The Man of Iron

by Richard Dehan

XXXVII

He would breathe for possibly an hour longer, but practically the man was dead. Still listening for the faint, intermittent heart-beats, a splash of gravel stung P. C. Breagh smartly in the neck and cheek, and the dull thunder of horse-hoofs came unpleasantly close and stopped. He lifted his ear from the rattling chest, and looked up into the face of an infantry officer, who was reining up his beast and bending from the saddle as he looked at the casualty on the ground. The officer asked in staccato sentences:

"It is a case of heat-stroke? You are a doctor?"

P. C. Breagh answered shortly:

"Enough of one to know that there is no hope."

The horse, a fine, spirited animal, hoofed the ground impatiently. The captain said, patting the glossy, sweating neck:

"Very good. Will you kindly show me his name-tag?"

P. C. Breagh found the zinc label, bearing the moribund Hessian's name, regimental, battalion and company-number, and turned it face-upward on the discolored breast. The captain, leaning from the saddle, read, and mentally registered. His keen eyes, hedged with dusty fair lashes, narrowed against the blinding white sunshine and, somewhat bloodshot with heat and fatigue, had something like a smile in them; and for some reason, to the dusty young man who squatted on the ground by the dying, the smile was an offense. He scowled, and the officer, noting this, asked curiously:

"Were you acquainted with that one, then?"

He indicated the body by an overhand thumb-gesture. Resenting the gesture for the same inexplicable reason, P. C. Breagh responded with a head-shake. The captain pursued, pulling the damp and blackened reins between his gloved fingers, stained with his own sweat and the horse's within the palms....

"I asked, because you seemed—how shall one put it?—sorry for him, you know!"

The dust-smeared, freckled face turned on the interlocutor angrily. The smouldering fire in the eyes leaped into sudden flame:

"I am, damned sorry for him! To come by his end like this—without firing a single shot!"

There was something unusual about this little dialogue, carried on between the smart mounted officer and the footsore, untidy pedestrian, over the body stretched out by the roadside. As the broad stream of marching men flowed by, curious eyes rolled their way, the whites showing startlingly in their owners' sunburned faces. Men wondered what he had died of, and what they were discussing there. And P. C. Breagh went on, his mouth pulled awry with wrathful bitterness:

"He was as good a patriot, I'd bet my hat!—as any fellow in his battalion. He set as much store as others by King and Fatherland! I daresay he dreamed of getting the Distinguished Service medal for some tremendous act of gallantry, and astonishing his wife—he wears a wedding ring, so I suppose he had one!—with it when he got home. And now it's all over. It makes me feel sick. All over, and nothing to show for it!"

The blank, rolled-up eyes, staring unwinkingly in the face of the coppery, westering sun, and the discolored face, with the look of agonized surprise now fixed upon it, seemed to echo dumbly: "Nothing but this!" The officer returned:

"So! but there will be a war-pension for the widow, as he died upon Active Service, and that will not be so bad, after all. And presently the Feld-lazarett will come up and put him in a wagon. He will be buried at sundown, when we halt.... They will give him a firing party and a bugler—everything will be done decently. After a battle there is not always—you understand?..."

He shrugged, and the Danish and Austrian war-medals on his dark blue tunic glinted, in witness of his ripe knowledge and experience. Hating him still more vigorously, P. C. Breagh ended his sentence:

"Not always time to stow away lost pawns!"

"'Pawns!' My worthy sir, our pawns are battalions!" The captain laughed, showing even, but tobacco-stained teeth under his thick brown mustache. "This was—a unit among myriads of myriads.... You will find plenty of work waiting for you among his comrades, if, as I guess, you are a graduate in surgery out for practice.... Let me advise you to join a Red Cross ambulance—the arm-badge is a protection—of a definite kind."

He saluted, gave rein, and the tired, yet impatient horse snorted relief, and cantered on with him, sending another shower of dust-grains and gravel-grit over the extinct "unit among myriads of myriads" and the unkempt Samaritan hunkering by its side.

A scalding wave of bitterness and resentment had swept over him a moment previously. Behind and through the officer's brown-eyed, good-looking face he had seen the fierce, challenging blue stare and great domed skull and bulldog jaw of the great Minister who made wars at will. And the limp, dead body of the "unit among myriads of myriads," lying by the beaten track where twenty thousand men thus clad and armed had passed already, had awakened in him a rage of pity and a fury of disgust.

This War that had seemed such a huge and splendid world-event, shaking sovereigns upon their thrones and stirring nations to wildest enthusiasm, meant catastrophes innumerable as minute; infinitesimal tragedies never to be heard of, related or known,—involving the humbler and the weaker among the people of both sides.

Meanwhile—here was a letter, pinned inside the dead man's shirt, an ill-spelt, loving scrawl, containing a wilted sprig of some kind of garden-herb, smelling evilly.

"Glory is glory," said the poor soul who wrote, "but so thou bring thyself safe back to me and the Kinder, that will be enough." Meanwhile, entreating her lambkin to remember that "old man" kept off the fleas, she enclosed "a bit picked from the clump in the garden border by the old red gooseberry bush," and with a tender inquiry after his poor corns, and a row of blotty kisses, signed herself his faithful wife Lottchen. One could only be sorry for poor Lottchen and note down her address, together with her deceased lambkin's name and regiment, and send her presently a line from a stranger who had been near him when he died.

For the unit among myriads of myriads, nothing could be done beyond pulling his yet pliant limbs into decent straightness and folding the already stiffening hands upon the unheaving breast. Then P. C. Breagh covered his face with the red handkerchief, and—a tin crucifix being suspended from the neck by a leather bootlace—touched the violet-mottled lips with it, and whispered a prayer for the departed soul, before, resuming possession of his discarded jacket and shouldering his knapsack, he trudged upon his way.

"Our Moltke" was testing his material at the outset, by heavy marching. Since breakfast-time there had been no halt; the columns of human flesh and horsemeat had pegged along, tirelessly as though the sinews that bore them had been forged of elastic steel.

The blazing sun set in a great whirlpool of molten rubies and gold beyond the Birkenfeld, while the sky to the north and east was green, with a vivid, springlike hue. The clear, thin dusk of August fell, yet the tireless columns marched on—and in company of other, even queerer wayfarers, the dusty young man with the knapsack doggedly continued to trudge beside them. When at length the halt was sounded, he staggered through a hedge-gap into a field of flax, and threw himself heavily face downward amid the yellowing stems that had long ago flowered, and seeded, and ripened for pulling.

Stupid with weariness, he might have lain there ten minutes, when a bugle shrilled close by, and the brown, hairy heads and forelegs of the leaders of a team of gun-horses crashed through the hedgerow, the scarlet face, open shouting mouth, and uplifted whip-arm of the forerider showing above. As luck would have it, orders had been given that a half-battery of mounted artillery should bivouac in this flax-field. And death under the iron-shod hoofs of the horses, and the iron-shod wheels that followed them, shaved very close to P. C. Breagh.

Yet he was not grateful as he picked himself out of the hollow into which his frog-like, instinctive leap for life had landed him. The heavy riding-whip of the forerider had cut him bitterly across the loins while yet in mid-air. Adding insult to injury, the artilleryman had cursed his victim for getting in the way of the battery, and the other riders and the gunners on the limber were grinning from ear to ear. Smarting, P. C. Breagh cursed back, in a cautious but vigorous whisper, as he hobbled back to the road....

Upon the farther side two half-battalions of infantry, divided by a little bushy knoll, were already encamped upon a strip of gorsey grass. The thing had been done as if by magic, the officers grouped in the foreground round their little camp tables were drinking Rhine wine and beer as peacefully as though they had not stirred for hours. Behind them the battalion-color and the halberd of the drum-major had been planted upright in the center of an orderly array of drums and band-instruments, the straight rows of knapsacks within rolled greatcoats, stretching away in the rear, were divided by the customary ten-pace interval, and the mathematically balanced stacks of needle-guns.

Fires of brush and dry cones from the pine-groves fringing the road crackled in the small oblong trenches dug by the fatigue-men. Squad-cooks were cutting up pea-sausages, raw potatoes, and onions into camp-kettles of water, destined to simmer, slung on sticks reaching from bank to bank. And the regimental butchers had already slaughtered a couple of young bullocks, whose skins lay smoking by the chopping-block. Presently, when the officers' mess-cooks had chosen such joints as seemed good to them, the rest of the meat would go to enrich the stew of the rank-and-file. Meanwhile the men, scattered to the utmost limits of the cordon of sentries, blunted the edge of hunger with black bread and the flinty brown biscuit, crowded thirstily round the beer and wine-carts, squatted in groups playing cards, chatting, or singing part-songs; wrestled and ran races, or dozed lying face downward on the sunburnt grass, their foreheads resting on their folded arms.

A charming scene, now that the all-pervading dust had begun to settle—the bivouac roofed in by the clear green twilight, through which diamond star-points began to thrust. If only one had been less sharp-set, and the proprietors of the wine and beer-carts had had bread and sausage to sell as well as warm, flat beer and musty-smelling vintage, the beauty would have appealed to one a good deal more.

Squatted by a lichened boulder in a clump of sun-scorched bracken, P. C. Breagh searched his pockets, and then the recesses of his knapsack, for something to eat. An ancient crust of black bread rewarded his investigations, just as the savory-smelling camp-kettles were taken off the fires.

He fell to work upon his crust as the stew was apportioned, and the big cans of beer distributed to each mess; and as he gnawed dog-like at the stone-hard lump of baked rye-dough, he caught the eye of one of the Barmecides, a merry-faced, red-haired young private, who was evidently the jester of his squad.

"Our soup smells good, what? Well, the smell may be had for nothing. He may fill his belly with as much of that as he can!"

A roar of laughter greeted the sally of the humorist. To whom P. C. Breagh nodded assent, and, gravely extending his diminished crust in the quarter from whence the whiff of oniony pea-soup came most powerfully, fell to with apparently renewed appetite, provoking the approving comment:

"He can take a joke! Well, then, let him take this! and this! Catch it, junge!"

A lump of very fresh beef, boiled in the oniony pea-soup, was dumped into a bit of newspaper, screwed up, and pitched across to the supperless. P. C. Breagh gratefully caught the oleaginous parcel and the two hard Army biscuits that came after, and, pulling out some small change, signified his desire to pitch back the coins in return. But a big hand waved them vigorously away, with the gruff exclamation: "Der Teufel! let him keep his pfennigs. One gives a share of one's supper—one doesn't sell!"

And so genuine was the one that, despite the smarting weal that had been the gift of another less kindly, P. C. Breagh's faith in humanity lifted up its head.

He disposed of the grub, and drank some hill-water tinctured with Kinahan, a permissible indulgence in view of his fatigue, and stuffed the well-used briar-root with bird's eye, and, propping his back comfortably against the boulder, kindled the pipe of peace. By nature clubbable, and athirst for news, he would have liked to mingle with the replete, unbuttoned soldiers, who, supper over, gathered round the fires to smoke and chat and sing. But the snub dealt by Valverden had not left off smarting; the fear of incurring another rebuff, even from a social inferior, kept him aloof and solitary. He realized with dismay that his stock of self-confidence was beginning to run low.

"I'd a lot of faith in myself when I accepted that commission from Knewbit," he ruminated, chewing hard on the stem of the venerable briar-root. "More than half his money's spent—what did I want with that revolver?—and I haven't written him a line. Instead, I've swotted up a thundering long descriptive article, telling people all about what they know already—and sent it to that shaved sea-elephant in a Gladstone collar, who told me I might forward letters from the seat of hostilities if ever I got there!"

He frowned, mentally reviewing the points of the first-born launched upon the tide of speculation. However ancient its matter might be, the vigor and mastery of that descriptive article—completed in the train between Bingen and Mayence, and dropped with paternal solicitude into the sack of a corporal of the Field Post—would surely—could not fail to—insure its appearance in print.

Why did a horrible conviction of its utter stodginess come home to him at this eleventh hour? Its labored periods revolted, its stately mawkishness sickened his memory. He knocked out the pipe-bowl against the boulder and got out his note-book and began to jot down a letter to Mr. Knewbit by the light of the now risen moon, who, with Venus blazing emerald at her opulent side, hung high in the south-east, looking down upon forest and field, mountain, valley and river, and the armed men and beasts, guns and wagon-trains, strung out over leagues of distance, calmly as befitting an aged Queen familiar with the portents of War.

She stared down so haughtily at the travel-soiled and dusty scallawag lying upon the fringe of the bivouac among the remnants of a meal cadged from a soldier's camp-kettle, that he caught her eye and broke his pencil-lead. No! he couldn't write, even well enough to "please plain, homely people." ... Why, hang it all!—Old Knewbit must have known from the beginning, to do that was the highest and most difficult art of all. Men came into the world equipped, as had come Shakespeare, and Scott, and Dickens, each with a single feather, such as might belong to the wing of a Phcenix or an Archangel, sprouting from his own flesh. Urged by the inborn crave to set down Life, each had plucked forth his birth-gift with a pang of unutterable anguish, and there, at the quill-end, hung a single drop of red, red blood. And that drop tinctured every page they penned, and thus what they wrote lived. To be a distinguished War Correspondent one had to be born with the magic pen-feather. The Doctor had it. That was why his written sentences dug home to the quick. Without it, Success would never come to one, no matter how hard one tried for it. One would be nothing better all one's life than a plodding paragraphist.

Pity an unlucky youth, fagged, footsore, and smarting, not only from disillusion and chagrin, but from the very recent application of an Artillery horsewhip. In addition, the infantry band had now begun to play with soul-melting sweetness. First "The Lorelei," and then "Red Dawn That Lights Me to My Early Grave," and then the song of Siebel from "Faust"—with all its yearning passion and tender anguish. And possibly other eyes were wet besides P. C. Breagh's, who fairly put down his head and sobbed, under cover of the twilight and the protecting boulder, as he had not done since his knickerbocker days.... Not now from a vague, wistful aching for the voice and the touch of the young, unknown, long-dead mother. Pain and longing were there, but of how different a kind....

The reign of Brünhilde-Britomart-Isolde was over. That night saw the smallest and slenderest of heroines established on the vacant throne of the Ideal.

He who wept was not the type of a young girl's hero, choking and gulping, and burrowing his hot, wet face into the dry, rustling fern. But he suffered as only youth can suffer, the pangs were very real that wrung from him such stifled cries as these:

"Oh, God! I love her—Juliette de Bayard! ... I have loved her since the moment our eyes met. My infernal ingratitude that she forgave like an angel!—the brutal things I thought and said of her—were because I could not forgive myself for loving her so. My discontent, my restlessness, my ambition to do something and be somebody—weren't they prompted by the longing to cut a figure in her eyes! ... Lovely eyes;—and at this minute her husband may be kissing them!—'the noble gentleman, brave as a lion,' who fought like the deuce and all! Stop, though! If he's an Army man, he has had to leave her. Could I have borne to do that if I had had the luck to be in his shoes? Yet how she would despise a lover who hesitated between her and his duty! Even if 'her heart-strings about his heels were tied,' as the Suabian ballad says, 'she would bid him march to war!' For a girl like that could love, mind you! like Juliet and Desdemona and Viola rolled into one, and yet never be blinded by love into forgetfulness of God, or honor, or loyalty. It is written in her face. Are these things first with me? I'm afraid not!... I think not!... I know they're not!... And yet I dare to love her—to whom they mean everything!"

His conscience stung and smarted like the weal from the Artillery whip-lash. And the dread of Death and the Hereafter wakened in him, shuddering and quaking in the creeping dusk.

Now he comprehended his own insignificance and weakness and loneliness.... He had seen a man die that day, suddenly, without time for preparation, as thousands of others would die before the ending of this war. What if to-morrow at the hottest hour the trenchant blade of the sun should bite through P. C. Breagh's brain-pan? He heard the other self within him saying "Suppose...?" And he asked himself, with a cold sweat breaking out upon his flesh, and a curious stirring among the roots of his hair, what would have happened only an hour or two back, if the flying squirrel-leap that had made the white teeth flash against the brown faces of the gunners on the limber, had failed to land the dusty scallawag who had been sleeping in the flax-field beyond reach of the pounding of the hoofs of the battery-team! ...

"Father, I cry to Thee!"

The soldiers were singing the Battle Prayer of Körner, the lusty Teutonic basses and baritones and tenors mingling in melodious unison with the night-breeze that had risen with the moon.

Previously P. C. Breagh might have smiled at the simultaneous production of hymn-books, the rising at the word of command to sing—the short, business-like prayer recited by an officer, that was followed by a crashing Amen.

Now, it seemed to him, there was something wholesome and good in the military regulation that united men of every Christian creed and denomination, with those who habitually omitted religion from the daily routine, in the brief act of worship described.... Recalled by it to the teachings of the Mother Church, he made the sacred sign upon brow and breast, and whispered his nightly prayers. The name of Juliette mingled in the entreaty that Our Lord and His Mother would bless and guard those dear to the petitioner from danger and harm.

"And not let me come to grief for her sake—of course I mean Monica's! For she never would have loved me even if there hadn't been another man. But O! take care of her, and shield her from evil, sickness, grief, and danger. And let me see her again one day!"

He grew drowsy, lying against the yet sun-warm boulder, listening to the distant cry of the mousing owl, and the long rattling chur'r'r! of the nightjar, mingled with the occasional snorting of the tethered horses, the measured tramp of the sentries,—the small explosions made by pine-cones thrown upon the blazing guard-fires, and the other sounds of the bivouac.