Crittenden Part 13

Crittenden's lips moved.

"G.o.d bless him."

"Fire!"

Over on the hill, before Caney, a man with a lanyard gave a quick jerk.

There was a cap explosion at the b.u.t.t of the gun and a bulging white cloud from the muzzle; the trail bounced from its shallow trench, the wheels whirled back twice on the rebound, and the sh.e.l.l was hissing through the air as iron hisses when a blacksmith thrusts it red-hot into cold water. Basil could hear that awful hiss so plainly that he seemed to be following the sh.e.l.l with his naked eye; he could hear it above the reverberating roar of the gun up and down the coast-mountain; hear it until, six seconds later, a puff of smoke answered beyond the Spanish column where the sh.e.l.l burst. Then in eight seconds--for the sh.e.l.l travelled that much faster than sound--the m.u.f.fled report of its bursting struck his ears, and all that was left of the first shot that started the great little fight was the thick, sunlit smoke sweeping away from the muzzle of the gun and the little mist-cloud of the sh.e.l.l rising slowly upward beyond the stone fort, which seemed not to know any harm was possible or near.

Again Crittenden, leaning against the palm, heard his name called. Again it was Blackford who was opening his mouth to shout some message when--Ah! The shout died on Blackford's lips, and every man on the hill and in the woods, at that instant, stayed his foot and his hand--even a man standing with a gray horse against the blue wall--he, too, stopped to listen. It really sounded too dull and m.u.f.fled for a sh.e.l.l; but, a few seconds later, there was a roar against the big walls of living green behind Caney.

The first shot!

"Ready!"

Even with the cry at El Poso came another sullen, low boom and another aggressive roar from Caney: then a great crackling in the air, as though thousands of schoolboys were letting off fire-crackers, pack after pack.

"Fire!"

Every ear heard, every eye saw the sudden white mist at a gun-muzzle and followed that first sh.e.l.l screaming toward the little Christmas toy sitting in the sun on that distant little hill. And yet it was nothing.

Another and yet another ma.s.s of shrapnel went screaming, and still there was no response, no sign. It was nothing--nothing at all. Was the Spaniard asleep?

Crittenden could see attache, correspondent, aid, staff-officer, non-combatant, sight-seer crowding close about the guns--so close that the gunners could hardly work. He could almost hear them saying, one to another:

"Why, is this war--really war? Why, this isn't so bad."

Tw.a.n.ged just then a bow-string in the direction of San Juan hill, and the tw.a.n.g seemed to be getting louder and to be coming toward the little blue farm-house. No cannon was in sight; there was no smoke visible, and many, with an upward look, wondered what the queer sound could be.

Suddenly there was a screeching, crackling answer in the air; the atmosphere was rent apart as by a lightning stroke directly overhead.

The man and the horse by the blue wall dropped noiselessly to the earth.

A Rough Rider paled and limped down the hill and Blackford shook his hand--a piece of shrapnel had fallen harmlessly on his wrist. On the hill--Crittenden laughed as he looked--on the hill, n.o.body ran--everybody tumbled. Besides the men at the guns, only two others were left--civilians.

"You're a fool," said one.

"You're another."

"What'd you stay here for?"

"Because you did. What'd you stay for?"

"Because _you_ did."

Then they went down together--rapidly--and just in time. Another sh.e.l.l shrieked. Two artillerymen and two sergeants dropped dead at their guns, and a corporal fell, mortally wounded. A third burst in a group of Cubans. Several of them flew out, killed or wounded, into the air; the rest ran shrieking for the woods. Below, those woods began to move.

Under those sh.e.l.ls started the impatient soldiers down that narrow lane through the jungle, and with Reynolds and Abe Long on the "point" was Crittenden, his Krag-Jorgensen across his breast--thrilled, for all the world, as though he were on a hunt for big game.

And all the time the sound of ripping cloth was rolling over from Caney, the far-away rumble of wagons over cobble-stones, or softened stage hail and stage thunder around the block-house, stone fort, and town. At first it was a desultory fire, like the popping of a bunch of fire-crackers that have to be relighted several times, and Basil and Grafton, galloping toward it, could hear the hiss of bullets that far away. But, now and then, the fire was as steady as a Gatling-gun. Behind them the artillery had turned on the stone fort, and Grafton saw one shot tear a hole through the wall, then another, and another. He could see Spaniards darting from the fort and taking refuge in the encircling stone-cut trenches; and then nothing else--for their powder was smokeless--except the straw hats of the little devils in blue, who blazed away from their trenches around the fort and minded the sh.e.l.ls bursting over and around them as little as though they had been bursting s...o...b..a.l.l.s. If the boy ahead noted anything, Grafton could not tell. Basil turned his head neither to right nor left, and at the foot of the muddy hill, the black horse that he rode, without touch of spur, seemed suddenly to leave the earth and pa.s.s on out of sight with the swift silence of a shadow. At the foot of a hill walked the first wounded man--a Colonel limping between two soldiers. The Colonel looked up smiling--he had a terrible wound in the groin.

"Well," he called cheerily, "I'm the first victim."

Grafton wondered. Was it possible that men were going to behave on a battlefield just as they did anywhere else--just as naturally--taking wounds and death and horror as a matter of course? Beyond were more wounded--the wounded who were able to help themselves. Soon he saw them lying by the roadside, here and there a dead one; by and by, he struck a battalion marching to storm a block-house. He got down, hitched his horse a few yards from the road and joined it. He was wondering how it would feel to be under fire, when just as they were crossing another road, with a whir and whistle and buzz, a cloud of swift insects buzzed over his head. Unconsciously imitating the soldiers near him, he bent low and walked rapidly. Right and left of him sounded two or three low, horrible crunching noises, and right and left of him two or three blue shapes sank limply down on their faces. A sudden sickness seized him, nauseating him like a fetid odour--the crunching noise was the sound of a bullet crashing into a living human skull as the men bent forward.

One man, he remembered afterward, dropped with the quick grunt of an animal--he was killed outright; another gave a gasping cry, "Oh, G.o.d"--there was a moment of suffering consciousness for him; a third hopped aside into the bushes--cursing angrily. Still another, as he pa.s.sed, looked up from the earth at him with a curious smile, as though he were half ashamed of something.

"I've got it, partner," he said, "I reckon I've got it, sure." And Grafton saw a drop of blood and the tiny mouth of a wound in his gullet, where the flaps of his collar fell apart. He couldn't realize how he felt--he was not interested any longer in how he felt. The instinct of life was at work, and the instinct of self-defence. When the others dropped, he dropped gladly; when they rose, he rose automatically. A piece of brush, a bush, the low branch of a tree, a weed seemed to him protection, and he saw others possessed with the same absurd idea. Once the unworthy thought crossed his mind, when he was lying behind a squad of soldiers and a little lower than they, that his chance was at least better than theirs. And once, and only once--with a bitter sting of shame--he caught himself dropping back a little, so that the same squad should be between him and the enemy: and forthwith he stepped out into the road, abreast with the foremost, cursing himself for a coward, and thereafter took a savage delight in reckless exposure whenever it was possible. And he soon saw that his position was a queer one, and an unenviable one, as far as a cool test of nerve was the point at issue.

The officers, he saw, had their men to look after--orders to obey--their minds were occupied. The soldiers were busy getting a shot at the enemy--their minds, too, were occupied. It was his peculiar province to stand up and be shot at without the satisfaction of shooting back--studying his sensations, meanwhile, which were not particularly pleasant, and studying the grewsome horrors about him. And it struck him, too, that this was a ghastly business, and an unjustifiable, and that if it pleased G.o.d to see him through he would never go to another war except as a soldier. One consideration interested him and was satisfactory. n.o.body was shooting at him--n.o.body was shooting at anybody in particular. If he were killed, or when anybody was killed, it was merely accident, and it was thus pleasant to reflect that he was in as much danger as anybody.

The firing was pretty hot now, and the wounded were too many to be handled. A hospital man called out sharply:

"Give a hand here." Grafton gave a hand to help a poor fellow back to the field hospital, in a little hollow, and when he reached the road again that black horse and his boy rider were coming back like shadows, through a rain of bullets, along the edge of the woods. Once the horse plunged sidewise and shook his head angrily--a Mauser had stung him in the neck--but the lad, pale and his eyes like stars, lifted him in a flying leap over a barbed-wire fence and swung him into the road again.

"d.a.m.n!" said Grafton, simply.

Then rose a loud cheer from the battery on the hill, and, looking west, he saw the war-balloon hung high above the trees and moving toward Santiago. The advance had begun over there; there was the main attack--the big battle. It was interesting and horrible enough where he was, but Caney was not Santiago; and Grafton, too, mounted his horse and galloped after Basil.

At head-quarters began the central lane of death that led toward San Juan, and Basil picked his way through it at a slow walk--his excitement gone for the moment and his heart breaking at the sight of the terrible procession on its way to the rear. Men with arms in slings; men with trousers torn away at the knee, and bandaged legs; men with brow, face, mouth, or throat swathed; men with no shirts, but a broad swathe around the chest or stomach--each bandage grotesquely pictured with human figures printed to show how the wound should be bound, on whatever part of the body the bullet entered. Men staggering along unaided, or between two comrades, or borne on litters, some white and quiet, some groaning and blood-stained, some conscious, some dying, some using a rifle for a support, or a stick thrust through the side of a tomato-can. Rolls, haversacks, blouses, hardtack, bibles, strewn by the wayside, where the soldiers had thrown them before they went into action. It was curious, but nearly all of the wounded were dazed and drunken in appearance, except at the brows, which were tightly drawn with pain. There was one man, with short, thick, upright red hair, stumbling from one side of the road to the other, with no wound apparent, and muttering:

"Oh, I don't know what happened to me. I don't know what happened to me."

Another, hopping across the creek on one leg--the other bare and wounded--and using his gun, muzzle down, as a vaulting-pole. Another, with his arm in the sling, pointing out the way.

"Take this road," he said. "I don't know where that one goes, but I know this one. I went up this one, and brought back a _souvenir_," he added, cheerily, shaking a b.l.o.o.d.y arm.

And everywhere men were cautioning him to beware of the guerillas, who were in the trees, adding horror to the scene--shooting wounded men on litters, hospital men, doctors. Once, there was almost the horror of a panic in the crowded road. Soldiers answered the guerilla fire from the road; men came running back; bullets spattered around.

Ahead, the road was congested with soldiers. Beyond them was anch.o.r.ed the balloon, over the b.l.o.o.d.y Ford--drawing the Spanish fire to the troops huddled beneath it. There was the death-trap.

And, climbing from an ambulance to mount his horse, a little, bent old man, weak and trembling from fever, but with his gentle blue eyes glinting fire--Basil's hero--ex-Confederate Jerry Carter.

"Give the Yanks h.e.l.l, boys," he shouted.

It had been a slow, toilsome march up that narrow lane of death, and, so far, Crittenden had merely been sprinkled with Mauser and shrapnel. His regiment had begun to deploy to the left, down the bed of a stream. The negro cavalry and the Rough Riders were deploying to the right. Now broke the storm. Imagine sheet after sheet of hailstones, coated with polished steel, and swerved when close to the earth at a sharp angle to the line of descent, and sweeping the air horizontally with an awful hiss--swifter in flight than a peal of thunder from sky to earth, and hardly less swift than the lightning flash that caused it.

"T-t-seu-u-u-h! T-t-seu-oo! T-t-seu-oo!"--they went like cloud after cloud of lightning-winged insects, and pa.s.sing, by G.o.d's mercy and the Spaniard's bad marksmanship--pa.s.sing high. Between two crashes, came a sudden sputter, and some singing thing began to play up and down through the trees, and to right and left, in a steady hum. It was a machine gun playing for the range--like a mighty hose pipe, watering earth and trees with a steady, spreading jet of hot lead. It was like some strange, huge monster, unseeing and unseen, who knows where his prey is hidden and is searching for it blindly--by feeling or by sense of smell--coming ever nearer, showering the leaves down, patting into the soft earth ahead, swishing to right and to left, and at last playing in a steady stream about the prostrate soldiers.

"Swish-ee! Swish-ee! Swishee!"

"Whew!" said Abe Long.

"G.o.d!" said Reynolds.

Ah, ye scornful veterans of the great war. In ten minutes the Spaniard let fly with his Mauser more bullets than did you fighting hard for two long hours, and that one machine gun loosed more death stings in an hour than did a regiment of you in two. And they were coming from intrenchments on an all but vertical hill, from piles of unlimited ammunition, and from soldiers who should have been as placid as the earth under them for all the demoralization that hostile artillery fire was causing them.