Chapter 29
“Yes, yes,” he replied, “it is a little remembrance that I received a while ago. A mere scratch, that don’t prevent me from sitting my horse—” And he added, as he turned to resume his position to the rear of his regiment: “As long as a man can stick on his horse he’s all right.”
At last the two batteries of reserve artillery came up. Their arrival was an immense relief to the anxiously expectant men, as if the guns were to be a rampart of protection to them and at the same time demolish the hostile batteries that were thundering against them from every side. And then, too, it was in itself an exhilarating spectacle to see the magnificent order they preserved as they came dashing up, each gun followed by its caisson, the drivers seated on the near horse and holding the off horse by the bridle, the cannoneers bolt upright on the chests, the chiefs of detachment riding in their proper position on the flank. Distances were preserved as accurately as if they were on parade, and all the time they were tearing across the fields at headlong speed, with the roar and crash of a hurricane.
Maurice, who had lain down again, arose and said to Jean in great excitement:
“Look! over there on the left, that is Honoré’s battery. I can recognize the men.”
Jean gave him a back-handed blow that brought him down to his recumbent position.
“Lie down, will you! and make believe dead!”
But they were both deeply interested in watching the maneuvers of the battery, and never once removed their eyes from it; it cheered their heart to witness the cool and intrepid activity of those men, who, they hoped, might yet bring victory to them.
The battery had wheeled into position on a bare summit to the left, where it brought up all standing; then, quick as a flash, the cannoneers leaped from the chests and unhooked the limbers, and the drivers, leaving the gun in position, drove fifteen yards to the rear, where they wheeled again so as to bring team and limber face to the enemy and there remained, motionless as statues. In less time than it takes to tell it the guns were in place, with the proper intervals between them, distributed into three sections of two guns each, each section commanded by a lieutenant, and over the whole a captain, a long maypole of a man, who made a terribly conspicuous landmark on the plateau. And this captain, having first made a brief calculation, was heard to shout:
“Sight for sixteen hundred yards!”
Their fire was to be directed upon a Prussian battery, screened by some bushes, to the left of Fleigneux, the shells from which were rendering the position of the Calvary untenable.
“Honoré’s piece, you see,” Maurice began again, whose excitement was such that he could not keep still, “Honoré’s piece is in the center section. There he is now, bending over to speak to the gunner; you remember Louis, the gunner, don’t you? the little fellow with whom we had a drink at Vouziers? And that fellow in the rear, who sits so straight on his handsome chestnut, is Adolphe, the driver—”
First came the gun with its chief and six cannoneers, then the limber with its four horses ridden by two men, beyond that the caisson with its six horses and three drivers, still further to the rear were the _prolonge_, forge, and battery wagon; and this array of men, horses and _matériel_ extended to the rear in a straight unbroken line of more than a hundred yards in length; to say nothing of the spare caisson and the men and beasts who were to fill the places of those removed by casualties, who were stationed at one side, as much as possible out of the enemy’s line of fire.
And now Honoré was attending to the loading of his gun. The two men whose duty it was to fetch the cartridge and the projectile returned from the caisson, where the corporal and the artificer were stationed; two other cannoneers, standing at the muzzle of the piece, slipped into the bore the cartridge, a charge of powder in an envelope of serge, and gently drove it home with the rammer, then in like manner introduced the shell, the studs of which creaked faintly in the spirals of the rifling. When the primer was inserted in the vent and all was in readiness, Honoré thought he would like to point the gun himself for the first shot, and throwing himself in a semi-recumbent posture on the trail, working with one hand the screw that regulated the elevation, with the other he signaled continually to the gunner, who, standing behind him, moved the piece by imperceptible degrees to right or left with the assistance of the lever.
“That ought to be about right,” he said as he arose.
The captain came up, and stooping until his long body was bent almost double, verified the elevation. At each gun stood the assistant gunner, waiting to pull the lanyard that should ignite the fulminate by means of a serrated wire. And the orders were given in succession, deliberately, by number:
“Number one, Fire! Number two, Fire!”
Six reports were heard, the guns recoiled, and while they were being brought back to position the chiefs of detachment observed the effect of the shots and found that the range was short. They made the necessary correction and the evolution was repeated, in exactly the same manner as before; and it was that cool precision, that mechanical routine of duty, without agitation and without haste, that did so much to maintain the _morale_ of the men. They were a little family, united by the tie of a common occupation, grouped around the gun, which they loved and reverenced as if it had been a living thing; it was the object of all their care and attention, to it all else was subservient, men, horses, caisson, everything. Thence also arose the spirit of unity and cohesion that animated the battery at large, making all its members work together for the common glory and the common good, like a well-regulated household.
The 106th had cheered lustily at the completion of the first round; they were going to make those bloody Prussian guns shut their mouths at last! but their elation was succeeded by dismay when it was seen that the projectiles fell short, many of them bursting in the air and never reaching the bushes that served to mask the enemy’s artillery.
“Honoré,” Maurice continued, “says that all the other pieces are popguns and that his old girl is the only one that is good for anything. Ah, his old girl! He talks as if she were his wife and there were not another like her in the world! Just notice how jealously he watches her and makes the men clean her off! I suppose he is afraid she will overheat herself and take cold!”
He continued rattling on in this pleasant vein to Jean, both of them cheered and encouraged by the cool bravery with which the artillerymen served their guns; but the Prussian batteries, after firing three rounds, had now got the range, which, too long at the beginning, they had at last ciphered down to such a fine point that their shells were landed invariably among the French pieces, while the latter, notwithstanding the efforts that were made to increase their range, still continued to place their projectiles short of the enemy’s position. One of Honoré’s cannoneers was killed while loading the piece; the others pushed the body out of their way, and the service went on with the same methodical precision, with neither more nor less haste. In the midst of the projectiles that fell and burst continually the same unvarying rhythmical movements went on uninterruptedly about the gun; the cartridge and shell were introduced, the gun was pointed, the lanyard pulled, the carriage brought back to place; and all with such undeviating regularity that the men might have been taken for automatons, devoid of sight and hearing.
What impressed Maurice, however, more than anything else, was the attitude of the drivers, sitting straight and stiff in their saddles fifteen yards to the rear, face to the enemy. There was Adolphe, the broad-chested, with his big blond mustache across his rubicund face; and who shall tell the amount of courage a man must have to enable him to sit without winking and watch the shells coming toward him, and he not allowed even to twirl his thumbs by way of diversion! The men who served the guns had something to occupy their minds, while the drivers, condemned to immobility, had death constantly before their eyes, and plenty of leisure to speculate on probabilities. They were made to face the battlefield because, had they turned their backs to it, the coward that so often lurks at the bottom of man’s nature might have got the better of them and swept away man and beast. It is the unseen danger that makes dastards of us; that which we can see we brave. The army has no more gallant set of men in its ranks than the drivers in their obscure position.
Another man had been killed, two horses of a caisson had been disemboweled, and the enemy kept up such a murderous fire that there was a prospect of the entire battery being knocked to pieces should they persist in holding that position longer. It was time to take some step to baffle that tremendous fire, notwithstanding the danger there was in moving, and the captain unhesitatingly gave orders to bring up the limbers.
The risky maneuver was executed with lightning speed; the drivers came up at a gallop, wheeled their limber into position in rear of the gun, when the cannoneers raised the trail of the piece and hooked on. The movement, however, collecting as it did, momentarily, men and horses on the battery front in something of a huddle, created a certain degree of confusion, of which the enemy took advantage by increasing the rapidity of their fire; three more men dropped. The teams darted away at breakneck speed, describing an arc of a circle among the fields, and the battery took up its new position some fifty or sixty yards more to the right, on a gentle eminence that was situated on the other flank of the 106th. The pieces were unlimbered, the drivers resumed their station at the rear, face to the enemy, and the firing was reopened; and so little time was lost between leaving their old post and taking up the new that the earth had barely ceased to tremble under the concussion.
Maurice uttered a cry of dismay, when, after three attempts, the Prussians had again got their range; the first shell landed squarely on Honoré’s gun. The artilleryman rushed forward, and with a trembling hand felt to ascertain what damage had been done his pet; a great wedge had been chipped from the bronze muzzle. But it was not disabled, and the work went on as before, after they had removed from beneath the wheels the body of another cannoneer, with whose blood the entire carriage was besplashed.
“It was not little Louis; I am glad of that,” said Maurice, continuing to think aloud. “There he is now, pointing his gun; he must be wounded, though, for he is only using his left arm. Ah, he is a brave lad, is little Louis; and how well he and Adolphe get on together, in spite of their little tiffs, only provided the gunner, the man who serves on foot, shows a proper amount of respect for the driver, the man who rides a horse, notwithstanding that the latter is by far the more ignorant of the two. Now that they are under fire, though, Louis is as good a man as Adolphe—”
Jean, who had been watching events in silence, gave utterance to a distressful cry:
“They will have to give it up! No troops in the world could stand such a fire.”
Within the space of five minutes the second position had become as untenable as was the first; the projectiles kept falling with the same persistency, the same deadly precision. A shell dismounted a gun, fracturing the chase, killing a lieutenant and two men. Not one of the enemy’s shots failed to reach, and at each discharge they secured a still greater accuracy of range, so that if the battery should remain there another five minutes they would not have a gun or a man left. The crushing fire threatened to wipe them all out of existence.
Again the captain’s ringing voice was heard ordering up the limbers. The drivers dashed up at a gallop and wheeled their teams into place to allow the cannoneers to hook on the guns, but before Adolphe had time to get up Louis was struck by a fragment of shell that tore open his throat and broke his jaw; he fell across the trail of the carriage just as he was on the point of raising it. Adolphe was there instantly, and beholding his prostrate comrade weltering in his blood, jumped from his horse and was about to raise him to his saddle and bear him away. And at that moment, just as the battery was exposed flank to the enemy in the act of wheeling, offering a fair target, a crashing discharge came, and Adolphe reeled and fell to the ground, his chest crushed in, with arms wide extended. In his supreme convulsion he seized his comrade about the body, and thus they lay, locked in each other’s arms in a last embrace, “married” even in death.
Notwithstanding the slaughtered horses and the confusion that that death-dealing discharge had caused among the men, the battery had rattled up the slope of a hillock and taken post a few yards from the spot where Jean and Maurice were lying. For the third time the guns were unlimbered, the drivers retired to the rear and faced the enemy, and the cannoneers, with a gallantry that nothing could daunt, at once reopened fire.
“It is as if the end of all things were at hand!” said Maurice, the sound of whose voice was lost in the uproar.
It seemed indeed as if heaven and earth were confounded in that hideous din. Great rocks were cleft asunder, the sun was hid from sight at times in clouds of sulphurous vapor. When the cataclysm was at its height the horses stood with drooping heads, trembling, dazed with terror. The captain’s tall form was everywhere upon the eminence; suddenly he was seen no more; a shell had cut him clean in two, and he sank, as a ship’s mast that is snapped off at the base.
But it was about Honoré’s gun, even more than the others, that the conflict raged, with cool efficiency and obstinate determination. The non-commissioned officer found it necessary to forget his chevrons for the time being and lend a hand in working the piece, for he had now but three cannoneers left; he pointed the gun and pulled the lanyard, while the others brought ammunition from the caisson, loaded, and handled the rammer and the sponge. He had sent for men and horses from the battery reserves that were kept to supply the places of those removed by casualties, but they were slow in coming, and in the meantime the survivors must do the work of the dead. It was a great discouragement to all that their projectiles ranged short and burst almost without exception in the air, inflicting no injury on the powerful batteries of the foe, the fire of which was so efficient. And suddenly Honoré let slip an oath that was heard above the thunder of the battle; ill-luck, ill-luck, nothing but ill-luck! the right wheel of his piece was smashed! _Tonnerre de Dieu!_ what a state she was in, the poor darling! stretched on her side with a broken paw, her nose buried in the ground, crippled and good for nothing! The sight brought big tears to his eyes, he laid his trembling hand upon the breech, as if the ardor of his love might avail to warm his dear mistress back to life. And the best gun of them all, the only one that had been able to drop a few shells among the enemy! Then suddenly he conceived a daring project, nothing less than to repair the injury there and then, under that terrible fire. Assisted by one of his men he ran back to the caisson and secured the spare wheel that was attached to the rear axle, and then commenced the most dangerous operation that can be executed on a battlefield. Fortunately the extra men and horses that he had sent for came up just then, and he had two cannoneers to lend him a hand.
For the third time, however, the strength of the battery was so reduced as practically to disable it. To push their heroic daring further would be madness; the order was given to abandon the position definitely.
“Make haste, comrades!” Honoré exclaimed. “Even if she is fit for no further service we’ll carry her off; those fellows shan’t have her!”
To save the gun, even as men risk their life to save the flag; that was his idea. And he had not ceased to speak when he was stricken down as by a thunderbolt, his right arm torn from its socket, his left flank laid open. He had fallen upon his gun he loved so well, and lay there as if stretched on a bed of honor, with head erect, his unmutilated face turned toward the enemy, and bearing an expression of proud defiance that made him beautiful in death. From his torn jacket a letter had fallen to the ground and lay in the pool of blood that dribbled slowly from above.
The only lieutenant left alive shouted the order: “Bring up the limbers!”
A caisson had exploded with a roar that rent the skies. They were obliged to take the horses from another caisson in order to save a gun of which the team had been killed. And when, for the last time, the drivers had brought up their smoking horses and the guns had been limbered up, the whole battery flew away at a gallop and never stopped until they reached the edge of the wood of la Garenne, nearly twelve hundred yards away.
Maurice had seen the whole. He shivered with horror, and murmured mechanically, in a faint voice:
“Oh! poor fellow, poor fellow!”
In addition to this feeling of mental distress he had a horrible sensation of physical suffering, as if something was gnawing at his vitals. It was the animal portion of his nature asserting itself; he was at the end of his endurance, was ready to sink with hunger. His perceptions were dimmed, he was not even conscious of the dangerous position the regiment was in now it no longer was protected by the battery. It was more than likely that the enemy would not long delay to attack the plateau in force.
“Look here,” he said to Jean, “I _must_ eat—if I am to be killed for it the next minute, I must eat.”
He opened his knapsack and, taking out the bread with shaking hands, set his teeth in it voraciously. The bullets were whistling above their heads, two shells exploded only a few yards away, but all was as naught to him in comparison with his craving hunger.
“Will you have some, Jean?”
The corporal was watching him with hungry eyes and a stupid expression on his face; his stomach was also twinging him.
“Yes, I don’t care if I do; this suffering is more than I can stand.”
They divided the loaf between them and each devoured his portion gluttonously, unmindful of what was going on about them so long as a crumb remained. And it was at that time that they saw their colonel for the last time, sitting his big horse, with his blood-stained boot. The regiment was surrounded on every side; already some of the companies had left the field. Then, unable longer to restrain their flight, with tears standing in his eyes and raising his sword above his head:
“My children,” cried M. de Vineuil, “I commend you to the protection of God, who thus far has spared us all!”
He rode off down the hill, surrounded by a swarm of fugitives, and vanished from their sight.
Then, they knew not how, Maurice and Jean found themselves once more behind the hedge, with the remnant of their company. Some forty men at the outside were all that remained, with Lieutenant Rochas as their commander, and the regimental standard was with them; the subaltern who carried it had furled the silk about the staff in order to try to save it. They made their way along the hedge, as far as it extended, to a cluster of small trees upon a hillside, where Rochas made them halt and reopen fire. The men, dispersed in skirmishing order and sufficiently protected, could hold their ground, the more that an important cavalry movement was in preparation on their right and regiments of infantry were being brought up to support it.
It was at that moment that Maurice comprehended the full scope of that mighty, irresistible turning movement that was now drawing near completion. That morning he had watched the Prussians debouching by the Saint-Albert pass and had seen their advanced guard pushed forward, first to Saint-Menges, then to Fleigneux, and now, behind the wood of la Garenne, he could hear the thunder of the artillery of the Guard, could behold other German uniforms arriving on the scene over the hills of Givonne. Yet a few moments, it might be, and the circle would be complete; the Guard would join hands with the Vth corps, surrounding the French army with a living wall, girdling them about with a belt of flaming artillery. It was with the resolve to make one supreme, desperate effort, to try to hew a passage through that advancing wall, that General Margueritte’s division of the reserve cavalry was massing behind a protecting crest preparatory to charging. They were about to charge into the jaws of death, with no possibility of achieving any useful result, solely for the glory of France and the French army. And Maurice, whose thoughts turned to Prosper, was a witness of the terrible spectacle.
What between the messages that were given him to carry and their answers, Prosper had been kept busy since daybreak spurring up and down the plateau of Illy. The cavalrymen had been awakened at peep of dawn, man by man, without sound of trumpet, and to make their morning coffee had devised the ingenious expedient of screening their fires with a greatcoat so as not to attract the attention of the enemy. Then there came a period when they were left entirely to themselves, with nothing to occupy them; they seemed to be forgotten by their commanders. They could hear the sound of the cannonading, could descry the puffs of smoke, could see the distant movements of the infantry, but were utterly ignorant of the battle, its importance, and its results. Prosper, as far as he was concerned, was suffering from want of sleep. The cumulative fatigue induced by many nights of broken rest, the invincible somnolency caused by the easy gait of his mount, made life a burden. He dreamed dreams and saw visions; now he was sleeping comfortably in a bed between clean sheets, now snoring on the bare ground among sharpened flints. For minutes at a time he would actually be sound asleep in his saddle, a lifeless clod, his steed’s intelligence answering for both. Under such circumstances comrades had often tumbled from their seats upon the road. They were so fagged that when they slept the trumpets no longer awakened them; the only way to rouse them from their lethargy and get them on their feet was to kick them soundly.
“But what are they going to do, what are they going to do with us?” Prosper kept saying to himself. It was the only thing he could think of to keep himself awake.
For six hours the cannon had been thundering. As they climbed a hill two comrades, riding at his side, had been struck down by a shell, and as they rode onward seven or eight others had bit the dust, pierced by rifle-balls that came no one could say whence. It was becoming tiresome, that slow parade, as useless as it was dangerous, up and down the battlefield. At last—it was about one o’clock—he learned that it had been decided they were to be killed off in a somewhat more decent manner. Margueritte’s entire division, comprising three regiments of chasseurs d’Afrique, one of chasseurs de France, and one of hussars, had been drawn in and posted in a shallow valley a little to the south of the Calvary of Illy. The trumpets had sounded: “Dismount!” and then the officers’ command ran down the line to tighten girths and look to packs.