XLIV
TURNING THE TABLES
"I shall take a little nap. There will be plenty to do later," said Westerling, after the last telegram detaching the reserves for concentration had gone.
Yes, he would rest while the troops were in motion. The staff should see that he was still the same self-contained commander whose every faculty was the trained servant of his will. His efforts at sleep resulted in a numbing brain torture, which so desensitized it to outward impressions that his faithful personal aide entering the room at dawn had to touch him on the shoulder to arouse attention.
"There's nothing like being able to order yourself to sleep, whatever the crisis," he said. But suddenly he winced as if a blast of bullets had crashed through a window-pane and buried themselves in the wall beside his bed. "What is that?" he gasped "What?" With appalling distinctness he heard a cannonade that seemed as wide-spread as the horizon.
"I was to tell you that the enemy has been attacking along the whole front," the aide explained.
"Attacking! The Browns attacking!" Westerling exclaimed as he gathered his wits. "Well, so much the worse for them. I rather expected they would," he added.
Then through the door which the aide had left open the division chiefs, led by Turcas, filed in. To Westerling they seemed like a procession of ghosts. The features of one were the features of all, graven with the weariness of the machine's treadmill. Their harness held them up. A moving platform under their feet kept their legs moving. They grouped around the great man's desk silently, Turcas, his lips a half-opened seam, his voice that of crinkling parchment, acting as spokesman.
"The enemy seized his advantage," he said, "when he found that our reserves were on the march, out of touch with the wire to headquarters."
Westerling forced a smile which he wanted to be a knowing smile.
"Exactly! Of course their guns are making a lot of noise," he said. "It seems strange to you, no doubt, that they and not we should be attacking. Excellent! Let them have a turn at paying the costs of the offensive. Let them thrash their battalions to pieces. We want them exhausted when we go in to-night."
"However, we had not prepared our positions for the defensive," continued that very literal parchment voice. "They began an assault on our left flank first and we've just had word that they have turned it."
"Probably a false report. Probably they have taken an outpost. Order a counter-attack!" exclaimed Westerling.
"Nor is that the worst of it," said the vice-chief. "They are pressing at other well-chosen points. They threaten to pierce our centre."
"Our centre!" gibed Westerling. "You do need rest. Our centre, where we have the column of last night's attack still concentrated! If anything would convince me that I have to fight this war-alone—I—" Westerling choked in irritation.
"Yes. The ground is such that it is a tactically safe and advantageous move for Lanstron to make. He strikes at the vitals of our machine."
"But what about the remainder of the force that made the charge? What about all our guns concentrated in front of Engadir?"
"I was coming to that. The rout of the assaulting column was much worse than we had supposed. Those who are strong enough cannot be got to reform. Many were so exhausted that they dropped in their tracks. Our guns are at this moment in retreat—or being captured by the rush of the Browns' infantry. Your Excellency, the crisis is sudden, incredible."
"Our wire service has broken down. We cannot communicate with many of our division commanders," put in Bellini, the chief of intelligence.
"Yes, our organization, so dependent on communication, is in danger of disruption," concluded Turcas. "To avoid disorder, we think it best to retreat across the plain to our own range."
At the word "retreat" Westerling sprang to his feet, his cheeks purple, the veins of his neck and temples sculptured as he took a threatening step toward the group, which fell back before the physical rage of the man, all except the vice-chief, his mouth a thin, ashy line, who held his own.
"You cowards!" Westerling thundered. "Retreat when we have five millions to their three!"
"We have not that odds now," replied the parchment voice. "All their men are engaged. They have caught us at a disadvantage, unable to use our numbers except in detail in trying to hold on in face of—"
"I tell you we cannot retreat!" Westerling interrupted. "That is the end. I know what you do not know. I am in touch with the government. Yes, I know—"
This brought fresh alarm into faces which had become set in grim stoicism by many alarms. If the people were in ignorance of the losses and the army in ignorance of the nation's feeling, the officers of the staff were no less in ignorance of what passed over the long-distance wire between the chief of staff and the premier.
"I know what is best—I alone!" Westerling continued, driving home his point. "Tell our commanders to hold. Neither general nor man is to budge. They are to stick to the death. Any one who does not I shall hold up to public shame as a poltroon. Who knows but Lanstron's attack may be a council of desperation? The Browns may be worse off than we are. Hold, hold! If are are tired, they are tired. Frequently it takes only an ounce more of resolution to turn the tide of battle. Hold, hold! To-morrow will tell a different story! We are going to win yet! Yes, we are going to win!"
"It is for you to decide, Your Excellency," said Turcas, slowly and precisely. "You take the responsibility."
"I take the responsibility. I am in command!" replied Westerling in unflinching pose.
"Yes, Your Excellency."
And they filed out of the room, leaving him to his isolation.
A little later, when François came in unannounced, bringing coffee, he found his master with face buried in hands. Westerling was on the point of striking the valet in anger at the discovery, but instead attempted a yawn to deceive him.
"I fell asleep; there's so little to worry about, François," he explained.
"Yes, Your Excellency. There is no need of worrying as long as you are in command," said François; and Westerling gulped at the coffee and chewed at a piece of roll, which was so dry in his mouth and so hard to swallow that he gave up the attempt.
After Marta had learned, over the telephone, from Lanstron of the certain repulse of the Gray assault, fatigue—sheer physical fatigue such as made soldiers drop dead in slumber on the earth, their packs still on their backs—overcame her. Her work was done. The demands of nature overwhelmed her faculties. She slept with a nervous twitching of her muscles, a restless tossing of her lithe body, until hammers began beating on her temples, beating, beating with the sound of shell bursts, as if to warn her that punishment for her share in the killing was to be the eternal concussion of battle in her ears. At length she realized that the cannonading was real.
Hastening out-of-doors, as her glance swept toward the range she saw bursts of shrapnel smoke from the guns of the Browns nearer than since the fighting had begun on the main line, and these were directed at bodies of infantry that were in confused retreat down the slopes, while all traffic on the pass road was moving toward the rear. Impelled by a new apprehension she hurried to the tunnel. Lanstron answered her promptly in a voice that had a ring of relief and joy in place of the tension that had characterized it since the outbreak of the war.
"Thanks to you, Marta!" he cried. "Everything goes back to you—thanks to you came this chance to attack, and we are succeeding at every point! You are the general, you the maker of victories!"
"Yes, the general of still more killing!" she cried in indignation. "Why have you gone on with the slaughter? I did not help you for this. Why?"
No reply came. She poured out more questions, and still no reply. She pressed the button and tried again, but she might as well have been talking over a dead wire.
Though the morning was chill, Mrs. Galland, in a heavy coat, was seated outside the tower door, beatifically calm and smiling; for she would miss rejoicing over no detail of the spectacle. The battle's sounds were sweet music—symphony of retribution. Oh, if her husband and her father could only be with her to see the ancient enemy in flight! Her cheeks were rosy with the happy thrumming of her heart; a delirious beat was in her temples. She wanted to sing and cheer and give thanks to the Almighty. The advancing bursts of billowy shrapnel down the slopes were a heavenly nimbus to her eyes. She breathed a silent blessing on a man[oe]uvring Brown dirigible. They were coming! The soldiers of her people were coming to take back their own from the robber hosts and restore her hearth to her. Soon she would be seated on the veranda watching the folds of her flag floating over La Tir.
"Isn't it wonderful? Isn't it like some good story?" she said to Marta. "Yes, like a miracle—and there has been a Galland in every war of the Browns and you were in this!"
Having no son, she had given her daughter in sacrifice on the altar of her country's gods, who had answered with victory. Her old-fashioned patriotism, true to the "all-is-fair-in-war" precept, delighted in the hour of success in every trick of Marta's double-dealing, though in private life she could have been guilty of no deceit.
"Marta, Marta, I shall never tease you again about your advanced ideas or about journeying all the way around the world without a chaperon. Your father and my father would have approved!" She squeezed Marta's hands and pressed them to her cheek. Marta smiled absently.
"Yes, mother," she said, but in such a fashion that Mrs. Galland was reminded again that Marta had always been peculiar. Probably it was because she was peculiar that she had been able to outwit the head of an army.
"Oh, that mighty Westerling who was going to conquer the whole world! How does he feel now?" mused Mrs. Galland "Westerling and his boasted power of five against three!"
For the Grays were barbarians to her and the Browns a people of a superior civilization, a superior aristocracy, a superior professional and farming and laboring class. There was nothing about the Browns to Mrs. Galland that was not superior. War, that ancient popular test of superiority in art, civilization, morals, scholarship, the grace of woman and the manliness of man, had proved her point in the high court, permitting of no appeal.
One man alone against the tide—rather, the man who has seen a tide rise at his orders now finding all its sweep against him—Westerling, accustomed to have millions of men move at his command, found himself, one man out of the millions, still and helpless while they moved of their own impulses.
As news of positions lost came in, he could only grimly repeat, "Hold! Tell them to hold!" fruitlessly, like adjurations to the wind to cease blowing. The bell of the long distance kept ringing unheeded, until at last his aide came to say that the premier must speak either to him or to the vice-chief. Westerling staggered to his feet and with lurching steps went into the closet. There he sank down on the chair in a heap, staring at the telephone mouthpiece. Again the bell rang. Clenching his hands in a rocking effort, he was able to stiffen his spine once more as he took down the receiver. To admit defeat to the premier—no, he was not ready for that yet.
"The truth is out!" said the premier without any break in his voice and with the fatalism of one who never allows himself to blink a fact. "Telegraphers at the front who got out of touch with the staff were still in touch with the capital. Once the reports began to come, they poured in—decimation of the attacking column, panic and retreat in other portions of the line—chaos!"
"It's a lie!" Westerling declared vehemently.
"The news has reached the press," the premier proceeded. "Editions are already in the streets."
"What! Where is your censorship?" gasped Westerling.
"It is helpless, a straw protesting against a current," the premier replied. "A censorship goes back to physical force, as every law does in the end—to the police and the army; and all, these days, finally to public opinion. After weeks of secrecy, of reported successes, when nobody really knew what was happening, this sudden disillusioning announcement of the truth has sent the public mad."
"It is your business to control the public!" complained Westerling.
"With what, now? With a speech or a lullaby? As well could you stop the retreat with your naked hands. My business to control the public, yes, but not unless you win victories. I gave you the soldiers. We have nothing but police here, and I tell you that the public is in a mob rage—the whole public, bankers and business and professional men included. I have just ordered the stock exchange and all banks closed."
"There's a cure for mobs!" cried Westerling. "Let the police fire a few volleys and they'll behave."
"Would that stop the retreat of the army? We must sue for peace."
"Sue for peace! Sue for peace when we have five millions against their three!"
"It seems so, as the three millions are winning!" said the premier.
"Sue for peace because women go hysterical? Do you suppose that the Browns will listen now when they think they have the advantage? Leave peace to me! Give me forty-eight hours more! I have told our troops to hold and they will hold. I don't mistake cowardly telegraphers' rumors for facts—"
"Pardon me a moment," the premier interrupted. "I must answer a local call." So astute a man of affairs as he knew that Westerling's voice, storming, breaking, tightening with effort at control, confirmed all reports of disaster. "In fact, the crockery is broken—for you and for me!" said the premier when he spoke again. His life had been a gamble and the gamble had turned against him in playing for a great prize. There was an admirable stoicism in the way he announced the news he had received from the local call: "The chief of police calls me up to say that the uprising is too vast for him to hold. There isn't any mutiny, but his men simply have become a part of public opinion. A mob of women and children is starting for the palace to ask me what I have done with their husbands, brothers, sons, and fathers. They won't have to break in to find me. I'm very tired. I'm ready. I shall face them from the balcony. Yes, Westerling, you and I have achieved a place in history, and they're far more bitter toward you than me. However, you don't have to come back."
"No, I don't have to go back! No, I was not to go back if I failed!" said Westerling dizzily.
Again defiance rose strong as the one tangible thought, born of his ruling passion. It was inconceivable that so vast an ambition should fail. Failure! He defied it! He burst into the main staff room, where the tired officers regarded him with a glare, or momentary, weary wonder, and continued packing up their papers for departure. He went on into the telegraphers' room. Some of the operators were packing their instruments.
"The news? What is the news?" Westerling asked hoarsely.
An operator who was still at the key, without even half rising let alone saluting, glanced up from the cavernous sockets of eyes unawed by the chief of staff's presence.
"All that comes in is bad," he said. "Where we get none because the wires are down we know it's worse. We've been licked."
He went on sending a message, wholly oblivious of Westerling, who stumbled back into the staff room and paused inarticulate before Turcas.
"The army is going—resisting by units, but going. It has made its own orders!" Turcas said. The other division chiefs nodded in agreement. "Your Excellency, we are doing our best," added the vice-chief, holding the door for Westerling to return to his own office. "The nation is not beaten. Given breathing time for reorganization, the army will settle down to the defensive on our own range. There the enemy may try our costly tactics against the precision and power of modern arms, if they choose. No, the nation is not beaten."
The nation! Westerling was not thinking of the nation.
"You—" he began, looking around from face to face.
Not one showed any sign of softening or deference, and, his mind a blank, he withdrew, driven back to his isolation by an inflexible ostracism. The world had come to an end. Public opinion was master—master of his own staff. He sank down before his desk, staring, just staring; hearing the roar of battle which was drawing nearer; staring at the staff orderlies, who came in to take down the wall maps, and at his aide packing up the papers and leaving him in a room bare of all the appurtenances of his position, with little idea in his coma of despair of the hour or even that time was passing. Finally, some one touched him on the shoulder. He looked up to see his aide at his elbow saluting and François, his valet, standing by with an overcoat.
"We must go, Your Excellency," said the aide.
"Go?" asked Westerling dazedly.
"Yes, the staff has already gone to a new headquarters."
The announcement was the needle prick that once more aroused him to a sense of his situation. He rose and struck his fist on the desk in a pulsing outbreak of energy and stubbornness.
"But I stay! I stay!" he cried. "The enemy is not near. He can't be!"
"Very near, general. You can see for yourself, said the aide.
"I will!" Westerling replied. "I will see how the conspiracy of the staff has made ruin of my plans!"
Again something of his old manner returned; something of the stoic's fatalism flashed in his eye. He shook his head to François, refusing to slip his arms into the sleeves of the coat which François dropped on to his shoulders.
"Yes, I will see for myself!" he repeated, as he led the way out to the veranda. "I'll see what goblin scared my pusillanimous staff and robbed me of victory!"
Every cry of triumph in war is paid for by a cry of pain. On one side, anguish of heart; on the other, inexpressible ecstasy. The Gray staff were oblivious of fatigue in the glum, overpowering necessity of restoring the organization of the Gray army for a second stand. The Brown staff were oblivious of fatigue in the exhilaration of victory.
Had a picture of the sight which the judge's son had witnessed at dawn in the path of the attack and the counter-attack been thrown on the wall of the big lobby room of the Brown headquarters, there might have been less exultation on the part of the junior officers of the staff gathered there. They were not seeing or thinking of the dead. They were seeing only brown-headed pins pushing gray-headed pins out of the way on the map, as the symbol of an attack become a pursuit and of better than their dreams come true—the symbol of security for altar fires and race and nation. They were of the living, in the mightiest thrill that a soldier may know.
No doubt now! No more suspense! Labor and sacrifice rewarded! Fervent thanks to the Almighty were mingled with whistled snatches of wedding marches and popular songs. An aide taking a message to the wire preferred leaping over a chair to going around it. A subaltern and a colonel danced together. Victory, victory, victory out of the burr of automatics, the pounding of artillery, the popping roar of rifles! Victory out of the mire of trenches after brain-aching strain! Victory for you and for me and for sweethearts and wives and children! Aren't we all Browns, orderly and captain, boyish lieutenant and gray-haired general? A taciturn martinet of a major hugged a telegrapher to whom he had never spoken a single unofficial word. Hadn't the telegraphers, those silent men who were the tongue of the army, received the good news and passed it on? Some officers who could be spared from duty went to their quarters, where they dropped like falling logs on their beds. To them, after their spell of rejoicing, victory meant sleep for the first time in weeks without forked lightnings of apprehension stabbing their sub-consciousness.
Fellowship was in the victory, the fellowship which, developed under Partow, who believed that Napoleons and Colossi and gods in the car and all such gentlemen belonged to an archaic farce-comedy, had grown under Lanstron. "The staff reports," began the messages that awakened a world, retiring with the idea that the Browns were grimly holding the defensive, to the news that three millions had outgeneralled and defeated five.
In the inner room, whose opening door gave glimpses of Lanstron and the division chiefs, a magic of secret council which the juniors could not quite understand had wrought the wonder. Lanstron had not forgotten the dead. He could see them; he could see everything that happened. Had not Partow said to him: "Don't just read reports. Visualize men and events. Be the artillery, be the infantry, be the wounded—live and think in their places. In this way only can you really know your work!"
His elation when he saw his plans going right was that of the instrument of Partow's training and Marta's service. He pressed the hands of the men around him; his voice caught in his gratitude and his breaths were very short at times, like those of a spent, happy runner at the goal. Feeding on victory and growing greedy of more, his division chiefs were discussing how to press the war till the Grays sued for peace; and he was silent in the midst of their talk, which was interrupted by the ringing of the tunnel telephone. When he came out of his bedroom, Lanstron's distress was so evident that those who were seated arose and the others drew near in inquiry and sympathy. It seemed to them that the chief of staff, the head of the machine, who had left the room had returned an individual.
"The connection was broken while we were speaking!" he said blankly. "That means it must have been cut by the enemy—that the enemy knows of its existence!"
"Perhaps not. Perhaps an accident—a chance shot," said the vice-chief.
"No, I'm sure not," Lanstron replied. "I am sure that it was cut deliberately and not by her."
"The 53d Regiment is going forward in that direction—the same regiment that defended the house—and it can't go any faster than it is going," the vice-chief continued, rather incoherently. He and the others no less felt the news as a personal blow. Though absent in person, Marta had become in spirit an intimate of their hopes and councils.
"She is helpless—in their power!" Lanstron said. "There is no telling what they might do to her in the rage of their discovery. I must go to her! I am going to the front!"
The announcement started a storm of protest.
"But you are the chief of staff! You cannot leave the staff!"
"You've no right to expose yourself!"
"A chance shell or bullet—"
"You do not seem to realize what this victory means to you. You might be killed at the very moment of triumph."
"I haven't had any triumph. But if I had, could there be a better time?" Lanstron asked with a half-bantering smile.
"You couldn't reach there before the 53d Regiment anyway!" declared the vice-chief, having in mind the fact that the staff was fifteen miles to the rear, where it could be at the wire focus. "You will find the roads blocked with the advance. You'll have to ride, you can't go all the way in a car."
"Terrible hardship!" replied Lanstron. "Still, I'm going. Things are well in hand. I can keep in touch by the wire as I proceed. If I get out of touch then you," with a nod to the vice-chief, "know as well as I how to meet any sudden emergency. Yes, you all know how to act—we're so used to working together. The staff will follow as soon as the Galland house is taken. We shall make our headquarters there. I'm free now. I can be my own man for a little while—I can be human!"
A certain awe of him and of his position, born of the prestige of victory, hushed further protest. Who if not he had the right to go where he pleased in the Brown lines now? They noted the eagerness in his eyes, the eagerness of one off the leash, shot with a suspense which was not for the fate of the army, as he left headquarters.
A young officer of the Grays who was with a signal-corps section, trying to keep a brigade headquarters in touch with the staff during the retreat, two or three miles from the Galland house, had seen what looked like an insulated telephone wire at the bottom of a crater in the earth made by the explosion of a heavy shell. The instructions to all subordinates from the chief of intelligence to look for the source of the leak in information to the Browns made him quick to see a clew in anything unusual. He jumped down into the crater and not only found his pains rewarded, but that the wire was intact and ran underground in either direction. Who had laid it? Not the Grays. Why was it there? He called for one of his men to bring a buzzer, and it was the work of little more than a minute to cut the wire and make an attachment. Then he heard a woman's voice talking to "Lanny." Who was Lanny? He waited till he had heard enough to know that it was none other than Lanstron, the chief of staff of the Browns, and the woman must be a spy. An orderly despatched to the chief of intelligence with the news returned with the order:
"Drop everything and report to me in person at once."
"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 masses were thickest. This way and that the Brown artillery fire drove retreating bodies, prodding them in the back with the fearful shepherdry of their shells. 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 pass 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 mêlée 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 masses on its front and protect them in their flight when they had passed.
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 cockpit 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 fortitude except the materialistic, he saw the altar of his god 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 débris—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 God! 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 shell 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 mass. 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 gratitude.
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, God 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 pass 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 hoarsely. "Early this morning, not far from the castle, this young officer found in the crater made by a ten-inch shell 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, man[oe]uvres—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 passionless 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.
François, 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 god 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.
"Oh, it was not personal! I did not think of myself as a person or of you as one—only of principles and of thousands of others—to end the killing—to save our country to its people! Oh, I'm sorry and, personally, I'm horrible—horrible!" she called after him in a broken, quavering gust of words which he heard confusedly in tragic mockery.
He made no answer; he did not even look around. Head bowed and hardly seeing the path, he permitted the aide to choose the way, which lay across the boundary of the Galland estate.
They had passed the stumps of the linden-trees and were in the vacant lot on the other side, when something white fluttered toward him, rustled by the breeze that carried it, and lay still almost at his feet. He saw his own picture on the front page of a newspaper, with the caption, "His Excellency, Field-Marshal Hedworth Westerling, Chief of Staff of Our Victorious Army." He stared at the picture and the picture stared at him as if they knew not each other. A racking shudder swept through him. He turned his face with a kind of resolution, appealing in its starkness, toward the battle and his glance rested on the battery and the shattered regiment of infantry in the fields opposite the Galland gate, under a canopy of shrapnel smoke, bravely holding their ground.
"I should be there. That is the place for me!" he exclaimed with a trace of his old forcefulness.
The aide's lips parted as if to speak in protest, but they closed in silence, while a glance of deep human understanding, dissolving the barriers of caste, passed between him and the valet, eloquent of their approval and their loyal readiness to share the fate of their fallen chief.
The canopy of shrapnel smoke grew thicker; the infantry began to break.
"But, no!" said Westerling. "The place for a chief of staff is at his headquarters."