The Last Shot Part 35

Fright prompted him to a fresh impulse. Picking up his rifle, which he had not touched since his leap, he faced toward the now unoccupied crest of the knoll and commenced firing. Meanwhile, Fraca.s.se's men had reached the point where their first charge had broken, marked by a line of bodies, including that of the manufacturer's son, who had thought that war would be beneficial as a deterrent to strikes and an impetus to industry, lying with his head on his arm, his neck twisted, and the whites of his eyes idled skyward. In a spasm of sickening realization of how impossible it was for those who had not run back to survive between two lines of fire, they heard a shot from the ground at their feet and beheld the runt of the company in the act of making war single-handed.

It was a miracle! It was like the dead coming to life!

"Peterkin?"

"Yes, Peterkin!"

"With a whole skin!"

Probably it was a great mistake for him to have a whole skin, thought Peterkin. He scrambled to his feet and kept pace with the others, hoping that he would be overlooked in the ranks.

"I'm so glad! Dear little Peterkin!" said Hugo Mallin, who was at Peterkin's side.

His knowledge of Hugo's gentle nature convinced Peterkin that Hugo was trying to soften the forthcoming reprimand.

When their feet at last actually stood on the knoll which had dealt death to their ranks and they saw the brown figures of the enemy that had driven them back in full flight, the men of the 128th felt the thrill of triumph won in the face of bullets. This is a thrill by itself, primitive and masculine, that calls the imagination of men to war for war's sake. Pilzer, the butcher's son, wanted to kill for the sheer joy and revenge of killing. He rejoiced in the dead and the blood spots that, as clearly as the trench itself, marked the line that Dellarme's men had occupied along the crest of the knoll. It pleased him to use one of the bodies as a rest for his rifle, while he laid his sight in ecstasy on the large target of two men of the last section who were bringing off one of the wounded, and he swore when they got away.

"But there's another out there all alone!" he cried. "Better say your prayers, for I'm going to get you," he whispered; though, as we know, Stransky was not hit.

Peterkin had been doing his best to make amends for past errors by present enthusiasm of application. He fired no less earnestly than the butcher's son. Now that Eugene Aronson was dead, Pilzer had become Peterkin's chief patron and guide. He would be doing right if he did what that brave Pilzer did, he was thinking, while he was conscious of Fraca.s.se's eyes boring into his back. With the others, but no more expeditiously, however frightened, he fell back to cover from the burst of sh.e.l.l fire; and then, with the word to break ranks, he found himself the centre of a group including not only his captain but the colonel of the regiment. He could not quite make out the expressions on their faces, but he surmised that they were wondering how any man born under the flag of the Grays could be such a coward as he was. Probably he would be shot at sunrise.

"How did it happen?" Fraca.s.se asked.

His tone was very pleasant, but Peterkin felt that this was only the calmness of a judge hearing the evidence of a culprit. Punishment would be, accordingly, the more drastic. He was too scared to tell the truth.

He spoke softly, with the mealy tongue of a valet father who never explained why the wine was low in the decanter by any reference to a weakness of his own palate.

"I didn't hear the whistle to fall back," he said, "so I stayed."

"Didn't hear the whistle!" exclaimed the captain. He looked at the colonel and the colonel looked at him. The colonel stroked his mustache as if it were a nice mustache. "There wasn't any whistle," said Fraca.s.se with a wry grin.

"Yes, my boy; and then?" asked the colonel, who had never before called any private in his regiment "my boy."

A bright light broke on Peterkin. Inherited instinct did not permit him to show much emotion on his face, and he had, too, an inherited gift of invention. He rubbed his rifle stock with his palm and bowed much in the fashion of the parent washing his hands in grat.i.tude for a compliment.

"And I didn't want to run," he continued. "I wanted to take that hill.

That was what we were told to do, wasn't it, sir?"

"Yes, yes!" said the colonel. "Go on!"

The light grew brighter, showing Peterkin's imagination the way to higher flights.

"I jumped quick into the crater, knowing that if I jumped quick I would not be hit," he proceeded, his thin voice accentuating his deferential modesty. "My! but the bullets were thick, going both ways! But I remembered the lectures to recruits said that it took a thousand to kill a man. I found that I had cover from the bullets from our side and some cover from their side. I could not lie there doing nothing, I decided, after I had munched biscuits for a while--"

"Coolly munching biscuits!" exclaimed the colonel.

"Yes, sir; so I began firing every time I had a chance and I picked off a number, I think, sir."

"My boy," said the colonel, putting his hand on Peterkin's shoulder, "I am going to recommend you for the bronze cross."

The bronze cross--desired of generals and privates--for Peterkin, when Pilzer had been so confident that he should win the first that came to the 128th now that Eugene Aronson was dead!

"I--I--" stammered Peterkin.

"And so modest about it!" added the colonel. "Remembered the lectures to recruits and acted on them faithfully!"

The old spirit of the nation was not dead. Here it was reappearing in a valet's son, as it was bound to reappear in all cla.s.ses! Yes, Peterkin had supplied the one shining incident of the costly day to the colonel, who found himself without his headquarters for the night at the Galland house as planned, waiting for orders on this confounded little knoll. He was wondering if his regiment would be out in reserve and given a rest on the morrow, when an officer of the brigade staff brought instructions:

"The batteries are going to emplace here for your support in the morning. You will move as soon as your men have eaten and occupy positions B-31 to B-35. That gives you a narrow front for one battalion, with two battalions in reserve to drive home your attack. The chief of staff himself desires that we take the Galland house before noon. The enemy must not have the encouragement of any successes."

"So easy for Westerling to say," thought the colonel; while aloud he acknowledged the message with proper spirit.

Before the order to move was given the news of it pa.s.sed from lip to lip among the men in tired whispers. Since dawn they had lived through the impressions of a whole war, and they had won. With victory they had not thought of the future, only of their hunger. After the nightmare of the charge, after hearing death whispering for hours intimately in their ears, they were too weary and too far thrown out of the adjustments of any natural habits of thought and feeling to realize the horror of eating their dinners in the company of the dead. Now they were to go through another h.e.l.l, but many of them in their exhaustion were chiefly concerned as to whether or not they should get any sleep that night.

Peterkin could hear his heart thumping and feel chills running down his spine. How should he ever live up to a bronze cross--the precious cross given for valor alone, which marked him as heroic for life--when all he wanted to do was to crawl away to some quiet, safe place and munch more biscuits? He had once been a b.u.t.tons who looked down on scullery boys, but how gladly would he be a scullery boy forever if he could escape to the rear where he would hear no more bullets!

His conscience smote him; he wanted a confessor. He had an impulse to tell the whole truth to Hugo Mallin, for Hugo was the one man in the company who would sympathetically understand the situation. Yet he did not find the words, because he was rather pleased with the reclame of being a hero, which was an entirely new experience in a family that had been for generations in service.

Hugo Mallin had fired when the others fired; advanced when the others advanced. He had done his mechanical part in a way that had not excited Fraca.s.se's further acute displeasure, and he had no sense of physical fatigue, only of mental depression, of the elemental things that he had seen and felt this day in a whirling pressure on his brain.

It seemed to him that all his comrades had changed. They could never be the same as before they had set out to kill another lot of men on the crest of the knoll. He could not keep a comparison out of mind: One of the dead Browns, lying in almost the same position, looked enough like the manufacturer's son to be his brother. He pictured Eugene Aronson's parents receiving the news of his death--the mother weeping, the father staring stonily. And he saw many mothers weeping and many fathers staring stonily.

XXV

THE TERRIBLE NIGHT

The satire of war makes the valet's son a hero; the chance of war kills the manufacturer's son and lets the day-laborer's son live; the sport of war gives the latent forces of a Stransky full play; the mercy of war grants Grandfather Fragini a happy death; the glory of war brings Dellarme quick promotion; the glamour and the spectacular folly of war turn the bolts of the lightnings which man has mastered against man.

Perhaps the savage who learned that he could start a flame by rubbing two dry sticks together may have set fire to the virgin forest and wild gra.s.s in order to destroy an enemy--and naturally with disastrous results to himself if he mistook the direction of the wind.

Marta Galland's thoughts at dusk when she returned up the steps to the house were much the same as Hugo Mallin's after Fraca.s.se had taken the knoll. While he had felt the hot whirlwind of war in his face, she had witnessed the wreckage that it left. She also was seeing fathers staring and mothers weeping. Her experience with the wounded drawing deep on the wells of sympathy, heightened her loathing of war and of all who planned and ordered it and led its legions. A Stransky righting would have been repulsive to her, but a Stransky trying to save a life was n.o.ble.

Except for the few minutes when she had gone out on the veranda and had seen Stransky bringing in the lifeless body of Grandfather Fragini, she had been engaged since dark in completing the work of moving valuable articles from the front to the rear rooms of the house, which had been begun early in the day by Minna and the coachman.

Shortly after Stransky had finished his meal Minna came to say that Major Dellarme wished to speak to Miss Galland. Dellarme a major! This was his reward for his part in filling the ambulances with groans! In the days when he was at the La Tir garrison he had been a frequent caller. Now, in the perversity of her reasoning, out of the chaos of the tangent odds of her impressions since she had gone to hold the session of her school that morning, she thought of him as peculiarly one who gave to the profession of arms the attraction that had made it the vocation of the aristocrat. Waiting for her in the dismantled dining-room, despite all that he had pa.s.sed through, his greeting had the diffident, boyish manner of her recollection; and despite a night on the ground his brown uniform was without creases, giving him a well-groomed, even debonair, appearance.

"I scarcely thought that we should ever meet under these conditions," he said slightly constrained, a touch of color in his cheeks.

She had no excuse for her reply unless, in truth, she were in training for the town scold. But he typified an idea. He gave to war the aspect of refinement.

"If you did not expect it, why did you enter the army?" she asked.

He saw that she was not quite herself. The strain of the day had unnerved her. Yet he answered her bootless question with simple directness.

"I liked the idea of being a soldier. I was reared in the atmosphere of the army, and I hoped that I might do my duty if war came."

Perhaps this was point one for him. Marta shrugged her shoulders.