Twelve hundred men rose no more from that bloody field before Yang-Tsun. The fighting force, sixteen thousand strong, was wearing off at the rate of almost a regiment and a half a day, and it was yet a hundred miles to Peking.
All about Thaine were men with faces grimy as his own; their lips, like his, split and purple from the alkali dust. They had had no water to drink in all that long day’s twelve miles of marching and six hours of fighting. Fearful is the price paid out when the wilderness goes forth to war! And heroic, sublimely heroic, may be the Christianity of the battlefield.
“We must help these fellows,” Thaine said to his comrades as the wail for water went up from wounded men.
“The river is this way,” McLearn declared. “Hurry! the boys are dying.”
So over countless forms they hurried to the river’s brink for water. Thaine and Tasker and Boehringer were accustomed to muddy streams, for the prairie waters are never clear. But Goodrich from Boston had a memory of mountain brooks. The Pennsylvania man, McLearn, the cold springs of the Alleghanies, and for Binford there was old Broad Ripple out beyond Indianapolis. All these men came down with dry canteens to the Peiho by Yang-Tsun. The river was choked with dead Chinamen and dead dogs and horses. They must push aside the bodies to find room to dip in their canteens.
“You have one more lesson. You must learn to be a Christian.” 376
Somehow the words seemed to ring round and round just out of Thaine’s mental sight.
“Vasser! Vasser!” cried a big German soldier before him.
Thaine stooped to give him a drink, and as he lifted up the man’s head he saw the stained face of Hans Wyker.