The Last Shot Part 67

"Not that, please!" she broke in. "I'm as foul and depraved as a dealer in subtle poisons in the Middle Ages! Oh, the shame of it, while I look into his eyes and feign admiration, feign everything which will draw out his plans! I can never forget the sight of him as he told me how two or three or four hundred thousand men were to be crowded into a ram, as he called it--a ram of human flesh!--and guns enough in support, he said, to tear any redoubts to pieces; guns enough to make their sh.e.l.ls as thick as the bullets from an automatic!"

"We'll meet ram with ram! We'll have some guns, too!" exclaimed Lanstron. "We'll send as heavy a sh.e.l.l fire at their infantry as they send into our redoubts."

"Yes; oh, yes!" she replied. "Westerling couldn't say it any better!

What difference is there between you? Each at his desk is saying: 'This regiment will die here; that regiment will die there!' I bring you word of one human ram going to destruction in order that you may send another to destroy and be destroyed! And I'm worse than you. I am the go-between in the conspiracy of universal murder, sleeping in a good bed every night, in no danger--when I can sleep; but I can't. I go mad from thinking of my part, keying myself up deliriously to each fresh deceit!"

With every sentence her voice broke and it seemed that she would not be able to utter another. Yet she kept on in the alternation of taut, pitiful monotone and dry, coughing sobs.

"How have I ever been able to go as far as I have? How did I get through this last scene? When it seems as if I were about to collapse, something supports me. When the thing grows too horrible and I am about to cry out to Westerling that I am false, I hear his boast that he made the war as a last step in his ambition. And there is Dellarme's smile rising before me. He died so finely in defence of our garden! When my brain goes numb and I can't think what to say, can't act, Feller appears, prompting with ready word and facile change of expression, and I have my wits again. I go on! I go on!"

A racking sob, now, and silence; then, in the sudden effort of one who must change the subject to hold his sanity, she asked:

"How is Feller? Is he doing well?"

"Yes."

"At least I have brought him happiness. Sometimes I think that is about all the good I have accomplished--I, his successor in carrying out your plans! Oh, I'm burned out, Lanny! I'm ashes. It doesn't seem that I can ever be sane or clean and human again. In order to forget I should have to find a new life, like Feller. Each morning when I look in the mirror I expect to see my hair turned white, like his."

Lanstron felt her suffering as if it were his own. He had let his patriotic pa.s.sion overwhelm every other consideration. He had allowed her to be a spy; he had sacrificed her sensibilities along with the battalions he had sent into battle. She was right: he was only the inhuman head of a machine. And she and Feller--they were human. Destiny playing in the crux of war's inconsistencies had formed a bond between them.

"But, go on, Lanny. Play your part as you see it--as Westerling sees his and Feller his and I mine," she said. "That is the only logic clear to me; only I can't play any more. I haven't the strength."

"Yes, I shall go on, Marta," he replied, "but you must not. Your work is over, and perhaps this last service may bring a quick end and save countless lives."

"Don't. It's too like Westerling! It has become too trite!" she protested. "The end! If I really were helping toward that and to save lives and our country to its people, what would my private feelings matter' My honor, my soul--what would anything matter? For that, any sacrifice. I'm only one human being--a weak, lunatic sort of one, just now!"

"Marta, don't suffer so! You are overwrought. You--"

"I can say all that for you, Lanny," she interrupted with the faintest laugh. "I've said it so many times to myself. Perhaps when I call you up again I shall not be so hysterical. Tell Feller how I have played his part, and, in the midst of all your responsibilities, remember to give him a chance."

Lanstron was not thinking of war or war's combination when he hung up the receiver.

"Yes, it is Gustave!" he thought. "I understand!" It was some moments before he returned to the staff room, and then he had mastered his emotion. He was the soldier again.

"They are clearing the wires for the chief of staff to speak to you, sir," announced the telephone aide in Feller's eyrie artillery lookout.

Feller received the word with his clucking "La, la, la!" and hummed a tune while the connection was being made. He had not spoken with Lanny since his own promotion to a colonelcy and Partow's death.

"My ear-drums split for joy at hearing your voice again!" Feller cried.

"A regiment of guns for yours truly! You've made me the happiest man in the world. And haven't I smacked the Grays in the tummy, not to mention in the nose and on the shins! Well, I should say so! La, la, la!"

"You certainly have, you bully old boy!" said Lanstron. "Miss Galland sends her congratulations and regards."

"Eh, what? Her regards to me! The telephone still continues to work? Our own original trunk-tunnel private line? Eh? Tell me; tell me, quick!"

"Yes, she has performed the greatest service of the war--better than you could have done it, Gustave!"

"Whee-ee! Why not? Of course! I'm not surprised. She's the greatest woman in the world, I tell you, and I know! And she sends her regards to her old gardener? Think of that! If trouble never comes singly, why shouldn't joys come in a pour? Oh, it she could see me now, so cosey up here among the birds, chucking sh.e.l.ls about as cheerily as if I were tossing roses to the ladies in a ballroom!"

"She wants you to have every chance," said Lanstron.

"She asks that for me!"

The peculiar intimate fervor of the exclamation sprang from a Feller in an officer's uniform who could now move in Marta's world. Lanstron hurried on to explain the nature of the next attack.

"If we repulse them we are going to throw in a ram of our own," he said.

"We're going to take the aggressive for the moment. It is the only sure policy for successful defence."

"Right! Now you're talking. We learned that principle at school, didn't we?"

"And that means a bigger chance for you, Gustave. We are bringing up reserve artillery and making new dispositions. I am going to give you charge of the field-guns. But the chief of artillery will tell you about your work."

"This is heaven, Lanny! How am I ever going to--"

"There, no thanks, Gustave. You are the man. It is a time when only efficiency must be considered."

"Then I have made good! Then I've been worthy of my opportunity! I'd rather be a good gunner than a king. I'll eat this new work and smack my lips for more. Tell Miss Galland that every sh.e.l.l that hits the mark is a thought from the old gardener for her. Six weeks ago tr.i.m.m.i.n.g rose-bushes and now--this is life! La, la, la! There's been romance and destiny in the whole business for us both, Lanny. And you--you are acting chief of staff! I forgot to congratulate you, Your Excellency.

Your Excellency! Think of that! But it's no surprise to me. Didn't we go to school together? How could any one ever go to school with me and not be a great man? And I'm wearing a flower in my b.u.t.tonhole! La, la, la!"

All that night and day before the night set for the attack, while the guns were being emplaced and the infantry formed in a gray carpet behind the slopes, a chill, misty rain fell, which the devout of the Grays might say proved that G.o.d was with them rather than with the Browns; for it screened their movements from the Brown lookouts. The judge's son and Peterkin and others of Fraca.s.se's company had finished their mine; the fuses were laid. There was no dry place for a seat in their flooded redoubt and they had to stand, eating cold rations and shivering in their filthy, wet clothes. The whole army was drenched; the whole army shivered.

If only the air did not clear when darkness fell! The last thing the staff of the Grays wanted was to see a star in the sky. Had they believed in prayer they would have gone on their knees for a black fog, unaware that all that they would hide had been made known to the Browns through Marta almost from the hour that the preparations for the attack were begun.

With darkness, the rain ceased; but the mist remained a thick mantle over the landscape, impenetrable to the watchful search-lights of the Browns, which never stopped playing from sunset to dawn. The gray carpet of the reserves that were to form Westerling's ram moved over the slopes, dipping and rising with the convolutions of the earth, with no word spoken except the repeated whispered warnings of silence from the officers. Sweeping on up toward the redoubts, it found that parallels and trenches had been filled to give footing for the swifter impulse of the tide, once it was started for the heights.

A flash from Fraca.s.se's pocket lamp showed faces pasty white and eyes of staring gla.s.siness. Fraca.s.se's face and the colonel's were also white--white with the rigidity of carved marble, carved with a set frown of determination. Fraca.s.se was going in with his company and the colonel with his regiment. It was their duty. Both realized the nature of the risk; and, worse, each knew that the men realized it. In another age, when education was not so common and unthinking, unforeseeing pa.s.sion could be aroused in ignorant minds, a stimulant on an empty stomach might have made them animals, oblivious to danger. They were about to offer their lives to pave the way for others to reach the works that none of them, probably, would ever reach. For the like of this, in gathering the enemy's spears to his breast, a saga had risen around one national hero. But Fraca.s.se's veterans were only the shivering units of the millions; the part of the machine that happened to be the first to strike another machine in collision. Such was the end of all the training, the marching, the drilling in the gallant business of arms, with no more romance or glory than beeves going to the slaughter.

"You'll be the first out into the glacis, the first into the enemy's redoubt," said the colonel, forcing a tone of good, old-fashioned "up-guards-and-at-'em" vigor, as he touched the bronze cross on Peterkin's breast with his forefinger.

Little Peterkin, always pale but not so pale now as his comrades, flushed at the distinction.

"Yes, sir!" and he saluted.

In his eyes was the exaltation of his simple-minded faith. He did not think too much. What more could kings and conquerors ask than such a soldier as the valet's son, secure in the belief that his charmed life would bring him through the a.s.sault unharmed?

"My G.o.d! I can't!" exclaimed the banker's son. "I've suffered enough.

There's life and wealth and all that it gives waiting for me at home!

I'm young--I can't!"

There was a rustle of bodies in a restless movement of drawn breaths at common thought taking form, desperately fraught with alarm to Fraca.s.se.

"You will!" Fraca.s.se said, thrusting his revolver muzzle against the ribs of the banker's son. "If you don't, I'll shoot you dead, or you'll be trampled to death by the rush from the rear!"

The wedge point may not strike back at the hammer that drives it. Close packed behind Fraca.s.se's company was a seemingly limitless ma.s.s of soldiery, palpitant with their short breaths, a steamy, sickening odor rising from their water-soaked clothes. Here were men so wet, so tired, so nerve-worn that they did not care when death came; men who wanted to curse and strike out against their fate; men who wanted to turn in flight, their natural impulse held down by the bonds of discipline and that pride of fellowship which is shamed to confess to a shiver along the spine. Some saw pictures of home, of sweethearts; some saw nothing.

Some were in a coma of merciless suspense that grew more and more unendurable, until it seemed that anything to break it would be welcome.