Chapter 18

Marta could not deny that there was something fine about Dellarme's smile no less than in his bearing and his delicately, chiselled features. It had the assurance and self-possession of a surgeon about to perform a critical operation, the difference being that, unlike the surgeon, he shared in the risk, which was for the purpose of taking vigorous young lives rather than saving lives enfeebled by disease. Was it this that gave to war its halo--this offering of the most valuable thing man possesses to sudden destruction that made war heroic?

But where was the romance of the last war forty years ago? Where the glad songs going into battle? The glitter of buttons and the pomp of showy uniforms? The general's staff watching the course of the action by the billows of black smoke? Gone where the railroad sent the stage-coach, electricity sent the candle and horse-drawn street-cars, serum sent diphtheria, the knife sent the appendix, and rifled cannon and explosive shells sent the wooden walls of old ships of the line.

It occurred to none of the actors, and to Marta alone, in the tight, foreboding silence, to look aloft. There was a serene blue sky. The birds were tuning up for their morning songs when she heard the dull echo of distant guns, soon to be submerged in other thunders at nearer points along the frontier. With every faculty an alert wire strung in suspense, she was instantly aware of the appearance of a figure whose lack of uniform made it conspicuous on that stage.

In straw hat and blue blouse, shuffling with his old man's walk, Feller came along the path from the gate. He was in retreat from the enticing picture of the regiment of field-guns in front of the castle that was ready for action. As the infantry had never interested him, he would be safe from temptation in the yard. He stopped back of the engineers, his glance roving down the line of brown shoulders until it rested on the automatic. This also was a gun, though it fired only bullets. His fingers began beating a tattoo on his trousers' seam; a hungry brilliance shone in his eyes. He took four or five steps forward as if drawn by an overpowering fascination.

"This is no place for you!" said one of the engineers.

"No, and don't waste any time, either, old man!" said another. "Back to your bulbs!"

Feller did not even hear them. For the moment he was actually deaf.

"Fire!" said Dellarme's whistle. "Thur-r-r!" went the automatic in soulless, mechanical repetition, its tape spinning through the cylinder, while the rifles spoke with the human irregularity of steel-tipped fingers pounding at random on a drumhead. All along the line facing La Tir the volume of fire spread until it was like the concert of a mighty loom.

Marta could see nothing of the enemy, but she guessed that he was making a rush from the second to the third terrace and from the outskirts of the town. The engineer's repeated warning unheard above the din, he touched Feller on the leg. Feller looked around with a frown of querulous abstraction just as the breaking of a storm of shell fire obscured Marta's vision with dust and smoke. She felt her head jerk as if it would go free of her neck with each explosion, until she reinforced her nerves with the memory of an old soldier's warning about the folly of dodging missiles that were already past before you heard them. She knew that she was perfectly safe behind the pillar.

The Gray batteries having tried out their range by the flashes of the automatic the previous evening were making the most of the occasion. "Uk-ung-n-ng!" the breaking jackets whipped out their grists. A crash on the roof brought a small avalanche of slate tumbling down. A concussion in the dining-room was followed by the tinkling of falling window-glass. The engineers had work immediately when two of the infantrymen and their rifles and the sand-bags on which they leaned were hurled together in a heap of sand and torn flesh. Other bags were placed in the breach; other men sprang forward and began firing. The reserves, the hospital-corps men and the engineers hugged the breastwork for cover. The leaves clipped from the trees by bullets were blown aside with the hurricane breaths of shrapnel bursts; bullets whistled so near Marta that she heard their shrillness above every other sound. She was amazed that the house still remained standing--that any one was alive. But she had a glimpse of Dellarme maintaining his set smile and another of Feller, who had crept up behind the automatic, making impatient "come-on! come-on! what-is-the-matter-with-you?" gestures in the direction of the batteries in front of the castle.

"Thur-eesh--thur-eesh!" As the welcome note swept overhead he waved his hands up and down in mad rapture and then peeped over the breastwork to ascertain if the practice were good. The Brown batteries had been a little slow in coming into action, but they had the range from the Gray batteries' flashes the previous night and, undisturbed in the security of their own flashes screened by the trees, soon broke the precision of the opposing fire.

Now shells coming infrequently fell short or went wide. The air cleared. Marta could again see distinctly, and she marvelled that the brown figures were proceeding with their knitting as if nothing had happened. She could not resist a thrill of grim admiration for their steadiness or an appreciative thrill as she saw Feller eagerly peering over the automatic gunner's shoulder to watch the effect of his fire. Suddenly, both the rifles and the automatic, which had been firing deliberately, began to fire with desperate rapidity. It was as if a boxer, sparring slowly, let out all his power in a rain of blows. She could see nothing of the Grays, but she understood that they were making a rush.

Then a chance shell, striking at the one point which the man who fired it six thousand yards away would have chosen as his bull's-eye, obscured Feller and the automatic and its gunners in the havoc of explosion. Feller must have been killed. The dust settled; she saw Dellarme making frantic gestures as he looked at his men. They were keeping up their fusillade with unflinching rapidity. Through the breach left in the breastwork she had glimpses, as the dust was finally dissipated, of gray figures, bayonets fixed, pressing together as they came on fiercely toward the opening. The Browns let go the full blast of their magazines. Had that chance shell turned the scales? Would the Grays get into the breastwork?

All Marta's faculties and emotions were frozen in her stare of suspense at the breach. Her heart seemed straining with the effort of the living, who heard nothing, thought nothing, in the crux of their effort. War's own mesmerism had made her forget Feller and everything except the gamble, the turn of the card, while the gray figures kept stumbling on over their fallen. Then her heart leaped, a cry in a gust of short breaths broke from her lips as the Browns let go a rasping, explosive, demoniacal cheer. The first attack had been checked!

After triumph, terror, faintness, and a closing of her eyes, she opened them to see Feller, with his old straw hat--brim torn and crownless now--still on his head, rise from the débris and shake himself like a dog coming ashore from a swim. While the engineers hastened to repair the breach he assisted Stransky, who had also been knocked down by the concussion, to lift the overturned automatic off the gunner. The doctor, putting a hand on the gunner's heart, shook his head, and two hospital-corps men removed the body to make room for the engineers.

Dellarme could now spare attention from the charge of the Gray infantry to observe the results of the shell fire. With the gunner dead, he looked for the gunner's assistant, who lay several feet distant. As Dellarme and the doctor hastened to him he raised himself to a sitting posture and looked around in dazed inquiry. The doctor poured a cup of brandy from his flask and held it to the assistant's lips, whereon he blinked and nodded his head in personal confirmation of the fact that he was still alive. But when he tried to raise his right arm the hand would not join in the movement. His wrist was broken.

For once Dellarme's cheery smile deserted him. There was no one left to man the automatic, so vital in the defence, and even if somebody could be found the gun was probably out of commission. As he started toward it his smile, already summoned back, was shot with surprise at sight of the gun in place and a stranger in blue blouse, white hair showing through a crownless straw hat, trying out the mechanism with knowing fingers. Dellarme stared. Feller, unconscious of everything but the gun, righted the cartridge band, swung the barrel back and forth, and then fired a shot.

"You--you seem to know rapid-firers!" Dellarme exclaimed in blank incomprehension.

"Yes, sir!" Feller raised his finger, whether in salute as a soldier or as a gardener touching his hat it was hard to say.

"But how--where?" gasped Dellarme.

This time the movement of the finger was undoubtedly in salute, in perfect, swift, military salute, with head thrown back and shoulders stiff. Feller the gardener was dead and buried without ceremony.

"Lanstron's class, school for officers, sir. Stood one in ballistics, prize medallist control of gun-fire. Yes, sir, I know something about rapid-firers," Feller replied, and fired a few more shots. "A little high, a little low--right, my lady, right!"

Stransky was back in his place next to the automatic and firing whenever a head appeared. He rolled his eyes in a characteristic squint of scrutiny toward the new recruit.

"Beats spraying rose-bushes for bugs, eh, old man?" he asked.

"Yes, a lead solution is best for gray bugs!" Feller remarked pungently, and their glances meeting, they saw in each other's eyes the joy of hell.

"A pair of anarchists!" exclaimed Stransky grinning, and tried a shot for another head.

As if in answer to prayer, a gunner had come out of the earth. Sufficient to the need was the fact. It was not for Dellarme to ask questions of a prize-medallist graduate of the school for officers in a blue blouse and crownless straw hat. His expert survey assured him that before another rush the enemy had certain preparations to make. He might give his fighting smile a recess and permit himself a few minutes' relaxation. Looking around to ascertain what damage had been done to the house and grounds, he became aware of Marta's presence for the first time.

"Miss Galland, you--you weren't there during the fighting?" he cried as he ran toward her.

"Yes," she said rather faintly.

"If I had known that I should have been scared to death!"

"But I was safe behind the pillar," she explained. "Your company did its work splendidly," she added, looking at him with eyes dull and wondering.

"Do you think so? They _are_ splendid, my men! They make one try to be worthy of them. Thank you!" he said, blushing with pleasure. "But, Miss Galland, please--there's no firing now, but any minute----."

"Yes?"

He did not attempt masculine firmness this time, only boyish pleading and a sort of younger-brother camaraderie.

"Miss Galland, you're such a good soldier--please--and I'm sure you have not had your breakfast, and all good soldiers never neglect their rations, not at the beginning of a war! Miss Galland, please--." Yes, as he meant it, please be a good fellow.

She could not resist smiling at the charming manner of his plea. She felt weak and strange--a little dizzy. Besides, her mother's voice now came from the doorway and then her mother's hand was pressing her arm.

"Marta, if you remain out here, I shall!" announced Mrs. Galland.

"I was just coming in," said Marta.

Dellarme, his cap held before him in the jaunty fashion of officers, bowed, his face beaming his happiness at her decision.

As they entered the dining-room Marta saw that the shell which had entered the window had burst just over the heavy mahogany table and a fragment of the jacket had cut a long scar in the rich fibre. She paused, her breath coming and going hotly. She felt the smarting pain of a file drawn over the skin. The table was very old; for generations it had been a family treasure. As a child she had loved its polished surface and revered its massive solidity.

"Oh! Oh! Somebody ought to be made to pay for such wickedness!" she exclaimed wrathfully.

"It will plane down and it is nothing we could help, Marta," said Mrs. Galland. "Fortunately, all the portraits were out of the room."

"Mother, you--you are just a little too philosophical!" complained Marta.

"Come!" Mrs. Galland slipped her hand into Marta's. "Two women can't fight both armies. Come! I prescribe hot coffee It is waiting; and, do you know, I find a meal in the kitchen very cosey."

Being human and not a heroine fed on lotos blossoms, and being exhausted and also hungry, when she was seated at table, with Minna adroitly urging her, Marta ate with the relish of little Peterkin in the shell crater munching biscuits from his haversack.

XXVII

HAND TO HAND

With Mrs. Galland on guard, insistent that wherever her daughter went she should go, Marta might not so easily expose herself again. For the time being she seemed hardly of a mind to. She sat staring at the kitchen clock on the wall in front of her, the only sign of any break in the funereal march of her thoughts being an occasional deep-drawn breath, or a shudder, or a clenching of the hands, or a bitter smile of irony.

An hour or more of intermittent firing passed in the suspense of listening to a trickle of water undermining a dam. Then, with the roar of waters carrying away the dam, a cataract of shell fire broke and continued in far heavier volume than that of the first attack.

"The last war was nothing like this!" murmured Mrs. Galland.

At every concussion against the walls of the house, at every crash within the house, Marta pressed her nails tighter into her palms. Abruptly as the inferno of the guns had commenced, it ceased, and the steady, passionate, desperate blasts of the rifles, now uninterrupted, were more deadly and venomous if less shocking to the ear.

The movement of the minute-hand on the clock-face became uncanny and merciless to her eye in its deliberate regularity. Dellarme had been told to hold on until noon, she knew. Was he still smiling? Was Feller still happy in playing a stream of lead from the automatic? Was the second charge of the Grays, which must have come to close quarters when the guns went silent, going to succeed?

The rifle-fire died down suddenly and she heard a cheer like that of the morning, only wilder and fiercer and even less human. Could it be from the Browns celebrating a repulse? Or from the Grays after taking the position? What did it matter? If the Grays had won there was an end to the agony so far as her mother and herself were concerned--an end to murder on the lawn and devastation of their property. But, at length, the rifle-fire beginning again in a slow, irregular pulse told her that the Browns had held.

Now another long intermission. The demon was wiping his brow and recovering his breath, Marta thought; he was repairing damaged joints in his armor and removing the flesh of victims from his claws. But he would not rest long, for the war was young--exactly one day old--and many battalions of victims remained unslain.

How slowly the big hand of the clock kept hitching on from minute-mark to minute-mark! Yet no more slowly than the hands of clocks in distant provinces of the Browns or of the Grays, where this day was as quiet and peaceful as any other day.

Mrs. Galland had settled down conscientiously to play solitaire, a favorite pastime of hers; but she failed to win, as she complained to Marta, because of her stupid way this morning of missing the combination cards.

"I really believe I need new glasses," she declared.

"Let me help you," said Marta. Welcome idea! Why hadn't she thought of it before? It was something to do.

"But, Marta--there you are, covering up the jack of spades, the very card I need--though it will not help now. I've lost again!" exclaimed Mrs. Galland at length. "Why, Marta, you miss worse than I do!"

"Do I? Do I?" asked Marta in blank surprise and irritation. "Please let me try once alone. I'll not miss this time. Correct me if I do."

She played with the deliberation and accuracy of Feller should he have to make a little ammunition for his automatic go a long way, and Mrs. Galland did not observe a single error.

"Hurrah! I won!" Marta cried triumphantly, with some of her old vivacity.

Then she drew away from the table wearily. The strain of concentrating her mind had been worse than that of the battle; or, rather, it had merely added another strain to a tortured brain after a sleepless night. For her ears had been constantly alert. The demon had moved one of his claws to fresh ground; the inferno on the La Tir side of the frontier had shifted to a valley beyond the Galland estate, where the firing appeared to come from the Brown side. Breaking from the leash of silence, guns, automatics, rifles--each one straining for a speed record--roared and crashed and rattled in greedy chorus, while the clock ticked perhaps a hundred times. Thus famished savages might boll their food in a time limit. Thereafter, for a while, the battle was desultory.

Then came another outburst from Dellarme's men, which she interpreted as the response to another rush by the Grays; and this yelping of the demon was not that of the hound after the hare, as in the valley, but of the hare with his back to the wall. When it was over there was no cheer. What did this mean? Oh, that slow minute-hand, resting so calmly between hitches of destiny, now pointing to a quarter after eleven! For half a century, it seemed to her, Marta had endured watching its snail pace. Now inaction was no longer bearable. Without warning to her mother she bolted out of the kitchen. Mrs. Galland sprang up to follow, but Minna barred the way.

"One is enough!" she said firmly, and Mrs. Galland dropped back into her chair.

In the front rooms Marta found havoc beyond her imagination. A portion of the ceiling had been blown out by a shell entering at an up-stairs window; the hardwood floors were littered with plaster and window-glass and ripped into splinters in places.

"How can we ever afford repairs!" she thought.

But she hurried on, impelled by she knew not what, through the dining-room, and, coming to the veranda, stopped short, with dilating eyes and a cry of grievous shock. Two of his men were carrying Dellarme back from the breastwork where they had caught him in their arms as he fell. They laid him gently on the sward with a knapsack under his head. His face grew whiter with the flow of blood from the red hole in the right breast of his blouse. Then he opened his lips and whispered to the doctor: "How is it?" Something in his eyes, in the tone of that faint question, required the grace of a soldier's truth in answer.

"Bad!" said the doctor.

"Then, good-by!" And his head fell to one side, his lips set in his cheery smile.

Had ever any martyr shown a finer spirit dying for any cause? Marta wondered. She felt the sublimity of a great moment, an inexorable sadness. She knew that she should never forget that cheery smile or that white face. What was danger to anybody? What was death if you had seen how he had died?

His company was a company with his smile out of its heart and in its place blank despair. Many of the men had stopped firing. Some had even run back to look at him and stood, caps off, backs to the enemy, miserable in their grief. Others leaned against the parapet, rifles out of hand, staring and dazed.

"They have killed our captain!"

"They've killed our captain!"--still a captain to them. A general's stars could not have raised him a cubit in their estimation.

"And once we called him 'Baby Dellarme,' he was so young and bashful! Him a baby? He was a king!"

"Men, get to your places!" cried the surviving lieutenant rather hopelessly, with no Dellarme to show him what to do; and Marta saw that few paid any attention to him.

In that minute of demoralization the Grays had their chance, but only for a minute. A voice that seemed to speak some uncontrollable thought of her own broke in, and it rang with the authority and leadership of a mature officer's command, even though coming from a gardener in blue blouse and crownless straw hat.

"Your rifles, your rifles, quick!" called Feller. "We're only beginning to fight!"

And then another voice in a bull roar, Stransky's:

"Avenge his death! They've got to kill the last man of us for killing him! Revenge! revenge!"

That cry brought back to the company all the fighting spirit of the cheery smile and with it another spirit--for Dellarme's sake!--which he had never taught them.

"Make them pay!"

"He was told to stay till noon!"

"They'll find us here at noon, alive or dead!"

Stransky picked up one of several cylindrical objects that were lying at his feet.

"He wouldn't use this--he was too soft-hearted--but I will!" he cried, and flung a hand-grenade, and then a second, over the breastwork. The explosions were followed by agonized groans from the Grays hugging the lower side of the terrace. For this they had crawled across the road in the night--to find themselves unable to move either way and directly under the flashes of the Browns' rifles.

Feller's and Stransky's shouts rose together in a peculiar unity of direction and full of the fellowship they had found in their first exchange of glances.

"You engineers, make ready!"

"Hand-grenades to the men under the tree! That's where they're going to try for it--no wall to climb over there!"

"You engineers, take your rifles--and bayonet into anything that wears gray!"

"Get back, you men by the tree, to avoid their hand-grenades! Form up behind them, everybody!"

"No matter if they do get in at first! Back, you men, from under the tree!"

There was not a single rifle-shot. In a silence like that before the word to fire in a duel, all orders were heard and the more readily obeyed because Dellarme's foresight had impressed their sense upon the men in his quiet way.

The sand-bags by the tree were blown up by the Grays. Then, before the dust had hardly settled, came a half score of hand-grenades thrown by the first men of a Gray wedge, scrambling as they were pushed through the breach by the pressure of the mass behind. In that final struggle of one set of men to gain and another to hold a position, guns or automatics or long-range bullets played no part. It was the grapple of cold steel with cold steel and muscle with muscle, in a billowing, twisting mob of wrestlers, with no sound from throats but straining breaths; with no quarter, no distinction of person, and bloodshot eyes and faces hot with the effort of brute strength striving, in primitive desperation, to kill in order not to be killed. The cloud of rocking, writhing arms and shoulders was neither going forward nor backward. Its movement was that of a vortex, while the gray stream kept on pouring through the breach as if it were only the first flood from some gray lake on the other side of the breastwork.

Marta had come to the edge of the veranda, at once drawn and repelled, feeling the fearful suspense of the combat, the savage horror of it, and herself uttering sounds like the straining breaths of the men. What a place for her to be! But she did not think of that. She was there. The dreadful alchemy of war had made her a stranger to herself. She was mad; they were mad; all the world was mad!