Winning the Wilderness Part 56

In the dim dawning of the August morning Little Kemper's bugle sounded the morning reveille. Thaine was just dreaming of home and he thought the first bugle note was the call for him up the stairway of the Sunflower Inn. His windows looked out on the Aydelot wheatfields and the grove beyond, and every morning the sunrise across the level eastern prairie made a picture only the hand of the Infinite could paint. This morning he opened his eyes on a far different scene. The reveille became a call to arms and the troops fell into line ready for battle.

Before the sun had reached the zenith the line was whipped end to end, as Binford of Indiana had said it might be. In this engagement on the sandy plain about the little village of Peit-Tsang, Thaine with his comrades saw what it meant to lead that battle line. He saw the brave little j.a.panese mowed down like standing grain before the reaper's sickle. He saw the ranks move swiftly up to take the places of the fallen, never wavering nor retreating, rushing to certain death as to places of vantage in a coronal pageantry. The Filipino's Mauser was as deadly as the older style gun of the Boxer. A bullet aimed true does a bullet's work. But in this battle that raged about Peit-Tsang Thaine quickly discovered that this was no fight in a Filipino jungle. Here was real war, as big and terrible above the campaigns he had known in Luzon as the purpose in it was big above loyalty to the flag and extension of American dominion and ideals.

When the thing was ended with the routing of the Boxer forces, of the sixteen thousand that went into battle a t.i.the of one-tenth of their number lay dead on the plains--sixteen hundred men, the cost of conquest in a far wilderness. The heaviest toll fell on the brave j.a.panese who had led in the attack.

Thaine Aydelot did not dream of home that night. He slept on his arms the heavy sleep of utter weariness, which Little Kemper's bugle call broke at three o'clock the next morning. Before the August sun had crawled over the eastern horizon the armies were swinging up the Peiho river toward Peking.

The American troops were leading the column now, as Thaine Aydelot had wished they might, and in all that followed after the day at Peit-Tsang the Stars and Stripes, brave token of a brave people, floated above the front lines of soldiery, even to the end of the struggle.

It was high noon above the Orient, where the Peiho flows beside the populous town of Yang-Tsun. The Boxer army routed by the battle of Peit-Tsang had ma.s.sed its front before the town, a formidable array in numbers, equipment, and frenzied eagerness to halt here and forever the poor little line of foreign soldiers creeping in upon it from the sea. The Boxers knew that they could match the fighting strength of this line with quadruple force. The troops coming toward them had marched twelve miles under the August heat of a hundred degrees, through sand and alkali dust, in the heavy humid air saturated with evil odors. They had had no food since the night before, nor a drink of water since daydawn. Joyful would it be to slaughter here the entire band and then rush back to the h.o.a.ry old City of Peking with the triumphant message that the Allied Armies of the World had fallen before China. Then the death of every foreigner in the Empire would be certain.

At noon the battle lines were formed. In the swinging into place as Thaine Aydelot stood beside Tasker, surrounded by his comrades, Little Kemper dashed by him.

"Here's where the corn-fed Kansans do their work," he said gaily to the Kansas men.

"With a few bean-eaters from Boston to help," Goodrich responded.

"And a Hoosier to give them culture," Binford added.

"Yes, yes, with the William Penn Quakers and the Pennsylvania Dutch,"

Schwoebel roared, striking McLearn on the shoulder.

Men think of many things as the battle breaks, but never do they fight less bravely because they have laughed the moment before.

Thaine was in the very front of the battle lines. In the pause before the first onslaught he thought of many things confusedly and a few most vividly. He thought of Leigh Shirley and her childish dream of Prince Quippi in China--the China just beyond the purple notches. He thought of his mother as she had looked that spring morning when he talked of enlisting for the Spanish War. He thought of his father, who had never known fear in his life. Of his last words:

"As thy days so shall thy strength be."

And keenly he remembered Dr. Carey, somewhere among the troops behind him.

The fine head crowned with white hair, caressed by the moonbeams, as he had seen it in the Manila garden, and his earnest words:

"You must learn to be a Christian. You must know what service for humanity means. You need not hunt for the opportunity to prove this. The opportunity is hurrying toward you now out of the Unknown."

"It is here, the opportunity," he murmured. "Oh, G.o.d, make me a fit soldier for Thy service."

He did not pray for safety from danger and death; he asked for fitness to serve and in that moment his great lesson was learned. There came an instant's longing for Dr. Carey; then the battle storm burst and he did not think any more, he fought. It were useless to picture that struggle.

Nothing counts in warfare till the results are shown. For six hours the fighting did not cease, and not at Valley Forge, nor Brandywine, Lake Erie, nor Buena Vista, Gettysburg, nor Shiloh, San Juan Hill, nor in any jungle in Luzon did the American flag stream out over greater heroes than it led today on the plains beside the Peiho river before Yang-Tsun.

At last the firing ceased, the smoke lifted above the field; the Boxers, gathering their shattered forces together, retreated again before the little line of Allied Troops invading this big strange land. And the last hours of that long hot day waned to eventide.

There were only a few of its events that Thaine could comprehend. He knew Little Kemper had received his death wound, blowing his bugle calls again and again after he had been stricken, till the last reveille sounded for him. The plucky little body with the big soul, who had found his brief fifteen years of life so full of "doing."

Thaine knew that in the thick of the fight the native Indian Infantry, the Sikhs and Sepoys, had fallen in cowardly fear before the Boxer fire. He remembered how big Schwoebel, and Tasker, and Binford, Goodrich, and McLearn, with himself and another man whom he recalled afterward as Boehringer, a Kansas man, had clubbed self-respect into a few of them and kicked the other whining cowards from their way. He knew that Schwoebel had been grievously wounded and was being taken back to Tien-Tsin with many other brave fellows who had been stricken that day. He knew that near the last of the fray a man whom he had admired and loved second to Lieutenant Alford, big Clint Graham, of a royally fine old family of state builders in far-away Kansas, had fallen by the mistaken shot of Russian cannon, and the weight of that loss hung heavy about the edge of his consciousness wherever he turned. But what followed the battle Thaine Aydelot will never forget.

Twelve hundred men rose no more from that b.l.o.o.d.y field before Yang-Tsun.

The fighting force, sixteen thousand strong, was wearing off at the rate of almost a regiment and a half a day, and it was yet a hundred miles to Peking.

All about Thaine were men with faces grimy as his own; their lips, like his, split and purple from the alkali dust. They had had no water to drink in all that long day's twelve miles of marching and six hours of fighting.

Fearful is the price paid out when the wilderness goes forth to war! And heroic, sublimely heroic, may be the Christianity of the battlefield.

"We must help these fellows," Thaine said to his comrades as the wail for water went up from wounded men.

"The river is this way," McLearn declared. "Hurry! the boys are dying."

So over countless forms they hurried to the river's brink for water.

Thaine and Tasker and Boehringer were accustomed to muddy streams, for the prairie waters are never clear. But Goodrich from Boston had a memory of mountain brooks. The Pennsylvania man, McLearn, the cold springs of the Alleghanies, and for Binford there was old Broad Ripple out beyond Indianapolis. All these men came down with dry canteens to the Peiho by Yang-Tsun. The river was choked with dead Chinamen and dead dogs and horses. They must push aside the bodies to find room to dip in their canteens.

"You have one more lesson. You must learn to be a Christian."

Somehow the words seemed to ring round and round just out of Thaine's mental sight.

"Va.s.ser! Va.s.ser!" cried a big German soldier before him.

Thaine stooped to give him a drink, and as he lifted up the man's head he saw the stained face of Hans Wyker.

"It's very goot," Hans murmured, licking his lips for more. "Wisky not so goot as va.s.ser," and then he trailed off into a delirium. "Don't tell.

Don't tell," he pleaded. "I neffer mean to get Schmitt. I not know he would be der yet. I hide for Yacob, an' I get Schmitt in der back and I only want Yacob. He send me to der pen for sure yet next time. I hate Yon Yacob."

A little silence, then Hans murmured:

"I didn't go to Kansas City. I coom back to Gretchen's home by Little Wolf. I hide where I watch for Yacob. I shoot twice to be sure of Yacob, an' Schmitt, hidin' in der crack by der roat, get one shot. So I coom to Yermany and enlist. Gretchen, she coom too an' she stay der. Vell! I help fight Boxer some. Mine Gott, forgif me. I do once some goot for der world dis day."

And that was the last of Wyker.

The twilight hour was near. The wounded had been borne away by busy Red Cross angels of mercy. Wide away across the Chinese plain the big red sun slipped down the amber summer sky into a bath of molten flame. Then out of sight behind the edge of the world it turned all the west into one magnificent surge of scarlet glory, touching to beauty the tiny gray cloud flecks far away to the eastward; while long rivers of golden light by rivers of roseate glow mingled at last along the zenith in one vast sweep of mother-of-pearl. A cool breeze came singing in from the sea--fanning the fevered faces of the weary soldiers. The desolate places were hidden by the deepening shadows, and the serenity of the twilight hour fell on the battlefield.

Then the men of each nationality went out to bury their dead. Swiftly the little brown j.a.panese digged and filled up the graves into which their comrades were deftly heaped. The Russian and Siberian Cossack lunged their fallen ones in heavily and unfeelingly. The Bengalese and Sikhs thrust their own out of sight as they were planting for an uncertain harvest.

Each soldier from France who lost his life on that battlefield fell on his own grave and there his countrymen covered him over, an unmarked spot in a foreign land.

Thaine straightened a minute above his spade. The cool breezes were grateful to his heated brow. The after-sunset glow seemed like the benediction of the Infinite on the closing act of the day. He saw the hurried and unfeeling dumping of bodies into the holes awaiting them. Then his heart grew big with something unspeakable as he noted how in all that irreverent and unsympathetic action the American and English soldiery alone were serving as brother for brother. In the long trenches prepared for them their dead were laid with reverent dignity and gentleness. Each one's place was carefully marked with a numbered slab that in a future day the sacred dust might be carried back to the soil of the homeland. As the sunset deepened to richer coloring and the battlefield grew still and still, far along the lines the bands of the English Royal Artillery and the Welsh Fusiliers, with the bagpipes of the Scottish Highlanders, mingled their music with the music of the splendid band of the Fourteenth American Infantry in the sweet and sacred strains of the beloved old hymn:

Nearer, my G.o.d, to Thee, Nearer to Thee.

E'en though it be a cross That raiseth me.

Still all my song shall be Nearer, my G.o.d, to Thee, Nearer to Thee.

And Thaine Aydelot knew that his last and biggest lesson was learned.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE END OF THE WILDERNESS

Have I named one single river? Have I claimed one single acre?

Have I kept one single nugget (barring samples)? No, not I.