Chapter 31

"How have I ever been able to go as far as I have? How did I get through this last scene? When it seems as if I were about to collapse, something supports me. When the thing grows too horrible and I am about to cry out to Westerling that I am false, I hear his boast that he made the war as a last step in his ambition. And there is Dellarme's smile rising before me. He died so finely in defence of our garden! When my brain goes numb and I can't think what to say, can't act, Feller appears, prompting with ready word and facile change of expression, and I have my wits again. I go on! I go on!"

A racking sob, now, and silence; then, in the sudden effort of one who must change the subject to hold his sanity, she asked:

"How is Feller? Is he doing well?"

"Yes."

"At least I have brought him happiness. Sometimes I think that is about all the good I have accomplished--I, his successor in carrying out your plans! Oh, I'm burned out, Lanny! I'm ashes. It doesn't seem that I can ever be sane or clean and human again. In order to forget I should have to find a new life, like Feller. Each morning when I look in the mirror I expect to see my hair turned white, like his."

Lanstron felt her suffering as if it were his own. He had let his patriotic passion overwhelm every other consideration. He had allowed her to be a spy; he had sacrificed her sensibilities along with the battalions he had sent into battle. She was right: he was only the inhuman head of a machine. And she and Feller--they were human. Destiny playing in the crux of war's inconsistencies had formed a bond between them.

"But, go on, Lanny. Play your part as you see it--as Westerling sees his and Feller his and I mine," she said. "That is the only logic clear to me; only I can't play any more. I haven't the strength."

"Yes, I shall go on, Marta," he replied, "but you must not. Your work is over, and perhaps this last service may bring a quick end and save countless lives."

"Don't. It's too like Westerling! It has become too trite!" she protested. "The end! If I really were helping toward that and to save lives and our country to its people, what would my private feelings matter' My honor, my soul--what would anything matter? For that, any sacrifice. I'm only one human being--a weak, lunatic sort of one, just now!"

"Marta, don't suffer so! You are overwrought. You--"

"I can say all that for you, Lanny," she interrupted with the faintest laugh. "I've said it so many times to myself. Perhaps when I call you up again I shall not be so hysterical. Tell Feller how I have played his part, and, in the midst of all your responsibilities, remember to give him a chance."

Lanstron was not thinking of war or war's combination when he hung up the receiver.

"Yes, it is Gustave!" he thought. "I understand!" It was some moments before he returned to the staff room, and then he had mastered his emotion. He was the soldier again.

* * * * *

"They are clearing the wires for the chief of staff to speak to you, sir," announced the telephone aide in Feller's eyrie artillery lookout.

Feller received the word with his clucking "La, la, la!" and hummed a tune while the connection was being made. He had not spoken with Lanny since his own promotion to a colonelcy and Partow's death.

"My ear-drums split for joy at hearing your voice again!" Feller cried. "A regiment of guns for yours truly! You've made me the happiest man in the world. And haven't I smacked the Grays in the tummy, not to mention in the nose and on the shins! Well, I should say so! La, la, la!"

"You certainly have, you bully old boy!" said Lanstron. "Miss Galland sends her congratulations and regards."

"Eh, what? Her regards to me! The telephone still continues to work? Our own original trunk-tunnel private line? Eh? Tell me; tell me, quick!"

"Yes, she has performed the greatest service of the war--better than you could have done it, Gustave!"

"Whee-ee! Why not? Of course! I'm not surprised. She's the greatest woman in the world, I tell you, and I know! And she sends her regards to her old gardener? Think of that! If trouble never comes singly, why shouldn't joys come in a pour? Oh, it she could see me now, so cosey up here among the birds, chucking shells about as cheerily as if I were tossing roses to the ladies in a ballroom!"

"She wants you to have every chance," said Lanstron.

"She asks that for me!"

The peculiar intimate fervor of the exclamation sprang from a Feller in an officer's uniform who could now move in Marta's world. Lanstron hurried on to explain the nature of the next attack.

"If we repulse them we are going to throw in a ram of our own," he said. "We're going to take the aggressive for the moment. It is the only sure policy for successful defence."

"Right! Now you're talking. We learned that principle at school, didn't we?"

"And that means a bigger chance for you, Gustave. We are bringing up reserve artillery and making new dispositions. I am going to give you charge of the field-guns. But the chief of artillery will tell you about your work."

"This is heaven, Lanny! How am I ever going to--"

"There, no thanks, Gustave. You are the man. It is a time when only efficiency must be considered."

"Then I have made good! Then I've been worthy of my opportunity! I'd rather be a good gunner than a king. I'll eat this new work and smack my lips for more. Tell Miss Galland that every shell that hits the mark is a thought from the old gardener for her. Six weeks ago trimming rose-bushes and now--this is life! La, la, la! There's been romance and destiny in the whole business for us both, Lanny. And you--you are acting chief of staff! I forgot to congratulate you, Your Excellency. Your Excellency! Think of that! But it's no surprise to me. Didn't we go to school together? How could any one ever go to school with me and not be a great man? And I'm wearing a flower in my buttonhole! La, la, la!"

All that night and day before the night set for the attack, while the guns were being emplaced and the infantry formed in a gray carpet behind the slopes, a chill, misty rain fell, which the devout of the Grays might say proved that God was with them rather than with the Browns; for it screened their movements from the Brown lookouts. The judge's son and Peterkin and others of Fracasse's company had finished their mine; the fuses were laid. There was no dry place for a seat in their flooded redoubt and they had to stand, eating cold rations and shivering in their filthy, wet clothes. The whole army was drenched; the whole army shivered.

If only the air did not clear when darkness fell! The last thing the staff of the Grays wanted was to see a star in the sky. Had they believed in prayer they would have gone on their knees for a black fog, unaware that all that they would hide had been made known to the Browns through Marta almost from the hour that the preparations for the attack were begun.

With darkness, the rain ceased; but the mist remained a thick mantle over the landscape, impenetrable to the watchful search-lights of the Browns, which never stopped playing from sunset to dawn. The gray carpet of the reserves that were to form Westerling's ram moved over the slopes, dipping and rising with the convolutions of the earth, with no word spoken except the repeated whispered warnings of silence from the officers. Sweeping on up toward the redoubts, it found that parallels and trenches had been filled to give footing for the swifter impulse of the tide, once it was started for the heights.

A flash from Fracasse's pocket lamp showed faces pasty white and eyes of staring glassiness. Fracasse's face and the colonel's were also white--white with the rigidity of carved marble, carved with a set frown of determination. Fracasse was going in with his company and the colonel with his regiment. It was their duty. Both realized the nature of the risk; and, worse, each knew that the men realized it. In another age, when education was not so common and unthinking, unforeseeing passion could be aroused in ignorant minds, a stimulant on an empty stomach might have made them animals, oblivious to danger. They were about to offer their lives to pave the way for others to reach the works that none of them, probably, would ever reach. For the like of this, in gathering the enemy's spears to his breast, a saga had risen around one national hero. But Fracasse's veterans were only the shivering units of the millions; the part of the machine that happened to be the first to strike another machine in collision. Such was the end of all the training, the marching, the drilling in the gallant business of arms, with no more romance or glory than beeves going to the slaughter.

"You'll be the first out into the glacis, the first into the enemy's redoubt," said the colonel, forcing a tone of good, old-fashioned "up-guards-and-at-'em" vigor, as he touched the bronze cross on Peterkin's breast with his forefinger.

Little Peterkin, always pale but not so pale now as his comrades, flushed at the distinction.

"Yes, sir!" and he saluted.

In his eyes was the exaltation of his simple-minded faith. He did not think too much. What more could kings and conquerors ask than such a soldier as the valet's son, secure in the belief that his charmed life would bring him through the assault unharmed?

"My God! I can't!" exclaimed the banker's son. "I've suffered enough. There's life and wealth and all that it gives waiting for me at home! I'm young--I can't!"

There was a rustle of bodies in a restless movement of drawn breaths at common thought taking form, desperately fraught with alarm to Fracasse.

"You will!" Fracasse said, thrusting his revolver muzzle against the ribs of the banker's son. "If you don't, I'll shoot you dead, or you'll be trampled to death by the rush from the rear!"

The wedge point may not strike back at the hammer that drives it. Close packed behind Fracasse's company was a seemingly limitless mass of soldiery, palpitant with their short breaths, a steamy, sickening odor rising from their water-soaked clothes. Here were men so wet, so tired, so nerve-worn that they did not care when death came; men who wanted to curse and strike out against their fate; men who wanted to turn in flight, their natural impulse held down by the bonds of discipline and that pride of fellowship which is shamed to confess to a shiver along the spine. Some saw pictures of home, of sweethearts; some saw nothing. Some were in a coma of merciless suspense that grew more and more unendurable, until it seemed that anything to break it would be welcome.

Occasionally came a sob from a man gone hysterical under the strain, a moan of mental misery; and once a laugh, a strange, hiccoughy, delirious laugh, a strident attempt at the wit that keeps up courage; and from Pilzer, the butcher's son, a string of oaths mixed with brimstone and obscenity. After each outbreak an automatic, irritable whisper for silence came from an officer. Legs and arms, bodies and souls and brains in a nauseating press! Humanity reckoned by the pound, high-priced from breeding and rearing and training; yet very cheap.

Hearts thumped and watches ticked off the time, until suddenly the heavens were racked by the prologue of the guns. Child's play that baptism of shell fire in the first charge of the war beside later thunders; and these, in turn, mild beside this terrific outburst, with all the artillery concentrated to support the ram in a sudden blast. The passing projectiles formed the continuous scream and roar of some many-toned siren that penetrated the flesh as well as the ears with its sound. Orders could not have been heard if given. There was no need for orders. Fracasse, counting off the minutes between him and eternity on his watch face by his flash-light, saw that ten had passed. Then his finger that pressed a button, his brain that spoke to his hand, were those of an automaton acting by time release. He exploded the mine. This was the signal for the charge; for all the legs of the ram to move.

XLIII

JOVE'S ISOLATION

An hour or so before the attack the telegraph instruments in the Galland house had become pregnantly silent. There were no more orders to give; no more reports to come from the troops in position until the assault was made. Officers of supply ceased to transmit routine matters over the wire, while they strained their eyes toward the range. Officers of the staff moved about restlessly, glancing at their watches and going to the windows frequently to see if the mist still held.

No one entered the library where Westerling was seated alone with nothing to do. His suspense was that of the mothers who longed for news of their sons at the front; his helplessness that of a man in a hospital lobby waiting on the result of an operation whose success or failure will save or wreck his career. The physical desire of movement, the conflict with something in his own mind, drove him out of doors.

"I want to blow my lungs in the fresh air! Call me if I am needed. I shall be in the garden," he told his aide; and he thought that his voice sounded calm and natural, as became Jove in a crisis that unnerved lesser men. "Though I fancy it is the other chief of staff who will have the work to do this evening, eh?" he added, forcing one of the smiles which had been the magnetic servant of his personal force in his rise to power.

"Yes, Your Excellency," said the aide.

Westerling was rather pleased with the fact that he could still smile; pleased with the loyalty of this young officer when, day by day, the rest of the staff had grown colder and more mechanical in the attitude that completed his isolation. Walking vigorously along the path toward the tower, the exercise of his muscles, the feel of the cool, moist air on his face, brought back some of the buoyancy of spirit that he craved. A woman's figure, with a cape thrown over the shoulders and the head bare, loomed out of the mist.

"I couldn't stay in--not to-night," Marta said, as Westerling drew near. "I had to see. It's only a quarter of an hour now, isn't it?"

"The Browns may sing 'God with us,' but He seems to have been with the Grays," Westerling answered. "Our whole movement was perfectly screened by the heavy weather."

"But they know--they know every detail that you have told me!" ran her mocking, scarifying thought. "And this will be the most terrible attack of all?" she asked faintly.

"Yes, such a concentration of men and guns as never were driven against any position--an irresistible force," he said. "Irresistible!" he repeated with a heavy emphasis.

"But if the Browns did know where you were going to attack?" she asked absently and still more faintly. "The sacrifice of lives then would be all the greater?"

"Yes, we should have to pay a higher price, but still we should be irresistible--irresistible!" he answered.

Ghastly faces were staring at her, their lips moving in death to excoriate her. It was not too late to tell him the truth; not too late to stop the attack. Her head had sunk; she trembled and swayed and a kind of moan escaped her. She seemed utterly frail and so distraught that Westerling, in an impulse of protection, laid his hands on her relaxed shoulders. She could feel the pressure of each finger growing firmer in its power, while a certain eloquence possessed him in defiance of his apprehensions.

"Our cause is at stake to-night," he declared, "yours and mine! We must win, you and I! It is our destiny!"

"You and I!" repeated Marta. "Why you and I?"

It seemed very strange to be thinking of any two persons when hundreds of thousands were awaiting the signal for the death prepared by him. He mistook the character of her thought in the obsession of his egoism.

"What do lives mean?" he cried with a sudden desperation, his grip of her shoulders tightening. "It is the law of nature for man to fight. Unless he fights he goes to seed. One trouble with our army is that it was soft from the want of war. It is the law of nature for the fittest to survive! Other sons will be born to take the place of those who die to-night. There will be all the more room for those who live. Victory will create new opportunities. What is a million out of the billions on the face of the earth? Those who lead alone count--those who dwell in the atmosphere of the peaks, as we do!" The pressure of his strong hands in the unconscious emphasis of his passion became painful; but she did not protest or try to draw away, thinking of his hold in no personal sense but as a part of his self-revelation. "All--all is at stake there!" he continued, staring toward the range. "It's the Rubicon! I have put my career on to-night's cast! Victory means that the world will be at our feet--honor, position, power greater than that of any other two human beings! Do you realize what that means--the honor and the power that will be ours? I shall have directed the greatest army the world has ever known to victory!"

"And defeat means--what does defeat mean?" she asked narrowly, calmly; and the pointed question released her shoulders from the vise.

What had been a shadow in his thoughts became a live monster, striking him with the force of a blow. He forgot Marta. Yes, what would defeat mean to _him_? Sheer human nature broke through the bonds of mental discipline weakened by sleepless nights. Convulsively his head dropped as he covered his face.

"Defeat! Fail! That I should fail!" he moaned.

Then it was that she saw him in the reality of his littleness, which she had divined; this would-be conqueror. She saw him as his intimates often see the great man without his front of Jove. Don't we know that Napoleon had moments of privacy when he whined and threatened suicide? She wondered if Lanny, too, were like that--if it were not the nature of all conquerors who could not have their way. It seemed to her that Westerling was beneath the humblest private in his army--beneath even that fellow with the liver patch on his cheek who had broken the chandelier in the sport of brutal passion. All sense of her own part was submerged in the sight of a chief of staff exhibiting no more stoicism than a petulant, spoiled schoolboy.

While his head was still bent the artillery began its crashing thunders and the sky became light with flashes. His hands stretched out toward the range, clenched and pulsing with defiance and command.

"Go in! Go in, as I told you!" he cried. "Stay in, alive or dead! Stay till I tell you to come out! Stay! I can't do any more! You must do it now!"

"Then this may be truly the end," thought Marta, "if the assault fails."

And silently she prayed that it would fail; while the flashes lighted Westerling's set features, imploring success.

No commander was a more prodigal employer of spies than Napoleon. Did he or any other conqueror ever acknowledge a success due to the despised outcasts who brought him information? No. The brilliance of combinations, the stroke of genius of the swift march and the decisive blow in flank, the splendid charges--these always win in the historian's narrative and public imagination. Think of any place in the frieze of the statue of the great leader for that hypocrite, that poor devil in disguise, whose news made the victory possible!

"Good generalship is easy if you know what the enemy is going to do," Lanstron remarked to a member of the staff council who said something complimentary to him. Compliments from subordinates to superiors had not received Partow's favor and, therefore, not Lanstron's. Eccentric old Partow had once disparaged the Napoleonic idea as a fetich which had nothing to do with modern military efficiency, and he had added that if Napoleon were alive to-day nobody would be so prompt to see it as Napoleon himself. If he did not, and tried to incarnate the idea of the time by making himself the supreme genius of war, he would fail, because ability was too nearly universal and the age too big for another Colossus.

Through Marta's information every detail of Westerling's plan outlined itself to the trained minds of the Brown staff. Amazement at their dependence on an underground wire and a woman's word for shaping vast affairs was not reflected in any scepticism or hesitation as to the method of meeting the assault.

The fortifications that had sheltered the Brown infantry, including Stransky's men of the 53d, would be the object of the artillery fire which was to support the Gray charge. Well Lanstron knew that no fortifications could withstand the gusts of shells to be concentrated on such a small target. The defenders could not see to fire for the dust. Their rifles would be knocked out of their hands by the concussions. They must be crushed or imprisoned by the destruction of the very walls that had been their protection. So they were withdrawn to other redoubts in the rear, where a line of automatics placed under their rifles were in pointblank range of their old position which the Grays' shells would tear to pieces.

Back of them was a brown carpet of waiting soldiery of as close a pile as Westerling's carpet of gray. The rain-drenched Brown engineers dug as fast as the enemy's. Lanstron massed artillery against massed artillery. For every Gray gun he had more than one Brown gun. The Grays might excel by ratio of five to three in human avoirdupois, but a willing Brown government had been generous with funds. Money will buy guns and skill will man them. Battery back of battery in literal tiers, small calibres in front and heavy calibres in the rear, with ranges fixed to given points--more guns than ever fired on a single position before--were to pour their exploding projectiles not into redoubts but into the human wedge.

In the Browns' headquarters, as in the Grays', telegraph instruments were silent after the preparations were over. Here, also, officers walked about restlessly, glancing at their watches. They, too, were glad that the mist continued. It meant no wind. When the telegraph did speak it was with another message from some aerostatic officer, saying, "Still favorable," which was taken at once to Lanstron, who was with the staff chiefs around the big table. They nodded at the news and smiled to one another; and some who had been pacing sat down and others rose to begin pacing afresh.

"We could have emplaced two lines of automatics, one above the other!" exclaimed the chief of artillery.

"But that would have given too much of a climb for the infantry in going in--delayed the rush," said Lanstron.

"If they should stick--if we couldn't drive them back!" exclaimed the vice-chief of staff.

"I don't think they will!" said Lanstron.

To the others he seemed as cool as ever, even when his maimed hand was twitching in his pocket. But now, suddenly, his eyes starting as at a horror, he trembled passionately, his head dropping forward, as if he would collapse.

"Oh, the murder of it--the murder!" he breathed.

"But they brought it on! Not for theirs, but for ours!" said the vice-chief of staff, laying his hand on Lanstron's shoulder.

"And we sit here while they go in!" Lanstron added. "There's a kind of injustice about that which I can't get over. Not one of us here has been under fire!"

Even the minute of the attack they knew; and just before midnight they were standing at the window looking out into the night, while the vice-chief held his watch in hand. In the hush the faint sound of a dirigible's propeller high up in the heavens, muffled by the fog, was drowned by the Gray guns opening fire.

* * * * *