XX
MARTA'S FIRST GLIMPSE OF WAR
As Marta and the children came to the door of the chapel after the recitation of the oath, she saw the civil population moving along the street in the direction of the range. Suddenly they paused in a common impulse and their heads turned as one head on the fulcrum of their necks, and their faces as one face in a set stare looked skyward.
"Keep on moving! No danger!" called the major of the brigade staff. "Pass the word—no danger! It's not going to drop any bombs; it's only a scout plane trying to locate the positions of the defences we've thrown up overnight. No danger—keep moving!"
He might as well have tried to distract the attention of the grand stand from the finish of a horse-race. More than the wizard's spell, years before, at the first sight of man in flight held them in suspense as they watched a plane approaching with the speed of an albatross down the wind straight on a line with the church tower where the sharpshooters were posted. The spread of the wings grew broader; the motor was making a circle of light as large as a man's hat-box, and the aviator was the size of some enormous insect when three or four sharp reports were audible from the church tower.
Still the plane came on intact over the spire. The sharpshooters had only rimmed the target, without injury to braces or engine. But they had another chance from the windows on the nearer side of the tower; and the crowd saw there the glint of rifle barrels. This time they got the bull's-eye. The aviator reeled and dropped sidewise, a dead weight caught by the braces, with his arm dangling. A teetering dip of the plane and his body was shaken free. His face, as he neared the earth in his descent, bore the surprised look of a man thumped on the back unexpectedly.
Marta pressed her fingers to her ears, but not soon enough to keep out the sound of a thud on the roof of the building across the street from the chapel.
"I was a coward to do that! I shall see worse things!" she thought, and went to the major, who had turned to the affairs of the living directly he saw that neither the corpse of the aviator nor the wreck of the plane was to strike in the street. "I will look after these children," she said, "and we will care for as many of the old and sick as we can in our house."
"The children will find their relatives or guardians in the procession there," he answered methodically. "If they do not, the government will look after them. It will not do for you to take them to your house. That would only complicate the matter of their safety." Here he was interrupted by a precipitate question from one of his lieutenants, who had come running up. "No! No matter what the excuse, no one can remain!" he answered. "The nation is not going to take the risk of letting spies get information to the enemy for the sake of gratifying individual interests. Every one must go!" Then he called to an able-bodied citizen of thirty years or so in the procession: "Here, you, if you're not in the reserve I have work for you!"
"But I was excused from army service on account of heart trouble!" explained the able-bodied citizen.
"We all have heart trouble to-day," remarked the major pithily. "Men are giving up their lives in defence of you and your property. Every man of your age must do his share when required. Go with this orderly!" was the final and tart conclusion of the argument. "And see that he is made useful," he added to the orderly.
An explosion in the factory district made windows rattle and brought an hysterical outcry from some of the women.
"It's nothing!" the major called, in the assurance of a shepherd to his sheep. "Blowing up some building that furnish cover for the enemy's approach in front of our infantry positions! You will hear more of it. Don't worry! Do as you're told! Keep moving! Keep moving!"
Now he had time to conclude what he had to say to Marta.
"As your house will soon be under fire, it will be not refuge for the children; and, in any event, we should net want to leave them to the care of the Grays with the parents on our side," he explained in a manner none the less final because of its politeness. "Every detail has been systematically arranged under government supervision. Private efforts will only bring confusion and hardship where we would have order and all possible mercy. As for the old, the sick, and the infirm—those who cannot bear being carried far are being moved to the hospital and barracks outside the town."
In proof of his words, ambulances and requisitioned carriages filled with the sick and infirm were already proceeding up one of the side streets.
"It's not human, though!" Marta exclaimed in the desperation of helplessness.
"No, it is war, which has a habit of being inhuman," replied the major, turning to call to a woman: "Now, madame, if you leave that pillow behind you will not be dropping your other things and having to stop all the time to pick them up!"
"But it's the finest goose feathers and last year's crop!" said the woman; and then gasped: "Oh, Lord! I left my silver jug on the mantel!"
"As I've told you before—as the printed slips we distributed when we woke you at dawn told you," said the major with some asperity, "you were to take only light things easily portable, and after you had gone, wagons would get what you had packed and left ready at the door of your houses, with your names clearly marked, up to two hundred pounds. The rest we trust to the mercy of the Grays."
There was nothing for Marta to do but start homeward. The thought that her mother was alone made her hasten at a pace much more rapid than the procession of people, whose talk and exclamations formed a monotone audible in its nearness, despite the continuous rifle-fire, now broken by the pounding of the guns.
"I wish I had brought the clock—it was my great-grandfather's."
"Johnny, you keep close to me!"
"And they've taken my wife off to the hospital—separated us!"
Some were excruciatingly alive to the situation; others were in a daze. But one cry always roused them from their complaints; always brought a flash to the dullest eye: Retribution! retribution! Taken from their peaceful pursuits arbitrarily by the final authority of physical force, which they could not dispute, their minds turned in primitive passion to revenge through physical force.
"I hope our army makes them pay!"
"Yes, make them pay! Make them pay!"
"It's all done to beat the Grays, isn't it, Miss Galland? They are trying to take our land," said Jacky Werther as Marta parted from him.
"Yes, it is done to beat the Grays," she answered. "Good luck, Jacky!"
Yes, yes, to beat the Grays! The same, idea—the fighting nature, the brute nature of man—animated both sides. Had the Browns really tried for peace? Had they, in the spirit of her oath, appealed to justice and reason? Why hadn't their premier before all the world said to the premier of the Grays, as one honest, friendly neighbor to another over a matter of dispute:
"We do not want war. We know you outnumber us, but we know you would not take advantage of that. If we are wrong we will make amends; if you are wrong we know that you will. Let us not play tricks in secret to gain points, we civilized nations, but be frank with each other. Let us not try to irritate each other or to influence our people, but to realize how much we have in common and that our only purpose is common progress and happiness."
But no. This was against the precedent of Cain, who probably got Abel into a cul-de-sac, handed down to the keeping of the Roman aristocrat, the baron, the first Galland, and the fat, pompous little man. It would deprive armies of an occupation. It would make statesmanship too simple and naïve to have the distinction of craft, which gave one man the right to lead another. Both sides had to act in the old fashion of mutual suspicion and chicanery.
She was overwrought in the fervor of her principles; she was in an anguish of protest. Her spirit, in arms against an overwhelming fact that was wrong, sinful, ridiculous, demanded some expression in action. Now she was half running, both running away from horror and toward horror; in a shuttle of resolutions and emotions: a being at war with war. Passing the head of the procession, she soon had the castle road to herself, except for orderlies on motor-cycles and horseback, until a train of automobile wagons loaded with household goods roared by. The full orchestra of war was playing right and left: crashing, high-pitched gun-booms near at hand; low-pitched, reverberating gun-booms in the distance. At the turn of the road in front of the castle she saw the gunners of the batteries that Feller had watched approaching making an emplacement for their guns in a field of carrots that had not yet been harvested. The roots of golden yellow were mixed with the tossing spadefuls of earth.
A shadow like a great cloud in mad flight shot over the earth, and with the gunners she looked up to see a Gray dirigible. Already it was turning homeward; already it had gained its object as a scout. On the fragile platform of the gondola was a man, seemingly a human mite aiming a tiny toy gun. His target was one of the Brown aeroplanes.
"They're in danger of cutting their own envelope! They can't get the angle! The plane is too high!" exclaimed the artillery commander. Both he and his men forgot their work in watching the spectacle of aerial David against aerial Goliath. "If our man lands with his little bomb, oh, my!" he grinned. "That's why he is so high. He's been waiting up there."
"Pray God he will!" exclaimed one of the gunners.
"Look at him volplane—motor at full speed, too!"
The pilot was young Etzel, who, as Lanstron had observed, would charge a church tower if he were bidden. He was taking no risks in missing. His ego had no cosmos except that huge, oblong gas-bag. He drove for it as a hawk goes for its prey. One life for a number of lives—the sacrifice of a single aeroplane for a costly dirigible—that was an exchange in favor of the Browns. And Etzel had taken an oath in his heart—not standing on a café table—that he would never let any dirigible that he attacked escape.
"Into it! Making sure! Oh, splen—O!" cried the artillery commander.
A ball of lightning shot forth sheets of flame. Dirigible and plane were hidden in an ugly swirl of yellowish smoke, rolling out into a purple cloud that spread into prismatic mist over the descent of cavorting human bodies and broken machinery and twisted braces, flying pieces of tattered or burning cloth. David has taken Goliath down with him in a death grip.
An aeroplane following the dirigible as a screen, hoping to get home with information if the dirigible were lost, had escaped the sharpshooters in the church tower by flying around the town. However, it ran within range of the automatic and the sharpshooters on top of the castle tower. They failed of the bull's-eye, but their bullets, rimming the target, crippling the motor, and cutting braces, brought the crumpling wings about the helpless pilot. The watching gunners uttered "Ahs!" of horror and triumph as they saw him fall, gliding this way and that, in the agony of slow descent.
"Come, now!" called the artillery commander. "We are wasting precious time."
Entering the grounds of the Galland house, Marta had to pass to one side of the path, now blocked by army wagons and engineers' materials and tools. Soldiers carrying sand-bags were taking the shortest cut, trampling the flowers on their way.
"Do you know whose property this is?" she demanded in a burst of anger.
"Ours—the nation's!" answered one, perspiring freely at his work. "Sorry!" he added on second thought.
Already parts of the first terrace were shoulder-high with sand-bags and one automatic had been set in place, Marta observed as she turned to the veranda. There her mother sat in her favorite chair, hands relaxed as they rested on its arms, while she looked out over the valley in the supertranquillity that comes to some women under a strain—as soldiers who have been on sieges can tell you—that some psychologists interpret one way and some another, none knowing even their own wives.
"Marta, did any of the children come?" Mrs. Galland asked in her usual pleasant tone. So far as she was concerned, the activity on the terrace did not exist. She seemed oblivious of the fact of war.
"Yes, seven."
"And did you hold your session?"
"Yes."
Marta's monosyllables absently answering the questions were expressive of her wonder at her mother. Most girls do not know their mothers much better than psychologists know their wives.
"I am glad of that, Marta. I am glad you went and sorry that I opposed your going, because, Marta, whatever happens one should go regularly about what he considers his duty," said Mrs. Galland. "They have been as considerate as they could, evidently by Colonel Lanstron's orders," she proceeded, nodding toward the industrious engineers. "And they've packed all the paintings and works of art and put them in the cellar, where they will be safe."
The captain of engineers in command, seeing Marta, hurried toward her.
"Miss Galland, isn't it?" he asked. "I have been waiting for you. I—I—well, I found that I could not make the situation clear to your mother."
"He thinks me in my second childhood or out of my head," Mrs. Galland explained with a shade of tartness. "And he has been so polite in trying to conceal his opinion, too," she added with a comprehending smile.
The captain flushed in embarrassment.
"I—I can't speak too strongly," he declared when he had regained his composure. "Though everything seems safe here now, it may not be in an hour. You must go, all of you. This house will be in an inferno as soon as the 53d falls back, and I can't possibly get your mother to appreciate the fact, Miss Galland."
"But I said that I did appreciate it and that the Gallands have been in infernos before—perhaps not as bad as the one that is coming—but, then, the Gallands must keep abreast of the times," replied Mrs. Galland. "I have asked Minna and she prefers to remain. I am glad of that. I am glad now that we kept her, Marta. She is as loyal as my old maid and the butler and the cook were to your grandmother in the last war. Ah, the Gallands had many servants then!"
"This isn't like the old war. This place will be shelled, enfiladed! And you two—" the captain protested desperately.
"I became a Galland when I married," said Mrs. Galland, "and the Galland women have always remained with their property in time of war. Naturally, I shall remain!"
"Miss Galland, it was you—your influence I was counting on to—" The captain turned to Marta in a final appeal.
Mrs. Galland was watching her daughter's face intently.
"We stay!" replied Marta, and the captain saw in the depths of her eyes, a cold blue-black, that further argument was useless.
With a shrug of his shoulders he was turning to go when his lieutenant, hurrying up and pointing to the row of lindens at the edge of the estate, exclaimed:
"If we only had those trees out of the way! They cut the line of our fire! They form cover and protection for the enemy."
"The orders are against it," replied the captain.
"Lanstron may be a great soldier, but—" declared the lieutenant petulantly.
"Cut the lindens if it will help the Browns!" called Mrs. Galland.
"Cut the lindens, mother! Is everything to be destroyed—everything to satisfy the appetite of savagery?" exclaimed Marta. Then, in an abrupt change of mood, inexplicable to the captain and even to herself, she added: "My mother says to cut the lindens. And you will tell us when to go into the house?" Marta asked the captain.
"Yes. There is no danger yet—none until we see the 53d falling back."
What mockery, what uncanny staginess for either her mother or herself to be so calm! Yet, what else were they to do? Were they to scream? Or fall into each other's arms and sob? Marta found a strange pleasure in looking at her garden before it was spattered with blood, as it had been in the last war. It had never seemed more beautiful. There was a sublimity in nature's obliviousness to the thrashing of the air with shells in a gentle breeze that fluttered the petals of the hydrangeas.
The sight of Feller coming along the path of the second terrace brought in sudden vividness to her mind that question which must soon be decided: whether or not she would allow him to remain to carry out his plan. He still had the garden-shears in hand. He was walking with the slow and soft step which was in keeping with the serenity of his occupation. Pausing before the chrysanthemum bed, he touched his hat, and as he awaited her approach he lifted one of the largest blooms that was drooping from its weight on the slender stem.
"They look well, don't you think?" he asked cautiously; and he was very cool, while his eyes had a singular limpidity, speaking better than any words the sadness of his story and the dependence of his hope of regeneration upon her.
"Yes, quite the best they ever have," she replied, inclined to look away from him, conscious of her sensitiveness to his appeal, and yet still looking at him, while she marvelled at him, at herself, at everything.
"Thank you," he said. "You don't know how much that means, how pleased I am."
Now came the sweep of a rising roar from the sky with the command to attention of the rush of a fast express-train past a country railway station. Two Gray dirigibles with their escort of aeroplanes—in formation like that which Mrs. Galland and Feller had seen race along the frontier—were bearing toward the pass over the pass road. One glimpse of the squadron was as a match to Feller's military passion. He swept off his old straw hat and with it all of the gardener's chrysalis. Feller the artillerist gazed aloft in feverish excitement.
"Lanny has them guessing! They're bound to know his plans if it takes all the air craft in the shop!" he exclaimed. "And what are we doing? Yes, what are we doing?" he cried in alarm as his glance swept the sky in front of the squadron, already even with the terrace in its terrific speed.
The automatic and the riflemen in the tower banged away to no purpose, for the aerostatic officers of the Grays had been apprised of the danger in that direction.
"Minutes, seconds count! Where are our high-angle guns?" Feller went on. He was unconsciously gesticulating with all the fervor of hurrying a battery into place to cover an infantry retreat in a crisis. "And they're turning! What's the matter? What are high-angle guns for, anyway, with such targets naked over our lines? Ah-h! Beautiful!"
The central sections of the envelope of the rear dirigible had been torn in shreds; it was buckling. Clouds of blue shrapnel smoke broke around its gondola. A number of field-guns joined forces with a battery of high-angle guns in a havoc that left a drifting derelict that had ceased to exist to Feller's mind immediately it was out of action; for he saw that the remainder of the squadron had completed its loop and was pointing toward the plain.
"And they were low enough to see all they want to know and rising now—evidently already out of reach of our guns—and nothing against them!" he groaned as he saw a clear sky ahead of the big disk and its attending wings, while clenched fists pumping up and down with the movement of his forearms shook his whole body in a palpitation of angry disgust. "Lanny, what's the matter! Lanny, they've beaten you! Eh? What? What—" A long whistle broke from his lips. His body still, transfixed, he cupped his hands over his eyes. "So, that is it! That is your plan, Lanny, old boy!" he shouted. "But if one of their confounded little aviators gets back, he has the story!"
From a great altitude, literally out of the blue of heaven, high over the Gray lines, Marta made out a Brown squadron of dirigibles and planes descending across the track of the Grays.
"Catch them as they come back! Between them and home—between the badger and his hole!" Feller went on explosively; and then, while the two squadrons were approaching at countering angles, he breathed the thoughts that the spectacle aroused in his quick brain: "This is war—war! Talk about your old-fashioned, take-snuff-my-card-sir courage, pray-and-swear courage—what about this? What about old Lanny's chosen men of the air, without boasts or oaths, offering their lives in no wild charge, but coolly, hand on lever, concentratedly, scientifically, in sane, twentieth-century fashion, just to keep our positions secret! Now—now for it!"
The Gray dirigibles, stern on, were little larger than umbrellas and the planes than swallows; the Brown dirigibles, side on, were big sausages and their planes specks. To the eye, this meeting was like that of two small flocks of soaring birds apparently unable to change their course. But imagination could picture the fearful crash of forces, whose wounded would find the succor of no hospital except impact on the earth below.
Marta put her hands over her eyes for only a second, she thought, before she withdrew them in vexation—hadn't she promised herself not to be cowardly?—to see one Brown dirigible and two Brown aeroplanes ascending at a sharp angle above a cloud of smoke to escape the high-angle guns of the Grays.
"We've got them all! No lips survive to tell what the eye saw!" exclaimed Feller, his words bubbling with the joy of water in the sunlight. "As I thought," he continued in professional enthusiasm and discrimination. "We are getting the theory of one feature of the new warfare in practice. It isn't like the popular dream of wiping out armies by dropping bombs as you sail overhead. The force of gravity is against the fliers. You have only to bring them to earth to put them out of action. Plane driven into plane dirigible into dirigible, and an end of bomb-dropping and scouting! War will still be won by the infantry and the guns. Yes, the guns—the new guns! They—"
Feller recalled with a nervous shock flashing through his system that he was a gardener, a gentle old gardener. He put his hat back on a head already bent, while the shoulders, after a pathetic shrug, drew together in the accustomed stoop. His slim fingers slipped under the largest chrysanthemum blossom, his attitude the same as when he had held it up for Marta's inspection before they heard the roar of the Gray squadron's motors.
"I think that we might cut them all now and fill the vases," he suggested, a musical, ingratiating note in his voice. "To-morrow we may not have a chance."
"Yes," she agreed mechanically, her thoughts still dwelling on the collision of the squadrons.
"And some of the finest ones for you to take now," he added, plying the shears as he made his selections. "I'll bring the rest," he concluded when he had gathered a dozen choice blossoms.
His fingers touched hers as the stems changed hands. In his eyes, showing just below the rim of his hat, was the light which she had seen first during the dramatic scene in his sitting-room and the appeal of deference, of suffering, and of the boyish hope of a cadet.