XXXVI
Said the sutler-woman, whose coarse black hair was powdered white as any lady's of the early eighteenth century, smearing the dust from the peonies of her cheeks with a brawny arm that was dusty as any miller's:
"Young man, if thou stick to thy word, and take good care of the jackass, remembering the sharp nail-spike in the end of the whip-butt if he tries to kick or bite—I'll creep in under the tilt and take a forty-winks. Lord be thanked! my legs are sound, but they ache a bit!"
The jackass, who boasted the not inglorious name of "Rumschottel," laid back his ears viciously at his mistress's reference to the persuasive spike in the whip-butt, and the young man addressed by his temporary employer nodded in assent without opening his lips. For the dust in which the little tilt-cart moved was almost solid, being kicked up by the Seventh Corps of the Second Army of Germany, in line of march through the Haardt Wald by Kaiserslautern.
The sutler-woman's young man had marched with the Fifth Corps from Mayence by Oppenheim and Alzey, and had picked up an American tourist who knew of a short cut to Kaiserslautern, and had mislaid the Army Corps in trying to find it. Staffs, squadrons, batteries, battalions, transport and baggage had vanished like smoke among these vineyard-and-forest-clad hills, these pine-jacketed gorges, these roads that ran between natural ramparts of granite, or passed through quaint villages tucked under hillsides crimson and gold with laden appletrees, and dominated by ancient castles perched on towering platforms of rock.
Scenery palls when the thigh-bones seem wearing through their sockets; when the stomach complains for very emptiness, and there are bloody blisters inside the ragged socks. The American who had been so cocksure about the road to Kaiserslautern was lying up under a peasant's penthouse-thatch, at a twenty-mile distant village, drinking Kirsch, nursing his own skinless heels, and reading up "Murray." His late companion had refused to give in, and perseverance had won its reward. Sixty miles or so above Kreuznach, where the main road forks right and left, climbing the shoulders of the Nahe Valley, he had met the Ninth Corps of the Second Army marching up from Bingen, and hobbled at the heels of one of the dusty battalions until he could hobble no more.
The sutler-woman had come upon him sitting pumped-out by the wayside, had sold him bread, coffee and sausage, doctored his blisters, supplied him with tallowed strips of linen to replace his wornout socks, earned his gratitude, and displayed no reluctance to profit by her philanthropy, when he had volunteered to help lead the jackass as far as Kaiserslautern. True, he spoke a most vile jargon, but you cannot have everything. And the weather was so beautifully dusty, thought the sutler-woman, that an assistant would certainly be of use. Without the dust that clogs the human throat, the trade in liquid lubricants would be less roaring. And the tilt-cart contained, beside other marching-requisites, a twenty-gallon barrel of rather luke-warm beer.
The young man nodded again as the cart-shafts tilted in the hame-straps, and a command to throw his weight on the front-board was issued from behind. There was a good deal of creaking as he obeyed. A heavy weight suddenly added to the jackass's load made Rumschottel look malevolently round his near-side blinker, and display an upper row of long orange-colored teeth in testimony of his desire to bite. Then his driver slid off the board, took the rope reins, and continued to trudge beside him, keeping well to the low hedgerow so as to leave a clear space between the sutler's cart and the seemingly endless column of dusty infantrymen, striding steadily forward through a blazing August noon.
Ahead, where black-and-white and white-and-black lance-pennons flickered at the turn of the road below a steep hill-shoulder covered with bronzing vineyards heavy with purpling grapes, the light-blue of a Prussian Dragoon regiment and the facings of a squadron of Red Uhlans showed through the thick coating of dust that clung to horse and man. But the dark uniforms of a succeeding battery of Horse Artillery and the indigo or rifle-green of the battalions that marched with the needle-gun, had long ago given place to a pervasive whitey-brown.
Schmidt, Klaus, and Klein were pressing on in spite of dust and an eighty-five-in-the-shade thermometer, you must understand, so as not to get left out of the fighting that must be going on ahead. For the First and Second Corps of the Second Army, with the Headquarters Staff, were known to have reached Homburg, and on the previous night the Army of the Crown Prince had bivouacked behind the Klingbach, south of Landau.... Five or six in the morning, supposing him to have marched at dawn, would see him well across the frontier. And scouts on the hills had heliographed and flag-signaled the arrival of Imperial battalions and artillery at Wissembourg, and blue Baden Dragoons reported a cavalry camp at Selz. For all they knew, "Unser Fritz" and the Napoleon were even then at grips.
So they marched—as they had marched since they detrained at Bingen, swinging starkly on under the weight of the knapsack, eighty rounds of ammunition, rolled great-coat, camp-kettle, sword, spade, water-bottle, haversack and bread-roll, or half-a-dozen flint-hard brown biscuits threaded together on a bit of string.
Men sweated and blistered under the relentless sun, but not many fell out, and there were very few severe cases of sunstroke, these for the most part falling to the lot of Reservists. And in the hottest part of the day a plump of thunder broke among the hills eastward, and a deluge that followed turned the dust on them to paste. Then the sun came out again and baked the paste hard; and the sutler-woman stuck her head out between the front flaps of the cart-tilt, and told her young man to pull up for a bit of a rest and a snack.
So P. C. Breagh unharnessed Rumschottel, and the jackass rolled in a sandy hollow in asinine fashion, and rose up braying and refreshed. Then, quite mildly submitting to be hobbled by his mistress, he fell-to upon a patch of thistles that the battery-wheels had spared. And the sutler-woman, who answered to the name of Krumpf, produced black bread and cheese, with peppery sausage of Brunswick, and a mighty tin bottle of cold milk-coffee, from the depths of her vehicle, and liberally dispensed of these refreshments to her servitor. She partook of them herself, largely, lacing her own mug of coffee out of a private bottle of schnaps.
"Herr Je!" she grumbled presently, "what is he gaping at?" For her young man had finished eating, and was absorbed in watching marching legs.... She added, snorting scornfully: "We might sit here and sleep for three hours, and they would still be going by when we woke up.... Horses' legs and men's legs, just as though they had got clockwork inside them.... It was so in Schleswig-Holstein, and it will be so in France. And what the Danes got the French will get, and that will be a thumping!" She nodded directly afterward and dozed heavily, leaning her broad back against the wheel of her cart.
Perhaps she slept a quarter-of-an-hour while the dusty men marched by, four abreast, without slackening pace or changing step. They had hard-featured, serious, intelligent faces for the most part, thought P. C. Breagh, though here and there was a visage that bore the stamp of vice upon it, or was pimply with drink, or brutal, or merely sly. They had ceased to sing, though their bivouac of the night before had been patriotically vocal; the dusty instruments of the bandsmen came less frequently out of their dustier bags. They marched for the most part in silence, though the trampling of their feet made the solid ground reverberate.
Sometimes a battalion would quit the road, and hedges would go down before it as by magic; and through the middle of a field of browning corn or whitening barley a broad white highway would be beaten hard as any threshing-floor, bare of anything save the most insignificant tokens of their passage, such as a covey of late-hatched partridge chicks trampled into rags, a broken strap, a fragment of biscuit, a scattering of potato-peels, an empty match-box, the paper that had held an ounce of tobacco, and many empty bottles that had held beer. Rarely, a great scurry in the dust where some obstreperous charger had reared and fallen with his rider, the extent of whose injuries might be guessed by a clotted puddle of drying blood and a broken stirrup-iron. Thus, under the rhythmical tread of the dusty boots, as under the iron-shod wheels and iron-shod hoofs that had preceded and would follow them—green things were beaten from the face of earth, and fur and feather fled, as they were flying before the Third Army, marching toward Wissembourg; as they were flying before Steinmetz, bringing the First Army from the North.
Where they halted they left their taint by the scorched hedgerows, and the black circles of their great fires remained to tell of them, like the soil-pits that scarred the fields where they had bivouacked. Last night, by some delusion of the wearied senses of sight and hearing, they had seemed to the boy who had slept on the outskirts of their camp to be marching even as they slept. The lusty snoring of the countless swathes of sleepers between the long, orderly rows of stacked needle-guns topped with gilt-spiked helmets, suggested the rushing of a host in onward motion. When the boy who had lain through the night under the sutler-woman's cart to guard it from light-fingered marauders had fallen into a troubled slumber, his blistered feet had carried him on in dreams behind them still. Then in the blue dusk before dawn cavalry trumpets far ahead and shrill bugles near at hand had shrilled reveillé—and when the tremendous war-machine rushed on again once more, the dusty boy had been caught up once more by the wind of its going, and drawn along with it, as a chip is whirled in the under-draught of a rushing express-train, or a wisp of hay is caught up by a traveling tornado, and borne upon its dreadful way.
He grinned now, reminiscent of the Doctor's analogy, as a blunt-nosed, shaggy dog of no distinguishable breed trotted past, sneezing, between the files at the rear of a half-company-column. "Whose is the beast?" he heard a soldier ask his neighbor on the right-hand, and: "Nobody's—joined the battalion at Bingen!" was the reply. Upon which the inquirer tossed the canine waif a scrap of biscuit, with "Here, Bang!" and Bang, thus adopted and christened, neatly caught the morsel, bolted it, and trotted on,—no more an ownerless mongrel, but a regimental dog.
Now the sutler-woman was waking, rubbing the sleep out of a pair of eyes which were less bright than they had been before their owner became addicted to the use of beer with schnaps as a lacing. She had an incipient beard, and the voice of a heavy dragoon, yet there was a tinge of womanly coquetry in her way of straightening her big, battered bonnet, and adjusting the checked blue-and-yellow shawl tied crosswise over her voluminous bust. She yawned, struggled to the perpendicular position, with some difficulty, owing to her corpulence; and cried, pointing a stout red finger at her henchman, yet squatting in the shade of a clump of dusty whins:
"Lord! if he isn't mooning still, with his chin on his two fists! Such a gimpel I never yet did see! But they say all the Englisch are mad, their climate makes them so. Otherwise would they not live in their country?—but no! they can't. Hier! Catch Rumschottel, and let's be moving!"
P. C. Breagh obliged, undisturbed by the appellation of idiot, or the contumely heaped on the United Kingdom. It was better to be on the black books of the sutler-woman than distinguished by her too-favorable regard.
For though the stout proprietress of the tilt-cart had undoubtedly played the part of a Samaritaness toward the wandering Englander, she was, it had to be owned, more charitable than chaste; trading not only in beer, bread, sausages, matches, cheap packs of cards, dominoes, pipe-tobacco, sweets and pickled cucumbers, but following, between marches, the oldest profession in the world.
Being invited on the previous evening to convey a verbal billet of the amorous kind to a young Pioneer of Würtemberg Artillery, P. C. Breagh had flatly declined. Conceiving the refusal to be prompted by jealousy, Frau or Fraulein Krumpf had not taken it in ill part. Until, being undeceived upon this point, she uncorked the vials of her anger and exerted a gift for vituperation justly celebrated among her clients of the rank and file.
"You threadling, you whipper-snapper! You pickled herring in a jacket and breeches! There is a man buried in the Domkirche at Mainz, where I belong, that has been dead over a hundred years, and has more of good red life in him to-day than thou! 'Frauenlob,' they called him, because he couldn't live without women, and women! and when he died, eight of the town-girls carried him on his bier. And they poured wine over his grave so that you stepped up to your knees in it—all because he had liked the women as a tom-cat likes cream!"
The first spate of her resentment over, she had accepted the situation. But the wound remained; and as the better-half of Potiphar may have railed at her husband's young Hebrew steward, the sutler-woman nagged at the young man who limped beside her jackass, through the deep welcome shade of ancient oak-forests or over long blistering stretches of naked mountain roads, as those tireless, dusty men marched by.
There was no keeping up with them; they passed, and others swarmed after them. Batteries succeeded battalions, ammunition and baggage, ambulance and commissariat-trains were followed by yet other battalions, while the sweat dripped into the eyes of P. C. Breagh and the skin wore off his heels.
At midday, when his chest hurt with the very act of breathing and his straining muscles seemed about to crack, a man died.
He was an infantryman of Hessians, and it happened quite suddenly. P. C. Breagh, who had long ago abandoned all unnecessary integuments, marching without coat, vest, collar, or braces, had noticed him a moment previously swinging along with unbuttoned uniform—it was marvelous how small a minority of the soldiers had sought this method of relief.... His open shirt showed the lighter skin of his bare chest, his pickelhaube was perched upon the cooking-pan crowning his knapsack-top, and he had draped a wetted red handkerchief over his steaming head.
Save that his face was purple with congested blood, so that his pale, staring eyes seemed colorless by comparison, and he walked with open mouth, the Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking as he gulped down the hot air, he conveyed no dire impression of breakdown. But suddenly he stumbled and spun round, as if seized by sudden giddiness, clutching at his shirt-breast, dropping his gun. Men were thrown out of step as he fell, with an absurd clatter of metal and tin-ware. Yet they marched on without a pause.
Others came, stepping over the fallen figure lying huddled in the way. Its fingers moved, paddling in the dust; and P. C. Breagh, yielding to a sudden impulse, dropped the bridle of the jackass, ran in, grabbed hold and hauled the heavy body out of the way.
"What are you doing, born stupid that you are?" the sutler-woman cried viciously, for Rumschottel had swerved aside to the hedge and was ravenously devouring weeds. She added, becoming aware of the prone infantryman, who was lying on his back staring at the sun unwinkingly: "It it all up with that one, his eyes are turning white already. Such as he have never six pfennigs to pay for other folks' time and trouble. Better leave him for the Feld-lazarett to pick up."
But P. C. Breagh only grunted dourly, hunkering by the prostrate Hessian, and with a parting sarcasm the proprietress of Rumschottel seized her beast's head and trudged on. If she had looked back, she would have seen good Irish whisky wasted. For despite the shade of the tree under which he was hauled, the rolled-up coat thrust under his head and the laving of his face and breast with spirit, it was all up with the man, as she had prophesied.
He grabbled with his sunburnt fingers in the dust a little, and tried to lift a hand to his perspiring chest. By the tin crucifix dependent from a leather bootlace round his neck, you could tell that he tried to make the sacred Sign. Then his eyes rolled up, and an expression of great surprise overspread his discolored countenance. His knees jerked and a sound like a rotten stick of wood, breaking, came from his open mouth.
"A-a-ach!"