Winning the Wilderness Part 55

"Then I'll enlist with the regulars," Thaine declared.

"Do you mean to follow a military life?" Carey inquired, bending forward to watch the play of light on the silvery waters, unconscious of the play of moonbeams on his silvery hair.

"No, not always," Thaine responded.

"Then why don't you go home now?" Carey went on.

Thaine sat silent for some minutes. Then he rose to his full height, the strong, muscular, agile embodiment of military requirement. On his face the firing line had graven a n.o.bility the old brown Kansas prairies had never seen.

He did not know how to tell Dr. Carey, because he did not yet fully understand himself, that war to him must be a means, not an end, to his career; nor that in the long quiet hours in the hospital the call of the Kansas prairies, half a world away, was beginning to reach his ears, the belief that the man behind the plow may be no less a patriot than the man behind the gun; that the lifelong influence of his farmer father and mother was unconsciously winning him back to the peaceful struggle with the soil. At length he said slowly:

"Dr. Carey, when I saw Lieutenant Alford brought in I counted the cost again. Only American ideals of government and civilization can win this wilderness. For this Alford's blood was shed. He wrote to his mother on Christmas day that he was studying here to get his Master's Degree from the Kansas University. I saw him just after he had received his diploma for that Degree. I was a fairly law-abiding civilian. The first shot of the campaign last February began in me what Alford's sacrifice completed.

I am waiting to see what next. But I have one thing firmly fixed now.

Warfare only opens the way for the wilderness winners to come in and make a kingdom. The Remington rifle runs back the frontier line; the plowshare holds the land at last. I want, when my service here is done, to go back to the wheatfields and the cornfields. I want to smell the alfalfa and see the prairie windbreaks and be king of a Kansas farm. I've lost my ambition for gold lace. I want a bigger mental ring of growth every year, and I believe the biggest place for me to get this will be with my feet on the prairie sod. Meantime, I shall reenlist, as I said."

"Sit down, Thaine, and let me ask you one question," Dr. Carey said.

The young man dropped to his seat again.

"When your service is done is there anything to hold you from going straight to the Gra.s.s River Valley again?"

Thaine leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head while he looked steadily at the splashing waters before him as he said frankly:

"Yes, there is. When I go back I want Leigh Shirley--and it's no use wanting."

"Thaine, you were a law-abiding civilian at home. The university made you a student. You came out here a fearless soldier to fight your country's enemies. Alford's death made you a patriot who would plant American ideals in these islands. May I tell you that there is still one more lesson to learn?"

Thaine looked up inquiringly.

"You must learn to be a Christian. You must know what service for humanity means. Then the call to duty will be a bugle note of victory wherever that duty may be. You needn't hunt for opportunity to prove this. The opportunity is hurrying toward you now from out of the Unknown."

The fine head with the heavy ma.s.ses of white hair seemed halo-crowned at that moment. It was as he appeared that night that Thaine Aydelot always remembers him. Two weeks later Thaine enlisted in the Fourteenth United States Infantry, stationed in Luzon. Dr. Carey was also enrolled in its hospital staff. In July the regiment was ordered from the Philippines to join the allied armies of the World Powers at Tien-Tsin in a northern Chinese province, where the Boxer forces were ma.s.sing about Peking. And Thaine's opportunity for learning his greatest lesson came hurrying toward him from out of the Unknown.

This notorious Boxer uprising, gone now into military annals, had reached the high tide of its power. Beginning in the southern province of China, it spread northward, menacing the entire Empire. A secret sect at first, it was augmented by the riffraff that feeds on any new, and especially lawless, body; by deserters disloyal to the imperial government; by the ignorant and the unthinking; by the intimidated and the intimidating. It enrolled an armed force of one hundred and seventy-five thousand soldiers.

Its purposes were fanatical. It aimed by the crudest means to root out every idea of modern life and thought in China; every occidental invention, every progressive method of society, every scientific discovery for the betterment of humanity. And especially did it aim to put to death every native Chinese Christian, to ma.s.sacre every missionary of the Christ, and to drive out or destroy every foreign citizen in China. Its resources were abundant, its equipment was ample, its methods unspeakably atrocious. Month after month the published record of this rebellion was sickening--its unwritten history beyond human imagining. Impenetrable were its walled cities, countless in numbers, unknown the scenes of its vast plains and rivers and barren fields and mountain fastnesses. Fifteen thousand native Christians and hundreds of foreigners were brutally ma.s.sacred. At last it centered its strength about the great city of Peking. And a faint, smothered wail for deliverance came from the Foreign Legation shut in behind beleaguered walls inside that city to starve or perish at the hands of the b.l.o.o.d.y Boxers.

Very patiently the World Powers waited and warned the Chinese leaders of a day of retribution. Fanatics are fanatics because they cannot learn. The conditions only whetted the Boxers to greater barbarity. They believed themselves invincible and they laughed to scorn all thought of foreign interference. Then came the sword of the Lord and of Gideon to the battle lines at Tien-Tsin on the Peiho River, as it came once long ago to the valley of Jezreel.

In the mid-afternoon of an August day Thaine Aydelot heard the bugle note calling the troops to marching order. Thaine was fond of the bugler, a little fifteen-year-old Kansas boy named Kemper, because he remembered that Asher Aydelot had been a drummer boy once when he was no older than "Little Kemper," as the regiment called him.

"I wish you were where my father is now, Kemper," Thaine said as the boy skipped by him.

"Where's that? It can't be h.e.l.l or he'd be with us," Little Kemper replied.

"No, he's in Kansas," Thaine said.

"Oh, that's right next door to heaven, but I can't go just yet. There's too much doing here," the little bugler declared as he hurried away.

Young as he was, Little Kemper was the busiest member of the regiment.

Life with him was a continual "doing" and he did it joyously and well.

"There's something doing here." Thaine hardly had time to think it as the armies came into their places. It was the third day after the regiment had reached Tien-Tsin. Along the Peiho river lay a sandy plain with scant tillage and great stretches of barren lands. Here and there were squalid villages with now and then a few more pretentious structures with adobe brick walls and tiled roofs. Everywhere was the desolation of ignorance and fear, saddening enough, without the Boxer rebellion to intensify it with months of dreadful warfare.

As Thaine fell into his place he thought of the Aydelot wheatfields and of the alfalfa that Leigh Shirley's patient judgment had helped to spread over the Cloverdale Ranch. And even in the face of such big things as he was on his way to meet the conquest of the prairie soil seemed wonderful.

Big things were waiting him now, and his heart throbbed with their bigness as his regiment took its place. It was a wonderful company that fell into line and swung up the Peiho river that August afternoon. The world never saw its like before, and may never see it again. Not wonderful in numbers, for there were only sixteen thousand of the allied armies, all told, to pit themselves against an armed force able to line up one hundred and sixteen thousand against them. Not numbers, but varying nationalities, varying races, strange confusion of tongues, with one common purpose binding all into one body, made the company forming on the banks of the Peiho a wonderful one.

Thaine's regiment was drawn up at an angle with the line, ready to fall into its place among the reserves, and the young Kansan watched the flower of the world's soldiery file along the way.

In the front were the little brown j.a.panese Cavalry, Artillery, and Infantry--men who in battle make dying as much their business as living.

Beside these were the English forces, the Scotch Highlanders, the Welsh Fusiliers, the Royal Artillery, all in best array. Behind them the Indian Empire troops, the Sikh Infantry with a sprinkling of Sepoys and the Mounted Bengalese Lancers. Then followed, each in its place, the Italian marines and foot soldiery, the well-groomed French troops from all branches of the military; the stalwart, fair-haired Germans, soldiers to a finish in weight and training; the Siberian Cossacks and the Russian Infantry and Cavalry, big, brutal looking men whom women of any nation might fear. In reserve at the last of the line were the American forces, the Ninth and Fourteenth Regiments of Infantry, the Sixth Cavalry, and F Battery of the Fifth Artillery.

So marched the host from Tien-Tsin along the sandy plains, led on by one purpose, to reach the old city of Peking and save the lives of the foreign citizens shut up inside their compound--whether ma.s.sacred, or living, starved, and tortured, this allied army then could not know.

The August day was intensely hot, with its hours made grievous by a heavy, humid air, and the sand and thick dust ground and flung up in clouds by sixteen thousand troops, with all the cavalry hoofs and artillery wheels.

It was only a type of the ten days that followed, wherein heat and dust and humid air, and thirst--burning, maddening thirst--joined together against the brave soldiery fighting not for fortune, nor glory, nor patriotism, but for humanity.

As they tramped away in military order, Thaine Aydelot said to his nearest comrade:

"Goodrich, I saw a familiar German face up in the line."

"Friend of yours the Emperor sent out to keep you company?" Goodrich inquired with a smile.

"No, a Kansas joint-keeper named Hans Wyker. What do you suppose put him against the Boxers?"

"Oh, the army is the last resort for some men. It's society's clearing house," Goodrich replied.

The speaker was a Harvard man, a cultured gentleman, in civil life a University Professor. The same high purpose was in his service that controlled Thaine Aydelot now.

"I don't like being at the tail-end of this procession," a big German from the Pennsylvania foundries declared, as he trudged st.u.r.dily along under the blazing sun. The courage in his determined face and his huge strength would warrant him a place in the front line anywhere.

"Nor I, Schwoebel," Thaine declared. "I came out with Funston's 'Fighting Twentieth.' I'm used to being called back, not tolled along after the rear."

"Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!" roared Schwoebel in a tremendous bellow.

"Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!" a Pennsylvania University man named McLearn followed Schwoebel.

"Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!" went down the whole line of infantry.

The old Kansas University yell, taken to the Philippines by college men, became the battle cry of the Twentieth Kansas Volunteers, who when they returned to civil life, left it there for the American, army--and "Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!" became the American watchword and cry of all that "far flung battle line" marching on through dust and heat to rescue the imperiled Christians in a beleagured fortress inside the impregnable city of Peking.

"You needn't worry about the rear, Aydelot. One engagement may whip this line about, end to end, or it may scale off all that's in front of us and leave nothing but the rear. All this before we have time to change collars again. We'll let you or Tasker here lead into Peking," an Indiana University man declared.

"That's good of you, Binford. Some Kansas man will be first to carry the flag into Peking. It might as well be Aydelot."

This from Tasker, a slender young fellow from a Kansas railroad office.

So they joked as they tramped along. It was nearly midnight when they pitched camp before the little village of Peit-Tsang beside the Peiho.