Red Fleece Part 8

The four were much together for a few days after that, Samarc and Spenski not yet a.s.signed to their battery. They learned each other in those few days as men often fail to learn the hearts of their immediate a.s.sociates during years. There was fighting--scattered, open, surprising often to one out of touch with the points and the scouting. Different towns every day, and a continual giving of territory on the part of the Austrians.

"This is not the main fighting at all," said Boylan. "This is but the edge of the game. It won't break into print. The big stuff is farther on. These that we meet are the Austrian columns hurrying forward. This territory is ours for the marching through. We'll catch it later--and this will be forgotten."

Samarc had known these towns that the Russian column was pa.s.sing through, yet he had to ask the names, because of the destruction. The Austrians would always destroy in haste before leaving, and more leisurely the Russians would destroy. It seemed to affect Samarc, as some landmark reopened from its ruin for his eyes,

"It seems to say," he told the lens-maker, "'I was this at one time, and now I must go.'" Orders came for Samarc and Spenski, but they were not to be remotely stationed, since their battery was a.s.signed to Kohlvihr's division--a different camp but the same field. Few words about the separation, but each of the four understood.... Night and day, the dead had been with them in the recent days--in such richness and variety they could not escape, could not cover them, and something from the dead entered their hearts. To Peter--so queerly were his thoughts running--the memorable incident of their last night together had to do with an ant colony.

Supper was over, and they had tossed on a decayed log to keep up the fire. A nest of ants was presently driven forth by the heat from the soft heart of the wood. They found themselves hemmed in flame and turned back, as Peter thought, to seek the treacherous shelter of the nest again. It was not so; they were wiser than that, and marched forth in scores once more, each carrying an egg in its jaws. Spenski swung the end of the log out to the gra.s.s for them to make good their retiring. It was all very sane and admirable. Peter respected them....

The dead were with them. They had not learned to forget. Spenski would whimper in his sleep. The days did not fill him, wearied his body but other faculties and potencies were restless at night. This man who could grind a lens so that a line from the center of the earth to the center of the sun would pa.s.s through it without chromatic aberration, was more shocked than the other three by the cursory killing of the days, his imagination intoxicated and sleep perverted. His companion who imagined himself of coa.r.s.er and heavier texture often placed his hand upon the dreaming one. Spenski would start, open his eyes and say, "Thanks, Samarc."

Continual rocking through the long days, and the rumbling of the earth from the artillery forward. A mountain country of sharply cool nights, of cool bright days--the scent of cedar and balsam, good water, steady skirmishing--food just a bit scarce so that the peasants snapped and bolted, showing sharp about the eyes. It was not hunger--just the lean kind of fare. Peter often watched the halted columns at night as the men sprang to the feeding. Supper fires burst forth at the drop of the rifles. Not so raw now, the Warsaw contingent, a military eye would remark--getting ripe, in fact.

A week afterward, Boylan reported at supper that they would be permitted to ride with the battery on the following day. In the meantime they had not seen nor heard of the other pair. Fighting and marching from dawn to nightfall usually; human nature refused effort after that. They were so near dead at night that they laughed about it, and felt their faces in embarra.s.sment, sharp-boned and unfamiliar as the faces of the dead. Mowbray's was still clean shaven. Young Dabnitz, the exquisite of the staff, and a rather brilliant young Russian, was the only other who had kept his razors in order. Perhaps a woman ruled his heart, as Berthe Wyndham ruled Mowbray's.

Big Belt had lost his last reservation about his companion. He gave everything to Peter that he had given to Lonegan and something more-- for the field called a little more, and perhaps Peter called a little more. The extent of Boylan's loyalty had nothing to do with words or matters of conduct so far, but it was a huge affair, a suggestion of which came to the younger man from time to time and humbled him.

Twice during the first fortnight, Boylan had asked if this were positively his first venture into the field with troops. "The reason I ask," he explained later, "is that you appear to have been on the job before."

This would have been a matter interesting to the Old Man of _The States_, according to Lonegan's story.

"I miss the little guy," said Boylan, referring to Spenski. They were antic.i.p.ating the next day with the battery.

"I miss Samarc, too," said Peter.

Romanceless, remorseless routine. The day that followed was their hardest, for they were pressing the Austrians, taking their punishment but inflicting punishment, as if called of G.o.d to extinguish a nation.

The face of the world seemed turned from them, in Peter's fancy. He marveled at what seemed the swift disintegration of an ancient worldly establishment like Austria--going down unsung. It was not like a country losing its ident.i.ty, though that had to do with the facts; but rather like a shadow pa.s.sing, to be followed, not by sunlight, but by another shadow of different contour and texture.

"We put such store by names," he muttered, as he watched the Austrian infantry give way before them, "and yet, the world will get on with other names just the same."

...There had been no chance for talk. They had merely pressed the hands of their friends, something darkly melancholy about Samarc, as if his eyes were in deep shadow, and something luminous in the eyes that shone from the haggard face of Little Spenski. They looked forward to the night, as men famished and athirst in a pit listen to the toil of rescuers. Almost the last thing that Peter remembered was that the moon came up before the sun had set. The rapid-fire battery was at work on a hot smoky hill, the shrapnel and larger pieces still higher, and the great ma.s.ses of infantry moving below among the wind- driven hazes of the valley, their long necklaces, of white puffs, showing and vanishing.

Mowbray's ears were deadened to all sounds save from the immediate machine-guns and the big hounds above; to his eyes the swaying strings of infantry smoke-puffs in the valley were spectral and soundless.

The Russians had taken the little town of Judenbach in the early afternoon, but the Austrians gave them a stand two miles beyond, finding solid position in a range of craggy hills. The Russians had not cared to leave them there over night, but the dislodgment proved difficult. The unlimbering of the batteries toward the end of the day on the shoulders of a thickly-wooded ma.s.s (from which Peter watched the infantry and the moonrise in daylight), was the final effort of the day to drive the enemy farther afield from Judenbach.

The two infantries were contending; gray Russian lines in the bottom land and already advancing up the slopes. Day after day, smitten and replenished--tillers of land becoming the dung of the land. Mowbray had always pitied the infantry, and watched them now with unspeakable awe and depression--moving up the slopes, lost in their white necklaces of skirmish-fire, sprayed upon with steel vomit from the Austrian machines.

Samarc's battery was idle. It was often so, Boylan reported, when the enemy's duplicate pieces were busy.

Now withering--those gray Russian lines. They diminished, gave way, a thin ghostly pattern of the whole, falling back. An Austrian sortie of yellow-brown men to finish the task.

"That's _our_ cue," Big Belt whispered.

The officers were already finding the range and fall. Samarc's machine was set, before his superior spoke. Peter saw what a week had done for him. Samarc seemed old at the task, already to have grown old. Spenski at the hopper--and the mutilating racket on. Between fire, Peter could not hold in mind the inconceivable magnitude and velocity of these sounds. His brain seemed to plow under, as it does the great events of pain, the impress of hideous suffering which the proximity of the machines caused. Yet at every firing the d.a.m.nable things hurt him more. Fast beyond count, as the threads break in a strip of canvas torn with one movement--yet each crackling thread here meant projected steel.

They saw their work on the Austrian infantry lines. Yet always more infantry would come forth, and in the silence following the machines, the gray Russian lines stole forward again. Such was the slow battle vibration.

A company of sappers was below, opening the wood of the slope, so that the machine fire would not be impeded in case the Austrians drove back the infantry beyond the hollows at the bottom of the valley. A hundred yards down they were working like beavers among the trunks of cedar and balsam, when a shrapnel broke among them. The Russian higher batteries had been trying the same game among the Austrian emplacements, but could not see results.

All battery men near the two Americans knew well that the Austrians would note _that_ explosion of their shrapnel, and would relate the range to the higher positions above. That one shot showed the Russian artillerymen that their position was untenable. It was not that the Austrians could see the damage they inflicted in one company of sappers, but that the shattering blow in plain sight from their position would show the exact means to displace the higher pieces that devastated their infantry.

"We've got to get out of here," Boylan whispered. Again as he spoke the orders to retire came quietly as a bit of garrison gossip, and as coldly. Horses came running down for the ammunition carts; every muscle of man and beast had its work now.

In thirty or forty seconds Austrian shrapnel would land higher. Peter was tallying off the seconds, wondering if they would get clear.... At this moment he noted that the moon had come up and that the sun was not yet sunk. The two on the eastern and western rims of the world were almost of a size and color, very huge and alike, except that one dazzled the eyes--the difference between incandescence and reflection.

The whole dome was lost in florid haze. He almost laughed at what followed in his mind, so strange is the caravan of pictures that hurries through in action. It was the beauty above and ghastly waste of the infantry that brought back to his brain the reason and decency of the ants in the burning log--their order in contrast to this chaos....

The Austrians were workmen. Their searching shrapnel had been quite enough. Samarc's battery had begun to move, when they landed in the heart of it. All was changed about, and new. The silence was like a deep excavation, and the smell of fresh ground was in the air.

Peter did not see Boylan. He arose, half crawled up the torn ground to the place where Spenski and Samarc had stood. They were some distance --a saving distance for Mowbray--when he saw Samarc arise, his face sheeted in red. Samarc was staring about for Spenski. Presently, Peter followed the eyes of Samarc and saw the little man--half down, but looking up toward his friend, the eyes wide open; also Spenski's mouth, and the most extraordinary smile in the red beard.

Peter crawled a step nearer. There was no voice yet. He was tranced before this meeting of the companions, each of whom saw none but the other. Spenski had been partly kneeling, but as Samarc approached, his head bowed slowly down, and the smile was gone.

"Come on--they'll do it again!"

Peter heard the words--but did not know who spoke them--possibly Boylan from behind, possibly _he_ had said it. He had not seen Samarc's lips move.

The voice was an offense in that silence.

Now Peter saw none but Spenski, until Samarc reached him, lifted, called. Peter saw the body raised from the ground to Samarc's arms-- saw the little man's body open upon his friend like a melon that has rotted underneath.

Chapter 5

All went black for Peter. The slope rose up and took him. For an eternity afterward he felt someone tugging at him--hands of terrible strength that would not let him die, would not let him sleep. After that a familiar voice began calling at intervals.

"h.e.l.lo," said Peter at last. "What have I been doing?"

"Not anything that you've pulled before. Is this an old habit?"

"What?"

"Pa.s.sing out unhurt--lying like a log for an hour or two?"

"No, it's a new one. Where are we?"

"Judenbach. It's past supper time--"

Peter sat up, wobbled. The terrible hands steadied him again. He knew now what had lamed him.

"Where is she?" he asked.

"Huh?"

"I was wondering what hit me?"