Part 4

Corporal Hayward Graham, back at the 10th's corral, had recovered his spirits as the day dragged along without any sound of battle, and he began to congratulate himself that he would finish up in good time all details that would keep him out of the fighting. When he walked over to the line late in the afternoon, however, and learned that the whole regiment was to be held out of the fight as a reserve, he immediately surmised that the 10th was kept out of it because they were negroes, and that the others from the general down wanted to scoop all the glory for the white soldiery,--and again he sat down and cursed the negro blood in his veins. The only salve to his outraged spirit was the information that those high and mighty prigs of the 71st were also to miss the glory. He even chuckled when he thought of the chagrin of Lieutenant Morgan and pictured to himself the scene of the lieutenant's meeting with Miss Elise Phillips if he should have to go back and explain to her how he came not to be under fire. Then he remembered Helen Phillips and the crimson pennant locked up in his trunk, and he felt that the whole war would count for naught if he had no chance to do something worthy of that pennant and of her. He wandered listlessly along the lines and tried to forget his troubles in listening to the talk of the fortunates who were going in.

He came to where a crowd of 1st X---- men were chaffing a squad of the 71st for "taking a gallery-seat at the show." Corporal Billie Catling of the 71st replied that they took the "gallery-seat" under orders and were put behind the 1st X---- to see that they didn't dodge a fight again like they did in Cuba.

"That's a damn lie!" came the 1st X----'s rejoinder in chorus; to which one of them added, "The 1st X---- never ran out of any fight in Cuba, and you gallery-gods can go to sleep or go to the devil, for we'll stay here till hell freezes over so thick you can skate on the ice."

"Well, you may not have run _out_ of any fight in Cuba, but it's blamed certain you didn't _run in_to one," retorted the 71st's spokesman.

"Now, sonny," yelled the X---- man, "don't get sassy because you're not permitted to sit down along with your betters. Run along and wait for the second table with the niggers!"

The 71st's contingent could not find a suitable retort to this sally, and, as fighting was out of the question, they walked away muttering imprecations amid the jeers of the men from X----.

Graham enjoyed the discomfiture of the 71st; but he was more than ever convinced that the colour of the 10th accounted for its being robbed of a chance for fame in this campaign: and he went back to his duty in a mutinous mood. He could not know that General Bell had held this veteran negro regiment in reserve because of its proved steadiness and valour; nor that he had placed the untried 1st X---- in his centre because it would thus be in the easiest supporting distance of his reserves.

The battle opened on April 3d the moment it became light enough for the gunners to locate the half-hidden German lines and artillery. For awhile the cannoneers had it all between themselves; and in this duel the advantage was with the Americans, for their position gave them better protection--the fighting-line being sheltered by the stream-bed and the guns and reserves by the hill. The Germans were entrenched on a hill as high as the Americans, but it was much flatter and afforded less natural cover.

After two or three hours of pounding the Germans with his artillery, which was evidently inflicting great damage, General Bell ordered his line forward to carry the German position by assault. Then the battle began in earnest. The German machine-guns opened on the American line as it rose out of the stream-bed and began its slow and terrible journey across the open valley by short rushes. The first breath of lead and iron that dashed in the faces of the American troops as they stood up began the work of death; and it came so promptly and so viciously that it overwhelmed the raw discipline and untempered metal of the 1st X----; for before advancing thirty paces the line wavered and broke and retreated ignobly to the sheltering bank of the stream. Not all the regiment broke at once; but the break and stampede of one company quickly spread along the entire regimental front, and back into the ditch they dived. Some of the officers cursed and commanded and entreated; but to no purpose. The wings of the American line were advancing steadily but slowly, standing up for a few moments to dash forward a dozen yards, and then lying as close to the ground as possible while returning the terrible fire from the hills in front of them.

General Bell from his position of vantage saw the failure of the 1st X---- to advance, and waited a few moments in hope that a half-dozen officers who were recklessly exposing themselves in their attempts to urge the men forward might succeed in their efforts. As it became evident that the regiment would not face the deadly fire of the Germans, however, and as the wings of the battle-line were diverging as they advanced because of the formation of the ground in their front, General Bell waited no longer, but ordered forward both the 10th Cavalry and the 71st Ohio. These came over the hill on the run and dropped down the slope into the water-course, where the heroic handful of officers were still making frantic efforts to have the 1st X---- go forward. A captain was violently berating his men for their cowardice and imploring them to advance, while his first lieutenant squeezed down behind the bank was yelling at them not to move. A major of one battalion was standing up straight and fully exposed, waving his sword and appealing to his men by every token of courage, while another major was lying as close to the bottom of the ditch as a spreading-adder. At places the men seemed to want to move, while the officers crouched in fear; while at others officers by no amount of commands or entreaties could get a man out of the ditch. A panic of terror seemed to be upon the regiment which the few untouched spirits were not able to overcome by any power of sharp commands, or violent pleading, or reckless examples of courage.

The boys of the 71st and the negro troopers of the 10th did not treat the X---- men tenderly as they passed over them. They jumped down upon them as they lay in the ditch and tramped upon them or kicked them out of the way contemptuously, while the fear-smitten creatures were as unresentful as hounds. Corporal Graham, near the left flank of the 10th, heard an officer of the 71st yell as they passed over the ditch, "Why don't you go forward? What the devil are you waiting for?" to which Billie Catling, as he knocked a cowering X---- man from his path, cried out in answer, "It's too hot for 'em, captain. They are going to stay here till this hell freezes over!"

As many perhaps as a fourth of the 1st X----, officers and men, fell in with the 71st and the 10th and bravely charged with them up the long slope. The remainder waited till the battle was so far ahead of them that their belated advance could not wipe out the black shame of cowardice.

In the hurry of their rush into the breach the adjoining flanks of the 10th and the 71st overlapped and were confused; but it was well that the two regiments were sent to replace the one, for the loss was appalling as they surged forward toward the German lines, and they were not long in being thinned out to an uncrowded basis.

The first sight of a man struck and falling to the ground shook Corporal Graham's nerves, and he had to pull himself together sharply to save himself from the weakening horror death always had for him. He turned his eyes resolutely away from the first half-dozen, that were knocked down, and applied himself religiously and consciously to the prescribed method of advancing by rushes; but all his faculties were alert to the dangers of the situation, and he could not shake off his keen sense of peril and of the tragedies around him. Not for long did he suffer thus, however, for as he rose up from the grass for one rush forward a bullet grazed his shin--and changed his whole nature in a twinkling. It did him no real damage and little blood came from the wound, but the pain was intense. He dropped on the earth and grabbed his leg to see what the harm was, and was surprised to find himself uninjured save for the burning, stinging sensation. Then he forgot everything but his pain, and became as pettishly angry in a moment as if he had collided with a rocking-chair in the dark. In that moment he conceived a personal enmity and grudge against the whole German army, and proceeded to avenge his injury on a personal basis. He became as cool and collected as if he were playing a game of checkers, and went in a business-like way about reducing the distance between himself and the gentlemen who had hurt his shin. His anger had dissolved his confusion and neutralized the horrors that were at first upon him. He was more than ever conscious of the falling men about him; but he had his debt to pay,--let them look after their own scores. He saw Lieutenant Wagner stagger and fall and raise up and drag himself into a protecting depression in the ground; he saw the colonel of the 1st X----, fighting with a carbine in his hand right alongside the black troopers of the 10th, drop in a heap and lie so still he knew he was dead; he saw Corporal Billie Catling straighten up and pitch his gun from him as a bullet hit him in the face and carried away the whole back of his head;--yet Graham stopped not to help or to think. He had only one purpose--to reach the man who hit his shin. He saw man after man, many of his own troop, drop in death or blood or agony--and his purpose did not change. Then, a little distance to his left and somewhat to his rear, he saw Colonel Phillips of the 71st go down in the grass; he saw him try to gain his feet, and fail; and then try to drag himself from his very exposed position, and fail. Then Corporal Graham forgot his personal grievance, and thought of the girl and the pennant. He ran across to Colonel Phillips and, finding him shot through both legs, picked him up and carried him for forty yards or more through the hurricane of lead to where the Valencia road made a cut in the long slope; and in this cut, down behind a sheltering curve, he placed him. Not a moment too promptly had the trooper acted, for of all the unfortunates who had fallen anywhere near Colonel Phillips not one but was found riddled with the bullets of the machine-guns when the battle was ended. Graham's own hat was shot away from his head and the officer in his arms received another wound as he bore him out of harm's way.... At the Colonel's request the negro tried to remove the boot from the bleeding right leg, which was broken below the knee. As this was so painful Colonel Phillips handed him a pearl-handled pocket-knife and asked him to cut the boot-top away. Graham did so, and bound a handkerchief around the leg to stop the flow of blood. Having made every other disposition for the officer's comfort which his situation permitted, he looked out in the direction of the battle so wistfully that the Colonel told him he might return to the fight. He did so with a rush, absent-mindedly pocketing the pearl-handled knife as he ran.

The firing-line had advanced quite a distance while Graham was rescuing Colonel Phillips and ministering to him; and in his overweening desire to be right at the front of the battle he ran forward without the customary stops for lying down and firing. That they should carry him safe through that driving rain of bullets, despite his indifference to the ordinary rules of the desperate game, was more than reasonably could have been expected of the Fates which had protected him up to that moment from serious harm; and--down he crashed in the grass and lay still without design, while the battle passed farther and farther up the long slope, away from him. In dim half-consciousness he realized what had befallen him; and the only two ideas which found place in his mind were the uncomfortable thought that he would be buried without a bath, and a feeling of satisfaction that the god of battle at least had dignified him with a more respectable wound than a bruised shin-bone.

*CHAPTER VI*

When two strong, alert men, disputing, come to the final appeal to battle, the decision is usually made quickly. It is only the weak or the unprepared who prolong a fight.

So was it that late summer in 191- saw an end of war between Germany and the United States--thanks partially to the intervention of the Powers. And with what result? The result does appear so inadequate! The Monroe Doctrine was still unshaken--and that was worth much perhaps; but ten thousand sailors and the flower of two navies were under the tide, and half as many soldiers dead of fever or fighting in Venezuela; small armies of newly made orphans and widows in Germany and America; mourning and despair in the houses of the desolate,--some hope in the heart of the pension attorney; a new set of heroes on land and sea,--at the top. Long, who at the battle of the Bermudas, finding his own small craft and a wounded German cruiser left afloat of twenty-odd vessels that had begun the fight, in answer to her demand for his surrender, had torpedoed and sunk the German promptly, and to his own everlasting astonishment had managed to save his neck and prevent the battle's becoming a Kilkenny affair by beaching his riddled boat and keeping her flag above water: from Long an endless list of real and fictitious heroes, dwindling by nice gradations in importance as they increased in numbers, till they touched bottom in the raw volunteer infantryman whose wildest tale of adventure was of his exemplary courage in a great storm that swept the God-forsaken sand-bar on which his company had been stationed,--to prevent the German navy's purloining the new-laid foundations of a fort to guard Catfish River.

In the long list of heroes Colonel Hayne Phillips was not without prominence. The sailormen were first for their deeds were more numerous and spectacular; but among the soldiers who were in the popular eye he was easily the most lauded. He was a volunteer; and that was everything in his favour, for it put him on a par with members of the regular establishment of ten times his merit. He was nothing more than a brave and patriotic man with a taste for the military and with but little of a professional soldier's knowledge or training; and yet his demonstrated possession of those two qualities alone, patriotism and personal courage (which most men indeed possess, and which are so inseparably associated with one's thought of a regular army officer as to add nothing to his fame or popularity),--the possession of these two simple American virtues had brought to Colonel Phillips the enthusiastic admiration of a hero-loving people, and--what was of more personal advantage to him--the consequent consideration and favour of party-managers in need of a popular idol.

These political prestidigitators, mindful of the political successes of the soldiers, Taylor, Grant and Roosevelt, took him and his war record in hand and proceeded to work a few easy miracles. The love and plaudits of a great State and a great nation for a favourite regiment coming home with honour and with the glory of hard-won battle upon its standards were skilfully turned to account for partisan political uses. The deeds and virtues of a thousand men were deftly placed to the credit of one, and before the very eyes of the people was the legerdemain wrought by which one political party and one Colonel Phillips drew all the dividends from the investment of treasure and of blood and of patriotic energy and devotion which that thousand men had made without a thought of politics or pay.

The partisan press, as always advertent to the peculiar penchant hero-worship has for ignoring patent absurdities, overdrew the picture--but no harm was done: for while truth of fact was disregarded and abused, essential truth suffered no hurt. Although enterprising newspapers did furnish for the political campaign one photogravure of Colonel Phillips leading the 71st regiment over the German earthworks at the battle of Valencia, and another of him in the act of receiving the German commander's sword on that occasion--these things did the gallant Colonel no injustice. He gladly would have attended to those little matters of the surrender in place of the veteran officer of regulars who officiated. It was through no fault of the 71st's commander that shortness of breath made it impossible for him to keep pace with his men up that long slope; nor in the least to his discredit that he was shot down in the rear of the regiment and his life saved through the bravery of a negro trooper.

The Colonel's courage was indeed of the genuine metal and he willingly would have met all the dangers and performed all the mighty deeds accredited to him if opportunity had come to him. Being conscious of this willingness in his own soul, he took no measures to correct impressions of his prowess made upon the minds of misinformed thousands of voters. The error was not in a mistaken public opinion as to his valour, for that was all that was claimed for it, but in the people's belief in certain spectacular exhibitions of that valour which were really totally imaginary. He knew that he was as brave a man as the people thought: why then quibble over facts that were entirely incidental? The hero-idolaters swallowed in faith and ecstasy all the details which an inventive and energetic press bureau could turn out, and cried for more: and the nomination for the presidency practically had been tendered to him by acclamation almost a year before the convention assembled which officially commissioned him its standard-bearer.

Colonel Phillips' campaign was attended by one wild hurrah from start to finish. It was pyrotechnic. Other candidates for this office of all dignity have awaited calmly at home the authoritative call of the people; but the materia medica of politics teaches that to quicken a sluggish pulse in the electorate a hero must be administered directly and vigorously into the system. So the Colonel was sent upon his mighty "swing around the circle."

In that sweeping vote-drive many weapons were displayed, but only one saw any real service. That was the Colonel's gray and battered campaign hat. He wore it for the sake of comfort, to be sure; but, like the log cabin and grandfather's hat of the Harrisons, the rails of Lincoln, and the Rough Riders uniform of Roosevelt, it was the tumult-raising and final answer to every argument and appeal of the opposition. It uprooted party loyalties, silenced partisan prejudices, overrode eloquence and oratory, beat back and battered down the shrewd attacks and defences of political manipulation, and contemptuously kicked aside anything savouring of serious political reasoning. The convention which nominated him had indeed formulated and declared an admirable platform upon which he should go before the people, and he placed himself squarely on that platform; but the gaze of the people never got far enough below that campaign hat to notice what its wearer was standing on.

Colonel Phillips was a sincere, honest, candid, plain-spoken politician--for politician he was if he was anything, while yet so fearless of party whips and mandates that his name was synonymous with honesty and lofty civic purpose. So, feeling his own purposes ringing true to the declarations of his party's platform he did not deem it necessary to direct the distracted attention of the people to these prosy matters of statecraft when they were taking such a friendly interest in his headgear. If they were willing to blindly follow the hat, he knew in his honest heart that the man under it would carry that hat along paths of political righteousness.

He was indeed playing upon every chord of popular feeling and seeking the favour of every man with a ballot. He had always fought to win in every contest he had entered, from single-stick to war, and he made no exception of this race for the chieftaincy of the Republic. It was to be expected, therefore, that the large negro vote in pivotal States, as well as his natural love of justice and his admiration for a brave soldiery, would lead him to pay enthusiastic and deserved tribute to the negro troops who had served in the Venezuelan campaign. He paid these tributes religiously and brilliantly in every speech he made, but always in general and impersonal terms and without a hint of his own debt to a corporal of the 10th Cavalry. There was no need for such minutiae of course, for that was a purely personal affair between him and an unknown negro who might be dead and buried for all he knew; while, besides, a recital of these unimportant details would necessitate a fruitless revision of other incidental ideas now pleasantly fixed in the public mind. He sometimes entertained his wife and daughters with the story of how a trooper of the 10th had saved his life, but never did he sound the personal note in public.

Colonel Phillips made votes with every speech and it looked as if he would win. He deserved to win, for he was honest, capable, clean. As election day drew near the opposing candidate received a confidential letter from his campaign manager in which that veteran politician said:

"I have lost and won many hats in my political career, but this is the first time I have ever been called upon to fight a hat--just a hat--to settle a Presidency. This is a hat campaign; and you have evidently made the mistake of going bareheaded all your life. You seem, too, to have limited yourself to a home-grown ancestry. The Colonel is simply wearing a hat and claiming kin with everything from a Plymouth Rock rooster to a palmetto-tree. The newspapers are getting on my nerves with their unending references to that campaign-hat and Phillips' ding-dong about the unity and virility of American blood and his mother's being a South Carolinian."

* * * * *

"The cards are running against us."

*CHAPTER VII*

Colonel Phillips' daughters were enjoying life to the full in their long summer outing on the St. Lawrence. The older, Elise, had just finished with the schools and was free from many of the restraints which the strict and old-fashioned ideas of her mother had put upon her during her girlhood, and was filled with a lively enjoyment of her first untrammelled association with the males of her kind. Helen was still a girl, and her mother yet threw about her all the guards and fences that properly hedge about the days of maidenhood. But this did not in the slightest check the flow of Helen's joy in life, for the matter of sex in her associates was not an element in her happiness. Boy or girl, it mattered not to her, if her fellow in the hour's sport was quick-witted, quick-moving and mischief-loving. The extent of her thoughts of love was that it and its victims were most excellent objects of banter and ridicule; and she found the incipient affair between Elise and Evans Rutledge a source of much fun.

"Are you a hero?" she once asked Mr. Rutledge solemnly.

"Not to my own knowledge," Rutledge answered. "Why?"

"Because if you are you may be my brother sometime. Elise likes you a little, I think, and she thinks your hair would curl beautifully if you didn't crop it so close--but you will have to be a hero. You needn't fear Mr. Morgan. He failed to be a hero when he had the chance, and now his chance is gone. Nobody but a hero can interest Elise for keeps."