Red Fleece Part 7

"A little while ago Spenski found his girl, and I would have withdrawn--for that is the high test," Samarc resumed. "But Spenski managed to keep us both without strain.... And then the war came along. A blight fell upon all workmanship in an hour. I had been on the military side of things from a boy, a matter of training and heredity. Of course, I would go. Spenski looked around the shop when I told him this. It was stricken, the machinery cranking down, the faces of the men white and troubled. 'I'll go, too,' said he.... I reminded him of her.... 'She wouldn't be interested in a chap who remained at home,' he said.... I told him of the big plants in Switzerland and America, where he could be of great value, but he was not tempted. 'I want to go if they'll take me in your battery,' was his last word on the matter.

"Of course I saw to that, but there's no work here, and there won't be, that can bring out Spenski's real values. Think of using such a man to feed the hopper of a rapid-fire piece.... But it's good to have him along. Spenski's a hard habit to break."

That night, when Boylan and Mowbray were together again, but a little apart from the others, Big Belt said:

"Say, Peter, that little Spenski is a card. A good little chap, smart and modest. I like him."

"I found Samarc worth cultivating, too," said Peter.

Chapter 2

Marching south along the Vistula with the old-fashioned army--no airships, nothing that intensely puzzled Mowbray in this service--that is, in the exteriors of it--nothing but earth poundage and earth power, a game that had much to do with earth and not with heaven.

Seven quiet days of marching in splendid summer weather, the raw peasant soldiery well fed and comfortable, becoming a unit, all outbreak of separate consciousness anywhere more and more impossible, hardening to the peculiar day's work. They were used to heavy work, but this was a particular task that needed specific hardening of feet and lungs; also the personal idea in each breast required numbing. The physical aim was to make men light for heavy work; to give them a taste of the joy and the true health of the field--before the entrainments, the haste and the fighting; but the psychological purpose was to make each atom forget itself, to weave it well into the fabric of the ma.s.s. Kohlvihr's division had to be moved; very well, let the movement gather the values of practice marching as well.

A raw division, with a scattering of Poles and Finns mixed with the straight Slav peasantry and regarded by the Russian war office, as Peter Mowbray understood at once, a ticklish proposition. The cement for this new service was "green" as yet; it had to set, required frequent wettings of fine humor and affiliation. The marvel to Mowbray was that the thousands fell for it. They had practically all left something that was life and death to them--land, labor, women, children. Each had established the beginnings at least of a personal connection in the world, and this relation had to be rubbed out. What had they been promised to take its place? _Freedom_, doubtless.

But intrinsically they were free men.

Peter recalled what Fallows had said: that properly fathered this peasantry might be led into a citizenship and virtue that would change the world. Instead they were to be impregnated with every crime. With such thoughts Peter felt the spirit of Berthe Wyndham awake in his mind.

Seven days and not a breath from the outer world. The correspondents were allowed to move in and out of Kohlvihr's headquarters; and, though they paid richly for everything, were treated well, and regarded as guests by the staff officers. Peter had met Kohlvihr in Warsaw before the thought of war--a good-tempered, if dull and bibulous old man, he had seemed in the midst of semi-civilian routine; but a different party here afield. Peter recalled the saying of old sailors that you never know a skipper until you ship under him.

Moments of evening, in the sharp hazes of wood smoke, when the whole army seemed nestling into itself, laughing, covering its nostalgia, putting on its strength, Peter met in certain moments the advisability of turning his back upon Boylan and Spenski and Samarc. The extraordinary nature of Berthe Wyndham would flood home to him, as to one to whom it belonged, very dear but very far.... He would smile when he thought of _The States_ and the Old Man.... "He thinks I'm clutched in the ripping drama and waiting for blood," he muttered, "that I am burning to stop the breath of the outer world with my story of gore and conquest.... But I'm eating his bread. I won't betray.

There must be a wise way to feed the red melodramatic receptivity of the cities and at the same time to tell the real story."

He stood in the midst of square miles of men and military engines. On every road other Russian forces moved southward and to the southeast.

The railroads groaned with troops, for the most part in a better state of preparation than Kohlvihr's division. Rumors reached the staff, as they neared the Galician border, that the Austrian fields below were already bleeding; finally word came, as they turned eastward, that they were to entrain at Fransic and make a junction with the main Russian columns preparing to invade Galicia from the northeast.

On the night before they entered Fransic, Mowbray awoke, and saw a figure sitting in the doorway of the little hut a.s.signed them for quarters. It was Spenski, his face upturned in the starlight. He sat so still that Peter slipped out from the blankets (which covered Boylan as well) and took his place beside the lens-maker. Spenski was facing the east. The street of the little hill town lost itself in a sharp declivity just ahead; the nearer huts were low. The whole east was naked to the horizon and an indescribable glory of starlight.

"Aren't they amazing?" Spenski whispered. "It must be nearly morning, for those are the winter stars. I think they must have wakened me up.

Do you know them?"

"Just the first magnitudes. They are more brilliant than I have ever known."

Orion and a great kite of suns stood out with new and flashing power.

"I never saw that huge _W_ before--" said Peter.

"You don't mean Ca.s.siopeia? Her chair isn't there, but over to the north--"

"No, no--_there_. Rigel, the upper right corner, down to the left, the Dog-star; up to Betelguese, down to the left again to Procyon, and up to the brightest of all--the stranger, not usually there--"

Spenski clutched him. "I was watching the bigger configuration, and didn't notice. Your stranger is the planet Saturn in transit between Taurus and Orion. Saturn completes the _W_, and the _W_ stands for--"

"War, possibly," said Peter.

There was a growl just now from Boylan: "Come on back to bed, you star-gazers."

"Saturn is so far and moves so slowly," the little man whispered, "that the _W_ will not be deranged for many months."

The hurry call for Kohlvihr came as expected in Fransic. The first sections of the divisions were entrained the next day--an end to summer road-work.... A day and night of intolerable slowness in a vile coach, and on the following noon the troop-train was halted, while a string of Red Cross cars drew up to a siding to give the soldiers the right of way; a momentary halt--the line of pa.s.sing windows filled with cheering, weeping nurses.

Just one reposeful face--as both trains halted a second or two. It was the face of one who seemed to understand the whole sorry story, already to be contemplating the ruin ahead. Her hands were folded, the eyes intent upon the distance rather than the immediate faces of men.

Mowbray could not articulate. Above all he wanted to meet her eyes, to put back the light of the present in them, but it was neither sound nor gesture that accomplished it; rather the storming intensity of anguish in his mind. His train jerked, her eyes found him, her arms raised toward him, lips parted. It became the one, above all, of the exquisite pictures in his consciousness, and the reality pa.s.sed so quickly--gone, and no word between them.

Thus her colors came to him again--the mystic trinity of white and gray and black--all he had since known and loved added to the mystery of their first meeting. It was like an awakening to the rack of thirst after one has dreamed of a spring of gurgling water--the swift pa.s.sing of that face of tender beauty and fort.i.tude, that fair brow, gray eyes and black hair....

Boylan was looking deeply into his face.

"Good G.o.d, man, you're a ghost. What is it, Peter?"

"It struck me queer to see a trainload of girls down here in the field," said Peter quite steadily.

"Well, if a trainload of strange women can do that to you--here's hoping we never do Paris together."

Little Spenski opposite had seen the outstretched hands, and Peter saw that he had seen.

Chapter 3

And now a rainy field. Two days of cold wind and rain after the cattle-cars; a different tone and temper from the men, coughing instead of laughter at night-fall. Another nameless village--Galician, now, for the border had been crossed, and the stillest night Peter Mowbray had so far known among the troops. It was a listening army-- the far distance breathing just the murmur of cannonading.

He moved about within the cordon of head-quarter sentries, studying the edges of the bivouac as the rain and the darkness fell. Kohlvihr's division was but a tooth of the main army now; the whole region was ma.s.sed with Russians marching westward; but still the outfit from Warsaw was enough, all that he could encompa.s.s of the mystery of numbers. Others had met the enemy, but these were still virgin. They were listening.

Their faces looked white in the thickening dark, noses pinched and the rest _beard_.... Hair--it was like some rapidly ripening harvest in the command, different each day, making the faces harder and harder to memorize. Mowbray had been disgusted at first--faces like changelings, atrocious like chickens. But the beards were taking form now--all gradations of yellow and red and black--many of that gray- yellow which loses itself in the middle distance and becomes a blur.

How he hated hair like that!

The next day dawned bright and cold. At ten Kohlvihr, in the midst of the southern wing, brushed the tail of an Austrian force in its turning. The engagement was sharp exhilaration to Peter; perhaps it was to certain of the soldiers; yet it was the first. Its touch of blood quivered through Kohlvihr's command not yet a.s.similated, stirred this raw ent.i.ty with deep inexplicable pa.s.sion.

The correspondents were riding with the staff; the point of the van was moving below in plain sight when its baptism fell. Kohlvihr licked his white lips, the upper lip uncontrollable like a deprived drunkard's. Below a skirmish was spreading out, the commands trumpeting back their messages. Mowbray turned. A little battery of mountain guns was racing forward through the infantry column, the drivers yelling for _gangway_. It was like a small town's fire department in action. Now the infantry poured down the rocky slopes that bordered the old iron road. Peter turned quite around in the saddle. The murmur in the air was queer--like something wrong below in a ship at sea. Kohlvihr's face interested him, the skirmish lines and their reinforcements, the voice of Boylan (though his faculties were too occupied to catch that rush of humorous comment in English); the mountain guns interested him, and the sudden racket of Russian riflery below.

Now one of the peasant soldiers was running up the slope from the van toward the staff. He was bare-headed, shocky-haired and bearded, making queer, high sounds like a squirrel as he ran--quite out of order and amazed at himself. He would have been struck down by his nearest neighbor ten days later, felled with the nearest officer's sword, but there was funk and a bit of dismay in the heart of the raw division that suffered the soldier to make his way to the staff.

Lifting his legs lumberingly, he held fast to his left wrist, where a bullet had started the blood. He held the wound high, like a trophy, the blood spurting, crying about it.... This was sudden discovery of something the army had started out to find, but had forgotten in the length of days. This was the red fleece--its drips of red were in each raw soul now. A little way farther and the staff awoke. An officer spoke. The peasant was caught and booted quiet. Kohlvihr licked his lips to keep them still. He perceived that Mowbray's eyes had fastened upon his mouth. The lips opened again. The order came forth for the soldier to be flogged.... It was their particular friend, Dabnitz, a lieutenant of the staff, who was given the execution of this order.

Chapter 4