. It's only the ruling classes
that want the proletariat to--"

"Fire away, Stransky! It's hours since you made a speech!" chirruped a
voice.

"Look out, Bert, the sergeant's coming!" another voice warned the
orator.

The state of mind of the 53d was that of all the regiments of the Browns
with their faces toward the white posts, quiet, thoughtful, and grave;
for they had not to arouse ardor for the aggressive. As they were to
receive rather than give blows they might be more honest with themselves
than the men of the Grays.

In marching order, with cartridge-boxes full, on Saturday night the 53d
marched out to the main pass road. When Grandfather Fragini found that
he had been ordered to remain behind he sought the colonel.

"I've got reasons! Let me come!" he pleaded.

"No. It is no place for you."

"I can keep up! I can keep up! I feel like a boy!"

"But it is different these days, and this is the infantry. The bullets
carry far. You will not know how to take cover," the colonel explained.

"Well, if I am killed I won't be losing much time on this earth,"
grandfather observed with cool logic. "But that ain't it. I'm worried
about Tom. I'm afraid he ain't going to fight! I--I want to stiffen him
up!"

"He will fight, all right. Sorry, but it is out of the question," said
the colonel, turning away.

Grandfather buried his face in his hands and shook with the sobs of
second childhood until an idea occurred to him. Wasn't he a free man?
Hadn't he as much right as anybody to use the public highway? Drying his
eyes, he set out along the road in the wake of the regiment.

One company after another left the road at a given point, bound for the
position mapped in its instructions Dellarme's, however, went on until
it was opposite the Galland house.

"We are depending on you," the colonel said to Dellarme, giving his hand
a grip. "You are not to draw off till you get the flag."

"No, sir," Dellarme replied.

"Mind the signal to the batteries--keep the men screened--warn them not
to let their first baptism of shell fire shake their nerves!" the
colonel added in a final repetition of instructions already indelibly
impressed on the captain's mind.

Moving cautiously through a cut, Dellarme's company came, about
midnight, to a halt among the stubble of a wheat-field behind a knoll.
After he had bidden the men to break ranks, he crept up the incline.

"Yes, it's there!" he whispered when he returned. "On the crest of the
knoll a cord is stretched from stake to stake," he said, explaining the
reason for what was to be done, as was his custom. "The engineers placed
it there after dusk and the frontier was closed, so that you would know
just where to use your spades in the dark. Quietly as possible! No
talking!" he kept cautioning as the men turned the soft earth, "and not
higher than the cord, and lay the stubble side of the sods on the
reverse so as to cover the fresh earth on the sky-line."

When the work was done all returned behind the knoll except the sentries
posted at intervals on the crest to watch. With the aid of a small
electric flash, screened by his hands, Dellarme again examined a section
of the staff map that outlined the contour of the knoll in relation to
the other positions. After this he wrote in his diary the simple facts
of the day's events, concluding with a sentiment of gratitude for the
honor shown to his company and a prayer that he might keep a clear head
and do his duty if war came on the morrow.

"Now, every one get all the sleep he can!" he advised the men.

Stransky slept, with his head on his arm, as soundly as Eugene Aronson,
his antithesis in character; the others slept no better than the men of
the 128th. The night passed without any alarm except that of their own
thoughts, and they welcomed dawn as a relief from suspense. There was no
hot coffee this morning, and they washed down their rations with water
from their canteens. The old sergeant was lying beside Captain Dellarme
on the crest, the sunrise in their faces. As the mist cleared from the
plain it revealed the white dots of the frontier posts in the meadow and
behind them many gray figures in skirmish order, scarcely visible
except through the glasses.

"It looks like business!" declared the old sergeant.

"Yes, it begins the minute they cross the line!" said Dellarme.

His glance sweeping to the rear to scan the landscape under the light of
day, he recognized, with a sense of pride and awe, the tactical
importance of his company's position in relation to that of the other
companies. Easily he made out the regimental line by streaks of
concealed trenches and groups of brown uniforms; and here and there were
the oblong, cloth stretches of waiting hospital litters. On the reverse
slope of another knoll was the farmhouse, marked X on his map as the
regimental headquarters, where he was to watch for the signal to fall
back from his first stand in delaying the enemy's advance. Directly to
the rear was the cut through which the company had come from the main
pass road, and beyond that the Galland house, which was to be the second
stand.

"Can you see them from up here?" chirped a voice in a jubilant, cackling
laugh that drew Dellarme's attention to his immediate surroundings, and
he saw Grandfather Fragini coming up to join him on the crest. He slid
back on his stomach below the sky-line and held up an arresting hand.

"Kept along after you," piped the old man; "and it's just as I
thought--the glummest lot of funeral faces I ever seen!"

"You must not remain! Follow that cut there and it will take you out to
the road!" Dellarme told grandfather sharply.

"Just got to stay. Too tired to take another step," and grandfather
dropped in utter exhaustion. "Have to carry me if you want me to go."

"That means two men out of the line," thought Dellarme.

"You're an archaic old fire-eater!" Stransky remarked in cynical
amusement to grandfather Fragini.

"And you're a traitor!" answered grandfather with all the energy he
could command.

Now Dellarme disposed his men in line back of the ridge of fresh earth
that they had dug in the night, ready to rush to their places when he
blew the whistle that hung from his neck, but he did not allow them a
glimpse over the crest.

"I know you are curious, but powerful glasses are watching for you to
show yourselves; and if a battery turned loose on us you'd understand,"
he explained.

The men wanted to talk but did not know what to talk about, so they
examined their rifles critically as if they were unfamiliar gifts which
they had found in their stockings on Christmas morning. Some began to
empty their magazines of cartridges for the pleasure or occupation of
refilling them; but one of the lieutenants stopped this. It might mean
delay when the whistle blew. Thus the hours wore on, and the church
clock struck nine and ten.

"Never a movement down there!" called the sergeant from the crest to
Dellarme. "Maybe this is just their final bluff before they come to
terms about Bodlapoo"--that stretch of African jungle that seemed very
far away to them all.

"Let us hope so!" said Dellarme seriously.

"Hope there won't be any war! Just listen to that from an army officer,
with the enemy right in front of him!" gasped grandfather.




XVII

A SUNDAY MORNING IN TOWN


"You ought not to leave the house--not this morning," protested Mrs.
Galland when Marta was putting on her hat to start for the regular
Sunday service of her school.

"The children expect me," Marta explained.

"Hardly, hardly this morning. They will take it for granted that you
will not come."

But Marta thrust her hatpin home decisively.

"Jacky Werther will certainly be there. Though he were the only one to
come, I would not disappoint him!" she said. "Heaven knows, mother, if
there were ever a time for teaching peace it is to-day! And I can't
remain inactive. Just to sit still and wait in a time like this--that is
too terrible!"

"As you will!" Mrs. Galland responded with gentle resignation.

Garden and veranda were as peaceful as on any other Sunday morning, but
it was a different kind of peace--a peace mocked by sounds beyond its
boundaries which were to her like the rattling of the steel scales of a
demon licking its jaws with its red tongue in voracious anticipation of
a gorge and stretching out great steel claws in readiness to sink them
into the flesh of its victims when Partow and Westerling gave the word.
As Lanstron had said, this demon would feed on every resource and energy
of the nation. It had no voice and no thought except kill, kill, kill!
And man called this demon patriotism and love of country. Those who
risked death in the demon's honor got iron crosses and bronze crosses,
but any one who dared to call it by its true name, if a man, received
the decoration of the white feather; if a woman, was regarded as a
sentimentalist and merely a woman, and told that she did not understand
practical human nature.

Choosing to go to town by the castle road rather than down the terrace
to the main pass road, Marta, as she emerged from the grounds, saw
Feller, garden-shears in hand and in his workman's clothes instead of
his Sunday black, a figure of stone watching the approach of some
field-batteries. In the week of distracting and cumulative suspense that
had elapsed since his secret had been revealed to her, their relations
had continued as before. She studiously kept up the fiction of his
deafness by writing her orders. The question of allowing him to
undertake his part as a spy had drifted into the background of her mind
under the distressing and ever-present pressure of the crisis. He was to
remain until there was war, and thought about anything that implied that
war was coming was the more hideous to her the nearer war approached.

"It will be averted! It cannot be!" she was thinking. Her glimpse of him
had no more interest for her at this moment of preoccupation than any
other familiar object of the landscape.

"The guns! The guns! How I love the guns!" he was thinking.

She was almost past him before he realized her presence, which he
acknowledged by a startled movement and a step forward as he took off
his hat. She paused. His eyes were glowing like coals under a blower as
he looked at her and again at the batteries, seeming to include her with
the guns in the spell of his fervid abstraction. He was unconscious that
he had ever been anything but a soldier. His throat was athirst for
words and his words craved a listening ear for all the pictures of the
machinery of war in motion that crowded his imagination. To him the
demon was a fair, beckoning god in cloth of gold--a god of hope and
fortune.

"Frontier closed last night to prevent intelligence about our
preparations leaking out--Lanny's plan all alive--the guns coming," he
went on, his shoulders stiffening, his chin drawing in, his features
resolute and beaming with the ardor of youth in action--"troops moving
here and there to their places--engineers preparing the
defences--automatics at critical points with the infantry--field-wires
laid--field-telephones set up--the wireless spitting--the caissons
full--planes and dirigibles ready--search-lights in position"

There the torrent of his broken sentences was checked A shadow passed in
front of him. He came out of his trance of imageries of activities, so
vividly clear to his military mind, to realize that Marta was abruptly
leaving.

"Miss Galland!" he called urgently. "Firing may commence at any minute.
You must not go into town!"

"But I must!" she declared, speaking over her shoulder while she paused.
It was clear that no warning would prevail against her determined mood.

"Then I shall go with you!" he said, starting toward her with a light
step, in keeping with the gallantry of a man even younger than his
years. He spoke in a tone of protective masculine authority, as an
officer might to a woman of whom he was fond when he saw her exposing
herself to danger. He would escort her; he would see that no harm befell
her. The impulse was spontaneous in an illusion free of the gardener's
part. But he saw her lips tighten and a frown gather.

"It is not necessary, thank you!" she answered, more coldly than she had
ever spoken to him. This had a magically quick effect on his attitude.

"I beg pardon! I forgot!" he explained in his old man's voice, his head
sinking, his shoulders drooping in the humility of a servant who
recognizes that he has been properly rebuked for presumption. "Not a
gunner any more--I'm a spy!" he thought, as he shuffled off without
looking toward the batteries again, though the music of wheels and hoofs
was now close by. "I must turn my back on the guns, for they tempt me.
And I must win her consent before I shall have even the dignity of a
spy--and I will win it!" he added, brightening. "La, la, la! Trust me!"

Marta had a glimpse, as she turned away, of an appealingly pathetic
figure bent as under a wound to his spirits, which gave her a sense of
personal cruelty in the midst of a wave of pity and regret.

"He is what he is because of the army; a victim of a cult, a habit," she
was thinking. "Had he been in any other calling his fine qualities might
have been of service to the world and he would have been happy."

Then her sympathy was drawn to another object of war's injustice--a man
approaching under the guard of two soldiers. Suddenly the man planted
his feet and refused to budge.

"I tell you, it isn't fair!" he cried in rage and appeal. "I tell you, I
was only visiting on this side and got caught! I'm a reservist of the
first line. If I don't answer the call I'll be branded a shirker in my
village, and I've got to live in that village all my life. You better
kill me and have done with it!"

"Sorry," said one of the soldiers, "but you were caught trying to sneak.
We're acting under orders. No use of balking."

"Who wouldn't sneak?" demanded the prisoner desperately. "Oh, say, be a
little human! The worst of it is that I came over here to see my girl to
say good-by to her. I'm going to marry her," he pleaded, "though my
folks are against it because she's a Brown. It makes me so cheap--it--"

"We were told to take you to the general. He'll let you off if there
isn't any war, and he may, anyway. But he sure won't if you resist
arrest." The soldiers seized his arms firmly. "Come along!" they said,
and he went. Any one must go when a steel claw of the demon enforces
the order.

A company of infantry resting among their stacked rifles changed the
color of the square in the distance from the gray of pavement to the
brown of a mass of uniforms. In the middle of the main street a major of
the brigade staff, with a number of junior officers and orderlies, was
evidently waiting on some signal. Sentries were posted at regular
intervals along the curb. The people in the houses and shops from time
to time stopped packing up their effects long enough to go to the doors
and look up and down apprehensively, asking bootless, nervous questions.

"Are they coming yet?"

"Do you think they will come?"

"Are you sure it's going to be war?"

"Will they shell the town?"

"There'll be time enough for you to get away!" shouted the major. "All
we know is what is written in our instructions, and we shall act on them
when the thing starts. Then we are in command. Meanwhile, get ready!"

A lieutenant of a detachment of engineers coming at the double from a
cross street stopped to inquire:

"This way to the knitting mills?"

"Straight ahead! Can't go wrong!" the major answered.

"We are going to loophole their walls for the infantry," explained the
lieutenant as he hurried on.

"Then they're going to fight in the town!"

"Blow our homes to pieces!"

"Destroy our property!"

After this fusillade from the people the major glared at the retreating
back of the lieutenant as much as to say that some men would never learn
to hold their tongues. Naturally, the duty of looking after refugees was
not to his soldierly taste.

"We are doing it all for you, for the country," he explained. "We are
going to make them pay for every foot they take--the invaders!"

"Yes, make them pay!" called a voice from the houses.

"Make them pay!" other voices joined in.

"It isn't the fellows just across the border that want to take our
property," said an elderly man. "They're good friends enough. It's the
Grays' politicians and the fire-eaters in the other provinces."

"The robbers!" piped a woman's high-pitched note. "I've got a son in the
army, and if ever he leaves that mountain range and goes down the other
side with the Grays chasing him, he'll get worse from me than the Grays
could give him!"

"That's right! That's the way to talk!" came a chorus.

Then the major became aware of a young woman who was going in the wrong
direction. Her cheeks were flushed from her rapid walk, her lips were
parted, showing firm, white teeth, and her black eyes were regarding him
in a blaze of satire or amusement; an emotion, whatever it was, that
thoroughly centred his attention.

"Yes," she said, anger getting the better of her, "make them pay--and
they make you pay--and you make them pay--and so on!"

The major smiled. It seemed the safe thing to do. He did not know but
the young woman might charge.

"Mademoiselle, I am sorry, but unless you live in this direction," he
said very politely, "you may not go any farther. Until we have other
orders or they attack, every one is supposed to remain in his house or
his place of business."

"This is my place of business!" Marta answered, for she was already
opposite a small, disused chapel which was her schoolroom, where a half
dozen of the faithful children were gathered around the masculine
importance of Jacky Werther, one of the older boys.

"Then you are Miss Galland!" said the major, enlightened. His smile had
an appreciation of the irony of her occupation at that moment. "Your
children are very loyal. They would not tell me where they lived, so we
had to let them stay there."

"Those who have homes," she said, identifying each one of the faithful
with a glance, "have so many brothers and sisters that they will hardly
be missed from the flock. Others have no homes--at least, not much of a
one"--here her temper rose again--"taxes being so high in order that you
may organize murder and the destruction of property."

"I--" gasped the major under the fire of those black eyes.

But their flashes suddenly splintered into less threatening lights as
she realized the fatuity of this personal allusion.

"Oh, I'm not the town scold!" she explained with a nervous little laugh
that helped her to recover poise.

With the black eyes in this mood, the major was conscious only of a
desire to please which conflicted with duty.

"Now, really, Miss Galland," he began solicitously, "I have been
assigned to move the civil population in case of attack. Your children
ought--"

"After school! You have your duty this morning and I have mine!" Marta
interrupted pleasantly, and turned toward the chapel.

"They are putting sharpshooters in the church tower to get the
aeroplanes, and there are lots of the little guns that fire bullets so
fast you can't count 'em--and little spring wagons with dynamite to blow
things up--and--" Jacky Werther ran on in a series of vocal explosions
as Marta opened the door to let the children go in.

"Yet you came!" said Marta with a hand caressingly on his shoulder.

"It looks pretty bad for peace, but we came," answered Jacky,
round-eyed, in loyalty. "We'd come right through the bullets 'cause we
said we would if we wasn't sick, and we wasn't sick."

"My seven disciples--seven!" exclaimed Marta as she counted them. "And
you need not sit on the regular seats, but around me on the platform. It
will be more intimate."

"That's grand!" came in chorus. They did not bother, about chairs, but
seated themselves on the floor around Marta's skirts.

"My, Miss Galland, but your eyes are bright!"

"And your cheeks are all red!"

"With little spots in the centre!"

"You're very wonderful, Miss Galland!"

The church clock boomed out its deliberate strokes through ten, the hour
set for the lesson, and all counted them--one--two--three. Marta was
thinking what a dismal little effort theirs was, and yet she was very
happy, tremblingly happy in her distraction and excitement, that they
had not waited for her at the door of the chapel in vain.

She announced that there would be no talk this morning; they would only
say their oath. Repeating in concert the pledge to the boys and girls of
other lands, the childish voices peculiarly sweet and harmonious in
contrast to the raucous and uneven sounds of foreboding from the street,
they came in due course to the words of the concession that the oath
made to militancy.

"If an enemy tries to take my land--"

"Children--I--" Marta interrupted with a sense of wonder and shock. They
paused and looked at her questioningly. "I had almost forgotten that
part!" she breathed confusedly.

"That's the part that makes all we're doing against the Grays right!"
put in Jacky Werther promptly.

"As I wrote it for you! 'I shall appeal to his sense of justice and
reason with him--'"

Jaws dropped and eyes bulged, for above the sounds of the street rose
from the distance the unmistakable crackling of rifle-fire which, as
they listened, spread and increased in volume.

"Go on--on to the end of the oath! It will take only a moment," said
Marta resolutely. "It isn't much, but it's the best we can do!"




XVIII

THE BAPTISM OF FIRE


After the morning sun commenced to tickle the back of his neck, Eugene
Aronson, the giant of the 128th of the Grays, stretched his limbs as
healthily as a cub bear.

"No war yet!" he exclaimed, rubbing his eyes.

"Oh, we'd have called you if there were!" said the manufacturer's son,
trying to make a joke, which was hard work with his clothes dew-soaked
after a sleepless night in the open.

"Wouldn't want you to miss it after coming so far," added the laborer's
son, aiming to show that he, too, was in a light-hearted mood.

"And how did you sleep?" asked Eugene, cheerily, of his neighbors.

"Fine!"

"First rate!"

"Like a stone!"

Every man was too intent in forcing his own spontaneity to notice that
that of the others was also forced.

"Like a top!" chimed in pasty-faced Peterkin, the valet's son, to be in
fashion.

"I didn't sleep much myself; in fact, not at all," said Hugo Mallin.

"Oh, ho!" groaned Pilzer, the butcher's son, with a broad grin that made
a crease in the liver patch on his cheek.

"You see, it's a new experience for me," Hugo explained in a drawl, his
face drawn as a mask. "I'm not so used to war as you other fellows are.
I'm not so brave!"

There was a forced laugh because Hugo appeared droll, and when he
appeared droll it was the proper thing to laugh. Besides, in the best
humor there is a grain of truth, whether you see it or not. This time a
number saw it quite clearly.

"I was thinking how ridiculous we all are," Hugo went on without change
of tone or expression, "grovelling here on our stomachs and pretending
that we slept when we didn't and that we want to be killed when we
don't!"

"White feather again!" Pilzer exclaimed.

"Oh, shut up!" snapped the doctor's son irritably. "Let Hugo talk. He's
only gassing. It's so monotonous lying here that any kind of nonsense is
better than growling."

"Yes, yes!" the others agreed.

Hugo's outburst of the previous evening was forgotten. They welcomed
anything that broke the suspense. Let the regimental wag make a little
fun any way that he could. As the officers had withdrawn somewhat to the
rear for breakfast, there was no constraint.

"I was thinking how I'd like to go out and shake hands with the Browns,"
said Hugo. "That's the way fencers and pugilists do before they set to.
It seems polite and sportsmanlike, indicating that there's no
prejudice."

There was a ripple of half-hearted merriment punctuated by exclamations.

"What a fool idea!"

"How do all your notions get into your head, Hugo?"

"Sometimes by squinting at the moonlight and counting odd numbers;
sometimes by knowing that anything that's different is ridiculous; and
sometimes by looking for tangent truths out of professorial ruts," Hugo
observed with a sort of erudite discursiveness which was the rank
dissimulation of a hypocrite to Pilzer and wholly confusing to Peterkin,
not to say a draught on mental effort for many of the others. "For
instance, I got a good one from two fellows of the Browns whom I met on
the road the first day we arrived. They were reservists. We were soon
talking together and so peaceably that I was sceptical if they were
Browns at all. So I determined on a test. I told them I was from a
distant province and hadn't travelled much and wouldn't they please take
off their hats. They consented very good-naturedly."

"Oh, good old Hugo! He got one on the Browns!"

"I'd like to have been there to see it!"

"And when they took off their hats, what then?"

"Why, I said: 'This isn't convincing at all.'" Hugo's drawl paused for a
second while interest developed. "'You haven't any horns! Haven't you
any forked tails, either? Or are they curled up nicely inside your
trousers' legs?'"

"Whew! But they must have felt cheap to have been got in that way!"

"And old Hugo looking so solemn!"

"Just like he does now!"

But the judge's son said under his breath, "Very pretty!" and the
doctor's son, who was next him in the ranks, nodded understandingly.

"It seems they had checked their horns and tails at the frontier," Hugo
continued, "and, as I had left mine hanging in the rifle racks at the
barracks, we got on together like real human beings. I found they could
speak my language better than my lesson-book try at theirs--yes, as well
as I can speak it myself--and that made it all the easier. After a while
I mentioned the war. They were very amiable and they didn't begin to
call me a swill-eating land-shark or any other of the pretty names I've
heard they are so fond of using. 'We want to keep what is ours,' they
said. 'Your side will have to start the fight by crossing the line. We
shall not!"'

"Because they know they'll be licked!" put in Pilzer hotly.

"No, we may beat them in fighting," agreed Hugo, "but these two fellows
had me beaten on the argument!"

"They hauled down our flag! They insulted us in their despatches! They
quibble! They're the perfidious Browns!" cried big Eugene Aronson,
speaking the lesson taught him by the newspapers, which had it from the
premier.

"There, he's got you again, Gene!"

"Yes, you funny old simpleton! You are almost too easy!"

There was something of the vivacity of the barrack-room banter in the
exclamations at Eugene's expense. Yet they were not the same. The look
on no man's face was the same. The humorist was silent.

"What next, Hugo?"

He half stared at them, and his mask was not solemn but tragic.

"I was thinking how men work their courage up, as if patriotism were a
Moloch of which they were afraid," he said. "How in order to get killed
we go out to kill others, when right is on their side! How you, Armand,
or you, Eugene, might be dead before to-morrow! How--."

"The bullet is not made that will get me!" exclaimed Eugene, with a
swelling breath from his bellows-like lungs.

"Take him home to mother!" groaned Pilzer.

"That will do for you, Hugo Mallin!" came another interruption, a sharp
one from Captain Fracasse, who had returned unobserved from the rear in
time to overhear Hugo's remarks. "And that's the way to talk, Aronson
and Pilzer. As for you, Mallin, I've a mind to put you under arrest and
send you back for a coward! A coward--do you hear?"

"Ah-h!" breathed Pilzer in a guttural of satisfaction.

Hugo crimsoned at first in confusion, then he looked frankly and
unflinchingly at the captain.

"Very well, sir!" he said with a certain dignity which Fracasse, who
was a good deal of a martinet, found very irritating.

"No, that would suit you too well!" Fracasse declared. "You shall stay!
You shall do the duty for which your country trained you and take your
share of the chances."

"Yes, sir!" answered Hugo. "But won't you," he asked persuasively and
with the wondering inquiry of the suggestion that had sprung into his
heretic brain, "won't you ask the men if there are not some here who
really, in their hearts, the logic of their hearts--which is often
better than brain logic--do not believe just as I do?"

"Have you gone insane? There are none!" In the impulse of anger that
swept his cheeks with a red wave Fracasse half drew his sword as if he
would strike Hugo. "And, Mallin, you are a marked man. I shall watch
you! I'll have the lieutenants and sergeants watch you. At the first
sign of flunking I'll make an example of you!"

"Yes, sir," answered Hugo, with the automatic deference of private to
officer but with a reserved and studious inquiry that made the captain
bite his lip.

"I'll have Aronson and Pilzer watch you, too!" Fracasse added.

"Yes, sir!" said Pilzer promptly.

Then, under the restraint of the captain's presence, there was a silence
that endured. The men were left to the sole resource of their thoughts
and observation of their surroundings. They were lying in a pasture
facing the line of white posts whose tops ran in an even row over level
ground. On the other side of the boundary was a wheat-field. Here a
farmer had commenced his fall ploughing. His plough was in the furrow
where he had left it when he unhitched his team for the day, before an
orderly had come to tell him that he must move out of his house
overnight. The wheat stubble swept on up to a knoll in the distance.

All the landscape in front of Fracasse's company seemed to have been
deserted; no moving figures were anywhere in sight; no sign of the
enemy's infantry. No trains came or went along the lines of steel into
the mountain tunnel, which had been mined at a dozen points by the
Browns. No vehicles and no foot-passengers dotted the highway into the
town. Over the mountains and over the plain, planes and dirigibles moved
in wide circles restively, watching for a signal as hawks watch for
prey. Suspense this--suspense of such a swift vibration that it was like
a taut G string of a violin under the bow!

Faintly the town clock was heard striking the hour. From eight to nine
and nine to ten Fracasse's men waited; waited until the machine was
ready and Westerling should throw in the clutch; waited until the troops
were in place for the first move before he hurled his battalions
forward. Every pawn of flesh facing the white posts had a thousand
thoughts whirling in such a medley that he could be said to have no
thought at all, only an impression juggled by destiny. No one would have
confessed what he felt, while physical inactivity gave free rein to
mental activity. That thing of a nation's nightmare; that thing for
which generations had drilled without its materializing; that thing of
speculation, of hazard, of horror; that thing of quick action and
long-enduring consequences was coming.

They did not know how the captain at their back received his orders;
they only heard the note of the whistle, with a command familiar to a
trained instinct on the edge of anticipation. It released a spring in
their nerve-centres. They responded as the wheels respond when the
throttle is opened. Jumping to their feet they broke into a run, bodies
bent, heads down, like the peppered silhouette that faced Westerling's
desk. What they had done repeatedly in drills and manoeuvres they were
now doing in war, mechanically as marionettes.

"Come on! The bullet is not made that can get me! Come on!" cried the
giant Eugene Aronson.

He leaped over a white post and then over the plough, which was also in
his path. Little Peterkin felt his legs trembling. They seemed to be
detached from his will, and the company's and the captain's will, and
churning in pantomime or not moving at all. If Hugo Mallin had been
called a coward, what of himself? What of the stupid of the company, who
would never learn even the manual of arms correctly, as the
drill-sergeant often said? A new fear made him glance around. He would
not have been surprised to find that he was already in the rear. But
instead he found that he was keeping up, which was all that was
necessary, as more than one other man assured his legs. After thirty or
forty yards most of the legs, if not Peterkin's, had worked out their
shiver and nearly all felt the exhilaration of movement in company. Then
came the sound that generations had drilled for without hearing; the
sound that summons the imagination of man in the thought of how he will
feel and act when he hears it; the sound that is everywhere like the
song snatches of bees driven whizzing through the air.

"That's it! We're under fire! We're under fire!" flashed as crooked
lightning recognition of the sound through every brain.

There was no sign of any enemy; no telling where the bullets came from.

"Such a lot of them, one must surely get me!" Peterkin thought.

Whish-whish! Th-ipp-whing! The refrain gripped his imagination with an
unseen hand. He seemed to be suffocating. He wanted to throw himself
down and hold his hands in front of his head. While Pilzer and Aronson
were not thinking, only running, Peterkin was thinking with the rapidity
of a man falling from a high building. Worse! He did not know how far he
had to go. He was certain only that he was bound to strike ground.

"An inch is as good as a mile!" He recollected the captain's teaching.
"Only one of a thousand bullets fired in war ever kills a man"--but he
was certain that he had heard a million already. Then one passed very
close, its swift breath brushing his cheek with a whistle like a s-s-st
through the teeth. He dodged so hard that he might have dislocated his
neck; he gasped and half stumbled, but realized that he had not been
hit. And he must keep right on going, driven by one fear against
another, in face of those ghastly whispers which the others, for the
most part, in the excitement of a charge, had ceased to hear.

Again he would be sure that his legs, which he was urging so frantically
to their duty, were not playing pantomime. He looked around to find that
he was still keeping up with Eugene and felt the thrill of the bravery
of fellowship at sight of the giant's flushed, confident face revelling
in the spirit of a charge. And then, just then, Eugene convulsively
threw up his arms, dropped his rifle, and whirled on his heel. As he
went down his hand clutched at his left breast and came away red and
dripping. After one wild, backward glance, Peterkin plunged ahead.

"Eugene!" Hugo Mallin had stopped and bent over Eugene in the supreme
instinct of that terrible second, supporting his comrade's head.

"The bullet is not--made--." Eugene whispered, the ruling passion strong
to the last. A flicker of the eyelids, a gurgle in the throat, and he
was dead.

Fracasse had been right behind them. The sight of a man falling was
something for which he was prepared; something inevitably a part of the
game. A man down was a man out of the fight, service finished. A man up
with a rifle in his hand was a man who ought to be in action.

"Here, you are not going to get out this way!" he said in the irritation
of haste, slapping Hugo with his sword. "Go on! That's hospital-corps
work."

Hugo had a glimpse of the captain's rigid features and a last one of
Eugene's, white and still and yet as if he were about to speak his
favorite boast; then he hurried on, his side glance showing other
prostrate forms. One form a few yards away half rose to call "Hospital!"
and fell back, struck mortally by a second bullet.

"That's what you get if you forget instructions," said Fracasse with no
sense of brutality, only professional exasperation, "Keep down, you
wounded men!" he shouted at the top of his voice.

The colonel of the 128th had not looked for immediate resistance. He had
told Fracasse's men to occupy the knoll expeditiously. But by the common
impulse of military training, no less than in answer to the whistle's
call, in face of the withering fire they dropped to earth at the base of
the knoll, where Hugo threw himself down at full length in his place in
line next to Peterkin.

"Fire pointblank at the crest in front of you! I saw a couple of men
standing up there!" called Fracasse. "Fire fast! That's the way to keep
down their fire--pointblank, I tell you! You're firing into the sky! I
want to see more dust kicked up. Fire fast! We'll have them out of there
soon! They're only an outpost."

Hugo was firing vaguely, like a man in a dream, and thinking that maybe
up there on the knoll were the two Browns he had met on the road and
perhaps their comrades were as fond of them as he was of Eugene. It is a
mistake for a soldier to think much, as Westerling had repeatedly said.

Pilzer was shooting to kill. His eye had the steely gleam of his rifle
sight and the liver patch on his cheek was a deeper hue as he sought to
avenge Eugene's death. Drowned by the racket of their own fire, not even
Peterkin was hearing the whish-whish of the bullets from Dellarme's
company now. He did not know that the blacksmith's son, who was the
fourth man from him, lay with his chin on his rifle stock and a tiny
trickle of blood from a hole in his forehead running down the bridge of
his nose.

Fracasse, glancing along from rifle to rifle, as a weaver watches the
threads of a machine loom, saw that Hugo was firing at too high an
angle.

"Mallin!" he called. Hugo did not hear because of the noise, and
Fracasse had to creep nearer, which was anything but cooling to his
temper. "You fool! You are shooting fifty feet above the top of the
knoll! Look along your sight!" he yelled.

Fracasse observed, with some surprise, that Hugo's hand was steady as he
carefully drew a bead. Hugo saw a spurt of dust at the point slightly
below the crest where he aimed; for he was the best shot in the company
at target practice.

"I'm not killing anybody!" he thought happily.




XIX

RECEIVING THE CHARGE


What about Stransky of the Reds, who would not fight to please the
ruling classes? What about Grandfather Fragini, who would fight on
principle whenever a Gray was in sight? Now we leave the story of
Fracasse's men at the foot of the knoll for that of the Browns on the
crest.

Young Dellarme, new to his captain's rank, with lips pressed tightly
together, his delicately moulded, boyish features reflecting the
confidence which it was his duty to inspire in his company, watching the
plain through his glasses, saw the movement of mounted officers to the
rear of the 128th as a reason for summoning his men.

"Creep up! Don't show yourselves! Creep up--carefully--carefully!" he
kept repeating as they crawled forward on their stomachs. "And no one is
to fire until the command comes."

Hugging the cover of the ridge of fresh earth which they had thrown up
the previous night, they watched the white posts. Stransky, who had been
ruminatively silent all the morning, was in his place, but he was not
looking at the enemy. Cautiously, to avoid a reprimand, he raised his
head to enable him to glance along the line. All the faces seemed drawn
and clayish.

"They don't want to fight! They're just here because they're ordered
here and haven't the character to defy authority," he thought. "The
leaven is working! My time is coming!"

But Grandfather Fragini's cheeks had a hectic flush; his heart was
beating with the exhilaration of an old war-horse. Looking over Tom's
shoulder, he squinted into the distance, his underlip quivering against
his toothless gums.

"My eyesight's kind of uncertain," he said. "Can you see 'em?"

"There by the white posts--those lying figures!" said Tom. "They're
almost the color of the stubble."

"So I do, the land-sharks! Down on their bellies, too! No flag, either!
But that ain't no reason why we shouldn't have a flag. It ought to be
waving at 'em in defiance right over our heads!"

"Flags draw fire. They let the enemy know where you are,' Tom explained.

"The Hussars didn't bother about that. We let out a yell and went after
'em!" growled grandfather. "Appears to me the fighting these days is
grovelling in the dirt and taking care nobody don't get hurt!"

"Oh, there'll be enough hurt--don't you worry about that!" said a voice
from the line.

"Good thing an old fellow who's been under fire is along to stiffen you
rookies!" replied grandfather tartly. "You'll be all right once you get
going. You'll settle down to be real soldiers yet. And I'd like to hear
a little more cussing. How the Hussars used to cuss! Too much reading
and writing nowadays. It makes men too ladylike."

By this time he had once more attracted the captain's attention.

"Grandfather Fragini, you must drop back--you must! If you don't, I'll
have you carried back!" called Dellarme, sparing the old man only a
glance from his concentrated observation on the front.

When he looked again at the enemy any thought of carrying out his threat
vanished, for the minute had come when all his training was to be put to
a test. The figures on the other side of the white posts were rising. He
was to prove by the way he directed a company of infantry in action
whether or not he was worthy of his captain's rank. He breathed one of
those unspoken prayers that are made to the god of one's own efficient,
conscientious responsibility to duty. The words of it were: "May I keep
my head as if I were at drill!" Then he smiled cheerily. In order that
he might watch how each man used his rifle, he drew back of the line,
his slim body erect as he rested on one knee, his head level with the
other heads while he fingered his whistle. His lieutenants followed his
example even to the detail of his cheery smile. There was a slight
stirring of heads and arms as eyes drew beads on human targets. The
instant that Eugene Aronson sprang over the white post a blast from
Dellarme's whistle began the war.

It was a signal, too, for Stransky to play the part he had planned; to
make the speech of his life. His six feet of stature shot to its feet
with a Jack-in-the-box abruptness, under the impulse of a mighty and
reckless passion.

"Men, stop firing!" he cried thunderously. "Stop firing on your
brothers! Like you, they are only the pawns of the ruling class, who
keep us all pawns in order that they may have champagne and caviare.
Comrades, I'll lead you! Comrades, we'll take a white flag and go down
to meet our comrades and we'll find that they think as we do! I'll lead
you!"

Grandfather Fragini, impelled by the hysterical call of the Hussar
spirit, also sprang up, waving his hat and trembling and swaying with
the emotion that racked his old body.

"Give it to 'em! Aim low! Give it to 'em--give it to 'em, horns and
hoofs, sabre and carbine!" he shouted in a high, jumpy voice. "Give it
to 'em! Make 'em weep! Make 'em whine! Make 'em bellow!"

Both appeals were drowned in the cracking of the rifles working as
regularly as punching-machines in a factory. Every soldier was seeing
only his sight and the running figures under it. Mechanically and
automatically, training had been projected into action, anticipation
into realization. A spectator might as well have called to a man in a
hundred-yard dash to stop running, to an oarsman in a race to jump out
of his shell.

So centred was Dellarme in watching his men and the effect of their fire
that he did not notice the two silhouettes on the sky-line, making
ridicule of all his care about keeping his company under cover, until
the doctor, who alone had nothing to do as yet, touched him on the arm.
At the moment he looked around, and before he could speak a command, a
hospital-corps man who was near Grandfather Fragini threw himself in a
low tackle and brought the old man to earth, while the company sergeant
sprang for Stransky with an oath. But Stransky was in no mood to submit.
He felled the sergeant with a blow and, recklessly defiant, stared at
Dellarme, while the men, steadily firing, were still oblivious of the
scene. The sergeant, stunned, rose to his knees and reached for his
revolver. Dellarme, bent over to keep his head below the crest, had
already drawn his as he hastened toward them.

"Stransky," said Dellarme, "you have struck an officer under fire! You
have refused to fight! Within the law I am warranted in shooting you
dead!"

"Well!" answered Stransky, throwing back his head, his face seeming all
big, bony nose and heavy jaw and burning eyes.

"Will you get down? Will you take your place with your rifle?" demanded
Dellarme.

Stransky laughed thunderously in scorn. He was handsome, titanic, and
barbaric, with his huge shoulders stretching his blouse, which fell
loosely around his narrow hips, while the fist that had felled the
sergeant was still clenched.

"No!" said Stransky. "You won't kill much if you kill me and you'd kill
less if you shot yourself! God Almighty! Do you think I'm afraid?
Me--afraid?"

His eyes in a bloodshot glare, as uncompromising as those of a bull in
an arena watching the next move of the red cape of the matador, regarded
Dellarme, who hesitated in the revulsion of the horror of killing and in
admiration of the picture of human force before him. But the old
sergeant, smarting under the insult of the blow, his sandstone features
mottled with red patches, had no compunctions of this order. He was
ready to act as executioner.

"If you don't want to shoot, I can! An example--the law! There's no
other way of dealing with him! Give the word!" he said to Dellarme.

Stransky laughed, now in strident cynicism. It was the laugh of the red,
of bastardy, of blanketless nights in the hedgerows, and boot soles worn
through to the macadam, with the dust of speeding automobiles blown in
the gaunt face of hunger. Dellarme still hesitated, recollecting
Lanstron's remark. He pictured Stransky in a last stand in a redoubt,
and every soldier was as precious to him as a piece of gold to a miser.

"One ought to be enough to kill me if you're going to do it to slow
music," said Stransky. "You might as well kill me as the poor fools that
your poor fools are trying to--"

Another breath finished the speech; a breath released from a ball that
seemed to have come straight from hell. The fire-control officer of a
regiment of Gray artillery on the plain, scanning the landscape for the
origin of the rifle-fire which was leaving many fallen in the wake of
the charge of the Gray infantry, had seen two figures on the knoll. "How
kind! Thank you!" his thought spoke faster than words. No need of
range-finding! The range to every possible battery or infantry position
around La Tir was already marked on his map. He passed the word to his
guns.

The burst of their first shrapnel-shell blinded all three actors in the
scene on the crest of the knoll with its ear-splitting crack and the
force of its concussion threw Stransky down beside the sergeant.
Dellarme, as his vision cleared, had just time to see Stransky jerk his
hand up to his temple, where there was a red spot, before another shell
burst, a little to the rear. This was harmless, as a shrapnel's shower
of fragments and bullets carry forward from the point of explosion. But
the next burst in front of the line. The doctor's period of idleness was
over. One man's rifle shot up as his spine was broken by a jagged piece
of shrapnel jacket. Now there were too many shells to watch them
individually.

"It's all right--all right, men!" Dellarme called again, assuming his
cheery smile. "It takes a lot of shrapnel to kill anybody. Our batteries
will soon answer!"

His voice was unheard, yet its spirit was felt. The men knew through
their training that there was no use of dodging and that their best
protection was an accurate fire of their own.

"Shelling us, the ---- ----!" gasped Grandfather Fragini, who had
experience, if he were weak in reading and writing. "All noise and
smoke!"--as it was to a larger degree in his day.

Stransky had half risen, a new kind of savagery dawning on his features
as he regained his wits. With inverted eyes he regarded the red ends of
his fingers, held in line with the bridge of his nose. He felt of the
wound again, now that he was less dizzy. It was only a scratch and he
had been knocked down like a beef in an abattoir by an unseen enemy, on
whom he could not lay hands! He glared around as if in search of the
hidden antagonist. The sergeant had crept forward to be a steadying
influence to the men in their first trial, if need be, and the doctor
and a hospital-corps man were dragging a wounded man out of fine without
exposing their own shoulders above the crest. Stransky rolled his eyes
in and out; the tendons of his neck swelled; his jaw worked as if
crunching pebbles. Deafeningly, the shrapnel jackets continued to crack
with "ukung-s-sh--ukung-s-sh" as the swift breath of the shrapnel
missiles spread.

"Give it to 'em! Give it to 'em!" Grandfather Fragini cried, his old
voice a quavering bird note in the pandemonium. "My, but they do come
fast!" he gasped.

Yes, a trifle faster than in your day, grandfather, when a gun of the
horse-artillery had to be relaid after the recoil, which is now taken up
by an oil chamber, while the gunner on his seat behind the breech keeps
the sight steady on the target. The guns of one battery of that Gray
regiment of artillery, each firing six fourteen-pound shells a minute
methodically, every shell loaded with nearly two hundred projectiles,
were giving their undivided attention to the knoll.

How long could his company endure this? Dellarme might well ask. He knew
that he would not be expected to withdraw yet. With a sense of relief he
saw Fracasse's men drop for cover at the base of the knoll and then,
expectation fulfilled, he realized that rifle-fire now reinforced the
enemy's shell fire. His duty was to remain while he could hold his men,
and a feeling toward them such as he had never felt before, which was
love, sprang full-fledged into his heart as he saw how steadily they
kept up their fusillade.

The sergeant, who now had time to think of Stransky, was seized with a
spasm of retributive rage. He drew his revolver determinedly.

"You brought this on! I'll do for you!" he cried, turning toward the
spot where he had left Stransky, only to lower his revolver in amazement
as he saw Stransky, eager in response to a new passion, spring forward
into place and pick up his rifle.

"If you will not have it my way, take it yours!" said the best shot in
the company, as he began firing with resolute coolness.

"They have a lot of men down," said Dellarme, his glasses showing the
many prostrate figures on the wheat stubble. "Steady! steady! We have
plenty of batteries back in the hills. One will be in action soon."

But would one? He understood that with their smokeless powder the
Gray guns could be located only by their flashes, which would not
be visible unless the refraction of light were favorable. Then
"thur-eesh--thur-eesh" above every other sound in a long wail! No man
ever forgets the first crack of a shrapnel at close quarters, the first
bullet breath on his cheek, or the first supporting shell from his side
in flight that passes above him.

"That is ours!" called Dellarme.

"Ours!" shouted the sergeant.

"Ours!" sang the thought of every one of the men.

Over the Gray batteries on the plain an explosive ball of smoke hung in
the still air; then another beside it.

"Thur-eesh--thur-eesh--thur-eesh," the screaming overhead became
a gale that built a cloud of blue smoke over the offending Gray
batteries--beautiful, soft blue smoke from which a spray of steel
descended. There was no spotting the flashes of the Browns' guns in
order to reply to them, for they were under the cover of a hill, using
indirect aim as nicely and accurately as In firing pointblank. The
gunners of the Gray batteries could not go on with their work under such
a hail-storm, they were checkmated. They stopped firing and began moving
to a new position, where their commander hoped to remain undiscovered
long enough to support the 128th by loosing his lightnings against the
defenders at the critical moment of the next charge, which would be made
as soon as Fracasse's men had been reinforced.

There was an end to the concussions and the thrashing of the air around
Dellarme's men, and they had the relief of a breaking abscess in the
ear. But they became more conscious of the spits of dust in front of
their faces and the passing whistles of bullets. In return, they made
the sections of Gray infantry in reserve rushing across the levels,
leave many gray lumps behind. But Fracasse's men at the foot of the
slope poured in a heavier and still heavier fire.

"Down there's where we need the shells now!" spoke the thought of
Dellarme's men, which he had anticipated by a word to the signal
corporal, who waved his flag one--two--three--four--five times. Come on,
now, with more of your special brand of death, fire-control officer!
Your own head is above the sky-line, though your guns are hidden. Five
hundred yards beyond the knoll is the range! Come on!

He came with a burst of screams so low in flight that they seemed to
brush the back of the men's necks with a hair broom at the rate of a
thousand feet a second. Having watched the result, Dellarme turned with
a confirmatory gesture, which the corporal translated into the wigwag of
"Correct!" The shrapnel smoke hanging over Fracasse's men appeared a
heavenly blue to Dellarme's men.

"They are going to start for us soon! Oh, but we'll get a lot of them!"
whispered Stransky gleefully to his rifle.

Dellarme glanced again toward the colonel's station. No sign of the
retiring flag. He was glad of that. He did not want to fall back in face
of a charge; to have his men silhouetted in the valley as they
retreated. And the Grays would not endure this shower-bath long without
going one way or the other. He gave the order to fix bayonets, and
hardly was it obeyed when he saw flashes of steel through the shrapnel
smoke as the Grays fixed theirs. The Grays had five hundred yards to go;
the Browns had the time that it takes running men to cover the distance
in which to stop the Grays.

"We'll spear any of them who has the luck to get this far!" whispered
Stransky to his rifle. The sentence was spoken in the midst of a salvo
of shrapnel cracks, which he did not hear. He heard nothing, thought
nothing, except to kill.

The Gray batteries on the plain, having taken up a new position and
being reinforced, played on the crest at top speed instantly the Gray
line rose and started up the slope at the run. With the purpose of
confusing no less than killing, they used percussion, which burst on
striking the ground, as well as shrapnel, which burst by a time-fuse in
the air. Fountains of sod and dirt shot upward to meet descending sprays
of bullets. The concussions of the earth shook the aim of Dellarme's
men, blinded by smoke and dust, as they fired through a fog at bent
figures whose legs were pumping fast in dim pantomime.

But the guns of the Browns, also, have word that the charge has begun.
The signal corporal is waiting for the gesture from Dellarme agreed upon
as an announcement. The Brown artillery commander cuts his fuses two
hundred and fifty yards shorter. He, too, uses percussion for moral
effect.

Half of the distance from the foot to the crest of the knoll Fracasse's
men have gone in face of the hot, sizzling tornado of bullets, when
there is a blast of explosions in their faces with all the chaotic and
irresistible force of a volcanic eruption. Not only are they in the
midst of the first lot of the Browns' shells at the shorter range, but
one Gray battery has either made a mistake in cutting its fuses or
struck a streak of powder below standard, and its shells burst among
those whom it is aiming to assist.

The ground seems rising under the feet of Fracasse's company; the air is
split and racked and wrenched and torn with hideous screams of invisible
demons. The men stop; they act on the uncontrollable instinct of
self-preservation against an overwhelming force of nature. A few without
the power of locomotion drop, faces pressed to the ground. The rest flee
toward a shoulder of the slope through the instinct that leads a hunted
man in a street into an alley. In a confusion of arms and legs, pressing
one on the other, no longer soldiers, only a mob, they throw themselves
behind the first protection that offers itself. Fracasse also runs. He
runs from the flame of a furnace door suddenly thrown open.

The Gray batteries have ceased firing; certain gunners' ears burn under
the words of inquiry as to the cause of the mistake from an artillery
commander. Dellarme's men are hugging the earth too close to cheer. A
desire to spring up and yell may be in their hearts, but they know the
danger of showing a single unnecessary inch of their craniums above the
sky-line. The sounds that escape their throats are those of a winning
team at a tug of war as diaphragms relax.

With the smoke clearing, they see twenty or thirty Grays plastered on
the slope at the point where the charge was checked. Every one of those
prostrate forms is within fatal range. Not one moves a finger; even the
living are feigning death in the hope of surviving. Among them is little
Peterkin, so faithful in forcing his refractory legs to keep pace with
his comrades. If he is always up with them they will never know what is
in his heart and call him a coward. As he has been knocked unconscious,
he has not been in the pell-mell retreat.

His first stabbing thought on coming to was that he must be dead; but,
no; he was opening his eyes sticky with dust. At least, he must be
wounded! He had not power yet to move his hands in order to feel where,
and when they grew alive enough to move, what he saw in front of him
held them frigidly still. His nerves went searching from his head to his
feet and--miracle of Heaven!--found no point of pain or spot soppy with
blood. If he were really hit there was bound to be one or the other, he
knew from reading.

Between him and the faces of the Browns--yes, the actual, living,
terrible Browns--above the glint of their rifle barrels, was no obstacle
that could stop a bullet, though not more than three feet away was a
crater made by a shell burst. The black circle of every muzzle on the
crest seemed to be pointing at him. When were they going to shoot? When
was he to be executed? Would he be shot in many places and die thus? Or
would the very first bullet go through his head? Why didn't they fire?
What were they waiting for? The suspense was unbearable. The desperation
of overwhelming fear driving him in irresponsible impulse, he doubled up
his legs and with a cat's leap sprang for the crater.

A blood-curdling burst of whistles passed over his head as a dozen
rifles cracked. This time he was surely killed! He was in some other
world! Which was it, the good or the bad? The good, for he had a glimpse
of blue sky. No, that could not be, for he had been alive when he leaped
for the crater, and there he was pressed against the soft earth of its
bottom. He burrowed deeper blissfully. He was the nearest to the enemy
of any man of the 128th, and he certainly had passed through a gamut of
emotions in the half-hour since Eugene Aronson had leaped over a white
post.

       *       *       *       *        *

"Confound it! If we'd kept on we'd have got them! Now we have to do it
all over again!" growled Fracasse distractedly as he looked around at
the faces hugging the cover of the shoulder--faces asking, What next?
each in its own way; faces blank and white; faces with lips working and
eyes blinking; faces with the blood rushing back to cheeks in baffled
anger. One, however, was half smiling--Hugo Mallin's.

"You did your share of the running, I'll warrant, Mallin!" said Fracasse
excitedly, venting his disgust on a particular object.

"Yes, sir," answered Hugo. "It was very hard to maintain a semblance of
dignity. Yes, sir, I kept near you all the time so you could watch me.
Wasn't that what you wanted me to do, sir?"

"Good old Hugo! The same old Hugo!" breathed the spirit of the company.
Three or four men burst into a hysterical laugh as if something had
broken in their throats. Everybody felt better for this touch of
drollery except the captain. Yet, possibly, it may have helped him in
recovering his poise. Sometimes even a pin-prick will have this effect.

"Silence!" he said in his old manner. "I will give you something to joke
about other than a little setback like this! Get up there with your
rifles!"

He formed the nucleus of a firing-line under cover of the shoulder, and
then set the remainder of his company to work with their spades making a
trench. The second battalion of the 128th, which faced the knoll, was
also digging at the base of the slope, and another regiment in reserve
was deploying on the plain. After the failure to rush the knoll the Gray
commander had settled down to the business of a systematic approach.

And what of those of Fracasse's men who had not run but had dropped in
their tracks when the charge halted? They were between two lines of
fire. There was no escape. Some of the wounded had a mercifully quick
end, others suffered the consciousness of being hit again and again; the
dead were bored through with bullet holes. In torture, the survivors
prayed for death; for all had to die except Peterkin, the pasty-faced
little valet's son.

Peterkin was quite safe, hugging the bottom of the shell crater under a
swarm of hornets. In a surprisingly short time he became accustomed to
the situation and found himself ravenously hungry, for the strain of the
last twelve hours had burned up tissue. He took a biscuit out of his
knapsack and began nibbling it, as became a true rodent.




XX

MARTA'S FIRST GLIMPSE OF WAR


As Marta and the children came to the door of the chapel after the
recitation of the oath, she saw the civil population moving along the
street in the direction of the range. Suddenly they paused in a common
impulse and their heads turned as one head on the fulcrum of their
necks, and their faces as one face in a set stare looked skyward.

"Keep on moving! No danger!" called the major of the brigade staff.
"Pass the word--no danger! It's not going to drop any bombs; it's only a
scout plane trying to locate the positions of the defences we've thrown
up overnight. No danger--keep moving!"

He might as well have tried to distract the attention of the grand stand
from the finish of a horse-race. More than the wizard's spell, years
before, at the first sight of man in flight held them in suspense as
they watched a plane approaching with the speed of an albatross down the
wind straight on a line with the church tower where the sharpshooters
were posted. The spread of the wings grew broader; the motor was making
a circle of light as large as a man's hat-box, and the aviator was the
size of some enormous insect when three or four sharp reports were
audible from the church tower.

Still the plane came on intact over the spire. The sharpshooters had
only rimmed the target, without injury to braces or engine. But they had
another chance from the windows on the nearer side of the tower; and the
crowd saw there the glint of rifle barrels. This time they got the
bull's-eye. The aviator reeled and dropped sidewise, a dead weight
caught by the braces, with his arm dangling. A teetering dip of the
plane and his body was shaken free. His face, as he neared the earth in
his descent, bore the surprised look of a man thumped on the back
unexpectedly.

Marta pressed her fingers to her ears, but not soon enough to keep out
the sound of a thud on the roof of the building across the street from
the chapel.

"I was a coward to do that! I shall see worse things!" she thought, and
went to the major, who had turned to the affairs of the living directly
he saw that neither the corpse of the aviator nor the wreck of the plane
was to strike in the street. "I will look after these children," she
said, "and we will care for as many of the old and sick as we can in our
house."

"The children will find their relatives or guardians in the procession
there," he answered methodically. "If they do not, the government will
look after them. It will not do for you to take them to your house. That
would only complicate the matter of their safety." Here he was
interrupted by a precipitate question from one of his lieutenants, who
had come running up. "No! No matter what the excuse, no one can remain!"
he answered. "The nation is not going to take the risk of letting spies
get information to the enemy for the sake of gratifying individual
interests. Every one must go!" Then he called to an able-bodied citizen
of thirty years or so in the procession: "Here, you, if you're not in
the reserve I have work for you!"

"But I was excused from army service on account of heart trouble!"
explained the able-bodied citizen.

"We all have heart trouble to-day," remarked the major pithily. "Men are
giving up their lives in defence of you and your property. Every man of
your age must do his share when required. Go with this orderly!" was the
final and tart conclusion of the argument. "And see that he is made
useful," he added to the orderly.

An explosion in the factory district made windows rattle and brought an
hysterical outcry from some of the women.

"It's nothing!" the major called, in the assurance of a shepherd to his
sheep. "Blowing up some building that furnish cover for the enemy's
approach in front of our infantry positions! You will hear more of it.
Don't worry! Do as you're told! Keep moving! Keep moving!"

Now he had time to conclude what he had to say to Marta.

"As your house will soon be under fire, it will be not refuge for the
children; and, in any event, we should net want to leave them to the
care of the Grays with the parents on our side," he explained in a
manner none the less final because of its politeness. "Every detail has
been systematically arranged under government supervision. Private
efforts will only bring confusion and hardship where we would have order
and all possible mercy. As for the old, the sick, and the infirm--those
who cannot bear being carried far are being moved to the hospital and
barracks outside the town."

In proof of his words, ambulances and requisitioned carriages filled
with the sick and infirm were already proceeding up one of the side
streets.

"It's not human, though!" Marta exclaimed in the desperation of
helplessness.

"No, it is war, which has a habit of being inhuman," replied the major,
turning to call to a woman: "Now, madame, if you leave that pillow
behind you will not be dropping your other things and having to stop all
the time to pick them up!"

"But it's the finest goose feathers and last year's crop!" said the
woman; and then gasped: "Oh, Lord! I left my silver jug on the mantel!"

"As I've told you before--as the printed slips we distributed when we
woke you at dawn told you," said the major with some asperity, "you were
to take only light things easily portable, and after you had gone,
wagons would get what you had packed and left ready at the door of your
houses, with your names clearly marked, up to two hundred pounds. The
rest we trust to the mercy of the Grays."

There was nothing for Marta to do but start homeward. The thought that
her mother was alone made her hasten at a pace much more rapid than the
procession of people, whose talk and exclamations formed a monotone
audible in its nearness, despite the continuous rifle-fire, now broken
by the pounding of the guns.

"I wish I had brought the clock--it was my great-grandfather's."

"Johnny, you keep close to me!"

"And they've taken my wife off to the hospital--separated us!"

Some were excruciatingly alive to the situation; others were in a daze.
But one cry always roused them from their complaints; always brought a
flash to the dullest eye: Retribution! retribution! Taken from their
peaceful pursuits arbitrarily by the final authority of physical force,
which they could not dispute, their minds turned in primitive passion to
revenge through physical force.

"I hope our army makes them pay!"

"Yes, make them pay! Make them pay!"

"It's all done to beat the Grays, isn't it, Miss Galland? They are
trying to take our land," said Jacky Werther as Marta parted from him.

"Yes, it is done to beat the Grays," she answered. "Good luck, Jacky!"

Yes, yes, to beat the Grays! The same, idea--the fighting nature, the
brute nature of man--animated both sides. Had the Browns really tried
for peace? Had they, in the spirit of her oath, appealed to justice and
reason? Why hadn't their premier before all the world said to the
premier of the Grays, as one honest, friendly neighbor to another over a
matter of dispute:

"We do not want war. We know you outnumber us, but we know you would
not take advantage of that. If we are wrong we will make amends; if you
are wrong we know that you will. Let us not play tricks in secret to
gain points, we civilized nations, but be frank with each other. Let us
not try to irritate each other or to influence our people, but to
realize how much we have in common and that our only purpose is common
progress and happiness."

But no. This was against the precedent of Cain, who probably got Abel
into a cul-de-sac, handed down to the keeping of the Roman aristocrat,
the baron, the first Galland, and the fat, pompous little man. It would
deprive armies of an occupation. It would make statesmanship too simple
and naïve to have the distinction of craft, which gave one man the right
to lead another. Both sides had to act in the old fashion of mutual
suspicion and chicanery.

She was overwrought in the fervor of her principles; she was in an
anguish of protest. Her spirit, in arms against an overwhelming fact
that was wrong, sinful, ridiculous, demanded some expression in action.
Now she was half running, both running away from horror and toward
horror; in a shuttle of resolutions and emotions: a being at war with
war. Passing the head of the procession, she soon had the castle road to
herself, except for orderlies on motor-cycles and horseback, until a
train of automobile wagons loaded with household goods roared by. The
full orchestra of war was playing right and left: crashing, high-pitched
gun-booms near at hand; low-pitched, reverberating gun-booms in the
distance. At the turn of the road in front of the castle she saw the
gunners of the batteries that Feller had watched approaching making an
emplacement for their guns in a field of carrots that had not yet been
harvested. The roots of golden yellow were mixed with the tossing
spadefuls of earth.

A shadow like a great cloud in mad flight shot over the earth, and with
the gunners she looked up to see a Gray dirigible. Already it was
turning homeward; already it had gained its object as a scout. On the
fragile platform of the gondola was a man, seemingly a human mite aiming
a tiny toy gun. His target was one of the Brown aeroplanes.

"They're in danger of cutting their own envelope! They can't get the
angle! The plane is too high!" exclaimed the artillery commander. Both
he and his men forgot their work in watching the spectacle of aerial
David against aerial Goliath. "If our man lands with his little bomb,
oh, my!" he grinned. "That's why he is so high. He's been waiting up
there."

"Pray God he will!" exclaimed one of the gunners.

"Look at him volplane--motor at full speed, too!"

The pilot was young Etzel, who, as Lanstron had observed, would charge a
church tower if he were bidden. He was taking no risks in missing. His
ego had no cosmos except that huge, oblong gas-bag. He drove for it as a
hawk goes for its prey. One life for a number of lives--the sacrifice of
a single aeroplane for a costly dirigible--that was an exchange in favor
of the Browns. And Etzel had taken an oath in his heart--not standing on
a café table--that he would never let any dirigible that he attacked
escape.

"Into it! Making sure! Oh, splen--O!" cried the artillery commander.

A ball of lightning shot forth sheets of flame. Dirigible and plane were
hidden in an ugly swirl of yellowish smoke, rolling out into a purple
cloud that spread into prismatic mist over the descent of cavorting
human bodies and broken machinery and twisted braces, flying pieces of
tattered or burning cloth. David has taken Goliath down with him in a
death grip.

An aeroplane following the dirigible as a screen, hoping to get home
with information if the dirigible were lost, had escaped the
sharpshooters in the church tower by flying around the town. However, it
ran within range of the automatic and the sharpshooters on top of the
castle tower. They failed of the bull's-eye, but their bullets, rimming
the target, crippling the motor, and cutting braces, brought the
crumpling wings about the helpless pilot. The watching gunners uttered
"Ahs!" of horror and triumph as they saw him fall, gliding this way and
that, in the agony of slow descent.

"Come, now!" called the artillery commander. "We are wasting precious
time."

Entering the grounds of the Galland house, Marta had to pass to one side
of the path, now blocked by army wagons and engineers' materials and
tools. Soldiers carrying sand-bags were taking the shortest cut,
trampling the flowers on their way.

"Do you know whose property this is?" she demanded in a burst of anger.

"Ours--the nation's!" answered one, perspiring freely at his work.
"Sorry!" he added on second thought.

Already parts of the first terrace were shoulder-high with sand-bags and
one automatic had been set in place, Marta observed as she turned to the
veranda. There her mother sat in her favorite chair, hands relaxed as
they rested on its arms, while she looked out over the valley in the
supertranquillity that comes to some women under a strain--as soldiers
who have been on sieges can tell you--that some psychologists interpret
one way and some another, none knowing even their own wives.

"Marta, did any of the children come?" Mrs. Galland asked in her usual
pleasant tone. So far as she was concerned, the activity on the terrace
did not exist. She seemed oblivious of the fact of war.

"Yes, seven."

"And did you hold your session?"

"Yes."

Marta's monosyllables absently answering the questions were expressive
of her wonder at her mother. Most girls do not know their mothers much
better than psychologists know their wives.

"I am glad of that, Marta. I am glad you went and sorry that I opposed
your going, because, Marta, whatever happens one should go regularly
about what he considers his duty," said Mrs. Galland. "They have been as
considerate as they could, evidently by Colonel Lanstron's orders," she
proceeded, nodding toward the industrious engineers. "And they've packed
all the paintings and works of art and put them in the cellar, where
they will be safe."

The captain of engineers in command, seeing Marta, hurried toward her.

"Miss Galland, isn't it?" he asked. "I have been waiting for you.
I--I--well, I found that I could not make the situation clear to your
mother."

"He thinks me in my second childhood or out of my head," Mrs. Galland
explained with a shade of tartness. "And he has been so polite in trying
to conceal his opinion, too," she added with a comprehending smile.

The captain flushed in embarrassment.

"I--I can't speak too strongly," he declared when he had regained his
composure. "Though everything seems safe here now, it may not be in an
hour. You must go, all of you. This house will be in an inferno as soon
as the 53d falls back, and I can't possibly get your mother to
appreciate the fact, Miss Galland."

"But I said that I did appreciate it and that the Gallands have been in
infernos before--perhaps not as bad as the one that is coming--but,
then, the Gallands must keep abreast of the times," replied Mrs.
Galland. "I have asked Minna and she prefers to remain. I am glad of
that. I am glad now that we kept her, Marta. She is as loyal as my old
maid and the butler and the cook were to your grandmother in the last
war. Ah, the Gallands had many servants then!"

"This isn't like the old war. This place will be shelled, enfiladed! And
you two--" the captain protested desperately.

"I became a Galland when I married," said Mrs. Galland, "and the
Galland women have always remained with their property in time of war.
Naturally, I shall remain!"

"Miss Galland, it was you--your influence I was counting on to--" The
captain turned to Marta in a final appeal.

Mrs. Galland was watching her daughter's face intently.

"We stay!" replied Marta, and the captain saw in the depths of her eyes,
a cold blue-black, that further argument was useless.

With a shrug of his shoulders he was turning to go when his lieutenant,
hurrying up and pointing to the row of lindens at the edge of the
estate, exclaimed:

"If we only had those trees out of the way! They cut the line of our
fire! They form cover and protection for the enemy."

"The orders are against it," replied the captain.

"Lanstron may be a great soldier, but--" declared the lieutenant
petulantly.

"Cut the lindens if it will help the Browns!" called Mrs. Galland.

"Cut the lindens, mother! Is everything to be destroyed--everything to
satisfy the appetite of savagery?" exclaimed Marta. Then, in an abrupt
change of mood, inexplicable to the captain and even to herself, she
added: "My mother says to cut the lindens. And you will tell us when to
go into the house?" Marta asked the captain.

"Yes. There is no danger yet--none until we see the 53d falling back."

What mockery, what uncanny staginess for either her mother or herself to
be so calm! Yet, what else were they to do? Were they to scream? Or fall
into each other's arms and sob? Marta found a strange pleasure in
looking at her garden before it was spattered with blood, as it had been
in the last war. It had never seemed more beautiful. There was a
sublimity in nature's obliviousness to the thrashing of the air with
shells in a gentle breeze that fluttered the petals of the hydrangeas.

The sight of Feller coming along the path of the second terrace brought
in sudden vividness to her mind that question which must soon be
decided: whether or not she would allow him to remain to carry out his
plan. He still had the garden-shears in hand. He was walking with the
slow and soft step which was in keeping with the serenity of his
occupation. Pausing before the chrysanthemum bed, he touched his hat,
and as he awaited her approach he lifted one of the largest blooms that
was drooping from its weight on the slender stem.

"They look well, don't you think?" he asked cautiously; and he was very
cool, while his eyes had a singular limpidity, speaking better than any
words the sadness of his story and the dependence of his hope of
regeneration upon her.

"Yes, quite the best they ever have," she replied, inclined to look away
from him, conscious of her sensitiveness to his appeal, and yet still
looking at him, while she marvelled at him, at herself, at everything.

"Thank you," he said. "You don't know how much that means, how pleased I
am."

Now came the sweep of a rising roar from the sky with the command to
attention of the rush of a fast express-train past a country railway
station. Two Gray dirigibles with their escort of aeroplanes--in
formation like that which Mrs. Galland and Feller had seen race along
the frontier--were bearing toward the pass over the pass road. One
glimpse of the squadron was as a match to Feller's military passion. He
swept off his old straw hat and with it all of the gardener's chrysalis.
Feller the artillerist gazed aloft in feverish excitement.

"Lanny has them guessing! They're bound to know his plans if it takes
all the air craft in the shop!" he exclaimed. "And what are we doing?
Yes, what are we doing?" he cried in alarm as his glance swept the sky
in front of the squadron, already even with the terrace in its terrific
speed.

The automatic and the riflemen in the tower banged away to no purpose,
for the aerostatic officers of the Grays had been apprised of the danger
in that direction.

"Minutes, seconds count! Where are our high-angle guns?" Feller went on.
He was unconsciously gesticulating with all the fervor of hurrying a
battery into place to cover an infantry retreat in a crisis. "And
they're turning! What's the matter? What are high-angle guns for,
anyway, with such targets naked over our lines? Ah-h! Beautiful!"

The central sections of the envelope of the rear dirigible had been torn
in shreds; it was buckling. Clouds of blue shrapnel smoke broke around
its gondola. A number of field-guns joined forces with a battery of
high-angle guns in a havoc that left a drifting derelict that had ceased
to exist to Feller's mind immediately it was out of action; for he saw
that the remainder of the squadron had completed its loop and was
pointing toward the plain.

"And they were low enough to see all they want to know and rising
now--evidently already out of reach of our guns--and nothing against
them!" he groaned as he saw a clear sky ahead of the big disk and its
attending wings, while clenched fists pumping up and down with the
movement of his forearms shook his whole body in a palpitation of angry
disgust. "Lanny, what's the matter! Lanny, they've beaten you! Eh? What?
What--" A long whistle broke from his lips. His body still, transfixed,
he cupped his hands over his eyes. "So, that is it! That is your plan,
Lanny, old boy!" he shouted. "But if one of their confounded little
aviators gets back, he has the story!"

From a great altitude, literally out of the blue of heaven, high over
the Gray lines, Marta made out a Brown squadron of dirigibles and planes
descending across the track of the Grays.

"Catch them as they come back! Between them and home--between the
badger and his hole!" Feller went on explosively; and then, while the
two squadrons were approaching at countering angles, he breathed the
thoughts that the spectacle aroused in his quick brain: "This is
war--war! Talk about your old-fashioned, take-snuff-my-card-sir courage,
pray-and-swear courage--what about this? What about old Lanny's chosen
men of the air, without boasts or oaths, offering their lives in no wild
charge, but coolly, hand on lever, concentratedly, scientifically, in
sane, twentieth-century fashion, just to keep our positions secret!
Now--now for it!"

The Gray dirigibles, stern on, were little larger than umbrellas and the
planes than swallows; the Brown dirigibles, side on, were big sausages
and their planes specks. To the eye, this meeting was like that of two
small flocks of soaring birds apparently unable to change their course.
But imagination could picture the fearful crash of forces, whose wounded
would find the succor of no hospital except impact on the earth below.

Marta put her hands over her eyes for only a second, she thought, before
she withdrew them in vexation--hadn't she promised herself not to be
cowardly?--to see one Brown dirigible and two Brown aeroplanes ascending
at a sharp angle above a cloud of smoke to escape the high-angle guns of
the Grays.

"We've got them all! No lips survive to tell what the eye saw!"
exclaimed Feller, his words bubbling with the joy of water in the
sunlight. "As I thought," he continued in professional enthusiasm and
discrimination. "We are getting the theory of one feature of the new
warfare in practice. It isn't like the popular dream of wiping out
armies by dropping bombs as you sail overhead. The force of gravity is
against the fliers. You have only to bring them to earth to put them out
of action. Plane driven into plane dirigible into dirigible, and an end
of bomb-dropping and scouting! War will still be won by the infantry
and the guns. Yes, the guns--the new guns! They--"

Feller recalled with a nervous shock flashing through his system that he
was a gardener, a gentle old gardener. He put his hat back on a head
already bent, while the shoulders, after a pathetic shrug, drew together
in the accustomed stoop. His slim fingers slipped under the largest
chrysanthemum blossom, his attitude the same as when he had held it up
for Marta's inspection before they heard the roar of the Gray squadron's
motors.

"I think that we might cut them all now and fill the vases," he
suggested, a musical, ingratiating note in his voice. "To-morrow we may
not have a chance."

"Yes," she agreed mechanically, her thoughts still dwelling on the
collision of the squadrons.

"And some of the finest ones for you to take now," he added, plying the
shears as he made his selections. "I'll bring the rest," he concluded
when he had gathered a dozen choice blossoms.

His fingers touched hers as the stems changed hands. In his eyes,
showing just below the rim of his hat, was the light which she had seen
first during the dramatic scene in his sitting-room and the appeal of
deference, of suffering, and of the boyish hope of a cadet.




XXI

SHE CHANGES HER MIND


The indefatigable captain of engineers had turned spectator. With
high-power binoculars glued to his eyes, he was watching to see if the
faint brown line of Dellarme's men were going to hold or break. If it
held, he might have hours in which to complete his task; if it broke, he
had only minutes.

Marta came up the terrace path from the chrysanthemum bed in time to
watch the shroud of shrapnel smoke billowing over the knoll, to
visualise another scene in place of the collision of the squadrons, and
to note the captain's exultation over Fracasse's repulse.

"How we must have punished them!" he exclaimed to his lieutenant. "How
we must have mowed them down! Lanstron certainly knew what he was
doing."

"You mean that he knew how we should mow them down?" asked Marta.

Not until she spoke did he realize that she was standing near him.

"Why, naturally! If we hadn't mowed them down his plan would have
failed. Mowing them down was the only way to hold them back," he said;
and seeing her horror made haste to add: "Miss Galland, now you know
what a ghastly business war is. It will be worse here than there."

"Yes," she said blankly. Her colorless cheeks, her drooping underlip
convinced him that now, with a little show of masculine authority, he
would gain his point.

"You and your mother must go!" he said firmly.

This was the very thing to whip her thoughts back from the knoll. He
was thunderstruck at the transformation: hot color in her cheeks, eyes
aflame, lips curving around a whirlwind of words.

"You name the very reason why I wish to stay. Why do you want to save
the women? Why shouldn't they bear their share? Why don't you want them
to see men mowed down? Is it because you are ashamed of your profession?
Why, I ask?"

The problem of dealing with an angry woman breaking a shell fire of
questions over his head had not been ready-solved in the captain's
curriculum like other professional problems, nor was it mentioned in the
official instructions about the defences of the Galland house. He aimed
to smile soothingly in the helplessness of man in presence of feminine
fury.

"It is an old custom," he was saying, but she had turned away.

"Picking flowers! What mockery! Lanny's plan--mow them down! mow them
down! mow them down!" she went on, more to herself than to him, as she
dropped the chrysanthemums on the veranda table.

In a fire of resolution she hastened back down the terrace steps. The
Grays and the Browns were fighting in their way for their causes; she
must fight in her way for hers. Stopping before Feller, she seemed
taller than her usual self and quivering with impatience.

"Have you connected the wire to the telephone yet?" she asked abruptly.

"No, not yet," he answered.

"Then please come with me to the tower!"

Whatever his fears, he held them within the serene bounds of the
gardener's personality, while his covert glimpse of her warned him
against the mistake of trying to dam the current of a passion running so
strong.

"Certainly, Miss Galland," he said agreeably, quite as if there were
nothing unusual in her attitude. No word passed between them as he kept
pace with her rapid gait along the path, but out of the corner of his
eye he surveyed in measuring admiration and curiosity the straight line
of nose and forehead under its heavy crown of hair, with a few detached
and riotous tendrils.

"Bring a lantern!" she said, as they entered his sitting-room, in a way
that left no excuse for refusal.

When he had brought the lantern she took it from his hand and led the
way into the tunnel.

"Please make the connection so that I can speak to Lanny!" she
instructed him after she had pressed the button and the panel door of
the telephone recess flew open.

For an instant he hesitated; then curiosity and the unremitting
authority of her tone had their way. He dropped to his knees, ran his
fingers into an aperture between two stones and made a jointure of two
wire ends.

"All ready!" he said, and eagerly. What a delightfully spirited rage she
was in! And what the devil was she going to do, anyway?

As she took the receiver from the hook she heard an electric bell at the
other end of the line, but no "Hello!"

"The bell means that Lanny will be called if he is there. No one except
him is to talk over this telephone," Feller explained softly.

Marta waited for some time before she heard a familiar, calm voice, with
a faint echo of irritation over being interrupted in the midst of
pressing duties.

"Well, Gustave, old boy, it can't be that you are in touch with
Westerling yet?"

"It is I--Marta!" and she came abruptly to the flaming interrogation
that had brought her there. "I want to ask a question. I want a clear
answer--I want everything clear! If Feller's plan succeeds it means that
you will know where the Grays are going to attack?"

"Yes; why, yes, Marta!"

"So that you can mow them down?"

"That is one way of putting it--yes."

"If I keep your secret--if I let the telephone remain, I am an
accomplice! I shall not be that--not to any kind of murder! I shall not
let the telephone remain!"

"As you will, Marta," he replied. "But anything that leads to victory
means less slaughter in the end. For we have tested our army well enough
to know that only when it is decimated will it ever retreat from its
main line of defence."

"The old argument!" she answered bitterly.

"As you will, Marta! Only, Marta--I plead with you--please, please leave
the house!" he begged passionately.

Again that request, which was acid to the raw spot of her anger! Again
that assumption that she must desert her own home because uninvited
guests would make it the theatre of their quarrel! How clear and
unassailable her reply in the purview of her distraught logic!

"Why particularly care for one life when you deal in lives by the
wholesale?" she demanded. "Why think of my life when you are taking
other lives every minute?"

"Because I am human, not just a machine! Because yours is the one life
of all to me--because I love you!" Feller, getting only one side of the
talk, cautiously watching her as he held up the lantern to throw her
face more clearly in relief, saw her start and caught the sound of a
quick indrawing of breath between her lips, while something electric
quivered through her frame. Then, as one who has twinged from a
pin-prick of distraction which she will not permit to waive her from a
white-heat purpose, she exclaimed, in rapid, stabbing, desperate
sentences:

"That! That now! After what I said to you a week ago! That in the midst
of your mowing! No, no, no!" She drove the receiver down on the hook and
blazed out to Feller: "Now you will tear out the 'phone'"

He steadied himself against the wall, covering his face with his hands,
and for the first time in her life she heard a man sob.

"My one chance--my last chance--gone!" he said brokenly. "The chance
for me to redeem myself, so that I might again look at the flag without
shame, taken from me in the name of mercy, when, by helping to bring
victory and shorten the war, I might have saved thousands of lives!" he
proceeded dismally.

"The old argument! Lanny has just used it!" said Marta. But coming from
a man sobbing it sounded differently. His hands fell away from his face
as if they were a dead weight. She saw him a wreck of a human being with
only his eyes alive, regarding her in harrowing wonder and reproach.

"When I was a gardener eating at the kitchen table, playing the part of
a spy--I who was honor man at the military school--I who had a
conscience that sent me back from the free life on the plains to try to
atone--when I hoped to do this thing in order to prove that I was fit to
die if not to live----"

He was as a man pitting his last grain of strength against overwhelming
odds. There were long, poignant pauses between his sentences as he
seemed to strive for coherence.

"--in order to prove it for my country, for Lanny, and for you who have
been so kind to me!" he concluded, another dry sob shaking him.

His chin dropped to his breast. Even the spark in his eyes flickered
out. In the feeble lantern light that deepened the shadows of his face
he was indescribably pitiful. She could not look away from him. There
was something infectious about his misery that compelled her to feel
with his nerves.

"Please," he pleaded faintly--"please leave me to myself. I will tear
out the telephone--trust me--only I wish to be alone. I am uncertain--I
see only dark!"

He sank lower against the wall, his head fell forward, though not so far
but he could see her from under his eyebrows. She started as she had at
the telephone, her breath came in the same sweep between her lips, and
he looked for a passionate refusal; but it did not come. She seemed in
some spell of recollection or projection of thought. A lustrous veil was
over her eyes. She was not looking at him or at anything in the range of
her vision. She shuddered and abruptly seized her left wrist with her
right hand, as Lanstron had in the arbor, which had brought her cry of
"I'm hurting you!" In this inscrutable attitude she was silent for a
time.

"Let it remain--it means so much to you!" she said wildly, and hurried
past him still clasping her wrist.

He stared into the darkness that closed around her. With the last sound
of her footsteps he became another Gustave Feller, who, all mercurial
vivacity, clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth with a "La,
la, la!" as his hand shot out for the receiver. There it paused, and
still another idea animated still another Gustave Feller.

"Why not tear out the telephone--why not?" he mused. "Why didn't I agree
to her plan? Why can't I ever carry more than one thing in mind at once?
I forgot that we were at war. I forget that I am already at the front. I
have skill! God knows, I ought to have courage! Volunteers who have both
are always welcome in war. Any number of gunners will be killed! When an
artillery colonel saw what I could do he would take me on without
further questioning. Then I should not be a spy, shuffling and whining,
but bang-bang-bang on the target!"

In imagination he now had a gun. His hand made a movement of
manipulation, head bent, eye sighting.

"How do you like that? You will like this one less! And here's
another--but, no, no!" He dropped against the wall again; he drove his
nails into his palms in a sort of castigation. "I am the same as a
soldier now--a soldier assigned to a definite duty for my flag. I should
break my word of honor--a soldier's word of honor! No, not that again!"

He snatched down the receiver to make sure that temptation did not
reappear in too luring a guise, and still another Gustave Feller was in
the ascendant.

"Didn't I say to trust it to me, Lanny?" he called merrily. "Miss
Galland consents!"

"She does? Good! Good for you, Gustave!"

"Her second thought," Feller rejoined. "And, Lanny," he proceeded in
boyish enthusiasm, using a slang word of military school days, "it was
bulludgeous the way we brought down their planes and dirigibles! How I
ache to be in it when the guns are so busy! With batteries back of the
house and an automatic in the yard, things seem very homelike. I--"

"Gustave," interrupted Lanstron, "we all have our weaknesses, and
perhaps yours is to play a part. So keep away from the fight and don't
think of the guns!"

"I will, I swear!" Feller answered fervently. "One thought, one duty!
I'll 'phone you when the house is taken, and if you don't hear from me
again, why, you'll know the plan has failed and I'm a prisoner. But,
trust me, Lanny! Trust me--for my flag and my country against the
invader!"

"Against the invader--that justifies all! And get Miss Galland out of
it. You seem to have influence with her. Get her out of it!"

"Trust me!"

"Bless you, and God with you!"

"One thought, one duty!" repeated Feller with the devoutness of a monk
trying to forget everything except his aves as he started toward the
stairway. "I wonder if we still hold the knoll!" he mused, extinguishing
the lantern. "We do! we do!" he cried when he was in the doorway. "Oh,
this is life!" he added after a deep-drawn breath, watching the little
clouds of shrapnel smoke here and there along the base of the range.




XXII

FLOWERS FOR THE WOUNDED


Was there nothing for Marta to do? Could she only look on in a fever of
restlessness while action roared around her? On the way from the tower
to the house the sight of several automobile ambulances in the road at
the foot of the garden stilled the throbs of distraction in her temples
with an answer. The wounded! They were already coming in from the field.
She hurried down the terrace steps. The major surgeon in charge,
surprised to find any woman in the vicinity, was about to tell her so
automatically; then, in view of her intensity, he waited for her to
speak.

"You will let us do something for them?" Marta asked. "We will make them
some hot soup."

He was immediately businesslike. No less than Dellarme or Fracasse or
Lanstron or Westerling, he had been preparing throughout his
professional career for this hour. The detail of caring for the men who
were down had been worked out no less systematically than that of
wounding them.

"Thank you, no! We don't want to waste time," he replied. "We must get
them away with all speed so that the ambulances may return promptly.
It's only a fifteen-minute run to the hospital, where every comfort and
appliance are ready and where they will be given the right things to
eat."

"Then we will give them some wine!" Marta persisted.

"Not if we can prevent it! Not to start hemorrhages! The field doctors
have brandy for use when advisable, and there is brandy with all the
ambulances."

Clearly, volunteer service was not wanted. There was no room at the
immediate front for Florence Nightingales in the modern machine of war.

"Then water?"

The major surgeon aimed to be patient to an earnest, attractive young
woman.

"We have sterilized water--we have everything," he explained. "If we
hadn't at this early stage I ought to be serving an apprenticeship in a
village apothecary shop. Anything that means confusion, delay,
unnecessary excitement is bad and unmerciful."

Marta was not yet at the end of her resources. The recollection of the
dying private who had asked her mother for a rose in the last war
flashed into mind.

"You haven't flowers! They won't do any harm, even if they aren't
sterilized. The wounded like flowers, don't they? Don't you like
flowers? Look! We've millions!"

"Yes, I do. They do. A good idea. Bring all the flowers you want to."

The major surgeon's smile to Marta was not altogether on account of her
suggestion. "It ought to help anybody who was ever wounded anywhere in
the world to have you give him a flower!" he was thinking.

She ran for an armful of blossoms and was back before the arrival of the
first wounded man who preceded the stretchers on foot. He was holding up
a hand bound in a white first-aid bandage which had a red spot in the
centre. Those hit in hand or arm, if the surgeon's glance justified it,
were sent on up the road to a point a mile distant, where transportation
in requisitioned vehicles was provided. These men were triumphant in
their cheerfulness. They were alive; they had done their duty, and they
had the proof of it in the coming souvenirs of scars.

Some of the forms on stretchers had peaceful faces in unconsciousness
of their condition. Others had a look of wonder, of pain, of
apprehension in their consciousness that death might be near. The single
word "Shrapnel!" by a hospital-corps corporal told the story of crushed
or lacerated features, in explanation of a white cloth covering a head
with body uninjured.

Feller, strolling out into the garden under the spell of watching shell
bursts, saw what Marta was doing. With the same feeling of relief at
opportunity for action that she had felt, he hastened to assist her,
bringing flowers by the basketful and pausing to watch her distribute
them--watching her rather than the wounded and enjoying incidental
thrills at examples of the efficiency of artillery fire.

"The guns--the guns are going to play a great part!" he thought. "These
rapid-firers will recover all the artillery's prestige of Napoleon's
time!"

Many of the wounded themselves looked at Marta even more than at the
flowers. It was good to see the face of a woman, her eyes limpid with
sympathy, and it was not what she said but the way she spoke that
brought smiles in response to hers. For she was no solemn ministering
angel, but high-spirited, cheery, of the sort that the major surgeon
would have chosen to distribute flowers to the men. Every remark of the
victims of war made its distinct and indelible impression on the
gelatine of her mind.

"I like my blue aster better than that yellow weed of yours, Tom!"

"You didn't know Ed Schmidt got it? Yes, he was right next me in the
line."

"Say, did you notice Dellarme's smile? It was wonderful."

"And old Bert Stransky! I heard him whistling the wedding march as he
fired."

"Miss, I'll keep this flower forever!"

"They say Billy Lister will live--his cheek was shot away!"

"Once we got going I didn't mind. It seemed as if I'd been fighting for
years!"

"Hole no bigger than a lead-pencil. I'll be back in a week!"

"Yes; don't these little bullets make neat little holes?"

"We certainly gave them a surprise when they came up the hill! I wonder
if we missed the fellow that jumped into the shell crater!"

"Our company got it worst!"

"Not any worse than ours, I'll wager!"

"Oh--oh--can't you go easier? Oh-h-h--" the groan ending in a clenching
of the teeth.

"Hello, Jake! You here, too, and going in my automobile? And we've both
got lower berths!"

"Sh-h! That poor chap's dying!"

Worst of all to Marta was the case of a shrapnel fracture of the
cranium, with the resulting delirium, in which the sufferer's
incoherence included memories of childhood scenes, moments on the
firing-line, calls for his mother, and prayers to be put out of misery.
A prod of the hypodermic from the major surgeon, and "On the
operating-table in fifteen minutes" was the answer to Marta's question
if the poor fellow would live.

Until dark, in groups, at intervals, and again singly, the wounded were
coming in from a brigade front in the region where the rifles were
crackling and the shrapnel clouds were hanging prettily over the hills;
and stretchers were being slipped into place in the ambulances, while
Marta kept at her post.

"We shan't have much more to do at this station," said the major surgeon
when a plodding section of infantry in retreat arrived.




XXIII

STRANSKY FIGHTS ALONE


Every unit engrossed in his own work! Every man taught how a weak link
may break a chain and realizing himself as a link and only a link! The
captain of engineers forgot Marta's existence as an error of his
subordinates caught his eye, and he went to caution the axemen to cut
closer to the ground, as stumps gave cover for riflemen. For the time
being he had no more interest in the knoll than in the wreckage of
dirigibles which were down and out of the fight.

After all, the knoll was only a single point on the vast staff map--only
one of many points of a struggle whose progress was bulletined through
the siftings of regimental, brigade, division, and corps headquarters in
net results to the staff. Partow and Lanstron overlooked all. Their
knowledge made the vast map live under their eyes. But our concern is
with the story of two regiments, and particularly of two companies, and
that is story enough. If you would grasp the whole, multiply the
conflict on the knoll by ten thousand.

There had been the engrossment of transcendent emotion in repelling the
charge. What followed was like some grim and passionless trance with
triggers ticking off the slow-passing minutes. Dellarme aimed to keep
down the fusillade from Fracasse's trench and yet not to neglect the
fair targets of the reserves advancing by rushes to the support of the
128th. Reinforced, the gray streak at the bottom of the slope poured in
a heavier fire. Above the steady crackle of bullets sent and the whistle
of bullets received rose the cry of "Doctor! Doctor!" which meant each
time that another Brown rifle had been silenced. The litter bearers,
hard pressed to remove the wounded, left the dead. Already death was a
familiar sight--an article of exchange in which Dellarme's men dealt
freely. The man at Stransky's side had been killed outright. He lay face
down on his rifle stock. His cap had fallen off. Stransky put it back on
the man's head, and the example was followed in other cases. It was a
good idea to keep up a show of a full line of caps to the enemy.

Suddenly, as by command, the fire from the base of the knoll ceased
altogether. Dellarme understood at once what this meant--the next step
in the course of a systematic, irresistible approach by superior
numbers. It was to allow the ground scouts to advance. Individual gray
spots detaching themselves from the gray streak began to crawl upward in
search of dead spaces where the contour of the ground would furnish some
protection from the blaze of bullets from the crest.

"Over their heads! Don't try to hit them!" Dellarme passed the word.

"That's it! Spare one to get a dozen!" said Stransky, grinning in ready
comprehension. He seemed to be grinning every time that Dellarme looked
in that direction. He was plainly enjoying himself. His restless nature
had found sport to its taste.

The creeping scouts must have signalled back good news, for groups began
crawling slowly after them.

"Over their heads! Encourage them!" Dellarme commanded.

After they had advanced two or three hundred yards they stopped,
shoulders and hands exposed in silhouette, and began to work feverishly
with their spades.

"Now let them have it!"

"Oh, beautiful!" cried Stransky. "That baby captain of ours has some
brains, after all! We'll get them now and we'll get them when they run!"

But they did not run. Unfalteringly they took their punishment while
they turned over the protecting sod in the midst of their own dead and
wounded. In a few minutes they had dropped spades for rifles, and other
sections either crawled or ran forward precipitately and fell to the
task of joining the isolated beginnings into a single trench.

Again Dellarme looked toward regimental headquarters, his fixed, cheery
smile not wholly masking the appeal in his eyes. The Grays had only two
or three hundred yards to go when they should make their next charge in
order to reach the crest. But his men had fifteen hundred to go in the
valley before they were out of range. After their brave resistance
facing the enemy they would receive a hail of bullets in their backs.
This was the time to withdraw if there were to be assurance of a safe
retreat. But there was no signal. Until there was, he must remain.

The trench grew; the day wore on. Two rifles to one were now playing
against his devoted company, which had had neither food nor drink since
early morning. As he scanned his thinning line he saw a look of
bloodlessness and hopelessness gathering on the set faces of which he
had grown so fond during this ordeal. Some of the men were crouching too
much for effective aim.

"See that you fire low! Keep your heads up!" he called. "For your homes,
your country, and your God! Pass the word along!"

Parched throat after parched throat repeated the message hoarsely and
leaden shoulders raised a trifle and dust-matted eyelashes narrowed
sharply on the sights.

"For the man in us!" growled Stransky. "For the favor of nature at birth
that gave us the right to wear trousers instead of skirts! For the joy
of hell, give them hell!"

"For our homes! For the man in us!" they repeated, swallowing the words
as if they had the taste of a stimulant. But Dellarme knew that it
would not take much to precipitate a break. He himself felt that he had
been on that knoll half a lifetime. He looked at his watch and it was
five o'clock. For seven hours they had held on. The Grays' trench was
complete the breadth of the slope; more reserves were coming up. The
brigade commander of the Grays was going to make sure that the next
charge succeeded.

At last Dellarme's glance toward regimental headquarters showed the flag
that was the signal for withdrawal. Could he accomplish it? The first
lieutenant, with a shattered arm, had gone on a litter. The old sergeant
was dead, a victim of the colonial wars. Used to fighting savage
enemies, he had been too eager in exposing himself to a civilized foe.
He had been shot through the throat.

"Men of the first section," Dellarme called, "you will slip out of line
with the greatest care not to let the enemy know that you are going!"

"Going--going! Careful! Men of the first section going!" the parched
throats repeated in a thrilling whisper.

"Those who remain keep increasing their fire!" called Dellarme again.
"Cover the whole breadth of the trench!"

Every fourth man wormed himself backward on his stomach until he was
below the sky-line, when his stiffened limbs brought him to his feet and
he started on a dead run down into the valley and toward a cut behind
another knoll across the road from the Galland house.

"Tom Fragini, with your corporal dead I put you in charge of the first
section! What are you waiting for, Corporal Fragini?"

Tom was bending over Grandfather Fragini, who had been forgotten by
everybody in the ordeal. The old man was lying where he had fallen after
the first burst of shrapnel.

"Can't go! Got a game leg!" said grandfather, pointing to a swollen
ankle that had been bruised by a piece of shrapnel jacket that had lost
most of its velocity before striking him. "You do your duty and leave me
alone. I ain't a fighting man any more. I done my work when I steadied
you young fellows."

"Yes, go on, Fragini," said Dellarme. "Attend to your men. Everybody in
his place. We'll get the old man away on a litter."

"Yes, you go or you ain't any grandson of mine!" shouted the old man in
a high-pitched voice. "Just been promoted, too! You'll be up for
insubordination in a minute, you young whelp!"

Dellarme meant to look after grandfather, but his attention was
engrossed in seeing that his men withdrew cautiously, for every minute
that he was able to delay the enemy's charge was vital. He himself
picked up a rifle in order to increase the volume of fire when the third
section was starting. As the fourth and last section drew off he uttered
his first cry of triumph of the day as his final look revealed the Grays
still in place. But they would not wait long once all fire from the
knoll had ceased. Stransky, who was in the fourth section, remained to
give a parting shot.

"Good-by, d---- you!" he called to the Grays. "You'll hear more from me
later!"

Then Dellarme saw that grandfather had not yet been carried away and no
litters remained. What was to be done? Grandfather was prompt with his
own view.

"Just leave me behind. I've done my work, I tell you!" he declared.

"Can't lose you, grandpop!" said Stransky.

Quickly shifting his pack to the ground, he squatted with his back to
the old man.

"I ain't going to--and you're a traitor, anyway; that's what you are!"

"No back talk! No politics in this!" Stransky replied. "Get up! You
carry your skin and I'll carry your bones. Get up quick!"

With Dellarme's authoritative assistance grandfather mounted. Then
Dellarme put Stransky's pack on his own back.

"Let me carry your rifle, too," he said to Stransky as they started.

"Not much!" answered Stransky. "I was just married to that rifle this
morning. We're on our honeymoon trip and getting fairly well acquainted,
and expect shortly to settle down to a busy domestic life."

He set off at a lope and gained the rear of the section in his first
burst of speed. As the other men got their second wind, however,
Stransky began to puff and they soon drew away from him.

"Put me down! I ain't going to depend on any traitor that insulted the
flag!" protested grandfather.

"That's the way! Call out to me now and then so I'll know you're there,"
said Stransky. "You're so light I mightn't know it if you fell off."

Dellarme did not think it right to expose the last section by asking it
to delay. Shepherd of his flock and miser of his pieces of gold, now
that their work was done the one thing he wanted in the world was that
they should escape without further punishment. Already the van of the
first section was disappearing into the cut in safety. But the fourth
section, which had held to the last, had yet a thousand yards to go over
a path bare of cover except a single small bush. At any moment he
expected to hear a cheer from the knoll, and what would follow the cheer
he knew only too well. Yet he tarried with Stransky out of one man's
impulse not to desert another in danger. At the same time he was wroth
with the old man for having made such a nuisance of himself.

"What are you waiting for?" Stransky demanded of Dellarme.

"I like good company," answered Dellarme cheerfully.

"Compliment for you, grandfather!" said Stransky.

"Put me down!" screamed grandfather.

"Still there, eh? Thanks, grandpop!" said Stransky, turning on
Dellarme. "Can't you run any faster than that, captain? Your place is
with your men, sir. If you got wounded I'd have to carry you, too. Your
company's gaining on you every minute. Hurry up!"

From the peremptory way that he spoke, Dellarme might have been the
private and Stransky the officer.

"Right!" said Dellarme in face of such unanswerable military logic, and
broke into a run.

Stransky adapted himself to a pace which he thought he could maintain,
and plodded on, eyes on the bush as a half-way point. After a while he
heard a mighty hurrah, which was cut short abruptly; then spits of dust
about their feet hastened the steps of the last section, which was near
the cut. He saw men drop out of line to make a cradle of their arms for
comrades who had been hit; and these finally passed out of danger with
their burdens.

"No flock in sight! It's the turn of the individual birds!" thought
Stransky, and heard a familiar sound about his ears.

"Bullets!" exclaimed grandfather. "Don't whistle like they used to. They
kind of crack and sizzle now. Maybe if they hit me I'll stop 'em, and
that'll save you."

"That's so," replied Stransky glumly, realizing that he was running with
a human shield on his back. "But they'll go right through him he's so
thin," he thought in relief. The worst of it was that he had to receive
without sending, which made him boil with rage. He wished that the bush
had legs so it could run toward him; he half believed that it had and
was retreating. "They're shooting right at us, and that's in our favor.
It's hard to get the bull's-eye at that range," he assured grandfather.

Whish-whish-whish! Enough pellets were singing by to have torn away the
rim of the target, yet none got the centre before Stransky dropped
behind the bush. Blessed bush! Back of it was a bowlder. Thrice-blessed
bowlder! It protected grandfather as securely as the armor of a
battleship.

"We are having a noisy time," remarked Stransky as two or three of the
leaves fell. "Intelligent thieves! How did you guess we were here?" and
he put his big thumb to his big nose.

"But they didn't know about the bowlder!" said the old man with a senile
giggle. "Say, I didn't mean it when I called you a traitor--not after
the fight! I just said that to make you mad so you'd put me down and we
shouldn't lose a good fighting man trying to save an old bag of bones
like me. You ain't no traitor! You're a patriot!"

"More politics, when I'm simply full of cussedness!" grumbled Stransky.
"Not having any home, I'm fighting to save the other fellows' homes,
principally because I was married this morning by a shrapnel-shell to a
lady that understands me perfectly. Say, shall we give them a few?" he
asked with a squint down the bridge of his nose as he took up his rifle.

"Yes, give 'em a few!" grandfather urged when they ought to have
remained quiet, as the firing was dying down. It was not worth while to
shoot at a bush, and after all the torrent of lead that they had poured
into the bush the Grays had concluded that nothing behind it could
remain alive.

Stransky aimed at a head and shoulder on the sky-line, which he took for
those of an officer, and was accurate enough to make the head and
shoulders duck and to get a swarm of bullets in return.

"Children, why will you waste your country's ammunition?" said Stransky,
firing again.

"That's the way to talk!" said grandfather approvingly. "Nothing like a
little gayety and ginger in war."

Now a Brown battery whose fire could be spared from other work dropped a
few shells on the knoll and so occupied the attention of the 128th that
it had no time to attend to occasional bullets from snipers.

"Think we're no account! Shall we charge them now we've got the support
of the guns?" chuckled Stransky.

"You Hussar, you!" Grandfather gave Stransky a slap on the back. "With a
thousand like you we could charge me whole army, if the general would
let us!"

"But he wouldn't let us," replied Stransky. "I could even tell you why."

With the shadows gathering he slipped back to grandfather's side, and
after it was quite dark he said that it was time for the old Hussar to
mount his fiery steed. Grandfather's hands slipped from around
Stransky's neck at the first trial; with the next, Stransky took the
bony fingers in his grip and held them clasped on his chest with one
hand, proceeding as quietly as he could, for he had an idea that the
Grays were already moving down from the knoll under cover of night.

"Yes, sir, I'm glad I came!" said grandfather faintly and meanderingly.
"I wasn't sure about Tom--all this new-fangled education and these
uniforms without any color in 'em. But I saw him firing away steady as a
rock; yes, sir! I was in it, too, under fire! It made my heart
thump-thump like the old days. And we're going to hold 'em--we're going
to teach the land-sharks--I'm very happy--made my heart thump so--kind
of tired me--"

The old man's voice died away into silence. His knees weakened their
grip and his legs swung pendulum-like with Stransky's steps.

"What about me for a sleeping-car!" thought Stransky. "But he's
certainly harder to carry."

Yet it pleased Stransky not to waken his passenger until they reached
the station his ticket called for. Entering the cut, he was halted by
the challenging cry of "Who goes there?" in his own tongue.

"Stransky of the Reds!" he roared back. "Stransky, private of the
53d--Stransky and his bride and grandfather!"

"All right, Bert!" was the answer. "Hurrah for you! I'd know your old
bull voice out of a thousand."

Even this did not arouse grandfather. Stransky trudged on past the
sentry, across a road and up three series of steps of a garden terrace,
through a breach in a breastwork of sand-bags, and was again at
home--the only home he knew--among the comrades of his company. Most of
them had fallen asleep on the ground after finishing their rations, logs
of men in animal exhaustion. Some of those awake were too weary to give
more than a nod and smile and an exclamation of delight. They had
witnessed too much horror that day to be excited over a soldier with an
old man on his back. A few of the others, including Tom Fragini,
gathered around the pair.

"We've arrived, grandfather!" said Stransky, squatting. There was no
answer. "He certainly sleeps sound. I wonder if--."

"Yes," said Dellarme, who with Tom eased the fall of the limp body.

The thumping of an old man's heart with the youth of a Hussar had been
too much for it.

"He was game!" said Stransky. "There isn't much in this world except to
be game, I've concluded; and you can't be so old or so poor or so
big-nosed and wall-eyed that you can't be game."

Marta, coming out on the veranda, had not heard his remark, but she had
seen a leonine sort of private bearing an old man on his back and had
guessed that he had remained behind to save a life when every man in
uniform had been engaged in taking life.

"You are tired! You are hungry!" she said with urgent gentleness. "Come
in!"

He followed her into the house and dropped on a leather chair before a
shining table in a room panelled with oak, wondering at her and at
himself. No woman of Marta's world had ever spoken in that way to him.
But it was good to sit down. Then a maid with a sad, winsome face and
tender eyes brought him wine and bread and cold meat and jam. He gulped
down a glassful of the wine; he ate with great mouthfuls in the ravenous
call of healthy, exhausted tissues, while the maid stood by to cut more
bread.

"When it comes to eating after fighting--"

He looked up when the first pangs of hunger were assuaged. Enormous,
broad-shouldered, physical, his cheeks flushed with the wine, his eyes
opened wide and brilliant with the fire that was in his nature--eyes
that spoke the red business of anarchy and war.

"Say, but you're pretty!"

Springing up, he caught her hand and made to kiss her in the brashness
of impulse. Minna struck him a stinging blow in the face. He received it
as a mastiff would receive a bite from a pup, and she stood her ground,
her eyes challenging his fearlessly.

"So you are like that!" he said thoughtfully. "It was a good one, and
you meant it, too."

"Decidedly!" she answered. "There's more where that came from!"

"As I was telling the Grays this afternoon! Good for you!" He sat down
again composedly, while she glared at him. "I'm still hungry. I've had
wine enough; but would you cut me another slice of bread?"

She cut another slice and he covered it generously with jam. Then little
Clarissa Eileen entered and pressed against her mother's skirts,
subjecting Stransky to childhood's scrutiny. He waved a finger at her
and grinned and drew his eyes together in a squint at the bridge of his
nose, making a funny face that brought a laugh.

"Your child?" Stransky asked Minna.

"Yes."

"Where's her father? Away fighting?"

"I don't know where he is!"

"Oh!" he mused. "Was that blow for him at the same time as for me?" he
pursued thoughtfully.

"Yes, for all of your kind."

"M-m-m!" came from between his lips as he rose. "Would you mind holding
out your hand?" he asked with a gentleness singularly out of keeping
with his rough aspect.

"Why?" she demanded.

"I've never studied any books of etiquette of polite society, and I am a
poor sort at making speeches, anyhow. But I want to kiss a good woman's
hand by way of apology. I never kissed one in my life, but I'm getting a
lot of new experiences to-day. Will you?"

She held out her hand at arm's length and flushed slightly as he pressed
his lips to it.

"You certainly do cut thick slices of bread," he said, smiling. "And you
certainly are pretty," he added, passing out of the door as jauntily as
if he were ready for another fight and just in time to see the colonel
of the regiment come around the house. He stood at the salute, half
proudly, half defiantly, but in nowise humbly.

"Well, Major Dellarme!" was the colonel's greeting of the company
commander.

"Major?" exclaimed Dellarme.

"Yes. Partow has the power. Four of the aviators have iron crosses
already and promotion, too; and you are a major. Company G got into a
mess and the whole regiment would have been in one unless you held on.
So I let you stay. It all came out right, as Lanstron planned--right so
far. But your losses have been heavy and here you are in the thick of it
again. Your company may change places with Company E, which has had a
relatively easy time."

"No, sir; we would prefer to stay," Dellarme answered quietly.

"Good! Then you will take this battalion and I'll transfer Groller to
Alvery's Bad loss, Alvery--shrapnel. The artillery has been doing ugly
work, but that is all in favor of the defensive. If we can hold them on
this line till to-morrow noon, it's all we want for the present," he
concluded.

"We'll hold them! Don't worry!" put in Stransky.

If a private had spoken to a colonel in this fashion at drill, without
being spoken to, it would have been a glaring breach of military
etiquette. Now that they were at war it was different. Real comradeship
between officer and man begins with war.

"We shall, eh?" chuckled the colonel. "You look big enough to hold
anything, young man! Here! Isn't this the fellow that Lanstron got off?"

"Yes, sir," answered Dellarme.

"Well, was Lanstron right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Wonderful man, Lanstron!"

"He knows just' a little too much!" Stransky half growled.




XXIV

THE MAKING OF A HERO


A digression, this, about pale, little Peterkin, the valet's son, whom
we left nibbling a biscuit in perfect security after his leap in mortal
terror. When Fracasse's men rose from their trench for the final charge
and found that the enemy had gone, Peterkin, hearing their cheer and the
thunderous tread of their feet, dared to look above the edge of the
shell crater. Here was his company coming and he not in the ranks where
he belonged. Of course he ought to have gone back with them when they
went; whatever they did he ought to do. This was the only safe way for
one of his incurable stupidity, as the drill sergeant had told him
repeatedly.

He recognized the stocky butcher's son and other familiar figures among
his comrades. Their legs, unlike his, had not been paralyzed with
fright; they had been able to run. He was in an absolute minority of
one, which he knew, from the experience of his twenty years of life and
his inheritance as a valet's son, meant that he was utterly in the
wrong. In a minute they would be sweeping down on him. They would be
jeering him and calling him a rabbit or something worse for hiding in
the ground.

Fright prompted him to a fresh impulse. Picking up his rifle, which he
had not touched since his leap, he faced toward the now unoccupied crest
of the knoll and commenced firing. Meanwhile, Fracasse's men had reached
the point where their first charge had broken, marked by a line of
bodies, including that of the manufacturer's son, who had thought that
war would be beneficial as a deterrent to strikes and an impetus to
industry, lying with his head on his arm, his neck twisted, and the
whites of his eyes idled skyward. In a spasm of sickening realization of
how impossible it was for those who had not run back to survive between
two lines of fire, they heard a shot from the ground at their feet and
beheld the runt of the company in the act of making war single-handed.
It was a miracle! It was like the dead coming to life!

"Peterkin?"

"Yes, Peterkin!"

"With a whole skin!"

Probably it was a great mistake for him to have a whole skin, thought
Peterkin. He scrambled to his feet and kept pace with the others, hoping
that he would be overlooked in the ranks.

"I'm so glad! Dear little Peterkin!" said Hugo Mallin, who was at
Peterkin's side.

His knowledge of Hugo's gentle nature convinced Peterkin that Hugo was
trying to soften the forthcoming reprimand.

When their feet at last actually stood on the knoll which had dealt
death to their ranks and they saw the brown figures of the enemy that
had driven them back in full flight, the men of the 128th felt the
thrill of triumph won in the face of bullets. This is a thrill by
itself, primitive and masculine, that calls the imagination of men to
war for war's sake. Pilzer, the butcher's son, wanted to kill for the
sheer joy and revenge of killing. He rejoiced in the dead and the blood
spots that, as clearly as the trench itself, marked the line that
Dellarme's men had occupied along the crest of the knoll. It pleased him
to use one of the bodies as a rest for his rifle, while he laid his
sight in ecstasy on the large target of two men of the last section who
were bringing off one of the wounded, and he swore when they got away.

"But there's another out there all alone!" he cried. "Better say your
prayers, for I'm going to get you," he whispered; though, as we know,
Stransky was not hit.

Peterkin had been doing his best to make amends for past errors by
present enthusiasm of application. He fired no less earnestly than the
butcher's son. Now that Eugene Aronson was dead, Pilzer had become
Peterkin's chief patron and guide. He would be doing right if he did
what that brave Pilzer did, he was thinking, while he was conscious of
Fracasse's eyes boring into his back. With the others, but no more
expeditiously, however frightened, he fell back to cover from the burst
of shell fire; and then, with the word to break ranks, he found himself
the centre of a group including not only his captain but the colonel of
the regiment. He could not quite make out the expressions on their
faces, but he surmised that they were wondering how any man born under
the flag of the Grays could be such a coward as he was. Probably he
would be shot at sunrise.

"How did it happen?" Fracasse asked.

His tone was very pleasant, but Peterkin felt that this was only the
calmness of a judge hearing the evidence of a culprit. Punishment would
be, accordingly, the more drastic. He was too scared to tell the truth.
He spoke softly, with the mealy tongue of a valet father who never
explained why the wine was low in the decanter by any reference to a
weakness of his own palate.

"I didn't hear the whistle to fall back," he said, "so I stayed."

"Didn't hear the whistle!" exclaimed the captain. He looked at the
colonel and the colonel looked at him. The colonel stroked his mustache
as if it were a nice mustache. "There wasn't any whistle," said Fracasse
with a wry grin.

"Yes, my boy; and then?" asked the colonel, who had never before called
any private in his regiment "my boy."

A bright light broke on Peterkin. Inherited instinct did not permit him
to show much emotion on his face, and he had, too, an inherited gift of
invention. He rubbed his rifle stock with his palm and bowed much in
the fashion of the parent washing his hands in gratitude for a
compliment.

"And I didn't want to run," he continued. "I wanted to take that hill.
That was what we were told to do, wasn't it, sir?"

"Yes, yes!" said the colonel. "Go on!"

The light grew brighter, showing Peterkin's imagination the way to
higher flights.

"I jumped quick into the crater, knowing that if I jumped quick I would
not be hit," he proceeded, his thin voice accentuating his deferential
modesty. "My! but the bullets were thick, going both ways! But I
remembered the lectures to recruits said that it took a thousand to kill
a man. I found that I had cover from the bullets from our side and some
cover from their side. I could not lie there doing nothing, I decided,
after I had munched biscuits for a while--"

"Coolly munching biscuits!" exclaimed the colonel.

"Yes, sir; so I began firing every time I had a chance and I picked off
a number, I think, sir."

"My boy," said the colonel, putting his hand on Peterkin's shoulder, "I
am going to recommend you for the bronze cross."

The bronze cross--desired of generals and privates--for Peterkin, when
Pilzer had been so confident that he should win the first that came to
the 128th now that Eugene Aronson was dead!

"I--I--" stammered Peterkin.

"And so modest about it!" added the colonel. "Remembered the lectures to
recruits and acted on them faithfully!"

The old spirit of the nation was not dead. Here it was reappearing in a
valet's son, as it was bound to reappear in all classes! Yes, Peterkin
had supplied the one shining incident of the costly day to the colonel,
who found himself without his headquarters for the night at the Galland
house as planned, waiting for orders on this confounded little knoll. He
was wondering if his regiment would be out in reserve and given a rest
on the morrow, when an officer of the brigade staff brought
instructions:

"The batteries are going to emplace here for your support in the
morning. You will move as soon as your men have eaten and occupy
positions B-31 to B-35. That gives you a narrow front for one battalion,
with two battalions in reserve to drive home your attack. The chief of
staff himself desires that we take the Galland house before noon. The
enemy must not have the encouragement of any successes."

"So easy for Westerling to say," thought the colonel; while aloud he
acknowledged the message with proper spirit.

Before the order to move was given the news of it passed from lip to lip
among the men in tired whispers. Since dawn they had lived through the
impressions of a whole war, and they had won. With victory they had not
thought of the future, only of their hunger. After the nightmare of the
charge, after hearing death whispering for hours intimately in their
ears, they were too weary and too far thrown out of the adjustments of
any natural habits of thought and feeling to realize the horror of
eating their dinners in the company of the dead. Now they were to go
through another hell, but many of them in their exhaustion were chiefly
concerned as to whether or not they should get any sleep that night.

Peterkin could hear his heart thumping and feel chills running down his
spine. How should he ever live up to a bronze cross--the precious cross
given for valor alone, which marked him as heroic for life--when all he
wanted to do was to crawl away to some quiet, safe place and munch more
biscuits? He had once been a buttons who looked down on scullery boys,
but how gladly would he be a scullery boy forever if he could escape to
the rear where he would hear no more bullets!

His conscience smote him; he wanted a confessor. He had an impulse to
tell the whole truth to Hugo Mallin, for Hugo was the one man in the
company who would sympathetically understand the situation. Yet he did
not find the words, because he was rather pleased with the réclame of
being a hero, which was an entirely new experience in a family that had
been for generations in service.

Hugo Mallin had fired when the others fired; advanced when the others
advanced. He had done his mechanical part in a way that had not excited
Fracasse's further acute displeasure, and he had no sense of physical
fatigue, only of mental depression, of the elemental things that he had
seen and felt this day in a whirling pressure on his brain.

It seemed to him that all his comrades had changed. They could never be
the same as before they had set out to kill another lot of men on the
crest of the knoll. He could not keep a comparison out of mind: One of
the dead Browns, lying in almost the same position, looked enough like
the manufacturer's son to be his brother. He pictured Eugene Aronson's
parents receiving the news of his death--the mother weeping, the father
staring stonily. And he saw many mothers weeping and many fathers
staring stonily.




XXV

THE TERRIBLE NIGHT


The satire of war makes the valet's son a hero; the chance of war kills
the manufacturer's son and lets the day-laborer's son live; the sport of
war gives the latent forces of a Stransky full play; the mercy of war
grants Grandfather Fragini a happy death; the glory of war brings
Dellarme quick promotion; the glamour and the spectacular folly of war
turn the bolts of the lightnings which man has mastered against man.
Perhaps the savage who learned that he could start a flame by rubbing
two dry sticks together may have set fire to the virgin forest and wild
grass in order to destroy an enemy--and naturally with disastrous
results to himself if he mistook the direction of the wind.

Marta Galland's thoughts at dusk when she returned up the steps to the
house were much the same as Hugo Mallin's after Fracasse had taken the
knoll. While he had felt the hot whirlwind of war in his face, she had
witnessed the wreckage that it left. She also was seeing fathers staring
and mothers weeping. Her experience with the wounded drawing deep on the
wells of sympathy, heightened her loathing of war and of all who planned
and ordered it and led its legions. A Stransky righting would have been
repulsive to her, but a Stransky trying to save a life was noble.

Except for the few minutes when she had gone out on the veranda and had
seen Stransky bringing in the lifeless body of Grandfather Fragini, she
had been engaged since dark in completing the work of moving valuable
articles from the front to the rear rooms of the house, which had been
begun early in the day by Minna and the coachman.

Shortly after Stransky had finished his meal Minna came to say that
Major Dellarme wished to speak to Miss Galland. Dellarme a major! This
was his reward for his part in filling the ambulances with groans! In
the days when he was at the La Tir garrison he had been a frequent
caller. Now, in the perversity of her reasoning, out of the chaos of the
tangent odds of her impressions since she had gone to hold the session
of her school that morning, she thought of him as peculiarly one who
gave to the profession of arms the attraction that had made it the
vocation of the aristocrat. Waiting for her in the dismantled
dining-room, despite all that he had passed through, his greeting had
the diffident, boyish manner of her recollection; and despite a night on
the ground his brown uniform was without creases, giving him a
well-groomed, even debonair, appearance.

"I scarcely thought that we should ever meet under these conditions," he
said slightly constrained, a touch of color in his cheeks.

She had no excuse for her reply unless, in truth, she were in training
for the town scold. But he typified an idea. He gave to war the aspect
of refinement.

"If you did not expect it, why did you enter the army?" she asked.

He saw that she was not quite herself. The strain of the day had
unnerved her. Yet he answered her bootless question with simple
directness.

"I liked the idea of being a soldier. I was reared in the atmosphere of
the army, and I hoped that I might do my duty if war came."

Perhaps this was point one for him. Marta shrugged her shoulders.

"I might have guessed beforehand what you would say," she replied. "You
sent for me?"

"Hardly that, please. I asked if I might see you. The captain of
engineers tells me that you insist on staying and I came to beg you to
keep in the back of the house. You will be safe there. Any shell that
may enter will explode in the front rooms and the fragments will not go
through the second wall."

"Yes, we understand that. We have already removed our heirlooms," she
replied indifferently.

The fatalism of her attitude and his alarm lest she had gone a little
out of her head aroused all the innate horror of a man at the thought of
a woman under fire. He broke out desperately:

"Miss Galland, this is no place for you! You do not realize--"

He had made the same mistake as the captain of engineers--touched a spot
of irritation as raw as it had been in the morning.

"Why shouldn't I stay here? Why shouldn't every wife and mother be here
in the fire zone? You soldiers die--it is very easy to die--and leave us
to suffer. You destroy and leave us to build up. You go on a debauch of
killing and come home to the women to nurse you. Why make us suffer the
consequences without sharing the glory of the deed?"

Such reasoning was not in the province of his training. He feared that
she was about to become hysterical.

"Really, Miss Galland, I--women and children--I--" he was stammering.

"Better kill the children young than go to the expense of bringing them
up before they are killed!" she went on, not hysterically, unless frozen
intensity is hysteria. "Children clinging to your knees might stop you,
but I suppose you would have a police force to tear the children away
rather than miss the masculine privilege of murder."

"Miss Galland, you are overwrought. I--"

She interrupted him with half-breathed laughter.

"Don't I look it--hysterical?" she exclaimed. "How awkward for you if I
should fall on the floor and kick and scream!"

With a peculiar uplifting of the brows which spoke a brittle humor, she
looked at the floor as if selecting a place for the performance.

"That is not your way," he managed to say. He was quite adrift in
confusion at the recollection of quotations he had heard about woman's
subtleties and inconsistencies and her charm. Resorting to the last
weapon in his armory--which the captain of engineers had already
used--his attitude changed to a soldierly sternness. "Miss Galland, I
feel that it is my duty, as long as you are going to stay, to make sure
that--"

She killed the sentence on his lips with a gleam of mockery from her
eyes. He understood that she had again anticipated what he was going to
say.

"There are times when you must be firm with a woman, aren't there? And
the time has come for you to be firm!" The color in his cheeks deepened.
He knew what to do with his men on the knoll, but not what to do in the
present situation. "This is our home; our home is our country. Here we
remain; but, naturally, we don't propose to stick our heads out of the
windows in a shower of shrapnel bullets," she continued. "Even your
soldiers are not so zealous for death but they fight behind sand-bags.
They are not like Mohammedan fatalists who so love to die for their
illusions that they bare their breasts to bullets. We have already
arranged sleeping-quarters in the rear. Good night!"

She held out her hand with a smile of conventional pleasantry. Had it
not been for the sound of firing, which still continued, and for the
walls denuded of pictures, they might have been parting at the head of
the stairs at a house-party. She stopped half-way up in an impulse to
call back happily:

"You see, masculine firmness did calm feminine hysteria!"

"Oh, Miss Galland!" he exclaimed. "Miss Galland, you are beyond me!"

"What a pose! How foolish to break out in that way!" she thought
angrily, as she hastened up the rest of the flight and along the
corridor. "To him of all men! A pattern-plate of an officer, who never
has had anything but a military thought! But everything is pose!
Everything is abnormal! And sleep? Sleep is a pose, too. I feel as if my
eyes would remain open forever. Oh, I wish they would begin the fighting
and tear the house to pieces if they are going to! I wish--"

She was at the door of her mother's room, which was like an antique
shop. Old plates lay on top of old tables, with vases on the floor under
the tables. Surrounded by her treasures, Mrs. Galland awaited the
attack; not as a soldier awaits it, but as that venerable Roman senator
of the story faced the barbarous Gauls--neither disputing the power of
their spears nor yielding the self-respect of his own mind and soul. She
had lain down in her wrapper for the night, and the light from a single
candle--she still favored candles--revealed her features calm and
philosophical among the pillows. Yet the magic of war, reaching deep
into hidden emotions, had her also under its spell. Her voice was at
once more tender and vital.

"Marta, I see that you are all on wires!"

"Yes; jangling wires, every one, jangling every second out of tune,"
Marta acquiesced.

"Marta, my father"--her father had been a premier of the Browns--"always
said that you may enjoy the luxury of fussing over little things, for
they don't count much one way or another; but about big things you must
never fuss or you will not be worthy of big things. Marta, you cannot
stop a railroad train with your hands. This is not the first war on
earth and we are not the first women who ever thought that war was
wrong. Each of us has his work to do and you will have yours. It does no
good to tire yourself out and fly to pieces, even if you do know so much
and have been around the world."

She smiled as a woman of sixty, who has a secret heart-break that she
had never given her husband a son, may smile at a daughter who is both
son and daughter to her, and her plump hand, all curves like her plump
face and her plump body, spread open in appeal.

Marta, who, in the breeding of her generation, felt sentiment as more or
less of a lure from logic, dropped beside the bed in a sudden burst of
sentiment and gathered the plump hand in hers and kissed it.

"Mother, you are wonderful!" she said. "Mother, you are great!"

"Tush, Marta!" said Mrs, Galland. "You shouldn't say that. Your
grandfather was great--a very great man. He never quite got his deserts;
no good man does in politics."

"You are better than great," said Marta. "You soothe; you help; you
have--what shall I call it?--the wisdom of mothers! Minna has it, too."
She ran a tattoo of kisses along the velvety skin of Mrs. Galland's arm.

Mrs. Galland was blushing, and out of the depths of her eyes bubbled a
little fountain of stars.

"Marta, you have kissed me often before," she said, "but you have been a
little patronizing from your hilltop of youth and knowledge. Sometimes
you have looked to me lonely up there on your hilltop and I know that I
have been lonely sometimes in my valley of the years where knees are not
good at climbing hills."

"It was not my intention," Marta said rather miserably.

"No, it is a businesslike age," answered Mrs. Galland.

"I--you mean I was too detached? I was not human?"

"You are now. You make me very happy," her mother replied. "But you must
sleep," she insisted.

After a time, her ear becoming as accustomed to the firing as a city
dweller's to the distant roar of city traffic Mrs. Galland slept. But
Marta could not follow her advice. If, transiently at least, she had
found something of the peace of the confessional, the vigor of youth was
in her arteries; and youth cannot help remaining awake under some
conditions. She tiptoed across the hall into her own room and seated
herself by the window, which had often spread the broadening vista of
landscape with its lessening detail before her eyes.

On other nights she had looked out into opaqueness with the drum-beat of
rain on the roof; into the faint starlight when there was only the
vagueness of heights and levels; into the harvest moonlight with its
spectral unreality. Now the symbol of what the ear had heard the eye
saw: war, working in tones of the landscape by day with smokeless
powder; war, revealed by its tongues of flame at night. Ugly bursts of
fire from the higher hills spread to the heavens like an aurora borealis
and broke their messengers in sheets of flame over the lower hills--the
batteries of the Browns sprinkling death about the heads of the gunners
of the Grays emplacing their batteries. Staccato flashes from a single
point counted so many bullets from an automatic, which, directed by the
beams of the search-lights, found their targets in sections of advancing
infantry. Hill crests, set off with flashes running back and forth,
demarked infantry lines of the Browns assisting the automatics.

There were lulls between the crashes of the small arms and the heavy,
throaty speech of the guns; lulls that seemed to say that both sides had
paused for a breathing spell; lulls that allowed the battle in the
distance to be heard in its pervasive undertone. In one Of them, when
even the undertone had ceased for a few seconds, Marta caught faintly
the groans of a wounded man--one of the crew of a Gray dirigible burned
by an explosion and brought in his agony softly to earth by a billowing
piece of envelope which acted as a parachute.

Fighting proceeded in La Tir in stages of ferocity and blank silence.
The upper part of the town, which the Browns still held, was in
darkness; the lower part, where the Grays were, was illuminated.

"Another one of Lanny's plans!" thought Marta. "He would have them work
in the light, while we fire out of obscurity!"

Soon all the town was in darkness, for the Grays had cut the wire in the
main conduit shortly after she had heard the groans of the wounded man.
There the automatics broke out in a mad storm, voicing their feelings at
getting a company in close order in a street for the space of a minute,
before those who escaped could plaster themselves against doorways or
find cover in alleys. Then silence from the automatics and a cheer from
the Browns that rasped out its triumph like the rubbing together of
steel files.

From the line of defence, that included the first terrace of the Galland
grounds as the angle of a redoubt, not a shot, not a sound; silence on
the part of officers and men as profound as Mrs. Galland's slumber,
while one of the Browns' search-lights, like some great witch's
slow-turning eye in a narrow radius, covered the lower terraces and the
road.

Marta gave intermittent glances at the garden; the glances of a
guardian. She happened to be looking in that direction when figures
sprang across the road, crouching, running with the short, quick steps
of no body movement accompanying that of the legs. The search-light
caught them in merciless silhouette and the automatic and the rifles
from behind the sand-bags on the first terrace let go. Some of the
figures dropped and lay in the road and she knew that she had seen men
hit for the first time. Others, she thought, got safely to the cover of
the gutter on the garden side. Of those on the road, some were still and
some she saw were moving slowly back on their stomachs to safety. Now
the search-light laid its beam steadily on the road. Again silence. From
the upper terrace came a great voice, like that of the guns, from a
human throat:

"Why didn't we level those terraces? They'll creep up from one to the
other!" It was Stransky.

In answer was another voice--Dellarme's.

"Perhaps there wasn't time to do everything. And if this position is
taken before we are ready to go, it will not be from that side, but from
the side of the town."

"We're making them pay for seeing our garden, but, anyhow, we won't let
them pick any flowers," Stransky remarked pungently.

"If they get as far as the first terrace--well, in case of a crisis, we
have hand-grenades," Dellarme added in explanation. "But, God knows, I
hope we shall not have to use them."

After an interval, more figures made a rush across the road. They, too,
in Stransky's words, paid a price for seeing the garden. But the flashes
from the rifles and the automatic provided a target for a Gray battery.
The blue spark that flies from an overhead trolley or a third rail,
multiplied a hundredfold, broke in Marta's face. It was dazzling,
blinding as a bolt of lightning a few feet distant, with the thunder
crash at the same second, followed by the thrashing hum of bullets and
fragments against the side of the house.

"I knew that this must come!" something within her said. If she had not
been prepared for it by the events of the last twelve hours she would
have jumped to her feet with an exclamation of natural shock and horror.
As it was, she felt a convulsive, nervous thrill without rising from her
seat. A pause. The next shell burst in line with the first, out by the
linden-trees; a third above the veranda.

"We've got that range, all right!" thought the Gray battery commander,
who had judged the distance by the staff map. This was all he wanted to
know for the present. He would let loose at the proper time to support
the infantry attack, when there were enough driblets across the road to
make a charge. The driblets kept on coming, and, one by one, the number
of dead on the road was augmented.

Marta was diverted from this process of killing by piecemeal by a more
theatric spectacle. A brigade commander of the Grays had ticked an order
over the wires and it had gone from battery to battery. Not only many
field-guns, which are the terriers of the artillery, but some guns of
siege calibre, the mastiffs, in a sudden outburst started a havoc of
tumbling walls and cornices in the upper part of the town.

Then an explosion greater than any from the shells shot a hemisphere of
light heavenward, revealing a shadowy body flying overhead, and an
instant later the heavens were illuminated by a vast circle of flame as
the dirigible that had dropped the dynamite received its death-blow. But
already the Brown infantry was withdrawing from the town, destroying
buildings that would give cover for the attack in the morning as they
went. Two or three hours after midnight fell a silence which was to last
until dawn. The combatants rested on their arms, Browns saying to Grays,
"We shall be ready for the morrow!" and Grays replying: "So shall we!"

Marta, at her window, her eyes following the movements of the display,
now here, now there, found herself thinking of many things, as in the
intermissions between the acts of a drama. She wondered if the groaning,
wounded man were crying for water or if he were wishing that some one at
home were near him. She thought of her talk with Lanstron over the
telephone and how mad and feminine and feeble it must have sounded to a
mind working in the inexorable processes of the clash of millions of
men. She saw his left hand twitching in his pocket, his right hand
gripping it to hold it still, on that afternoon when, for the first
time, she had understood his injury in the aeroplane accident as the
talisman of his feelings--his controlled feelings! Always his controlled
feelings!

She saw Feller leaning against the moist wall of the dank tunnel,
suffering as it had never seemed to her that man could suffer, his agony
an irresistible plea. She saw Westerling, so conscious of his strength,
directing his chessmen in a death struggle against Partow. And he was
coming to this house as his headquarters when the final test of the
strength of the Titans was made.

She hoped that her mother was still sleeping; and she had seconds when
she was startled by her own calmness. Again, the faces of the children
in her school were as clear as in life. She breathed her gratitude that
the procession in which they moved to the rear was hours ago out of the
theatre of danger. In the simplicity of big things, her duty was to
teach them, a future generation, no less than Feller's duty was to the
pursuing shadow of his conscience. She should see war, alive, naked,
bloody, and she would tell her children what she had seen as a warning.

Silence, except an occasional rifle-shot--silence and the darkness
before dawn which would, she knew, concentrate the lightnings around the
house. She glanced into her mother's room and marvelled as at a miracle
to find her sleeping. Then she stole down-stairs and opened the outer
door of the dining-room. A step or two brought her to the edge of the
veranda. There she paused and leaned against one of the stone pillars.
Dellarme himself was in a half-reclining position, his back to a tree.
He seemed to be nodding. Except for a few on watch over the sand-bags,
his men were stretched on the earth, moving restlessly at intervals,
either in an effort to sleep or waking suddenly after a spell of
harassed unconsciousness.




XXVI

FELLER IS TEMPTED


With the first sign of dawn there was a movement of shadowy forms taking
position in answer to low-spoken commands. The search-light yielded its
vigil to the wide-spread beam out of the east, and the detail of the
setting where Marta was to watch the play of one of man's passions,
which he dares not permit the tender flesh of woman to share, grew
distinct. Bayonets were fixed on the rifles that lay along the parapet
of sand-bags in front of the row of brown shoulders. Back of them in the
yard was a section of infantry in reserve, also with bayonets fixed,
ready to fill the place of any who fell out of line, a doctor and
stretchers to care for the wounded, and a detachment of engineers to
mend any breaches made in the breastwork by shell fire.

The gunner of the automatic sighted his barrel, slightly adjusted its
elevation, and swung it back and forth to make sure that it worked
smoothly, while his assistant saw that the fresh belts of cartridges
which were to feed it were within easy reach. Dellarme, walking behind
his men, cautioning them not to expose their heads and at the same time
to fire low, had his cheery smile in excellent working order.

"We expect great things of you!" this smile said as he bent over the
gunner with a pat on the shoulder.

"I understand!" said the upward glance in reply.

Marta could not deny that there was something fine about Dellarme's
smile no less than in his bearing and his delicately, chiselled
features. It had the assurance and self-possession of a surgeon about to
perform a critical operation, the difference being that, unlike the
surgeon, he shared in the risk, which was for the purpose of taking
vigorous young lives rather than saving lives enfeebled by disease. Was
it this that gave to war its halo--this offering of the most valuable
thing man possesses to sudden destruction that made war heroic?

But where was the romance of the last war forty years ago? Where the
glad songs going into battle? The glitter of buttons and the pomp of
showy uniforms? The general's staff watching the course of the action by
the billows of black smoke? Gone where the railroad sent the
stage-coach, electricity sent the candle and horse-drawn street-cars,
serum sent diphtheria, the knife sent the appendix, and rifled cannon
and explosive shells sent the wooden walls of old ships of the line.

It occurred to none of the actors, and to Marta alone, in the tight,
foreboding silence, to look aloft. There was a serene blue sky. The
birds were tuning up for their morning songs when she heard the dull
echo of distant guns, soon to be submerged in other thunders at nearer
points along the frontier. With every faculty an alert wire strung in
suspense, she was instantly aware of the appearance of a figure whose
lack of uniform made it conspicuous on that stage.

In straw hat and blue blouse, shuffling with his old man's walk, Feller
came along the path from the gate. He was in retreat from the enticing
picture of the regiment of field-guns in front of the castle that was
ready for action. As the infantry had never interested him, he would be
safe from temptation in the yard. He stopped back of the engineers, his
glance roving down the line of brown shoulders until it rested on the
automatic. This also was a gun, though it fired only bullets. His
fingers began beating a tattoo on his trousers' seam; a hungry
brilliance shone in his eyes. He took four or five steps forward as if
drawn by an overpowering fascination.

"This is no place for you!" said one of the engineers.

"No, and don't waste any time, either, old man!" said another. "Back to
your bulbs!"

Feller did not even hear them. For the moment he was actually deaf.

"Fire!" said Dellarme's whistle. "Thur-r-r!" went the automatic in
soulless, mechanical repetition, its tape spinning through the cylinder,
while the rifles spoke with the human irregularity of steel-tipped
fingers pounding at random on a drumhead. All along the line facing La
Tir the volume of fire spread until it was like the concert of a mighty
loom.

Marta could see nothing of the enemy, but she guessed that he was making
a rush from the second to the third terrace and from the outskirts of
the town. The engineer's repeated warning unheard above the din, he
touched Feller on the leg. Feller looked around with a frown of
querulous abstraction just as the breaking of a storm of shell fire
obscured Marta's vision with dust and smoke. She felt her head jerk as
if it would go free of her neck with each explosion, until she
reinforced her nerves with the memory of an old soldier's warning about
the folly of dodging missiles that were already past before you heard
them. She knew that she was perfectly safe behind the pillar.

The Gray batteries having tried out their range by the flashes of the
automatic the previous evening were making the most of the occasion.
"Uk-ung-n-ng!" the breaking jackets whipped out their grists. A crash on
the roof brought a small avalanche of slate tumbling down. A concussion
in the dining-room was followed by the tinkling of falling window-glass.
The engineers had work immediately when two of the infantrymen and their
rifles and the sand-bags on which they leaned were hurled together in a
heap of sand and torn flesh. Other bags were placed in the breach; other
men sprang forward and began firing. The reserves, the hospital-corps
men and the engineers hugged the breastwork for cover. The leaves
clipped from the trees by bullets were blown aside with the hurricane
breaths of shrapnel bursts; bullets whistled so near Marta that she
heard their shrillness above every other sound. She was amazed that the
house still remained standing--that any one was alive. But she had a
glimpse of Dellarme maintaining his set smile and another of Feller, who
had crept up behind the automatic, making impatient "come-on! come-on!
what-is-the-matter-with-you?" gestures in the direction of the batteries
in front of the castle.

"Thur-eesh--thur-eesh!" As the welcome note swept overhead he waved his
hands up and down in mad rapture and then peeped over the breastwork to
ascertain if the practice were good. The Brown batteries had been a
little slow in coming into action, but they had the range from the Gray
batteries' flashes the previous night and, undisturbed in the security
of their own flashes screened by the trees, soon broke the precision of
the opposing fire.

Now shells coming infrequently fell short or went wide. The air cleared.
Marta could again see distinctly, and she marvelled that the brown
figures were proceeding with their knitting as if nothing had happened.
She could not resist a thrill of grim admiration for their steadiness or
an appreciative thrill as she saw Feller eagerly peering over the
automatic gunner's shoulder to watch the effect of his fire. Suddenly,
both the rifles and the automatic, which had been firing deliberately,
began to fire with desperate rapidity. It was as if a boxer, sparring
slowly, let out all his power in a rain of blows. She could see nothing
of the Grays, but she understood that they were making a rush.

Then a chance shell, striking at the one point which the man who fired
it six thousand yards away would have chosen as his bull's-eye, obscured
Feller and the automatic and its gunners in the havoc of explosion.
Feller must have been killed. The dust settled; she saw Dellarme making
frantic gestures as he looked at his men. They were keeping up their
fusillade with unflinching rapidity. Through the breach left in the
breastwork she had glimpses, as the dust was finally dissipated, of gray
figures, bayonets fixed, pressing together as they came on fiercely
toward the opening. The Browns let go the full blast of their magazines.
Had that chance shell turned the scales? Would the Grays get into the
breastwork?

All Marta's faculties and emotions were frozen in her stare of suspense
at the breach. Her heart seemed straining with the effort of the living,
who heard nothing, thought nothing, in the crux of their effort. War's
own mesmerism had made her forget Feller and everything except the
gamble, the turn of the card, while the gray figures kept stumbling on
over their fallen. Then her heart leaped, a cry in a gust of short
breaths broke from her lips as the Browns let go a rasping, explosive,
demoniacal cheer. The first attack had been checked!

After triumph, terror, faintness, and a closing of her eyes, she opened
them to see Feller, with his old straw hat--brim torn and crownless
now--still on his head, rise from the débris and shake himself like a
dog coming ashore from a swim. While the engineers hastened to repair
the breach he assisted Stransky, who had also been knocked down by the
concussion, to lift the overturned automatic off the gunner. The doctor,
putting a hand on the gunner's heart, shook his head, and two
hospital-corps men removed the body to make room for the engineers.

Dellarme could now spare attention from the charge of the Gray infantry
to observe the results of the shell fire. With the gunner dead, he
looked for the gunner's assistant, who lay several feet distant. As
Dellarme and the doctor hastened to him he raised himself to a sitting
posture and looked around in dazed inquiry. The doctor poured a cup of
brandy from his flask and held it to the assistant's lips, whereon he
blinked and nodded his head in personal confirmation of the fact that
he was still alive. But when he tried to raise his right arm the hand
would not join in the movement. His wrist was broken.

For once Dellarme's cheery smile deserted him. There was no one left to
man the automatic, so vital in the defence, and even if somebody could
be found the gun was probably out of commission. As he started toward it
his smile, already summoned back, was shot with surprise at sight of the
gun in place and a stranger in blue blouse, white hair showing through a
crownless straw hat, trying out the mechanism with knowing fingers.
Dellarme stared. Feller, unconscious of everything but the gun, righted
the cartridge band, swung the barrel back and forth, and then fired a
shot.

"You--you seem to know rapid-firers!" Dellarme exclaimed in blank
incomprehension.

"Yes, sir!" Feller raised his finger, whether in salute as a soldier or
as a gardener touching his hat it was hard to say.

"But how--where?" gasped Dellarme.

This time the movement of the finger was undoubtedly in salute, in
perfect, swift, military salute, with head thrown back and shoulders
stiff. Feller the gardener was dead and buried without ceremony.

"Lanstron's class, school for officers, sir. Stood one in ballistics,
prize medallist control of gun-fire. Yes, sir, I know something about
rapid-firers," Feller replied, and fired a few more shots. "A little
high, a little low--right, my lady, right!"

Stransky was back in his place next to the automatic and firing whenever
a head appeared. He rolled his eyes in a characteristic squint of
scrutiny toward the new recruit.

"Beats spraying rose-bushes for bugs, eh, old man?" he asked.

"Yes, a lead solution is best for gray bugs!" Feller remarked pungently,
and their glances meeting, they saw in each other's eyes the joy of
hell.

"A pair of anarchists!" exclaimed Stransky grinning, and tried a shot
for another head.

As if in answer to prayer, a gunner had come out of the earth.
Sufficient to the need was the fact. It was not for Dellarme to ask
questions of a prize-medallist graduate of the school for officers in a
blue blouse and crownless straw hat. His expert survey assured him that
before another rush the enemy had certain preparations to make. He might
give his fighting smile a recess and permit himself a few minutes'
relaxation. Looking around to ascertain what damage had been done to the
house and grounds, he became aware of Marta's presence for the first
time.

"Miss Galland, you--you weren't there during the fighting?" he cried as
he ran toward her.

"Yes," she said rather faintly.

"If I had known that I should have been scared to death!"

"But I was safe behind the pillar," she explained. "Your company did its
work splendidly," she added, looking at him with eyes dull and
wondering.

"Do you think so? They _are_ splendid, my men! They make one try to be
worthy of them. Thank you!" he said, blushing with pleasure. "But, Miss
Galland, please--there's no firing now, but any minute----."

"Yes?"

He did not attempt masculine firmness this time, only boyish pleading
and a sort of younger-brother camaraderie.

"Miss Galland, you're such a good soldier--please--and I'm sure you have
not had your breakfast, and all good soldiers never neglect their
rations, not at the beginning of a war! Miss Galland, please--." Yes, as
he meant it, please be a good fellow.

She could not resist smiling at the charming manner of his plea. She
felt weak and strange--a little dizzy. Besides, her mother's voice now
came from the doorway and then her mother's hand was pressing her arm.

"Marta, if you remain out here, I shall!" announced Mrs. Galland.

"I was just coming in," said Marta.

Dellarme, his cap held before him in the jaunty fashion of officers,
bowed, his face beaming his happiness at her decision.

As they entered the dining-room Marta saw that the shell which had
entered the window had burst just over the heavy mahogany table and a
fragment of the jacket had cut a long scar in the rich fibre. She
paused, her breath coming and going hotly. She felt the smarting pain of
a file drawn over the skin. The table was very old; for generations it
had been a family treasure. As a child she had loved its polished
surface and revered its massive solidity.

"Oh! Oh! Somebody ought to be made to pay for such wickedness!" she
exclaimed wrathfully.

"It will plane down and it is nothing we could help, Marta," said Mrs.
Galland. "Fortunately, all the portraits were out of the room."

"Mother, you--you are just a little too philosophical!" complained
Marta.

"Come!" Mrs. Galland slipped her hand into Marta's. "Two women can't
fight both armies. Come! I prescribe hot coffee It is waiting; and, do
you know, I find a meal in the kitchen very cosey."

Being human and not a heroine fed on lotos blossoms, and being exhausted
and also hungry, when she was seated at table, with Minna adroitly
urging her, Marta ate with the relish of little Peterkin in the shell
crater munching biscuits from his haversack.




XXVII

HAND TO HAND


With Mrs. Galland on guard, insistent that wherever her daughter went
she should go, Marta might not so easily expose herself again. For the
time being she seemed hardly of a mind to. She sat staring at the
kitchen clock on the wall in front of her, the only sign of any break in
the funereal march of her thoughts being an occasional deep-drawn
breath, or a shudder, or a clenching of the hands, or a bitter smile of
irony.

An hour or more of intermittent firing passed in the suspense of
listening to a trickle of water undermining a dam. Then, with the roar
of waters carrying away the dam, a cataract of shell fire broke and
continued in far heavier volume than that of the first attack.

"The last war was nothing like this!" murmured Mrs. Galland.

At every concussion against the walls of the house, at every crash
within the house, Marta pressed her nails tighter into her palms.
Abruptly as the inferno of the guns had commenced, it ceased, and the
steady, passionate, desperate blasts of the rifles, now uninterrupted,
were more deadly and venomous if less shocking to the ear.

The movement of the minute-hand on the clock-face became uncanny and
merciless to her eye in its deliberate regularity. Dellarme had been
told to hold on until noon, she knew. Was he still smiling? Was Feller
still happy in playing a stream of lead from the automatic? Was the
second charge of the Grays, which must have come to close quarters when
the guns went silent, going to succeed?

The rifle-fire died down suddenly and she heard a cheer like that of
the morning, only wilder and fiercer and even less human. Could it be
from the Browns celebrating a repulse? Or from the Grays after taking
the position? What did it matter? If the Grays had won there was an end
to the agony so far as her mother and herself were concerned--an end to
murder on the lawn and devastation of their property. But, at length,
the rifle-fire beginning again in a slow, irregular pulse told her that
the Browns had held.

Now another long intermission. The demon was wiping his brow and
recovering his breath, Marta thought; he was repairing damaged joints in
his armor and removing the flesh of victims from his claws. But he would
not rest long, for the war was young--exactly one day old--and many
battalions of victims remained unslain.

How slowly the big hand of the clock kept hitching on from minute-mark
to minute-mark! Yet no more slowly than the hands of clocks in distant
provinces of the Browns or of the Grays, where this day was as quiet and
peaceful as any other day.

Mrs. Galland had settled down conscientiously to play solitaire, a
favorite pastime of hers; but she failed to win, as she complained to
Marta, because of her stupid way this morning of missing the combination
cards.

"I really believe I need new glasses," she declared.

"Let me help you," said Marta. Welcome idea! Why hadn't she thought of
it before? It was something to do.

"But, Marta--there you are, covering up the jack of spades, the very
card I need--though it will not help now. I've lost again!" exclaimed
Mrs. Galland at length. "Why, Marta, you miss worse than I do!"

"Do I? Do I?" asked Marta in blank surprise and irritation. "Please let
me try once alone. I'll not miss this time. Correct me if I do."

She played with the deliberation and accuracy of Feller should he have
to make a little ammunition for his automatic go a long way, and Mrs.
Galland did not observe a single error.

"Hurrah! I won!" Marta cried triumphantly, with some of her old
vivacity.

Then she drew away from the table wearily. The strain of concentrating
her mind had been worse than that of the battle; or, rather, it had
merely added another strain to a tortured brain after a sleepless night.
For her ears had been constantly alert. The demon had moved one of his
claws to fresh ground; the inferno on the La Tir side of the frontier
had shifted to a valley beyond the Galland estate, where the firing
appeared to come from the Brown side. Breaking from the leash of
silence, guns, automatics, rifles--each one straining for a speed
record--roared and crashed and rattled in greedy chorus, while the clock
ticked perhaps a hundred times. Thus famished savages might boll their
food in a time limit. Thereafter, for a while, the battle was desultory.

Then came another outburst from Dellarme's men, which she interpreted as
the response to another rush by the Grays; and this yelping of the demon
was not that of the hound after the hare, as in the valley, but of the
hare with his back to the wall. When it was over there was no cheer.
What did this mean? Oh, that slow minute-hand, resting so calmly between
hitches of destiny, now pointing to a quarter after eleven! For half a
century, it seemed to her, Marta had endured watching its snail pace.
Now inaction was no longer bearable. Without warning to her mother she
bolted out of the kitchen. Mrs. Galland sprang up to follow, but Minna
barred the way.

"One is enough!" she said firmly, and Mrs. Galland dropped back into her
chair.

In the front rooms Marta found havoc beyond her imagination. A portion
of the ceiling had been blown out by a shell entering at an up-stairs
window; the hardwood floors were littered with plaster and window-glass
and ripped into splinters in places.

"How can we ever afford repairs!" she thought.

But she hurried on, impelled by she knew not what, through the
dining-room, and, coming to the veranda, stopped short, with dilating
eyes and a cry of grievous shock. Two of his men were carrying Dellarme
back from the breastwork where they had caught him in their arms as he
fell. They laid him gently on the sward with a knapsack under his head.
His face grew whiter with the flow of blood from the red hole in the
right breast of his blouse. Then he opened his lips and whispered to the
doctor: "How is it?" Something in his eyes, in the tone of that faint
question, required the grace of a soldier's truth in answer.

"Bad!" said the doctor.

"Then, good-by!" And his head fell to one side, his lips set in his
cheery smile.

Had ever any martyr shown a finer spirit dying for any cause? Marta
wondered. She felt the sublimity of a great moment, an inexorable
sadness. She knew that she should never forget that cheery smile or that
white face. What was danger to anybody? What was death if you had seen
how he had died?

His company was a company with his smile out of its heart and in its
place blank despair. Many of the men had stopped firing. Some had even
run back to look at him and stood, caps off, backs to the enemy,
miserable in their grief. Others leaned against the parapet, rifles out
of hand, staring and dazed.

"They have killed our captain!"

"They've killed our captain!"--still a captain to them. A general's
stars could not have raised him a cubit in their estimation.

"And once we called him 'Baby Dellarme,' he was so young and bashful!
Him a baby? He was a king!"

"Men, get to your places!" cried the surviving lieutenant rather
hopelessly, with no Dellarme to show him what to do; and Marta saw that
few paid any attention to him.

In that minute of demoralization the Grays had their chance, but only
for a minute. A voice that seemed to speak some uncontrollable thought
of her own broke in, and it rang with the authority and leadership of a
mature officer's command, even though coming from a gardener in blue
blouse and crownless straw hat.

"Your rifles, your rifles, quick!" called Feller. "We're only beginning
to fight!"

And then another voice in a bull roar, Stransky's:

"Avenge his death! They've got to kill the last man of us for killing
him! Revenge! revenge!"

That cry brought back to the company all the fighting spirit of the
cheery smile and with it another spirit--for Dellarme's sake!--which he
had never taught them.

"Make them pay!"

"He was told to stay till noon!"

"They'll find us here at noon, alive or dead!"

Stransky picked up one of several cylindrical objects that were lying at
his feet.

"He wouldn't use this--he was too soft-hearted--but I will!" he cried,
and flung a hand-grenade, and then a second, over the breastwork. The
explosions were followed by agonized groans from the Grays hugging the
lower side of the terrace. For this they had crawled across the road in
the night--to find themselves unable to move either way and directly
under the flashes of the Browns' rifles.

Feller's and Stransky's shouts rose together in a peculiar unity of
direction and full of the fellowship they had found in their first
exchange of glances.

"You engineers, make ready!"

"Hand-grenades to the men under the tree! That's where they're going to
try for it--no wall to climb over there!"

"You engineers, take your rifles--and bayonet into anything that wears
gray!"

"Get back, you men by the tree, to avoid their hand-grenades! Form up
behind them, everybody!"

"No matter if they do get in at first! Back, you men, from under the
tree!"

There was not a single rifle-shot. In a silence like that before the
word to fire in a duel, all orders were heard and the more readily
obeyed because Dellarme's foresight had impressed their sense upon the
men in his quiet way.

The sand-bags by the tree were blown up by the Grays. Then, before the
dust had hardly settled, came a half score of hand-grenades thrown by
the first men of a Gray wedge, scrambling as they were pushed through
the breach by the pressure of the mass behind. In that final struggle of
one set of men to gain and another to hold a position, guns or
automatics or long-range bullets played no part. It was the grapple of
cold steel with cold steel and muscle with muscle, in a billowing,
twisting mob of wrestlers, with no sound from throats but straining
breaths; with no quarter, no distinction of person, and bloodshot eyes
and faces hot with the effort of brute strength striving, in primitive
desperation, to kill in order not to be killed. The cloud of rocking,
writhing arms and shoulders was neither going forward nor backward. Its
movement was that of a vortex, while the gray stream kept on pouring
through the breach as if it were only the first flood from some gray
lake on the other side of the breastwork.

Marta had come to the edge of the veranda, at once drawn and repelled,
feeling the fearful suspense of the combat, the savage horror of it, and
herself uttering sounds like the straining breaths of the men. What a
place for her to be! But she did not think of that. She was there. The
dreadful alchemy of war had made her a stranger to herself. She was mad;
they were mad; all the world was mad!

One minute--two, perhaps--not three--and the thing was over. She saw
the Grays being crushed back and realized that the Browns had won, when
a last detail of the lessening tumult fixed her attention with its
gladiatorial simplicity. Here, indeed, it was a case of man to man with
the weapons nature gave them.

Standing higher than the others on the edge of the breach was that giant
who had brought Grandfather Fragini in pickaback, looking a young god on
an escarpment of rock on Olympus. His great nose showed in silhouette at
intervals of wrestling lurches back and forth as he tugged at the rifle
of a thick-set soldier of the Grays with a liver patch on the cheek that
made his face hideous enough for an incarnation of war's savagery. At
last Jacob Pilzer tumbled backward over the breastwork. Unlucky Pilzer!
That bronze cross was further away than ever for him, while Stransky
shook the trophy of a captured rifle aloft, a torn sleeve revealing the
weaving muscles of his powerful arm.

"I thought so!" cried Feller. "Attacks on frontal positions by daylight
are going out of fashion!"

It was he who mercifully arrested the shower of hand-grenades that
followed the exit of the enemy. Two of the guns of the castle batteries,
having changed their position, were making havoc enough at pointblank
range, with a choice of targets between the Grays huddled on the other
side of the breastwork and those in retreat.

"We'll have peace for a few hours now," said Stransky, squinting down
his nose. "And we'll have something to eat. I ought to have got that
fellow with the beauty-spot on his physiognomy, but, confound him, he
was an eel!"

By this time the men had recovered their breath. It occurred to them by
common impulse that a cheer was due, and for the first time they broke
into a hurrah with wide-open throats.

"Another--for Dellarme!" called Stransky, who seemed to think that he
and not the callow lieutenant was in command.

This they gave, standing instinctively at attention, with heads bared,
for the leader whose spirit survived in them; a cheer with triumph in
its roar, but a different sort of triumph from the first cheer.

Listening to it were the wounded among the Grays who had fallen within
the breastwork to be trampled by the Browns as they had pressed forward.
The doctor, but a moment ago a fiend himself with features of rage, now,
in the second nature of his calling, with a look of tender sympathy, was
ministering without distinction of friend or foe. One of the Grays, his
cheek bearing the mark of a boot heel, raised himself, and, in defiance
and the satisfaction of the thought to his bruises and humiliation,
pointing his finger at Feller, Marta heard him say:

"You there, in your straw hat and blue blouse, they've seen you--a man
fighting and not in uniform! If they catch you it will be a drumhead and
a firing squad at dawn!"

"That's so!" replied Feller gravely. "But they'll have to make a better
job of it than you fellows did if they're going to----"

He turned away abruptly but did not move far. His shoulders relaxed into
the gardener's stoop, and he pulled his hat down over his eyes and
lowered his head as if to hide his face. He was thus standing, inert,
when a division staff-officer galloped into the grounds.

"Splendid! Splendid! There's some iron crosses in this for you!" he was
shouting before he brought his horse to a standstill. "The way you held
on gained the day for Lanstron's plan. They tried to flank in the valley
after their second attack on your position failed We drew them on and
had them--a battalion in close order--under the guns for a couple of
minutes. It was ghastly! Our losses have been heavy enough, but nothing
to theirs--and how they are driving their men in! But where is Major
Dellarme?"

When he saw Dellarme's still body he dismounted and in a tide of
feeling which, for the moment, submerged all thought of the machine,
stood, head bowed and cap off, looking down at Dellarme's face.

"I was very fond of him! He was at the school when I was teaching there.
But a good death--a soldier's death!" he said. "I'll write to his mother
myself." Then the voice of the machine spoke. "Who is in command?"

"I am, sir!" said the callow lieutenant, coming up.

Feller's fingers moved in a restless beat on his trousers' seam, his
lips half parted as if he must speak, but the men of the company spoke
for him.

"Bert Stransky!" they roared.

It was not according to military etiquette, but military etiquette meant
nothing to them now. They were above it in veteran superiority.

"And--" Stransky had started to point to Feller, whose name he did not
know, when a forbidding gleam under the hat brim arrested him.

"Where's Stransky?" demanded the staff-officer.

"You're looking at him!" replied Stransky with a benign grin.

Seeing that Stransky was only a private, the officer frowned at the
anomaly when a lieutenant was present, then smiled in a way that
accorded the company parliamentary rights, which he thought that they
had fully earned.

"Yes, and he gets one of those iron crosses!" put in Tom Fragini.

"What for?" demanded Stransky in surprise. They were making a lot of
fuss about him when he had not done anything except to work out his
individual destiny.

"Yes--the first cross for Bert of the Reds!"

"And we'll let him make a dozen anarchist speeches a day!"

"Yes, yes!" roared the company.

"By all means--but not for this; for trying to save an old man's life!"
put in Marta.

After his survey of that amazing company the officer was the more amazed
to hear a woman's voice in such surroundings.

"The ays have it!" he announced cheerfully. He lifted his cap to Marta.
With tender regard and grave reverence for that company, he took extreme
care with his next remark lest a set of men of such dynamic spirit might
repulse him as an invader. "The lieutenant is in command for the
present, according to regulations," he proceeded. "You will retire
immediately to positions 48 to 49 A-J by the castle road. You have done
your part. To-night you sleep and to-morrow you rest."

Sleep! Rest! Where had they heard those words before? Oh, yes, in a
distant day before they went to war! Sleep and rest! Better far than an
iron cross for every man in the company! They could go now with
something warmer in their hearts than consciousness of duty well done;
but this time they need not go until their dead as well as their wounded
were removed.

"You're not coming with us?" Stransky whispered to Feller.

"Eh? eh?" Feller put his hand to his ear. "Quite deaf!" he quavered.
"But I judge you ask if I am coming with you. No. I have to stay to look
after my garden. It has been sadly damaged, I fear."

"That's right--of course you're deaf!" agreed Stransky, well knowing the
contrary. "I'll be lonely without you, pal. It was love at first sight
with me!"

"And with me!" Feller whispered. "You and I, with a brigade of infantry
and guns--" he began, but remembering his part, as he often would in the
middle of a sentence since the distraction of war was in his mind, he
turned to go.

"A cheer for the old gardener! We don't know who he is or was, and it's
none of our business. He saved the day!" called Stransky.

Feller started; he paused and looked back as he heard that stentorian
chorus in his honor; and, irresistibly, he made a snappy officer's
salute before starting on.

"That was very sweet to me," he was thinking, and then: "A mistake! a
mistake! One thought! One duty!"

Making to pass around the corner of the house, he was confronted by
Marta, who had come to the end of the veranda. There, within hearing of
the soldiers, the dialogue that followed was low-toned, and it was swift
and palpitant with repressed emotion.

"Mr. Feller, I saw you at the automatic. I heard what the wounded
private of the Grays said to you and realized how true it was."

"He is a prisoner. He cannot tell."

"Does he need to? You have been seen--the conspicuous figure of a man in
gardener's garb fighting on the very terrace of his own garden! The Gray
staff is bound to hear of such an extraordinary occurrence. It is one of
those stories that travel of themselves. And Westerling will find that
same gardener here when he comes! What hope have you for your ruse,
then?"

"I--I--no matter! I forgot myself, when Lanny had warned me not to go
near the guns. My promise to him! My duty! I accept what I have prepared
for myself--that is a soldier's code."

"But I shall not let you risk your life in this fashion."

"You--" A searching look--a look of fire--from his eyes into hers, which
were bright with appeal.

"I feel that I have no right to let you go to your death by a firing
squad," she interrupted hurriedly, "and I shall not! For I decide now
not to allow the telephone to remain!"

"But my chance--my one chance to--"

"You have it there--happiness in the work you like, the work for which
you seem to have been born--at least, a better work than spying and
deceit--the right that you have won this morning there with the gun!"

"I"--he looked around at the automatic ravenously and fearsomely--"I--"

"It is all simply arranged. There is time for me to use the telephone
before the Grays arrive. I shall tell Lanny why you took charge of the
gun and how you handled it, and I know he will want you to keep it."

"And the uniform--the uniform again! Yes, the uniform--if only a gunner
private's uniform!" he exclaimed in short, pulsating breaths of ecstasy.

"Yes, count on that, too! And good-by!"

"Good-by! I--" But she had already turned away. "I've changed my mind!
Exit gardener! Enter gunner! I'm going with you! I'm going with you!" he
cried in a jubilant voice that arrested the attention of every one on
the grounds. They saw him throw his arms around Stransky and then rush
to the automatic. "One thought! One duty! Oh, that is easy now!" he
breathed, caressing the breech with a flutter of pats from both hands.




XXVIII

AN APPEAL TO PARTOW


"You, Marta--you are still there!" Lanstron exclaimed in alarm when he
heard her voice over the tunnel telephone. "But safe!" he added in
relief. "Thank God for that! It's a mighty load off my mind. And your
mother?"

"Safe, too."

"And Minna and little Clarissa Eileen?"

"All safe."

"Well, you're through the worst of it. There won't be any more fighting
around the house, and certainly Westerling will be courteous. But where
is Gustave?"

"Gone!"

"Gone!" he repeated dismally.

In a flash he had guessed another tragedy for poor Gustave, who must
have once more failed to stick to his purpose, thus shattering the last
hope that the thousandth chance would ever come to anything.

"Wait until you hear how he went," Marta said. With all the vividness of
her impressions, a partisan for the moment of him and Dellarme, she
sketched Feller's part with the automatic.

As he listened, Lanstron's spirit was twenty again, with the fever that
Feller's "let's set things going!" could start rollicking in his veins.
What did the thousandth chance matter? Only a wool-gatherer would ever
have had any faith in it. Victory for Gustave! Victory for the friend in
whom he believed when others had disbelieved! Victory for those gifts
that had broken a career against army routine in peace, once they had
full play in war!

"I can see him," he said. "It was a full breath of fresh air to the
lungs of a suffocating man. I--"

Marta was off in interruption in the full tide of an appeal.

"You must--I promised--you must let him have the uniform again!" she
begged. "You must let him keep his automatic. To take it away would be
like separating mother and child; like separating Minna from Clarissa
Eileen."

"Better than an automatic--a battery of guns!" replied Lanstron. "This
is where I will use any influence I have with Partow for all it is
worth. Now, let the red-tapists dare to point to his past when I ask
anything for him and I'll overwhelm them with the living present! Yes,
and he shall have the iron cross. It is for such deeds as his that the
iron cross was meant."

"Thank you," she said. "It's worth something to make a man as happy as
you will make him. Yes, you are real flesh and blood to do this, Lanny."

Her point won with surprising ease, when she had feared that military
form and law could not be circumvented, she leaned against the wall in
reaction. For twenty-four hours she had been without sleep. The interest
of her appeal for Feller had kept up her strength after the excitement
of the fight for the redoubt was over. Now there seemed nothing left to
do.

"No doctor who ever examined me for promotion has yet found that I
wasn't flesh and blood," Lanstron remarked a little plaintively.

"Then the doctor must have kept the truth from Partow," she told him
with a faint return of the teasing spirit that he knew well. "He wants
only men of steel, with nerves of copper wire run by an electric
battery, on his staff, I'm sure."

Lanstron laughed very humanly for an automaton.

"I'll suggest the battery to him. It might prove a labor saver," he
said. "Being a little old-fashioned, he has depended on clockwork, which
requires a special orderly to wind us when we fun down and nod at our
desks." Then he turned solicitous. "The Gray staff will certainly give
you an escort beyond the Gray lines, where you will find a place to
establish yourselves comfortably."

The suggestion brought her energy back with the snap of a whip.

"No!" she declared. "We stay in our home. It's ours! No one else has any
right there while our taxes are paid. Doesn't my children's oath say:
'I'll not let a burglar drive me out of my house'?"

"Isn't that coming around to my view, Marta?" he asked. "Aren't we
refusing to leave the nation's house because a burglar is trying to
enter?"

"Lanny, you, with all your intellect--when you know the oath as well as
I--you pettifog like that! The oath says to appeal to justice and reason
even after the first blow is struck. Why doesn't our premier appeal to
the people of the Grays?"

"They garbled his last despatch, as it was, to suit their purpose."

"Their government garbled it. I meant to appeal not to their premier but
to the people, as human beings to human beings. Over there they're human
beings just as much as we are. Why didn't Partow speak, too, as chief of
staff, if he is so fond of peace? He is the one--not the Fellers and the
Dellarmes and the Stranskys, who merely act up to their faith and
training as pawns--he in the security of his cabinet making war. Why
didn't he say: 'We do not want war. We will not mobilize our army. We
will do nothing to arouse the war passion?'"

"Their government would only have been convinced of an easier conquest,
and by this time they would have been up to the main line of defence.
Marta, when the diplomatic history of the war is known it will be found
that the Gray government struck as a matter of cold, deliberate
intention. Bodlapoo was only an excuse to carry out a plan of conquest."

"So Partow has taught the Browns," she answered stubbornly. "That is one
partisan view. What is theirs? What is Westerling teaching the Grays?"

"Marta--really, I--"

"What a smashing argument _really_ is! You see that you really are not
for peace, but for war. But won't you ask Partow to do one thing, if he
still insists that he is for peace? I wonder if he will chuckle or laugh
at my suggestion, or will he grin or roar? Though you know that he will
do them all, ask him to send out a flag of truce to the Grays and beg
them to stay their operations while his appeal--an appeal with a little
of the Christ spirit in it, from one Christian nation to another to stop
the murder--is read to the Gray soldiers and ours; to those who have to
suffer and die! Oh, I'd like to help write that appeal, telling the
women what I have seen! Do you think if it were given to the world that
the Grays would still come on? Ask him, Lanny, ask him to make that
simple human appeal, as brother to brother, to the court of all
humanity! Ask him, please, Lanny!"

"I shall, Marta!" he replied seriously, in respect for her seriousness
throbbing with the abandoned play of her vitality, though he knew how
fruitless the request would be. He loved her the more for this outburst.
He loved her for her quick sympathies with any one in trouble, whether
Feller or Minna; for all of her inconsistencies which were so real to
her; for her dreams, her visions, her impulses, because she tried to put
them in action, and he envied Feller for having fought in defence of her
house. How could he expect her to interest herself exclusively in him as
one human being when all human beings interested her so profoundly? If
the world were peopled with Martas and their disciples then her proposal
would be practicable.

"That's fine of you, Lanny!" she said. "You've taken it like a good
stoic, this loss of your thousandth chance. You really believed in it,
didn't you?"

"Forgotten already, like the many other thousandth chances that have
failed," he replied cheerfully. "One of the virtues of Partow's steel
automatons is that, being tearless as well as passionless, they never
cry over spilt milk. And now," he went on soberly, "we must be saying
good-by."

"Good-by, Lanny? Why, what do you mean?" She was startled.

"Till the war is over," he said, "and longer than that, perhaps, if La
Tir remains in Gray territory."

"You speak as if you thought you were going to lose!"

"Not while many of our soldiers are alive, if they continue to show the
spirit that they have shown so far; not unless two men can crush one man
in the automatic-gun-recoil age. But La Tir is in a tangent and already
in the Grays' possession, while we act on the defensive. So I should
hardly be flying over your garden again."

"But there's the telephone, Lanny, and here we are talking over it this
very minute!" she expostulated.

"You must remove it," he said. "If the Grays should discover it they
might form a suspicion that would put you in an unpleasant position."

The telephone had become almost a familiar institution in her thoughts.
Its secret had something of the fascination for her of magic.

"Nonsense!" she exclaimed. "I am going to be very lonely. I want to
learn how Feller is doing--I want to chat with you. So I decide not to
let it be taken out. And, you see, I have the tactical situation, as you
soldiers call it, all in my favor. The work of removal must be done at
my end of the line. You're quite helpless to enforce your wishes. And,
Lanny, if I ring the bell you'll answer, won't you?"

"I couldn't help it!" he replied.

"Until then! You've been fine about everything to-day!"

"Until then!"

When Marta left the tower she knew only that she was weary with the
mind-weariness, the body-weariness, the nerve-weariness of a spectator
who has shared the emotion of every actor in a drama of death and finds
the excitement that has kept her tense no longer a sustaining force.

As she went along the path, steps uncertain from sheer fatigue, her
sensibilities livened again at the sight of a picture. War, personal
war, in the form of the giant Stransky, was knocking at the kitchen
door. His two-days-old beard was matted with dust and there were dried
red spatters on his cheek. War's furnace flames seemed to have tanned
him; war seemed to be breathing from his deep chest; his big nose was
war's promontory. But the unexposed space of his forehead seemed
singularly white when he took off his cap as Minna came in answer to his
knock. Her yielding lips were parted, her eyes were bright with inquiry
and suspicion, her chin was firmly set.

"I came to see if you would let me kiss your hand again," said Stransky,
squinting through his brows wistfully.

"Would that do you any good?" Minna asked.

"A lot--a big lot!" said Stransky. "But if it is easier for you, why,
you can give me another blow in the face. I deserve it. It would show
that you weren't quite indifferent; that you took some interest in me."

"I see your nose has been broken once. You don't want it broken a second
time. I'm stronger than you think!" Minna retorted, and held out her
hand carelessly as if it pleased her to humor him.

He was rather graceful, despite his size, as he touched his lips to her
fingers. Just as he raised his head a burst of cheering rose from the
yard.

"So you've found that we have gone, you brilliant intellects!" he
shouted, and glared at the wall of the house in the direction of the
cheers.

"Quick! You have no time to lose!" Minna warned him.

"Quick! quick!" cried Marta.

Stransky paid no attention to the urgings. He had something more to say
to Minna.

"I'm going to keep thinking of you and seeing your face--the face of a
good woman--while I fight. And when the war is over, may I come to
call?" he asked.

His feet were so resolutely planted on the flags that apparently the
only way to move them was to consent.

"Yes, yes!" said Minna. "Now, hurry!"

"Say, but you make me happy! Watch me poke it into the Grays for you!"
he cried and bolted.

"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 hell
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 Fracasse's company of the
Grays whom Marta had seen from her window the night before rushing
across the road into the garden. It is time for their story--the story
of their attack on the redoubt. One of those who remained motionless on
the road was the doctor's son. If he had sprained his ankle at
manoeuvres, the whole company would have gossiped about the accident.
If he had died in the garrison hospital from pneumonia, the barracks
would have been blue for a week. If he had fallen in the charge across
the white posts, the day-laborer's son on his right and the judge's son
on his left would have felt a spasm of horror.

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

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

"Then they must have got him!"

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

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

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

The thinner the veneer of civilized habit, the more easily the animal,
always waiting and craving war, breaks through. And the animal was
strong in Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son. He had a bull's heart and
lacked the little tendrils of sensibility whose writhing would tire him.
Hugo Mallin had these tendrils by the thousand. He had so many that they
gave him a reserve physical endurance like a kind of intoxication. He
felt as if he had been drinking some noxious, foamy wine which made his
mind singularly keen to every impression. Therefore he and Pilzer alone
of Fracasse's company were not utterly fatigued.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugo would not even cheat himself by trying to close his eyes. He lay
quite still looking at the quietly twinkling, kindly stars. Unlike his
comrades, he had not to go to hell in order to know what hell was like.
He had foreseen the nature of war's reality, so it had not come as a
surprise. Sufficient universal projection of this kind of imagination
might afford sufficient martial excitement without war.

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

The thing that held him back from a declaration of self was the pale
faces around him; his comrades of the barracks and manoeuvres. He
loved them; he thought, student fashion, that he understood them. He
liked being their humorist; he liked to win their glances of affection.
The fortitude to endure their contempt, their enmity, their ostracism
would not save those dear to him in his distant provincial home from
humiliation and heart-break. There was the rub: his father and mother
and his sweetheart. He was an only son. His sweetheart was a goddess to
his eyes. What purpose is there in the rebellion of a grain of sand on
the seashore, in the insubordination of one of five million soldiers?
Hadn't Westerling answered all doubts with the aphorism, "It is a
mistake for a soldier to think too much"?

Thus pondering, in the company of the stars, Hugo, who had so many
thoughts of his own that he led a double life, awaited the dawn. When
the church spire became outlined in the rosy, breaking light of the
east, he thought how much it was like the church spire of his own town.
He saw that he was in what had been a beautiful, tenderly cared-for old
garden before soldiery had ruthlessly trampled its flowers.

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

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

Hugo looked around at Pilzer in his quizzical fashion.

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

Pilzer had a torrent of abuse ready to his tongue's end when Fracasse
interrupted with a hoarse, whispered warning:

"Silence, Pilzer! You talk too much."

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

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

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

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

With a welter of slaughter around them, Fracasse's men were in something
of the position that little Peterkin had enjoyed in the shell crater.
They ate a breakfast of biscuits, washed down by water from their
canteens. Trickles of sand from bullet holes sprinkled their shoulders
and they had enough resiliency of spirit to grin when a stream of sand
from a bag torn by a shell burst ran down the back of Pilzer's neck. It
was rather amusing to hear Jake growling as he twisted in his blouse.

Hugo caught the humor of it in another sense, for the same shell burst
threw a piece of brown sleeve matted in a piece of flesh among the
flowers. The next instant he saw a squad of Grays who sprang up to rush
toward the linden stumps go down under the hose stream from the
automatic with the precision of having been struck by an electric
current. Not occupied, as he had been yesterday, with the business of
keeping to his part as a physical cog in the machine, he was seeing war
as a spectator--as Marta saw it, as only a privileged few ever see it.
Society, he was thinking, took the trouble to bring boys through the
whooping-cough and measles, pay for clothing and doctors' bills, and,
while it complained about business losses and safe-guarded trees and
harvests and buildings, destroyed the most valuable product of all with
a spatter of bullets from a rapid-firer.

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

Yes; oh, yes!

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

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

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

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

"Watch me snatch that rifle!" he announced.

"No, you don't! Get down!" snapped Fracasse. "We aren't inviting
hand-grenades. It's a wonder that we have escaped so far."

"Hand-grenades!" gasped Peterkin, going white.

But nobody observed his pallor. Every one else was gasping,
"Hand-grenades!" under his breath; or, if not, his thoughts were
shrieking, "Hand-grenades!" There was a restless movement, a wistful
look to the rear.

"Keep quiet!" whispered Fracasse. "Let us hope it isn't known that we're
here."

They became as still as men of stone.

"Well, if they are going to throw grenades then they will throw them!"
exclaimed Peterkin with the bravery of fear. He must do or say something
worthy of a hero, he thought, in order to prove that he was not as
scared as he knew he had looked and still felt.

"You have the right sort of _sang-froid_, Peter Kinderling!" whispered
Fracasse. "And you, Pilzer, showed a proper spirit, too, if wrongly
directed."

Under cover of this favor, Peterkin drew a little out of line, making a
great pretence of stretching his legs and yawning--yawning with a
sincerely dropped jaw and a quivering lip. He pressed his chin against
the ground and this stopped the quivering. Also, he was in a position to
watch the parapet closely and to make a quick spring.

Fatalism had become suspense--suspense without action to take their
minds off the prospect, the suspense of death lurking in a cloud which
might break in a lightning flash! They thought that they knew the full
gamut of horrors; but nothing that they had yet gone through was any
criterion for what they now had to endure. All understood the nature of
a hand-grenade, which bursts like a Nihilist's bomb. It was as easy,
they knew, to toss hand-grenades over the sand-bags into human flesh as
apples into a basket. They felt themselves bound and gagged, waiting for
an assassin to macerate them at his own sweet will.

The second hour was worse than the first, the third worse than the
second. In lulls they heard the voices of Dellarme and his men, which
seemed more ominous than the crash of rifles or the scream and crack of
shells. Finally there was a lull which they knew meant the supreme
attempt to storm the position from the town side. They heard the
commotion that followed Dellarme's death; the sharp, rallying commands
of Feller and Stransky; and then, as Peterkin saw a black object fly
free of a hand over the parapet he made a catlike spring, followed by
another and another, and plunged face downward at the angle where the
face of the redoubt bent toward the town.

He thought that he was dead, and found, as he had in the shell crater,
that he was not. After the two explosions he heard groans that chilled
his blood, and looked around to see living faces like chalk, with
glassy, beady, protruding eyes, and a dozen men killed and eviscerated
and mangled in bleeding confusion.

But Hugo and Pilzer and those of Peterkin's immediate group were alive.
They were in their places, while he was alone and out of his place. He
had bolted, while they held their ground; now he would be revealed in
his true light. The bronze cross would be lost before it was pinned to
his breast. From where he lay, however, he could see the other face of
the redoubt and a wedge of men about to mount the sand-bags. His next
act was born of the inspired cunning of his fear of being exposed,
which was almost as compelling as his fear of death. He waved his hand
excitedly to the others to come on.

"Charge! Charge! This is the way!" shrieked Peterkin.

His voice had the terror of a man floating toward a falls and calling
for a rope, but not so to Fracasse, to whom it was the voice of a great
chance. Why hadn't he thought of this before? Of course, he should move
around under cover of the reverse wall of the redoubt to join in the
attack on the weak point! The valet's son had shown him the way.

"Come, men, come! Follow me and Peterkin!" cried Fracasse.

Did they follow? Westerling or any expert in the psychology of war could
understand how ripe was their mood. "It is the wait under right
conditions that will make men fiends unleashed when the word to storm is
given," an older authority had written. Under sentence of death for six
hours, they welcomed any opportunity to get at grips with those who had
held death suspended over their heads.

You will use hand-grenades, will you? Snug behind sand-bags you will
tear the flesh of our comrades to pieces, will you? They saw red, the
red of raw fragments of flesh; the red of the gush from torn artery
walls--all except Hugo and Peterkin, who might well begin to believe
that there was a measure of art in heroism. Peterkin seemed to share
leadership at the captain's side, but he slipped and fell--he had weak
ankles, anyway--as Fracasse's men pressed the rear of the wedge forward
with the strength of mass, only to be borne back by men, riddled with
bullets, tumbling fairly into their faces.

As we have seen, there was no getting through a breach under the
concentrated blasts of a hundred rifles, and Pilzer, who, by using human
shoulders for steps, had reached the parapet, turned a back somersault
with out his rifle. However, he seized one from a dead man's hand
before the captain had noticed the loss. Some of the company joined in
the flight of the attackers from the town into the open, but Hugo and
Pilzer and their friends remained under cover of the wall. They still
saw red, the red of a darker anger--that of repulse.

When, finally, they burst into the redoubt after it was found that the
Browns had gone, all, even the judge's son, were the war demon's, own.
The veneer had been warped and twisted and burned off down to the raw
animal flesh. Their brains had the fever itch of callouses forming. Not
a sign of brown there in the yard; not a sign of any tribute after all
they had endured! They had not been able to lay hands on the murderous
throwers of hand-grenades. Far away now was the barrack-room geniality
of the forum around Hugo; in oblivion were the ethics of an inherited
civilization taught by mothers, teachers, and church.

But here was a house--a house of the Browns; a big, fine house! They
would see what they had won--this was the privilege of baffled victory.
What they had won was theirs! To the victor the spoils! Pell-mell they
crowded into the dining-room, Hugo with the rest, feeling himself a
straw on the crest of a wave, and Pilzer, most bitter, most ugly of all,
his short, strong teeth and gums showing and his liver patch red, lumpy,
and trembling. In crossing the threshold of privacy they committed the
act that leaves the deepest wound of war's inheritance, to go on from
generation to generation in the history of families.

"A swell dining-room! I like the chandeliers!" roared Pilzer.

With his bayonet he smashed the only globe left intact by the shell
fire. There was a laugh as a shower of glass fell on the floor. Even the
judge's son, the son of the tribune of law, joined in. Pilzer then
ripped up the leather seat of a chair. This introductory havoc whetted
his appetite for other worlds of conquest, as the self-chosen leader of
the increasing crowd that poured through the doorway.

"Maybe there's food!" he shouted. "Maybe there's wine!"

"Food and wine!"

"Yes, wine! We're thirsty!"

"And maybe women! I'd like to kiss a pretty maid servant!" Pilzer added,
starting toward the hall.

"Stop!" cried Hugo, forcing his way in front of Pilzer.

He was like no one of the Hugos of the many parts that his comrades had
seen him play. His blue eyes had become an inflexible gray. He was
standing half on tiptoe, his quivering muscles in tune with the
quivering pitch of his voice: a Hugo in anger! This was a tremendous
joke. He was about to regain his reputation as a humorist by a brilliant
display in keeping with the new order of their existence.

"We have no right in here! This is a private house!"

But the fever of their savagery--the infectious savagery of the
mob--wanted no humor of this kind.

"Out of the way, you white-livered little rat!" cried Pilzer, "or I'll
prick the tummy of mamma's darling!"

What happened then was so sudden and unexpected in Hugo that all were
vague about details. They saw him in a catapultic lunge, mesmeric in its
swiftness, and they saw Pilzer go down, his leg twisted under him and
his head banging the floor. Hugo stood, half ashamed, half frightened,
yet ready for another encounter.

Fracasse, entering at this moment, was too intent on his mission to
consider the rights of a personal difference between two of his company,
though he heard and noted Pilzer's growling complaint that he had been
struck an unfair blow.

"There's work to do! Out of here, quick! We are losing valuable time!"
he announced, rounding his men toward the door with commanding
gestures. "We are going in pursuit!"

Marta, who had observed the latter part of the scene from the shadows of
the hall, knew that she should never forget Hugo's face as he turned on
Pilzer, while his voice of protest struck a singing chord in her
jangling nerves. It was the voice of civilization, of one who could
think out of the orbit of a whirlpool of passionate barbarism. She could
see that he was about to spring and her prayer went with his leap. She
gloried in the impact that felled the great brute with the liver patch
on his cheek, which was like a birthmark of war.

After the men were gone she regretted that she had not gone to Hugo and
expressed her gratitude. She vaguely wondered if she should see him
again and hoped that she might. The two faces, Hugo's and Pilzer's, in
the instant of Hugo's protest and Pilzer's contempt, were as clear as in
life before her eyes.

Then a staff-officer appeared in the doorway. When he saw a woman enter
the room he frowned. He had ridden from the town, which was empty of
women, a fact that he regarded as a blessing. If she had been a maid
servant he would have kept on his cap. Seeing that she was not, he
removed it and found himself in want of words as their eyes met after
she had made a gesture to the broken glass on the floor and the
lacerated table top, which said too plainly:

"Do you admire your work?"

The fact that he was well groomed and freshly shaven did not in any wise
dissipate in her feminine mind his connection with this destruction. He
had never seen anything like the smile which went with the gesture. Her
eyes were two continuing and challenging flames. Her chin was held high
and steady, and the pallor of exhaustion, with the blackness of her
hair-and eyes, made her strangely commanding. He understood that she was
not waiting for him to speak, but to go.

"I did not know that there was a woman here!" he said.

"And I did not know that officers of the Grays were accustomed to enter
private houses without invitations!" she replied.

"This is a little different," he began.

She interrupted him.

"But the law of the Grays is that homes should be left undisturbed,
isn't it? At least, it is the law of civilization. I believe you
profess, too, to protect property, do you not?"

"Why, yes!" he agreed. He wished that he could get a little respite from
the steady fire of her eyes. It was embarrassing and as confusing as the
white light of an impracticable logic.

"In that case, please place a guard around our house lest some more of
your soldiers get out of control," she went on.

"I can do that, yes," he said. "But we are to make this a staff
headquarters and must start at once to put the house in readiness."

"General Westerling's headquarters?" she inquired.

He parried the question with a frown. Staff-officers never give
information. They receive information and transmit orders.

"I know General Westerling. You will tell him that my mother, Mrs.
Galland, and our maid and myself are very tired from the entertainment
he has given us, unasked, and we need sleep to-night. So you will leave
us until morning and that door, sir, is the one out into the grounds."

The staff-officer bowed and went out by that door, glad to get away from
Marta's eyes. His inspection of the premises with a view to plans for
staff accommodation could wait. Westerling would not be here for two
days at least.

"Whew! What energy she has!" he thought. "I never had anybody make me
feel so contemptibly unlike a gentleman in my life."

Yet Marta, returning to the hall, had to steady herself in a dizzy
moment against the wall. Complete reaction had come. She craved sleep as
if it were the one true, real thing in the world. She craved sleep for
the clarity of mind that comes with the morning light. In the haziness
of fleecy thought, as slumber drew its soft clouds around her, her last
conscious visions were the pleasant ones rising free of a background of
horror: of Feller's smile when he went back to his automatic for good;
of Dellarme's smile as he was dying; of Stransky's smile as Minna gave
him hope; and of Hugo's face as he uttered his flute-like cry of
protest. In her ears were the haunting calmness and contained force of
Lanstron's voice over the telephone. She was pleased to think that she
had not lost her temper in her talk with the staff-officer. No, she had
not flared once in indignation. It was as if she had absorbed some of
Lanny's own self-control. Lanny would approve of her in that scene with
an officer of the Grays. And she realized that a change had come over
her--a change inexplicable and telling--and she was tired--oh, so tired!
It had been exhausting work, indeed, for one woman, though she had been
around the world, making war on two armies.

       *       *       *       *        *

Meanwhile, all too flushed with energy, the energy of movement, to think
of the feud between Hugo and Pilzer, Fracasse's men had sped along the
castle road. Little Peterkin easily kept pace. There was no danger in
pursuit. In him was the same zest of the chase which Animated his
comrades. They dropped down on a ledge without much regard to order.
Before them, at close range, was a company breaking out of close order
in a _sauve-qui-peut_ rout up a reverse slope. It was not Dellarme's
company, but some other that had mistaken its direction and retired too
late and by the wrong road.

You will throw hand-grenades, will you? thought Fracasse's men. You will
mangle our fellows when they Can't strike back, will you? Now you'll
pay! Now it is our turn! We have seen our blood flow and now yours will
flow!

The lust of the red slipped the cartridge clips into the magazines and
held a true aim in the mad delight of slaughter. No one minded, for no
one heard--not even little Peterkin--the scattering bullets in return.
They had reached the stage where the objective thought of revenge wholly
submerged the subjective thought of personal danger, which is the mood
of the hungry tiger in the hunt. They were the veritable finished
products of veteran experience in purpose and marksmanship. Hugo, too,
was firing, but far over the head of every target; firing like a man in
a trance who needs some deciding incident to bring him out of it into
the part he was to play.

Only occasional figures who had not escaped over the ridge were to be
seen. The fewer the targets the greater the concentration. A whole
company was firing on a dozen straggling figures. But one--that one in
the pasture--seemed to have a charmed life. The ground around him was
peppered with dust spots. He had only a few yards more to go to safety;
yes his head--the exasperation of him!--was in line with the crest
before he fell.

Where was there any more prey? With ferret quickness eyes swept the
range of vision. Out of an orchard into the stubble of a wheat-field
broke a panicky mass; a score or more of men who had lost their officer
and their heads presumably. They were the nail under the hammer, a brown
blot, a target.

"Ah!" a chorus of excited exclamations in greeting of the game flushed
from cover ran along the line. Just the way you got our fellows with the
hand-grenades, we will get you! This was the thought, this the prayer
which they saw being fulfilled by the glad medley of their fire when
Hugo Mallin sprang up and threw down his rifle as if it were something
whose touch had become venomous. He threw it down with features
transformed in the uplifting thought and the relief of a final
resolution taken.

"I am through!" he cried. "I will not murder my fellowman who has done
me no wrong! I cannot, I will not kill!"

Fracasse, who was near by, heard enough to understand the purport of the
declaration, and his recollection of Hugo's heresy and all the prejudice
that he had formed against Hugo and the abhorrence of Hugo's offence to
the strict militarist brought a rush of anger to his brain as he leaped
up and drawing his sword, struck at Hugo with the flat of it. He aimed
for Hugo's back, but a bullet had hit Hugo in the calf of his leg and,
his knees giving under him, he received the blow on the head and fell
unconscious.

When he came to it was with a twitch of pain in his ribs. He saw the
glowering faces of his comrades above him and realized that Pilzer had
given him a kick which expressed the general opinion.

"Once ought to be enough of that," said the doctor, who was bandaging
the leg, speaking to Pilzer.

Yet in the doctor's eyes Hugo saw no favor, only the humanity of his
occupation of mercy to criminal and king alike. But Hugo expected no
favor and he was glad of what he had done as he swooned again. When he
came to a second time, his head aching with throbs, it was with a sense
of falling. He found that he was on a litter that had just been set
down. Evidently this was by order of the colonel, who was standing over
Hugo in the company of some officers. All were regarding him as if he
were a species of reptile.

"World anarchist ideas, which is another word for treason or white
liver," observed the colonel. "To think that it happened in my regiment!
But I'll not try to cover it for the regiment's good name. He will get
the full measure of the law!"

"The placard is a good idea," suggested an officer.

"Yes, put on by one of his comrades!"

"The punishment of public opinion. It shows how sound the army is at
heart."

Hugo, lowering his glance, was able to see a sheet of note-paper pinned
to his blouse. It was lettered, but he could not make out the words.
Then he heard the approach of a galloping horse, whose hoofs seemed to
strike his head, and heard the horse stop and an orderly saying
something about Company I having got too far forward into a mess and the
need of litters.

"We can spare this one," said the colonel.

Hugo was rolled roughly onto the ground by the roadside and left alone.
He managed to raise himself on his elbow and saw that the lettering of
the placard was "Coward!" Officers and soldiers and hospital-corps men
called attention to it as they passed. The sun was very hot and he was
growing feverish. Painfully he dragged himself to the shelter of a tree,
and then, looking around, saw that he was near the big house of the
terraced garden.




XXX

MARTA MEETS HUGO


The general staff-officer of the Grays, who had tasted Marta's temper on
his first call, when he returned the next morning did not enter
unannounced. He rang the door-bell.

"I have a message for you from General Westerling," he said to her. "The
general expresses his deep regret at the unavoidable damage to your
house and grounds and has directed that everything possible be done
immediately in the way of repairs."

In proof of this the officer called attention to a group of
service-corps men who were removing the sand-bags from the first
terrace. Others were at work in the garden setting uprooted plants back
into the earth.

"His Excellency says," continued the officer, "that, although the house
is so admirably suited for staff purposes, we will find another if you
desire."

He was too polite and too considerate in his attitude for Marta not to
meet him in the same spirit.

"That is what we should naturally prefer," and Marta bowed her head in
indecision.

"We should have to begin installing the telegraph and telephone service
on the lower floor at once," he remarked. "In fact, all arrangements
must be made before the general's arrival."

"He has been a guest here before," she said reminiscently and
detachedly.

Her head dropped lower, in apparent disregard of his presence, as she
took counsel with herself. She was perfectly still, without even the
movement of an eyelash. Other considerations than any he might suggest,
he subtly understood, held her attention. They were the criterion by
which she would at length assent or dissent, and nothing could hurry the
Marta of to-day, who yesterday had been a creature of feverish impulse.

It seemed a long time that he was watching that wonderful profile under
the very black hair, soft with the softness of flesh, yet firmly carved.
She lifted her head gradually, her eyes sweeping past the spot where
Dellarme had lain dying, where Feller had manned the automatic, where
Stransky had thrown Pilzer over the parapet. He saw the glance arrested
and focussed on the flag of the Grays, which was floating from a staff
on the outskirts of the town, and slowly, glowingly, the light rippling
on its folds was reflected in her face.

"She is for us! She is a Gray!" he thought triumphantly. The woman and
the flag! The matter-of-fact staff-officer felt the thrill of sentiment.

"I think we can arrange it," Marta announced with a rare smile of
assent.

"Then I'll go back to town and set the signal-corps men to work," he
said.

"And when you come you will find the house at your disposal," she
assured him.

Except that he was raising his cap instead of saluting, he was conscious
of withdrawing with the deference due to a superior.

In place of the smile, after he had gone, came a frown and a look in her
eyes as if at something revolting; then the smile returned, to be
succeeded by the frown, which was followed by an indeterminate shaking
of the head.

The roar of battle kept up its steady refrain in the direction of the
range. Marta had heard it when she fell asleep and heard it when she
awakened. A battery of heavy guns of the Grays broke their flashes from
a knoll this side of the one where Dellarme's men had made their first
stand. At the foot of the garden, where yesterday she had distributed
flowers to the wounded Browns, a regiment of Gray infantry was marching
past a train of siege-guns. All the figures moving on the landscape,
which yesterday had been brown, had changed to gray. The Grays were
masters of the town and all the neighborhood.

Marta stepped down from the veranda in response to the call of the open
air to physical vigor renewed after sweet sleep. Rather than return
directly to the kitchen, where breakfast was waiting, she would go
around the house. She stopped before a Japanese maple which had been
split by a shell striking in a crotch. Was there any hope of saving it?
No. She turned white about the lips, with red spots on her cheeks, and
at length nodded her head as if in answer to some inward question.

Over the sward, cut by shell fragments, lay torn limbs and bits of bark,
and in the shade of a tree near the road she had a glimpse of the
shoulder of the gray uniform of a prostrate man. The rest of him was
hidden by the low-hanging branches of one of the Norway spruces which
bordered the estate at this point. Another step and she saw a circular
red spot on a white leg bandage; another, and a white square of paper
pinned to a blouse; another, and she identified the wounded man as her
hero of the scene in the dining-room.

Hugo's eyes were closed, his breaths slow, in restless sleep. His face,
flushed with fever, was winningly boyish and frank. He who had had the
courage to speak alone against the opinion of his fellows, to voice a
belief that made every sympathetic chord in her own mind sing with
praise and understanding, the courage to say that invasion was wrong
even when made by his own people, had been labelled coward and left to
die!

The exaltation of his features when he had been the champion of her
beliefs and her impulse against the barbarism of his comrades and the
charm of their resignation now, the pitifulness of his condition--all
had an appeal as she bent over him that called for an expression having
the touch of the sublimely feminine. She took his hand in hers and
pressed it gently. He awoke and brought himself jerkily to a sitting
posture. The effort made a crash in his head that sent his senses
swimming. She thought that he was going to swoon and slipped her arm
behind him in support and, the Marta of impulse, pressed her lips to his
brow. After the first racking throb of his temples he was able to steady
himself, and as she drew away she saw his blue eyes starting in wonder
at her act.

"I--I had to do it to thank you for what you did in the dining-room!"
she stammered.

"Oh! Oh! It was very beautiful of you, but I couldn't help being
surprised, for it was rather unusual--from a stranger." He smiled, and
Hugo had a gift in smiles, as we know: smiles for laughter, smiles for
reassurance, and smiles to cure embarrassment. "It was almost as
refreshing as a drink of water," he concluded impersonally.

"You are thirsty?"

"This--this is morning, isn't it?" Hugo went on quizzically.

"Yes, yes!"

"Then it must be the next day," he pursued, still quizzically. "You see,
I said I would not kill any more--and I will not--and I was shot and got
tagged without even being shipped as freight. I was thirsty last night,
very thirsty, and some one--I think it was Jake Pilzer--some one said to
go to the fountain of hell for a drink, but I--I don't think that a very
good place to get a drink, do you?"

Weak and faint as he was, he put a touch of drollery into the question
which made her laugh, her eyes sparkling through a moist haze.

"You're real, aren't you?" he inquired in sudden perplexity. "I'm not
dreaming?"

"As real as the water I shall bring you."

Soon Marta was back, holding a glass to his lips.

"There's no doubt about it; you are real!" said Hugo.

"I feel as if the chimney were still hot but that you had drenched the
fire in the grate."

"Who put this on you?" she asked as she unpinned the placard.

"I've a vague idea, from a vague overhearing of the colonel's remarks,
that it is public opinion," he replied, and seeing, that she was about
to tear it up, he arrested her action. "No, I think I'd like to save it
as a souvenir--the odds are so greatly against me--as a sort of souvenir
to keep up my courage."

His tone, the way he drew the muscles of his face, ironed out her frown
of disgust at public opinion with a smile. For he made his kind of
courage no less light-hearted and free of pose than Dellarme had made
his.

Directly the coachman, whom Marta had summoned when she went for the
water, appeared with an improvised litter, and the two bore in at the
kitchen door a guest for breakfast whose arrival gave Mrs. Galland a
distinctly visible surprise. His uniform was gray, and in her heart of
hearts she hated gray as the symbol of an enemy whom her husband had
fought. But when Marta told the story of the part he had played in
defence of the chandelier, personal partisanship abetted the motherly
impulse that was already breaking down prejudice. She was busy with a
dozen suggestions for his comfort, quite taking matters out of Marta's
hands.

"I know more about the care of the sick than you do!" she insisted. "One
lump or two in your coffee, sir? There, there, you had better let me
hold the cup for you. You are sure you can sit up? Then we must have a
pillow."

"I'll fetch one from the other room," put in Minna.

"Two will be better!" Marta called after her.

"It is delightful to have breakfast in your kitchen, madame," said Hugo
to Mrs. Galland in a way that ought to have justified her in thinking
herself the most charming and useful person in the world.




XXXI

UNTO CÆSAR


It was more irritating than ever for Mrs. Galland to keep pace with her
daughter's inconsistencies. There was a Marta listening in partisan
sympathy to Hugo's story of why he had refused to fight and telling the
story of her school in return. There was a Marta seizing Hugo's hand in
a quick, impulsive grasp as she exclaimed: "Your act personified what I
taught my children!" There was a Marta planning how he should be
secreted in the coachman's quarters over the stable, where he would be
reasonably free from discovery until his strength was regained. Then
here was another Marta, after Hugo had been carried away on the litter,
saying coolly to her mother:

"'Unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's!' We have our property, our
home to protect. Perhaps the Grays have come to stay for good, so
graciousness is our only weapon. We cannot fight a whole army
single-handed."

"You have found that out, Marta?" said Mrs. Galland.

"We have four rooms in the baron's tower and a kitchen stove," Marta
proceeded. "With Minna we can make ourselves very comfortable and leave
the house to the staff."

"The Gallands in their gardener's quarters! The staff of the Grays in
ours! Your father will turn in his grave!" Mrs. Galland exclaimed.

"But, mother, it is not quite agreeable to think of three women living
in the same house with a score of strange men!" Marta persisted.

"I had not thought of that, Marta. Of course, it would be abominable!"
agreed Mrs. Galland, promptly capitulating where a point of propriety
was involved.

When Marta informed the officer--the same one who had rung the door-bell
on his second visit--of the family's decision he appeared shocked at the
idea of eviction that was implied. But, secretly pleased at the turn of
events, he hastened to apologize for war's brutal necessities, and
Marta's complaisance led him to consider himself something of a
diplomatist. Yes, more than ever he was convinced of the wisdom of an
invader ringing door-bells.

Meanwhile, the service-corps men had continued their work until now
there was no vestige of war in the grounds that labor could obliterate;
and masons had come to repair the walls of the house itself and
plasterers to renew the broken ceilings.

All this Marta regarded in a kind of charmed wonder that an invader
could be so considerate. Her manner with the officers in charge of
preparations had the simplicity and ease which a woman of twenty-seven,
who is not old-maidish because she is not afraid of a single future, may
employ as a serene hostess. She frequently asked if there were good
news.

"Yes," was the uniform reply. An unexpected setback here or resistance
there, but progress, nevertheless. But she learned, too, that the first
two days' fighting along the frontier had cost the Grays fifty thousand
casualties.

"In order to make an omelet you must break eggs!" she remarked.

"Spoken like a true soldier--like a member of the staff!" was the reply.

In her constraint and detachment they realized her conscious
appreciation of the fact that in earlier times her people had been for
the Browns; but in her flashes of interest in the progress of the war,
flashes from a woman's unmilitary mind, they judged that her heart was
with the Grays. And why not? Was it not natural that a woman with more
than her share of intellectual perception should be on the right side?
From her associations it was not to be expected that she would make an
outright declaration of apostasy. This would destroy the value and the
attractiveness of her conversion Reverence for the past, for a father
who had fought for the Browns, against her own convictions, made her
attitude appear singularly and delicately correct.

Though everything was ready for them, the staff delayed coming owing to
the stubbornness of some heavy guns of the Browns, which, while they had
directed no shells against the house, had shown that they had the range
by unexpectedly playing havoc with infantry in close order on the pass
road at the foot of the garden and with transportation on the castle
road. But at last the battery was silenced and the mind of the army
might establish itself in its offices on the ground floor and its
quarters on the second floor without being in danger.

The war was a week old--a week which had developed other tangents and
traps than La Tir--on the morning that the first instalment of junior
officers came to occupy the tables and desks. Where the family portraits
had hung in the dining-room were now big maps dotted with brown and gray
flags. Portable field cabinets with sectional maps on a large scale were
arranged around the walls of the drawing-room. In what had been the
lounging room of the old days of Galland prosperity, the refrain of half
a dozen telegraph instruments made medley with the clicking of
typewriters. Cooks and helpers were busy in the kitchen; for the staff
were to live like gentlemen; they were to have their morning baths,
their comfortable beds, and regular meals. No twinge of indigestion or
of rheumatism from exposure was to interfere with the working of their
precious intellectual processes. No detail of assistance would be
lacking to save any bureaucratic head time and labor The bedrooms were
apportioned according to rank--that of the master awaited the master;
the best servant's bedroom awaited François, his valet.

When Bouchard, the chief of intelligence, who fought the battle of wits
and spies against Lanstron, came, two hours before Westerling was due,
the last of the staff except Westerling and his personal aide had
arrived Bouchard, with his iron-gray hair, bushy eyebrows, strong,
aquiline nose, and hawk-like eyes, his mouth hidden by a bristly
mustache, was lean and saturnine, and he was loyal. No jealous thought
entered his mind at having to serve a man younger than himself. He did
not serve a personality; he served a chief of staff and a profession.
The score of words which escaped him as he looked over the arrangements
were all of directing criticism and bitten off sharply, as if he
regretted that he had to waste breath in communicating even a thought.

"I tell nothing, but you tell me everything!" said Bouchard's hawk eyes.
He was old-fashioned; he looked his part, which was one of the many
points of difference between him and Lanstron as a chief of
intelligence.

After he had gone through the house he went for a flyspecking tour of
the grounds, where he came upon a private of the Grays on crutches. With
rest and good food the tiny hole in Hugo's leg from the merciful
small-calibre bullet had healed rapidly. Confinement was irksome on a
sunny day. He had grown strong enough in spirit to face his fate,
whatever it might be, and in the absence of the watchful coachman he had
risked the delight of a convalescent's adventure in the open, clad in
his uniform, the only clothes he had. Bouchard saw instantly that this
private did not wear the insignia of staff service.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"Getting well of a wound," answered Hugo, looking frankly into the hawk
eyes.

"Evidently!" said Bouchard, who was always irritated when told what he
could see for himself. "Why aren't you at a hospital?"

"I was not wanted there!" said Hugo.

"What! what!" But Bouchard had wasted two words. "Your name and
regiment?" he asked.

"Hugo Mallin, of the 128th," replied Hugo.

"Uh-h!" Bouchard's pigeonhole memory had retained the name.
"Charge--mutiny under fire; anarchism!" he went on, chopping out the
words as if they were chips from a piece of granite. "Well, you have not
escaped trial by hiding."

"I did not flatter myself that with one leg against a whole army I had
much chance, sir!" Hugo replied respectfully.

"Uh-h!" The hawk eyes flashed their disapproval of such controversial
freedom of language from a private. Had he had his way he would have
hanged Hugo to the nearest tree; for Bouchard had truly a mediæval soul.

But Hugo's case was so extraordinary that it had reached Westerling's
ears, and Bouchard knew that Westerling wished to see Hugo when he was
apprehended. It was not for Bouchard to consider this desire of a chief
of staff to deal with the case of a private in person as singular. No
request of the chief of staff was singular to him. It became a matter of
natural law. He called to one of the staff guards who was pacing back
and forth near by.

"Take this man in charge and watch him sharply until General Westerling
sends for him!"

"And you will get justice from General Westerling!" It was Marta's
voice. In approaching she had unavoidably overheard part of the
conversation. "Justice is his first characteristic!" she added as the
hawk eyes turned their scrutiny into hers, which were calm and smiling.

Hugo had not seen Marta since he had been carried to the coachman's
quarters. Minna had visited him frequently, bearing inquiries from her
mistress as well as custards. He had looked forward to a talk with Marta
as a kindred spirit, yet it was difficult for him to reconcile the
woman speaking now with the woman who had kissed him on the forehead.
But he said nothing as he was marched away.

"Miss Galland!" exclaimed Bouchard in a way that said he knew her story.
"Yes, that little monkey can depend on more justice than he deserves.
The unanswerable evidence is on the chief of staff's desk awaiting his
arrival."

Bouchard's hawk eyes probed hers for an instant longer and seemed to
find nothing to call further curiosity; then he lifted his cap and
proceeded with his tour of inspection.

Marta smiled thoughtfully as she watched his receding figure, while her
eyelashes narrowed and she inclined her head with a nod before she moved
away in the direction of the tower. There was almost complete silence
along the front. Since yesterday's action, which had checked the guns
commanding the range of the house, there had been little firing. She
guessed that the lull was only a recess of preparation for the grand
attack on the first line of permanent defence, and that probably this
would follow Westerling's arrival. He was due at four o'clock and he
would be characteristically prompt to the minute.

"It must not be! Hugo Mallin is too fine a spirit to be sacrificed. I'll
go on my knees, if need be, to Westerling," Marta was thinking as she
paced back and forth in her room. On her knees to him! She stopped
short, struck in revolt with a memory of the way he had looked at her
once as she sat across the tea-table from him in the hotel
reception-room. "No, I could not endure that except as a last resort. If
ever there were a time to use all my wits it is now--to save Hugo
Mallin, the one soldier who acted out the principles which I taught my
children!"




XXXII

TEA ON THE VERANDA AGAIN


As it lacked one minute to four when Hedworth Westerling, chief of staff
in name as well as power now, alighted from the gray automobile that
turned in at the Galland drive, the chauffeur thought well enough of
himself to forget the crush of supplies and ambulances that had delayed
His Excellency's car for at least ninety seconds in the main street of
the town. Though His Excellency had not occupied his new headquarters as
soon as he expected, this could have no influence on results. If he had
lost fifty thousand men on the first two days and two hundred thousand
since the war had begun, should he allow this to disturb his well-being
of body or mind? His well-being of body and mind meant the ultimate
saving of lives.

The Grays were winning; this alone counted in the present. They would
continue to win; this alone counted in the future. They had won by
crowding in reserves till the positions attacked yielded to superior
strength. Thus they would continue to win until the last positions had
yielded.

Five million mothers' sons against three million mothers' sons! Five to
three pounds of flesh! Five to three ounces of blood! With equal skill,
superior strength must always tell. Westerling and his staff were
responsible for the skill. If their minds would work better for it, the
nation could well afford to feed them on nightingales' tongues.

Confidence is the handmaiden of skill. Confidence is the edge on the
sword; confidence brings the final charge that wins the redoubt.
Confidence was reflected in Westerling's bearing and in his smile of
command as he passed through the staff rooms, Turcas and Bouchard in his
train, with tacit approval of the arrangements. Finally, Turcas, now
vice-chief of staff, and the other chiefs awaited his pleasure in the
library, which was to be his sanctum. On the massive seventeenth-century
desk lay a number of reports and suggestions. Westerling ran through
them with accustomed swiftness of sifting and then turned to his
personal aide.

"Tell François that I will have tea on the veranda."

From the fact that he took with him the papers that he had laid aside,
subordinate generals, with the gift of unspoken directions which is a
part of their profession, understood that he meant to go over the
subjects requiring special attention while he had tea.

"Everything is going well--well!" he added in a way that said that
everything must be if he said so and that he knew how to make everything
go well. "And we shall be up pretty late to-night. Any one who feels the
need had better take a nap"--the implication being that he did not.

"Well!" ran the unspoken communication of confidence through the staff.
So well that His Excellency was calmly taking tea on the veranda! For
the indefatigable Turcas the detail; for Westerling the front of Jove.

"Well!" The thrill of the word was with him in a flight of sentiment as
he stood on that veranda where a certain prophecy had been made to a
young colonel. Sight of the rippling folds of the flag of his country on
the outskirts of the town prolonged the thrill. His eyes swept the pale
horizon of the distances of plain and Mountain and lowered to the
garden. Above the second terrace he saw a crown of woman's hair--hair of
a jet abundance, radiant in the sunlight and shading a face that brought
familiar completeness to the scene.

He had told Marta only two weeks ago that he should see her again if
war came; and war had come. With the inviting prospect of a few holiday
moments in which to continue the interview that had been abruptly
concluded in a hotel reception-room, he started down the terrace steps.
Their glances met where the second terrace path ended at the second
terrace flight; hers shot with a beam of restrained and questioning good
humor that spoke at least a truce to the invader.

"You called sooner than I expected," she said in a note of equivocal
pleasantry.

"Or I," he rejoined with a shade of triumph, the politest of triumph. He
was a step above her, her head on a level with the pocket of his blouse.
His square shoulders, commanding height, and military erectness were
thus emphasized, as was her own feminine slightness.

"I want to thank you," she said. "As becomes a soldier, your forethought
was expressed in action. It was the promptness of the men you sent to
look after the garden which saved the uprooted plants before they were
past recovery."

"I wished it for your sake and somewhat for my own sake to be the same
that it was in the days when I used to call," he said graciously. "Tea
was from four to five, do you remember? Will you join me? I have just
ordered it."

A generous, pleasant conqueror, this! No one knew better than Westerling
how to be one when he chose. He was something of an actor. Leaders of
men of his type usually are.

"Why, yes. Very gladly!" she assented with no undue cordiality and no
undue constraint, quite as if there were no war.

"It was the Browns who cut the lindens?" he suggested significantly.

"They said that it was necessary as part of the defence," she replied.
"We shall plant new ones and have the pleasure of watching them grow."

Neutrality could not be better impersonated he thought, than in the
even cleaving of her lips over the words. They seemed to say that a
storm had come and gone and a new set of masters had taken the place of
the old. As they approached the veranda François was placing the tea
things.

"Quite the same! That was your chair, as I remember," said Westerling
after indicating to François that he might go, "and this was mine."

But the teapot was not Mrs. Galland's--it belonged to the staff.

"This is different," observed Marta, touching her finger-tip to the coat
of arms of the Grays on the side of a cup.

"Yes, my own field kit," he answered, thinking that the novelty of tea
from a soldier's service had appealed to her; for she was smiling.

"So, you being the host and I the guest now, why, you pour!" she said.
There was a touch of brittleness in her tone--of half-teasing,
half-serious brittleness.

"Oh, no, no!" he protested laughingly, and found her glance flashing
through her brows holding him fast in an indefinable challenge.

"I shall pour when you do us the honor to come to tea at the gardener's
quarters in the tower," she said.

"No, no!" he objected. "The tea conditions are the same as before."

He was earnest for his point. It would please his masculine fancy to
watch those firm, small fingers pausing over the cup before the plunge
of a lump of sugar stirred the miniature ocean in waves; to watch the
firm little hand in its grip of the handle of the pot.

"Conditions the same as before?" She laughed softly. "How can they be in
my thoughts or yours?" she asked with a sudden show of seriousness.

"We did turn you out of house and home--I understand!" he exclaimed
apologetically. "And that is the symbol of it to you!" He indicated the
coat of arms.

"The symbol of the conqueror, isn't it?" he asked playfully, for in the
company of women it pleased him to be playful.

"Conqueror? It's a big word!" she mused. "I hadn't thought of it in
connection with pouring tea"--which might be another way of saying that
she had just been thinking of it very hard and might be trying to find
whether it had a pleasant or an unpleasant side. Clearly, here was a
Marta different from any yet precipitated by the alchemy of war.

The resourceful variety of her! Oh, it was like the old days! It made
him feel young, as young as when he had been a colonel commanding the
garrison on the other side of the white posts. She had intelligence, yet
was at the same time distinctly feminine, with the gift of as much talk
about who should pour tea as about how to storm a redoubt. She did not
carry her mental wares on her sleeve. She flashed them in a way that
prompted curiosity as to the next exhibit. He had sought primarily,
selfishly, to be entertained at tea, and he was being entertained. To
want to win was his nature. He understood, too, that she wanted to win.
He liked that quality in her the more because it heightened the valve of
victory for him.

"Then, if you don't think of it in connection with pouring tea, let me
tell you what I think of when I sit on this veranda. I think of you as
hostess. You refuse to play the part!" he exclaimed with that
persistence, softened a little, perhaps, yet suggestive of the quality
characterized by the firm jaw and still eyes, which won his point at
staff councils. Again he was conscious of one of her sweeping glances of
appraisal, with just a glint of admiration and even approval tucked away
in the recesses of her smile.

"Suppose we compromise," she suggested thoughtfully, with the gravity of
one making a great concession. "Suppose you do the heavy work, and pour,
and I drop the sugar in the cups."

But Westerling always used a half concession as a lever to gain a full
concession.

"I'd really better do it all--act out the host and the conqueror!" he
declared. "One can't compromise principles."

"Oh! Why?" She was distinctly interested, leaning nearer to him and
playing a tattoo with one set of fingers on the back of the other hand.

"Anything except your doing all the honors leaves me in the same
invidious position," he answered. "It compounds my felony. It shows that
you do think that we failed by our conduct to show respect for your
property. It leaves me feeling that you think that I do not regard this
as your veranda, your garden, your home, sacred by more than the laws of
war--by an old friendship!"

He made his appeal finely, as he well knew how to do. A certain magnetic
eloquence that went well with his handsome face and sturdy bearing had
been his most successful asset in making him chief of staff.

The tattoo of her fingers died down while she listened to his final,
serious reasons about a subject that became peculiarly significant; and
her brows lifted, her eyes opened in the surprise of one who gets a
sudden new angle of light.

"You put it very well. In that case--" she said, and his glance and hers
dropped, his to the capable hand on the handle of the teapot, hers into
the cup. "With the honors of war and officers permitted to retain their
side-arms?" she asked.

"Yes; oh, yes!" he answered happily.

She smiled her acknowledgment with just that self-respect of
capitulation which flatters the victor with the thought that he has
overcome no mean opponent--the highest form of compliment known to the
guild of courtiers.

He was susceptible to it and, in turn, to the curiosity about her that
had remained unsatisfied at the end of their talk in the hotel. Her own
veranda was the natural, familiar place to judge the work of time in
those character-forming years from seventeen to twenty-seven. She was
not like what she had been in the artificial surroundings of a fortnight
ago. She filled the eye and the mind now in the