BY ORDER OF THE LEAGUE.
BY FRED. M. WHITE.
IN TWENTY CHAPTERS.—CHAP. IV.
Five years have passed away, bringing strange changes and startling revolutions—years, to some, fraught with misery and regret; years, to others, which have been pregnant with fame and honour; but to the suffering, patient world, only another step nearer to eternity. Five years later, and night in the small German town where honour is wrecked and lives are lost on the hazard of a die. The Kursaal at Homburg sparkling with the glitter of ten thousand lights. Men of all nations were gathered there, drawn together by the strongest cords which bind human destiny—the power of gold. No type of face was wanting; no passion, no emotion that the human visage is capable of, but had its being there: rage, despair, misery, exultation—the whole gamut of man’s passions and triumphs. Women were there too. The bluest-blood recorded in the Almanach de Gotha did not disdain to rub elbows with the last fancy from the Comédie Française; my lord, cold, indifferent, and smiling, sat side by side with the reckless plunger who would have bartered his honour, had that commodity remained to him, for the gold to place upon the colour. On the long green tables, the glittering coins fell with a subdued chink sweeter than the finest music to the hungry ears; a republic the most perfect in the universe, where rich and poor alike are welcomed, with one great destiny—to lose or to gain. There were no wild lamentations there; such vulgar exhibitions were out of place, though feeling cannot be disguised under the deepest mask, for a tremor of the eyelid, a flash of the eye, a convulsive movement of the fingers, betray poor human nature. As the game proceeded with the monotonous cry of the croupier, it was awful to watch the intentness of the faces, how they deepened in interest as the game was made, bending forward till at length ‘Rouge perd et couleur’ came from the level voice again.
The croupiers raked in the glittering stacks of gold, silently, swiftly, but with as much emotion as a child would gather cowslips, and threw the winning on each stake as calmly, knowing full well that in the flight of time it must return. The piles were raked up, and then arose a murmur, a confusion of tongues, reminding the spectator of what the bewilderment at Babel must have been, a clamour which died away to silence at the inthralling ‘Faites votre jeu.’
How the hands clawed at the sparkling treasure; eager, trembling avarice in every finger-tip; from the long, lean, yellow claw of the old withered gamester, to the plump little hand of the bride, who is trying her fortune with silver, fearful lest, driven by despair, some less fortunate player should lay felonious fingers upon the piled-up treasure.
Standing behind the all-absorbed group was a young man with pale, almost ghostly features, and a heavy dark moustache. From his attitude and smile, it was hard to say how fortune had served him, for his face was void of any emotion. He held one piece of gold in his hand, placed it on a colour, waited, and lost. A trifling movement of his lips, pressed tightly together under the dark moustache—that was all. Then for a moment he hesitated, pondered, and suddenly, as if to settle the matter quickly, he detached a coin from his watchchain and leaned forward again. Under him, seated at the table, was a woman winning steadily. A pile of gold was before her; she was evidently in the luckiest vein. The man, with all a gambler’s superstition, placed the coin in her hand. ‘Stake for me,’ he whispered; ‘you have the luck.’
Mechanically, she took the proffered coin, and turned it in her hand; then suddenly a wave of crimson, succeeded by a deathly whiteness, came across her face. She held the coin, then put it carefully aside, and staked another in its place. Then, apparently forgetting her emotion in the all-absorbing interest of the game, she looked at the table. ‘Rouge gagne, et couleur perd,’ came the chant of the croupier. The stakes were raked in, and the money lost. Under his breath, the man uttered a fervent imprecation, slightly shrugged his shoulders, and turned to watch the game again. From that moment the woman lost; her pile dwindled away to one coin beyond the piece of metal tendered her to stake, but still she played on, the man behind watching her play intently. A little varying luck, at one moment a handful of napoleons, at another, reduced to one, the game proceeded. At length the last but one was gone, save the piece tendered to her by the man behind the chair; that she never parted with. As she sat there, words came to her ears vaguely—the voice of the man behind her, and every time he spoke she shivered, as if a cold breath were passing through her heart. A temporary run of luck came to her aid, and so she sat, listening and playing.
The new-comer was another man, evidently an Italian, fine, strong, with an open face and dark passionate eyes. He touched the first man upon the shoulder lightly, speaking in excellent English.
There were four actors there, playing, had they but known it, a ghastly tragedy. The two men were players; the listening woman was another; and across the table, behind the spectators, stood a girl. She had a dark southern face of great beauty—a face cleanly chiselled, and lighted by a pair of wondrous black eyes—eyes bent upon the two men and the woman, playing now with the keenest interest. She shrank back a little as the new-comer entered, and her breath came a little quicker; but there she stayed, watching and waiting for some opportunity. Her look boded ill for some one. Meanwhile, the unconscious actors fixed their attention on the game. The last arrival touched the other man upon the elbow again, a little roughly this time.
‘You have been playing again, Hector?’ he said.
‘I have been playing my friend—yes. It is not in my nature to be in such a place without. What would you have me do, Luigi? I am dying of ennui from this inaction—kicking up my heels here waiting for orders.’
‘I should have thought you could have found something better to occupy your time,’ the man addressed as Luigi returned. ‘Our work is too stern, too holy, to be shared with such frivolity as this. Gold, gold, with no thoughts of anything but this maddening scramble!’
‘My dear Luigi, pray, control yourself. Are you not aware that this sort of thing has been done to death? Do not, as you love me, descend to the level of the descriptive journalist, who comes over here to coin his superlative condemnatory adjectives into money—to lose at this very interesting game. John Bull holds up his hands in horror as he reads the description in his Telegraph, and then he comes to try his luck himself. I, Hector le Gautier, have seen a bishop here.’
‘How fond you are of the sound of your own voice,’ Luigi Salvarini returned. ‘Come outside; I have something important to say to you.’
‘Something connected with the League, I suppose,’ Le Gautier yawned. ‘If it was not yourself I was talking to, I should say, confusion to the League.’
‘How rash you are!’ Salvarini returned in a low tone, accompanied by an admiring glance at his companion. ‘Consider what one word spoken lightly might mean to you. The attendants here, the croupier even, might be a Number in the League.’
‘Very likely,’ Le Gautier replied carelessly; ‘but it is not probable that, if I should whisper the magic words in his ear, he would give me credit for a few napoleons. I am in no mood for business to-night, Luigi; and if you are the good fellow I take you for, you will lend me’——
‘One Brother must always aid another according to his means, says the decree. But, alas! I have nothing.—I came to you with the intention’——
‘Oh, did you?’ Le Gautier asked sardonically. ‘Then, in that case, I must look elsewhere; a few francs is all my available capital.’
‘Hector,’ the Italian exclaimed suddenly, in a hoarse whisper, ‘where is the?’—— He did not finish his sentence, but pointed to the watchchain the other was idly twirling in his fingers.
Le Gautier smiled sarcastically. ‘It is gone,’ he said lightly—‘gone to swell the bloated coffers of the bank. Fortune, alas! had no favour even for that mystic coin. Sacred as it should have been, I am its proud possessor no more.’
‘You are mad, utterly mad!’ Salvarini exclaimed. ‘If it were but known—if it has fallen into the hands of the bank, or a croupier happens to have a Number, think of what it means to you! The coin would be forwarded to the Central Council; the signs would be called in; yours missing’——
‘And one of these admirable German daggers would make acquaintance with my estimable person, with no consolation but the fact of knowing what a handsome corpse I shall make. Bah! A man can only die once, and so long as they do not make me the posthumous hero of a horrible tragedy, I do not care. It is not so very serious, my Luigi.’
‘It is serious; you know it is,’ Luigi retorted. ‘No Brother of the League would have had the sublime audacity, the reckless courage’——
‘L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace,’ Le Gautier returned. ‘I sigh for new temptations; the sight of the gaming-table is to me what the smell of battle afar off is to the war-horse. I came here intending to risk a louis; I have lost everything. There is nothing like courage at the tables; and as it had a spice of danger in it, I risked’——
‘Your life! You do not seem to comprehend the danger.’
‘But, my dear friend, it is exactly that spice of danger that gives the thing its nameless charm. Come, you are hipped, out of sorts. You see the duties of the Order in every action; you see the uplifting of the avenging dagger in every shadow that trembles on the wall. Be a man!’
‘I am all the more disturbed,’ Salvarini observed with moody, uneasy face, ‘that the orders have come. That is the principal reason I am here to look for you. We are translated to London.’
‘That is good news, at anyrate,’ Le Gautier exclaimed briskly. ‘I have been literally dying to get back there. By the bright eyes of Enid—— What is that?’
Above the clamour of tongues and the rattle of the gold pieces, a low laugh was heard distinctly close to the speaker’s elbow. He turned sharply round; but there was no one within a few feet of them. Apparently, it had not disturbed the inthralled players, though the croupier swept his cold eye around to discover the author of this unseemly mirth.
‘Strange!’ Le Gautier observed. ‘I seem to have heard that laugh before, though I cannot remember where.’
‘And so have I,’ Salvarini whispered hoarsely—‘only once, and I hope that I may never hear it again. It is horrible!’
Le Gautier looked at his companion, amazed to see the agitation pictured on his face. It was white and drawn, as if with some inward pain. Salvarini wiped his damp brow as he met the other’s piercing gaze, and tried to still the trembling of his limbs.
‘A passing fancy,’ he explained—‘a fancy which called up a remembrance of my boyhood, the recollection of a vengeance as yet unpaid.—But I am idling; let us get outside. The orders have come, as I tell you, for London. We are to meet the Head Centre at the old address.’
‘And how did the orders come?’ Le Gautier asked.
‘The old mysterious way,’ was the impatient reply; ‘secrecy and darkness; no trust in any one, however worthy he may have proved—the old suspicion, which drags us down, and holds our hands even in the act of striking. I found them on my table when I got in. You and I are to get to London, and there await orders. Our instructions bear the crossed daggers, indicating extreme secrecy and a mission of great danger.’
In spite of his sang froid, Le Gautier could not repress a slight start; and a smile of covert sarcasm, pity almost, rose to his lips as he looked in his companion’s eager, enthusiastic face; the same sort of pity the sharper feels for his unconscious victim when he has him within the toils. Not that the younger man noticed this; his eyes were full of some far-away project, something noble, by their expression.
‘The old story of the monkey and the chestnuts,’ Le Gautier observed with his most sinister smile; ‘the puppets run the risk, and the Head Centres get the glory. If we fall, it is in freedom’s name. That is sufficient epitaph for us poor, silly, fluttering moths.’
‘But the glory of it!’ Salvarini cried—‘think of that!’
‘The glory, yes—the glory of a felon’s grave! The glory lies in the uncertainty. What do we gain, you and I, by the removal of crowned heads? When the last tyrant fell at our leader’s dictate, how much did we benefit by the blow? He was not a bad man; for a king, he was just.’
‘You are in a bitter mood, to-night, Hector,’ Salvarini answered. ‘What will you say when I tell you the appointment has come with your nomination as a Deputy, with a seat at the Council of the Crimson Nine?’
‘My appointment at last! You are joking, Luigi. Surely they had need of better men than I. What of La Fontaine?’
‘Dead,’ Salvarini responded grimly. ‘Treachery was suspected, and it was necessary to remove him.—But what I tell you is true; you are ordered to be present at the next Council at Warsaw, two months hence, when you will give up your badge as an Avenger, and take the premier order.’
‘And I have staked it to-night on the hazard of a die!’ Le Gautier exclaimed, pallid even beyond his usual deathly whiteness. ‘Fool, fool that I was! How can I prevent it becoming known? I am undone!’
‘You do not know the worst,’ Salvarini replied. ‘Come closer, and let me whisper in your ears; even the walls carry such tidings. The Supreme Director is here!’
Le Gautier turned faint and sick as he looked furtively round the room, with its long mirrors and barbaric splendour.
‘Suppose you lend me yours?’ he suggested. ‘You will not want it now. What a mad fool I have been! I wonder if there is any way of recovering it? for I must have it, come what will. With a penalty of’——
‘Death!’
The word, abruptly, sternly uttered, was followed by the same low mocking laugh they had heard before. They looked around in alarm, but no trace of any one could be seen. Standing in the recess of a window, they looked out; but no sign of the mysterious warning, so strangely given.
‘Let us get away from this,’ Le Gautier groaned. ‘I am stifled! Come outside into the open air. My nerves must be unstrung to-night.’
They walked out through the high folding-doors, and disappeared in the darkness. As they left, the woman who had been playing rose from her seat and followed them. Apparently, she was too late, for they had vanished; and with a sigh, she abandoned her evident intention, turning into the Kursaal gardens and throwing herself into a seat. Directly she quitted the saloon, the woman with the dark eyes followed, and tracked the other to the quiet retreat. For some time she stood behind the shadow of a tree, watching her. It was a brilliant moonlight night—clear, calm, and peaceful. Without there, the lighted windows of the gambling saloon could be seen; and ever and anon the murmur of the croupier, the scrape of the rakes, and the subdued clink of the gold, might be heard. But the figure on the seat did not heed these things; she was looking at a coin in her hand, making out as she best could the devices that it bore, strange and puzzling to her.
It was merely a gold coin, in fine a moidore of Portugal; and upon the reverse side, the figure had been rubbed down, and an emblem engraved in its place. There was a figure of Liberty gazing at a rising sun, her foot upon a prostrate dead body, and underneath the words, ‘I strike.’ Over the rising sun, in tiny letters, was the device, ‘In Freedom’s name;’ and at the top, two letters in a monogram. The seated figure noted these things, but, from the expression on her face, they represented nothing to her. Behind the shadow of the tree, the watcher crept closer and closer, trying in vain to get a glimpse of the golden coin. As the seated figure bent over it, tears began to gather in her eyes, overflowing at last, and the passion of sorrow seemed to rise, till her frame was shaken with the sobs she did not strive to master. The woman looking on stepped out from her shelter and crossed the open grass to the other’s side. Her face, on the contrary, was eager, almost hopeful, as she bent forward and touched the weeper on the shoulder. She looked up, surprise mastering her grief for a brief moment.
ARMY PANICS:
BY ONE WHO HAS BEEN IN THEM.
Few men have gone through a campaign of any duration without having experienced some one or more of those strange incidents of warfare which are known under the name of Panics. Those who have been in them know but too well their peculiarity—how a sudden access of fear seizing upon a body of troops, and communicating itself from man to man with a rapidity that can only be compared to a conflagration in a city built of wood, spreads so quickly that it is impossible to detect its cause, and the coolest observer cannot tell whence the contagion had its origin. Amongst raw levies or young and inexperienced soldiery, such panics are naturally more frequent than amongst tried troops; but history tells us that even the oldest veterans are not proof against their attack.
Napier, in his Peninsular War, devotes but some eight or nine lines to an account of the most remarkable recorded incident of this nature, in which Robert Crauford’s celebrated Light Division—consisting of those three distinguished regiments, the 43d, the 52d, and the 95th—were seized and put to flight by an attack of fear so sudden and causeless that the historian makes no attempt whatever to ascribe a reason for it. ‘The Light Division,’ he writes, ‘encamped in a pinewood, where happened one of those extraordinary panics attributed in ancient times to the influence of a god. No enemy was near, no alarm given, when suddenly the troops, as if seized with a frenzy, started from sleep and disappeared in every direction; nor was there any possibility of allaying this strange terror, until some persons called out that the enemy’s cavalry were amongst them, when the soldiers mechanically ran together, and the illusion was dissipated.’ It seems odd that so diffuse a writer should have seen fit to say so little of so extraordinary an occurrence, more especially when we remember that this same Light Division was the flower of the British army in the Peninsula, and that he writes of it not many pages before as ‘composed of three regiments singularly fitted for difficult service. Long and carefully disciplined by Sir John Moore, they came to the field with such a knowledge of arms, that six years of warfare could not detect a flaw in their system, nor were they ever overmatched in courage and skill.’
The public has been made acquainted with a goodly number of panics during the last few years, the military annals of which have been so replete with the warlike operations of the British arms. Many of us have thrown up our hands and sighed over the decadence of the pristine virtue of our soldiers, or prophesied darkly the downfall of the whole British race. The reason why the world nowadays is more familiar with many of the shortcomings and failings of our troops is not very difficult to find. As, before Agamemnon, lived many brave men whose virtues have not been handed down, so too, perhaps, many little indiscretions on the part of the soldiers of Marlborough and Wellington have passed into oblivion through want of a ‘special war correspondent.’ In spite of press censorship on the part of military officers, sooner or later these lynx-eyed gentlemen, being in the midst of the fighting-men, have seen and recorded in the columns of the daily press very many incidents, the seriousness of which has not been lessened in the telling. Amongst soldiers themselves, a natural pride would make them reticent in such matters; and l’esprit de corps has probably caused more than we know of to be buried in the bosoms of the members of some particular corps.
This reminds us of an unrecorded case of ‘panic’ pure and simple, which was communicated to us, years after its occurrence, by an officer in the regiment concerned. When he spoke of it, he did so with the air of a man fearful of breaking a sacred trust, which even then he seemed to feel hardly justified in betraying, though the regiment had changed its title, and scarcely one of the members in it at the time still remained. Suffice it to say that the regiment was a distinguished infantry one, composed almost entirely of veterans, who had added lustre to their former glories by the courage and bravery with which they had behaved throughout the trying times of the Indian Mutiny. It was shortly after this terrible outbreak had been quelled that the regiment in question was marching from the scene of some of the bloodiest outrages to a new station in a comparatively undisturbed portion of India. Then, as now, marches in that country were usually carried out at night, the sun in the hot season rendering exposure to its influence more or less unsafe to Europeans. They had almost reached the spot where they were to halt for the night—which, by-the-bye, was an exceptionally dark one—in fact, the advance-party had already arrived, when suddenly some sort of commotion and press of men from the rear was noticed by the officers. Before they could divine the cause, the confusion increased, and the regiment, without paying any heed to the commands of the officers, broke its ranks, and fled precipitately into the jungle on either side of the road. As usual, the officers, and even the senior non-commissioned officers, had not shared the general terror, and some few of the privates had at first called upon their comrades to remain steady—but all to no avail. They were regularly broken, and scarcely a man remained. Very soon, an explanation was forthcoming. A number of loose horses came galloping down the road. It was the noise of their hoofs over the hard ground, breaking the stillness of the Indian night, that had mysteriously magnified itself into a vague but all-mastering terror. How complete the panic was may be imagined from the fact that many of the men had fled so far into the jungle that they did not return till the following morning. Every inquiry was made by the colonel into the case; but no one was ever made responsible as the originator; and the regiment mutually agreed to keep the whole affair a profound secret. So well did they do so, that it never leaked out till years afterwards, when time had blunted the sting of publicity.
In South Africa, the disaster of Isandlhwana gave the soldiers’ nerves a severe shaking, and it often happened that false alarms at night led to the rousing of whole camps, and sometimes even to a reckless discharge of firearms. In some cases, friendly natives or even comrades were taken by the excited imagination of a sentry for enemies; in others, unoffending cattle, even a bush or a shrub, became the innocent cause of a fusilade sufficient to have dealt widespread destruction to a host of Zulus.
An odd incident, illustrative of the slightness of the cause—or even, perhaps, of the absence of any cause at all—that gives rise to a panic, occurred on the night of Tel-el-Kebir, amidst a small corner of the force that was bivouacking on the battlefield. The narrator had crawled into a marquee in which, with other commissariat stores, were the rum casks from which the troops had received their liquor ration after the fatigues and excitement of the day’s fight and previous night-march. Besides one or two commissariat issuers in charge of the stores, several ‘odds and ends’ of other corps had found their way into the marquee, preferring to rest under its shelter amidst the casks and biscuit-boxes, than under the open sky with the sand for a bed. Suddenly, in the middle of the night when all were sleeping, a noise and commotion began in the bivouac outside. Before the inhabitants of the tent were sufficiently awake to understand its cause, the curtains were thrust aside by a red-coated soldier, who shouted to us to get up: ‘The Arabs are in the camp—they are upon us!’ Then he disappeared as rapidly as he had come. Every one sprang to his arms, and probably experienced that especially uncomfortable sensation that is caused by a vague feeling of an unseen though imminent danger against which one is ignorant how to guard. Outside, every one around was aroused and up, eagerly striving to discover from what quarter attack was to be expected. Nothing, however, more unpleasant occurred than the advent of a staff-officer asking the cause of the confusion. Probably the truth never did reach headquarters. Afterwards, however, a report gained ground—no other or better reason was ever forthcoming—that the alarm arose from the screams of a sleeping soldier, who, overwrought perhaps by the horrors of the day, had been fighting his battle over again in his dreams!
It is perhaps as well that all cases of panic should be brought forward and investigated. Hushing them up may be satisfactory to those who feel that the credit and reputation of their particular regiment or corps are at stake; but, like all undeclared and secret evils, they are best dealt with by being dragged to light. How else can the soldier learn their absurdity—how else learn to recognise them and reason on the moment whether he be in the presence of a causeless panic or a real danger?
One lesson certainly the few lines of Napier quoted above teach us. The cry of some one that the enemy’s cavalry were amongst them caused the Light Division to rally—it was the dissipation of a vague terror by the substitution for it of a substantial danger.
Enough has been said to show that panics will occur. It is easy to see how fatal may be their results, and how detrimental they are to the morale of an army. A recognition of this fact must convince us of the necessity that exists for neglecting no step that may tend to minimise their occurrence, or, if they must occur, to most efficaciously and speedily counteract their effects. Long since, sailors learnt by experience that real or imagined outbreaks of fire on shipboard were too apt to cause panic and confusion, and thereby increase tenfold the horrors of the situation. To provide against this, the fire-alarm is frequently sounded, with a view to accustoming the crew to take up rapidly their allotted posts, when fire actually does occur, with the calmness and despatch bred of familiarity. This system of accustoming men to sudden alarms of attack was practised with success in the Marine Camp round Suakim, and they probably owed the idea in some measure to their naval training. At anyrate, their camp was particularly free from needless night-alarms, and their sentries earned the somewhat rare distinction of never having been forced throughout the whole campaign.