XXV
THE TERRIBLE NIGHT
The satire of war makes the valet's son a hero; the chance of war kills the manufacturer's son and lets the day-laborer's son live; the sport of war gives the latent forces of a Stransky full play; the mercy of war grants Grandfather Fragini a happy death; the glory of war brings Dellarme quick promotion; the glamour and the spectacular folly of war turn the bolts of the lightnings which man has mastered against man. Perhaps the savage who learned that he could start a flame by rubbing two dry sticks together may have set fire to the virgin forest and wild grass in order to destroy an enemy—and naturally with disastrous results to himself if he mistook the direction of the wind.
Marta Galland's thoughts at dusk when she returned up the steps to the house were much the same as Hugo Mallin's after Fracasse had taken the knoll. While he had felt the hot whirlwind of war in his face, she had witnessed the wreckage that it left. She also was seeing fathers staring and mothers weeping. Her experience with the wounded drawing deep on the wells of sympathy, heightened her loathing of war and of all who planned and ordered it and led its legions. A Stransky righting would have been repulsive to her, but a Stransky trying to save a life was noble.
Except for the few minutes when she had gone out on the veranda and had seen Stransky bringing in the lifeless body of Grandfather Fragini, she had been engaged since dark in completing the work of moving valuable articles from the front to the rear rooms of the house, which had been begun early in the day by Minna and the coachman.
Shortly after Stransky had finished his meal Minna came to say that Major Dellarme wished to speak to Miss Galland. Dellarme a major! This was his reward for his part in filling the ambulances with groans! In the days when he was at the La Tir garrison he had been a frequent caller. Now, in the perversity of her reasoning, out of the chaos of the tangent odds of her impressions since she had gone to hold the session of her school that morning, she thought of him as peculiarly one who gave to the profession of arms the attraction that had made it the vocation of the aristocrat. Waiting for her in the dismantled dining-room, despite all that he had passed through, his greeting had the diffident, boyish manner of her recollection; and despite a night on the ground his brown uniform was without creases, giving him a well-groomed, even debonair, appearance.
"I scarcely thought that we should ever meet under these conditions," he said slightly constrained, a touch of color in his cheeks.
She had no excuse for her reply unless, in truth, she were in training for the town scold. But he typified an idea. He gave to war the aspect of refinement.
"If you did not expect it, why did you enter the army?" she asked.
He saw that she was not quite herself. The strain of the day had unnerved her. Yet he answered her bootless question with simple directness.
"I liked the idea of being a soldier. I was reared in the atmosphere of the army, and I hoped that I might do my duty if war came."
Perhaps this was point one for him. Marta shrugged her shoulders.
"I might have guessed beforehand what you would say," she replied. "You sent for me?"
"Hardly that, please. I asked if I might see you. The captain of engineers tells me that you insist on staying and I came to beg you to keep in the back of the house. You will be safe there. Any shell that may enter will explode in the front rooms and the fragments will not go through the second wall."
"Yes, we understand that. We have already removed our heirlooms," she replied indifferently.
The fatalism of her attitude and his alarm lest she had gone a little out of her head aroused all the innate horror of a man at the thought of a woman under fire. He broke out desperately:
"Miss Galland, this is no place for you! You do not realize—"
He had made the same mistake as the captain of engineers—touched a spot of irritation as raw as it had been in the morning.
"Why shouldn't I stay here? Why shouldn't every wife and mother be here in the fire zone? You soldiers die—it is very easy to die—and leave us to suffer. You destroy and leave us to build up. You go on a debauch of killing and come home to the women to nurse you. Why make us suffer the consequences without sharing the glory of the deed?"
Such reasoning was not in the province of his training. He feared that she was about to become hysterical.
"Really, Miss Galland, I—women and children—I—" he was stammering.
"Better kill the children young than go to the expense of bringing them up before they are killed!" she went on, not hysterically, unless frozen intensity is hysteria. "Children clinging to your knees might stop you, but I suppose you would have a police force to tear the children away rather than miss the masculine privilege of murder."
"Miss Galland, you are overwrought. I—"
She interrupted him with half-breathed laughter.
"Don't I look it—hysterical?" she exclaimed. "How awkward for you if I should fall on the floor and kick and scream!"
With a peculiar uplifting of the brows which spoke a brittle humor, she looked at the floor as if selecting a place for the performance.
"That is not your way," he managed to say. He was quite adrift in confusion at the recollection of quotations he had heard about woman's subtleties and inconsistencies and her charm. Resorting to the last weapon in his armory—which the captain of engineers had already used—his attitude changed to a soldierly sternness. "Miss Galland, I feel that it is my duty, as long as you are going to stay, to make sure that—"
She killed the sentence on his lips with a gleam of mockery from her eyes. He understood that she had again anticipated what he was going to say.
"There are times when you must be firm with a woman, aren't there? And the time has come for you to be firm!" The color in his cheeks deepened. He knew what to do with his men on the knoll, but not what to do in the present situation. "This is our home; our home is our country. Here we remain; but, naturally, we don't propose to stick our heads out of the windows in a shower of shrapnel bullets," she continued. "Even your soldiers are not so zealous for death but they fight behind sand-bags. They are not like Mohammedan fatalists who so love to die for their illusions that they bare their breasts to bullets. We have already arranged sleeping-quarters in the rear. Good night!"
She held out her hand with a smile of conventional pleasantry. Had it not been for the sound of firing, which still continued, and for the walls denuded of pictures, they might have been parting at the head of the stairs at a house-party. She stopped half-way up in an impulse to call back happily:
"You see, masculine firmness did calm feminine hysteria!"
"Oh, Miss Galland!" he exclaimed. "Miss Galland, you are beyond me!"
"What a pose! How foolish to break out in that way!" she thought angrily, as she hastened up the rest of the flight and along the corridor. "To him of all men! A pattern-plate of an officer, who never has had anything but a military thought! But everything is pose! Everything is abnormal! And sleep? Sleep is a pose, too. I feel as if my eyes would remain open forever. Oh, I wish they would begin the fighting and tear the house to pieces if they are going to! I wish—"
She was at the door of her mother's room, which was like an antique shop. Old plates lay on top of old tables, with vases on the floor under the tables. Surrounded by her treasures, Mrs. Galland awaited the attack; not as a soldier awaits it, but as that venerable Roman senator of the story faced the barbarous Gauls—neither disputing the power of their spears nor yielding the self-respect of his own mind and soul. She had lain down in her wrapper for the night, and the light from a single candle—she still favored candles—revealed her features calm and philosophical among the pillows. Yet the magic of war, reaching deep into hidden emotions, had her also under its spell. Her voice was at once more tender and vital.
"Marta, I see that you are all on wires!"
"Yes; jangling wires, every one, jangling every second out of tune," Marta acquiesced.
"Marta, my father"—her father had been a premier of the Browns—"always said that you may enjoy the luxury of fussing over little things, for they don't count much one way or another; but about big things you must never fuss or you will not be worthy of big things. Marta, you cannot stop a railroad train with your hands. This is not the first war on earth and we are not the first women who ever thought that war was wrong. Each of us has his work to do and you will have yours. It does no good to tire yourself out and fly to pieces, even if you do know so much and have been around the world."
She smiled as a woman of sixty, who has a secret heart-break that she had never given her husband a son, may smile at a daughter who is both son and daughter to her, and her plump hand, all curves like her plump face and her plump body, spread open in appeal.
Marta, who, in the breeding of her generation, felt sentiment as more or less of a lure from logic, dropped beside the bed in a sudden burst of sentiment and gathered the plump hand in hers and kissed it.
"Mother, you are wonderful!" she said. "Mother, you are great!"
"Tush, Marta!" said Mrs, Galland. "You shouldn't say that. Your grandfather was great—a very great man. He never quite got his deserts; no good man does in politics."
"You are better than great," said Marta. "You soothe; you help; you have—what shall I call it?—the wisdom of mothers! Minna has it, too." She ran a tattoo of kisses along the velvety skin of Mrs. Galland's arm.
Mrs. Galland was blushing, and out of the depths of her eyes bubbled a little fountain of stars.
"Marta, you have kissed me often before," she said, "but you have been a little patronizing from your hilltop of youth and knowledge. Sometimes you have looked to me lonely up there on your hilltop and I know that I have been lonely sometimes in my valley of the years where knees are not good at climbing hills."
"It was not my intention," Marta said rather miserably.
"No, it is a businesslike age," answered Mrs. Galland.
"I—you mean I was too detached? I was not human?"
"You are now. You make me very happy," her mother replied. "But you must sleep," she insisted.
After a time, her ear becoming as accustomed to the firing as a city dweller's to the distant roar of city traffic Mrs. Galland slept. But Marta could not follow her advice. If, transiently at least, she had found something of the peace of the confessional, the vigor of youth was in her arteries; and youth cannot help remaining awake under some conditions. She tiptoed across the hall into her own room and seated herself by the window, which had often spread the broadening vista of landscape with its lessening detail before her eyes.
On other nights she had looked out into opaqueness with the drum-beat of rain on the roof; into the faint starlight when there was only the vagueness of heights and levels; into the harvest moonlight with its spectral unreality. Now the symbol of what the ear had heard the eye saw: war, working in tones of the landscape by day with smokeless powder; war, revealed by its tongues of flame at night. Ugly bursts of fire from the higher hills spread to the heavens like an aurora borealis and broke their messengers in sheets of flame over the lower hills—the batteries of the Browns sprinkling death about the heads of the gunners of the Grays emplacing their batteries. Staccato flashes from a single point counted so many bullets from an automatic, which, directed by the beams of the search-lights, found their targets in sections of advancing infantry. Hill crests, set off with flashes running back and forth, demarked infantry lines of the Browns assisting the automatics.
There were lulls between the crashes of the small arms and the heavy, throaty speech of the guns; lulls that seemed to say that both sides had paused for a breathing spell; lulls that allowed the battle in the distance to be heard in its pervasive undertone. In one Of them, when even the undertone had ceased for a few seconds, Marta caught faintly the groans of a wounded man—one of the crew of a Gray dirigible burned by an explosion and brought in his agony softly to earth by a billowing piece of envelope which acted as a parachute.
Fighting proceeded in La Tir in stages of ferocity and blank silence. The upper part of the town, which the Browns still held, was in darkness; the lower part, where the Grays were, was illuminated.
"Another one of Lanny's plans!" thought Marta. "He would have them work in the light, while we fire out of obscurity!"
Soon all the town was in darkness, for the Grays had cut the wire in the main conduit shortly after she had heard the groans of the wounded man. There the automatics broke out in a mad storm, voicing their feelings at getting a company in close order in a street for the space of a minute, before those who escaped could plaster themselves against doorways or find cover in alleys. Then silence from the automatics and a cheer from the Browns that rasped out its triumph like the rubbing together of steel files.
From the line of defence, that included the first terrace of the Galland grounds as the angle of a redoubt, not a shot, not a sound; silence on the part of officers and men as profound as Mrs. Galland's slumber, while one of the Browns' search-lights, like some great witch's slow-turning eye in a narrow radius, covered the lower terraces and the road.
Marta gave intermittent glances at the garden; the glances of a guardian. She happened to be looking in that direction when figures sprang across the road, crouching, running with the short, quick steps of no body movement accompanying that of the legs. The search-light caught them in merciless silhouette and the automatic and the rifles from behind the sand-bags on the first terrace let go. Some of the figures dropped and lay in the road and she knew that she had seen men hit for the first time. Others, she thought, got safely to the cover of the gutter on the garden side. Of those on the road, some were still and some she saw were moving slowly back on their stomachs to safety. Now the search-light laid its beam steadily on the road. Again silence. From the upper terrace came a great voice, like that of the guns, from a human throat:
"Why didn't we level those terraces? They'll creep up from one to the other!" It was Stransky.
In answer was another voice—Dellarme's.
"Perhaps there wasn't time to do everything. And if this position is taken before we are ready to go, it will not be from that side, but from the side of the town."
"We're making them pay for seeing our garden, but, anyhow, we won't let them pick any flowers," Stransky remarked pungently.
"If they get as far as the first terrace—well, in case of a crisis, we have hand-grenades," Dellarme added in explanation. "But, God knows, I hope we shall not have to use them."
After an interval, more figures made a rush across the road. They, too, in Stransky's words, paid a price for seeing the garden. But the flashes from the rifles and the automatic provided a target for a Gray battery. The blue spark that flies from an overhead trolley or a third rail, multiplied a hundredfold, broke in Marta's face. It was dazzling, blinding as a bolt of lightning a few feet distant, with the thunder crash at the same second, followed by the thrashing hum of bullets and fragments against the side of the house.
"I knew that this must come!" something within her said. If she had not been prepared for it by the events of the last twelve hours she would have jumped to her feet with an exclamation of natural shock and horror. As it was, she felt a convulsive, nervous thrill without rising from her seat. A pause. The next shell burst in line with the first, out by the linden-trees; a third above the veranda.
"We've got that range, all right!" thought the Gray battery commander, who had judged the distance by the staff map. This was all he wanted to know for the present. He would let loose at the proper time to support the infantry attack, when there were enough driblets across the road to make a charge. The driblets kept on coming, and, one by one, the number of dead on the road was augmented.
Marta was diverted from this process of killing by piecemeal by a more theatric spectacle. A brigade commander of the Grays had ticked an order over the wires and it had gone from battery to battery. Not only many field-guns, which are the terriers of the artillery, but some guns of siege calibre, the mastiffs, in a sudden outburst started a havoc of tumbling walls and cornices in the upper part of the town.
Then an explosion greater than any from the shells shot a hemisphere of light heavenward, revealing a shadowy body flying overhead, and an instant later the heavens were illuminated by a vast circle of flame as the dirigible that had dropped the dynamite received its death-blow. But already the Brown infantry was withdrawing from the town, destroying buildings that would give cover for the attack in the morning as they went. Two or three hours after midnight fell a silence which was to last until dawn. The combatants rested on their arms, Browns saying to Grays, "We shall be ready for the morrow!" and Grays replying: "So shall we!"
Marta, at her window, her eyes following the movements of the display, now here, now there, found herself thinking of many things, as in the intermissions between the acts of a drama. She wondered if the groaning, wounded man were crying for water or if he were wishing that some one at home were near him. She thought of her talk with Lanstron over the telephone and how mad and feminine and feeble it must have sounded to a mind working in the inexorable processes of the clash of millions of men. She saw his left hand twitching in his pocket, his right hand gripping it to hold it still, on that afternoon when, for the first time, she had understood his injury in the aeroplane accident as the talisman of his feelings—his controlled feelings! Always his controlled feelings!
She saw Feller leaning against the moist wall of the dank tunnel, suffering as it had never seemed to her that man could suffer, his agony an irresistible plea. She saw Westerling, so conscious of his strength, directing his chessmen in a death struggle against Partow. And he was coming to this house as his headquarters when the final test of the strength of the Titans was made.
She hoped that her mother was still sleeping; and she had seconds when she was startled by her own calmness. Again, the faces of the children in her school were as clear as in life. She breathed her gratitude that the procession in which they moved to the rear was hours ago out of the theatre of danger. In the simplicity of big things, her duty was to teach them, a future generation, no less than Feller's duty was to the pursuing shadow of his conscience. She should see war, alive, naked, bloody, and she would tell her children what she had seen as a warning.
Silence, except an occasional rifle-shot—silence and the darkness before dawn which would, she knew, concentrate the lightnings around the house. She glanced into her mother's room and marvelled as at a miracle to find her sleeping. Then she stole down-stairs and opened the outer door of the dining-room. A step or two brought her to the edge of the veranda. There she paused and leaned against one of the stone pillars. Dellarme himself was in a half-reclining position, his back to a tree. He seemed to be nodding. Except for a few on watch over the sand-bags, his men were stretched on the earth, moving restlessly at intervals, either in an effort to sleep or waking suddenly after a spell of harassed unconsciousness.