The Last Shot Part 73

"For this I have made my sacrifice!" Marta thought. "The killing goes on by Lanny's orders, not by Westerling's, this time."

Leaving her mother to enjoy the prospect, a slow-moving figure, trance-like, she went along the first terrace path to a point near the veranda where the whole sweep of landscape with its panorama of retreat magnetized her senses. Like the gray of lava, the Gray soldiery was erupting from the range; in columns, still under the control of officers, keeping to the defiles; in swarms and batches, under the control of nothing but their own emotions. Mostly they were hugging cover, from instinct if not from direction, but some relied on straight lines of flight and speed of foot for escape. Coursing aeroplanes were playing a new part. Their wireless was informing the Brown gunners where the ma.s.ses were thickest. This way and that the Brown artillery fire drove retreating bodies, prodding them in the back with the fearful shepherdry of their sh.e.l.ls. Officers' swords flashed in the faces of the bolters or in holding rear-guards to their work. Officers and orderlies were galloping hither and thither with messages, in want of wires.

Commanders had been told to hold, but how and where to hold? They saw neighboring regiments and brigades going and they had to go. The machine, the complicated modern war machine, was broken; the machine, with its nerves of intelligence cut, became a thing of disconnected parts, each part working out its own salvation. Authority ceased to be that of the bureau and army lists. It was that of units racked by hardship, acting on the hour's demand.

Gorged was the pa.s.s road, overflowing with the struggling tumult of men and vehicles. Self-preservation breaking the bonds of discipline was in the ascendant, and it sought the highway, even as water keeps to the river bed. Like specks on the laboring tide was the white of bandages.

An ambulance trying to cut out to one side was overturned. The frantic chauffeur and hospital-corps orderly were working to extricate the wounded from their painful position. A gun was overturned against the ambulance. A melee of horses and men was forming at the foot of the garden gate in front of the narrowing bounds of the road into the town, as a stream banks up before a jam of driftwood. The struggle for right of way became increasingly wild; the dam of men, horses, and wagons grew. A Brown dirigible was descending toward the great target; but on closer view its commander forbore, the humane impulse outweighing the desire for retribution for colleagues in camp and mess who had gone down in a holocaust in the aerial battles of the night.

Thus far the flight had seemed in the face of an unseen pursuer, like that of an army fleeing from some power visible to itself but not to Marta. Now she began to observe the flashes of rifles from the crests that the rear-guards of the Grays were deserting; then the rush of the Brown skirmish line to close quarters. Her glance pausing long on no detail, so active the landscape with its swarms and tumult, returned to the scene in front of the house. A Gray field-battery, cutting out to one side of the road, knocking over flimsier vehicles and wounded who got in the way, careening, its drivers cursing and officers shouting, galloped out in the open field and unlimbered to support a regiment of infantry that was hastily intrenching as a point to steady the retreating ma.s.ses on its front and protect them in their flight when they had pa.s.sed.

Marta saw how desperately the gunners worked; she could feel their fatigue. Nature had sunk in her heart a partisanship for the under dog.

She who had stood for the three against five, now stood for the shaken, bewildered five in the c.o.c.kpit under the fire of the three. Her sympathies went out to every beaten, weary Gray soldier. What was the difference between a Gray and a Brown? Weren't they both made of flesh and bone and blood and nerves?

Under the awful spell of the panorama, she did not see Westerling, who had stopped only a few feet distant with his aide and his valet, nor did he notice her as the tumult glazed his eyes. He was as an artist who looks on the ribbons of the canvas of his painting, or the sculptor on the fragments of his statue. Worse still, with no faith to give him fort.i.tude except the materialistic, he saw the altar of his G.o.d of military efficiency in ruins. He who had not allowed the word retreat to enter his lexicon now saw a rout. He had laughed at reserve armies in last night's feverish defiance, at Turcas's advocacy of a slower and surer method of attack. In those hours of smiting at a wall with his fists and forehead, in denial of all the truth so clear to average military logic, if he had only given a few conventional directions all this disorder would have been avoided. His army could have fallen back in orderly fashion to their own range. The machine out of order, he had attempted no repair; he had allowed it to thrash itself to pieces.

The splinters of its debris--steel splinters--were lacerating his brain.

He had a sense that madness was coming and some instinct of self-preservation made the whole scene grow misty, as he tried to resolve it out of existence in the desire for some one object which was not his guns and his men in demoralization. A bit of pink caught his eye--the pink of a dress, a little girl's dress, down there at the edge of the garden by the road, at the same moment that some guns of the Browns, in a new position, opened on an inviting target. Over her head was a crack and a blue tongue of smoke whipped out of nothing; while a shower of shrapnel bullets made spurts of dust around her. She started to run toward the terrace steps and another burst made her run in the opposite direction, while she looked about in a paralysis of fear and then threw herself on her face.

"My G.o.d! That little girl--there--there!" Westerling exclaimed distractedly.

"Clarissa! Clarissa!" cried Marta, seeing the child for the first time.

She started precipitately to the rescue, but a hand on her arm arrested her and she turned to see Hugo Mallin bound past her down the slope.

Still remaining on the premises under guard while Westerling had neglected to dispose of the case, he had the run of the grounds that morning while the staff was feverishly preparing for departure.

Marta watched him leaping from terrace to terrace. Before he had reached Clarissa worse than shrapnel bursts happened. The spatter of the fragments and bullets falling on either side of the road whipped the edges of the struggling human jam inward. In the midst of this a percussion sh.e.l.l struck, bursting on contact with the road and spreading its own grist of death and the stones of the road in a fan-shaped, mowing swath. Legs and bodies were thrown out as if driven centrifugally by a powerful breath, with Hugo lost in the smoke and dust of the weaving ma.s.s. He came out of it bearing Clarissa in his arms, up the terrace steps. To Marta, this was an isolated deed of saving life, of mercy in the midst of merciless slaughter; a parallel to that of Stransky bringing in Grandfather Fragini pickaback.

"Big fireworks!" said Clarissa Eileen as Hugo set her down in front of Marta, whose heart was in her eyes speaking its grat.i.tude.

The artillery's maceration of the human jam suddenly ceased; perhaps because the gunners had seen the Red Cross flag which a doctor had the presence of mind to wave. Westerling turned from a sight worse to him than the killing--that of the flowing retreat along the road pressing frantically over the dead and wounded in growing disorder for the cover of the town, and found himself face to face with the mask-like features of that malingerer who had told him on the veranda that the Grays could not win. Gall flooded his brain. In Hugo he recognized something kindred to the spirit that had set his army at flight, something tangible and personified; and through a mist of rage he saw Hugo smiling--smiling as he had at times at the veranda court--and saluting him as a superior officer.

"Now I am going to fight," said Hugo, "if they try to cross the white posts; to fight with all the skill and courage I can command. But not till then. They are still in their own country and we are not in ours.

Then they, in the wrong, will attack and we, in the right, will defend--and, G.o.d with us, we shall win."

Thus a second time he had given to the prayer of Marta's children the life of action. She could imagine how steadfastly and exaltedly he would face the invader.

"Thank you, Miss Galland," he said. "And say good-by to your mother and Minna for me."

He was gone, without waiting for any reply, this stranger whom her part had not permitted to know well. A thousand words striving for utterance choked her as she watched him pa.s.s out of sight. Westerling was regarding her with a stare which fixed itself first on one thing and then on another in dull misery. Near by were Bellini, the chief of intelligence, and a subaltern who had arrived only a minute before. The subaltern was dust-covered. He seemed to have come in from a hard ride.

Both were watching Marta, as if waiting for her to speak. She met Westerling's look steadily, her eyes dark and still and in his the reflection of the vague realization of more than he had guessed in her relations with Hugo.

"Well," she breathed to Westerling, "the war goes on!"

"That's it! That's the voice!" exclaimed the subaltern in an explosion of recognition.

A short, sharp laugh of irony broke from Bellini; the laugh of one whose suspicions are confirmed in the mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. Marta looked around at the interruption, alert, on guard.

"You seem amused," she remarked curiously.

"No, but you must have been," replied Bellini hoa.r.s.ely. "Early this morning, not far from the castle, this young officer found in the crater made by a ten-inch sh.e.l.l a wire that ran in a conduit underground. The wire was intact. He tapped it. He heard a voice thanking some one for her part in the victory, and it seems that the woman's voice that answered is yours, Miss Galland. So, General Westerling, the leak in information was over this wire from our staff into the Browns'

headquarters, as Bouchard believed and as I came to believe."

So long had Marta expected this moment of exposure that it brought no shock. Her spirit had undergone many subtle rehearsals for the occasion.

"Yes, that is true," she heard herself saying, a little distantly, but very quietly and naturally.

Westerling fell back as from a blow in the face. His breath came hard at first, like one being strangled. Then it sank deep in his chest and his eyes were bloodshot, as a bull's in his final effort against the matador. He raised a quivering, clenched fist and took a step nearer her.

But far from flinching, Marta seemed to be greeting the blow, as if she admitted his right to strike. She was without any sign of triumph and with every sign of relief. Lying was at an end. She could be truthful.

"Do you recall what I said in the reception-room at the hotel?" she asked.

The question sent a flash into a hidden chamber of his mind. Now the only thing he could remember of that interview was the one remark which hitherto he had never included in his recollection of it.

"You said I could not win." He drew out the words painfully.

"And I pleaded with your selfishness--the only appeal to be made to you," she continued, "to prevent war, which you could have done. When you said that you brought on this war to gratify your ambition, I chose to be one of the weapons of war; I chose, when driven to the wall, to be true to that part of my children's oath that made an exception of the burglar, the highwayman, and the invader. In war you use deceit and treachery, under the pleasanter names of tactics and strategy, to draw men to their death in traps, in order to increase the amount of your killing. It was strategy, tactics, manoeuvres--give it any fine word you please--that hideous and shameless part which I played. With fire I fought fire. I fought for civilization, for my home, with the only means I had against the wickedness of a victory of conquest--the precedent of it in this age--a victory which should glorify such trickery as you practised on your people."

"I should like to shoot you dead!" cried Bellini.

"No doubt. I like your honesty in saying so," said Marta. "Why not? The business of war is murder; and as I have engaged in it I can claim no exception. And why shouldn't women engage in it? Why should they be excepted from the sport when they pay so many of the costs? It's easy to die and easy to kill. The part you force on women is much harder. By killing me you admit me to full equality."

"You--you--" But Bellini had no adequate word for her, and his anger softened into a kind of admiration of her, of envy, perhaps, that he had had no such adjutant. It hardened again as he looked Westerling up and down, before turning to leave without a salute or even a direct word.

"And you let me make love to you!" Westerling said in a dazed, groping monotone to Marta.

Such a wreck was he of his former self that she found it amazing that she could not pity him. Yet she might have pitied him had he plunged into the fight; had he tried to rally one of the broken regiments; had he been able to forget himself.

"Rather, you made love to yourself through me," she answered, not harshly, not even emphatically, but merely as a statement of pa.s.sionless fact. "If you dared to endure what you ordered others to endure for the sake of your ambition; if--"

She was interrupted by a sharp zip in the air. Westerling dodged and looked about wildly.

"What is that?" he asked. "What?"

Five or six zips followed like a charge of wasps flying at a speed that made them invisible. Marta felt a brush of air past her cheek and Westerling went chalky white. It was the first time he had been under fire. But these bullets were only strays. No more came.

"Come, general, let us be going!" urged the aide, touching his chief on the arm.

"Yes, yes!" said Westerling hurriedly.

Francois, who had picked up the coat that had fallen from Westerling's shoulders with his start at the buzzing, held it while his master thrust his hands through the sleeves.

"And this is wiser," said the aide, unfastening the detachable insignia of rank from the shoulders of the greatcoat. "It's wiser, too, that we walk," he added.

"Walk? But my car!" exclaimed Westerling petulantly.

"I'm afraid that the car could not get through the press in the town,"

was the reply. "Walking is safer."

The absence in him of that quality which is the soldier's real glory, the picture of this deserted leader, this G.o.d of a machine who had been crushed by his machine, his very lack of stoicism or courage--all this suddenly appealed to Marta's quick sympathies. They had once drunk tea together.