The Last Shot Part 16

"A broken-hearted man playing deaf; a secret telephone installed on our premises without our consent--this is all I know so far," said Marta, who was opposite Lanstron at one end of the circular seat in the arbor of Mercury, leaning back, with her weight partly resting on her hand spread out on the edge of the bench, head down, lashes lowered so that they formed a curtain for her glance. "I listen!" she added.

"Of course, with our three millions against their five, the Grays will take the offensive," he said. "For us, the defensive. La Tir is in an angle. It does not belong in the permanent tactical line of our defences. Nevertheless, there will be hard fighting here. The Browns will fall back step by step, and we mean, with relatively small cost to ourselves, to make the Grays pay a heavy price for each step--just as heavy as we can!"

They had often argued before with all the weapons known to controversy; but now the realization that his soldierly precision was bringing the forces of war into their personal relations struck her cold, with a logic as cold as his own seemed to her.

"You need not use euphonious terms," she said without lifting her lashes or any movement except a quick, nervous gesture of her free hand that fell back into place on her lap. "What you mean is that you will kill as many as possible of the Grays, isn't it? And if you could kill five for every man you lost, that would be splendid, wouldn't it?"

"I don't think of it as splendid. There is nothing splendid about war,"

he objected; "not to me, Marta."

"Still you would like to kill five to one, even ten to one, wouldn't you?" she persisted.

"Marta, you are merciless!"

"So is war. It should be treated mercilessly."

"Yes, twenty to one if they try to take our land!" he declared. "If we could keep up that ratio the war would not last more than a week. It would mean a great saving of lives in the end. We should win."

"Exactly. Thank you. Westerling could not have said it better as a reason for another army-corps. For the love of humanity--the humanity of our side--please give us more weapons for murder! And after you have made them pay five to one or ten to one in human lives for the tangent, what then? Go on! I want to look at war face to face, free of the will-o'-the-wisp glamour that draws on soldiers!"

"We fall back to our first line of defence, fighting all the time. The Grays occupy La Tir, which will be out of the reach of our guns. Your house will no longer be in danger, and we happen to know that Westerling means to make it his headquarters."

"Our house Westerling's headquarters!" she repeated. With a start that brought her up erect, alert, challenging, her lashes flickering, she recalled that Westerling had said at parting that he should see her if war came. This corroborated Lanstron's information. One side wanted a spy in the garden; the other a general in the house. Was she expected to make a choice? He had ceased to be Lanny. He personified war. Westerling personified war. "I suppose you have spies under his very nose--in his very staff offices?" she asked.

"And probably he has in ours," said Lanstron, "though we do our best to prevent it."

"What a pretty example of trust among civilized nations!" she exclaimed.

"And you say that Westerling, who commands the killing on his side, will be in no danger?"

"Naturally not. As you know, a chief of staff must be at the wire head where all information centres, free of interruption or confusion or any possibility of broken lines of communication with his corps and divisions."

"Then Partow will not be in any danger?"

"For the same reasons, no."

"How comfortable! In perfect safety themselves, they will order other men to death!"

"Marta, you are unjust!" exclaimed Lanstron, for he revered Partow as disciple reveres master. "Partow has the iron cross!"--the prized iron cross given to both officers and men of the Browns for exceptional courage in action and for that alone. "He won it leading a second charge with a bullet in his arm, after he had lost thirty per cent, of his regiment. The second charge succeeded."

"Yes, I understand," she went on a little wildly. "And perhaps the colonel on the other side, who fought just as bravely and had even heavier losses, did not get the bronze cross of the Grays because he failed. Yes, I understand that bravery is a requisite of the military cult. You must take some risk or you will not cause enough slaughter to win either iron or bronze crosses. And, Lanny, are you a person of such distinction in the business of killing that you also will be out of danger?"

She had forgotten about the telephone; she had forgotten the picture of dare-devil nerve he made when he rose from the wreck of his plane. If his work were to make war, her work was against war--the mission of her life as she saw it in the intense, pa.s.sionate moments when some new absurdity of its processes appeared to her. She was ready to seize any argument his talk offered to combat the things for which he stood. She did not see, as her eyes poured her hot indignation into his, that his maimed hand was twitching or how he bit his lips and flushed before he replied:

"Each one goes where he is sent, link by link, down from the chief of staff. Only in this way can you have that solidarity, that harmonious efficiency which means victory."

"An autocracy, a tyranny over the lives of all the adult males in countries that boast of the ballot and self-governing inst.i.tutions!" she put in.

"But I hope," he went on, with the quickening pulse and eager smile that used to greet a call from Feller to "set things going" in their cadet days, "that I may take out a squadron of dirigibles. After all this spy business, that would be to my taste."

"And if you caught a regiment in close formation with a shower of bombs, that would be positively heavenly, wouldn't it?" She bent nearer to him, her eyes flaming demand and satire.

"No! War--necessary, horrible, h.e.l.lish!" he replied. Something in her seemed to draw out the brutal truth she had asked for in place of euphonious terms.

"You apparently know where your profession ought to feel perfectly at home--but what is the use? What?" She put her hands over her face and shuddered. "I grow savage; but it is because I have known you so well and because everything you say brings up its answer irresistibly to my mind. I keep thinking of what mother said at luncheon--of her certainty that war is coming. I see the garden spattered with blood, the wounded and the dying--an eddy in the conflict! And I am in a controversial eddy whirling round and round away from the main current of what you were to tell me." She let her hands drop, but her eyes still held their lights of hostility. "Go on. I listen!"

"When I became chief of intelligence I found that an underground wire had been laid to the castle from the Eighth Division headquarters, which will be our general staff headquarters in time of war," he said. "The purpose was the same as now, but abandoned as chimerical. All that was necessary was to install the instrument, which Feller did. I, too, saw the plan as chimerical, yet it was a chance--the one out of a thousand.

If it should happen to succeed we should play with our cards concealed and theirs on the table."

"The n.o.ble art of war, so sportsmanlike!" she exclaimed. "So like the rules and ideals of the Olympic games! But the games will not serve to keep nations virile. They must shed blood!"

"Sportsmanlike? Not in the least!" he said. "The sport and glamour of war are past. The army becomes a business, a trade that ought to be uniformed in blue jumpers rather than gold lace. We are in an era of enormous forces, untried tactics, and rapidly changing conditions. This is why the big nations hesitate to make war; why they prepare well; why the stake is so great that the smallest detail must not be overlooked."

She could not hold back her arguments, reason was so unquestionably on her side.

"Yes, the cunning of the fox, the brutality of Cain, using modern science and invention! Feint and draw your enemy into a cul-de-sac; screen your flank attacks; mask your batteries and hold their fire till the infantry charge is ripe for decimation! Oh, I have been brought up among soldiers! I know!"

"The rest of Feller's part you have guessed already," he concluded. "You can see how a deaf, inoffensive old gardener would hardly seem to know a Gray soldier from a Brown; how it might no more occur to Westerling to send him away than the family dog or cat; how he might retain his quarters in the tower; how he could judge the atmosphere of the staff, whether elated or depressed, pick up sc.r.a.ps of conversation, and, as a trained officer, know the value of what he heard and report it over the 'phone to Partow's headquarters."

"But what about the aeroplanes?" she asked. "I thought you were to depend on them for scouting."

"We shall use them, but they are the least tried of all the new resources," he said. "A Gray aeroplane may cut a Brown aeroplane down before it returns with the news we want. At most, when the aviator may descend low enough for accurate observation he can see only what is actually being done. Feller would know Westerling's plans before they were even in the first steps of execution. This"--playing the thought happily--"this would be the ideal arrangement, while our planes and dirigibles were kept over our lines to strike down theirs. And, Marta, that is all," he concluded. "I've tried to make everything clear."

"You have, quite!" Marta replied decisively. "Now it is my turn to talk."

"You have been talking a little already!" he intimated good-naturedly.

"Only interruptions. That's not really talking," she answered, and broke into a sharp little laugh. A laugh was helpful to both after such a taut colloquy, but it seemed only to renew her energies for conflict. "If there is war, the moment that Feller's ruse is discovered he will be shot as a spy?" she asked.

"I warned him of that," said Lanstron. "I made the situation plain. He refused the a.s.signments I first suggested to him. He objected that they did not offer any real expiation; they were not difficult or hazardous enough. I saw that I could not trick his conscience--what a conscience old Gustave has!--by any nominal task. When I mentioned this one he was instantly keen. The deafness was his idea of a ruse for his purpose. He wanted his secret kept. Thinking that his weakness for change would not let him bear the monotony of a gardener's life as he saw himself bearing it in imagination, I recommended him to you. And there was the chance--the thousandth chance, Marta! He is a soldier, with a soldier's fatalism. He sees no more danger in this than in commanding a battery in a crisis."

"Naturally, as he is all impulse and fire. But you are the tempered steel of self-control. You should save him from his impulses, not make use of them."

"You put it bluntly, Marta. You--"

"My turn to talk!" she reminded him. "Did you of all her views of Feller from his entrance to his quarters till he had gone. Her lips, which had kept so firm in argument, were parted and trembling in sympathy.

"I can see how he would take it!" she exclaimed. "I see his white hair, his eyes, his fingers trembling on the edge of the table, his utter dejection--and then impulse, headlong, irresponsible, craving the devil's company!"

"Yes, nothing could hold him," Lanstron agreed. "What makes it worse is that with regular living, the pleasure of the garden, and a settled purpose I have noticed his improvement already!"

"There is something so fine about him, something that deserves to win out against his weaknesses," she said reflectively.

"If there is no war, I hope--after a year or so, I hope and believe that I may have him rewarded in some way that would make him feel that he had atoned."

"And we have been talking as if war were due to-morrow!" she exclaimed.

The breaking light of a discovery, followed by a wave of happy relief, swept over her responsive features, from relaxing brows to chin, which gave a toss on its own account. "Why, of course, Lanny! Till war does come he is only a gardener with an illusion that is giving mental strength. Why didn't you put it that way before?" she asked in surprise at so easy a solution having escaped them. "Let him stay, at least until war comes."