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.