XLIII
JOVE'S ISOLATION
An hour or so before the attack the telegraph instruments in the Galland house had become pregnantly silent. There were no more orders to give; no more reports to come from the troops in position until the assault was made. Officers of supply ceased to transmit routine matters over the wire, while they strained their eyes toward the range. Officers of the staff moved about restlessly, glancing at their watches and going to the windows frequently to see if the mist still held.
No one entered the library where Westerling was seated alone with nothing to do. His suspense was that of the mothers who longed for news of their sons at the front; his helplessness that of a man in a hospital lobby waiting on the result of an operation whose success or failure will save or wreck his career. The physical desire of movement, the conflict with something in his own mind, drove him out of doors.
"I want to blow my lungs in the fresh air! Call me if I am needed. I shall be in the garden," he told his aide; and he thought that his voice sounded calm and natural, as became Jove in a crisis that unnerved lesser men. "Though I fancy it is the other chief of staff who will have the work to do this evening, eh?" he added, forcing one of the smiles which had been the magnetic servant of his personal force in his rise to power.
"Yes, Your Excellency," said the aide.
Westerling was rather pleased with the fact that he could still smile; pleased with the loyalty of this young officer when, day by day, the rest of the staff had grown colder and more mechanical in the attitude that completed his isolation. Walking vigorously along the path toward the tower, the exercise of his muscles, the feel of the cool, moist air on his face, brought back some of the buoyancy of spirit that he craved. A woman's figure, with a cape thrown over the shoulders and the head bare, loomed out of the mist.
"I couldn't stay in—not to-night," Marta said, as Westerling drew near. "I had to see. It's only a quarter of an hour now, isn't it?"
"The Browns may sing 'God with us,' but He seems to have been with the Grays," Westerling answered. "Our whole movement was perfectly screened by the heavy weather."
"But they know—they know every detail that you have told me!" ran her mocking, scarifying thought. "And this will be the most terrible attack of all?" she asked faintly.
"Yes, such a concentration of men and guns as never were driven against any position—an irresistible force," he said. "Irresistible!" he repeated with a heavy emphasis.
"But if the Browns did know where you were going to attack?" she asked absently and still more faintly. "The sacrifice of lives then would be all the greater?"
"Yes, we should have to pay a higher price, but still we should be irresistible—irresistible!" he answered.
Ghastly faces were staring at her, their lips moving in death to excoriate her. It was not too late to tell him the truth; not too late to stop the attack. Her head had sunk; she trembled and swayed and a kind of moan escaped her. She seemed utterly frail and so distraught that Westerling, in an impulse of protection, laid his hands on her relaxed shoulders. She could feel the pressure of each finger growing firmer in its power, while a certain eloquence possessed him in defiance of his apprehensions.
"Our cause is at stake to-night," he declared, "yours and mine! We must win, you and I! It is our destiny!"
"You and I!" repeated Marta. "Why you and I?"
It seemed very strange to be thinking of any two persons when hundreds of thousands were awaiting the signal for the death prepared by him. He mistook the character of her thought in the obsession of his egoism.
"What do lives mean?" he cried with a sudden desperation, his grip of her shoulders tightening. "It is the law of nature for man to fight. Unless he fights he goes to seed. One trouble with our army is that it was soft from the want of war. It is the law of nature for the fittest to survive! Other sons will be born to take the place of those who die to-night. There will be all the more room for those who live. Victory will create new opportunities. What is a million out of the billions on the face of the earth? Those who lead alone count—those who dwell in the atmosphere of the peaks, as we do!" The pressure of his strong hands in the unconscious emphasis of his passion became painful; but she did not protest or try to draw away, thinking of his hold in no personal sense but as a part of his self-revelation. "All—all is at stake there!" he continued, staring toward the range. "It's the Rubicon! I have put my career on to-night's cast! Victory means that the world will be at our feet—honor, position, power greater than that of any other two human beings! Do you realize what that means—the honor and the power that will be ours? I shall have directed the greatest army the world has ever known to victory!"
"And defeat means—what does defeat mean?" she asked narrowly, calmly; and the pointed question released her shoulders from the vise.
What had been a shadow in his thoughts became a live monster, striking him with the force of a blow. He forgot Marta. Yes, what would defeat mean to him? Sheer human nature broke through the bonds of mental discipline weakened by sleepless nights. Convulsively his head dropped as he covered his face.
"Defeat! Fail! That I should fail!" he moaned.
Then it was that she saw him in the reality of his littleness, which she had divined; this would-be conqueror. She saw him as his intimates often see the great man without his front of Jove. Don't we know that Napoleon had moments of privacy when he whined and threatened suicide? She wondered if Lanny, too, were like that—if it were not the nature of all conquerors who could not have their way. It seemed to her that Westerling was beneath the humblest private in his army—beneath even that fellow with the liver patch on his cheek who had broken the chandelier in the sport of brutal passion. All sense of her own part was submerged in the sight of a chief of staff exhibiting no more stoicism than a petulant, spoiled schoolboy.
While his head was still bent the artillery began its crashing thunders and the sky became light with flashes. His hands stretched out toward the range, clenched and pulsing with defiance and command.
"Go in! Go in, as I told you!" he cried. "Stay in, alive or dead! Stay till I tell you to come out! Stay! I can't do any more! You must do it now!"
"Then this may be truly the end," thought Marta, "if the assault fails."
And silently she prayed that it would fail; while the flashes lighted Westerling's set features, imploring success.
No commander was a more prodigal employer of spies than Napoleon. Did he or any other conqueror ever acknowledge a success due to the despised outcasts who brought him information? No. The brilliance of combinations, the stroke of genius of the swift march and the decisive blow in flank, the splendid charges—these always win in the historian's narrative and public imagination. Think of any place in the frieze of the statue of the great leader for that hypocrite, that poor devil in disguise, whose news made the victory possible!
"Good generalship is easy if you know what the enemy is going to do," Lanstron remarked to a member of the staff council who said something complimentary to him. Compliments from subordinates to superiors had not received Partow's favor and, therefore, not Lanstron's. Eccentric old Partow had once disparaged the Napoleonic idea as a fetich which had nothing to do with modern military efficiency, and he had added that if Napoleon were alive to-day nobody would be so prompt to see it as Napoleon himself. If he did not, and tried to incarnate the idea of the time by making himself the supreme genius of war, he would fail, because ability was too nearly universal and the age too big for another Colossus.
Through Marta's information every detail of Westerling's plan outlined itself to the trained minds of the Brown staff. Amazement at their dependence on an underground wire and a woman's word for shaping vast affairs was not reflected in any scepticism or hesitation as to the method of meeting the assault.
The fortifications that had sheltered the Brown infantry, including Stransky's men of the 53d, would be the object of the artillery fire which was to support the Gray charge. Well Lanstron knew that no fortifications could withstand the gusts of shells to be concentrated on such a small target. The defenders could not see to fire for the dust. Their rifles would be knocked out of their hands by the concussions. They must be crushed or imprisoned by the destruction of the very walls that had been their protection. So they were withdrawn to other redoubts in the rear, where a line of automatics placed under their rifles were in pointblank range of their old position which the Grays' shells would tear to pieces.
Back of them was a brown carpet of waiting soldiery of as close a pile as Westerling's carpet of gray. The rain-drenched Brown engineers dug as fast as the enemy's. Lanstron massed artillery against massed artillery. For every Gray gun he had more than one Brown gun. The Grays might excel by ratio of five to three in human avoirdupois, but a willing Brown government had been generous with funds. Money will buy guns and skill will man them. Battery back of battery in literal tiers, small calibres in front and heavy calibres in the rear, with ranges fixed to given points—more guns than ever fired on a single position before—were to pour their exploding projectiles not into redoubts but into the human wedge.
In the Browns' headquarters, as in the Grays', telegraph instruments were silent after the preparations were over. Here, also, officers walked about restlessly, glancing at their watches. They, too, were glad that the mist continued. It meant no wind. When the telegraph did speak it was with another message from some aerostatic officer, saying, "Still favorable," which was taken at once to Lanstron, who was with the staff chiefs around the big table. They nodded at the news and smiled to one another; and some who had been pacing sat down and others rose to begin pacing afresh.
"We could have emplaced two lines of automatics, one above the other!" exclaimed the chief of artillery.
"But that would have given too much of a climb for the infantry in going in—delayed the rush," said Lanstron.
"If they should stick—if we couldn't drive them back!" exclaimed the vice-chief of staff.
"I don't think they will!" said Lanstron.
To the others he seemed as cool as ever, even when his maimed hand was twitching in his pocket. But now, suddenly, his eyes starting as at a horror, he trembled passionately, his head dropping forward, as if he would collapse.
"Oh, the murder of it—the murder!" he breathed.
"But they brought it on! Not for theirs, but for ours!" said the vice-chief of staff, laying his hand on Lanstron's shoulder.
"And we sit here while they go in!" Lanstron added. "There's a kind of injustice about that which I can't get over. Not one of us here has been under fire!"
Even the minute of the attack they knew; and just before midnight they were standing at the window looking out into the night, while the vice-chief held his watch in hand. In the hush the faint sound of a dirigible's propeller high up in the heavens, muffled by the fog, was drowned by the Gray guns opening fire.
Before the mine exploded, by the light of the shell bursts breaking their vast prisms from central spheres of flame for miles, with the quick sequence of a moving-picture flicker, Fracasse'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 shells 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 shell 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 Fracasse, 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 banal before such a consummation of hell.
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 shell 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 shell 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 shells rose from the earth as they passed.
"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 hell, more hell, and then still more hell!" 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 shell 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 mass at their backs, and, in turn, plunged forward on their stomachs in the seams and furrows of the mine's havoc. The mass 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 shelling, 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 shell 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 shells made gaps and tore holes in the human mass, 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 débris, 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 shell 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 shell 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 vertebræ 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 asserted 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 mass of the Browns in pursuit. Of all those of Fracasse'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 shell 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 titter 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 assault 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 altitudes. 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—"
"I was not asking advice!" interrupted Westerling.
"But, I repeat, the leak is not necessary to disclose this new movement that you plan. Their air craft will disclose it," Bellini concluded. He had done his duty and had nothing more to say.
"Dirigibles do not win battles!" Westerling announced. "They are won by getting infantry in possession of positions and holding them. No matter if we don't surprise the enemy. Haven't the Browns held their line with inferior numbers? If they have, we can hold the rest of ours. That gives us overwhelming forces at Engadir."
"You take all responsibility?" asked Turcas.
"I do!" said Westerling firmly. "And we will waste no more time. The premier supports me. I have decided. We will set the troops in motion."
With fierce energy he set to work detaching units of artillery and infantry from every part of the line and starting them toward Engadir.
"This means an improvised organization; it breaks up the machine," said the tactical expert to Turcas when they were alone.
"Yes," replied Turcas. "He wanted no advice from us when he was taking counsel of desperation. If he succeeds, success will retrieve all the rest of his errors. We may have a stroke of luck in our favor."
In the headquarters of the Browns, junior officers and clerks reported the words of each bulletin with the relief of men who breathed freely again. The chiefs of divisions who were with Lanstron alternately sat down and paced the floor, their restlessness now that of a happiness too deeply thrilling to be expressed by hilarity. Each fresh detail only confirmed the completeness of the repulse as that memorable night in the affairs of the two nations slowly wore on. Shortly before three, when the firing had died down after the Brown pursuit had stopped, a wireless from a dirigible flying over the frontier came, telling of bodies of Gray troops and guns on the march. Soon planes and other dirigibles flying over other positions were sending in word of the same tenor. The chiefs drew around the table and looked into one another's eyes in the significance of a common thought.
"It cannot be a retreat!" said the vice-chief.
"Hardly. That is inconceivable of Westerling at this time," Lanstron replied. "The bull charges when wounded. It is clear that he means to make another attack. These troops on the march across country are isolated from any immediate service."
It was Lanstron's way to be suggestive; to let ideas develop in council and orders follow as out of council.
"The chance!" exclaimed some one.
"The chance!" others said in the same breath. "The God-given chance for a quick blow! The chance! We attack! We attack!"
It was the most natural conception to a military tactician, though any man who made it his own might have builded a reputation on it if he knew how to get the ear of the press. Their faces were close to Lanstron as they leaned toward him eagerly. He seemed not to see them but to be looking at Partow's chair. In imagination Partow was there in the life—Partow with the dome forehead, the pendulous cheeks, the shrewd, kindly eyes. A daring risk, this! What would Partow say? Lanstron always asked himself this in a crisis: What would Partow say?
"Well, my boy, why are you hesitating?" Partow demanded. "I don't know that I'd have taken my long holiday and left you in charge if I'd thought you'd be losing your nerve as you are this minute. Wasn't it part of my plan—my dream—that plan I gave you to read in the vaults, to strike if a chance, this very chance, were to come? Hurry up! Seconds count!"
"Yes, a chance to end the killing for good and all!" said Lanstron, coming abruptly out of his silence. "We'll take it and strike hard."
The staff bent over the map, Lanstron's finger flying from point to point, while ready expert answers to his questions were at his elbow and the wires sang out directions that made a drenched and shivering soldiery Who had been yielding and holding and never advancing grow warm with the thought of springing from the mire of trenches to charge the enemy. And one, Gustave Feller, in command of a brigade of field-guns—the mobile guns that could go forward rumbling to the horses' trot—saw his dearly beloved batteries swing into a road in the moonlight.
"La, la, la! The worm will turn!" he clucked. "It's a merry, gambling old world and I'm right fond of it—so full of the unexpected for the Grays! That lead horse is a little lame, but he'll last the night through. Lots of lame things will! Who knows? Maybe we'll be cleaning the mud off our boots on the white posts of the frontier to-morrow! A whole brigade mine! I live! You old brick, Lanny! This time we are going to spank the enemy on the part of his anatomy where spanks are conventionally given. La, la, la!"
If not his own pain, the moans, the gasps, the appeals for water, the convulsive shivers from cold, and the demoniacal giggles from a soldier gone insane in medley around him would have kept the judge's son awake. After he had fallen, struck by he knew not what, and consciousness had returned, came the surging charge of the Browns in the counter-attack, with throaty cries and threshing tread. He was able to turn over on his face and cover the back of his head with his hands, as a slight protection from steps that found footing on his body instead of on the earth. After that he had understood vaguely that a newcomer on the field of the fallen needed help with a first aid, and he had found his knife and slit a sleeve and applied a bandage to check the bleeding of an artery. Before dawn broke the sky was all alight again with a far-reaching gun-fire—that of the Brown advance—throwing the scene of slaughter into spectral relief, which became more real and terrible in the undramatic light of day.
Thick, ghastly thick, the dead and wounded; and the faces—faces half buried, faces black with congealed blood, faces staring straight up at the sky, faces with eyes popping where necks had been twisted! Near by was the distorted metal work of a dirigible, with the bodies of its crew burned beyond recognition, and farther away were other dirigible wrecks. A wounded Gray, who had not the strength to do it himself, begged some one to lift a corpse off his body. A Gray and a Brown were locked in a wrestling embrace in which a shrapnel burst had surprised them. Piles of dead and wounded had been scattered and torn by a shell which found only dead and wounded for destruction at the point of its explosion. The living were crawling out from under the shields they had made of corpses in shell craters, and searching for water in the canteens and biscuits in the haversacks of the dead. One Gray who was completely entombed except his head remarked that he was all right if some one would dig him out. At his side showed the legs of a man who had been buried face downward. Ribs of the wounded broken in; features of the dead mashed by the heels of the Brown countercharge! With every turn of his glance his surroundings grew more intimate in details of horror to the judge's son. On the earth, saturated with rivulets and little lakes of blood, gleamed the lead shrapnel bullets and the brighter, nickelled rifle-bullets and the barrels of rifles dropped from the hands of the fallen.
"I'd have bled to death if you hadn't put on that bandage. You saved my life!" whispered the man next to the judge's son, who was Tom Fragini.
"Did I? Did I?" exclaimed the judge's son. "Well, that's something."
"It certainly is to me," replied Tom, holding out his hand, and thus they shook hands, this Gray and this Brown. "Maybe some time, when the war's over, I can thank you in more than words."
"More than words! Perhaps you can do that now. You—you haven't a cigarette, old fellow?" asked the judge's son. "I haven't smoked for three days."
"Yes, only I roll mine," said Tom.
"So do I mine," said the judge's son.
"But with a game hand I—"
"Oh, I've the hands. It's my leg that's been mashed up," said the judge's son. "Labor and capital!" he added cheerily as he dropped the cosmopolitan tobacco on the cosmopolitan wafer of rice-paper.
They smoked and smiled at each other in the glow of that better passion when wounds have let out the poison of conflict, while the doctors and the hospital-corps men began their attention to the critical cases and on down the slopes the mills of war were grinding out more dead and wounded.
"At the hospital where I was interne before the war we were trying to save a crippled boy the use of his leg," remarked a reserve surgeon. "Half a dozen surgeons held consultations over that boy—yes, just for one leg. And now look at this!"