The Last Shot Part 43

"No, you don't! Get down!" snapped Fraca.s.se. "We aren't inviting hand-grenades. It's a wonder that we have escaped so far."

"Hand-grenades!" gasped Peterkin, going white.

But n.o.body observed his pallor. Every one else was gasping, "Hand-grenades!" under his breath; or, if not, his thoughts were shrieking, "Hand-grenades!" There was a restless movement, a wistful look to the rear.

"Keep quiet!" whispered Fraca.s.se. "Let us hope it isn't known that we're here."

They became as still as men of stone.

"Well, if they are going to throw grenades then they will throw them!"

exclaimed Peterkin with the bravery of fear. He must do or say something worthy of a hero, he thought, in order to prove that he was not as scared as he knew he had looked and still felt.

"You have the right sort of _sang-froid_, Peter Kinderling!" whispered Fraca.s.se. "And you, Pilzer, showed a proper spirit, too, if wrongly directed."

Under cover of this favor, Peterkin drew a little out of line, making a great pretence of stretching his legs and yawning--yawning with a sincerely dropped jaw and a quivering lip. He pressed his chin against the ground and this stopped the quivering. Also, he was in a position to watch the parapet closely and to make a quick spring.

Fatalism had become suspense--suspense without action to take their minds off the prospect, the suspense of death lurking in a cloud which might break in a lightning flash! They thought that they knew the full gamut of horrors; but nothing that they had yet gone through was any criterion for what they now had to endure. All understood the nature of a hand-grenade, which bursts like a Nihilist's bomb. It was as easy, they knew, to toss hand-grenades over the sand-bags into human flesh as apples into a basket. They felt themselves bound and gagged, waiting for an a.s.sa.s.sin to macerate them at his own sweet will.

The second hour was worse than the first, the third worse than the second. In lulls they heard the voices of Dellarme and his men, which seemed more ominous than the crash of rifles or the scream and crack of sh.e.l.ls. Finally there was a lull which they knew meant the supreme attempt to storm the position from the town side. They heard the commotion that followed Dellarme's death; the sharp, rallying commands of Feller and Stransky; and then, as Peterkin saw a black object fly free of a hand over the parapet he made a catlike spring, followed by another and another, and plunged face downward at the angle where the face of the redoubt bent toward the town.

He thought that he was dead, and found, as he had in the sh.e.l.l crater, that he was not. After the two explosions he heard groans that chilled his blood, and looked around to see living faces like chalk, with gla.s.sy, beady, protruding eyes, and a dozen men killed and eviscerated and mangled in bleeding confusion.

But Hugo and Pilzer and those of Peterkin's immediate group were alive.

They were in their places, while he was alone and out of his place. He had bolted, while they held their ground; now he would be revealed in his true light. The bronze cross would be lost before it was pinned to his breast. From where he lay, however, he could see the other face of the redoubt and a wedge of men about to mount the sand-bags. His next act was born of the inspired cunning of his fear of being exposed, which was almost as compelling as his fear of death. He waved his hand excitedly to the others to come on.

"Charge! Charge! This is the way!" shrieked Peterkin.

His voice had the terror of a man floating toward a falls and calling for a rope, but not so to Fraca.s.se, to whom it was the voice of a great chance. Why hadn't he thought of this before? Of course, he should move around under cover of the reverse wall of the redoubt to join in the attack on the weak point! The valet's son had shown him the way.

"Come, men, come! Follow me and Peterkin!" cried Fraca.s.se.

Did they follow? Westerling or any expert in the psychology of war could understand how ripe was their mood. "It is the wait under right conditions that will make men fiends unleashed when the word to storm is given," an older authority had written. Under sentence of death for six hours, they welcomed any opportunity to get at grips with those who had held death suspended over their heads.

You will use hand-grenades, will you? Snug behind sand-bags you will tear the flesh of our comrades to pieces, will you? They saw red, the red of raw fragments of flesh; the red of the gush from torn artery walls--all except Hugo and Peterkin, who might well begin to believe that there was a measure of art in heroism. Peterkin seemed to share leadership at the captain's side, but he slipped and fell--he had weak ankles, anyway--as Fraca.s.se's men pressed the rear of the wedge forward with the strength of ma.s.s, only to be borne back by men, riddled with bullets, tumbling fairly into their faces.

As we have seen, there was no getting through a breach under the concentrated blasts of a hundred rifles, and Pilzer, who, by using human shoulders for steps, had reached the parapet, turned a back somersault with out his rifle. However, he seized one from a dead man's hand before the captain had noticed the loss. Some of the company joined in the flight of the attackers from the town into the open, but Hugo and Pilzer and their friends remained under cover of the wall. They still saw red, the red of a darker anger--that of repulse.

When, finally, they burst into the redoubt after it was found that the Browns had gone, all, even the judge's son, were the war demon's, own.

The veneer had been warped and twisted and burned off down to the raw animal flesh. Their brains had the fever itch of callouses forming. Not a sign of brown there in the yard; not a sign of any tribute after all they had endured! They had not been able to lay hands on the murderous throwers of hand-grenades. Far away now was the barrack-room geniality of the forum around Hugo; in oblivion were the ethics of an inherited civilization taught by mothers, teachers, and church.

But here was a house--a house of the Browns; a big, fine house! They would see what they had won--this was the privilege of baffled victory.

What they had won was theirs! To the victor the spoils! Pell-mell they crowded into the dining-room, Hugo with the rest, feeling himself a straw on the crest of a wave, and Pilzer, most bitter, most ugly of all, his short, strong teeth and gums showing and his liver patch red, lumpy, and trembling. In crossing the threshold of privacy they committed the act that leaves the deepest wound of war's inheritance, to go on from generation to generation in the history of families.

"A swell dining-room! I like the chandeliers!" roared Pilzer.

With his bayonet he smashed the only globe left intact by the sh.e.l.l fire. There was a laugh as a shower of gla.s.s fell on the floor. Even the judge's son, the son of the tribune of law, joined in. Pilzer then ripped up the leather seat of a chair. This introductory havoc whetted his appet.i.te for other worlds of conquest, as the self-chosen leader of the increasing crowd that poured through the doorway.

"Maybe there's food!" he shouted. "Maybe there's wine!"

"Food and wine!"

"Yes, wine! We're thirsty!"

"And maybe women! I'd like to kiss a pretty maid servant!" Pilzer added, starting toward the hall.

"Stop!" cried Hugo, forcing his way in front of Pilzer.

He was like no one of the Hugos of the many parts that his comrades had seen him play. His blue eyes had become an inflexible gray. He was standing half on tiptoe, his quivering muscles in tune with the quivering pitch of his voice: a Hugo in anger! This was a tremendous joke. He was about to regain his reputation as a humorist by a brilliant display in keeping with the new order of their existence.

"We have no right in here! This is a private house!"

But the fever of their savagery--the infectious savagery of the mob--wanted no humor of this kind.

"Out of the way, you white-livered little rat!" cried Pilzer, "or I'll p.r.i.c.k the tummy of mamma's darling!"

What happened then was so sudden and unexpected in Hugo that all were vague about details. They saw him in a catapultic lunge, mesmeric in its swiftness, and they saw Pilzer go down, his leg twisted under him and his head banging the floor. Hugo stood, half ashamed, half frightened, yet ready for another encounter.

Fraca.s.se, entering at this moment, was too intent on his mission to consider the rights of a personal difference between two of his company, though he heard and noted Pilzer's growling complaint that he had been struck an unfair blow.

"There's work to do! Out of here, quick! We are losing valuable time!"

he announced, rounding his men toward the door with commanding gestures. "We are going in pursuit!"

Marta, who had observed the latter part of the scene from the shadows of the hall, knew that she should never forget Hugo's face as he turned on Pilzer, while his voice of protest struck a singing chord in her jangling nerves. It was the voice of civilization, of one who could think out of the orbit of a whirlpool of pa.s.sionate barbarism. She could see that he was about to spring and her prayer went with his leap. She gloried in the impact that felled the great brute with the liver patch on his cheek, which was like a birthmark of war.

After the men were gone she regretted that she had not gone to Hugo and expressed her grat.i.tude. She vaguely wondered if she should see him again and hoped that she might. The two faces, Hugo's and Pilzer's, in the instant of Hugo's protest and Pilzer's contempt, were as clear as in life before her eyes.

Then a staff-officer appeared in the doorway. When he saw a woman enter the room he frowned. He had ridden from the town, which was empty of women, a fact that he regarded as a blessing. If she had been a maid servant he would have kept on his cap. Seeing that she was not, he removed it and found himself in want of words as their eyes met after she had made a gesture to the broken gla.s.s on the floor and the lacerated table top, which said too plainly:

"Do you admire your work?"

The fact that he was well groomed and freshly shaven did not in any wise dissipate in her feminine mind his connection with this destruction. He had never seen anything like the smile which went with the gesture. Her eyes were two continuing and challenging flames. Her chin was held high and steady, and the pallor of exhaustion, with the blackness of her hair-and eyes, made her strangely commanding. He understood that she was not waiting for him to speak, but to go.

"I did not know that there was a woman here!" he said.

"And I did not know that officers of the Grays were accustomed to enter private houses without invitations!" she replied.

"This is a little different," he began.

She interrupted him.

"But the law of the Grays is that homes should be left undisturbed, isn't it? At least, it is the law of civilization. I believe you profess, too, to protect property, do you not?"

"Why, yes!" he agreed. He wished that he could get a little respite from the steady fire of her eyes. It was embarra.s.sing and as confusing as the white light of an impracticable logic.

"In that case, please place a guard around our house lest some more of your soldiers get out of control," she went on.

"I can do that, yes," he said. "But we are to make this a staff headquarters and must start at once to put the house in readiness."