The Last Shot Part 62

XL

WITH FRACa.s.sE'S MEN

We have heard nothing of Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son, and Peterkin, the valet's son, and others of Fraca.s.se's company of the 128th of the Grays since Hugo Mallin threw down his rifle when they were firing on scattered Brown soldiers in retreat.

It was in one of the minor actions of the step-by-step advance after the taking of the Galland house that the judge's son received official notice of a holiday in the form of a nickel pellet from the Browns which made a clean, straight hole the size of a lead pencil through his flesh and then went singing on its way without deflection, as if it liked to give respites from travail to tired soldiers.

"Grazed the ribs--no arteries!" remarked the examining surgeon. "You'll be well in a month."

"We'll hold the war for you!" called the banker's son cheerily after the still figure on the stretcher.

"And you'll get gruel and custards, maybe," said the barber's son. "I like custards."

Once the judge's son had thought that nothing could be so grand as to be wounded fighting for one's country. He had in mind then, as the object of his boyish admiration, a young officer returned from a little campaign against the blacks in Africa, when, the casualties being few and the scene distant and picturesque, all heroes with scars had an aspect of romantic exclusiveness. But there was no more distinction now in being wounded than in catching cold. Truly, colonial wars were the only satisfactory kind.

The judge's son found himself one of many men on cots in long rows in the former barracks of the Browns near La Tir. Daily bulletins told the patients the names of the positions taken and daily they heard of fresh batches of wounded arriving, which were not mentioned on the bulletin-board.

"We continue to win," said the doctors and nurses invariably in answer to all questions. "General Westerling announces that everything is going as planned."

"You must know that speech well!" observed the judge's son to the nurse of his section.

Her lips twitched in a kind of smile.

"Letter-perfect!" she replied "It's official."

In two weeks, so fast had the puncture from the aseptic little pellet of civilized warfare healed under civilization's medical treatment, the judge's son was up and about, though very weak. But the rules strictly confined his promenades to the barracks yard. There might be news coming down the traffic-gorged castle road out of the region where the guns sounded that convalescents were not intended to hear. For news could travel in other ways than by bulletin-boards; and the judge's son, merely watching the faces of medical officers, guessed that it was depressing. But after the first attack on Engadir their faces lighted.

The very thrill of victory seemed to be in the air.

"It's in the main line of defence!" called the doctor on his morning rounds of the cots. "They've made Westerling a field-marshal. He's outwitted the Browns! In a few days now we'll have the range!"

How staggering was the cost he was not to realize till later, when the ambulance stewards kept repeating:

"More to come!"

A newcomer, who took the place of a man who had died on the cot next to the judge's son, had been in the fight. He was still ether-sick and weak from the amputation of his right arm, with a dazed, gla.s.sy, and far-away look in his eyes, as if everything in the world was strange and uncertain.

"The fearful flashes--the explosions--the gusts of steel in the air!"

he whispered.

The next night Westerling followed up his supposed advantage at Engadir as he had planned, and there was no sleep for the thunders and the light of the explosions through the barracks-room windows.

"I can see what is happening and feel--and feel!" said the man who had been at Engadir.

In the morning the bulletin announced that more positions were taken, with very heavy losses--to the enemy. But the news that travelled unofficially from tongue to tongue down the castle road and spoke in the faces of doctors and nurses said, "And to us!" plainly enough, even if the judge's son had not heard a doctor remark:

"It's awful--inconceivable! Not a hospital tent in this division is unoccupied. Most of the houses in town are full, and we're preparing for another grand attack!"

Now for two days the guns kept up their roar.

"Making ready for the infantry to go in," ran the talk around the barracks yard.

After the infantry had gone in and the result was known, the doctor on his morning round said to the judge's son:

"You're pretty pale yet, but you'll do. We must make room for a big crowd that is coming and the orders are to get every man who is in any condition to fight to the front."

"And if I get another hole in me you'll patch me up again?"

"Get any number and we'll patch you up if they're in the right place,"

was the answer. "But be careful about that detail."

Soon the judge's son was with a score of convalescents who were marched down to the town, where they formed in column with other detachments.

"Not with that cough!" exclaimed a doctor as they were about to start, ordering a man out of line. "You'd never get to the front. You'd only have to be brought back in an ambulance."

An enlightening march this for the judge's son from hospital to trenches, moving with a tide of loaded commissariat wagons and empty ambulances and pa.s.sing a tide of loaded ambulances and empty commissariat wagons. A like scene was on every road to the front; a like scene on every vista of landscape along any part of the frontier. All trees and bushes and walls and buildings that would give cover to the enemy the Browns had razed. On every point of rising ground were the trenches and redoubts that the Browns had yielded after their purpose of making the Grays earn their way by trenches of their own had been served. The fields were trampled by the feet of infantry, cut by gun wheels, ploughed by sh.e.l.ls, and sown with the conical nickel pellets from rifles and the round lead bullets of shrapnel. An escarpment of rock, where the road-bed was slashed into a hillside in a sharp turn, struck by the concentrated fire of automatics, appeared to have been beaten by thousands of sharp-headed hammers, leaving a pile of chips and dust.

The traffic of the main roads spread into branch roads which ended in the ganglia of supply depots, all kept in touch by the network of wires focussing through different headquarters to Westerling. In this conquered territory with its face of desolation there were no fighting men except reserves or convalescents on their way to the front. All the rest were wounded or dead or occupied in the routine of supply and intelligence. The organization which had been drilled through two generations of peace for this emergency exhibited the signs of pressure.

Eyes that met when commands were given and received were dull from want of sleep or hectically bright as a hypochondriac's. Voices spoke in a grim, tired monotone, broken by sudden flashes of irritation or eruptions of anger. Features were drawn like those of rowers against a tide. The very proportions of the ghastly harvest after the last, the heaviest of all, of the attacks brought spasms of nausea to men already hardened to blood and death. If the officers of the staffs in their official conspiracy of silence would not talk, the privates and the wounded would. The judge's son, observing, listening, thinking, was gathering a story to tell his comrades of Company B of the 128th.

That night he and his comrade convalescents slept in the open. Their bodies were huddled close together under their blankets for warmth, while aching limbs twitched from the fatigue of the march. The morning showed that others had coughs which should have kept them from the front.

"Four or five cases of pneumonia due in that lot!" a doctor remarked to a hospital-corps sergeant. "Put them in empties right away."

After this announcement other coughs developed. Amusing, these sudden, purposeful efforts should one happen to think of them in that way. But no one did.

"No you don't, you malingerers!" said the doctor sharply. "I've been at this business long enough to know a real cough."

Now the judge's son and a dozen others were separated from the rest of their companions and started over a hill. From the top they had a broad view. Across a strip of valley lay the main rise to the heights of the range. Along the summit nothing warlike was visible except the irregular landscape against the horizon. There the enemy rested in his fortifications. The slopes, as far as the judge's son could see on either hand, were like the warrens of an overpopulated rabbit world in hiding. Here was the army of the Grays in its redoubts and trenches A thousand times as many men as were ever at work on the Panama Ca.n.a.l had been digging their way forward--digging regardless of union hours; digging to save their own lives and to take lives. And the nearer they came to the top of the range the deeper they had to dig and the slower their progress.

As the little group of convalescents descended into a valley a bursting sh.e.l.l from the Browns scattered its fragments over the earth near by.

"They drop one occasionally, though they don't expect to get more than a man or two by chance, which is hardly worth the cost of the charge,"

some one explained. "You see that they must know just what our positions are from their understanding of our army's organization, and the purpose is to bother us about bringing up supplies and reserves. Start a commissariat train or a company in close order across, and--whew! The air screams!"

Once on the other side of the valley, and the maze of zigzags and parallels leading into the warrens was simplified by signs indicating the location of regiments. At length the judge's son found himself in the home cave of his own tribe. His comrades were resting at the noon-hour, their backs against the wall of their sh.e.l.l-proof. In the faint light their faces were as gray as the dust on the dirty uniforms that hung on their gaunt bodies. Dust was caked in the seams around their eyes; their cheeks were covered with dusty beards. Their greeting of the returned absentee was that of men who had pa.s.sed through a strain that left existence untouched by the spring of average sensations.

"Did you get the custards?" asked the barber's son in a squeaky voice.

"No, but I got a jelly once--only once!"

"Sn.o.b!" said the barber's son.

"Jelly! I could eat a hogshead of jelly and still be empty! What I want is fresh meat!" growled Pilzer, the butcher's son.