The Last Shot Part 69

Before the mine exploded, by the light of the sh.e.l.l bursts breaking their vast prisms from central spheres of flame for miles, with the quick sequence of a moving-picture flicker, Fraca.s.se's men could see one another's faces, spectral and stiff and pasty white, with teeth gleaming where jaws had dropped, some eyes half closed by the blinding flashes and some opened wide as if the lids were paralyzed. Faces and faces! A sea of faces stretching away down the slope--faces in a trance.

Up over the breastworks, over rocks and splintered timbers, Peterkin and the judge's son and their comrades clambered. When they moved they were as a myriad-legged creature, brain numbed, without any sensation except that of rapids going over a fall. Those in front could not falter, being pushed on by the pressure of those in the rear. For a few steps they were under no fire. The scream of their own sh.e.l.ls breaking in infernal pandemonium in front seemed to be a power as irresistible as the rear of the wedge in driving them on.

Then sounds more hideous than the flight of projectiles broke about them with the abruptness of lightnings held in the hollow of the Almighty's hand and suddenly released. The Browns' guns had opened fire. Explosions were even swifter in sequence than the flashes that revealed the stark faces. Dust and stones and flying fragments of flesh filled the air. Men went down in positive paralysis of faculties by the terrific crashes.

Sections of the ram were blown to pieces by the burst of a shrapnel shoulder high; other sections were lifted heavenward by a sh.e.l.l burst in the earth.

Peterkin fell with a piece of jagged steel embedded in his brain. He had gone from the quick to the dead so swiftly that he never knew that his charm had failed. The same explosion got Fraca.s.se, sword in hand, and another buried him where he lay. The banker's son went a little farther; the barber's son still farther. Men who were alive hardly realized life, so mixed were life and death. Infernal imagination goes faint; its wildest similes grow feeble and ba.n.a.l before such a consummation of h.e.l.l.

But the tide keeps on; the torn gaps of the ram are filled by the rushing legs from the rear. Officers urge and lead. Such are the orders; such is the duty prescribed; such is human bravery even in these days when life is sweeter to more men in the joys of mind and body than ever before. Precision, organization, solidarity in this charge such as the days of the "death-or-glory" boys never knew! Over the bodies of Peterkin and the barber's and the banker's sons, plunging through sh.e.l.l craters, stumbling, staggering, cut by swaths and torn by eddies of red destruction in their ranks, the tide proceeded, until its hosts were oftener treading on flesh than on soil. And all they knew was to keep on--keep on, bayonet in hand, till they reached the redoubt, and there they were to stay, alive or dead.

In that pulsating, fierce light, while the ground under their feet trembled with the concussions, Westerling's face was as clear to Marta as if he were staring in at a furnace door. The lines of breeding and of restrained authority which gave it distinction had faded. It had the eager ferocity of the hunt. His short, tense exclamations explained the stages of progress of the attack as revealed to his sight.

"It cannot fail! No! Impossible! Look at the speed of our gun-fire! But I judge that we have not been able to silence as many of their guns as we ought to--they're using sh.e.l.l into our close order. But all the guns in creation shall not stop us! I have men enough this time--enough, enough, enough! There! Our shorter-range guns have ceased firing! That shows we are in the redoubts. The longer-range guns continue. They are firing beyond the redoubt against any counter-attack, if the Browns try to recover what they have lost. But every minute brings another battalion into place. Engineers and guns will follow. The war is as good as won!"

He caught at Marta's hand, but she drew away; and her start of revulsion at his touch was almost coincident with a start on his part for another reason. A huge shadow shot at railway-train speed over their heads.

Something very like fear flashed into his expression.

"One of our dirigibles!" he exclaimed. "I confess it came so near that it gave me a sort of shock, too."

"Only a shadow with no death in it," she said. "And there is death in every flash there on the range. General Westerling, have you ever been under fire?" she asked suddenly.

He had scarcely heard the question. He took a step forward, with head raised and shading his eyes.

"Not ours! One of theirs!" he exclaimed. "Theirs--and any number of theirs!"

Driving toward the volcano's centre were many Brown dirigibles, slowing down as they approached. Greater eruptions than any from sh.e.l.ls rose from the earth as they pa.s.sed.

"So that's what they've had their dirigibles in reserve for--for the last desperate defence!" he said. "The defence that can never win! Not their dirigibles--not any power known to man can stop my men. I have sent in so many that enough must survive. But where are _our_ dirigibles? A few are up--why don't they close in? And our guns--why don't they fire at a target before their eyes as big as a house? There they go, and they got one!"--as a circle of flame brighter than the illumination of other explosions broke in the sky. "And one of ours is closing in! Look, both have blown up as they collided! That shows that two can play at the game! But what a swarm they have--more than we knew!

Bouchard's intelligence at fault again! However, if they try to stop our fortifying the redoubt our guns will care for them. That clever trick of Lanstron's may have cost us a few extra casualties, but it will not change the result. It's time we had details over the wire," he concluded, turning back to the house rather precipitately. "Then there may be work for me."

"After h.e.l.l, more h.e.l.l, and then still more h.e.l.l!" was the way that Stransky expressed his thought when the engineers had taken the place of the 53d of the Browns in the redoubt. They put their mines and connections deep enough not to be disturbed by sh.e.l.l fire. After the survivors in the van of the Grays' charge, spent of breath, reached their goal and threw themselves down, the earth under them, as the mine exploded, split and heaved heavenward. But those in the rear, slapped in the face by the concussion, kept on, driven by the pressure of the ma.s.s at their backs, and, in turn, plunged forward on their stomachs in the seams and furrows of the mine's havoc. The ma.s.s thickened as the flood of bodies and legs banked up, in keeping with Westerling's plan to have "enough to hold."

Now the automatics and the rifles from the redoubt to which the Browns had fallen back opened fire. So close together were these bullet-machines that the orbit of each one's swing made a spray of only a few yards' breadth over the old redoubt, where the Browns' gun-fire had not for a moment ceased its persistent sh.e.l.ling, with increasingly large and solid targets of flesh for their practice. The thing for these targets to do, they knew, was to intrench and begin to return the infantry and automatics' fire. Desperately, with the last effort of courage, they rose in the attempt--rose into playing hose streams of bullets whose close hiss was a steady undertone between sh.e.l.l bursts. In the garish, jumping light brave officers impulsively stood up to hearten their commands in their work, and dropped with half-uttered urgings, threats, and oaths on their lips.

The bullets from the automatics missing one mark were certain to find another, perhaps four or five in a row, such was their velocity and power of penetration. Where sh.e.l.ls made gaps and tore holes in the human ma.s.s, the automatics cut with the regularity of the driven teeth of a comb. The men who escaped all the forms of slaughter and staggered on to the ruins of the redoubt, pressed their weight on top of those in the craters or hugged behind the pyramids of debris, and even made breastworks from the bodies of the dead. The more that banked up, the more fruitless the efforts of the officers to restore order in the frantic medley of sh.e.l.l screams and explosions at a time when a minute seemed an age.

Meanwhile, between them--this banked-up force at the charge's end--and the Brown redoubt with its automatics, the Gray gunners were making a zone of sh.e.l.l bursts in order to give the soldiers time to make their hold of the ground they had gained secure. Through this zone Stransky and his men were to lead the Browns in a counter-attack.

At the very height of the Gray charge, when all the reserves were in, dark objects fell out of the heavens, and where they dropped earth and flesh were mingled in the maceration. Like some giant reptile with its vertebrae breaking, gouged and torn and pinioned, the charge stopped, in writhing, throbbing confusion. Those on the outer circle of explosions were thrown against their fellows, who surged back in another direction from an explosion in the opposite quarter. From the rear the pressure weakened; the human hammer was no longer driving the ram. Blinded by the lightnings and dust, dizzy from concussions and noise, too blank of mind to be sane or insane, the atoms of the bulk of the charge in natural instinct turned from their goal and toward the place whence they had come, with death from all sides still buffeting them. Staggeringly, at first, they went, for want of initiative in their paralysis; then rapidly, as the law of self-preservation a.s.serted itself in wild impulse.

As sheep driven over a precipice they had advanced; as men they fled.

There was no longer any command, no longer any cohesion, except of legs struggling in and out over the uneven footing of dead and wounded, while they felt another pressure, that of the ma.s.s of the Browns in pursuit.

Of all those of Fraca.s.se's company whom we know, only the judge's son and Jacob Pilzer were alive. Stained with blood and dust, his teeth showing in a grimace of mocking hate of all humankind, Pilzer's savagery ran free of the restraint of discipline and civilized convention.

Striking right and left, he forced his way out of the region of sh.e.l.l fire and still kept on. Clubbing his rifle, he struck down one officer who tried to detain him; but another officer, quicker than he, put a revolver bullet through his head.

Westerling, who had buried his face in his hands in Marta's presence at the thought of failure, must keep the pose of his position before the staff. With chin drawn in and shoulders squared in a sort of petrified military habit, he received the feverish news that grew worse with each brief bulletin. He, the chief of staff; he, Hedworth Westerling, the superman, must be a rock in the flood of alarm. When he heard that his human ram was in recoil he declared that the repulse had been exaggerated--repulses always were. With word that a heavy counter-attack was turning the retreat into an ungovernable rout, he broke into a storm. He was not beaten; he could not be beaten.

"Let our guns cut a few swaths in the mob!" he cried. "That will stop them from running and bring them back to a sense of duty to their country."

The irritating t.i.tter of the bell in the closet off the library only increased his defiance of facts beyond control. He went to the long distance with a reply to the premier's inquiry ready to his lips.

"We got into the enemy's works but had to fall back temporarily," he said.

"Temporarily! What do you mean?" demanded the premier.

"I mean that we have only begun to attack!" declared Westerling. He liked that sentence. It sounded like the shibboleth of a great leader in a crisis. "I shall a.s.sault again to-morrow night."

"Then your losses were not heavy?"

"No, not relatively. To-morrow night we press home the advantage we gained to-night."

"But you have been so confident each time. You still think that--"

"That I mean to win! There is no stopping half-way."

"Well, I'll still try to hold the situation here," replied the premier.

"But keep me informed."

Drugged by his desperate stubbornness, Westerling was believing in his star again when he returned to the library. All the greater his success for being won against scepticism and fears! He summoned his chiefs of divisions, who came with the news that the Browns had taken the very redoubt from which the head of the Gray charge had started; but there they had stopped.

"Of course! Of course they stopped!" exclaimed Westerling. "They are not mad. A few are not going to throw themselves against superior numbers--our superior numbers beaten by our own panic! Lanstron is not a fool. You'll find the Browns back in their old position, working like beavers to make new defences in the morning. Meanwhile, we'll get that mob of ours into shape and find out what made them lose their nerve.

To-morrow night we shall have as many more behind them. We are going to attack again!"

The staff exchanged glances of amazement, and Turcas, his dry voice crackling like parchment, exclaimed:

"Attack again? At the same point?"

"Yes--the one place to attack!" said Westerling. "The rest of our line has abundant reserves; a needless number for anything but the offensive.

We'll leave enough to hold and draw off the rest to Engadir at once."

"But their dirigibles! A surprising number of them are over our lines,"

Bellini, the chief of intelligence, had the temerity to say.

"You will send our planes and dirigibles to bring down theirs!"

Westerling commanded.

"I have--every last one; but they outnumber us!" persisted Bellini.

"Even in retreat they can see. The air has cleared so that considerable bodies of troops in motion will be readily discernible from high alt.i.tudes. The reason for our failure last night was that they knew our plan of attack."

"They knew! They knew, after all our precautions! There is still a leak!

You--"

Westerling raised his clenched hand threateningly at the chief of intelligence, his cheeks purple with rage, his eyes bloodshot. But Bellini, with his boyish, small face and round head set close to his shoulders, remained undisturbedly exact.

"Yes, there is a leak, and from the staff," he answered. "Until I have found it this army ought to suspend any aggressive--"