The Last Shot Part 39

"Bad!" said the doctor.

"Then, good-by!" And his head fell to one side, his lips set in his cheery smile.

Had ever any martyr shown a finer spirit dying for any cause? Marta wondered. She felt the sublimity of a great moment, an inexorable sadness. She knew that she should never forget that cheery smile or that white face. What was danger to anybody? What was death if you had seen how he had died?

His company was a company with his smile out of its heart and in its place blank despair. Many of the men had stopped firing. Some had even run back to look at him and stood, caps off, backs to the enemy, miserable in their grief. Others leaned against the parapet, rifles out of hand, staring and dazed.

"They have killed our captain!"

"They've killed our captain!"--still a captain to them. A general's stars could not have raised him a cubit in their estimation.

"And once we called him 'Baby Dellarme,' he was so young and bashful!

Him a baby? He was a king!"

"Men, get to your places!" cried the surviving lieutenant rather hopelessly, with no Dellarme to show him what to do; and Marta saw that few paid any attention to him.

In that minute of demoralization the Grays had their chance, but only for a minute. A voice that seemed to speak some uncontrollable thought of her own broke in, and it rang with the authority and leadership of a mature officer's command, even though coming from a gardener in blue blouse and crownless straw hat.

"Your rifles, your rifles, quick!" called Feller. "We're only beginning to fight!"

And then another voice in a bull roar, Stransky's:

"Avenge his death! They've got to kill the last man of us for killing him! Revenge! revenge!"

That cry brought back to the company all the fighting spirit of the cheery smile and with it another spirit--for Dellarme's sake!--which he had never taught them.

"Make them pay!"

"He was told to stay till noon!"

"They'll find us here at noon, alive or dead!"

Stransky picked up one of several cylindrical objects that were lying at his feet.

"He wouldn't use this--he was too soft-hearted--but I will!" he cried, and flung a hand-grenade, and then a second, over the breastwork. The explosions were followed by agonized groans from the Grays hugging the lower side of the terrace. For this they had crawled across the road in the night--to find themselves unable to move either way and directly under the flashes of the Browns' rifles.

Feller's and Stransky's shouts rose together in a peculiar unity of direction and full of the fellowship they had found in their first exchange of glances.

"You engineers, make ready!"

"Hand-grenades to the men under the tree! That's where they're going to try for it--no wall to climb over there!"

"You engineers, take your rifles--and bayonet into anything that wears gray!"

"Get back, you men by the tree, to avoid their hand-grenades! Form up behind them, everybody!"

"No matter if they do get in at first! Back, you men, from under the tree!"

There was not a single rifle-shot. In a silence like that before the word to fire in a duel, all orders were heard and the more readily obeyed because Dellarme's foresight had impressed their sense upon the men in his quiet way.

The sand-bags by the tree were blown up by the Grays. Then, before the dust had hardly settled, came a half score of hand-grenades thrown by the first men of a Gray wedge, scrambling as they were pushed through the breach by the pressure of the ma.s.s behind. In that final struggle of one set of men to gain and another to hold a position, guns or automatics or long-range bullets played no part. It was the grapple of cold steel with cold steel and muscle with muscle, in a billowing, twisting mob of wrestlers, with no sound from throats but straining breaths; with no quarter, no distinction of person, and bloodshot eyes and faces hot with the effort of brute strength striving, in primitive desperation, to kill in order not to be killed. The cloud of rocking, writhing arms and shoulders was neither going forward nor backward. Its movement was that of a vortex, while the gray stream kept on pouring through the breach as if it were only the first flood from some gray lake on the other side of the breastwork.

Marta had come to the edge of the veranda, at once drawn and repelled, feeling the fearful suspense of the combat, the savage horror of it, and herself uttering sounds like the straining breaths of the men. What a place for her to be! But she did not think of that. She was there. The dreadful alchemy of war had made her a stranger to herself. She was mad; they were mad; all the world was mad!

One minute--two, perhaps--not three--and the thing was over. She saw the Grays being crushed back and realized that the Browns had won, when a last detail of the lessening tumult fixed her attention with its gladiatorial simplicity. Here, indeed, it was a case of man to man with the weapons nature gave them.

Standing higher than the others on the edge of the breach was that giant who had brought Grandfather Fragini in pickaback, looking a young G.o.d on an escarpment of rock on Olympus. His great nose showed in silhouette at intervals of wrestling lurches back and forth as he tugged at the rifle of a thick-set soldier of the Grays with a liver patch on the cheek that made his face hideous enough for an incarnation of war's savagery. At last Jacob Pilzer tumbled backward over the breastwork. Unlucky Pilzer!

That bronze cross was further away than ever for him, while Stransky shook the trophy of a captured rifle aloft, a torn sleeve revealing the weaving muscles of his powerful arm.

"I thought so!" cried Feller. "Attacks on frontal positions by daylight are going out of fashion!"

It was he who mercifully arrested the shower of hand-grenades that followed the exit of the enemy. Two of the guns of the castle batteries, having changed their position, were making havoc enough at pointblank range, with a choice of targets between the Grays huddled on the other side of the breastwork and those in retreat.

"We'll have peace for a few hours now," said Stransky, squinting down his nose. "And we'll have something to eat. I ought to have got that fellow with the beauty-spot on his physiognomy, but, confound him, he was an eel!"

By this time the men had recovered their breath. It occurred to them by common impulse that a cheer was due, and for the first time they broke into a hurrah with wide-open throats.

"Another--for Dellarme!" called Stransky, who seemed to think that he and not the callow lieutenant was in command.

This they gave, standing instinctively at attention, with heads bared, for the leader whose spirit survived in them; a cheer with triumph in its roar, but a different sort of triumph from the first cheer.

Listening to it were the wounded among the Grays who had fallen within the breastwork to be trampled by the Browns as they had pressed forward.

The doctor, but a moment ago a fiend himself with features of rage, now, in the second nature of his calling, with a look of tender sympathy, was ministering without distinction of friend or foe. One of the Grays, his cheek bearing the mark of a boot heel, raised himself, and, in defiance and the satisfaction of the thought to his bruises and humiliation, pointing his finger at Feller, Marta heard him say:

"You there, in your straw hat and blue blouse, they've seen you--a man fighting and not in uniform! If they catch you it will be a drumhead and a firing squad at dawn!"

"That's so!" replied Feller gravely. "But they'll have to make a better job of it than you fellows did if they're going to----"

He turned away abruptly but did not move far. His shoulders relaxed into the gardener's stoop, and he pulled his hat down over his eyes and lowered his head as if to hide his face. He was thus standing, inert, when a division staff-officer galloped into the grounds.

"Splendid! Splendid! There's some iron crosses in this for you!" he was shouting before he brought his horse to a standstill. "The way you held on gained the day for Lanstron's plan. They tried to flank in the valley after their second attack on your position failed We drew them on and had them--a battalion in close order--under the guns for a couple of minutes. It was ghastly! Our losses have been heavy enough, but nothing to theirs--and how they are driving their men in! But where is Major Dellarme?"

When he saw Dellarme's still body he dismounted and in a tide of feeling which, for the moment, submerged all thought of the machine, stood, head bowed and cap off, looking down at Dellarme's face.

"I was very fond of him! He was at the school when I was teaching there.

But a good death--a soldier's death!" he said. "I'll write to his mother myself." Then the voice of the machine spoke. "Who is in command?"

"I am, sir!" said the callow lieutenant, coming up.

Feller's fingers moved in a restless beat on his trousers' seam, his lips half parted as if he must speak, but the men of the company spoke for him.

"Bert Stransky!" they roared.

It was not according to military etiquette, but military etiquette meant nothing to them now. They were above it in veteran superiority.

"And--" Stransky had started to point to Feller, whose name he did not know, when a forbidding gleam under the hat brim arrested him.

"Where's Stransky?" demanded the staff-officer.