II
At ten o'clock the next morning, the two cars were moving at sixty miles an hour along a road that ran parallel with the German trenches. There was a slight screen of canvas to hide the traffic, for the road by Dead-Man's-Corner was not the safest way into Arras at that time. But they reached the city without misadventure, and May Margaret felt nearer now than ever to the secret of the quest.
No dream was ever so strange as this great echoing shell of the deserted city where he, too, had walked so recently. He, too, had passed along these cracked pavements, keeping close to the wall, in order to escape observation from the enemy, whose lines ran through one end of the city at this moment. He had seen these pitiful interiors of shattered houses, where sometimes the whole front had been blown away, leaving the furniture still intact on two floors, and even pictures, a little askew, on the walls. He had seen that little black crucifix over that bed; crossed this grass-grown square; and gone into the shattered railway-station, where the many-colored tickets were strewn like autumn leaves over the glass-littered floor. The Spaniard filled his pockets with them.
They went down a narrow street to the ruins of the cathedral. On one of the deserted houses there was a small placard advertising the Paris edition of a London paper, the only sign of the outside world in all that echoing solitude. The neutrals rejoiced greatly before a deserted insurance office, which still displayed an advertisement of its exceedingly reasonable rates for the lives of peaceful citizens. Their merriment was stopped abruptly by a hollow boom that shook the whole city and rumbled echoing along the deserted streets from end to end.
"That's a Boche shell," said Crump. "It sounds as if they've got the cathedral again."
At noon they lunched under the lee of a hill just outside Arras, that had been drenched with blood a few weeks earlier. The great seas of thunder ebbed and flowed incessantly from sky to sky, as if the hill were the one firm island in the universe and all the rest were breaking up and washing around them. The amazing incongruity of things bewildered May Margaret again. It was more fantastic than any dream. They sat there at ease, eating chicken, munching sandwiches, filling their cups with red wine and white, and ending with black coffee, piping hot from the thermos bottle. Great puffs of brown smoke rose in the distance where our shells were dropping along the German line. It looked as if the trees were walking out from a certain distant wood. Little blue rings of smoke rose from the peaceful cigarettes around her. Bees and butterflies came and went through the sunshine; and, in the stainless blue sky overhead there was a rush and rumor as of invisible trains passing to and fro. The neutrals amused themselves by trying to distinguish between our own and the enemy shells.
At two o'clock Crump rose. "I'll take you along now, Grant, if you are ready," he said. "The rest of you wait here. I shall be back in about ten minutes."
May Margaret stumbled after him down the hill. At the foot, a soldier was waiting; and, hardly conscious of the fact that she had exchanged one guide for another, she found herself plodding silently beside him on her unchanging quest, toward the communication trenches.
"What do they think about things in England, sir?" said her new companion at last, with a curiously suppressed eagerness.
"They are very hopeful," said May Margaret.
"When do they think it will be over?"
"Some of them say in six months."
"Ah, yes. I've been here three years now, and they always say that. At the end of the six months they'll say it again."
It was the first open note of depression that May Margaret had heard. "Do most of the men feel like that?" she said.
"They don't say so, sir, but they all want it to be over." Then he added, with the doggedness of his kind, "Not till we get what we're fighting for, of course. You're a correspondent, sir, aren't you? Well, I never seen the real fax put in the papers yet. There was one of these soldier writers the other day. I saw his book in the Y. M. C. A. hut. He said that the only time he nearly broke his heart was when there was a rumor that Germany was asking for peace before he was able to get into it hisself. That's what I call bloody selfish, sir. All this poytry! (he spat into a shell-hole) making pictures out of it and talking about their own souls. Mind you I'm all for finishing it properly; but it ain't right, the way they look at it. It's like saying they're glad the Belgians had their throats cut because it's taught their own bloody selves the beauty of sacrifice. If what they say is true, why in the hell do they want the war ever to stop at all? P'raps if it went on for ever, we should all of us learn the bloody beauty of it, and keep on learning it till there wasn't any one left. There was a member of Parliament out here the other day. He saw three poor chaps trying to wash in a mine-crater full of muddy water. Covered with lice they was. The paper described it afterwards. The right honorable gentleman laughed 'artily, it said, same as they say about royalty. Always laughing 'artily. P'raps he didn't laugh. I dunno about that. But if he did, I'd like him to 'ave a taste of the fun hisself."
They were entering the long tunnel of the communication-trench now. The soldier went ahead, and May Margaret followed, through smells of earth, and the reek of stale uniforms, for a mile or more, till they came to the alert eyes along the fire-step of the front-line trench.
"Here's Major Hilton, sir." A lean young man with a thin aquiline nose and a face of Indian red approached them, stepping like a cat along the trench.
"Mr. Grant," he said.
May Margaret nodded, and they were about to shake hands, when one side of the trench seemed to rise up and smash against their faces, with a roar that stunned them. May Margaret picked herself up at once, wiping the bits of grit out of her eyes. The bombardment appeared to be growing in intensity.
"That was pretty near," said Major Hilton. "You'd better come into my dugout till this blows over."
He led the way into his gloomy little cavern. It was not much of a shelter from a direct hit; but it would protect them from flying splinters at least.
"Mr. Davidson was my friend," said May Margaret at once. "I know his people. I think there must be some mistake about ... about the grave."
"You're not a relative of his, are you?" said Major Hilton. "Had you known him for long?"
"No. Less than a year."
"Well, I don't mind telling you that there was a mistake. We discovered it a few hours after it was made; but we thought it better not to upset his people by giving them further details."
"He was killed, then," May Margaret whispered; and, if the darkness of the dugout had not veiled her face, Major Hilton would not have continued.
"Yes. It was a trench raid. The Boches took a section of our trenches. When we recovered it, we found him. You'd better not tell his people, but I don't mind telling you. It was a pretty bad case."
"What do you mean?"
"One of those filthy Boche tricks. They'd nailed him up against the lining of the trench with bayonets. He was still alive when we found him. But they'll get it all back. We're going to give 'em hell to-night."
May Margaret was silent for so long that Major Hilton peered at her more closely. Her white face looked like a bruised thing in the darkness.
"I'm sorry," he said. "Perhaps I shouldn't have told you. They have done so much of that kind of thing, I suppose we've got used to it. Well, you've been tramping about all day, and if I were you, as you're going to spend the night here, I should settle down for a bit in the dugout. The bombardment seems to be easing off a little, and you'll want to be awake all night. There'll be some sights coming on of the picturesque kind—fireworks and things, which is what you want, I suppose, for the blessed old public."
Far away, in another section of the trenches, there was a burst of cheering. Major Hilton pricked up his ears to listen; but it was drowned immediately in another blast outside that sealed the mouth of the dugout like a blow from a gigantic hammer and plunged them into complete darkness thick with dust and sand.
"Are you all right?" said Hilton, in a moment or two. "They've blown the parapet over us. Our chaps will soon get us out."
They sat down and waited. The sound of their rescuers' shovels was followed almost immediately by the pulling away of a sandbag, and the dusty daylight filtered in again, bringing with it another roar of cheering, nearer now, and rolling along the trenches like an Atlantic breaker.
"What the hell are they shouting about?" Hilton grunted, as he scrambled through the opening. May Margaret was about to follow him, when the abrupt answer struck her motionless.
"America has declared war, sir."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, sir. They are passing the President's message along the line. It looks as if they mean business."
May Margaret had moved further back into the darkness of the dugout. She was breathing quickly, panting like a thirsty dog. She dropped on her knees by an old packing-case in the corner.
"Thank God. Thank God," she repeated, with her eyes shut. Then the tears came, and her whole body shook.
A hand touched her shoulder. She rose to her feet and saw the bewildered face of Major Hilton, peering again at her own.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's the first time I've done it since I was a kid; but I've been hoping for this ever since the beginning. It's my country, you see."
"I've just been looking at the President's message," said Hilton. "I'm an Englishman, but—if a democracy can discipline itself—I'm not sure that yours won't be the greatest country in the world. I suppose it must be, or the Lord wouldn't have entrusted so much to you. He gave you the best that we ever had to give, and that was our Englishman, George Washington; and the best thing that George Washington ever did, was to fight the German King and his twenty thousand Hessians. Eh, what?"
It was a little after dusk when the unexpected happened. There had been a lull in the bombardment; and, on Major Hilton's advice, May Margaret was resting in the dugout in readiness for the long wakeful night of the trenches.
She lay there, dazed as from shell-shock by the account of Brian's death; and the declaration of war from her own country had burst upon her with an equal violence, leaving her stunned in a kind of "No Man's Land," a desolate hell, somewhere between despair and triumph. Her world had broken up. Her mind was no longer her own. Her thoughts were helpless things between enormous conflicting forces; and, as if to escape from their rending clutches, as if to cling to the present reality, she whispered to herself the words of the wounded soldier at Charing Cross station: "If you meet him, give him hell for me! Give him hell for me." It seemed as if it were Brian himself speaking. Once, with a swift sense of horror, catching herself upon the verge of insanity, she found that her imagination was furtively beginning to picture his last agony, and she stopped it, screwing her face up, like a child pulling faces at a nightmare, and making inarticulate sounds to drive it away.
Of one thing she was quite certain now. She did not wish to live any longer in a world where these things were done. She meant, by hook or by crook, to get to the dangerous bit of the trench, where our men were only separated by six yards from the enemy, and to stay there until she was killed. Even if she couldn't throw bombs herself, she supposed that she could hand them up to others. And any thought that conflicted with this idea she suppressed, automatically, with her monotonous echo of the wounded soldier, "Give them hell for me."
But she was spared any further trouble about the execution of her plans; and she knew, at once, that she had come to the end of her quest, when she heard the quick sharp cries of warning outside.
It was a trench-raid, brief, and unimportant from a military point of view. The newspapers told London, on the next day, that nothing of importance had happened. Half a dozen revolvers cracked. There were curses and groans, a sound of soft thudding blows and grunting, gasping men, followed by a loud pig-like squeal. Then May Margaret saw three faces peering cautiously into the dugout, faces of that strange brutality, heavy-boned, pig-eyed, evil-skulled, which has impressed itself upon the whole world as a distinct reversion from all civilized types of humanity. She knew them, as one recognizes the smell of carrion; and her whole soul exulted as she seized her supreme chance of striking at the evil thing. She had picked up a revolver almost unconsciously, and without pausing to think she fired three times with a steady hand. Two of them she knew that she had killed. The third had been too quick for her, and in another second she was down on her back, with a blood-greased boot on her throat, and a throng of evil-smelling cattle around her. Unhappily, they did not kill her at once; and so the discovery was made, amidst a storm of guttural exclamations.
When the trench was retaken, half an hour later, a further discovery was made by Major Hilton. A locket containing a photograph of Brian Davidson was buried in what remained of her left breast, as if it had been trying to hide in her heart. It was almost the only thing about her that was unhurt.
Major Hilton made no explanations; but when the body was removed, he gave strict orders for it to be buried by the side of Lieutenant Davidson.
A week later, Mr. Harvey, of the Chicago Bulletin, was informed that his correspondent, Mr. Martin Grant, had died of pneumonia. The authorities left the responsibility of informing others, who might be interested, to his capable hands.
He went to see Julian Sinclair about it; but he could not discover whether that sincerely regretful young diplomat with the dazzling smile and the delightful manners knew anything more. It may have been a coincidence that, shortly afterwards, Mr. Harvey was recalled to the shores of Lake Michigan, and replaced by another manager.