Chapter 30

"Yes, my father's last letter was pretty blue about business," said the banker's son. He was looking at his dirty hands. The odor of clothes unlaundered for weeks, in which the men had slept, tortured his sensitive nostrils. "A millionaire and filthy as swine in a sty!" he exclaimed. "Digging like a navvy in order to get admission to the abattoir!"

"Were there any reserves coming our way?" asked the barber's son.

"Yes, masses."

"Perhaps they will relieve us and we'll go into the reserves for a while," suggested the very tired voice.

"No fear!" growled Pilzer.

"They have called out the old men, the fellows of forty-five to fifty, who were supposed to be out of it for good," said the judge's son. "Westerling says they are to guard prisoners and property when we cross the range and start on the march to the Browns' capital. Then all the other men can be on the firing-line and force the war to a mercifully quick end with a minimum loss. I saw numbers of them just arriving at La Tir, footsore and limping."

"I know. Mine's been indoor work, making paints," said the very tired voice. "When you've had long hours in the shop and had to sit up late with sick babies, you aren't fit for marching. And I think I've got lead-poisoning."

"Whew!" The judge's son put his hand over his nose as a breeze sprang up from the direction of the Brown lines.

"I thought we got them all," said the barber's son.

"Must have missed one that was buried by a shell and another shell must have dug him up!" muttered Pilzer, glaring at the barber's son. "It's not nice on people with ladylike nostrils. James, get the _eau de cologne_ and draw his bath for our plutocrat!"

"You see, something had to be done about the dead between the redoubts," explained the barber's son, "though the officers on both sides were against it."

"Naturally. It afforded opportunities for observation," put in Peterkin, repeating the colonel's words.

"But finally it was agreed to let a dozen from either side go out without arms," the barber's son concluded.

"I heard there was great complaint from the women," went on the judge's son. "Women aren't like what they were in the last war. They want to know what has become of their men-folk. They have been gathering in crowds and making trouble for the police. One of the old reservists was telling me of talk of an army of women marching to the front to learn the truth of the situation."

"If you don't stop leaning on me I'll give you a punch you'll remember!" exclaimed Pilzer as he rammed his elbow into the old reservist's ribs.

"I beg pardon! It was because I am tired and sort of blank-minded," the old reservist explained.

"You brute!" snapped the banker's son to Pilzer.

"Mallin thrashed you once and I've done it once. On my word, I've a mind to again!"

"No, you don't! No, you can't! And this time your boxing tricks will do you no good. I'll finish you!"

The two had sprung to their feet with hectic energy: Pilzer's liver patch a mottled purple in the midst of his curly red beard, his head lowered in front of his short, thick neck as before a spring, and the banker's son, lighter and quicker, awaiting the attack. Some of the others half rose, while the rest looked on in curiosity mixed with indifference.

"I'll call the captain!" piped Peterkin.

The judge's son stopped Peterkin and put a hand on either of the adversaries' shoulders.

"Can't we get enough fighting from the Browns without fighting each other?" he asked.

The banker's son and Pilzer dropped back in their places, in the reaction of men who had spent their strength in defiance.

"The thick of it last night, I heard, was still at Engadir, where Westerling is determined to break through," the judge's son proceeded. "At one point they sent in a regiment with a regiment covering it from the rear, and the fellows ahead were told that they wouldn't be allowed to come back alive--just what occurred at Port Arthur, you know--so they had better take the position."

"What happened?" asked the very tired voice.

"Those who reached the enemy's works alive were taken prisoner."

Further talk was interrupted by a volume of voices singing, which seemed to issue from a cellar not far away. It had the swell of a hymn of resolute purpose.

"The Browns' song--something new since you were with us," explained the barber's son to the judge's son.

"Yes, their whole line sung it in the silence of dawn following last night's repulse," said the banker's son. "Notice the hammer beat to it and then the earth rumble, like pounding nails in a coffin box and rattling the earth on top of the box after it is lowered."

"Yes, and I get the words," said the judge's son, who knew the language of the Browns: "'God with us, not to take what is theirs, but to keep what is ours! God with us!'"

"They say some private--Stransky, I believe his name is--composed the words from a saying of Partow, their chief of staff, and it spread," put in the very tired voice.

"As it would at a time of high pressure like this, when all humanity's nerves form an electric circuit," said the judge's son. "'God with us!' What a power they put into that!"

"But God is with us, not with them!" put in Peterkin earnestly. "Let's have our song to answer them," he added, striking up the tune.

So they sung the song they had sung as they started off to the war--a song about camping in the squares of the Browns' capital and dining in the Browns' government palace; a hurrahing, marchy song, but without exactly the snap in keeping with its character.

"The trouble is that they lie at the mouths of their burrows and get us naked to their fire," said the banker's son. "We have to take their positions--they don't try to take ours."

"But we must go on! We can't give up now!" said the barber's son.

"Yes, we must go on!" agreed some of the others stubbornly.

"Yes, yes," came faintly from the very tired voice.

"We shall win! The aggressive always wins!" declared Peterkin.

Then the redoubt shook with an explosion and their eyes were blinded with dust.

"I thought it was about time!" said the barber's son.

"Yes, the--!" snarled Pilzer.

The shell had struck some distance away from where they sat, and as the dust settled they heard the news of the result:

"One fellow had his arm broken and another had his head crushed."

"It'll keep us from working on the mine while we mend the breach," said the barber's son.

While the judge's son was telling the news, the colonel of the 128th and Captain Fracasse were eating their biscuits together and making occasional remarks rather than holding a conversation.

"Well, Westerling is a field-marshal," said the colonel.

"Yes, he's got something out of it!"

"The men seem to be losing their spirit--there's no doubt of it!" exclaimed the colonel, more aloud to himself than to Fracasse, after a while.

"No wonder!" replied Fracasse. Martinet though he was, he spoke in grumbling loyalty to his soldiers. "What kind of spirit is there in doing the work of navvies? Spirit! No soldiers ever fought better--in invasion, at least. Look at our losses! Spirit! Westerling drives us in. He thinks we can climb Niagara Falls! He--"

"Stop! You're talking like an anarchist!" snapped the colonel. "How can the men have spirit when you feel that way?"

"I shall continue to obey orders and do my duty, sir!" replied Fracasse. "And they will, too, or I'll know the reason why."

There was a silence, but at length the colonel exploded:

"I suppose Westerling knows what he is doing!"

"Still, we must go on! We must win!"

"Yes, the offensive always wins in the end. We must go on!"

"And once we have the range--yes, once we've won one vital position--the men will recover their enthusiasm and be crying: 'On to the capital!'"

"Right! We were forgetting history. We were forgetting the volatility of human nature."

XLI

WITH FELLER AND STRANSKY

Far up on a peak among the birds and aeroplanes, in a roofed, shell-proof chamber, with a telephone orderly at his side, a powerful pair of field-glasses and range-finders at his elbow, and a telescope before his eye, Gustave Feller, one-time gardener and now acting colonel of artillery, watched the burst of shells over the enemy's lines. While other men had grown lean on war, he had taken on enough flesh to fill out the wrinkles around eyes that shone with an artist's enjoyment of his work. Down under cover of the ridge were his guns, the keys of the instrument that he played by calls over the wire. Their barking was a symphony to his ears; errors of orchestration were errors in aim. He talked as he watched, his lively features reflective of his impressions.

"Oh, pretty! Right into their tummies! Right in the nose! La, la, la! But that's off--and so's that! Tell Battery C they're fifty yards over. Oh, beady-eyed gods and shiny little fishes--two smacks in the same spot! Humph! Tell Battery C that the trouble with that gun is worn rifling; that's why it's going short. Elevate it for another hundred yards--but it ought not to wear out so soon. I'd like to kick the maker or the inspector. The fellows in B 21 will accuse us of inattention. It's time to drop a shell on them to show we're perfectly impartial in our favors. La, la, la! Oh, what a pretty smack! Congratulations!"

B 21 was the position of Fracasse's company and the pretty smack the one that broke one man's arm and crushed another's head.

* * * * *

The "God with us!" song was singularly suited to the great, bull voice of its composer, born to the red and become Captain Stransky in the red business of war. It was he who led the thunder of its verses not far from where Peterkin led the song of the Grays.

"I certainly like that song," said Stransky. Well he might. It had made him famous throughout the nation. "There's Jehovah and brimstone in it. Now we'll have our own."

"Our own" was also of Stransky's composition and about Dellarme; for Stransky, child of the highways and byways, of dark, tragic alleys and sunny fields, had music in him, the music of the people. The skin on his high cheek-bones was drawn tighter than before, further exaggerating the size of his nose, and the deeper set of his eyes gave their cross a more marked character. He carried on the spirit of Dellarme in the company in his own fashion. The survivors among his men were as lean and dirty as Fracasse's, but, never having expected to reach the enemy's capital, war had brought few illusions. They had known sleepless vigils, but not much digging since they had fallen back on the main line into the fortifications which, with all resources at command, the engineers had built before the war. And the Browns still held the range! The principal fortifications of Engadir and every other vital point of the main line was theirs. All that the enemy had gained in his latest attack were a few minor positions.

"But we're always losing positions!" complained one of the men. "Little by little they are getting possession."

"They say the offensive always wins," said another.

"Five against three! They count on numbers," said Lieutenant Tom Fragini.

"There you go, Tom! Any other pessimists or anarchists want to be heard?" called out Stransky. "Just how long, at the present rate, will it take them to get the whole range? There's a limit to the number of even five millions."

"Yes, but if they ever break through in one place and get their guns up--"

"As you've said before, Tom!"

"As we want to keep saying--as we want to keep fighting our damnedest to make sure they won't," Tom explained.

"Yes, that's it!" declared a chorus.

"That's it, no matter what we pay!" declared Stransky. "We're not going back there except in hearses!" He swung his hand in a semicircle toward the distant hills, gold and purple in their dying foliage under the autumn sunlight.

Then the telephone in the redoubt brought some news. The staff begged to inform the army that the enemy's casualties in the last three days had been two hundred thousand! Immediately everybody was talking at once in Stransky's parliament, as he sometimes called that company of which he was, in the final analysis, unlimited monarch.

"How do they know?"

"Do you think it's fake?"

"That sums up to pretty near a million!"

"My God! Think of it--a million!"

"We're whittling them down!"

"It doesn't make any difference whether Partow or Lanstron is chief of staff!"

"They're paying!"

"Paying for our fellows that they've killed! Paying for being in the wrong!"

"Let's have the song again! Come on!"

"Yes, the song! The song!"

"No; hold on!" cried Tom. "Not because men are killed!"

"That's right, that's right!" said Stransky. "After all, they're our brothers." It was the first time since he had undergone the transformation which the war had wrought in him that he had mentioned any of his world-brotherhood ideas. "I still believe in that. We're fighting for that!" he concluded.

With the ready change of subject of soldiers who have been long in company, they were soon talking about other things--things that concerned the living.

"Say, wouldn't I like a real bath--an altogether!"

"And plenty of soap all over!"

"A welter of lather from head to foot and blowing bubbles from between my lips!"

"And to shave off this beard!"

"Think of the beards that are going when the war is over!"

"Not if you can't grow any more than John!"

"I'm not fighting out of ambush like you!" replied John. "I haven't got a place for the birds to nest!"

"I'm going to trim mine down gradually," said another; "first an imperial and mustache with mutton choppers; then mow my cheeks; then a great, sweeping mustache; then a dandy little mustache; then--"

"Mow is the word! Don't inflict a barber!"

"And, after the bath, clean underclothes, and, oh, me!--a home dinner!"

"Stop with your home dinners! That's barred. Army biscuits!"

"Yes, we all prefer army biscuits!"

"We wouldn't touch a home dinner!"

Stransky, his eyes drawing inward in their characteristic slant, was well pleased with his company, and the scattered exclamatory badinage kept on until it was interrupted by the arrival of the mail. Partow and Lanstron, understanding their machine as human in its elements, had chosen that the army should hear from home.

"How's this!" exclaimed one man, reading from a newspaper. "They're going to put up a statue of Partow in the capital! It's to show him as he died, dropped forward on the map, and in front of his desk a field of bayonets. On one face of the base will be his name. Two of the other faces will have 'God with us!' and 'Not for theirs, but for ours!' The legend on the fourth face the war is to decide."

"Victory! Victory!" cried those who had listened to the announcement.

"My mother says just what yours says, Tom. I needn't come home unless we win."

"The girl I'm going to marry said that, too!"

"If we go back with the Gray army at our heels we shall strike a worse fire than if we stick!"

Stransky was thinking that they had to do more than hold the Grays. Before he should see his girl they had to take back the lost territory. He carried two pictures of Minna in his mind: one when she had struck him in the face as he had tried to kiss her and the other as he said good-by at the kitchen door. There was not much encouragement in either.

"But when she gets better acquainted with me there's no telling!" he kept thinking. "I was fighting out of cussedness at first. Now I'm fighting for her and to keep what is ours!"

XLII

THE RAM

"I've learned that the greatest, most desperate attack of all is coming," Marta told Lanstron. "But I don't know at what point. I see Westerling only when he comes into the garden, and he does not come so frequently of late."

Very sweet and very harrowing to him was the intimacy of their conspiracy over that underground wire. With the prolongation of the strain, he feared for her. He understood how she suffered. Sometimes he felt that the Marta of their holiday comradeship was dead and it was the impersonal spirit of a great purpose that brought him information and inspiration. Her voice was taut, without inflection, as if in pain, occasionally breaking into a dry sob, only to become even more taut after a silence.

"I don't--I can't urge you to any further sacrifice," Lanstron replied. "You have endured enough."

"But it will help? It will be of vital service?"

"Yes, tremendously vital."

"I will try to learn more when I see him," she continued. "But it cannot be done by questioning. A single question might be fatal. The thing must come in a burst of confidence. That's the horrible part of it, the--" There was a dry sob over the wire as the voice broke and then went on steadily: "But I'm game! I'm game!"

In the closet off the Galland library, where the long-distance telephone was installed, Westerling was talking with the premier in the Gray capital.

"Your total casualties are eight hundred thousand! That is terrific, Westerling!" the premier was saying.

"Only two hundred thousand of those are dead!" replied Westerling. "Many with only slight wounds are already returning to the front. Terrific, do you say? Two hundred thousand in five millions is one man out of every twenty-five. That wouldn't have worried Frederick the Great or Napoleon much. Eight hundred thousand is one out of six. The trouble is that such vast armies have never been engaged before. You must consider the percentages, not the totals."

"Yet, eight hundred thousand! If the public knew!" exclaimed the premier.

"The public does not know!" said Westerling.

"They guess. They realize that we stopped the soldiers' letters because they told bad news. The situation is serious."

"Why not give the public something else to think about?" Westerling demanded.

"I've tried. It doesn't work. The murmurs increase. I repeat, my fears of a rising of the women are well grounded. There is mutiny in the air. I feel it through the columns of the press, though they are censored. I--"

"Then, soon I'll give the public something to think about, myself!" Westerling broke in. "The dead will be forgotten. The wounded will be proud of their wounds and their fathers and mothers triumphant when our army descends the other side of the range and starts on its march to the Browns' capital."

"But you have not yet taken a single fortress!" persisted the premier. "And the Browns report that they have lost only three hundred thousand men."

"Lanstron is lying!" retorted Westerling hotly. "But no matter. We have taken positions with every attack and kept crowding in closer. I ask nothing better than that the Browns remain on the defensive, leaving initiative to us. We have developed their weak points. The resolute offensive always wins. I know where I am going to attack; they do not. I shall not give them time to reinforce the defence at our chosen point. I have still plenty of live soldiers left. I shall go in with men enough this time to win and to hold."

"The army is yours, Westerling," concluded the premier. "I admire your stolidity of purpose. You have my confidence. I shall wait and hold the situation at home the best I can. We go into the hall of fame or into the gutter together, you and I!"

For a while after he had hung up the receiver Westerling's head drooped, his muscles relaxed, giving mind and body a release from tension. But his spine was as stiff as ever as he left the closet, and he was even smiling to give the impression that the news from the capital was favorable. When the telegraphers' jaws had dropped as the reports of casualties came in, when discouragement lengthened the faces around him and whispered in the very breezes from the fields of the dead, he had automatically maintained his confident mien. Any sign of weakening would be ruinous in its effect on his subordinates. The citadel of his egoism must remain unassailable. He must be the optimist, the front of Jove, for all.

When he called his chiefs of divisions it was hardly for a staff council. Stunned by the losses and repulses, loyally industrious, their opinions unasked, they listened to his whirlwind of orders without comment--all except Turcas.

"If they are apprised of our plan and are able to concentrate more artillery than our guns can silence, the losses will be demoralizing," he observed.

Westerling threw up his head, frowning down the objection.

"Suppose they amount to half the forces that we send in!" he exclaimed. "Isn't the position, which means the pass and the range, worth it?"

"Yes, if we both take and hold it; not if we fail," replied Turcas, quite unaffected by Westerling's manner.

"Failure is not in my lexicon!" Westerling shot back. "For great gains there must be great risks."

"We prepare for the movement, Your Excellency," answered Turcas.

It was a steel harness of his own will that Westerling wore, without admitting that it galled him, and he laid it off only in Marta's presence. With her, his growing sense of isolation had the relief of companionship. She became a kind of mirror of his egoism and ambitions. He liked to have her think of him as a great man unruffled among weaker men. In the quiet and seclusion of the garden, involuntarily as one who has no confidant speaks to himself, reserving fortitude for his part before the staff, while she, under the spell of her purpose, silently, with serene and wistfully listening eyes, played hers, he outlined how the final and telling blow was to be struck.

"We must and we shall win!" he kept repeating.

* * * * *

Through a rubber disk held to his ear in the closet of his bedroom a voice, tremulous with nervous fatigue, was giving Lanstron news that all his aircraft and cavalry and spies could not have gained; news worth more than a score of regiments; news fresh from the lips of the chief of staff of the enemy. The attack was to be made at the right of Engadir, its centre breaking from the redoubt manned by Fracasse's men.

"Marta, you genius!" Lanstron cried. "You are the real general! You--"

"Not that, please!" she broke in. "I'm as foul and depraved as a dealer in subtle poisons in the Middle Ages! Oh, the shame of it, while I look into his eyes and feign admiration, feign everything which will draw out his plans! I can never forget the sight of him as he told me how two or three or four hundred thousand men were to be crowded into a ram, as he called it--a ram of human flesh!--and guns enough in support, he said, to tear any redoubts to pieces; guns enough to make their shells as thick as the bullets from an automatic!"

"We'll meet ram with ram! We'll have some guns, too!" exclaimed Lanstron. "We'll send as heavy a shell fire at their infantry as they send into our redoubts."

"Yes; oh, yes!" she replied. "Westerling couldn't say it any better! What difference is there between you? Each at his desk is saying: 'This regiment will die here; that regiment will die there!' I bring you word of one human ram going to destruction in order that you may send another to destroy and be destroyed! And I'm worse than you. I am the go-between in the conspiracy of universal murder, sleeping in a good bed every night, in no danger--when I can sleep; but I can't. I go mad from thinking of my part, keying myself up deliriously to each fresh deceit!"

With every sentence her voice broke and it seemed that she would not be able to utter another. Yet she kept on in the alternation of taut, pitiful monotone and dry, coughing sobs.