Chapter 16

"Men of the first section," Dellarme called, "you will slip out of line with the greatest care not to let the enemy know that you are going!"

"Going--going! Careful! Men of the first section going!" the parched throats repeated in a thrilling whisper.

"Those who remain keep increasing their fire!" called Dellarme again. "Cover the whole breadth of the trench!"

Every fourth man wormed himself backward on his stomach until he was below the sky-line, when his stiffened limbs brought him to his feet and he started on a dead run down into the valley and toward a cut behind another knoll across the road from the Galland house.

"Tom Fragini, with your corporal dead I put you in charge of the first section! What are you waiting for, Corporal Fragini?"

Tom was bending over Grandfather Fragini, who had been forgotten by everybody in the ordeal. The old man was lying where he had fallen after the first burst of shrapnel.

"Can't go! Got a game leg!" said grandfather, pointing to a swollen ankle that had been bruised by a piece of shrapnel jacket that had lost most of its velocity before striking him. "You do your duty and leave me alone. I ain't a fighting man any more. I done my work when I steadied you young fellows."

"Yes, go on, Fragini," said Dellarme. "Attend to your men. Everybody in his place. We'll get the old man away on a litter."

"Yes, you go or you ain't any grandson of mine!" shouted the old man in a high-pitched voice. "Just been promoted, too! You'll be up for insubordination in a minute, you young whelp!"

Dellarme meant to look after grandfather, but his attention was engrossed in seeing that his men withdrew cautiously, for every minute that he was able to delay the enemy's charge was vital. He himself picked up a rifle in order to increase the volume of fire when the third section was starting. As the fourth and last section drew off he uttered his first cry of triumph of the day as his final look revealed the Grays still in place. But they would not wait long once all fire from the knoll had ceased. Stransky, who was in the fourth section, remained to give a parting shot.

"Good-by, d---- you!" he called to the Grays. "You'll hear more from me later!"

Then Dellarme saw that grandfather had not yet been carried away and no litters remained. What was to be done? Grandfather was prompt with his own view.

"Just leave me behind. I've done my work, I tell you!" he declared.

"Can't lose you, grandpop!" said Stransky.

Quickly shifting his pack to the ground, he squatted with his back to the old man.

"I ain't going to--and you're a traitor, anyway; that's what you are!"

"No back talk! No politics in this!" Stransky replied. "Get up! You carry your skin and I'll carry your bones. Get up quick!"

With Dellarme's authoritative assistance grandfather mounted. Then Dellarme put Stransky's pack on his own back.

"Let me carry your rifle, too," he said to Stransky as they started.

"Not much!" answered Stransky. "I was just married to that rifle this morning. We're on our honeymoon trip and getting fairly well acquainted, and expect shortly to settle down to a busy domestic life."

He set off at a lope and gained the rear of the section in his first burst of speed. As the other men got their second wind, however, Stransky began to puff and they soon drew away from him.

"Put me down! I ain't going to depend on any traitor that insulted the flag!" protested grandfather.

"That's the way! Call out to me now and then so I'll know you're there," said Stransky. "You're so light I mightn't know it if you fell off."

Dellarme did not think it right to expose the last section by asking it to delay. Shepherd of his flock and miser of his pieces of gold, now that their work was done the one thing he wanted in the world was that they should escape without further punishment. Already the van of the first section was disappearing into the cut in safety. But the fourth section, which had held to the last, had yet a thousand yards to go over a path bare of cover except a single small bush. At any moment he expected to hear a cheer from the knoll, and what would follow the cheer he knew only too well. Yet he tarried with Stransky out of one man's impulse not to desert another in danger. At the same time he was wroth with the old man for having made such a nuisance of himself.

"What are you waiting for?" Stransky demanded of Dellarme.

"I like good company," answered Dellarme cheerfully.

"Compliment for you, grandfather!" said Stransky.

"Put me down!" screamed grandfather.

"Still there, eh? Thanks, grandpop!" said Stransky, turning on Dellarme. "Can't you run any faster than that, captain? Your place is with your men, sir. If you got wounded I'd have to carry you, too. Your company's gaining on you every minute. Hurry up!"

From the peremptory way that he spoke, Dellarme might have been the private and Stransky the officer.

"Right!" said Dellarme in face of such unanswerable military logic, and broke into a run.

Stransky adapted himself to a pace which he thought he could maintain, and plodded on, eyes on the bush as a half-way point. After a while he heard a mighty hurrah, which was cut short abruptly; then spits of dust about their feet hastened the steps of the last section, which was near the cut. He saw men drop out of line to make a cradle of their arms for comrades who had been hit; and these finally passed out of danger with their burdens.

"No flock in sight! It's the turn of the individual birds!" thought Stransky, and heard a familiar sound about his ears.

"Bullets!" exclaimed grandfather. "Don't whistle like they used to. They kind of crack and sizzle now. Maybe if they hit me I'll stop 'em, and that'll save you."

"That's so," replied Stransky glumly, realizing that he was running with a human shield on his back. "But they'll go right through him he's so thin," he thought in relief. The worst of it was that he had to receive without sending, which made him boil with rage. He wished that the bush had legs so it could run toward him; he half believed that it had and was retreating. "They're shooting right at us, and that's in our favor. It's hard to get the bull's-eye at that range," he assured grandfather.

Whish-whish-whish! Enough pellets were singing by to have torn away the rim of the target, yet none got the centre before Stransky dropped behind the bush. Blessed bush! Back of it was a bowlder. Thrice-blessed bowlder! It protected grandfather as securely as the armor of a battleship.

"We are having a noisy time," remarked Stransky as two or three of the leaves fell. "Intelligent thieves! How did you guess we were here?" and he put his big thumb to his big nose.

"But they didn't know about the bowlder!" said the old man with a senile giggle. "Say, I didn't mean it when I called you a traitor--not after the fight! I just said that to make you mad so you'd put me down and we shouldn't lose a good fighting man trying to save an old bag of bones like me. You ain't no traitor! You're a patriot!"

"More politics, when I'm simply full of cussedness!" grumbled Stransky. "Not having any home, I'm fighting to save the other fellows' homes, principally because I was married this morning by a shrapnel-shell to a lady that understands me perfectly. Say, shall we give them a few?" he asked with a squint down the bridge of his nose as he took up his rifle.

"Yes, give 'em a few!" grandfather urged when they ought to have remained quiet, as the firing was dying down. It was not worth while to shoot at a bush, and after all the torrent of lead that they had poured into the bush the Grays had concluded that nothing behind it could remain alive.

Stransky aimed at a head and shoulder on the sky-line, which he took for those of an officer, and was accurate enough to make the head and shoulders duck and to get a swarm of bullets in return.

"Children, why will you waste your country's ammunition?" said Stransky, firing again.

"That's the way to talk!" said grandfather approvingly. "Nothing like a little gayety and ginger in war."

Now a Brown battery whose fire could be spared from other work dropped a few shells on the knoll and so occupied the attention of the 128th that it had no time to attend to occasional bullets from snipers.

"Think we're no account! Shall we charge them now we've got the support of the guns?" chuckled Stransky.

"You Hussar, you!" Grandfather gave Stransky a slap on the back. "With a thousand like you we could charge me whole army, if the general would let us!"

"But he wouldn't let us," replied Stransky. "I could even tell you why."

With the shadows gathering he slipped back to grandfather's side, and after it was quite dark he said that it was time for the old Hussar to mount his fiery steed. Grandfather's hands slipped from around Stransky's neck at the first trial; with the next, Stransky took the bony fingers in his grip and held them clasped on his chest with one hand, proceeding as quietly as he could, for he had an idea that the Grays were already moving down from the knoll under cover of night.

"Yes, sir, I'm glad I came!" said grandfather faintly and meanderingly. "I wasn't sure about Tom--all this new-fangled education and these uniforms without any color in 'em. But I saw him firing away steady as a rock; yes, sir! I was in it, too, under fire! It made my heart thump-thump like the old days. And we're going to hold 'em--we're going to teach the land-sharks--I'm very happy--made my heart thump so--kind of tired me--"

The old man's voice died away into silence. His knees weakened their grip and his legs swung pendulum-like with Stransky's steps.

"What about me for a sleeping-car!" thought Stransky. "But he's certainly harder to carry."

Yet it pleased Stransky not to waken his passenger until they reached the station his ticket called for. Entering the cut, he was halted by the challenging cry of "Who goes there?" in his own tongue.

"Stransky of the Reds!" he roared back. "Stransky, private of the 53d--Stransky and his bride and grandfather!"

"All right, Bert!" was the answer. "Hurrah for you! I'd know your old bull voice out of a thousand."

Even this did not arouse grandfather. Stransky trudged on past the sentry, across a road and up three series of steps of a garden terrace, through a breach in a breastwork of sand-bags, and was again at home--the only home he knew--among the comrades of his company. Most of them had fallen asleep on the ground after finishing their rations, logs of men in animal exhaustion. Some of those awake were too weary to give more than a nod and smile and an exclamation of delight. They had witnessed too much horror that day to be excited over a soldier with an old man on his back. A few of the others, including Tom Fragini, gathered around the pair.

"We've arrived, grandfather!" said Stransky, squatting. There was no answer. "He certainly sleeps sound. I wonder if--."

"Yes," said Dellarme, who with Tom eased the fall of the limp body.

The thumping of an old man's heart with the youth of a Hussar had been too much for it.

"He was game!" said Stransky. "There isn't much in this world except to be game, I've concluded; and you can't be so old or so poor or so big-nosed and wall-eyed that you can't be game."

Marta, coming out on the veranda, had not heard his remark, but she had seen a leonine sort of private bearing an old man on his back and had guessed that he had remained behind to save a life when every man in uniform had been engaged in taking life.

"You are tired! You are hungry!" she said with urgent gentleness. "Come in!"

He followed her into the house and dropped on a leather chair before a shining table in a room panelled with oak, wondering at her and at himself. No woman of Marta's world had ever spoken in that way to him. But it was good to sit down. Then a maid with a sad, winsome face and tender eyes brought him wine and bread and cold meat and jam. He gulped down a glassful of the wine; he ate with great mouthfuls in the ravenous call of healthy, exhausted tissues, while the maid stood by to cut more bread.

"When it comes to eating after fighting--"

He looked up when the first pangs of hunger were assuaged. Enormous, broad-shouldered, physical, his cheeks flushed with the wine, his eyes opened wide and brilliant with the fire that was in his nature--eyes that spoke the red business of anarchy and war.

"Say, but you're pretty!"

Springing up, he caught her hand and made to kiss her in the brashness of impulse. Minna struck him a stinging blow in the face. He received it as a mastiff would receive a bite from a pup, and she stood her ground, her eyes challenging his fearlessly.

"So you are like that!" he said thoughtfully. "It was a good one, and you meant it, too."

"Decidedly!" she answered. "There's more where that came from!"

"As I was telling the Grays this afternoon! Good for you!" He sat down again composedly, while she glared at him. "I'm still hungry. I've had wine enough; but would you cut me another slice of bread?"

She cut another slice and he covered it generously with jam. Then little Clarissa Eileen entered and pressed against her mother's skirts, subjecting Stransky to childhood's scrutiny. He waved a finger at her and grinned and drew his eyes together in a squint at the bridge of his nose, making a funny face that brought a laugh.

"Your child?" Stransky asked Minna.

"Yes."

"Where's her father? Away fighting?"

"I don't know where he is!"

"Oh!" he mused. "Was that blow for him at the same time as for me?" he pursued thoughtfully.

"Yes, for all of your kind."

"M-m-m!" came from between his lips as he rose. "Would you mind holding out your hand?" he asked with a gentleness singularly out of keeping with his rough aspect.

"Why?" she demanded.

"I've never studied any books of etiquette of polite society, and I am a poor sort at making speeches, anyhow. But I want to kiss a good woman's hand by way of apology. I never kissed one in my life, but I'm getting a lot of new experiences to-day. Will you?"

She held out her hand at arm's length and flushed slightly as he pressed his lips to it.

"You certainly do cut thick slices of bread," he said, smiling. "And you certainly are pretty," he added, passing out of the door as jauntily as if he were ready for another fight and just in time to see the colonel of the regiment come around the house. He stood at the salute, half proudly, half defiantly, but in nowise humbly.

"Well, Major Dellarme!" was the colonel's greeting of the company commander.

"Major?" exclaimed Dellarme.

"Yes. Partow has the power. Four of the aviators have iron crosses already and promotion, too; and you are a major. Company G got into a mess and the whole regiment would have been in one unless you held on. So I let you stay. It all came out right, as Lanstron planned--right so far. But your losses have been heavy and here you are in the thick of it again. Your company may change places with Company E, which has had a relatively easy time."

"No, sir; we would prefer to stay," Dellarme answered quietly.

"Good! Then you will take this battalion and I'll transfer Groller to Alvery's Bad loss, Alvery--shrapnel. The artillery has been doing ugly work, but that is all in favor of the defensive. If we can hold them on this line till to-morrow noon, it's all we want for the present," he concluded.

"We'll hold them! Don't worry!" put in Stransky.

If a private had spoken to a colonel in this fashion at drill, without being spoken to, it would have been a glaring breach of military etiquette. Now that they were at war it was different. Real comradeship between officer and man begins with war.

"We shall, eh?" chuckled the colonel. "You look big enough to hold anything, young man! Here! Isn't this the fellow that Lanstron got off?"

"Yes, sir," answered Dellarme.

"Well, was Lanstron right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Wonderful man, Lanstron!"

"He knows just' a little too much!" Stransky half growled.

XXIV

THE MAKING OF A HERO

A digression, this, about pale, little Peterkin, the valet's son, whom we left nibbling a biscuit in perfect security after his leap in mortal terror. When Fracasse's men rose from their trench for the final charge and found that the enemy had gone, Peterkin, hearing their cheer and the thunderous tread of their feet, dared to look above the edge of the shell crater. Here was his company coming and he not in the ranks where he belonged. Of course he ought to have gone back with them when they went; whatever they did he ought to do. This was the only safe way for one of his incurable stupidity, as the drill sergeant had told him repeatedly.

He recognized the stocky butcher's son and other familiar figures among his comrades. Their legs, unlike his, had not been paralyzed with fright; they had been able to run. He was in an absolute minority of one, which he knew, from the experience of his twenty years of life and his inheritance as a valet's son, meant that he was utterly in the wrong. In a minute they would be sweeping down on him. They would be jeering him and calling him a rabbit or something worse for hiding in the ground.

Fright prompted him to a fresh impulse. Picking up his rifle, which he had not touched since his leap, he faced toward the now unoccupied crest of the knoll and commenced firing. Meanwhile, Fracasse's men had reached the point where their first charge had broken, marked by a line of bodies, including that of the manufacturer's son, who had thought that war would be beneficial as a deterrent to strikes and an impetus to industry, lying with his head on his arm, his neck twisted, and the whites of his eyes idled skyward. In a spasm of sickening realization of how impossible it was for those who had not run back to survive between two lines of fire, they heard a shot from the ground at their feet and beheld the runt of the company in the act of making war single-handed. It was a miracle! It was like the dead coming to life!

"Peterkin?"

"Yes, Peterkin!"

"With a whole skin!"

Probably it was a great mistake for him to have a whole skin, thought Peterkin. He scrambled to his feet and kept pace with the others, hoping that he would be overlooked in the ranks.

"I'm so glad! Dear little Peterkin!" said Hugo Mallin, who was at Peterkin's side.

His knowledge of Hugo's gentle nature convinced Peterkin that Hugo was trying to soften the forthcoming reprimand.

When their feet at last actually stood on the knoll which had dealt death to their ranks and they saw the brown figures of the enemy that had driven them back in full flight, the men of the 128th felt the thrill of triumph won in the face of bullets. This is a thrill by itself, primitive and masculine, that calls the imagination of men to war for war's sake. Pilzer, the butcher's son, wanted to kill for the sheer joy and revenge of killing. He rejoiced in the dead and the blood spots that, as clearly as the trench itself, marked the line that Dellarme's men had occupied along the crest of the knoll. It pleased him to use one of the bodies as a rest for his rifle, while he laid his sight in ecstasy on the large target of two men of the last section who were bringing off one of the wounded, and he swore when they got away.

"But there's another out there all alone!" he cried. "Better say your prayers, for I'm going to get you," he whispered; though, as we know, Stransky was not hit.

Peterkin had been doing his best to make amends for past errors by present enthusiasm of application. He fired no less earnestly than the butcher's son. Now that Eugene Aronson was dead, Pilzer had become Peterkin's chief patron and guide. He would be doing right if he did what that brave Pilzer did, he was thinking, while he was conscious of Fracasse's eyes boring into his back. With the others, but no more expeditiously, however frightened, he fell back to cover from the burst of shell fire; and then, with the word to break ranks, he found himself the centre of a group including not only his captain but the colonel of the regiment. He could not quite make out the expressions on their faces, but he surmised that they were wondering how any man born under the flag of the Grays could be such a coward as he was. Probably he would be shot at sunrise.

"How did it happen?" Fracasse asked.

His tone was very pleasant, but Peterkin felt that this was only the calmness of a judge hearing the evidence of a culprit. Punishment would be, accordingly, the more drastic. He was too scared to tell the truth. He spoke softly, with the mealy tongue of a valet father who never explained why the wine was low in the decanter by any reference to a weakness of his own palate.

"I didn't hear the whistle to fall back," he said, "so I stayed."

"Didn't hear the whistle!" exclaimed the captain. He looked at the colonel and the colonel looked at him. The colonel stroked his mustache as if it were a nice mustache. "There wasn't any whistle," said Fracasse with a wry grin.

"Yes, my boy; and then?" asked the colonel, who had never before called any private in his regiment "my boy."

A bright light broke on Peterkin. Inherited instinct did not permit him to show much emotion on his face, and he had, too, an inherited gift of invention. He rubbed his rifle stock with his palm and bowed much in the fashion of the parent washing his hands in gratitude for a compliment.

"And I didn't want to run," he continued. "I wanted to take that hill. That was what we were told to do, wasn't it, sir?"

"Yes, yes!" said the colonel. "Go on!"

The light grew brighter, showing Peterkin's imagination the way to higher flights.

"I jumped quick into the crater, knowing that if I jumped quick I would not be hit," he proceeded, his thin voice accentuating his deferential modesty. "My! but the bullets were thick, going both ways! But I remembered the lectures to recruits said that it took a thousand to kill a man. I found that I had cover from the bullets from our side and some cover from their side. I could not lie there doing nothing, I decided, after I had munched biscuits for a while--"

"Coolly munching biscuits!" exclaimed the colonel.

"Yes, sir; so I began firing every time I had a chance and I picked off a number, I think, sir."

"My boy," said the colonel, putting his hand on Peterkin's shoulder, "I am going to recommend you for the bronze cross."

The bronze cross--desired of generals and privates--for Peterkin, when Pilzer had been so confident that he should win the first that came to the 128th now that Eugene Aronson was dead!

"I--I--" stammered Peterkin.

"And so modest about it!" added the colonel. "Remembered the lectures to recruits and acted on them faithfully!"

The old spirit of the nation was not dead. Here it was reappearing in a valet's son, as it was bound to reappear in all classes! Yes, Peterkin had supplied the one shining incident of the costly day to the colonel, who found himself without his headquarters for the night at the Galland house as planned, waiting for orders on this confounded little knoll. He was wondering if his regiment would be out in reserve and given a rest on the morrow, when an officer of the brigade staff brought instructions:

"The batteries are going to emplace here for your support in the morning. You will move as soon as your men have eaten and occupy positions B-31 to B-35. That gives you a narrow front for one battalion, with two battalions in reserve to drive home your attack. The chief of staff himself desires that we take the Galland house before noon. The enemy must not have the encouragement of any successes."

"So easy for Westerling to say," thought the colonel; while aloud he acknowledged the message with proper spirit.