It was not for him to see, in those smiles, that the helpless man, bound for the flogging-posts of the "Dolina of Weeping," where so many martyrs to that goddess which is Italy had expiated in torment their crimes of loyalty and courage, had already found a refuge beyond the reach of his spies and torturers that he opposed even now to bonds and blows a resistance that no armed force could overcome. If he saw the smiles at all, he took them for a tribute to his brisk, decisive action with the cane.
"And now, take him along," he commanded, when the prisoner's wrists were tied behind him to his satisfaction. "And stand no nonsense! If he won't walk make him!"
The corporal saluted. "Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann," he deferred, and the prisoner was thrust down the bank. The old mother, her head averted, moaned softly. The old man, upholding her, smiled yet his death's-head smile.
The tiger-yellow of the grass between the trees was paler, the black was blacker, as the two officers returned across the fields; to the hush of afternoon had succeeded the briskness of evening. Birds were awake and a breeze rustled in the branches; and Captain Hahn was strongly moved to speech.
"System," he said explosively. "All war all life comes down to system. You get your civil labor by system; you keep it by system. Now, that little arrest."
It was as maddening as the noise of a mouse in a wainscot. Jovannic wanted not so much to think as to dwell in the presence of his impressions. Those strange, quiet smiles!
"Did you see them laughing?" he interrupted. "Smiling, I should say. After you had cut the fellow down they stopped crying out and they smiled."
"Ha! Enough to make 'em," said Captain Hahn. "I laughed myself. All that play-acting before his people, and then, with two smacks kaput! Fellow looked like a fool! It's part of the system, you see."
"That was it, you think?" The explanation explained nothing to Jovannic, least of all his own sensations when the sudden surrender and the sad, pitying mirth had succeeded to the struggle and the violence. He let Captain Hahn preach his German gospel of system on earth and organization to man, and walked beside him in silence, with pensive eyes fixed ahead, where the prisoner and his escort moved in a plodding black group.
He had not that gift of seeing life and its agents in the barren white light of his own purposes which so simplified things for Captain Hahn. He was a son of that mesalliance of nations which was Austria-Hungary Slavs, their slipping grasp clutching at eternity, Transylvanians, with pervert Latin ardors troubling their blood, had blended themselves in him; and he was young. Life for him was a depth not a surface, as for Captain Hahn; facts were but the skeleton of truth; glamour clad them and made them vital. He had been transferred to the Italian front from Russia, where his unripe battalion had lain in reserve throughout his service; his experiences of the rush over the Isonzo, of the Italian debacle and the occupation of the province of Friuli, lay undigested on his mental stomach. It was as though by a single violent gesture he had translated himself from the quiet life in his regiment, which had become normal and familiar, to the hush and mystery of the vast Italian plain, where the crops grew lavishly as weeds and the trees shut out the distances.