Chapter 36

"Nothing is impossible with Lanstron. How he has worked it out--baited them to their own destruction!"

"A frontier of our own choosing!"

"On the next range. We will keep all that stretch of plain there!"

"And the river, too!"

"They shall pay--pay for attacking us!"

Pay, pay for the drudgery, the sleepless nights, the dead and the wounded--for our dead and wounded! No matter about theirs! The officers were too intent in their elation to observe a young woman, standing quite still, her lips a thin line and a deep blaze in her eyes as she looked this way and that at the field of faces, seeking some dissentient, some partisan of the right. She was seeing the truth now; the cold truth, the old truth to which she had been untrue when she took Feller's place. There could be no choice of sides in war unless you believed in war. One who fought for peace must take up arms against all armies. Her part as a spy appeared to her clad in a new kind of shame: the desertion of her principles.

Nor did the officers observe a man of thirty-five, wearing the cords of the staff and a general's stars, coming around the corner of the house. Marta's feverish, roving glance had noted him directly he was in sight. His face seemed to be in keeping with the other faces, in the ardor of a hunt unfinished; hand in blouse pocket, his bearing a little too easy to be conventionally military--the same Lanny.

She was dimly conscious of surprise not to find him changed, perhaps because he was unaccompanied by a retinue or any other symbol of his power. He might have been coming to call on a Sunday afternoon. In that first glimpse it was difficult to think of him as the commander of an army. But that he was, she must not forget. She was shaken and trembling; and a mist rose before her, so that she did not see him clearly when, with a gesture of relief, he saw her.

"Lanstron!" exclaimed an officer in the first explosive breath of amazement on recognizing him; then added: "His Excellency, the chief of staff!"

But the one word, Lanstron, had been enough to thrill all the officers into silence and ramrod salutes. Marta noted the deference of their glances as they covertly looked him over. On what meat had our Cæsar fed that he had grown so great? This was the man who had pleaded with her to allow a spy in her garden; for whom she herself had turned spy. To-morrow his name would be in the head-lines of every newspaper in the world. His portrait would become as familiar to the eyes of the world as that of the best-advertised of kings. He was the conqueror whose commonplace sayings would be the sparks of genius because the gamble of war had gone his way. He had grown so great by sending shells into the stricken eddy at the foot of the garden and driving punishing columns against the retreating masses in the defile. The god in the car and of the machine, with his quiet manner, his intellectual features; this one-time friend, more subtle in pursuit of the same ambitions than the blind egoism of Westerling! These officers and men and all officers and men and herself were pawns of his plans and his will. Yes, even herself. Had he stopped with the repulse of the enemy? No. Would he stop now? No. Her disillusion was complete. She knew the truth; she felt it as steel stiffening against him and against every softer impulse of her own.

"I wanted a glimpse of the front as well as the rear," Lanstron remarked in explanation of his presence to the general of brigade as he passed on toward Marta, who was thinking that she, at least, was not in awe of him; she, at least, saw clearly and truly his part.

"Marta! Marta!"

Lanstron's voice was tremulous, as if he were in awe of her, while he drank in the fact that she was there before him at arms' length, safe, alive. She did not offer her hand in greeting. She was incapable of any movement, such was her emotion; and he, too, was held in a spell, as the reality of her, after all that had passed, filled his eyes. He waited for her to speak, but she was silent.

"Marta--that bandage! You have been hurt?" he exclaimed.

Unlike Feller, he had not been so obsessed with a purpose as to be blind to externals. Her hostile mood was quick to recall that no smallest detail of anything under his sight ever escaped him. This was his kind of strength--the strength that had wrecked Westerling as a fine, intellectual process. He could act, too. In the tone of the question, "You've been hurt?" without tragic emphasis, was a twitching, throbbing undercurrent of horror, which set the hand hidden in the pocket of his blouse quivering. Why care if she were hurt? Why not think about the hundreds of thousands of others who were wounded. Why not care for that poor fellow whose ghastly wound kept staring at her as he wrote "Kill me!" on the wagon body?

"It's the fashion to be wounded," she said, eyebrows lifted and lashes lowered, with a nervous smile. "I played Florence Nightingale, the natural woman's part, I believe. We should never protest; only nurse the victims of war. After helping to send men to death I went under fire myself, and--and that helped."

She could be kind to Feller but not to Lanstron. He was not a child. He was Lanny, who, as she thought of him now, did nothing except by calculation.

"Yes, that would help," he agreed, wincing as from a knife thrust.

Her old taunt: sending men to death and taking no risk himself! She saw that he winced; she realized that she had stayed words that were about to come in a flood. Then she seemed to see him through new lenses. He appeared drawn and pale and old, as if he, too, had become ashes; anything but the conqueror. Her feelings grew contradictory. Why all this fencing? How weak, how silly! She had much to say to him--a last appeal to make. Her throat held a dry lump. She was marshalling her thoughts to begin when the brittle silence was broken by a rumbling of voices, a stirring of feet, and a cheer.

"Lanstron! Lanstron! Hurrah for Lanstron!"

The soldiers in the garden did not bother with any "Your Excellency, the chief of staff" formula when word had been passed of his presence. Marta looked around to see their tempestuous enthusiasm as they tossed their caps in the air and sent up their spontaneous tribute from the depths of their lungs. Conqueror and hero to the living, but the dead could not speak, whispered some fiend in her heart.

Lanstron uncovered to the demonstration impulsively, when the conventional military acknowledgment would have been a salute. He always looked more like the real Lanny to her with his forehead bare. It completed the ensemble of his sensitive features. She saw that he was blinking almost boyishly at the compliment and noted the little deprecatory shake of his head, as much as to say that they were making a mistake.

"Thank you!" he called, and the cheeriness of his voice, she thought, expressed his real self; the delight of victory and the glowing anticipation of further victories.

"Thank _you_!" called a private with a big voice.

"Yes, thank _you_!" repeated some of the officers in quick appreciation of a compliment as real as human courage.

"We're going to put your headquarters in the Grays' capital!" cried the soldier with the big voice.

Another cheer rose at the suggestion.

"You will follow the staff?" Lanstron called in sudden intensity.

"Yes, yes, yes!" they shouted. "Yes, yes; follow you!"

"You think our staff led you wisely?" he continued distinctly, slowly, and very soberly. "You think we can continue to do so? You trust us? You trust our judgment?"

"Yes, yes, yes!"

"Thank you!" he said with a long-drawn, happy breath.

"Thank _you_!" they shouted.

He stood smiling for a moment in reply to their smiles; then, still smiling, but in a different way, he said to Marta:

"As you say, that helps!" with a nod toward the bandage on her forearm and hurriedly turned away.

She saw him involuntarily clutch the wrist above the pocket of his blouse to still the twitching; but beyond that there was no further sign of emotion as he went to the telephone. She had been about to cry out her protest against the continuance of the war in the name of humanity, of justice, of every bit of regard he had ever had for her. When he was through talking she should go to him in appeal--yes, on her knees, if need be, before all the officers and soldiers--to stop the killing; but instantly he was through he started toward the pass road, not by the path to the steps, but by leaping from terrace to terrace and waving his hand gayly to the soldiers as he went. The officers stared at the sight of a chief of staff breaking away from his communications in this unceremonious fashion. They saw him secure a horse from a group of cavalry officers on the road and gallop away.

Marta having been the object of Lanstron's attention now became the object of theirs. It was good to see a woman, a woman of the Browns, after their period of separation from feminine society. She found herself holding an impromptu reception. She heard some other self answering their polite questions; while a fear, a new kind of fear, was taking hold of her real self; a fear inexplicable, insidiously growing. Lanstron was still in the officers' minds after his strange appearance and stranger departure. They began to talk of him, and Marta listened.

"He said something about being a free man now!"

"Yes, he looked as eager as a terrier after rats."

"He knows what he is doing. He sees so far ahead of what we are thinking that it's useless to guess his object. We'll understand when it's done."

"How little side he has! So perfectly simple. He hardly seems to realize the immensity of his success. In fact, none of us realizes it; it's too enormous, overwhelming, sudden!"

"And no nerves!"

"No nerves, did you say? There you are wrong. Did you see that hand twitching in his pocket? Of course, you've heard about the hand? Why, he's a bundle of nerve-wires held in control; a man of the age; master of his own machine, therefore, able to master the machine of an army."

Of course, they guessed nothing of Marta's part in his success. The very things they were saying about him built up a figure of the type whose character she had keenly resented a few minutes before.

"But, Miss Galland, you seem to know him far better than we. This is not news to you," remarked the brigade commander.

"Yes, I saw the accident of his first flight when his hand was injured," she said, and winced with horror. Never had the picture of him as he rose from the wreck appeared so distinct. She could see every detail of his looks; feel his twinges of pain while he smiled. Was the revelation the more vivid because it had not once occurred to her since the war began? It shut out the presence of the officers; she no longer heard what they were saying. Black fear was enveloping her. Vaguely she understood that they were looking away at something. She heard the roar of artillery not far distant and followed their gaze toward the knoll where Dellarme's men had received their baptism of fire, now under a canopy of shrapnel smoke.

"That's about their last stand in the tangent, their last snarl on our soil," remarked the brigade commander.

"And we're raining shells on it!" said his aide. "With our glasses we'll be able to watch the infantry go in."

"Yes, very well."

"We're all used to how it feels, now we'll see how it looks at a distance," piped one of the soldiers.

Not until he had shouted to them did they notice a division staff-officer who had come up from the road. He had a piece of astounding news to impart before he mentioned official business.

"What do you think of this?" he cried. "Nothing could stop him! Lanstron--yes, Lanstron has gone into that charge with the African Braves!"

In these days, when units of a vast army in the same uniform, drilled in the same way, had become interchangeable parts of a machine, the African Braves still kept regimental fame. They had guarded the stretches of hot sand in one of the desert African colonies of the Browns; and they had served in the jungle in the region of Bodlapoo, which, by the way, was nominally the cause of the war. They had fought Mohammedan fanatics and black savages. It did not matter much to them when they died; now as well as ever. If they had mothers or sisters they were the secrets of each man's heart. The scapegrace youth, the stranded man of thirty who would forget his past, the born adventurer, the renegade come a cropper, the gentleman who had gambled, the remittance man whose remittance had stopped, the peasant's son who had run away from home, criminals and dreamers, some minor poets, some fairly good actors, scholarly fellows who chanted the "Odyssey," and both oath-ripping and taciturn, quiet-mannered fellows who could neither read nor write found a home in the African Braves' muster-roll. Their spirit of corps had a dervish fatalism. They had begged to have a share in the war and Partow had consented. In the night after their long journey, while Westerling's ram was getting its death-blow, they had detrained and started for the front. But the Grays were going as fast as the Braves, and they had been unable to get into action.

"Wait for us! We want to be in it!" cried their impatience. "We'll show you how they fight in Africa! Way for us!"

"Give them a chance!" said Lanstron.

This order a general of corps repeated to a general of division, who repeated it to a general of brigade.

"Give them a chance! Give them a chance!"

Reserves along the route of their advance knew them at a glance by their uniform, their Indian tan, and their jaunty swagger and gave a cheer as they passed. They touched the chord of romance in the hearts of officers, who regarded them as an archaic survival which sentiment permitted in an isolated instance in Africa, where it excellently served. And officers looked at one another and shook their heads knowingly, out of the drear, hard experience in spade approaches, when they thought of that brilliant uniform as a target and of frontier tactics against massed infantry and gun-fire.

"Once will be enough," said the cynical. "There won't be many left to tell the tale!"

And the African Braves knew how the army felt. They had a reputation out of Africa to sustain, this band of exotics among the millions of home-trained comrades. They didn't quite believe in all this machine business. Down the slopes with their veteran stride, loose-limbed and rhythmic, they went, past the line of the Galland house, with no fighting in sight. What if they had to return to Africa without firing a shot? The lugubrious prospect saddened them. They felt that a battle should be ordered on their account.

"You will take that regiment's place and it will fall back for support, while you storm the knoll beyond!" said the brigade commander, a twinkle in his eye.

"Is it much of a job, do you think?" asked the colonel of the Braves.

He had two fingers' length of service colors on his blouse. Lean he was and bony-jawed, with deep-set eyes. He loved every mother's son of the Braves, from illiterate to the chanter of the "Odyssey"; from peasant's son to penniless nobleman, and thought any one of his privates rather superior to a home brigade commander.

"A pretty good deal. I think the Grays'll make a snappy resistance," said the brigade commander honestly. "The way we feel them out, they're getting back their wind, and for the first time we'll be fighting them up-hill. Yes, there's a sting in a retreating army's tail when it gets over its demoralization."

"Good!" observed the colonel as if he had a sweet taste in his mouth.

"And if you find it too stiff," the brigade commander went on, "why, I've seasoned veterans back of you who will press in to your support."

"Veterans, you say, and seasoned? I have some of my own, too! Thank you! Thank you most kindly!" said the colonel, saluting stiffly, with a twist to the corner of his mouth. "When we need their help it will be to bury our dead," he added. "Can we do it alone? Will we?"

He passed these inquiries along the line, which rose to the suggestion with different kinds of oaths and jests and grins and grim whistles. The scholar suddenly transferred his affections from the Greeks' phalanx to the Roman legions and began with the first verse of Virgil's "Æneid." He always made the change when action was near. "The Greeks for poetry and the Romans for war!" he declared, and could argue his company to sleep if anybody disputed him.

"I want to be in one fight. I haven't been under fire in the whole war," Lanstron explained to the colonel, who understood precisely the feeling.

"Lanstron is with us! The chief of staff is watching us!" ran the whisper from flank to flank of the Braves. It was not wonderful to them that he should be there. This complicated business of running a war over a telephone was not in the ken of their calculations. The colonel was with them, so all the generals ought to be. "We'll show Lanstron!" determined the Braves. "We'll show him how we fight in Africa!"

"With the first rush you go to the bottom of the valley; with the second, take the knoll!" Such were the colonel's simple tactics. "But stop on the top of the knoll. Though we'd like to take the capital this afternoon, it's against orders."

Lanstron, dropping into place in the line, felt as if he were about to renew his youth. He had the elation of his early aeroplane flights, when he was likely to be hung on a church steeple. Now he was not sending men to death; he was having his personal fling. It was all very simple beside sitting at a desk with battle raging in the distance. He dodged at the first bullet that whistled near his head and looked rather sheepishly at the man next him, who was grinning.

"Lots of fellows do that with the first one, no matter how many times they've been under fire," said the comrade. "But if they do it with the second one--" He dropped the corners of his mouth with a significance that required no further comment to express his views on that kind of a soldier.

"I shan't!" said Lanstron; and he kept his word.

"I knew by the cut of your jib you wouldn't!" observed the Brave, speaking not to the chief of staff but to the man. What were chiefs of staff to him? Everybody on the firing-line was simply another Brave.

Lanstron liked the compliment. It pleased him better than those endowing him with military genius. It was free of rank and etiquette and selfishness.

Of such stuff were the Braves as Cæsar's veterans who walloped the Belgæ, the adventurous ruffians of Cortez, the swashbucklers who fought in Flanders, the followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the regulars of the American Indian campaigns. When they rose to the charge with a yell, in a wave of scarlet and blue, flashing with brass buttons, their silken flag rippling in the front rank, they made a picture to please the romantic taste. Here on the brown background of the commonplace three millions of moderns was a patch of the color and glamour that story-tellers, poets, artists, and moving-picture men would choose as the theme of real military glory.

Intoxication of all the senses, of muscles and nerves, with the mesmerism of movement and burning desire which calls the imagination of youth to arms! The supreme moment of fury and splendid rush, which becomes the recollection to the survivor to be told from the knee to future generations in a way to make small boys love to play with soldiers! These men knew nothing except that they had legs and that ahead was a goal. Oaths and laughter were mingled in their souls; the energy of a delirium sped their steps. They were so many human missiles fired by an impulse, with too much initial velocity to stop at the bottom of the valley as the colonel had directed. Lord, no! Let's have the thing over with, bit in teeth! The common instinct of the living, who neither saw nor thought of those who fell, swept them up the slope. Every man who survived was the whole regiment in himself; its pride, its gallantry, its inheritance in his keeping.

"Fiends of hell and angels of heaven! We're here and we did it alone!" gasped the winded, ragged line that reached the crest.

"I thought they would!" said the brigade commander, who had watched the charge through his glasses from an eminence. "But at what a cost! It was lucky for them that it was only a rear-guard resistance. However, it certainly thrills the imagination and it will be a good thing for Brown prestige in Africa."

"Why?" Marta heard the officers around her asking after their exclamations of amazement at the news that Lanstron was going in the charge. "Why should the chief of staff risk his life in this fashion?"

Marta knew. All her taunts about sending others to death from his office chair, uttered as the fugitive sarcasm of a mood, recurred in the merciless hammer-beat of recollection. For a moment she was aghast, speechless. Then the officers, occupied with the startling news, heard a voice, wrenched from a dry throat in anguish, saying:

"The telephone! Try to reach him! Tell him he must not!"

"We can hardly say 'must not' to a chief of staff," said the general automatically.

"Tell him I ask him not to! Try to reach him--try--you can try!"

"Yes, yes! Certainly!" exclaimed the general, turning to the telephone operator.

He had seen now what the younger men had seen at a glance. They were recalling Lanstron's relief at seeing her; how he had passed them by to speak to her; the intensity of the two in their almost wordless meeting. Her bloodless lips, the imploring passion in her eyes, her quivering impatience told the rest.

"Division headquarters!" called the operator. "They're getting brigade headquarters," he added while he waited in silence. "Brigade headquarters says the Braves have no wire. It's too late. The charge is starting."

"So it is!" cried one of the subalterns. "Look! Look!"

Marta looked toward the rising ground this side of the knoll in time to see bayonets flash in the waning afternoon sunlight and disappear as they descended the slope.

"There! They're up on the other slope without stopping!" exclaimed the general. "Quick! Don't you want to see?" He offered his glasses to Marta.

"No, I can see well enough," she murmured, though the landscape was moving before her eyes in giddy waves.

"The madness of it! The whole slope is peppered with the fallen!"

"What a cost! Magnificent, but not war. Carrying their flag in the good old way, right at the front!"

"Heavens! I hope they do it!"

"The flag's down!"

"Another man has it--it's up!"

"Now--now--splendid! They're in!"

"So they are! And the flag, too!"

"Yes, what's left are in!"

"And Lanstron was there--in that!"

"What if--"

"Yes, the chief of staff, the head of the army, in an affair like that!"

"The mind of the army--the mind that was to direct our advance!"

"When all the honors of the world are his!"

Their words were acid-tipped needles knitting back and forth through Marta's brain. Was Lanny one of those black specks that peppered the slope? Was he? Was he?

"Telephone and--and see if Lanny is--is killed!" she begged.