Chapter 1

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.