Chapter 15

"You mean that he knew how we should mow them down?" asked Marta.

Not until she spoke did he realize that she was standing near him.

"Why, naturally! If we hadn't mowed them down his plan would have failed. Mowing them down was the only way to hold them back," he said; and seeing her horror made haste to add: "Miss Galland, now you know what a ghastly business war is. It will be worse here than there."

"Yes," she said blankly. Her colorless cheeks, her drooping underlip convinced him that now, with a little show of masculine authority, he would gain his point.

"You and your mother must go!" he said firmly.

This was the very thing to whip her thoughts back from the knoll. He was thunderstruck at the transformation: hot color in her cheeks, eyes aflame, lips curving around a whirlwind of words.

"You name the very reason why I wish to stay. Why do you want to save the women? Why shouldn't they bear their share? Why don't you want them to see men mowed down? Is it because you are ashamed of your profession? Why, I ask?"

The problem of dealing with an angry woman breaking a shell fire of questions over his head had not been ready-solved in the captain's curriculum like other professional problems, nor was it mentioned in the official instructions about the defences of the Galland house. He aimed to smile soothingly in the helplessness of man in presence of feminine fury.

"It is an old custom," he was saying, but she had turned away.

"Picking flowers! What mockery! Lanny's plan--mow them down! mow them down! mow them down!" she went on, more to herself than to him, as she dropped the chrysanthemums on the veranda table.

In a fire of resolution she hastened back down the terrace steps. The Grays and the Browns were fighting in their way for their causes; she must fight in her way for hers. Stopping before Feller, she seemed taller than her usual self and quivering with impatience.

"Have you connected the wire to the telephone yet?" she asked abruptly.

"No, not yet," he answered.

"Then please come with me to the tower!"

Whatever his fears, he held them within the serene bounds of the gardener's personality, while his covert glimpse of her warned him against the mistake of trying to dam the current of a passion running so strong.

"Certainly, Miss Galland," he said agreeably, quite as if there were nothing unusual in her attitude. No word passed between them as he kept pace with her rapid gait along the path, but out of the corner of his eye he surveyed in measuring admiration and curiosity the straight line of nose and forehead under its heavy crown of hair, with a few detached and riotous tendrils.

"Bring a lantern!" she said, as they entered his sitting-room, in a way that left no excuse for refusal.

When he had brought the lantern she took it from his hand and led the way into the tunnel.

"Please make the connection so that I can speak to Lanny!" she instructed him after she had pressed the button and the panel door of the telephone recess flew open.

For an instant he hesitated; then curiosity and the unremitting authority of her tone had their way. He dropped to his knees, ran his fingers into an aperture between two stones and made a jointure of two wire ends.

"All ready!" he said, and eagerly. What a delightfully spirited rage she was in! And what the devil was she going to do, anyway?

As she took the receiver from the hook she heard an electric bell at the other end of the line, but no "Hello!"

"The bell means that Lanny will be called if he is there. No one except him is to talk over this telephone," Feller explained softly.

Marta waited for some time before she heard a familiar, calm voice, with a faint echo of irritation over being interrupted in the midst of pressing duties.

"Well, Gustave, old boy, it can't be that you are in touch with Westerling yet?"

"It is I--Marta!" and she came abruptly to the flaming interrogation that had brought her there. "I want to ask a question. I want a clear answer--I want everything clear! If Feller's plan succeeds it means that you will know where the Grays are going to attack?"

"Yes; why, yes, Marta!"

"So that you can mow them down?"

"That is one way of putting it--yes."

"If I keep your secret--if I let the telephone remain, I am an accomplice! I shall not be that--not to any kind of murder! I shall not let the telephone remain!"

"As you will, Marta," he replied. "But anything that leads to victory means less slaughter in the end. For we have tested our army well enough to know that only when it is decimated will it ever retreat from its main line of defence."

"The old argument!" she answered bitterly.

"As you will, Marta! Only, Marta--I plead with you--please, please leave the house!" he begged passionately.

Again that request, which was acid to the raw spot of her anger! Again that assumption that she must desert her own home because uninvited guests would make it the theatre of their quarrel! How clear and unassailable her reply in the purview of her distraught logic!

"Why particularly care for one life when you deal in lives by the wholesale?" she demanded. "Why think of my life when you are taking other lives every minute?"

"Because I am human, not just a machine! Because yours is the one life of all to me--because I love you!" Feller, getting only one side of the talk, cautiously watching her as he held up the lantern to throw her face more clearly in relief, saw her start and caught the sound of a quick indrawing of breath between her lips, while something electric quivered through her frame. Then, as one who has twinged from a pin-prick of distraction which she will not permit to waive her from a white-heat purpose, she exclaimed, in rapid, stabbing, desperate sentences:

"That! That now! After what I said to you a week ago! That in the midst of your mowing! No, no, no!" She drove the receiver down on the hook and blazed out to Feller: "Now you will tear out the 'phone'"

He steadied himself against the wall, covering his face with his hands, and for the first time in her life she heard a man sob.

"My one chance--my last chance--gone!" he said brokenly. "The chance for me to redeem myself, so that I might again look at the flag without shame, taken from me in the name of mercy, when, by helping to bring victory and shorten the war, I might have saved thousands of lives!" he proceeded dismally.

"The old argument! Lanny has just used it!" said Marta. But coming from a man sobbing it sounded differently. His hands fell away from his face as if they were a dead weight. She saw him a wreck of a human being with only his eyes alive, regarding her in harrowing wonder and reproach.

"When I was a gardener eating at the kitchen table, playing the part of a spy--I who was honor man at the military school--I who had a conscience that sent me back from the free life on the plains to try to atone--when I hoped to do this thing in order to prove that I was fit to die if not to live----"

He was as a man pitting his last grain of strength against overwhelming odds. There were long, poignant pauses between his sentences as he seemed to strive for coherence.

"--in order to prove it for my country, for Lanny, and for you who have been so kind to me!" he concluded, another dry sob shaking him.

His chin dropped to his breast. Even the spark in his eyes flickered out. In the feeble lantern light that deepened the shadows of his face he was indescribably pitiful. She could not look away from him. There was something infectious about his misery that compelled her to feel with his nerves.

"Please," he pleaded faintly--"please leave me to myself. I will tear out the telephone--trust me--only I wish to be alone. I am uncertain--I see only dark!"

He sank lower against the wall, his head fell forward, though not so far but he could see her from under his eyebrows. She started as she had at the telephone, her breath came in the same sweep between her lips, and he looked for a passionate refusal; but it did not come. She seemed in some spell of recollection or projection of thought. A lustrous veil was over her eyes. She was not looking at him or at anything in the range of her vision. She shuddered and abruptly seized her left wrist with her right hand, as Lanstron had in the arbor, which had brought her cry of "I'm hurting you!" In this inscrutable attitude she was silent for a time.

"Let it remain--it means so much to you!" she said wildly, and hurried past him still clasping her wrist.

He stared into the darkness that closed around her. With the last sound of her footsteps he became another Gustave Feller, who, all mercurial vivacity, clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth with a "La, la, la!" as his hand shot out for the receiver. There it paused, and still another idea animated still another Gustave Feller.

"Why not tear out the telephone--why not?" he mused. "Why didn't I agree to her plan? Why can't I ever carry more than one thing in mind at once? I forgot that we were at war. I forget that I am already at the front. I have skill! God knows, I ought to have courage! Volunteers who have both are always welcome in war. Any number of gunners will be killed! When an artillery colonel saw what I could do he would take me on without further questioning. Then I should not be a spy, shuffling and whining, but bang-bang-bang on the target!"

In imagination he now had a gun. His hand made a movement of manipulation, head bent, eye sighting.

"How do you like that? You will like this one less! And here's another--but, no, no!" He dropped against the wall again; he drove his nails into his palms in a sort of castigation. "I am the same as a soldier now--a soldier assigned to a definite duty for my flag. I should break my word of honor--a soldier's word of honor! No, not that again!"

He snatched down the receiver to make sure that temptation did not reappear in too luring a guise, and still another Gustave Feller was in the ascendant.

"Didn't I say to trust it to me, Lanny?" he called merrily. "Miss Galland consents!"

"She does? Good! Good for you, Gustave!"

"Her second thought," Feller rejoined. "And, Lanny," he proceeded in boyish enthusiasm, using a slang word of military school days, "it was bulludgeous the way we brought down their planes and dirigibles! How I ache to be in it when the guns are so busy! With batteries back of the house and an automatic in the yard, things seem very homelike. I--"

"Gustave," interrupted Lanstron, "we all have our weaknesses, and perhaps yours is to play a part. So keep away from the fight and don't think of the guns!"

"I will, I swear!" Feller answered fervently. "One thought, one duty! I'll 'phone you when the house is taken, and if you don't hear from me again, why, you'll know the plan has failed and I'm a prisoner. But, trust me, Lanny! Trust me--for my flag and my country against the invader!"

"Against the invader--that justifies all! And get Miss Galland out of it. You seem to have influence with her. Get her out of it!"

"Trust me!"

"Bless you, and God with you!"

"One thought, one duty!" repeated Feller with the devoutness of a monk trying to forget everything except his aves as he started toward the stairway. "I wonder if we still hold the knoll!" he mused, extinguishing the lantern. "We do! we do!" he cried when he was in the doorway. "Oh, this is life!" he added after a deep-drawn breath, watching the little clouds of shrapnel smoke here and there along the base of the range.

XXII

FLOWERS FOR THE WOUNDED

Was there nothing for Marta to do? Could she only look on in a fever of restlessness while action roared around her? On the way from the tower to the house the sight of several automobile ambulances in the road at the foot of the garden stilled the throbs of distraction in her temples with an answer. The wounded! They were already coming in from the field. She hurried down the terrace steps. The major surgeon in charge, surprised to find any woman in the vicinity, was about to tell her so automatically; then, in view of her intensity, he waited for her to speak.

"You will let us do something for them?" Marta asked. "We will make them some hot soup."

He was immediately businesslike. No less than Dellarme or Fracasse or Lanstron or Westerling, he had been preparing throughout his professional career for this hour. The detail of caring for the men who were down had been worked out no less systematically than that of wounding them.

"Thank you, no! We don't want to waste time," he replied. "We must get them away with all speed so that the ambulances may return promptly. It's only a fifteen-minute run to the hospital, where every comfort and appliance are ready and where they will be given the right things to eat."

"Then we will give them some wine!" Marta persisted.

"Not if we can prevent it! Not to start hemorrhages! The field doctors have brandy for use when advisable, and there is brandy with all the ambulances."

Clearly, volunteer service was not wanted. There was no room at the immediate front for Florence Nightingales in the modern machine of war.

"Then water?"

The major surgeon aimed to be patient to an earnest, attractive young woman.

"We have sterilized water--we have everything," he explained. "If we hadn't at this early stage I ought to be serving an apprenticeship in a village apothecary shop. Anything that means confusion, delay, unnecessary excitement is bad and unmerciful."

Marta was not yet at the end of her resources. The recollection of the dying private who had asked her mother for a rose in the last war flashed into mind.

"You haven't flowers! They won't do any harm, even if they aren't sterilized. The wounded like flowers, don't they? Don't you like flowers? Look! We've millions!"

"Yes, I do. They do. A good idea. Bring all the flowers you want to."

The major surgeon's smile to Marta was not altogether on account of her suggestion. "It ought to help anybody who was ever wounded anywhere in the world to have you give him a flower!" he was thinking.

She ran for an armful of blossoms and was back before the arrival of the first wounded man who preceded the stretchers on foot. He was holding up a hand bound in a white first-aid bandage which had a red spot in the centre. Those hit in hand or arm, if the surgeon's glance justified it, were sent on up the road to a point a mile distant, where transportation in requisitioned vehicles was provided. These men were triumphant in their cheerfulness. They were alive; they had done their duty, and they had the proof of it in the coming souvenirs of scars.

Some of the forms on stretchers had peaceful faces in unconsciousness of their condition. Others had a look of wonder, of pain, of apprehension in their consciousness that death might be near. The single word "Shrapnel!" by a hospital-corps corporal told the story of crushed or lacerated features, in explanation of a white cloth covering a head with body uninjured.

Feller, strolling out into the garden under the spell of watching shell bursts, saw what Marta was doing. With the same feeling of relief at opportunity for action that she had felt, he hastened to assist her, bringing flowers by the basketful and pausing to watch her distribute them--watching her rather than the wounded and enjoying incidental thrills at examples of the efficiency of artillery fire.

"The guns--the guns are going to play a great part!" he thought. "These rapid-firers will recover all the artillery's prestige of Napoleon's time!"

Many of the wounded themselves looked at Marta even more than at the flowers. It was good to see the face of a woman, her eyes limpid with sympathy, and it was not what she said but the way she spoke that brought smiles in response to hers. For she was no solemn ministering angel, but high-spirited, cheery, of the sort that the major surgeon would have chosen to distribute flowers to the men. Every remark of the victims of war made its distinct and indelible impression on the gelatine of her mind.

"I like my blue aster better than that yellow weed of yours, Tom!"

"You didn't know Ed Schmidt got it? Yes, he was right next me in the line."

"Say, did you notice Dellarme's smile? It was wonderful."

"And old Bert Stransky! I heard him whistling the wedding march as he fired."

"Miss, I'll keep this flower forever!"

"They say Billy Lister will live--his cheek was shot away!"

"Once we got going I didn't mind. It seemed as if I'd been fighting for years!"

"Hole no bigger than a lead-pencil. I'll be back in a week!"

"Yes; don't these little bullets make neat little holes?"

"We certainly gave them a surprise when they came up the hill! I wonder if we missed the fellow that jumped into the shell crater!"

"Our company got it worst!"

"Not any worse than ours, I'll wager!"

"Oh--oh--can't you go easier? Oh-h-h--" the groan ending in a clenching of the teeth.

"Hello, Jake! You here, too, and going in my automobile? And we've both got lower berths!"

"Sh-h! That poor chap's dying!"

Worst of all to Marta was the case of a shrapnel fracture of the cranium, with the resulting delirium, in which the sufferer's incoherence included memories of childhood scenes, moments on the firing-line, calls for his mother, and prayers to be put out of misery. A prod of the hypodermic from the major surgeon, and "On the operating-table in fifteen minutes" was the answer to Marta's question if the poor fellow would live.

Until dark, in groups, at intervals, and again singly, the wounded were coming in from a brigade front in the region where the rifles were crackling and the shrapnel clouds were hanging prettily over the hills; and stretchers were being slipped into place in the ambulances, while Marta kept at her post.

"We shan't have much more to do at this station," said the major surgeon when a plodding section of infantry in retreat arrived.

XXIII

STRANSKY FIGHTS ALONE

Every unit engrossed in his own work! Every man taught how a weak link may break a chain and realizing himself as a link and only a link! The captain of engineers forgot Marta's existence as an error of his subordinates caught his eye, and he went to caution the axemen to cut closer to the ground, as stumps gave cover for riflemen. For the time being he had no more interest in the knoll than in the wreckage of dirigibles which were down and out of the fight.

After all, the knoll was only a single point on the vast staff map--only one of many points of a struggle whose progress was bulletined through the siftings of regimental, brigade, division, and corps headquarters in net results to the staff. Partow and Lanstron overlooked all. Their knowledge made the vast map live under their eyes. But our concern is with the story of two regiments, and particularly of two companies, and that is story enough. If you would grasp the whole, multiply the conflict on the knoll by ten thousand.

There had been the engrossment of transcendent emotion in repelling the charge. What followed was like some grim and passionless trance with triggers ticking off the slow-passing minutes. Dellarme aimed to keep down the fusillade from Fracasse's trench and yet not to neglect the fair targets of the reserves advancing by rushes to the support of the 128th. Reinforced, the gray streak at the bottom of the slope poured in a heavier fire. Above the steady crackle of bullets sent and the whistle of bullets received rose the cry of "Doctor! Doctor!" which meant each time that another Brown rifle had been silenced. The litter bearers, hard pressed to remove the wounded, left the dead. Already death was a familiar sight--an article of exchange in which Dellarme's men dealt freely. The man at Stransky's side had been killed outright. He lay face down on his rifle stock. His cap had fallen off. Stransky put it back on the man's head, and the example was followed in other cases. It was a good idea to keep up a show of a full line of caps to the enemy.

Suddenly, as by command, the fire from the base of the knoll ceased altogether. Dellarme understood at once what this meant--the next step in the course of a systematic, irresistible approach by superior numbers. It was to allow the ground scouts to advance. Individual gray spots detaching themselves from the gray streak began to crawl upward in search of dead spaces where the contour of the ground would furnish some protection from the blaze of bullets from the crest.

"Over their heads! Don't try to hit them!" Dellarme passed the word.

"That's it! Spare one to get a dozen!" said Stransky, grinning in ready comprehension. He seemed to be grinning every time that Dellarme looked in that direction. He was plainly enjoying himself. His restless nature had found sport to its taste.

The creeping scouts must have signalled back good news, for groups began crawling slowly after them.

"Over their heads! Encourage them!" Dellarme commanded.

After they had advanced two or three hundred yards they stopped, shoulders and hands exposed in silhouette, and began to work feverishly with their spades.

"Now let them have it!"

"Oh, beautiful!" cried Stransky. "That baby captain of ours has some brains, after all! We'll get them now and we'll get them when they run!"

But they did not run. Unfalteringly they took their punishment while they turned over the protecting sod in the midst of their own dead and wounded. In a few minutes they had dropped spades for rifles, and other sections either crawled or ran forward precipitately and fell to the task of joining the isolated beginnings into a single trench.

Again Dellarme looked toward regimental headquarters, his fixed, cheery smile not wholly masking the appeal in his eyes. The Grays had only two or three hundred yards to go when they should make their next charge in order to reach the crest. But his men had fifteen hundred to go in the valley before they were out of range. After their brave resistance facing the enemy they would receive a hail of bullets in their backs. This was the time to withdraw if there were to be assurance of a safe retreat. But there was no signal. Until there was, he must remain.

The trench grew; the day wore on. Two rifles to one were now playing against his devoted company, which had had neither food nor drink since early morning. As he scanned his thinning line he saw a look of bloodlessness and hopelessness gathering on the set faces of which he had grown so fond during this ordeal. Some of the men were crouching too much for effective aim.

"See that you fire low! Keep your heads up!" he called. "For your homes, your country, and your God! Pass the word along!"

Parched throat after parched throat repeated the message hoarsely and leaden shoulders raised a trifle and dust-matted eyelashes narrowed sharply on the sights.

"For the man in us!" growled Stransky. "For the favor of nature at birth that gave us the right to wear trousers instead of skirts! For the joy of hell, give them hell!"

"For our homes! For the man in us!" they repeated, swallowing the words as if they had the taste of a stimulant. But Dellarme knew that it would not take much to precipitate a break. He himself felt that he had been on that knoll half a lifetime. He looked at his watch and it was five o'clock. For seven hours they had held on. The Grays' trench was complete the breadth of the slope; more reserves were coming up. The brigade commander of the Grays was going to make sure that the next charge succeeded.

At last Dellarme's glance toward regimental headquarters showed the flag that was the signal for withdrawal. Could he accomplish it? The first lieutenant, with a shattered arm, had gone on a litter. The old sergeant was dead, a victim of the colonial wars. Used to fighting savage enemies, he had been too eager in exposing himself to a civilized foe. He had been shot through the throat.