Chapter 11

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--"