The Last Shot Part 66

"Yes, we all prefer army biscuits!"

"We wouldn't touch a home dinner!"

Stransky, his eyes drawing inward in their characteristic slant, was well pleased with his company, and the scattered exclamatory badinage kept on until it was interrupted by the arrival of the mail. Partow and Lanstron, understanding their machine as human in its elements, had chosen that the army should hear from home.

"How's this!" exclaimed one man, reading from a newspaper. "They're going to put up a statue of Partow in the capital! It's to show him as he died, dropped forward on the map, and in front of his desk a field of bayonets. On one face of the base will be his name. Two of the other faces will have 'G.o.d with us!' and 'Not for theirs, but for ours!' The legend on the fourth face the war is to decide."

"Victory! Victory!" cried those who had listened to the announcement.

"My mother says just what yours says, Tom. I needn't come home unless we win."

"The girl I'm going to marry said that, too!"

"If we go back with the Gray army at our heels we shall strike a worse fire than if we stick!"

Stransky was thinking that they had to do more than hold the Grays.

Before he should see his girl they had to take back the lost territory.

He carried two pictures of Minna in his mind: one when she had struck him in the face as he had tried to kiss her and the other as he said good-by at the kitchen door. There was not much encouragement in either.

"But when she gets better acquainted with me there's no telling!" he kept thinking. "I was fighting out of cussedness at first. Now I'm fighting for her and to keep what is ours!"

XLII

THE RAM

"I've learned that the greatest, most desperate attack of all is coming," Marta told Lanstron. "But I don't know at what point. I see Westerling only when he comes into the garden, and he does not come so frequently of late."

Very sweet and very harrowing to him was the intimacy of their conspiracy over that underground wire. With the prolongation of the strain, he feared for her. He understood how she suffered. Sometimes he felt that the Marta of their holiday comradeship was dead and it was the impersonal spirit of a great purpose that brought him information and inspiration. Her voice was taut, without inflection, as if in pain, occasionally breaking into a dry sob, only to become even more taut after a silence.

"I don't--I can't urge you to any further sacrifice," Lanstron replied.

"You have endured enough."

"But it will help? It will be of vital service?"

"Yes, tremendously vital."

"I will try to learn more when I see him," she continued. "But it cannot be done by questioning. A single question might be fatal. The thing must come in a burst of confidence. That's the horrible part of it, the--"

There was a dry sob over the wire as the voice broke and then went on steadily: "But I'm game! I'm game!"

In the closet off the Galland library, where the long-distance telephone was installed, Westerling was talking with the premier in the Gray capital.

"Your total casualties are eight hundred thousand! That is terrific, Westerling!" the premier was saying.

"Only two hundred thousand of those are dead!" replied Westerling. "Many with only slight wounds are already returning to the front. Terrific, do you say? Two hundred thousand in five millions is one man out of every twenty-five. That wouldn't have worried Frederick the Great or Napoleon much. Eight hundred thousand is one out of six. The trouble is that such vast armies have never been engaged before. You must consider the percentages, not the totals."

"Yet, eight hundred thousand! If the public knew!" exclaimed the premier.

"The public does not know!" said Westerling.

"They guess. They realize that we stopped the soldiers' letters because they told bad news. The situation is serious."

"Why not give the public something else to think about?" Westerling demanded.

"I've tried. It doesn't work. The murmurs increase. I repeat, my fears of a rising of the women are well grounded. There is mutiny in the air.

I feel it through the columns of the press, though they are censored.

I--"

"Then, soon I'll give the public something to think about, myself!"

Westerling broke in. "The dead will be forgotten. The wounded will be proud of their wounds and their fathers and mothers triumphant when our army descends the other side of the range and starts on its march to the Browns' capital."

"But you have not yet taken a single fortress!" persisted the premier.

"And the Browns report that they have lost only three hundred thousand men."

"Lanstron is lying!" retorted Westerling hotly. "But no matter. We have taken positions with every attack and kept crowding in closer. I ask nothing better than that the Browns remain on the defensive, leaving initiative to us. We have developed their weak points. The resolute offensive always wins. I know where I am going to attack; they do not. I shall not give them time to reinforce the defence at our chosen point. I have still plenty of live soldiers left. I shall go in with men enough this time to win and to hold."

"The army is yours, Westerling," concluded the premier. "I admire your stolidity of purpose. You have my confidence. I shall wait and hold the situation at home the best I can. We go into the hall of fame or into the gutter together, you and I!"

For a while after he had hung up the receiver Westerling's head drooped, his muscles relaxed, giving mind and body a release from tension. But his spine was as stiff as ever as he left the closet, and he was even smiling to give the impression that the news from the capital was favorable. When the telegraphers' jaws had dropped as the reports of casualties came in, when discouragement lengthened the faces around him and whispered in the very breezes from the fields of the dead, he had automatically maintained his confident mien. Any sign of weakening would be ruinous in its effect on his subordinates. The citadel of his egoism must remain una.s.sailable. He must be the optimist, the front of Jove, for all.

When he called his chiefs of divisions it was hardly for a staff council. Stunned by the losses and repulses, loyally industrious, their opinions unasked, they listened to his whirlwind of orders without comment--all except Turcas.

"If they are apprised of our plan and are able to concentrate more artillery than our guns can silence, the losses will be demoralizing,"

he observed.

Westerling threw up his head, frowning down the objection.

"Suppose they amount to half the forces that we send in!" he exclaimed.

"Isn't the position, which means the pa.s.s and the range, worth it?"

"Yes, if we both take and hold it; not if we fail," replied Turcas, quite unaffected by Westerling's manner.

"Failure is not in my lexicon!" Westerling shot back. "For great gains there must be great risks."

"We prepare for the movement, Your Excellency," answered Turcas.

It was a steel harness of his own will that Westerling wore, without admitting that it galled him, and he laid it off only in Marta's presence. With her, his growing sense of isolation had the relief of companionship. She became a kind of mirror of his egoism and ambitions.

He liked to have her think of him as a great man unruffled among weaker men. In the quiet and seclusion of the garden, involuntarily as one who has no confidant speaks to himself, reserving fort.i.tude for his part before the staff, while she, under the spell of her purpose, silently, with serene and wistfully listening eyes, played hers, he outlined how the final and telling blow was to be struck.

"We must and we shall win!" he kept repeating.

Through a rubber disk held to his ear in the closet of his bedroom a voice, tremulous with nervous fatigue, was giving Lanstron news that all his aircraft and cavalry and spies could not have gained; news worth more than a score of regiments; news fresh from the lips of the chief of staff of the enemy. The attack was to be made at the right of Engadir, its centre breaking from the redoubt manned by Fraca.s.se's men.

"Marta, you genius!" Lanstron cried. "You are the real general! You--"